Queer Generosity: An Introduction from the Guest Editors

We are living in a moment characterized by a profound lack of generosity. The attacks on the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021. The ascendency of global fascism. The hoarding of life-saving vaccines by powerful nation states. The continued exploitation of land, air, and water despite a well-documented and near irreversible global climate crisis. We could go on, listing the kinds of cruelty that extend beyond any individual lived experiences and yet feel so specific to them.

It is within our current context of overwhelming cruelty that we turn our attention to the radical potential of generosity. To be clear, we are not talking about charitable giving. Such giving throws resources at a problem in hopes that others do the work for us. Charitable giving tricks us into thinking we have done enough when what is really required is a being-in-coalition in ways that change the material conditions that make life unbearable for too many.¹ Here we are talking about acts of worldmaking—gestures of care, material acts of giving, especially at a time of pandemic, that nurture, that help us survive, that give us strength to endure, and then do better.

We are at a moment when perhaps what we need most is other ways of thinking, feeling, living—being—in the world. We need more models, more imaginative play, more creative possibilities, more aspirational potential. At a time of affective retrenchment, in which more people than ever are putting up walls and cordoning off community out of a sense of fear, a need to protect themselves in the face of immense uncertainty, we wonder: can anything be more generous than to open ourselves up, to offer practices of survival, to share our best creative possibilities for living together? It seems not only generous, but queerly generous to hold open space right now to show one another how to live differently. Isn't that what queerness is, in many ways? The insistence on living differently in the face of pressures to live as everyone else does—and then to share with each other how to do so, how not just to survive but to survive together?

In times of crisis, critical orientations toward violence make generosity seem like a weak political stance. However, as Isaac West notes, "[m]ore generous modes of queer critique are not naive nor do they excuse those moments where norms and normativities are reinforced more than they are challenged."² Rather generous critiques create new forms of life that help us imagine creative reasons to go on living. Think, for example, of the Silence = Death campaign as a collective struggle rhetorically linking speech with life and working against the cruel negligence of the Reagan administration. This is the politics of visibility built on the increasing call to "come out" as Harvey Milk and Jean O'Leary entreat us to do. Think also of Sylvia Rivera's "Y'all Better Quiet Down" as a call into better forms of care that liberal gaystream activists at the time resisted. Rivera disrupted the collective's forward movement toward exclusionary gay rights agenda and asked that we also focus attention on trans women, the poor, the indigent, the homeless—others abandoned, discarded, and marginalized by the dominant social and political order. Their generosity points us to a belonging that is richer and more possible³ than the forms of death imagined by our current political economic situation.

This special issue of QED explores what queer generosity is, and might still yet be, in a context of massive cultural and political upheaval. Before we consider how our contributors have enlivened our sense of queer generosity, we want to trace our own grappling with the concept, our own sense of how we have come to understand the personal and political power of queer generosity.

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Our thinking about queer generosity has emerged at a moment when a few other scholars, critics, and activists have started thinking about the value of generosity, often as a counterpoint to the extreme partisanship and voluble animosity that have characterized...