The “then and there” of queer translingual citizenship in Erín Moure’s O Cidadán
Abstract
This article analyzes the remapping of queer citizenship in time and space in Erín Moure’s 2002 collection, O Cidadán, particularly through her translingual practice. Her translingualism contravenes the exclusive structures of the patriarchal, heteronormative, monolingual nation-state by deconstructing its spatiotemporal tenets. Setting up a conversation between her epistemological poetics and José Muñoz’s theory of queer futurity, I examine her creation of alternative queer spacetimes and her subsequent queering of citizenship.
Résumé
Cet article analyse la manière dont la citoyenneté queer est re-cartographiée dans le temps et l’espace dans le recueil de poésie, O Cidadán d’Erín Moure (2002), notamment par sa pratique translingue. Son translinguisme contrevient aux structures exclusives de l’état-nation patriarcal, hétéronormatif, et monolingue en en déconstruisant les fondements spatio-temporels. En proposant une conversation entre sa poétique épistémologique et la théorie de l’« advenir queer » de José Muñoz, nous verrons la création d’un espace-temps queer alternatif qui lui permet de queeriser la citoyenneté.
Texte intégral
Introduction 1
To intersect a word: citizen. […] O cidadán. […] It seems inflected “masculine.” And, as such, it has a feminine supplement. Yet if I said ‘a cidadá’ I would only be speaking of 52% of the world, and it’s the remainder that inflects the generic, the cidadán. How can a woman then inhabit the general (visibly and semantically skewing it)? […] In this book, I decided I will step into it just by a move in discourse. I, a woman: o cidadán. As if “citizen” in our time can only be dislodged when spoken from a “minor” tongue, one historically persistent despite external and internal pressures, and by a woman who bears – as lesbian in a civic frame – a policed sexuality. Unha cidadán: a semantic pandemonium. 2
Canadian poet Erín Moure prefaces her 2002 collection, O Cidadán, framing her poetics as a reaction to the patriarchal marginalization of women, especially queer women such as herself, from citizenship. She moves through Galician 3 to reveal how language grammatically performs marginalization, suggesting it also participates in social and political marginalization. Here, and in the rest of the book, she defies such ideas through poetic translingualism, i.e. the practice of writing between distinct languages that may influence each other, attending particularly to their situatedness in power dynamics 4 . In the passage quoted above, Moure’s translingualism, turning to a minoritized language of Spain, aims at queering language by suturing a feminine determiner to a masculine noun, thereby rethinking the civic frame through queer potentiality.
O Cidadán then “is not so much a collection of poems about citizenship as a field of inquiry into the epistemological discourses and practices of citizenship” 5 . Moure’s collection engages with various thinkers—in an “Acknowledgement” section at the end of the book presented like a bibliography, we find, amongst others, works by Augustine, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous 6 … In “documents,” mainly prose texts that attempt to un- or remake definitions of citizenship in relation with her poetic notion, the cidadán, Moure sometimes quotes from those thinkers, or gives her own readings of their works, as well as her reactions to them. The documents are interspersed with lesbian love poems all titled “Georgette,” and other untitled poems. A third form, called “catalogue of harms,” consists in prose, verse, fractions, sometimes even diagrams, which for the most part explore injustices suffered by people representing otherness against the dominant conception of the citizen. Progressively, all forms tend to seep into each other, suggesting that whatever epistemological, and even political discourse Moure deploys in the book is inextricably intertwined to her aesthetics. As Jessica MacEachern puts it, her poetics “moves” the theory through a distinctive attention to language as material 7 , exposing the limits of theory’s discourse on citizenship, in form and content. Her poetic translingualism works to that end as it enacts her notion of the cidadán who moves between and across languages and borders, and even more broadly, time and space to engage with others. Moure’s attention in that sense goes beyond queerness and towards various “othered” subjects (racial, religious): for this article, I will focus on lesbian embodiments of citizenship as it undergirds the cidadán and Moure’s queering of citizenship to go beyond queerness 8 .
Moure’s conceptualization of the cidadán stands in opposition to the still pervasive idea that the nation-state as a political unit defines citizenship. Both in this book of poetry and in a later essay, she rejects the nation-state, as a “product” of 19th c. and 20th c. elitist policies of exclusion: “It is citizenship’s acts I dream of, acts not constrained or dilated by nation, especially as nation-state and its 19th c. model of sovereignty” 9 . This refers to the western nation-state, which has been theorized as a political unit to which is attached a territory with clearly defined borders founded, in part, on self-naturalized monolingualism and temporally linear historical narratives 10 . Based on these characteristics, the nation-state determines who is excluded from citizenship, including some already present within its bounds, notably queer subjects 11 . As Brian Baer explains, their exclusion from such a political category may be closely linked to the advent of the nation-state, which is also founded on heteronormativity 12 . Heteronormativity as a cornerstone of (western) societies, is, according to Monique Wittig, the fallacious naturalization of heterosexuality: its underlying principle, reproduction, a duty that befalls women, has served as the basis of their oppression 13 . This mechanism results in what has been called “straight time,” i.e. the self-naturalized linear temporality of hetero-reproduction that also underpins the nation-state through narratives of advancement and progress: as such, it oppresses, marginalizes, or even excludes queer sexualities and existences 14 . Brian Baer shows that the monolingual norm has also participated in the exclusion of queer subjects from the nation-state, straight time, and so possibly citizenship: he explains how not only queer people were described as strangers within that heteronormative framework, but how queerness was also projected onto foreign others. Foreignization was even one of the traits developed in gay literature to negotiate queerness 15 . How, then, may queer subjects exist as citizens? How do foreign detours participate in constructing queer poetics, or how does queerness inflect translingual aesthetics? In what ways does Moure’s translingual poetics transform queer citizens’ possibilities in the political sphere? Through what different spatio-temporal arrangements? I will show that Moure’s queer translingualism deconstructs the foundational spatiotemporal tenets of the nation-state in order to remap queer citizenship. Ultimately, even though the book mostly dwells on dire instances of exclusions, her cidadán leans towards a rethinking of citizenship as hopeful, as she stresses the need for a future vision of citizenship being present in the now 16 .
I will read Moure’s epistemologico-poetical inquiry into citizenship in relation with José Muñoz’s theory of queer futurity, which echoes many of Moure’s arguments in O Cidadán 17 , starting with their distrust of the nation-state as the spacetime in which queer individuals may thrive politically 18 . Muñoz redefines the spacetime of queer subjects emphasizing the need to envision queer futurity to change our political imagination. He describes queer futurity as a utopian horizon structured by hopeful longings for what is missing from the present world for queer subjects. Paradoxically, this future is not simply ahead, but discernible in the past: there, he sees traces of those hopeful longings and visions of something better 19 . These traces of another time may be re-enacted in the present to imagine actual queer presents and futures, especially for world-building and citizenship 20 . In reading Moure and Muñoz together, I do not wish to suggest Muñoz’s theory would enable me to give a totalizing or stabilized account of Moure’s poetic remapping of queer citizenship: Moure’s poetry is rather characterized by excess with multiple, plural, proliferating, unstable, sometimes even contradictory meanings — her translingualism is a manifestation of this, and is a feature that Muñoz does not discuss when it comes to queer experience. By close reading poems with Muñoz’s theory, I will attend to the echoes and dissimilarities between the two writers to tease out the “field of potentialities” 21 that Moure’s queer translingual poetics proposes. Her translingual approach, I argue, enacts, or even creates, her remapping of queer citizenship and its alternative spacetimes. Close reading translingual passages implies balancing out their potential opacity and the multiple, additional senses they give to language(s) — in doing so, I will show how translingual poetics remaps queer citizenship not by ascribing one single, univocal meaning to it, but rather by confusing and proliferating it.
The Scales of Queer Citizens
Citizenship is most often mapped out at the national scale, the citizen belonging to a territory defined by national boundaries. If Moure acknowledges that we, including as citizens, are unavoidably “coded” by the national scale 22 , her poetics remaps citizenship at other scales not only to give visibility to queer subjects within a civic framework, but also to explore other possibilities for what citizenship may entail. The translingual notion of the cidadán questions the national boundaries of the state used to define the citizen. On the one hand, the echo between O Cidadán and the Canadian anthem “O Canada” suggests the instability of the cidadán between several national spaces. On the other, Moure’s use of a regional language also questions the national scale to define citizenship 23 . To further remap citizenship, Moure shifts scales to the local space of the city as a locale of existence for queer subjects, a space where Muñoz discerns traces of queer existence and citizenship 24 . As Zoë Skoulding points out, Moure’s attention to the city explicitly ties geographical and political considerations, as she frames the city as the polis in her essays on citizenship 25 . Another word appears to discuss citizenship and the space of the city, the Latin civitas, in “document28 (lectora-leitora),” where she outlines reading as an act of citizenship. She proposes this poetic association: “civitas (read lenguas) à stranger” 26 . The word civitas effectively makes the space of the city a political locale as the Latin both designates the city and a collective group of citizens. In Moure’s take, the group of citizens is open to otherness, as is suggested by the idea of reading languages, possibly unknown languages. Reading Latin and Spanish in the segment, we are invited to experience openness toward the stranger. Better yet, we may realize we are strangers to these languages as well. In the context of the book, that stranger is inflected by Moure’s queer imagination and self-positioning as a lesbian who is a stranger and speaks other tongues: as Shannon Maguire shows, Moure’s reflections on citizenship also corresponds to her adopting a heteronym that estranges her name, no longer the Canadian Erin Mouré, but the Galician-accented Erín Moure 27 . Within the poem, the queer stranger in the city(zenship) appears through translingualism, with the feminine nouns (“lectora-leitora” and “civitas”), echoing the lesbian figure through which the cidadán is imagined.
Queer translingual poetics remaps citizenship by replacing its association to rigid national boundaries with a more flexible and open space, that of the city, which in turn also appears open to otherness through the cohabitation of languages and cultures 28 . For both Moure and Muñoz however, the space of the city may also be alienating for queer subjects: while Muñoz sees metropolises as potentially homogenized by heteronormative mass culture of the nation-state, for Moure, the legal order is also what rigidifies the city 29 . In that sense, the city would merely appear as a microcosm replicating the logic of the nation-state — hence the necessity for both thinkers to transform the space of the city. To ground such an idea into actual spaces, Moure references her personal experience in Canada, as someone from an Anglophone part of the country (Calgary), but who has lived in francophone Montréal for many years. In an untitled poem, she explains: “I who have made myself strange in the arena of my country and, here, come to Québec where I bear a strange tongue (yet hegemonic), allowed to be foreign. […] To be a stranger (hospes or advena) here is to faire partie de tout ce qui comporte le civis” 30 . Moure’s plurilingual description embodies her citizen status as hospes and advena within the civis, Latin terms that build upon the earlier evocation of civitas. Skoulding notes how Moure’s play on the ambiguity of hospes, meaning both guest and host, enacts the way in which the cidadán remaps citizenship as simultaneously inside and outside the space of the city, which implies that the citizen may be able to cross the boundaries of the city 31 . That liminal position is decidedly that of the queer citizen, as Moure self-designates also as advena, meaning stranger, a Latin word inflected in the feminine and used as such for all genders, which echoes Moure’s queering of the cidadán. Moure’s queer translingual citizenship is mapped within Canada’s arena, both a metaphorical and literal space of political strife, which may be interpreted as Montréal. The homophony between English and Galician (or Spanish) in “arena” furthermore implies a connection with other cities in other countries with similar political and linguistic issues —possibly Vigo, a city in Galicia that Moure references 32 . Consequently, the term “arena” remaps the space of the city in two ways for queer citizens to experience a form of inclusion: not only does the translingual pun make the city into an overlapping of cultures and languages, but it also opens it to foreign spaces — and so otherness — to which it may be connected globally. In these two ways, queer citizens are indeed inside and outside, crossing boundaries within the city, as well as its outer boundaries. The city, and therefore queer citizenship, appear as both local and global, connecting various spaces translocally 33 .
Moure, indeed, does not only look at her own city, but connects queer experiences in different cities, even different locales, enacting how the cidadán is remapped beyond the national. As Muñoz reminds us, one of the ways in which the city, as a symptom of the heteronormative state, excludes queer subjects from politics and citizenship is to confine them to private spaces 34 . Against that, Muñoz identifies public locales in cities that are restructured by queer experience, for example bars are clubs. Moure also identifies such locales, the interiority of which enables a public display of queer existence. In “document5 (dehiscence’s tiny cape),” she juxtaposes reflections on civic relations and what appears to be a recollection of an erotic encounter with her lover: “her article to touch or not her article. / my lips miss ‘kindred’ / Zinc bar on the rue de Rennes (Au Vieux Colombier) […] / Boundary or knee. Rain / <98.11.12/Paris>” 35 . Although the lesbian encounter evoked here seems to show a certain form of hesitation, or restraint (the image of the boundary, the polysemy of miss, the paratactic style), the encounter is nonetheless localized in a public space in Paris, a city fantasized as a city of lovers, here re-appropriated for a lesbian couple. Through the occupation of that public interiority, Paris becomes a site for the imagination to restructure queer citizenship. Moure’s take on queer structuring of space goes one step further as she connects Paris to other cities: the crossing of borders between private and public is paralleled by the crossing of national borders to manifest queer imagination. First the poem quoted is part of a section entitled “montréal papers,” suggesting Moure links this lesbian experience in Paris to life in Canada. Moreover, other locales with allusions to female queer desire are mentioned. In one “Georgette” poem for instance, the speaker directly expresses her love (“O Georgette is this my letter of adoration? / If ecstasy is abrupt, I love you”), she mentions both her passing through Prague, and a village 36 . Crossing these borders to connect queer experiences creates a network of locales that undermine the national scale to better remap queer citizenship as translocal. Moure, in that sense, does not advocate for a borderless world, but rather for porous borders that admit difference and passage to create encounters, and so to admit the possibility of openness towards others that may maintain their difference. 37 Moure’s attention to the city and its variable scales undermines the national scale: the city proves to be a potentially very malleable space where borders may be crossed to enact that openness to others that is fundamental to queer citizenship. However, if we go back to the Parisian poem, the restraint between the lesbian lovers may show the difficulty to reach the complete openness to otherness on which queer citizenship seems to be premised, questioning the very possibility of queer citizenship. In that sense, is queer citizenship already there, or does it exist only as a potentiality?
Temporalities of Queer Civic Potentiality
Moure’s replacing of the cidadán in a more malleable and crossable space transforms time, also remapping queer citizenship in time. This type of queer re-structuring of space is what makes it possible to imagine other futures and possibilities for queer citizens, outside of the heteronormative nation-state and straight time, as Muñoz explains 38 . In an early poem in the collection, “document2 (inaugural),” Moure first insists on the mobility of subjects across space, especially borders (“Our cared selves a product always of migrations or emigrative qualities”) 39 , to enact openness. Her “cidadán,” who moves across space in such a way is therefore detached from “country or origin.” Moure further develops this image of crossable borders with leaky edges, which in turn alters the time of queer subjects and citizens. She writes: “the cidadán stands in time as the person stands in space, liquid edge before or beyond the other she craves, the she she craves also a she, and this is space that opens time, / it is a space / where time tumbles backwards, brings a future into presence” (sic) 40 . By seeping otherness into the nation-state, the liquidity of the edges of space jeopardizes the linear processes through which it builds the legitimacy of its borders and so of exclusive citizenship. Therefore, the cidadán implodes the linear temporality of the nation-state by anchoring her future not ahead of her, but in the present 41 . Moure’s remapping of the cidadán in time finds an echo in Muñoz’s theory of queer temporality, as this bringing of the future into the present is precisely what constitutes queer futurity as distinct from straight time. Indeed, Moure’s translingual altering of time is also a queering, as is reiterated with the repetition of the pronoun “she,” evoking the cidadán’s lesbian desire, which here, as Skoulding observes, is also a desire for a genuine public space that does not reject queer subjects 42 .
Nevertheless, Moure does not actually describe a clearly-delineated future within her poems — with Muñoz, we might rather see this future as a horizon that responds to queer longings for something missing from the heteronormative framework they are caught in 43 . Moure’s poetic development of the cidadán’s future as brought into the present is reminiscent of Muñoz’s theory. In “document9 (categorical resistance),” she reflects on the (im)possibility to define things during encounters, in particular when these things appear to us as others, being in that sense unpredictable, and so resisting definition. She elaborates on this point through temporal instability, by transforming the grammatical phrase “not yet” into a concept:
How to think along the edges of something that is not yet a thing, using one’s own “not yet” which is anterior to our “our”ness, to any “my” or any sum… and which creates the “our”ness too as a further (always further) “not-yet” superimposed or perhaps coalescent with an “our” that is tentative (but oh this is beauty) and urged up and forward by the “not-yet” (sic) 44 .
Moure discusses the temporal bounds at the heart of the relation between the collective — our, ourness — and the individual — my, and sum, connoting both the Latin “I am” and the idea of a totality of identity, subsuming the collective within the individual. In her discussion, all of them appear as unstable, or more accurately, yet to come. In the context of the collection, this relation between the individual and the collective may be read as the basis for citizenship, especially since collectivity and individuality are framed as both possession of something (perhaps a citizenship) and identity (belonging to a group). In the context of the book, that thing that is not yet a thing may very well be the condition of the cidadán as queer citizenship — “one’s own not yet” alluding perhaps to one’s own personal experience and hopes for the future. Throughout these lines, what, paradoxically enough, defines it is its lack or definition, or rather its lack of definition and stability in the now. The concept of the “not-yet” connotes this instability, this futurity that enables us to think of what cannot be thought of right now. Although nominalized here, Moure’s notion is also unstable itself, as she expands its meanings translingually: in an essay on her writing of O Cidadán, it also appears through the Portuguese word and notion of saudade, a form of nostalgia and longing, or as she translates it “memory-to-come” 45 . This translingual adaptation of her notion complicates the temporal relation for the construction of citizenship as collective, gearing it both towards a future and a past. The translingual notion also enacts a crossing of borders that reveals these queer longings that make it possible to imagine queer citizenship. These queer longings appear as hopeful in this passage by Moure, which is discernible in what I see as poetic excess. On the one hand, although essayistic, the use of parenthesis with “(but oh this is beauty)” bends the apparent genre of the text, to express irrepressible glee as to the potential for a collective that remains to be inflected by this queer future. On the other hand, the syntax of the passage and the use of repetitions tend to confuse referentiality, and rather insists on the instability of possibilities within this “not-yet.” This excess, as Dowling points out, is also that of queer relations and existence within the heteronormative, patriarchal framework of the state 46 : in that sense, it is well indeed a form of queer futurity and hope that Moure invokes here to rethink our collective, civic lives.
This beauty, this hope, may be seen as being urged by a utopian drive, the temporality of which participates in the remapping of citizenship for queer subjects. Muñoz describes how queer futurity is utopian, as its hopeful tendency points to something perhaps more ideal than the world in which queer subjects actually exist, without being prescriptive of what the world must be 47 . Inspired by German idealist philosopher Ernst Bloch, he delineates this temporality as a dialectic between future and past converging into the present: utopian mechanisms imply to look for traces of what is “not-yet-here” (the future) into the “no-longer-conscious” (the past) in order to criticize what is missing in the world and imagine better presents, and ultimately better futures. The terminology itself, especially to designate the future, or the hopes for the future is not unlike Moure’s — this is precisely that utopian temporality that, for Muñoz, and I contend for Moure, implodes the straight time undergirding the nation-state, and so makes it possible to re-imagine citizenship. To be clear, Muñoz does not discuss utopias as an artistic genre 48 , and O Cidadán is not a utopia either 49 — rather, it is traversed by utopian longings for something better, the seeds of which are perceptible in the book. To rethink citizenship, for instance, Moure references the Quixote, who may be interpreted as a hopeful figure driven by utopian longings for a better world that is not yet here 50 . She re-appropriates and bends the figure of the Quixote outside of its original context to particularly emphasize how the cidadán’s acts are less structured by obedience to the state than by the hope for something better in relation with others. In “document15 (differential planes),” Moure also mentions two figures who fought against Nazi oppression and the complicity of states that either aided, or attempted to hide Nazi crimes: first Paul Grüninger who altered passports to allow Austrian Jews to remain in Switzerland in 1938, and Christoph Meili, a Swiss whistleblower who disclosed Holocaust-era documents between Swiss banks and Nazi Germany about to be destroyed in 1997. The latter in particular is directly compared to Quixote as Moure quotes from the Simon Leys article “The imitation of our Lord Don Quixote” (NYRB June 11, 1998): “he finally decided that the career of a knight errant would be the most rewarding, intellectually and morally” 51 . The errancy of the Quixote questions the bounds of the state to suggest how it may be a figure through which to rethink citizenship — as Moure adds on the next page to that poem: “To read Quixote not as ‘foolish’ or as ‘hero’ but as ‘citizen.’” Although not a queer character per se, the Quixote, because of his difference and foreignness may be interpreted as a figure of inspiration for cidadáns. The Quixote’s foreignness resurfaces in a later poem, “sovereign body39 (vis-à-vis)” (sic), as its name appears in a French spelling in a definition of the cidadán: “O cidadán is not the person subject to rules/laws […] but “one who does not accept the gap” […] therefore one who acts differently. (Quichotte)” 52 . Not only does the Quixote, both through errancy and the translingual versions of his name, remap citizenship outside the nation-state, but the figure also shows this finding of beauty for the future in examples of the past, a temporality reminiscent of Moure’s not-yet as saudade, i.e. as “a memory-to-come”.
This alternative temporality activates the potentialities of who has acted differently in the past. This difference is often what justifies exclusion from the nation, notably for queer subjects. This remapping in time outside of straight time is therefore what enables the reclaiming of citizenship for queer subjects. In the book, we find queer potentialities for citizenship, as those things that “[are] present but not existing in the present tense” 53 . In other words, those potentialities are anachronic acts that already manifest a sort of “not-yet” in the past or the present. In Moure’s poetics, memory plays a structuring role 54 , and the remapping of queer citizenship and exploring of its hopeful potentialities in an alternative spacetime in O Cidadán is no exception. Queer memory, especially as public memory, is difficult to access, as Muñoz explains, being mainly discernible as traces — yet it is located in such unstable memory that he sees the materialization of queer longings and potential hopeful future into the present 55 . In her poems, Moure tracks “memory of harms 56 ”. In the “Fourth Catalogue of the Underwater Locker of Thieved Harms,” the speaker opposes a “we” and a “they” in the past — “Did harms’ encyclical hold us in? We compelled such harms, they said, like bruxas.” — after which the poem describes tenderness between the poetic persona and her female lover 57 . In the context of the poem, “us” may be understood as lesbians, or women with non-conforming behavior; “they” reprises the “encyclical,” papal letters to bishops, which may be read metonymically as patriarchal authority that have supported the state. “They” call “us” “bruxas,” a foreign word which confers lesbians a status of outsider: the potential opacity of the word posits them as a sort of absolute other. The context of the poem and the collection, evoking Spain and Galicia, as well as papal orders, is reminiscent of the 15th c. Spanish Inquisition, which allied religious and state power against behaviors and sexualities considered deviant. Indeed, “bruxa,” is a Galician word meaning witch: the vagueness of the preterit used in the opening lines of the poem prevents us from pinpointing the exact moment in the past the speaker alludes to. The Galician rather awakens the old, collective memory of witch hunts and harms exacted on women considered to have a deviant sexuality during the Spanish Inquisition, and throughout Europe in the following centuries. In the context of North America, the Galician makes these witches even more radically other, while connecting them translocally and transhistorically to the American memory of witch hunts in Salem, as well as to 20th-century heteronormative witch hunts of queer subjects, for instance during the Red and Lavender Scare of McCarthyism 58 . Consistently in these memories, queer women were harmed and evicted from the possibility of citizenship: as she adds in “Sixth Catalogue of the Pubis of Harms,” “there were places where we were cast aside/our grip was cast aside” 59 — this “we” being reminiscent of lesbians in the earlier poem. The mention of the “bruxas” thus awakens this memory of harm shifting through different times, places, and languages, implying there is also a certain opacity that remains in this figure of the other that is the witch, and so lesbians: yet, what hope is there to find in the poem? What future for queer citizenship?
The figure of the witch has been re-appropriated by feminist and lesbian groups to reframe their self-appreciation on their own terms 60 . Therefore, the memory of those collective harms, also becomes the site of a potential self-redefinition: Moure’s reparative practice is enacted in the poem by the erotic lesbian encounter. It seems that against the papal document, the speaker intertwines lesbian sexuality (with the mentions of wetness, e.g. “the wet ‘fond’ risen of that drapery / I raise above your knee”) and her writing of that sexuality “against / all harm.” The speaker’s writing appears ambiguous, urged by queer desire: “you the wettening surface / I declare upon / not advisedly but with splendours / and drapery.” The beauty coming from their queer encounter is what motivates this urgency, although it may be dangerous. Interestingly, queer beauty is again marked by Hispanic foreignness, when the poetic persona suggests her lover’s dress may be painted by Velázquez, as if to ironically offset and re-appropriate the bruxa, perhaps as royalty. The dress is associated with the “drapery” that the speaker raises on her lover’s leg, suggesting she is also infused with Velásquez’s foreignness as a lesbian writer. The erotic encounter may be read here in terms of what Muñoz calls “ecstatic time,” as the temporality of queerness, where past, present, and future all coalesce into one moment to reveal its utopian potential 61 . Here, this ecstasy is made literal through the erotic encounter seen through the lens of the “bruxa,” that associates past, present, and future, which is all the more visible in the poem with the mixtures of tenses and temporal markers. The poem evokes an unstable past with the preterit at the beginning, but the lesbian encounter itself is written in the present tense: the future also appears with the erotic encounter and the idea that the speaker would like “to become / unheld by that confine or boundary,” suggesting that the freedom gained through the erotic encounter, may also liberate from entrapping national, and political categories. Thus, the lesbian relationship appears foundational for queering citizenship based on tenderness and pleasure. Moure’s ecstatic translingual approach of citizenship remaps queer subjects in time, coalescing various moments, to better imagine what queer citizenship can be 62 . Indeed, such a spatiotemporal remapping for queer subjects is precisely what rekindles political imagination for Muñoz, which in Moure’s book leads not just to re-imagining citizenship for queer subjects, but a queering of the concept of citizenship.
Civic Enactment of Queer Relationality
What do these potentialities look like? What becomes of the citizen in that context? In Moure’s poems, the cidadán can no longer be defined as a set of obligations or rights stemming from their allegiance to the state 63 . Yet it remains impossible to clearly define what would then be the identity of the cidadán. In “document32 (inviolable),” Moure indeed questions the fixity of identity. She first makes a connection between the instability of language and the porosity of borders: “When ‘my language’ fails, only then can we detect signals that harken to a porosity of borders or lability of zones… (across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, not just the visual. as in planetary noise)” 64 . The failure of language points to those moments when what we consider as a self-evident language no longer appears as so, when it is no longer enough, nor self-sufficient. To be able to pay attention to such porosities, she undermines the notion of identity as likewise self-evident: “But first we have to suspend our need to see identity itself as saturate signal (obliterating all “noise”), following Lispector / into a ‘not-yet’—” 65 . Within the traditional framework of the state, the “signal” represents what would be considered as the norm — linguistic, gendered, and sexual, and racial. In contrast, it is when the language “fails” that we can hear different signals, or even noise, i.e. anything other, especially in terms of languages and sexualities, here lesbian sexualities 66 . Noise, in that context is all the more disruptive, as it points to something one does not understand (like a foreign language), and that may be unpleasant: in that sense it resists the homogenizing tendencies of the nation-state by introducing difference, which we may not understand. Moure suggests identity should be open to “noise” to remain radically unstable in a “not-yet.” In that sense, the cidadán’s identity can be seen as a “becoming,” as always to be reinvented, to borrow Muñoz’s terminology, which reflects his own wariness at the idea of identity as static 67 . In Moure’s elaboration, “becoming” happens by existing in the alternative spacetime in which the cidadán may evolve. In that sense, as she suggests in “document36 (hermao),” the cidadán is “no fijada en ningún lugar” 68 . The use of the Spanish performs the instability and mobility of the cidadán, exemplifying how her own translingual performance may also be part of what citizenship can be. She thus proposes: “Citizenship as enactment ==> to cross a border,” suggesting queer citizens are not only remapped in an alternative spacetime, but they also perform the remapping of space and time, and so the queering of citizenship 69 . The very last paragraph of the poem elaborates on how the cidadán does so:
What if national determinations in a unitary state (España, Canadá) created more borderlands, thus more potential for overlap, irruption, thus freedoms! O Cidadán. The one who carries a passport, for she has already been somewhere else. And brings back words in another idiom:
“hermao” galego eonaviego
The cidadán brings back otherness from her being on the outside in the form of foreign languages, thus participating in the destabilization of the national space into a borderland 70 that may afford porosity, and endless crossings—the Hispanic spelling of Canada suggests this has already happened. It is echoed by the last line that mentions two regional languages of Spain, Galician and Eonagievo (spoken in Asturias), and the word “hermao,” a medieval spelling for the word “irmão,” meaning brother, or sibling. The cidadán performs the crossings of time and space through the use of these words, while calling for an inclusive form of citizenship for those deemed as others.
When Moure queers citizenship, reframing it as a crossing through space, time, and language, she offers an alternative to the way in which belonging to the state is denied to queer subjects – either through legal or illegal discrimination 71 . Yet, if citizenship is also instability for all, what political collective relation can the cidadán yield? Muñoz’s reconstruction of queer citizenship in alternative spacetimes ultimately leads to the possibility of belonging for queer subjects, by recreating new forms of relationality between them 72 . Fostering relationality is at the heart of Moure’s queering of citizenship, for instance when she describes acts of relationality that perform openness to otherness: in her case, however, that process makes her question belonging as a mode of citizenship in favor of enactment 73 . For Moure, the idea of belonging is too closely tied to identities that have become essentialized by the structures and the history of the nation-state as rooted in a closed-off territory 74 . Instead, through the cidadán who can cross space and time, she re-imagines it as a relation that foregrounds an openness to others. This is performed through acts of crossing borders which seem infused with the hopeful potentiality of queerness 75 . Moure frames such relationality and acts within her concept of the “not-yet,” when she defines it as aproximação, a term borrowed to a reading of Clarice Lispector by Hélène Cixous. She defines it as “the space of an encounter” where touch is made possible, not as a form of incorporation or appropriation, but rather of co-existence and exchange through care 76 . In O Cidadán, the term first appears in “document5 (dehiscence tiny cape),” where we saw a lesbian encounter in Paris — here Moure links aproximação to a practice of care: “Cixous reads Clarice Lispector’s Paixão as aproximação — approach or approximations — and it is political: the “between-us” which we must touch with care” 77 . What I had previously identified as restraint between the lovers may also be read as the performance of aproximação, showing that moment of lesbian tenderness as imbued with queer potentiality of care for the other in public spaces. The private, queer relation is transferred to the public, political sphere to rethink civic relationality — i.e. how the body of citizens is a group that acts with and for each other – through queer aproximação.
Civic relationality as aproximação or “not-yet” thus leads Moure to develop an ethics of hospitality through translingualism to queer citizenship. If she dwells on intimate lesbian encounters as inspiration for a relationality that offsets the structures of the nation-state, she also emphasizes that the civic relation cannot only be built on the relation to l’autre (the intimate other), but also to autrui (unknown others) 78 . This is made all the clearer in a later poem, “document19 (abrigar),” which explicitly links the quixotic acts of citizens such as Grüninger or Meili to a practice of aproximação as a form of manifesting noise as fullness against signal: “Signal’s clamour cannot impede noise’s aproximação. Citizenship’s acts are rather acts of unrecognized ‘fullness’” 79 — this fullness being a form of excess against the rigid structures of the nation-state. This leads her to elaborate on how we open ourselves to others, as the title also suggests, “abrigar” meaning “open” in Spanish: “To face or ear that is also a terrain, the harbouring of / ‘l’autre homme’ without insisting he ‘make sense’ according to my structure.” Both this idea, and the move from l’autre to autrui are reminiscent of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, which posits the welcoming of the other, not to assimilate it to me (i.e. reduce it to a form of sameness, which is what the state usually does), but to accept and let its singularities be 80 . As Moure explains in an interview with Dawne McCance about her proximity with Levinas and the responsibility that comes with citizenship:
And Levinas sees the fundamental call of ethics as an opening to the other, without setting the terms of this opening, this receipt of the stranger. The stranger is not the neighbour, the neighbour is someone like us, someone we already think we know or can know. The stranger is not this person. 81
The position of the stranger is one in which queer subjects have been put, and that Moure re-appropriates through translingualism in her poems.
She therefore suggests how citizens are also sexual beings, and that erotic and civic relation inflect each other 82 . Such a continuity, or perhaps intertwining, is enacted in Moure’s exploration of the civic relation, which goes from the relation to l’autre as amorosa to that to autrui as cariñosa — from love to tenderness, the latter thematizing the idea of care and hospitality through translingual paronomasia. In cariñosa we hear the English word “care,” and the Spanish term “cara” (the face) which alludes to Levinas, as we acknowledge autrui by looking at their face 83 . The queering of the civic relation comes to the fore through Moure’s translingualism: the foreign words inflected in the feminine remind us that her lesbian perspective can be articulated by crossing borders, and perform the welcoming of the stranger. She ponders such civic relation through the use of pronouns and address. In a “Georgette,” she writes: “The memory of such harms not quite wiped out […] / St. Augustin’s plea to tú irreproducible but as ‘thou’ / a quaintness,” linking it to the way in which touching her lover makes them both exist in space locally 84 . The reference to Augustine inserts the relation to autrui in a poem about a relation to l’autre locating hospitality in tender touching performed by the use of an archaic pronoun. Poetic echoes of “thou” appear in the poem “I who have made myself strange,” linking it with the idea of hospitality (“où tout ce qui est anétatique m’accueille”) 85 . The need for this translingual quaintness fostering the civic relation of hospitality is triggered in the poem by the lingering memory of violence on lesbian subjects, as the reference to “the memory of such harms” suggests. Against those, through the civic relation, Moure describes and advocates for what Lianne Moyes has called “acts of civilian love” that disturb, or I would say queer, the normative order: these acts effectively transform citizenship into a relational practice of hospitality rather than allegiant belonging to the state 86 .
Citizenship as a relational practice of hospitality extends to readers who are invited to experience other languages and the acts of civilian love they manifest. In the “Georgette” poem mentioned just before, the lay-out reinforces this extension to the reader: the word “quaintness” describing the address “thou,” is followed by what I read as a further description of the other:
, a quaintness
the in – coherent.
ways in which to incohere is to cherish
formidable
wreak inure
(fabulate)
An oblique dotted line traverses the verb “to incohere” all the way down to the left side of “inure,” as if to suggest readers could fold the page on itself, having the words “cherish” and “inure” overlap with “in – coherent” and “formidable.” First, the idea of incoherence of the past suggests the instability of identity or meaning for all that appears as foreign, as other, or queer — what is more, the spelling may even suggest that it is in incoherence that we may find a form of coherence. For instance, in the poems discussed in this paper, this instability, or shiftiness, or excess of meaning could be that of the witch, that remains at least in part elusive in its Galician wording “bruxa,” or even reveals inconsistencies between images of the witch as various queer others in space and time. In that sense the dotted line could also be seen as the porous border that folds on itself, engaging citizens-as-readers into what Fitzpatrick and Rudy have described as a “negotiating of meaning in a field of exchanging” 87 . Such inconsistencies, or excess, are not viewed as problematic in the Georgette poem. Quite the opposite, perhaps hospitality is accepting others as those who cannot be grasped in their entirety, since “to incohere is to cherish.” Holding or touching each other in those differences would be hospitality: folding these words onto each other physically manifests accepting or thinking with incoherence, and possibly welcoming difference as a queering of citizenship.
That being said, in incoherence, ambiguities remain and this queer manifestation of touching the incoherent also has its potential for violence. “Formidable” may be read translingually as both the French for something great and extraordinary and the English for something daunting. Likewise, the folding of “inure” onto “formidable” suggests a similar unavoidable form of violence, including in hospitable, civilian, queer touching and love. In yet another reading of the lesbian encounter in Paris, we could in that sense see the restraint affected by the speaker as a form of self-conscious anxiety that by touching she may harm the lover: the cidadán is both at risk to be harmed and to harm, even through careful aproximação 88 . Perhaps, what remains in these unresolvable ambivalences is the act of imagination, which itself appears as ambiguous and queer. The verb “fabulate” coined by Moure connotes all at once the recounting of fabulous narratives, the telling of lies, and a search for moral truths. The ambiguity of “fabulating” itself suggests that even Moure’s text should perhaps not be taken as one absolute truth 89 , but rather as potentialities 90 to imagine hospitality and queer citizenship. In that sense, much like Muñoz’s analyses on queer utopian hopes, I read the book not as a conclusive remapping of citizenship, but rather as propositions, or possibilities for queer citizens that are made imaginable thanks to this remapping that is “not-yet” over.
Conclusion
Reading Moure with Muñoz has helped delineate some of the ways in which O Cidadán remaps queer citizenship in a spacetime different to that of rigid and exclusive nation-state: the spacetime of queer citizenship is malleable, crossable — different scales and moments overlap to make it possible to actually imagine other, hopeful futures for queer subjects and possibly implement them within the present. Moure’s translingual aesthetic —as a practice that creates excess, instability, pluralization, and proliferation of senses — plays a fundamental role in the creation of such spacetimes in which queer citizens may then thrive insofar as it is what opens up and recasts space and time in multiscale, multidirectional, overlapping configurations. Here, translingualism appears not only as the embodiment of queer citizenship as crossing to make the lesbian subject visible, but also as the performance of such crossings, and so of queer citizenship itself. In the poems, then, through translingualism, queer citizens are shown to participate in this very remapping. In that sense, queer citizenship is not about finding a way to fit queerness into a priori models of citizenship, but about queering citizenship itself, which for Moure amounts to hospitable crossings, that unavoidably remains a practice that holds risk. The first of those crossings might be reading the book itself, perhaps to experience, or at least interact with those alternative spacetimes through which citizenship is remapped. Therefore, Moure’s queering of citizenship exceeds queer subjects, and offers a renewed form of citizenship discovered through queerness to make us think of the potentialities of what could be in collective political experience.
- I am grateful to Yannick Blec for his careful reading and editing of this article, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their critiques and insights.↵
- Erín Moure, O Cidadán: poems, Toronto, House of Anansi Press, 2002, n.p. Italics original.↵
- Galician is a regional language of Spain, which has survived decades of monolingual national politics. In the book, Moure also moves through English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Ancient Greek, and German.↵
- Sarah Dowling, Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism, Iowa City, U of Iowa P, 2018, p. 4-6.↵
- Lianne Moyes, “Acts of Citizenship: Erín Moure’s O Cidadán and the Limits of Wordliness,” Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, dir. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Waterloo, Ont., Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007, p. 113.↵
- Erín Moure, op. cit. p. 141.↵
- Jessica MacEachern, “Mobilizing Affect and Intellect in Erotic Citizenship: or, The Becoming Lover of Erín Moure’s Citizen Trilogy,” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature Canadienne, 46/1, 2021, p. 166-188.↵
- See also Sarah Dowling, Remote Intimacies: Multilingualism in Contemporary Poetry, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2012, p. 191; and Zalfa Feghali, Crossing Borders and Queering Citizenship: Civic reading practice in contemporary American and Canadian writing, Manchester, Manchester UP, 2019, p. 2, 129. Regarding the question of race specifically, Moure mentions it sporadically in the poems (for instance p. 124), but her questioning and re-imagination of citizenship is not race-oriented per se, which is why here I focus on issues of queerness.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 42. See also, Erín Moure, My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice, Edmonton, NeWest Press, 2009, p. 167-168. Although it is clear that, for her, contemporary nation-states are not the equivalent of 19th and 20th c. nation-states, it is because the former, to a certain degree, are a continuance of the latter, that I focus on this political unit. Moure’s attention to the formation and development of nation-states turns to Canada, as well as other countries such as the United-States or Spain.↵
- Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: the Postmonolingual Condition, New York, Fordham UP, 2012, p. 3; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), London, Verso, 2016, p. 19, 27, 33.↵
- Especially through institutional and symbolic refusal to acknowledge and protect them. See Robert Payne and Cristyn Davies, “Introduction to the Special Section: Citizenship and queer critique,” Sexualities, 15/3, 2012, p. 251-6.↵
- Brian J. Baer, Queer Theory and Translation Studies: Language, Politics, Desire, Abingdon, Routledge, 2020.↵
- Monique Wittig, La pensée straight (2001), Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2018, p. 47, 70, 81.↵
- See in particular Jack Halberstam, for whom this temporality is based not only on reproduction but also on inheritance and stability to reinforce the state — such normative temporalities manifest through other temporal arrangements or rhythms, but aim at re-affirming the straight line of straight time (Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York, NYU Press, 2005, p. 2-8). José Muñoz also uses the term following Halberstam, signaling how in this configuration the future is only the repetition and continuation of the same present underpinned by hetero-reproduction as well (José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York, NYU Press, 2009, p. 22). Elizabeth Freeman refers to straight time but prefers discussing dominant temporality in terms of “chrononormativity,” i.e. the homogeneous empty time and consequential, linear time of the nation, and “chronobiopolitics,” namely the management of population through cycles of hetero-reproduction that underpin the linear time of the nation (Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham, Duke UP, 2010, p. xxii, 3, 5-6). All three of them, and others, have outlined alternative queer temporal arrangements that resist these dominant temporalities. As I will mostly rely on Muñoz’s work, I choose to use the expression “straight time” in this article.↵
- Brian, J. Baer, op. cit. p. 3, 5, 7.↵
- Erín Moure, Beloved, cit.p. 163, 221.↵
- It should be noted that Muñoz’s theory is posterior to and does not reference Moure.↵
- José Muñoz, op. cit., p. 29.↵
- Ibid. p. 9.↵
- Ibid. p. 49, 56.↵
- See Jamie Dopp, “‘A field of potentialities’: Reading Erin Moure,” Essays on Canadian Writing 67, 1999, p. 261-287.↵
- Erín Moure, Beloved, cit., p. 154.↵
- Sarah Dowling, Remote Intimacies, cit., p. 194-195.↵
- He focuses, notably on American cities such as New York and Los Angeles. See José Muñoz, op. cit.↵
- Zoë Skoulding, Contemporary Women’s Poetry and the Urban Space: Experimental Cities, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 139, and Erín Moure, Beloved, cit., p. 59.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 72.↵
- Shannon Maguire, “Parasite Poetics: Noise and Queer Hospitality in Erin Moure’s O Cidadán,” Canadian Literature 224, 2015. Retrieved at https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/parasite-poetics-noise-queer-hospitality-erín/docview/1739056747/se-2, p. 4-5.↵
- Zoë Skoulding, op. cit., p. 139.↵
- José Muñoz, op. cit., p. 29; Erín Moure, Beloved, cit., p. 59.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 82, italics original.↵
- Zoë Skoulding, op. cit., p. 144.↵
- She both references the city in a poem, p. 9, and as a place from which she writes her poems in the section “Vigo papers.”↵
- Lianne Moyes, op. cit., p. 114.↵
- José Muñoz, op. cit., p. 29, 53-54.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 19.↵
- Ibid, p. 110.↵
- Lianne Moyes, op. cit., p. 122.↵
- José Muñoz, op. cit., p. 116.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 9, italics original.↵
- Ibid., italics original.↵
- The relation between space and time is further developed in poems appearing later in the collection. For instance, in “document17 (sainte terre),” (p. 47) Moure considers what would be the implications of a citizen as one who is in relation with others in a locale. After this supposition, we read these lines: “which creates time, therefore history / what if the inhabitation of space were an event? (as in Lani Maestro’s To Dream Sleep, and dream of the other).” On the page, an arrow links the words time and event. These lines suggest that the way in which citizens experience space, no longer as national, but as local, might also be what creates time, or a temporality. Although what this time would look like is not described here, the arrow linking event and time, makes us go back earlier in the poem, perhaps hinting at the dissolution of a form of straight time through inhabitation of local spaces.↵
- Skoulding, op. cit., p. 40.↵
- José Muñoz, op. cit., p. 35.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 28.↵
- Erín Moure, Beloved, cit., p. 218-219.↵
- Dowling, Remote Intimacies, cit. p. 206, 208-209.↵
- José Muñoz, op. cit., p. 96-97.↵
- Based on Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia, this would be the description of an ideal, perfect place that does not exist per se; the genre has considerably evolved since then, see notably Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the future: the desire called utopia and other science fictions, London, Verso, 2007.↵
- Moure even shows a certain degree of suspicion towards the idea of utopia. For instance, she refers to the figures of the “holy lesbian” or “utopic fantastic woman” harbored by some feminisms: for her these figures can easily essentialize women and lesbians, which runs against her idea of the cidadán existing in a not-yet, i.e. as someone unpredictable that is always (re)-created through poetic language, see Erín Moure, Beloved, cit. p. 65-6, 205. In O Cidadán, this appears in “Nineteenth Catalogue of the Basura of Harms,” where she evokes the idea that utopia may be the place where “to dress harmed her.” See Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 124. She may refer to the way in which utopias can also be read as exclusive and prescriptive, especially for minor individuals. Unlike this type of utopia, I suggest Muñoz’s understanding of utopia as a non-prescriptive hopeful affect may be better suited to navigate Moure’s hopeful incursions on citizenship. Moreover, Moure is also wary of utopian depictions as being in a non-place; her poetry on the opposite explores specific spaces, places, and times, see Erín Moure, Beloved, cit. p. 94. Here, again, thinking with Muñoz’s recasting of utopian longing may be useful insofar as he also sees them as being performed in specific sites, which in turn helps us re-imagine political categories.↵
- Augustin Redondo, “Revisitanto el concepto de “utopia” y algunas de sus manfestaciones en la España del siglo XVI y de principios del siglo XVII”, e-Spania, revue interdisciplinaire d’études hispaniques médiévales et modernes 25, 2015, p. 49. https://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/24395#bodyftn58. Accessed Nov. 8th, 2023. See Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 42, 102.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 42.↵
- Ibid p. 102.↵
- José Muñoz, op. cit. p. 9.↵
- Erín Moure, Beloved, cit., p. 60.↵
- José Muñoz, op. cit., p. 35, 71-72.↵
- The titles of these poems are mostly given with this genitive form: “catalogue of the [noun] of Harms.” They explore different kinds of harms done to minoritized subjects, either thematizing in the title the ways through which harms come to be , e.g. “Eighth Catalogue of the in jure of Harms,” p. 36, which alludes to the relationship with soil, or to whom harms are done, e.g. “Twelfth Catalogue of the Emigration of Harms,” p. 58, which dwells on what one brings with emigration. The genitive might be ambiguous however, especially for the latter, implying that emigrating also creates harms: Moure thus suggests the ambiguity of harms, that those harmed may also harm.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 17. Italics original.↵
- Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: the Story of the Struggle, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2015, p. 23.↵
- Moure, Cidadán, cit. p. 26.↵
- For instance, with the lesbian science-fiction fanzine The Witch and the Chameleon published in the 1970s. See chapter three in Rox Samer, Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Durham, Duke UP, 2022.↵
- José Muñoz, op. cit., p. 187.↵
- Skoulding, op. cit., p. 144.↵
- Sarah Dowling, Remote Intimacies. cit., p. 207-208.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 79.↵
- Lispector refers to Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), whose oeuvre dramatically affected the landscape of Brazilian literature, and which has been re-read extensively by feminist and gender studies, notably by Hélène Cixous. She has been very influential for Moure, both for her linguistic experiences, being a multilingual writer, and concepts such as “Paixão,” see below.↵
- Shannon Maguire, op. cit., p. 1; Zoë Skoulding, op. cit., p. 140.↵
- José Muñoz, op. cit., p. 51-52, 127.↵
- “Not affixed to any place,” (my translation), Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 94. Italics original.↵
- Ibid., p. 94.↵
- The vocabulary of borderland is reminiscent of earlier poetics and theories of other lesbian writers that reflect on the liminality of their sexuality and their languages as well as the visible and invisible borders that separate the normative from queer. See for instance Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: the New Mestiza, San Francisco, Aunt Lute Books, 1987.↵
- For more on these discriminations in North America, especially in the period coming up to Moure’s O Cidadán, see Shane Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of citizenship, Philadelphia, Temple UP, 2001.↵
- José Muñoz, op. cit., p. 121.↵
- Erín Moure, Beloved, cit., p. 164-165.↵
- Ibid., p. 63, 83.↵
- “It is citizen acts I dream of.” See Erín Moure, Cidadán. cit., p. 42. It should be said that a number of these acts she identifies in the past go beyond the existence of queer subjects but remain an inspiration for her, as we saw for instance with Grüninger and Meili.↵
- Erín Moure, Beloved, cit. p. 168; Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 19, 37.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit. p. 19.↵
- Dawne McCance and Erín Moure, “Crossings: An Interview with Erín Moure,” Mosaic 50/1, 2017, p. 147-161, p. 149.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit. p. 51.↵
- See Emmanuel Levinas, Liberté et commandement, Paris, Fata Morgana, 1994.↵
- Dawne McCance and Erín Moure, op. cit. p. 159.↵
- Ibid.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit., p. 32, 72.↵
- Ibid., p. 89.↵
- Ibid., p. 82, “where all that is unstately welcomes me,” my translation.↵
- Lianne Moyes, op. cit., p. 117, 123.↵
- Ryan Fitzpatrick and Susan Rudy, “‘These marked spaces lie beneath / the alphabet’ Readers, Borders, and Citizens in Erín Moure’s most recent work,” Canadian Literature 210/211, p. 5. Retrieved, https://www.proquest.com/docview/963546969?sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals.↵
- Erín Moure, Cidadán, cit. p. 34, 77.↵
- Shirley McDonald, “Finding Common Ground: Purposeful Disarticulation in the Poetry of Erin Mouré,” ESC 41/2-3, 2015, p. 109-131, p. 121.↵
- See Jamie Dopp, op. cit.↵
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Auteur
Élise Angioi
Élise Angioi is a PhD candidate at Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis. Her research focuses on plurilingualism and questions of temporality in contemporary poetry published in North America, namely in the works of Caroline Bergvall, Natalie Diaz, LaTasha Diggs, Erín Moure, and M. Nourbese Philip. Her work has notably been published in the Revue française d’études américaines.
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Élise Angioi, The “then and there” of queer translingual citizenship in Erín Moure’s O Cidadán, ©2024 Quaderna, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2024, url permanente : https://quaderna.org/7/the-then-and-there-of-queer-translingual-citizenship-in-erin-moures-o-cidadan/
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