TRANSLATING KUIR MAGAZINE

This exercise suggests that something has changed or, at least, that a shift is becoming
necessary, well into the 21st century. These festivals seem to be looking for the point of
encounter within a context of hate that has learned to camouflage itself. One that nowadays
is able to celebrate gay weddings and to perfectly use neutral pronouns. We will recall that in
the not at all distant past, the meeting point among dissidents used to be injury, the common
wound, the expulsion as destiny that Didier Eribon deeply described in Réflexions sur la question
gay (published as Insult and the Making of the Gay Self in English). The meeting point was, in
turn, the experience of the closet which includes an obligatory and unifying secret, an open
secret. The traumatic and violent exit from that crystal closet of compulsory heterossexuality so
well described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwic has been the great living room (death room?) where
reflections, reactions, and new languages have taken shape. The meeting point used to be that
crystal closet constructed from the outside of families, friendship and guardian institutions to
perpetuate “pretending not to be” what everyone knows and the existential limit of running the
risk of being discovered.
The references to this common territory appear in almost every intervention. But the closet has
remained in the prehistoric times of each person and community and this sets these meetings
apart. Perhaps, within this archeology of obscurity, and no longer within the open sore, are the
conditions of possibility for the artistic expressions of the present. Because if we cannot quite
say that persectuion, both murderous and symbollic, has remained in the past as a dreadful
yet overcome stage, we know that the real advances in mentalities and parctices, thanks to
feminists and antiracist struggles and dissident activisim, as well as the deceptive goodness of
tolerance, have brought some change. The context is different, even in spaces where violence
keeps killing; perspectives and legal frameworks have been modified and therefore the possible
points of confluence and struggle have too. Within this context, one of the main creative and
political impulses of the “Translating Kuir” cycle is, beyond the stories that describe that injury,
the exercise of cordiality as a platform of knowledge production.
So, here and now, following the course proposed by this laboratory of thought, what does what
we will call a Kuir Kordiality mean?
Not politeness, nor good
education, nor good manners.
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