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This contribution revolves around our experiences within the queer and feminist framework in constructing solidarities, transforming them, and sometimes watching them fade or reconfigure. Our histories are intercon-nected, since we are both activists, and beyond other more personal identifi-cations, we both identify as lesbian, and queer. Simona’s activities consisted of, among other, art teaching at the National University of the Arts in Bucharest and in less formal contexts, organising contemporary art spaces and groups (Platforma Space, FemCAV), events such as workshops, per-formances, exhibitions and talks opening the discussions on relevant social themes, while Ramona was navigating different feminist and queer groups (both informal and NGOs), in search of belonging and ways to self-educate on issues that never passed through the Romanian education filters and later on include these “new” dimensions in her incipient research. Due to our age difference and to the fact that, within queer temporalities, ten years repre-sent, from a generational standpoint, a generation of activism and political transformations, we do think of ourselves, in a sense, as being formed—as queer persons starting to get awareness of our surroundings—within dif-ferent generational spans. In short, and for the sake of simplification, these generations could be formulated in terms of the pre-2001 and post-2001 context1 in Romania, 2001 being the year that saw the repeal of article 200 from the Romanian Criminal Code, in preparation of Romania’s coming inclusion into NATO and process to join the European Union. While all public LGBTQAI+ activism could only be developed locally after 2001, the years prior come back to Simona’s memory through deep layers of stigma, secrecy and random discoveries. Feminist and queer organising was sporadically present in the interval 2001–2010, and we would argue that 2010–2011 was the most visible turning point for Bucharest-based activism in terms of groups and collectives being formed, public spaces becoming available for the presentation of queer cultural products (Dumitriu, 2020), as well through a rise in official NGO activity, a subtle rise in number of queer events and their public. We wereboth active in different contexts during this turning point, and, unbeknown to each other, we had started a process of education and self-education, within local, Romanian activist circles, or in academic and international contexts (mostly Western-centred). While we had glimpses of each other over the years, our work and life partnership started in 2014, and it often functioned between the realms of the private and the public (through public performances, or through our involvement in academia or transnational networks developing specific projects, queer workshops, feminist meetings, conferences, etc.). Very briefly described above, we consider our activities, as well as our interactions as partners in life and thought, as building stones for site-specific activist selves, constructed in a very specific, often stigma- laden local environment which led to, in our case and the case of other per-sons around us, a need to search for, build, cling to and value safe spaces and groups that would comfort and offer a counteracting environment of respite, education and radical strength. We are now positioning ourselves at a turn of our activist identities, trig-gered by our relocation in Sweden in February 2018. Apart from economic reasons, our move to Sweden had another dimension based on a vague, indescribable desire to experience “queer freedom”, in a country that our parents, then ourselves, mythologised as a socialist, queer utopia. Sweden and other Nordic countries seem exceptionally good at creating the image of a safe queer land, although this image nonetheless hides other struggles: those of queer asylum seekers who must prove their sexuality (see Akin, 2019), those of queer people of colour that are tokenised in various projects depicting inclusivity and diversity, those of poor queers that are made invisible by the State, for example. This homotolerant image of the Nordic states is one of the mechanisms for advancing homonationalist and racist discourses (Liinason, 2020: 115) in line with the current tendencies of right-wing policies and parties which are on the rise across Europe. Nordic exceptionalism can thus be analysed through the concept of homonation-alism which is seen by Puar as a way in which nation-states redefine their positions as protectors of queerness, of “(some) homosexual bodies”, in a shift of the connections between capitalism, the very notion of state and dif-ferent sexualities (Puar, 2013, 2017). In this way, homonationalism deepens the existent forms of exclusion (e.g., the “progressive” West vs. other spaces), also contributing to the institutionalisation of sexualities (see how catego-ries of non-normative sexualities are constructed and defined by states in asylum seeker cases) and ways to exercise the power relationships between nation-states and individuals. A little over four years into our adventure, we experience something quite different: the loss of an activist self, an acute feeling of un-belonging as our ties to our own queer community, back in Romania, slowly dissolve, and as we feel less and less that we have the right to get our voice heard in the strug-gles we left behind, while realising that we still have to belong somewhere in the new surroundings. Yet, we feel estranged from the queer history ofSweden. We feel solidarity with fights that LGBTQAI+ persons are leading within other diasporas, and in this feeling, we also realise that our experi-ence and the history of our own bodies may find a place, but the process is a slow one, of careful learning and continuous repositioning of privilege. Belonging, in essence, can be measured in terms of affection, topologi-cal certainty, and language. We exist the most in the realm of our lägenhet (transl. apartment), as the poster stating “Home is where the cat is” is the last object we move every time we move from one place to the next, together with our cat. We exist in Romanian at home and with a few good friends, over the phone with our mothers, in English and Swedish at work. As English is still our main language to express our soul to friends that do not speak Romanian, and Swedish will probably never be more than a vehicle for work, the O Horizon2 of each new friendship is hard rock, rather than easy soil, with nuances and emotions being hard to convey. Within that, the Romanian diaspora is a “little Romania”3 in which traditions and the sanctity of fam-ily become walls of separation from Swedish homonationalism (Puar, 2013, 2017). |
