Performing Landscapes of/and Loss

Queerscape

“…Second, I shift to the human landscape-my interactions with the town's residents-where I feel the necessity to stifle my queer persona in favor of a performance that passes as heterosexual. Both landscape contexts imaginatively position geography as a catalyst for autobiography (Santoro, 2015), theorizing queer subjectivity and problematizing ethnographic practice by incorporating thick descriptions ''of describing and embodying behaviors, giving the audience an experiential instance for understanding the meaningfulness of expression, and the political importance of the utterance in a larger cultural context'' (Alexander, 2011, p. 100). Whether negotiating gender and sexuality in real-time or in the realm of imagination, recalling memories and reenacting performances from my closeted past, I render a queer auto/ ethnographer in and as performance, process, and analysis (Denzin, 2014, p. 30).…”