Queer world-making: Destabilizing heteronormativity through skateboarding

Abstract

Heteronormativity, or the expectation of heterosexuality and the traditional alignment of sex, gender, and sexuality organizes society such that heterosexual cisgender identities are widely privileged over queer identities. However, heteronormativity is not a natural structure. It is performed through normalized and relational practices, beliefs, and institutions which are susceptible to challenge, modification, and replacement. In this thesis, I argue that it is possible to compose a queer world and illustrate this potential using actor-network theory (ANT). I employ actor-network theory (ANT) and its concepts of agency and relationality to trace connections between different communities—skateboarding, hip hop, punk, street art, and queer culture—and to demonstrate the ways they have, and are, reordering queerness and heteronormativity in their communities and wider society. A crucial, and often misunderstood, element of ANT analysis is its emphasis on describing and tracing networks. However, description reveals and traces critical connections, in this case between skateboarding, hip hop, punk, and art networks, that become the foundations of new communities.

I present my argument for queer world-making through skateboarding in three successive parts: deployment, stabilization, and composition. In the first part, I identify the agencies and relations that comprise heteronormativity and skateboarding networks. In Part II, I demonstrate the different ways that queer arrangements of skateboarding, hip hop, punk, and art are challenging the heteronormative social order. In the final part, I show that network relations, and specifically queer interactions, can make and remake collectives by creating new spaces, identities, and perspectives. Ultimately, queerness and heteronormativity are arranged and rearranged in multiple, simultaneous, and contradictory ways as various agencies attempt to compose their version of the collective. I suggest that by drawing attention to, and reimagining, often overlooked queer connections and networks within apparent heteronormative networks has the potential to reorder society.