Opacity in Open Air: Producing Queer Outsides through Glissant’s Poetics of Relation

Abstract

This essay provides a queer reading of Édouard Glissant’s critique of Western metaphysics as presented in his 1990 work Poetics of Relation. Glissant’s text is interpreted as offering conceptual tools for understanding the production of an outside of the gender binary, as well as for a critique of the naturalisation of the bourgeois framework underlying queer visibility and inclusion as political ends. Based on the self-transgressive character shared by the notions of Relation and queerness, it is further argued that both the potentialities and the aporetic elements of Glissant’s proposal can elucidate those of queer theories and practices.