Abstract
I use my most recent film, Thick Relations, to argue that traditional narrative structures are by definition oppressive and controlling. Traditional narratives demand a straight progress through time, through life, through love, through sexuality and conflict and family—a straight progress that would have us believe in and desirous of state-sanctioned institutions and relations. Queer lives don't make sense. We are not supposed to be alive, to love the people we love, to live in our bodies so creatively. And it is precisely this confusion—this nonsense—that I seek to preserve for the ways that it exposes and rejects normativity. I believe we need to hold onto, acknowledge, and celebrate this otherness, not because we thrive on being contrarian, but because the regimes of normality are the forces that seek to obliterate us. We must resist in order to survive.
