QFL 2024: Questioning Queerness

Questioning Queerness

2024 takes a more fluid approach than previous years. Instead of fixed monthly meetings, our events are intermittent and organically occuring, following the interests that emerge from previous sessions.

Each month we’ll share a writing prompt on Instagram, inspired by our favorite writers and artists, to inspire your personal writing practices. We welcome you to write along to these in your own time and if you feel like sharing, we will be collecting responses in our online archive.

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We are reflecting a lot on our practises and identity at the moment, wondering what the role of futuring is at a time when the demands of the present feel so urgent and the entire notion of a future feels contested. But also believing that this space for collective dreaming and storytelling feels more needed than ever, and we hope in this new year to keep gathering in all our strength, grief and hope to tell stories of resistance and regeneration towards the world we aspire to live in.

At the moment we are particularly asking ourselves what the ‘queer’ of queer futures means to us today, and how this might have changed from a year ago.

What is queer? What is future?

Queerness has definitely been very trending this last year, often used as a proxy for when something/someone is scrambling to advertise themselves as vaguely progressive or current. While we’re all for queers in the spotlight, it’s also undeniable that the use of the term Queer has been co opted and appropriated by institutions and organizations everywhere. This has been a big part of our dialog, what makes a piece of writing or art queer? When is nature queer? What makes a future queer? When its use is so widespread, how do we relate to this term both as a group and individual identity?

What is the connection between science fiction and the future? Are they inherently linked? Can we resist compulsive forwards orientation through futurist writing? How do we rewrite progress narratives through emphasis on remembering and looking backwards? What is it to write the future versus channeling the future, moving the future, queering the future? How do we future and why?

What do we really mean by a ‘queer’ future? What does our queerness aspire towards? What does queerness embody within our different political and cultural contexts?

10 January, 2024

online