Prepositioning Resistance, Queerly

BACKGROUND Cappello argues creative nonfiction is performative, a queer genre. It knows the power of the preposition by eschewing writing ‘about’ preferring to write from, toward, inside. Building on ideas of prepositional thinking and the encounter of queer essay, and 'love as inside' (Rendle-Short, Fleischmann, Murray, Cixous, Eades), this essay performs resistance. It asks how might content and form resist three ways: subject matter, queering form, and speaking position or subjectivity. CONTRIBUTION By marrying content and form in toggle and corkscrew, this essay seeks to demonstrate how to perform resistance. Rendle-Short argues it is in the doing that any luminescence gathers; the practice of writing allows for a prepositional ethics. Specifically, this essay brings together a triptych of speaking positions: political and cultural queer resistance sourced from film and archives from Queensland in the 1970s, embodied story bringing that material to life, and an eisegetical troubling of language, form, and method. As a fluid multi-logic spiral-counter-narrative, it trumpets transgression and resistance as method enabling transition, promise and possibility. It reimagines a different set of relationships, where queer or terkw refuses to counter bend. The reader is offered a lexicon and syntax of resistance and courage, a suite of animated prepositional perspectives on and off the page. SIGNIFIGANCE Bending Genre (first edition, 2013) is a highly acclaimed international collection of critical essays on creative nonfiction. This essay was commissioned by the co-editors, an invitation to write an original essay specifically on ‘resistances’ for the new volume: to give voice to the under-represented. It performs resistance as play, experimentation, transgression, push-back with purpose. The editors agree it’s playful, funny, angry, self- and Bending-Genre referential.