spitting nails (devin west and deneige nadeau)

As first generation scholars and queer individuals, we are committed to taking up the role of the subversive intellectual as a calling. Like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, we take the position that the university can be a place of refuge while refusing to accept that “the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” Thus, our work is committed to enlivening the undercommons rather than seeking inclusion in the university proper. Our relationship to the university is criminal. Our identities as first generation scholars make such a relationship necessary, to exist in spite of its str(i/u)ctures. 

We may identify as subversive intellectuals, raging homos and first generation scholars, but, following Michel Foucault, we understand the assertion of such identities as a limited activist gesture. Drawing on his interviews “Friendship as a Way of Life” and “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity”, we call for an understanding of our subjective positions not solely as identities to be discovered and asserted on the basis of inclusion, but as conditions for creative practices of freedom. His interviews call for us to figure out how to become gay, to create gay culture, and assert the productivity found in friendship or “the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force.” Queer friendships in particular “short-circuit [institutional codes] and introduce love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule, or habit.” Crafting queer ways of life together through the intensities of relations are our means of bushwacking a path of subversive intellectual practice. We have forged our friendship through tailgating. 

Author Biography:

spitting nails was assembled at the gateway to oblivion, loitering on the edge of the Marysburgh Vortex, at the intersection of Joy Road and Destiny Lane. devin west and deneige nadeau bonded over a mutual enchantment with bone, barbed wire, rural queerness, Patti Smith and a shared commitment to be in, but not of, Queen’s University. Sometimes we make art, sometimes we write, but mostly we agitate and take up space (existence=resistance).