The Erotics of Violence: Imagining Alternative Possibilities to/of Queerphobia Available to Purchase

This article is a meditation on the form and contours of violence through a single scene of queerphobic street harassment. I offer a vignette from an ethnography on queer desire conducted in Sri Lanka, an encounter between a flamboyantly gender‐nonnormative figure and a stranger alighting from a bus, to think through the polyvalence of violence before the spectacle of queer aesthetics. By staying with the scene to assay the sensuousness and multiple affects that exist alongside violence, I offer a reading that challenges the orthodoxy that violence is inevitable in the encounter of difference. To interpret such reparative possibility, this analysis turns to Black feminism, feminist studies more broadly, and queer theory, while devising an interpretive method that attends to the ephemeral through innovations in multisensory anthropology, affect studies, and speculative inquiry. These multiple genealogies unite within an interpretive framework that places Audre Lorde's seminal essay “Uses of the Erotic” at its heart, in order to trace the erotic as both object and method of analysis in excavating the ephemera of intersubjective and structural relations. The archeology of this sedimented moment demonstrates how the erotic is dialectically entangled with violence, gesturing to the transformative possibilities that can be realized therein.