Captions / Transcript to Cataloguing Queerness

Cataloging exists as a system within boundaries, parameters, born of and into a time and place of oppressive structures, tasked with classifying and containing information, compressing whole identities into authority headings, metadata, and controlled vocabulary.

What is concealed? What is revealed? How is one seen within this system versus outside it?

What fits into the standard, and what is left outside?

A balancing act between access to information and freedom of expression, between the need to contain and define that which is liquid and ever-changing.

Can we transcend the confines of the established order?

To queer the catalog and embrace complexity, mess, and contradiction, to be an authority of the self, of one’s queerness, aliveness.

Where is the place to be open? The place to be free? Where can we unfurl completely?

We make that space. To define ourselves inside and outside the lexicon, beyond the boundaries of what language itself can hold.

We give ourselves permission to just be.

[Ukulele string being plucked]

[Low ambient noise]

[Rain sounds]

[Birdsong]

[Steel drum playing]

[Saxophone playing]

[Laughter]

[Whale sounds]

[Cheering and yelling]

[Music beat]