And Then Suddenly, It Was Simply Everywhere

Abstract

This article offers an artistic reflection on the Queer Percussion Research Group Zine Collection (2023) through the concept of shimmering as a queer political and positional affect across light and sound. With over a dozen contributions that consist of artist publications, pamphlets, and experimental scores, the Zine Collection was produced by folks “interested in the intersection of queerness and percussion in a variety of contexts.” While glitter scatters across contributions from inside the clear plastic folio, this writing recounts the impact and implications of glitter’s trace as it moves between surfaces, bodies, and skins. Rather than declaring glitter as inherently queer, this work considers the ways that glitter—and other glistening things—“blur the body,” as Michele White writes, and disrupts normative presentations of gender. Its reflective surfaces thus become entangled with the slippages between the masculine/feminine binary, shifting the legibility of the (gendered) surface that might allow viewers to see otherwise. Thinking with and alongside glitter’s shimmering properties allows for a reconceptualization of queer, which might enable further forms of conceptual movement and framing that extend its theoretical capacity.