On a damp June evening in Manchester’s Canal Street, drag performers turned umbrellas into glittering shields. Sequins caught the glow of the streetlamps as chants of “we dance, therefore we resist” travelled through the crowd. Passers-by slowed their steps, drawn into the rhythm of defiance that pulsed with colour and music. The performance was not carnival detached from politics, but politics performed as carnival. Joy functioned as confrontation, staged not as consolation but as collective defiance.
To outsiders, such moments can appear playful, even frivolous, as if joy were a distraction from the violence queer communities endure. Yet for those within the crowd, joy was the weapon, the shield, and the demand. It carried the history of resistance embedded in ballroom halls, cabaret stages, and pride marches. Laughter became the chorus line of survival, echoing across generations of struggle. Pleasure was not decoration but defiance.
Audre Lorde once wrote that the erotic is not indulgence but power. Her essay on the uses of the erotic reframes intimacy and delight as resources for survival in oppressive worlds. That framework resonates here: joy, like the erotic, is often trivialised precisely because it carries revolutionary potential. To laugh together, to move together, to glitter together is to reassert power where vulnerability is expected. Joy insists on possibility when the world insists on impossibility.
José Esteban Muñoz argued that queer futurity is glimpsed in the ephemeral moments of performance and connection. What Canal Street offered was a glimpse of that futurity embodied in the present. The dance floor became a rehearsal for another world, where community was not tolerated but celebrated. Each spin of a performer’s sequined umbrella suggested an elsewhere, a utopia that exists in fragments of joy. These fragments accumulate into resistance.
Sara Ahmed’s work on affect reminds us that emotions are political, shaping the ways bodies inhabit public space. Joy, in this sense, refuses the politics of fear that structures queer marginalisation. It disrupts the affective economies that treat queer bodies as threats or pathologies. To be joyful in public becomes an act of reclamation. It is a refusal to embody the scripts of shame that heteronormativity imposes.
The night on Canal Street echoed global scenes of queer joy-as-resistance. In Nairobi, pride parades faced bans, yet communities staged parties that doubled as political declarations. In Mexico City, Las Reinas Chulas turned cabaret into a classroom of dissent, teaching audiences that humour and desire are tools of liberation. In South Africa, Zanele Muholi’s portraits transformed joy into testimony, their subjects radiant in defiance of erasure. These global echoes show joy as a shared political language.
For every moment of glittering resistance, there exists the risk of commodification. Institutions often seek to package queer joy as spectacle while ignoring the politics it contains. Pride floats sponsored by corporations flatten resistance into marketing. Gallery exhibitions risk aestheticising struggle without committing to justice. Joy remains radical only when it resists capture — as seen in grassroots alternatives to corporate Pride, such as Queer Picnic collectives in London or migrant-led Pride marches in Leeds, where community refuses to be flattened into branding.
Queer joy unsettles the narrative that resistance must be solemn to be sincere. It contests the cultural expectation that marginalised lives are validated only through suffering. By celebrating, communities insist on being more than resilient; they insist on being abundant. That insistence shifts cultural politics away from endurance toward flourishing. Resistance here is measured not only in survival but in the refusal to give up delight.
In Canal Street, the umbrellas and sequins staged a choreography of defiance. Each spin, each laugh, each chant stitched bodies together into a collective fabric of resistance. Joy travelled like electricity, difficult to contain and impossible to ignore. It made visible what silence would have concealed: a community unwilling to bow to erasure. The performance became an archive, testimony, and demand.
Queer joy is not a diversion from politics but one of its sharpest instruments of resistance, transforming survival into collective presence. By tracing its presence in ballroom culture, in digital networks, and across the Global South, we uncover joy’s radical charge. What Canal Street revealed is true across continents: joy is a politics that refuses disappearance.
Ballroom as Archive of Resistance
Ballroom culture emerged in the Harlem Renaissance as a counter-world to the exclusions of both white-dominated society and mainstream gay spaces. Houses formed not just as teams for performance but as chosen families, offering shelter and recognition to those rejected elsewhere. Balls became stages where black and Latinx queer communities redefined beauty, status, and power. To walk a category was to claim presence in a world that refused to see you. The ballroom was an archive, a stage, and a sanctuary at once.
To call ballroom an archive is to recognise it as a living repository of cultural memory. Voguing, with its angular gestures and floor drops, preserves histories of defiance against police raids and social exclusion. Categories like “realness” expose the absurdity of respectability politics by exaggerating them into performance. Each runway strut remembers those who carved space in hostile cities. Memory here is not a museum object but a body in motion.
Queer joy finds its most flamboyant expression in these ballrooms. Chants from the commentator, cheers from the crowd, and the thunder of heels against the floor create an atmosphere of collective affirmation. Every win is celebrated not just as personal achievement but as community victory. The joy reverberates beyond the hall, reminding participants that they belong to something larger than themselves. This joy, grounded in excess, becomes resistant precisely because it is unapologetic.
José Esteban Muñoz saw in ballroom culture the promise of queer futurity. The ballroom offered glimpses of worlds not yet realised, where survival transformed into flourishing. The runway became a utopian stage, a rehearsal for freedom performed in real time. Each gesture, exaggerated or delicate, signalled a refusal of imposed limits. The future was danced into the present, dazzling in its insistence.
Jack Halberstam’s notion of failure also finds a home in ballroom. Mainstream society measured queer lives as unsuccessful by the standards of family, career, and respectability. Ballroom turned those failures into art. To lose in one category might mean shining in another; to be too much or not enough became the very condition of creativity. In this way, failure became another form of joy, unburdened by heteronormative expectations.
The politics of ballroom extended beyond the hall. Houses provided care in the face of systemic neglect, from shelter to medical support during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Joy within the ball was inseparable from mutual aid outside it. Communities rehearsed survival strategies that mainstream institutions denied them. Care, like performance, was a collective act of resistance.
Visual documentation has ensured that ballroom culture endures as an archive beyond the ephemeral. Jennie Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning brought ballroom into mainstream awareness, though not without critique for its extractive gaze. More recently, photographers and artists within the community, like Gerard H. Gaskin, have preserved ballroom histories with care and fidelity. These visual records confirm that the ballroom was never only a performance but also a testimony. Each image insists that these worlds existed and continue to thrive.
The influence of ballroom has now travelled globally, reshaping queer joy across continents. In São Paulo, balls merge with samba rhythms, creating hybrid forms of performance. In Mexico City, houses link ballroom to cabaret traditions, staging joy as satire and rebellion. In Johannesburg, balls incorporate local dance forms, transforming imported traditions into decolonial expressions. The global proliferation of ballroom confirms its adaptability as a language of resistance.
Critics sometimes accuse ballroom of being consumed by mainstream culture, pointing to its representation in fashion or pop music. Yet even when appropriated, its core remains resistant. Communities continue to gather in basements, warehouses, and nightclubs, creating spaces of safety and delight away from commodification. What mass culture borrows as style, ballroom sustains as survival. The heart of joy remains untranslatable into a commodity.
Ballroom culture, then, is not only art but a living archive of queer resistance. It documents histories of exclusion while staging futures of flourishing. Its joy is radical. It is excessive because it dares to shine in spaces that demand disappearance. Each category walked is a line written into history with glitter and sweat. In the ballroom, joy is survival, and survival is art.
Pleasure as Political Power
Pleasure has often been dismissed as trivial, indulgent, or even dangerous. Within queer histories, this dismissal has been weaponised, painting desire and celebration as irresponsible in the face of stigma or crisis. Yet communities have long known that pleasure is not the opposite of politics but one of its most potent forms. To take joy in one another, to delight in touch, movement, or intimacy, becomes a radical reconfiguration of power. Pleasure, once framed as a distraction, emerges here as a strategy.
Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic redefined the erotic as power rather than indulgence. She argued that pleasure was not a luxury but a wellspring of resilience and vision. For queer communities, this insight has been foundational: joy and erotic connection fuel resistance by affirming life against systemic devaluation. To experience delight in a hostile world is to reject its terms of worth. Pleasure becomes not escape but refusal.
bell hooks, in All About Love, framed love as a practice of freedom. She insisted that love and care are political choices, not private indulgences. Queer joy resonates with this framework by linking pleasure to collective care. To dance together, to celebrate together, is an enactment of love that resists alienation. In this sense, joy becomes not only resistance to oppression but a building block of liberated futures.
Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion reminds us that emotions organise social life. Joy, she notes, reorients bodies and draws them into new alignments. In queer communities, joy interrupts the scripts of shame and fear imposed by heteronormativity. It turns gatherings into spaces where bodies move differently, touch differently, and imagine differently. Each joyful encounter unsettles the hierarchies of emotion that keep marginalised lives in place.
To see joy as political is also to see how it is policed. Laws regulating public assembly, bans on pride marches, and moral panics around queer nightlife reveal the threat joy poses to the status quo. If pleasure were trivial, it would not be so consistently targeted. The hostility itself proves that joy carries disruptive potential. That is why dancing in the street, kissing in public, or performing drag becomes an act of revolt.
Pleasure also redefines how communities approach survival. Activists in Nairobi speak of queer joy as protest, staging parties in defiance of bans and arrests. These gatherings risk violence, yet they persist because they transform fear into solidarity. In Latin America, queer festivals create spaces where music and intimacy reframe survival as collective abundance. Each act of pleasure is also an act of endurance. Joy sustains bodies where institutions abandon them.
The politics of pleasure are visible in art as well as activism. Zanele Muholi’s photography foregrounds the beauty and radiance of queer life in South Africa, documenting joy as testimony against erasure. Las Reinas Chulas in Mexico City use cabaret to satirise patriarchy while celebrating desire as liberation. These artistic practices confirm what theorists have long argued: pleasure is not incidental but central to resistance. Art becomes an archive and amplifier of joy’s politics.
At the same time, pleasure is not without tension. Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism warns that attachments to joy can sometimes sustain harmful systems. The challenge is to discern when pleasure resists and when it risks being co-opted. Corporate pride floats or nightlife tied to unsafe labour conditions remind us that not all joy is emancipatory. Critical pleasure requires vigilance, ensuring that joy remains aligned with justice. This vigilance keeps queer joy radical.
In ballroom culture, on dance floors, and in digital spaces, joy circulates as a currency of resistance. It cannot be fully translated into a commodity because its value is relational, embodied, and shared. When a crowd erupts in laughter at satire, or when dancers collapse into embraces after a performance, pleasure resists isolation. These moments are difficult to capture in statistics or policies, yet they are no less political. Pleasure becomes infrastructure, invisible but sustaining.
Pleasure as political power insists that survival is not enough. To live queerly is not only to endure but to flourish, and flourishing demands delight. Communities that centre joy transform the terms of struggle, turning protest into celebration and resistance into art. The refusal of despair is not a denial of reality but an insistence on possibility. In this, queer pleasure is both a survival tactic and a revolutionary vision.
Digital Joy and Queer Futures
The digital realm has become one of the most important stages for queer joy. Online platforms allow communities to connect across borders, to share performances, and to amplify resistance. Hashtags turn fleeting moments of joy into collective archives, accessible to those who cannot attend pride marches or ballroom events. Memes and videos transmit laughter and glitter at the speed of a click. Digital joy resists erasure by multiplying itself across networks.
For queer youth, especially in regions where physical gathering is restricted, online spaces become vital refuges. Social media groups and forums provide places to celebrate identities without fear of immediate reprisal. A drag performance posted on TikTok can circulate globally, inspiring audiences from São Paulo to Nairobi. These acts of sharing constitute a form of activism, carving space in digital landscapes otherwise dominated by normative narratives. Joy becomes borderless through the screen.
José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of queer futurity resonates strongly with digital culture. Online joy is not just documentation of the present but a rehearsal for futures yet to come. A livestreamed ball or a virtual pride march shows what global queer solidarity can look like, even under conditions of repression. These fragments of digital joy signal worlds not yet fully realised. They offer utopian glimpses stitched together by bandwidth and imagination.
Yet the digital sphere is not a neutral arena. Algorithms often suppress queer content, marking it as inappropriate or dangerous. Online harassment targets LGBTQIA+ users with coordinated campaigns of abuse. Despite these hostilities, queer joy persists, adapting through coded language, alternative platforms, and creative strategies of resistance. Each workaround becomes part of the politics of joy. Survival online is as inventive as performance on a stage.
Digital joy is also deeply creative. Artists use augmented reality filters to stage drag performances that would be impossible in physical venues. Queer musicians release tracks that circulate through SoundCloud and Bandcamp, bypassing mainstream gatekeepers. Visual artists turn Instagram grids into digital exhibitions that merge activism with aesthetics. In each case, joy is both message and method. The digital transforms pleasure into visibility.
The Global South demonstrates how digital joy becomes a lifeline. In Uganda and Kenya, where queer gatherings are criminalised, activists use encrypted messaging apps to share joyful moments of community. These digital traces carry immense political weight, defying censorship and state repression. Rest of World reported on South African artists creating online archives of queer futures, ensuring visibility even in precarious conditions. Joy here is resistant precisely because it insists on circulation.
Digital performance often blends with physical activism. Livestreams of protests, pride parades, or drag shows connect diasporic communities to struggles back home. Watching a livestream becomes an act of solidarity, turning spectatorship into participation. Digital joy collapses distances, allowing diasporic bodies to feel the rhythm of resistance elsewhere. These connections weave new forms of belonging that institutions struggle to recognise but that communities already live.
At the same time, digital joy exposes the fragility of platforms. Corporate policies can erase entire archives overnight, shutting down accounts or restricting visibility. This precariousness raises urgent questions about ownership and preservation. Who controls the digital memories of queer joy? The answer shapes not only what is remembered but also what futures can be imagined. Archiving becomes part of resistance.
Despite these risks, digital joy continues to expand possibilities for queer world-making. It demonstrates that resistance does not always need a physical square or ballroom; it can erupt in a feed, a video, or a shared image. The politics of visibility take on new dimensions when algorithms are as decisive as governments. Yet queer creativity has always thrived on constraints, transforming limits into innovation. Digital joy exemplifies this tradition of adaptation.
In the face of hostility, the persistence of digital joy is itself a testament to queer futurity. Each post, livestream, or meme signals a refusal to disappear. Together, these fragments create a mosaic of resilience and possibility. They confirm what Muñoz anticipated: that queerness is always a horizon, glimpsed in moments of exuberance. Digital joy is not only survival but also prophecy.
Queer Joy in the Global South
The conversation on queer joy has too often been centred in Euro-American contexts. Yet some of the most powerful expressions of joy-as-resistance emerge in the Global South, where queer communities face repression with creativity and celebration. Here, joy is not abstract theory but a survival strategy woven into festivals, art, and everyday life. The politics of pleasure intersect directly with histories of colonialism and ongoing struggles against state violence. Joy becomes resistance in its most urgent form.
In Latin America, queer festivals create vibrant counter-publics. Open Democracy documented how events in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina merge music, performance, and protest into spaces of collective affirmation. These festivals are both carnivals and classrooms, teaching participants that laughter, dance, and satire are forms of political education. Pleasure becomes pedagogy, ensuring that joy circulates alongside demands for justice. Resistance is taught not through silence but through exuberance.
Mexico City’s cabaret collective Las Reinas Chulas embodies this approach. Their performances combine humour with biting critique of patriarchy and heteronormativity. Audiences erupt in laughter even as the satire cuts deep into systems of oppression. Joy here is not a distraction but sharpened dissent, a weapon disguised as entertainment. Each performance proves that laughter can be louder than censorship.
In Brazil, queer joy pulses through the intersection of ballroom and samba. Balls in São Paulo merge Afro-Brazilian rhythms with voguing, producing hybrid performances of resilience. These events resist the violence of homophobia and transphobia by staging extravagance in the very spaces where exclusion thrives. Communities reclaim joy as both art and politics, making public celebration inseparable from resistance. The dance floor becomes an insurgent classroom of freedom.
Across Africa, queer joy manifests under conditions of intense hostility. Amnesty International reported on how LGBTQIA+ activists in Uganda and Kenya staged celebrations despite violent crackdowns. Parties, often clandestine, doubled as sites of solidarity and survival. Music and laughter carried political weight, defying laws that criminalised existence itself. Joy in these contexts was not naïve but profoundly courageous.
South Africa provides another powerful case. Zanele Muholi’s visual activism insists on capturing joy as testimony. Their portraits celebrate black queer life with radiance and dignity, countering narratives of erasure and victimhood. Each image reframes queer existence as beautiful, abundant, and unapologetic. In Muholi’s work, joy becomes an archive, ensuring future generations inherit proof of resistance. The lens becomes both witness and weapon.
In South Asia, queer joy emerges through festivals, pride marches, and digital activism. In India, post-decriminalisation celebrations transformed public streets into carnivals of colour and defiance. Music, dance, and theatre turned legal recognition into cultural affirmation. These performances were not mere festivities but political claims to belonging. Joy became the visible face of legal and social struggle.
Digital platforms have amplified Global South expressions of queer joy. In contexts where mainstream media erases queer lives, online circulation ensures visibility. Videos of Latin American drag festivals or African pride celebrations reach global audiences within hours. Hashtags connect communities across borders, linking Nairobi to Mexico City to Mumbai. Digital joy carries the urgency of testimony, making local resistance part of a global conversation.
These practices challenge the tendency to romanticise queer joy as universal. They insist that joy cannot be understood outside the realities of repression, poverty, and colonial legacies. Pleasure here is sharpened by risk, and its political charge comes from its refusal to be extinguished. The Global South shows that queer joy is not an add-on to resistance but its beating heart. To celebrate is to survive.
What emerges is a powerful lesson for global queer politics. Joy is not a luxury reserved for the privileged; it is a radical insistence in contexts of violence and exclusion. Global South communities reveal how joy functions as testimony, pedagogy, and survival all at once. Their celebrations illuminate pathways for resistance that mainstream narratives often overlook. Joy here is not only a dream of futurity but a practice of the present.
Against Assimilation: Joy as Revolt
Assimilation has long been presented as the pathway to safety for queer communities. The promise of respectability — marriage, family recognition, corporate sponsorship — suggests that survival depends on conformity. Yet joy unsettles this narrative by refusing to shrink itself into palatable forms. To laugh too loudly, to dress too extravagantly, to love too visibly is to reject assimilation’s quiet bargains. Queer joy insists on revolt rather than accommodation.
Ballroom culture makes this refusal visible. Categories like “realness” parody the very respectability politics they appear to emulate. By exaggerating norms of gender, class, and race, performers reveal the absurdity of assimilation’s demands. The celebration of excess, flamboyance, and failure resists the narrow script of normalcy. Joy here becomes a satire of assimilation’s promises.
Corporate Pride parades illustrate the danger of co-optation. Barclays’ sponsorship of Pride in London, for instance, drew criticism in 2019 for its investments in fossil fuels and arms industries, exposing the contradictions of commodified celebration. Resistance is reframed as consumption, and solidarity is sold as branding. Yet activists respond with counter-marches, die-ins, and alternative festivals that reclaim joy’s political urgency. These acts remind us that celebration without critique risks serving the very systems that marginalise.
Jack Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure is instructive here. To fail at assimilation is not to lose but to gain new forms of freedom. Joy in failure resists the cruel optimism of promises that never deliver safety. Instead, failure opens pathways to creativity, collectivity, and defiance. The smile in the face of exclusion becomes a form of victory.
Joy also challenges the idea that political seriousness must always appear solemn. Too often, movements are judged by their ability to mirror state institutions, with marches and speeches that echo official decorum. Queer joy interrupts this expectation by celebrating laughter, glitter, and satire as valid political tactics. To dance in protest is not to trivialise but to transform resistance. Joy rejects the assimilationist demand to mourn in silence.
Examples abound across the Global South. In Bogotá, queer festivals deploy humour and satire to expose government hypocrisy. In Nairobi, clandestine parties double as strategy sessions, where joy resists state repression. In Mexico City, cabaret performances parody religious and political authorities with laughter that cuts sharper than speeches. These practices prove that joy flourishes where assimilation would be silenced. Joy becomes revolt precisely because it refuses to be respectable.
Assimilation also threatens through commodification. Fashion industries borrow queer aesthetics while excluding queer workers and designers from recognition. The music industry profits from queer performers while sanitising their politics for mainstream markets. Yet queer joy resists by insisting on authenticity in community spaces, from underground clubs to DIY festivals. Commodification may mimic the look of joy, but it cannot replicate its radical core.
Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism warns of attachments to promises that harm us. Assimilation seduces with the cruel optimism of recognition within systems that continue to exclude. Queer joy exposes this paradox by refusing the bait. It insists that flourishing cannot come from fitting into structures built to oppress. Revolt, not assimilation, is the only viable horizon.
The revolt of queer joy lies in its unapologetic excess. Glitter that refuses subtlety, laughter that refuses quiet, intimacy that refuses shame all disrupt assimilation’s demands. These performances of abundance cannot be reduced to metrics of respectability. They are designed to overflow, to be too much, to disrupt the logic of assimilation. Joy in this sense is an insurgent practice.
Against assimilation, queer joy declares itself uncontainable. It survives commodification, resists co-optation, and mocks respectability politics. Each festival, ball, and protest that erupts in celebration refuses to make peace with systems of exclusion. Joy is revolt because it refuses compromise. It transforms what might appear frivolous into the sharpest refusal of all: the refusal to disappear quietly.
Futures of Queer Joy
Futures of queer joy remind us that revolution can be staged through laughter, performance, and defiant celebration. They insist that politics need not be confined to solemn rituals of endurance. Instead, they imagine worlds where glitter and protest coexist, where satire teaches as sharply as speeches, and where dancing together is as strategic as any manifesto. These futures resist assimilation and co-optation by insisting on abundance. Revolution here is rehearsed in joy.
These futures are not utopian escapes detached from material struggle. They are grounded in the daily realities of repression, poverty, and resilience. To dance in Nairobi despite police raids, or to hold a clandestine festival in Kampala, is to create futures in hostile terrain. The joy that erupts in these spaces does not erase danger but insists that danger cannot erase possibility. Futures are carved in the present through the persistence of celebration.
Digital networks expand the reach of these futures. A livestreamed ball in Johannesburg can inspire voguing in Mumbai; a meme from Bogotá can circulate as solidarity in London. Each digital trace becomes a building block of collective imagination. Online archives preserve what states would silence, ensuring that queer joy outlives repression. Technology becomes a vessel for futurity, amplifying what communities create in the shadows.
Futures of queer joy are also ecological. Festivals, balls, and pride marches are increasingly tied to struggles against environmental destruction. Communities insist that liberation cannot exist on a collapsing planet. Artistic practices link joy to sustainability, refusing to separate queer survival from climate justice. The future imagined here is both queer and ecological, a world where joy thrives alongside environmental care.
Theorists like Sara Ahmed remind us that joy is not neutral but directional. It draws bodies toward certain futures and away from others. The futures queer joy gestures toward are collective rather than individual, abundant rather than scarce. These futures resist assimilation into neoliberal promises of inclusion without change. Instead, they demand structural transformation as the condition for flourishing.
Yet futures are fragile, and joy’s persistence requires vigilance. States continue to criminalise, corporations continue to co-opt, and cultural institutions continue to hesitate. Futures of queer joy will not arrive automatically; they must be built, defended, and rehearsed. This labour of futurity is ongoing and exhausting, but it is also sustaining. Communities gather strength precisely through the pleasure of imagining otherwise.
Art remains central to these imaginings. Zanele Muholi’s portraits not only document present joy but project dignity into the future. Las Reinas Chulas craft a satirical cabaret that anticipates political change by laughing it into being. Ballroom houses choreographed futures on the runway, embodying worlds where abundance defeats scarcity. Each artwork doubles as a manifesto, sketching what might yet become. Art ensures futures are not abstract but visible.
Global solidarities intensify these possibilities. Latin American festivals connect with African digital archives; South Asian pride marches echo chants from Europe; diasporas link struggles across oceans. Futures of queer joy are woven from these transnational threads. They resist isolation by reminding communities that they are never alone in their defiance. The future of joy is polyphonic, composed of many voices and many rhythms.
Against despair, queer joy insists on resilience. It does not deny violence but refuses to let violence dictate the limits of imagination. Futures are fragile, but they are not empty: they are rehearsed in every protest turned into dance, every insult transformed into satire, every silence broken by laughter. Joy confirms that survival is not only endurance but also flourishing. This resilience ensures that queer joy always points forward.
The futures imagined through joy are revolutionary because they refuse disappearance. They insist that queer lives are not temporary, not marginal, not disposable. Each burst of joy writes queer futures into the cultural archive, ensuring that they cannot be erased. The rehearsal becomes performance, the fragment becomes structure, and the possibility becomes real. Futures of queer joy remind us that revolution can sparkle.
Queer Joy Will Not Be Erased
Queer joy refuses disappearance. It resists assimilation, mocks repression, and transforms celebration into survival. From Canal Street to São Paulo, from Nairobi to Johannesburg, joy is the choreography of defiance that unsettles violence with glitter, laughter, and love. It insists that politics need not be only solemn or tragic; it can dazzle, sparkle, and seduce while demanding justice. To celebrate is to revolt, and to revolt is to imagine futures where flourishing replaces fear.
Rock & Art believes that queer joy is not a soft diversion but a hard demand. It calls on us to defend spaces of abundance against commodification, to amplify voices from the Global South, and to preserve archives of resistance against erasure. Joy is a politics, and like all politics, it requires commitment, vigilance, and solidarity. The challenge is clear: to protect joy as a weapon of resistance and a horizon of possibility.
Join us in recognising queer joy as more than spectacle. Support community spaces, defend trans and queer artists, and refuse the corporate capture of Pride. Share the laughter, preserve the archives, and celebrate defiantly. Joy is not naïve — it is revolutionary. And together, we can ensure it continues to shape futures that glitter with resistance.
References (APA 7th)
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Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/cruel-optimism
BBC News. (2022, June 24). Latin America’s queer revolution: Pride and prejudice. BBC World Service. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-61925375
hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. HarperCollins. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/all-about-love-bell-hooks
Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-queer-art-of-failure
Lorde, A. (1978). Uses of the erotic: The erotic as power. Out & Out Books. https://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive1998-2013/sites/default/files/attached-files/lor_uses_of_the_erotic.pdf
Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. NYU Press. https://nyupress.org/9780816671932/cruising-utopia/
Open Democracy. (2023, June). Pleasure as resistance: Queer festivals in Latin America. Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/pleasure-as-resistance-queer-festivals-latin-america/
OutStories Bristol. (n.d.). OutStories Bristol: LGBTQ+ history of Bristol and the surrounding area. Retrieved October 6, 2025, from https://outstoriesbristol.org.uk/welcome/
Rest of World. (2024, February). Queer futures: The digital resistance of LGBTQ+ artists in South Africa. Rest of World. https://restofworld.org/2024/queer-futures-south-africa/
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