Recently I started to address the questions of estrangement and intimacy through working gently and patiently with my non-dominant hand, which I call queer, or using a feminist’s and a philosopher’s Sara Ahmed’s language, a slanted hand. My left hand escaped the years of normative capitalist socializing that my right hand underwent. It lacks the efficiency of executional skills that my right hand had to learn in order to pass the normativity test of living in the post-Soviet and then in the US American capitalist societies.
I feel connected to my slanted hand as the one that is more native to my queer body, the one that cannot pass and, therefore, lives a different, underdog, or queer life. In my 20s I used to identify as a visual artist doing illustrative art work to my own writings with my dominant hand but gave up on the work feeling disconnected from it and finding other art forms to be closer to my being. Several years ago I did a series of self-portraits with my queer hand that was the only one able to capture the deep emotional pain that I was going through during a long depressive episode.
Currently, I have been inviting my slanted hand to work on writing and doodling, both being surprised and learning from it.
