About the Project

Fueling the Fire: Counternarratives of Queer Desire is a photovoice project exploring queer young people’s experiences of sexuality and desire. Over the course of eight weeks, a group of six artists and co-researchers met to discuss and share lived experiences of sexuality, desire, and connection. From there, we collaborated to develop a body of work responding to the research questions: How do queer young people experience sexuality and desire? What role does sexuality and desire play in the lives of queer young people?

Together these images construct a counternarrative of queer desire. Rather than positioning queer desire as pathological, deviant, dangerous, or other, our project tells a different story. One of community, intimacy, longing, subjectivity, safe spaces, and the inherent nature of queerness, among many other things.

As one co-researcher said: “The stories from shared community can help create a new language, like we always do, like we always did.” We hope this project contributes to that queer legacy of collective storytelling, to establish new ways of knowing and understanding our experiences and the world around us.

For more information on the project, please reach out to Nora Wynn at nwynn@luc.edu.

About the Title

Fire became a formative image as we discussed a name for this project. The more we discussed, the more parallels we discovered. First, fire is a commonly evoked metaphor for desire, a clear connection to this project. We also saw fire, in many ways, as a mirror to queer experiences. Like queerness, fire is a powerful aspect of nature, both a sustaining life force and an agent of radical transformation. Fire is a site of connection and community, where people gather and share stories, traditions, where wisdom is passed along. Fire is a persistent light in the dark.

Fire can also be destructive, consuming and destroying all in its path. Yet, destruction is often necessary; it cultivates fertile ground and generates new life. For us, this destructive element of fire is distinctly political. The United States government continues its attempts to silence, erase, and eradicate queer existence. We see our stories, our desires, fueling the fire which burns down these oppressive systems and brings forth rich soil to build a new world. A new world fueled, and formed, by our desires.