Queer Fugitive Joy and the Future It Breaks Open

This paper argues that queer fugitive joy is not merely an affect that accompanies queer life but a practice that reorganizes bodies, time, and belonging into durable sacred forms. Against both queer theory's tendency to let negation have the last word and softer celebrations of joy that detach it from fugitivity and collective struggle, the paper reads three scenes of queer gathering as sites where joy does organizational work. The Black and Latinx House Ballroom scene functions as fugitive ecclesial practice rooted in African diasporic religions. Two Spirit powwows reclaim Indigenous ceremonial form from which gender-diverse people were excluded through colonial violence. A trans rebaptism in San Salvador seizes Catholic liturgical form from the institution that brought it through conquest. Across these scenes, queer fugitive joy assembles kinship, invents ritual, and produces sacred space, rehearsing futures that the present cannot authorize but that fugitive practice has already begun to construct.