I’ll gesture here towards what David Eng calls “queer liberalism”, and what Enoch Mailangi, a wonderful young Polynesian and Indigenous nonbinary creator from Western Sydney would call “the optics of queer” by suggesting that “queer” has become depoliticised across time, unmoored from its roots as a reclamation of outsider status that Queer Nation rallied around in the late 80s. The Queer Nation slogan “not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you!” is greeted with disapproval in these times where a liberal human rights version of queer strives for acceptance. So queering as method has been thrown under the bus for queer as acceptable identity.
I propose that Xeno, in Sheldon’s version, is a methodology along which lines strangers can become “familiars” or kin(d) through a process of defamiliarization, by becoming strangers to ourselves. As Sheldon says, xeno “presumes that the force of the other is always wholly other.” There is a darkness to Sheldon’s Xeno, but it is a welcome darkness, implying “a horizon of action that cannot be determined at the outset.” There is no predetermination in Xeno-kinning. Xeno + queering both align with Deleuze’s writings on difference (or becoming) which have at their core an ontological presupposition that everything is in a constant state of change, nothing is ever static or finished, but is in a constant state of becoming. This is counterposed to other philosophies that Deleuze identifies as being concerned with identity and unity. This is not to say that identity is not important, but these philosophies saw identity as a static state. One was always Black, one was always white, one was always man, one was always woman. These philosophies relegate subjects into segregated groups with no complexity or change. Rather for Deleuze one is always between these states, moving towards one but never reaching it. There is nothing common here, just the constancy of striving to attain.