Puffin Power

The Melancholic Absence of Rainbow-Colored Seabirds

Abstract

Departing from the author’s shared experience with Jack Halberstam at a pride march in the North Atlantic, the essay discusses the context-bound ontology of the wild and the symbolic importance of seabirds. Investigating Faroese queer activism and Swedish porn magazines it argues that LGBT initiatives are bound to fail in the absence of agents for change, and that the wild and provocative sex liberalism in the 1950s ceased to be so in the 1970s. What in the 1950s was considered a bold challenge to the existing moral order was increasingly considered an embarrassing manifestation of male chauvinism and sexual exploitation in the 1970s. Finally, the essay concludes that undoing worlds may not be the optimal way to create lasting change, but rather the plurality of resistances as outlined by Foucault.