Concept:

Queer Qi is a somatic and spiritual practice that explores queerness through the lens of Taichi philosophy, Chinese energy systems, and movement-based inquiry. It seeks to reconnect queer bodies—particularly queer Asian bodies—to ancestral knowledge and embodied presence, resisting the fragmentation imposed by colonial modernity, capitalism, and heteronormativity.

Rooted in the concept of Qi (气) — the vital force that animates all life — and the Daoist principle of Taiji (太极) — the Supreme Ultimate from which yin and yang emerge — this practice reclaims softness, fluidity, and cyclical motion as sources of power and healing.

Drawing from traditional Taichi structures, Queer Qi queers the form itself: inviting deviation, re-interpretation, and improvisation. It is a slow resistance against rigid systems — not only of gender or sexuality, but of identity itself.

Positioning & Tension:

This practice moves between ancient Chinese cosmologies and contemporary queer thought, not to harmonize them, but to create a new space inside their friction — a space where breath, body, and energy become mediums of healing, contradiction, and becoming.

But this is not easy.

The word “queer” comes from a Western genealogy — with its own politics, trauma, and academic frameworks.
The word “Asian” too was assigned to me — a continent collapsed into a single identity, a race constructed and projected from outside.
I didn’t invent these words.
But I live in them.
They were placed on me.
And still, I move.

Queer Qi is how I move withain what was never mine — and still find my own peace, rhythm, and breath.

This is not about returning to tradition in search of purity, nor about performing queerness as spectacle.

It is about reclaiming:

• Softness as strength

• Fluidity as intelligence

• The body as a sacred site of refusal and renewal

Questions That Guide the Practice:

Queer Qi asks:

• What does it mean to be soft in a world that demands rigidity?

• How does energy move in a queer body — across time, culture, and desire?

• Can slowness and presence be forms of political resistance and spiritual clarity?

• How do we return to inherited practices not as fixed heritage, but as evolving, queer lineages?

• What is healing when identity is fractured by language?

• What is power when lineage is broken or borrowed?

• What kind of movement resists capture?

Each gesture in Queer Qi is both inheritance and invention,
a living contradiction,
a quiet revolution,
a breath that cannot be translated.

The Bridge I Am Building:

• Asian heritage and queer futurity

• Energy-based wisdom and somatic resistance

• Traditional structures and improvised deviation

• Personal healing and political embodiment

This is not just a reinterpretation of Taichi.
It is a queering of flow itself —
a return to the body as both archive and oracle.