Cher Tan is an essayist, critic and editor living and working on unceded Wurundjeri land (so-called Melbourne). She previously lived in Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide and Singapore, where she was born and raised. Her work has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Kill Your Darlings, Cordite, Gusher Magazine, Catapult, The Guardian, Art Guide Australia and The Age, among many others.

She is the reviews editor at Meanjin and an editor at LIMINAL magazine. In 2023 she was a book columnist at the ABC. Her debut essay collection, Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging, is out now with NewSouth Publishing.

Header image by: Su Cassiano

Archer Magazine: Hey Cher, congratulations on the release of Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging! This book has serious breadth. At times, it feels like I’m hyperlink-jumping or falling through wormholes (this is meant as the highest compliment)! Can you tell us how it all started?

Cher Tan: Thank you! It was one of my intentions while writing the book, so I’m glad to hear it had that effect on you.

So, a peer nudged me to apply for one of those unpublished manuscript awards, and my knee-jerk reaction was that I didn’t have a book in me. But I thought more about it and realised maybe I did – I had a few essays lying around at the time, and it felt to me that they were trying to grasp at something on a subterranean level. I obviously didn’t win the award, but the idea continued to follow me.

Not too long after that, I took a workshop on building an essay collection, which helped me discover the book’s main conceit. The more I thought about it, the more the ideas within the book materialised; I was also writing little scraps and notes as it went along. It just kept evolving and building in a way as if I were following a train track.

AM: I’m interested in weirdness as a form of social cachet, and how this may also relate to rainbow capitalism and pinkwashing. How do you think queerness and weirdness (which are sometimes synonyms) can push back against being trends or commodities? Or do you think this is inevitable?

CT: I think we can look to the histories of pinkwashing and artwashing and it’ll tell us a little bit of how our identities are always going to be commodified under capitalism.

Particularly damning examples include the Women in AI awards, which are sponsored by the world’s largest weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, or L’Oreal having a “Yassification Station” at Midsumma.

The Progress Shark, while laughable, is another example – all part of a phenomenon scholar that Lisa Duggan describes as “homonormativity”, wherein a privatised and depoliticised queer culture is anchored in consumption and domesticity.

And it would be remiss of me to not bring up how zionist and zionist-affliated institutions have paraded a smokescreen of embracing racial and gender diversity, and “cutting-edge” art, yet are involved in murdering and dispossessing Palestinians of their land and resources.

That said, I don’t think it’s a lost cause – we need to find different ways of expressing ourselves without capitulating to visibility all the time. Not to mention, we need to explicitly resist institutions and entities that seek to harvest our worth through the marketplace.

That kind of resistance is difficult to co-opt. It has to be done through a collective refusal, while being clear and steadfast about who we are and what we want.

Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging is out now online and at all good bookstores.

AM: To use your terminology from Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging: what is it to be “real” – both online and in “meatspace”? And what is hyperreality? How do influencers and “normies” fit into the discussion of authenticity? And what makes someone an “outsider”?

CT: I don’t think “real” exists, and we shouldn’t really spend our time aspiring to it or searching for it; this is why it’s so often marketed to us. And what I’ve just said is a part of the hyperreality, I suppose – where something gets taken to suit the purposes of the marketplace and then universalised and resold to people until it becomes normalised.

Influencers fit into the discussion around authenticity because they are a part of that market I’ve described above; they sell the idea of authenticity, so to speak, which then breeds parasocial relationships.

I don’t think “normies” exist; it’s a relational descriptor based on how you view yourself in a world where weirdness has become commodified, such that whoever is deemed “normier” than you becomes “less than”.

As to what makes someone an “outsider” is related to the collective refusal I refer to above; if we were to jointly refuse normalisation, then there’d be no outsiders.

AM: Can you talk to us about your experiences with code-switching and how this relates to class and imperialism?

CT: Code-switching is a type of self-preservation tactic I suppose, wherein you study the mannerisms and speech of those in a dominant social position compared to you, and then attempt to replicate them so you can seamlessly enter their spaces (‘passing’) – or at least without too much trouble. It’s a kind of wilful masking perhaps.

I can code-switch between the different Englishes I know, or between the varied social worlds in which I exist in or come from. I think I’ve ended up weaponising this masking to make it a sort of journalistic pursuit – a bit like being a detective.

AM: What is the role of the artist today? As you’ve written in Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging:

“Art flourishes under capitalism, yet the same art dies. If, in this society, love is private, reproductive and unpaid (art is a labour of love), and work is public, productive and paid (art can never be quantified), I wonder where that leaves art-work. Surely there are more options than just burnout or poverty.”

Can you speak more to this?

CT: The role of the artist in these times of catastrophe is to bring people into a wider conversation about the catastrophe(s), while being vigilant about co-option. The role is to be critical about the status quo. It feels like art hovers in that eternal chasm between ‘job’ and ‘vocation’, because it simply is incompatible with capitalism.

How can life’s work be transacted and sustained in a way that feels uncoerced, or expected to act as an ROI (return on investment)? That’s what I’m trying to interrogate.

AM: Who are some of your literary influences or inspirations?

CT: Literary influences include Momtaza Mehri, Patricia Lockwood, Ania Walwicz, Eileen Myles, Percival Everett, Brian Castro, П. O., Jackie Ess, Dubravka Ugrešić… I could go on.

I generally admire writers who are good at balancing serious and funny on a tonal and intellectual level, without us being able to immediately see their conceptual skeleton(s).

AM: What do you want readers to take away from your book?

CT: I’d rather people tell me what they think of it instead of me telling them what to think of it!

You can grab a copy of Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging by Cher Tan through NewSouth Publishing.