Throughout this book, a shape has emerged and perhaps shown itself, but only as it changes. It may have hovered but not quite settled, then transformed, shifted, altered, become other than itself, reconfigured and moved on. Perhaps the shape has undergone continual transformation – that description we encountered in the Introductions, in the words of Ezra Furman describing queer identity. The shape has not been explicitly referred to, though as the writing in each chapter has proposed, expressed, deformed and defamiliarised itself, a shape of proportions inspired by the unmathematical topological imagination and undergoing continual deformation.

The shape-shifting nature of the material-discursive operations described in the preceding chapters are why perhaps the most apt figure to take up to embody or enflesh this shape-shifter is the trickster figure that Audre Lorde invokes through Afrekete. The rewriting, refolding and refleshing of the trickster figure, found in folklore from a multitude of cultures, is useful because of its inherent deviance and potential for more deviance: deviance squared. The trickster is conventionally male, but as Lorde and others have shown us, this need not be the case. The trickster is archetypal, but as we have seen, archetypes suggest the notion of universal norms which is precisely what this book seeks to disrupt. Universal norms do not precede difference, which is why we need to rewrite concepts such as the trickster figure to accommodate that which does not fit inside those mythical norms.

Through this book, the three processes outlined in the three introductions – the threefold analogical statement I proposed at the beginning ‘defamiliarising can be queering can be mattering’ and later on ‘rewriting can be refolding can be refleshing’ – have been explored through the writing process itself. I have examined examples of defamiliarising/ queering/mattering in each chapter while subjecting my own writing to those very processes in different ways. In the positing of ‘synvariance’ in Chapter 1 I proposed various deformations of syntagmatic logic, suggesting (playfully) that the reader follow a rose-strewn path in order to perceive the ways that language, made strange, can matter and shift. Chapter 2 was populated by a defamiliarised public of fictive personae, both intimate and estranged; figures wrested from their web of familiar associations and shifted around, just as Shklovsky describes, as if they were logs in the fire.