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Has the Queer Ever Been Human?
... (8) Bolstered by Enlightenment discourses and Romantic visions, the colonial worldview emancipated white, European men -the so-called 'human' -apart from the rest of nature, and called upon them to civilise, order and manage the wild; this was achieved, in part, through the scientific establishment of hierarchies and taxonomical distinctions (Cronon 1996;Hejnol 2017: G92;Lutz 2020). The settler-colonial concept of the 'human' is a terrorising force that subjugates ecological others and oppresses persons whose racial, gendered, sexual and embodied identities diminish their humanity (Luciano andChen 2015, Turner, Spalding andDeur 2020). Following suit, colonial-scientific designations on species -native, non-native, introduced, naturalised and invasive -demarcates the boundaries between acceptable and delinquent forms of nature, the latter of which contributes to an unmanageable and unproductive ecology, a land beyond human subjectivity -a wasteland (Gandy 2022: 89). ...
Among the Drupes (Elegy for a Wasteland) is an exhibition in communion with The West Toronto Railpath, an emergent ecology at the edge of ruin. Over eight months, I came to know the last remaining grove of staghorn sumacs (Rhus typhina) and their creaturely kin through foraging for and preparation of pigments. In this essay, I interrogate the biopolitics of the Railpath as a site of ongoing forms of displacement, producing mutualisms between Indigenous, queer and marginalised peoples alongside fated more-than-human others. Through harvesting lively colours, I demonstrate flows between ecological agents that antagonise divides between species and their dooming imaginaries. I draw connections between material art practice and forensic-ecology toward environmental justice for eco-assemblages marked for death by settler-colonial hegemonies. Finally, I demonstrate how art can aid us in bearing witness and, through acts of creative and community-based recuperation, provides hope in times of ecosocial grief.
... While it is historically framed as the "West's environmental other" (Clayton, 2012, p. 180), it is more complexly shaped by the various encounters between human and nonhuman agents both within and without the tropical zone (see Lundberg et al., 2022;Benitez & Lundberg, 2022). And so, given this attunement to its materiality, the tropics-just like the nonhuman in general (see Luciano & Chen, 2015;Muñoz et al., 2015)-is regarded here as entangled with and constitutive of the queerness, in its sheer diversity, being articulated in this special issue. ...
This special issue entitled "Queering the Tropics" explores how queering as a methodology and gender and sexuality as a critical rubric complicate the study of the tropics and conceptions of tropicality. It also engages with how the tropics as a worldly zone, and the notion of tropicality as simultaneously material and imaginary, reconfigure notions of queer sexuality. In other words, our aim has been to study how the tropical might queer queerness itself. This is to attempt to understand queer as a way to initiate and pursue critical encounters with the tropical world-indeed to begin queering the tropics. This first part of the double special issue draws on queer and trans theories and LGBTQIA2+ studies to map encounters with tropical nature, including tropical materialisms, queer ecologies, and spectral tropicality. Decolonial praxis and Indigenous epistemologies also inform this cartography. The papers collected together in this special issue offer a richness that both critiques and expands queer studies.
... Queer theory-political ecology's "then" and "there" Queer theory has long been a critical framework for deconstructing the hetero-patriarchal nature of a globalized society produced through capitalist development (Halberstam 2020;Sedgwick 2008). However, embedded within queer theory's criticism is an understanding that, for many, the present world is not only hostile toward, but built in opposition to queer existence (Luciano and Chen 2015). As a result, the knowledge produced from queer critique is arguably inherently affirmative in that it celebrates modes of living and subjectivities that have always existed and persisted, despite, and in spite of, social normativities. ...
This review highlights the potential of a political ecology that approaches socionatures more experimentally and speculatively. We first consider theoretical frameworks which can help elucidate a conceptual and methodological pathway for more experimental and speculative political ecology scholarship. Next, we bring together and systematize multiple threads of political ecology scholarship that already lean into experimentation and speculation. We highlight what we see as their potential, particularly focusing on ongoing struggles for climate and environmental justice. First, we conclude that experimental and speculative approaches are critical for laying the foundations of a future-oriented and reparative mode of critique that illuminates emerging possibilities for alternative worlds. Second, these approaches can generate new registers of consciousness that make room for hope, possibility, creativity, and action. Third, experimental and speculative approaches reconfigure political ecological praxis by fostering a more proactive role for the researcher in addressing socioecological challenges as they emerge. It is our hope that this intervention inspires others to do work that is intentionally more experimental or speculative, creating conditions that could potentially lead to a more equitable society in the present with ramifications for a more just future.
... Similar to how the mark of 'woman' under patriarchy designates inferiority because associated with nature (Merchant, 1980;Mies and Shiva, 1993), the queer other occupies the position of nature in the human-nature binary that constructs the human as a placeholder for civilised respectability (Gaard, 1997). These civilisational discourses intersect with colonial frameworks of paternalist rulemaking for the 'savage', the yet-to-become human, and the logically never quite fully recognisable subjects (Carter, 2007;Gosine, 2021;Luciano and Chen, 2015). Indeed, much queer theorising on the place of nature highlights this Enlightenment-based thinking and colonial heritage as regulating the deviant and their habitat. ...
Queerphobic discourses variably frame nature as defined by reproductive heterosexuality or as defined by unruly desires that civilised heterosexuality promises a progress away from. This article argues that both these politicised determinations of nature follow the logic of ‘renaturalisation’ – a strategy that invokes nature and the natural to reinforce a normative process – and that the ambiguity in nature discourses stems from the conflictual construction of queerness as both social and antisocial. Because queerness oscillates between being a recognisable identity and a critique of everything social, nature discourses used to justify heteronormative ontologies are contradictory and must change according to the context of the argument. Excavating a theory of renaturalisation from Guy Hocquenghem, this article suggests that queer politics should take nature seriously not because nature is inherently progressive or conservative but because this very duality materialises through cultural anxieties around queerness.
... 53 Anzaldúa thereby sees 'dehumanization as an opportunity to reconstruct what it means to be human'. 54 The onto-epistemology of Anzaldúa's New Mestiza focuses on how humans are all an inherent mix of human and nonhuman. Anzaldúa thereby writes, 'You're all the different organisms and parasites that live on your body and also the ones who live in a symbiotic relationship to you . . . ...
... Of interest here is the human surface and how it rearranges through sensing rearrangements away from overdetermined human figurations. Perhaps the most directly linked literature that combines the non/human worlds with "human" otherness is found in Mel Y Chen and DanaLuciano's (2015) theory of queer inhumanism which traces the void. Chen and Luciano steer clear from the commonly used ...
This dissertation follows an unfolding praxis that inquires into the fluid potentials of humanocean relations. The praxis combines embodied encounters, literature and art-making into an unmethodological, creative practice that opens up a sensorium for oceanic relationing. The praxis treats knowledge-making as a necessarily messy reconfiguring process for analysing power in ontological human-ocean relations. It treats my own human-ocean relations as a point of departure to think specific human figurations in relation to the oceanic. These relations funnel into encounters had with high weathering systems on a voyage I undertook across parts of the Indian Ocean. By analysing the loss of broadcast signal and the associated rise of static in the radio receiver during this voyage, the praxis locates a zone for politicising discomfort through the noisy activity of terra-ocean relations. This zone opens toward the material activities of oceanic weathering, which informs ontological understandings for oceanic relations. In the pursuit for such understandings, human-ocean figurations are rearranged via perceptions of the oceanic. Working through perceptions in this way helps to set them adrift in wayward directions from over-determined terra-associated perceptions of the oceanic. In this, the singular trajectories of the anthropocene shift toward a more caring, sensuous multiplicity, which is associated with the sensitiveness of the Indian Ocean itself, and oceanic more broadly.
... The editorial of that issue was titled "Has the queer ever been human?" (Luciano and Chen, 2015), and it aimed to explore; "(...) the overlap between queer studies and the rising critical interest, across the humanities and social sciences, in nonhuman objects" (84). The editorial quotes Stacy Alaimo, who claimed; "The figure of the queer/trans body does not merely unsettle the human as norm; it generates other possibilities-multiple, cyborgian, spectral, transcorporeal, transmaterial-for living" (187). ...
Mermaiding is the practice of wearing a tail designed to look like that of a fish. In this work I look at this phenomenon from the lens of gender and performance, aiming to understand if mermaiding constitutes a form of drag, by establishing the position of the mermaid symbol in queer and transgender spaces, then comparing testimonies of drag performers and professional and amateur mermaids. I also look at this practice through the lens of post-human theory, determining in which ways the mermaid body constitutes an object of identification for the person wearing a tail. By doing so, I demonstrate the similarities between the phenomena and their meaning, and show that the emergence of this practice affirms posthuman predictions of a future where the connection between human body and identity dissolve and enable new, hybrid identities.
... We took a feminist participative approach (Askins, 2018) in which we recognize our own embodiments and positionalities as both participants and researchers/artists. Embodied approaches have a long tradition in both feminist (cultural) geography and self-portraiture, in questioning the god-trick 'view from nowhere' (Haraway, 1988), decentring the heteropatriarchal gaze and refusing appropriation (Luciano & Chen, 2015). In embodied practices including selfportraiture or autoethnography, the 'proper' scale of power and politics is questioned, making the personal political and diminishing the 'distance between subject and object' (Jones, 1998, p. 182). ...
... Apart from Queer being defined as a label, Queer can also be used to challenge broader discourse. Luciano and Chen (2015) described their function of Queer as a "tool of incessant unsettling" (p. 192). ...
Following the tragedy of another shooting that happened in a visibly Queer space, this study explores how Queerness in rural spaces generates a spectrum of visibility. Men in Place (2019) by Miriam Abelson and Out in the Country: Youth Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America (2009) by Mary Gray, personal narratives/podcasts cultivated by Country Queers, and “place histories” such as Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard which were highly visible cases of rural Queer overkill, are used as objects of study to explore the role and function of visibility in rural contexts. After exploring these rural Queer-centric narratives, I generated three thematic categories: working to preserve Queer comfort in rural spaces, identity work of rural Queerness, and fears and spaces of violence. I conclude by using the three categories to offer three implications for educational practices to complicate our understanding of Queer visibility in rural schools.
In Catherine Lacey's Pew (2020), a congregation in an unnamed town in the American South, discovers a mysterious figure—Pew—sleeping on a pew. Pew's gender, age, and racial identity are indistinguishable, and as the townspeople grapple with Pew's identity, they disclose their worries and confidences in monological conversations with Pew, as the latter remains silent. This paper aims to examine the intersection of Gothic and Posthuman themes that portray Pew as an outsider whose silence disrupts the community's social cohesion. Pew's silence reveals how the absence of language can provoke both intrigue and fear as it destabilizes the community bonds and boundaries that language typically reinforces. Pew can be understood as a posthuman figure whose fluid and undefinable selfhood challenges normative concepts of identity definition and reveals contemporary fears of otherness linked to concepts such as queer identities, trust, innocence, and transparency.
Homes are intimate spaces where many bodies come together in space and time to deeply learn and understand the processes that have created one another. Ecology, the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment, is based on the study of a home. Yet ecologists are trained in patriarchal, heteronormative, and otherwise Western articulations and understandings of nature that prevent access to this ecological home. In this article, I argue that through (re)constructing ecology as a home, ecologists can better understand the social and ecological processes that shape an organism. To (re)construct ecology as a home, I first dissect conflict with wildlife as a concept that reinforces taxonomical hierarchies and prevents humans from making a home with wildlife. I then leverage Queer theory to flatten taxonomical hierarchies and create a landscape that invites the (re)construction of ecology as a homemaking discipline. Lastly, I sit within the ecological home to examine urban wildlife and the environmental pressures they are subjected to—using the urban coyote as an example. This work leverages Queerness to collapse taxonomical hierarchies and push traditional ecology towards a boundless relationality with wildlife to more holistically understand the various social and ecological pressures that ultimately create their phenotype.
For over a century, attempts to fix, capture, and control a way of being now known as "autism" have haunted and harmed countless autistic people, all under the guises of medical care and treatment. These unjust events precipitated from rigid Western scientific and cultural paradigms about what is real and what is normal, leading to the deep misunderstanding and social oppression of autism and other non-normative ways of being. Presently, autistic people still endure oppressive and traumatic behavioral interventions and minority stressors (such as internalized prejudice and discrimination) in consequence of living in an "autistiphobic" world-a world that is preoccupied with being normal. Yet, non-normative ways of being such as autism generate new possibilities, which can liberate and facilitate connections between people. Systemic and cybernetic therapy frameworks-in combination with insights from the neurodiversity paradigm of autism-may offer insights into co-transformative psychotherapy practices with autistic clients and people close to them, enabling more authentic autistic being in the world. This study used interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore how neurodiversity paradigm-embracing therapists retroactively make sense of their co-transformations with autistic clients; specifically, their reinterpretations of social normativities and connectedness. Results showed that participants came to both 1) recognize and oppose normative oppression in their therapeutic practices and 2) align with neurodivergent authenticity, autonomy, and connection as therapists and people. Implications of this research for therapeutic practice and broader sociopolitical issues are discussed at the end of the project. The goal of this research is to offer curious therapists possible paths for ethical, liberatory, and generative work with autistic clients.
How should we tell the story of ecology? In this essay, the authors draw from a long and deep history of ecology, in which more affective approaches to nature become visible, ones that are attuned to both plants and their contexts and aligned with trans* studies. The authors offer the many synergistic possibilities and shared ideas between plant community ecology and trans* ecologies and propose a vegetal trans* ecology that can bridge trans* studies with plant ecological studies. The article raises inconvenient phenomena in community ecology for trans* ecologies to play with, including alternative stable states, mutualisms, and coexistence. The authors believe that trans* studies, with highly developed conceptual languages for indeterminacy, contingency, and change, can support reconfiguration in ecology. Their confidence emerges from a growing group of ecologists who seek interdisciplinary collaboration, and they encourage cross-pollinations through a lens of vegetal trans* ecology. Finally, this article reflects on the importance of affective engagement for ecologists, which relocating the field within a natural history tradition can account for, and suggest again that trans* studies can influence place-based, contingent, and situated ecological knowledge.
There are many overlaps between crip and trans ecologies, such that human and more-than-human corporeal difference, like trans existence, is often constituted as unnatural and undesired within dominant scientific discourses. Yet in the context of environmental futurities, the notion of desiring disability, as a central framework within critical disability studies, prompts distinct questions. Disability and corporeal differences are often positioned as incommensurable with environmental futures, in that disability and corporeal difference are constituted as evidence, or even the cause, of environmental destruction leading to impending doom. This project turns toward these questions to consider how we might foster a crip ecologies approach that enables the possibility of crip futures, while also attending to the conditions of debility. Such an approach to crip ecologies necessitates an anti-colonial politic that refuses Western science and its method of conservation through eradication and instead looks toward the connections and assemblages between crip politics and Indigenous knowledges and practices.
La fluidité de genre et la non-binarité sont répandues dans les univers de science-fiction. Les auteur·ice·s profitent de la diversité offerte par le genre pour expérimenter avec les graphies, les accords et les pronoms. Cette diversité est adressée de plusieurs façons : la neutralité des protagonistes non-binaires, les êtres sentients robotiques, ou encore les êtres extraterrestres dont les corps et les cultures n’ont aucune conception de la binarité des corps humains. La créativité des auteur·rice·s exige des traducteur·rice·s et des éditeur·rice·s de se positionner sur comment rendre l’étrangéité du texte de départ (des néologismes aux structures socioculturelles et politiques) dans le texte d’arrivée, en ce qu’elle mène à des propositions non standardisée. Dans cet article, nous explorerons la diversité des propositions pour représenter la non-binarité et la neutralité de genre en science-fiction. Pour cela, nous nous concentrerons sur l’analyse comparative des séries Murderbot Diaries de Martha Wells et Monk and Robot de Becky Chambers, accompagnées de leurs traductions en français. Nous contextualiserons cette analyse en explorant les façons dont les auteur·rice·s anglophones et francophones abordent le genre et la non-binarité dans les œuvres.
By situating stones in play, this chapter explores the ecological and affective dimensions of the digital environments of World of Warcraft (Blizzard 2004–). Much of the intervention of this chapter entails considering the entanglements between videogames and the environment to recognise how nonhuman matters determine the nature of, and participate in, play. Reprising works at the crossroads of game studies and (new) materialisms (Bienia, Role-Playing Materials, Zauberfeder Verlag, Ph.D, 2016; Germaine, Rosen (ed), Diseases of the Head: Essays on the Horrors of Speculative Philosophy, Punctum Books, Santa Barbara, 2020; Germaine and Wake, Germaine and Wake (eds), Material Game Studies, Bloomsbury, London, 2022), thinking with nonhuman matters decentres the human body as the leading affective site in play. This chapter takes up a queer and materialist position to challenge notions that stones are inert and mundane, finding them instead the substance of narrative, temporality, and sensation. Stones and their inherent sensations are understood as a foundational matter of digital and actual worlds. In recognising the material, artistic, and philosophical links between digital stones and their lithic counterparts, this essay determines what real effects stones generate in play. World of Warcraft is taken as the primary example here, though the affordances of digital stones are irradiated alongside other games, art, literature, and performances that likewise ‘play’ with matter. Through an interdisciplinary lens encompassing game studies, philosophy, and ecological thinking, this chapter highlights the pervasive presence of stones as a matter of reality and investigates the efficacies of stones generated in gameplay.
This essay reads the poet Eileen Myles's recent turn to climate activism as an extension of their queer critique of predatory urban change on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where they have lived since the 1970s. Myles's climate activism opposes the demolition of Manhattan's East River Park to facilitate one of New York City's first large-scale climate resiliency projects. Myles argues that residents’ desires should shape climate resiliency planning priorities. I read Myles's earlier poems and essays to describe how the queer persistence and the attention to the “now” of urban change that they develop in response to New York's housing crisis in the 1980s during the early era of AIDS inform their climate activism. I argue that the environmental humanities tools needed to represent climate change on an urbanizing planet are inextricable from a queer theory approach to sustaining desire and loss amid precarity, as becomes apparent through Myles's writing.
Queer subjectivity invites discussions around gender performativity, culture, narratives of “coming out,” and identity politics. Postcolonial queer subjects—like those emerging from the Philippines—require additional layers of critique attending to language, practice, and resistance. This brief reflection will explore the place of camp, rampa, and posthuman worldviews in the constitution of Filipino queer bodies. It argues that as queer narratives become global—and normalized— camp and rampa offer a place where queerness can both expand critical theology and imaginations of the human.
This case study documents the process of research, identification, and cocreation —with members of the drag community— a visual ethnography of Gainesville's drag culture. This study documented drag performance as an integral element of public-facing queer communities and took place during 2021 and 2022. Drag GNV
aim is to contextualize the importance and nuance of drag as an activity supporting LGBTQ+ individuals and communities and as a publicly visible format for sharing elements of LGBTQ+ community identity with broader audiences. This research focused on conversations with the queer community (performers and allies) and centered reflections on drag venues as safe spaces to build on the oral and visual history and promote the drag art form. The project weaves together past and present stories and contributes to the collective creation of safe spaces for queer people.
The article reads The Stone Virgins as a text underlined by an Indigenous poetics that situates the land as a speaking subject and an archive of memory. Its critical foci are African feminist conceptions of the entanglement of human and nonhuman matter and their implications for current conceptions of the archive. The article suggests that, rather than incorporating into the postcolonial national archive the excluded voices of women and ethnic minorities, The Stone Virgins makes legible minority practices of memory making that the archive does not recognize. To account for these practices and their literary representation, the article draws a comparison between the novel’s poetics of land and Indigenous poetics across other Anglophone spheres. The comparison is based in the convergence of Black and Indigenous conceptions of the coconstitutionality of the human and nonhuman. The comparison provides a new critical model for reading postcolonial aesthetic formations that engage nonhuman beings. It furthermore speaks to larger conversations regarding the “ontological turn” of criticism oriented to animist and new materialisms, as it addresses a mode of reading the land in African writing attuned to Indigenous systems of knowledge.
The article moves beyond some of the more recognizable intersections of disability and camp—the flamboyant irreverence of disabled performers—to ask how a crip sensibility can modify our very definition and epistemologies of the camp aesthetic. Leveraging the definitional kinship between bodies considered disposable and objects slated for discard, a new cripistemology of the camp aesthetic redefines camp through relations of care—those practices through which we nurture that which is beyond recovery and past the point of repair. Building on but departing from important work in disability studies that emphasizes crip theatricality and camp spectacle, the article explores the different affects that circulate through the intimacies and animacies of camp objecthood.
Drawing on the concepts of queer temporality, cyborg, and posthumanism with reference to queer inhumanism, this article examines a trans-cyborgized protagonist's non-linear life splices to unravel humanness within the queered narratives of Chi Ta-wei's dystopian novella The Membranes, a renowned science fiction produced in 1990s Taiwan that features anthrodecentrism. Unlike the common practice to cripple compulsory heteronormativity, The Membranes imagines a cyberpunk world underpinning cyborg chronology, such that the central figure Momo, a transgender synthesis of a "male human brain" and a fabulated "female cyborg body," embarks on a self-inquiry journey to situate her fluid, flexible, and unsettled identities, which are obfuscated somewhere between the human brain and a prothesized bodily container. Analyzed in this article is Chi's existentialist questioning of the hierarchies and default forms of humanhood. The locus of this article, accordingly, is to debunk the deferred, converged chronotope of a transgendered, anthropomorphized cyborg in the sense of Chi's transqueering posthuman conceptions.
This paper examines the significance of soundscapes in the Tamil American poet Divya Victor’s reconstruction of the archive of anti-South Asian violence in her acclaimed poetry collection Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021). Being a continuation of the poet’s investigation of the limits of conceptual and “documental” poetics (Michael Leong), advanced in her Natural Subjects, UNSUB and Kith, Curb appropriates public and personal records to critique discrimination against the South Asian community in America’s post-9/11 political landscape. Victor’s poetics enact extreme witnessing, re-establishing the archive’s unheard durations that her modality of the lyric upholds, and recovering locutions of the Indian diaspora eroded or erased by anti-immigrant and anti-Asian racism. Tracing the dynamics of location and locution at the sites of violent events as well as their barely audible frequencies registered in the sequence “Frequency (Alka’s Testimony),” I argue that the archive’s duration in Curb is extended by forms of “sonic agency” (Brandon LaBelle). I further show how, through the poetic work of hearing and sounding (including such techniques as echolocation and ventriloquy), Victor creates a simultaneously critical and lyrical space akin to auditory experience where the text’s multiple durational vectors throw into sharp relief the lives “curbed,” diminished, or destroyed by wounding, fear, and trauma, testifying to the extremity of the very act of witnessing. Finally, focusing on opacity as a fundamental quality of the archive, I also turn to Carolyn Chen’s concrète sound compositions and Amarnath Ravva’s assemblages that traverse Curb, accompanying the poet in collaborative hearing of the archive’s spatial, temporal, and sonic dynamics.
In this article, the authors introduce the concept of a “queer counter-mythology.” They do so by discussing a speculative song they wrote as an enactment of research-creation. Research-creation names an interdisciplinary scholarly praxis where artist-scholars create the artefacts they want to think-with, rather than analysing existing cultural productions. The song discussed in this article, “Cosmic Beavers,” proposes a queer counter-mythology that reimagines the historical, colonial archive by foregrounding the stories of giant, trans-dimensional beavers who shred Lewis and Clark and use them to reinforce their Time-Dam. Drawing on this song, as well as queer theories of time and anti-colonial thinkers, the authors suggest that artistic interventions invoke speculative lures that, while not changing history, can complicate state-sanctioned archives and narratives of the past and future: they frame this intervention as a queer counter-mythology.
This article reads the final moment of Fatma Aydemir’s 2022 novel, Dschinns, as an instance of heterolingual address, which provides an alternative to the progressive logic of assimilation in both Germany and Turkey and the cyclicality of transgenerational trauma. Opening out onto the possibility of a forthcoming counter-address marked by queer spectrality, the novel prompts readers to engage in an open-ended process of community formation by rethinking their own modes of address and the myriad power structures that undergird them.
Freud’s readings of Shakespeare are notorious for their universalizing claims about human sexuality. What is less commonly noticed, and what this article foregrounds, is the asexuality that underwrites psychoanalytic theories of sex. Venus and Adonis shows that Shakespeare’s poem is replete with asexual encounters. In other words, it is not Adonis alone who spurns sexual romance. Venus’s insatiable kissing is a textbook example of Freud’s point about the paradoxicality of sex: when it comes to the pleasures of kissing, Freud says, “It’s a pity I can’t kiss myself.” This essay reads asexuality not as a particular orientation; rather, it asks how asexuality, psychoanalysis, and Shakespeare disorient our readings of sex.
Transmigration refers to movements made across, between, through, or beyond spatial, spiritual, and bodily boundaries—motions to which queer and trans studies scholars have long imputed important political and social valences. This essay tracks the many transmigrations of the silkworm Bombyx mori, the source of commercial silk, through an archive of literary and critical writings by W. G. Sebald, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Jen Bervin. The author pays special attention to the trans-migration silkworms make through their own bodies, or metamorphosis, thus opening the way to a less anthropocentric account of transmigratory processes. This essay shows how silkworms and silk cross and recross the constructed lines dividing East and West, matter and language, natural and synthetic. In doing so, silkworms enter a broader collective of trans-migrating bodies in which certain bodies are granted free movement at the expense of other, often racialized, queer, or animal bodies. The author argues that the embodied, quotidian metamorphosis of the silkworm exemplifies an alternative mode of trans-migration that refuses transcendence and instead ties us, by silken threads, to the vicissitudes of the present moment.
This paper operationalises the prefix trans in transformative constitutionalism to think expansively about post-apartheid freedoms. It uses the prefix to challenge limited conceptions of how freedom and transformation are read into the post-apartheid moment. In South Africa, often, debates about transformation are debates about race, and its linkages to class. This has created what looks like “first” and “secondary” struggles, with race being first and struggles like gender and gender equality regarded as secondary. This paper argues for a more complicated articulation of post-apartheid freedoms that does not neglect other forms of struggle like gender. Using trans – both as in transgender, the lived realities, and as in trans as metaphor – this paper challenges simplistic ways of reading freedom in post-apartheid South Africa. Furthermore, understanding the concept of the human has had a troubled history in that the foundations of the human have meant white, male and Western. Therefore, this paper uses the prefix trans to grapple with the meaning of the human in the human rights that are part of the South African Constitution.
Building on the foundational Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect's resonances with today's most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future potentials of affect theory.
The fields of critical animal studies and feminist new materialisms have important implications for anthropology. In attending to ethics in human-animal relations, these fields not only decenter but also destabilize the very category of the Human. In conversation with critical animal studies and feminist anthropology, multispecies ethnography thinks with nonhumans and honors their specificities as both individuals and species. Multispecies ethnography encourages analysis of humans’ entanglement with other species as well as thinking about seemingly inanimate matter such as rocks as animate entities. Recognizing the animacy of objects offers interesting and important insights for ethnography. In this chapter, the author provides an overview of the cross-pollination of the multispecies and new materialist turns to explore how feminist and queer studies of the non/human are important for anthropology. Multispecies and feminist new materialist interrogations of sexuality are discussed, focusing on their innovative and important ethical contributions to human understandings of sexuality. The author argues that anthropology is uniquely positioned to intervene further in this conversation and posits that queering multispecies ethnography, rather than simply using nonhuman animals to reify or resist human formations of sexuality, can offer an opening to interrogate sexuality as a multispecies entanglement.
Paul Robeson's global memorialization poorly represents the extent to which the famous African American activist, actor, athlete, singer, and scholar impacted international culture and politics. Robeson's memorials, while few and far between, particularly in the United States, reside primarily within college campuses and theatrical and musical productions, alongside a few more traditional plaques, works of public art, and his own work. While there has been some interest in these various memorials, commemorations, and works of Robeson, no one has yet explored one of the most widespread and historically loaded aspects of his commemoration: the Paul Robeson Tomato. This heirloom tomato, developed in the Soviet Union, has, as one seed website states, "a cult following." Reading through various gardening and seed websites, we find that the tomato has a special place among heirlooms. At the same time, the digital and print networks conveying information about the tomato and Paul Robeson silence and twist Robeson's memorialization given political, cultural, and ecological contexts. This leads us to ask a number of questions, particularly how we might understand this tomato within the broader memory and memorialization of Paul Robeson? How does this human-environment interaction of more-than-human memory impact Robeson's legacy? And how can we further think of living memory beyond human experience to the remainder of the natural landscape around us and the power it has? This project explores these notions of living memory, more-than-human, and memorialization in the context of the histories which envelop Paul Robeson and the tomato.
This chapter is the first of two chapters exploring shapeshifting and somatic instability in zhiguai tales. Here, we focus upon the queer figure of the ‘non/human’ (vis-à-vis Giffney and Hird et al., eds., Queering the Non/Human, Ashgate, Hampshire and Burlington, 2008), considering how transforming objects and the blurred boundaries between humans and animals destabilise anthropocentrism. We consider the ways in which such shapeshifting troubles the relationship between bodies and identities, and also brings humans and non/humans into ethical relationships with one another. Such shapeshifting is not always depicted positively, however, and there are also patterns correlating women with animals, and becoming-animal as a form of punishment. Tracing the valence of some of these transformations, we explore how identity hierarchies remain in operation despite (or rather, within) such transformations, and the linking of forms of deviance (including sexual) with non/humanity.
This article critiques current theories of the commons as having been produced and sustained by human-centered paradigms of intellectual reasoning. It develops a commons beyond the human in response, which offers another way to envisage the commons and its pledge to the construction of better, alternate futures. Rather than advance yet another definition of the commons, this article examines how its means of knowledge production might ensue differently by dislocating the concept from its existing points of epistemological orientation. At the heart of this inquiry lies an attempt to rethink the commons concept beyond its regulating logics of liberal humanism, a radical reconsideration of the kinds of politics it should and might still enable beyond the lure of progressive reason. Turning to a reading of Alexis Wright’s 2013 novel The Swan Book, the article argues that a commons beyond the human gathers in the text through the more-than-human existence engendered between a young Aboriginal girl, Oblivia, and a flock of black swans. The novel presents neither the disavowal of the inherited knowledges of the commons nor a concrete policy to herald its appearance in a conjectural future, but a critical expansion of its transitive acts of worlding. This is made feasible by its insistence on upholding an Indigenous Australian ontological reality as the structuring provision for its narratives—one that has long stressed its dissonance from dominant Western genres of thinking and being.
Building on the foundational The Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect’s resonances with today’s most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future potentials of affect theory.
Building on the foundational The Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect's resonances with today's most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future potentials of affect theory.
Homes are intimate spaces where many bodies come together in space and time to deeply learn and understand the many processes that have created one another. Ecology, the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment, is based on the study of a home. Yet, ecologists are trained in patriarchal, heteronormative, and otherwise Western articulations and understandings of nature that prevent access to this ecological home. In this article, I argue that through (re)constructing ecology as a home, ecologists can better understand the social and ecological processes that shape an organism. To do this, I dissect conflict with wildlife as a concept that reinforces taxonomical hierarchies and prevents humans from making a home with wildlife. I then leverage queer theory to flatten taxonomical hierarchies and create a landscape that invites the (re)construction of ecology as a home-making discipline. I then sit within the ecological home to examine urban wildlife and the environmental pressures they are subjected to – using the urban coyote as an example. This work leverages Queerness to collapse taxonomical hierarchies and push traditional ecology towards a boundless relationality with wildlife to more holistically understand the various social and ecological pressures that ultimately create their phenotype.
This paper offers a close reading of interdisciplinary visual artist kate-hers rhee ’s The Multiverse Portraits (2015–2016), a multimedia installation that incorporates photography and drawing in its speculative representation of rhee ’s body across imagined parallel universes. I analyze the ways in which rhee appropriates ethnographic tropes and methods as an embodied mode of diasporic critique. By tracing the spectre and spectacle of artificiality and monstrosity that haunt the plastic Korean woman and the “inauthentic,” transracially adopted Korean in The Multiverse Portraits , this paper considers the possibility for diasporic visual art to restage notions of beauty and belonging in terms of illegibility, unruliness, and refusal. This paper animates an alternative genealogy of beauty that demonstrates how the enduring afterlives of the Cold War and US militarism produce monstrous bodies and histories that ultimately transgress the very promise and fantasy of assimilatory inclusion and transnational kinship.
This article analyzes Candice Lin’s 2020 solo exhibition, Natural History: A Half-Eaten Portrait, an Unrecognizable Landscape, a Still Still Life , a show that reflects the artist’s ongoing enquiry into non-Western botanical knowledge and attempts to develop nontoxic death rituals by building more-than-human intimacies. Merging the biological processes associated with decomposition and the discursive formations of race and gender, the work also interrogates the knowledge systems constructed by museums. I examine Lin’s works through the lens of queer inhumanisms to illustrate how this exhibition challenges modern curatorial practices and historical representations of the Asiatic in natural histories. I refer to this aesthetics of disfigurement as “decompositional forms.” Ultimately, I forward that this method of representation renders Asian American racial form into multisensorial registers (which literally penetrate art consumers) to recognize racial histories beyond identity and alongside the omni-presence of the more-than-human.
Author(s): Levi R. Bryant Title (English): Of Parts and Politics: Onticology and Queer Politics Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 2011) Publisher: Research Center in Gender Studies - Skopje and Euro-Balkan Institute Page Range: 13-28 Page Count: 15 Citation (English): Levi R. Bryant, “Of Parts and Politics: Onticology and Queer Politics,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 2011): 13-28.
This interview was conducted on a balcony, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea (with airplanes taking off and landing above our heads) during the Third International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, at Corfu, Greece in June 2011. The symposium had the theme “How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts and Materiality in Organization Studies”. We talked the day after Karen Barad had given the keynote “Ma(r)king Time: Material Entanglements and Re-memberings: Cutting Together-Apart”.
We're Deer. We're Queer. Get Used to It. A new exhibit in Norway outs the animal kingdom.
How have discourses of sexuality shaped depictions of native identity, and how have ideas about kinship been central to these ongoing struggles over the character and contours of native peoplehood? This book is the first study of its kind in its exploration of the complex relationship between contested U.S. notions of sexual order and shifting forms of Native American political representation. Offering a cultural and literary history that stretches from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, it demonstrates how U.S. imperialism against native peoples over the past two centuries can be understood as an effort to make them "straight"-to insert indigenous peoples into Anglo-American conceptions of family, home, desire, and personal identity. It shows how attempts by non-natives to cast native cultures as a perverse problem to be fixed or a liberating model to be emulated both rely on the erasure of indigenous political autonomy; reciprocally, it illustrates how native writers in several periods, in response, have insisted on the coherence and persistence of native polities by examining the ways traditions of kinship and residency give shape to particular modes of governance and land tenure.
For centuries, medicine aimed to treat abnormalities. But today normality itself is open to medical modification. Equipped with a new molecular understanding of bodies and minds, and new techniques for manipulating basic life processes at the level of molecules, cells, and genes, medicine now seeks to manage human vital processes. The Politics of Life Itself offers a much-needed examination of recent developments in the life sciences and biomedicine that have led to the widespread politicization of medicine, human life, and biotechnology. Avoiding the hype of popular science and the pessimism of most social science, Nikolas Rose analyzes contemporary molecular biopolitics, examining developments in genomics, neuroscience, pharmacology, and psychopharmacology and the ways they have affected racial politics, crime control, and psychiatry. Rose analyzes the transformation of biomedicine from the practice of healing to the government of life; the new emphasis on treating disease susceptibilities rather than disease; the shift in our understanding of the patient; the emergence of new forms of medical activism; the rise of biocapital; and the mutations in biopower. He concludes that these developments have profound consequences for who we think we are, and who we want to be.
This essay travels with the testosterone molecule to pursue a theory of racialized and trans embodiment as technical capacities of all bodies, not only of the trans-of-color subject subordinated to racially normative and gender-normative white and cisgender bodies (though the hormone molecule is implicated in those relations). It focuses on technology to think race and transgender together, from a common conceptual ground, rather than as separate strands of thought recombined through an intersectional or cyborg hybridity framework.
This essay takes up the recent embrace of geology by contemporary postsecular critics in relation to a history of nonsecular uses of geology as a resource for what Michael Taussig terms the “unthought zones of materiality.” It looks closely at one such manifestation: the nineteenth-century collaboration between the geologist and Spiritualist lecturer and writer William Denton and his wife, the psychometric medium Elizabeth Foote Denton, which produced a three-volume study titled The Soul of Things: Psychometric Researches and Discovery, published between 1863 and 1874. Psychometric geology suspends itself between materialism and vitalism in an effort to develop a theory, at once practical and ethical, of interobjectivity. A certain attunement, at once intellectual and intuitive, to the geological past would, according to the Dentons, lay the foundations for a vitalized and egalitarian orientation to the world. Placing the Dentons’ enchanted geology in dialogue with contemporary critical appeals to the geological, the essay explores the affective and political aspirations of both projects as they map out the progressive possibilities that may emerge from a reckoning with inspirited matter.
In this paper I will argue that Chicana feminist artist Laura Aguilar, Alma Lopez, Laura Molina, and Yreina D. Cervantez established a continuing counter-narrative of cultural hegemony and Western essentialized hegemonic identification. Through artistic expression they have developed an oppositional discourse that challenges racial stereotypes, discrimination, socio-economic inequalities, political representation, sexuality, femininity, and hegemonic discourse. I will present a complex critique of both art and culture through an inquiry of the production and evaluation of the Chicana feminist artist, their role as the artist, and their contributions to unfixing the traditional and marginalized feminine. I argue that third wave Chicana feminist artists have developed a unique representational arena of the feminine or unfeminine that continues to challenge Western hegemonic imagery and is engaged in a more complex Chicana feminist epistemological and theoretical aesthetic. I will take a semiotic approach to contextualize Chicana feminist artists Laura Aguilar, Alma Lopez, Laura Molina, and Yreina D. Cervantez. I argue aesthetic portrayals of the Chicana body; in addition I will analyze art works for a visual representation of oppositional discourse in Chicana feminist aesthetics, in which they reveal and reconstruct the female body, reclaim “space”, and evoke reclamation identification by revealing new interpretations, and revealing perspectives of Chicana identity disrupting Western hegemonic discourse, thus putting Chicana Feminist Theory into practice.
Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has widened our scope of inquiry to include ecosystems, animals, and artificial intelligence. Yet the vast majority of the stuff in our universe, and even in our lives, remains beyond serious philosophical concern. This book develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being—a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest. And unlike experimental phenomenology or the philosophy of technology, this book’s alien phenomenology takes for granted that all beings interact with and perceive one another. This experience, however, withdraws from human comprehension and becomes accessible only through a speculative philosophy based on metaphor.
Although Samuel Delany is best known, as a memoirist, for The Motion of Light in Water (1988) and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (2001), this essay considers his first work in this genre, Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (1979). Named after the folk music group and commune to which Delany belonged from 1967 to 1968, the memoir intersperses notes taken from that tumultuous period with recollections composed a decade later. Reading the memoir today—amidst an ecological crisis and a stagnating mainstream LGBT politics—sets into play yet another circuit of memory and recollection. Although not nature writing, Delany's memoir supplies instructive instances of what Timothy Morton calls the "ambient poetics" of the counterculture's valorization of the pastoral (Ecology without Nature 32-54). Delany renders the environment of countercultural communal life, musicking, and polymorphous sexuality through literary techniques Morton identifies with ecomimesis, such as the medial, the timbral, and the Aeolian. These techniques offer the nascent interdisciplinary discourse of queer ecology a genealogy in music, sex, and alternative world-making.1 Delany's literary and sexual ecologies "without nature" provide a way of pursuing the utopian spirit of the musical and sexual subcultures of the sixties without necessarily seeking pathways "back to the garden" (Mitchell, Ladies). From within the milieu of free love often retrospectively associated with white middle-class heterosexuality, Delany developed literary strategies for estranging the romance with nature, supplying terms for a more robust and inclusive contemporary ecological imagination. One consequence of this estrangement is a different orientation toward the rendering of race within ecological contexts, a difference that I argue is queer.
"We are stardust. / We are golden," Joni Mitchell sang of the 1969 Woodstock festival. "And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden" (Ladies). Mitchell's naive couplet renders an indelible image of the counterculture's pastoral sublime, intensified by the song's copious use of the first-person plural and Mitchell's piercing melismatic scat that extends the penultimate "garden." "Rendering," Morton writes, "attempts to simulate reality itself: to tear to pieces the aesthetic screen that separates the perceiving subject from the object. The idea is that we obtain an immediate world, a directly perceived reality beyond our understanding" (35). "Woodstock" renders stardust into a figure for life beyond the limits of time and space, creed and color, and calls for an effort to restore Eden, or, in some versions of the song, its "semblance."2 That the lyric derives not from actual experience of Woodstock but only Mitchell's vicarious desire to have been there only adds further color and texture to how the song at once renders counter-cultural ecotopia and "re-marks" it, calling attaching to the song as itself only an echo (Morton 48). That vicariousness gives the song's ironical boast that "By the time we got to Woodstock, / We were half a million strong" a pointed significance that many a boxed set, documentary film, TV anniversary special, or 25th anniversary commemorative concert lacks, especially for those born too late to have been there. Like the echo of self-doubt on later versions of the song, in which Mitchell specifies our destination as some semblance of the garden, her composing the song in a hotel room in New York "glued to the media" (Ruhlman) coverage of an event that paternalistic sexism had prevented her from performing at, makes her Woodstock peculiarly ours, insofar as the "garden" that "we" have to find our way back to is as vicariously drawn to her as it to us (Mitchell, Miles). It remarks her original rendering as high camp, as a way of being in love with a perverse artifice it cannot stop mistaking for the real.
A camp reading of Mitchell's "Woodstock" affords an unexpectedly useful route into a reading of Delany's own perverse affinities for a literary artifice posing as naturalism. While Delany is not often associated with the Woodstock generation, during the heady years of 1967 and 1968 he was deeply involved in countercultural experiments with communal living, sexual liberation, racial and gender egalitarianism, and the folk music revival. Indeed, Salim Washington has pointed out that the...
“Grids happen ” writes Brian Massumi , at a moment in Parables for the Virtual where one is tempted to be swept away by the endless affirmative becomings of movement, flux, and potential, as opposed to being pinned down by the retroactive positioning of identity (2002, 8). For the most part, Massumi has been less interested in how grids happen than in asking how they can un-happen, or not happen. What the tension between the two purportedly opposing forces signals, at this junction of scholarly criticism, might be thought of as a dialogue between theories that deploy the subject as a primary analytic frame, and those that highlight the forces that make subject formation tenuous, if not impossible or even undesirable. I have seen this tension manifest acutely in my own work on intersectionality and assemblage theory. On the one hand I have been a staunch advocate of what is now commonly known as an intersectional approach: analyses that foreground the mutually co-constitutive forces of race, class, sex, gender, and nation. Numerous feminist thinkers consider intersectionality the dominant paradigm through which feminist theory has analyzed difference; Leslie McCall argues that intersectionality might be considered “the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with other fields, has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1771). Intersectional analysis is now a prevalent approach in queer theory.1 At the same time, encountering a poststructuralist fatigue with the now-predictable yet still necessary demands for subject recognition, I also argued in my book, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, that intersectionality as an intellectual rubric and a tool for political intervention must be supplemented—if not complicated and reconceptualized—by a notion of assemblage. Following Massumi on the “retrospective ordering” of identities such as “gender, race, and sexual orientation” which “back-form their reality,” in Terrorist Assemblages I write, “[I]ntersectional identities and assemblages must remain as interlocutors in tension . . . intersectional identities are the byproducts of attempts to still and quell the perpetual motion of assemblages, to capture and reduce them, to harness their threatening mobility” (Puar 2007, 213). Subject positioning on a grid is never self-coinciding; positioning does not precede movement but rather it is induced by it; epistemological correctives cannot apprehend ontological becomings; the complexity of process is continually mistaken for a resultant product.2
Since the publication of Terrorist Assemblages, in response to anxieties about my apparent prescription to leave intersectionality behind (as if one could), I have often been asked to elaborate on the political usages of assemblages and assemblage theory. A prominent concept in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, assemblage seems to inspire doubt about its political “ applicability,” while intersectionality seems to hold fast as a successful tool for political and scholarly transformation. Part of the assumption at work in these queries is that representation, and its recognized subjects, is the dominant, primary, or most efficacious platform of political intervention, while a Deleuzian nonrepresentational, non-subject-oriented politics is deemed impossible. Perhaps these queries also reveal concerns about how they might be somehow incompatible or even oppositional, despite the fact that intersectionality and assemblage are not analogous in terms of content, utility, or deployment. As analytics, they may not be reconcilable. Yet they need not be oppositional but rather, I argue, frictional.
In what follows, I offer some preliminary thoughts on the limits and possibilities of intersectionality and assemblage and what might be gained by thinking them through and with each other. What are the strengths of each in the realms of theory, political organizing, legal structures, and method? Through highlighting the convivial crossings of these two differentiated but not oppositional genealogies, I offer some thoughts on epistemological correctives in feminist knowledge production—which has been driven, sometimes single-mindedly, by the mandate of intersectional analysis—to see what kinds of futures are possible for feminist theorizing. I reread the formative concept that fueled the metaphoric invocation of intersectionality, specifically Kimberlé Crenshaw’s use of the traffic intersection, to show where intersectionality, as that which retroactively forms the grid and positions on it, and assemblage, as that which is prior to, beyond, or past the grid, not so much intersect...
This essay addresses current theories of matter and materialism, particularly ontological approaches. My key proposition is that the Humanities’ ontological turn is a theoretical primitivism that presents itself as a methodological avant-garde. It is so because it fetishizes the sundering of human and object worlds. We need to ask why these primitivist ontologies have come to prominence. “The molecular” – a critical object that exemplifies this primitivist turn – is the focus of my analysis here. Combining Marxism, queer studies, and Joel Olson’s conception of a “fanatical approach,” I argue that molecular ontologies mediate a dual intensification specific to the present: that of neoliberal forms of settler colonialism and financialized capital accumulation.
nearer than breathing, closer than hands and feet
—George Morrison, “The Reawakening of Mysticism”
Ecological criticism and queer theory seem incompatible, but if they met, there would be a fantastic explosion. How shall we accomplish this perverse, Frankensteinian meme splice? I'll propose some hypothetical methods and frameworks for a field that doesn't quite exist—queer ecology. (The pathbreaking work of Catriona Sandilands, Greta Gaard, and the journal Undercurrents must be acknowledged here.) This exercise in hubris is bound to rattle nerves and raise hackles, but please bear with me on this test flight. Start with the basics. Let's not create this field by comparing literary-critical apples and oranges. Let's do it the hard way, up from foundations (or unfoundations). Let's do it in the name of ecology itself, which demands intimacies with other beings that queer theory also demands, in another key. Let's do it because our era requires it—we are losing touch with a fantasy Nature that never really existed (I capitalize Nature to make it look less natural), while we actively and passively destroy life-forms inhabiting and constituting the biosphere, in Earth's sixth mass extinction event. Giving up a fantasy is even harder than giving up a reality.
Queer studies highlights the importance of developing analyses that go beyond identity and representational politics. For Native studies in particular, queer theory points to the possibility of going beyond representing the voices of Native peoples, a project that can quickly become co-opted into providing Native commodities for consumption in the multicultural academic-industrial complex. The subjectless critique of queer theory can assist Native studies in critically interrogating how it could unwittingly re-create colonial hierarchies even within projects of decolonization. This critique also sheds light on how Native peoples function within the colonial imaginary-including the colonial imaginary of scholars and movements that claim to be radical. At the same time, Native studies can build on queer of color critique's engagement with subjectless critique. In the move to go "postidentity," queer theory often reinstantiates a white supremacist, settler colonialism by disappearing the indigenous peoples colonized in this land who become the foils for the emergence of postcolonial, postmodern, diasporic, and queer subjects. With respect to Native studies, even queer of color critique does not necessarily mark how identities are shaped by settler colonialism. Thus a conversation between Native studies and queer theory is important, because the logics of settler colonialism and decolonization must be queered in order to properly speak to the genocidal present that not only continues to disappear indigenous peoples but reinforces the structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy that affect all peoples.
Despite scholarly assumptions that the scientific is opposed to the sentimental, sentimentalism shaped racial and sexual science. I argue that the once-prominent American School of Evolution translated the sensationist epistemology, in which all knowledge derives from the senses, into an explanation of species and race formation. In this view, species originated in sense-based experience and civilization originated in sentiment, granting individuals and especially the civilized control over their own evolution. As sensibility and sentiment denoted a susceptibility to both progress and degeneration, I show how these scientists’ concept of sex differentiation attempted to work out some of the contradictions of the sentimental body. Overall, the essay suggests how the discourse of feeling shaped the modern logic of biological difference.
In her essay “Dungeon Intimacies” (2005) Susan Stryker offers “autoethnography” as a methodology for theorizing embodiment and politics. She invites us to see how corporeality situates more generalizable knowledges. Following Stryker, this essay explores male-to-female transsexual transitioning in an urban setting, San Francisco's Tenderloin, through bodily experience. These accounts might appear as drifts in personal recollection, but they are meant to suggest, however speculatively, and without aiming toward universalizing, the sensuous transaction between body and environment. Apprehending the interplay of sensation and place, I suggest, requires an attention to streets, buildings, and sidewalks, but also other non-humans. Guided by figural and literal spiders and the effects of hormone replacement therapy in the form of horse urine (Premarin), this essay proffers that transsexuality is relational in terms of social, economic, and political milieus as well as spatial, affective, and speciated registers.
1. For studies of Aguilar's photography, in addition to the works cited below Laying It Bare Subversive Bodily Acts: The Photography of Laura Aguilar Chicana Aesthetics: A View of Unconcealed Alterities and Affirmations of Chicana Identity through Laura Aguilar's Photographic Images
- A Chon
- M Noriega Astrid
- Fellner
Chon A. Noriega, " Clothed/Unclothed, " Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33,
no. 2 (2008): 1. For studies of Aguilar's photography, in addition to the works cited
below, see Yvonne Yarbro-Bejerano, " Laying It Bare, " in Living Chicana Theory,
ed. Laura Trujillo (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman, 1998), 277 – 305; Astrid M. Fellner,
" Subversive Bodily Acts: The Photography of Laura Aguilar, " in Body Signs: The
Latino/a Body in Cultural Production, ed. Astrid M. Fellner (Vienna, Austria: Lit
Verlag, 2011); Daniel Perez, " Chicana Aesthetics: A View of Unconcealed Alterities
and Affirmations of Chicana Identity through Laura Aguilar's Photographic Images, "
LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University 2, no. 1 (2013), scholarship.claremont.edu/lux/vol2/iss1/22. Thanks to
Gino Conti and J. Jack Halberstam for pointing us to this image and to Aguilar's work
in general.
Performing the Other as Self: Cindy Sherman and Laura Aguilar Pose the Subject
- Amelia Jones
Amelia Jones, "Performing the Other as Self: Cindy Sherman and Laura Aguilar Pose
the Subject," in Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance, ed. Sidonie
Smith and Julia Watson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 93.
Geological Fantasies, Haunting Anachronies: Eros, Time, and History in Harriet Spofford's 'The Amber Gods Sacred Theories of Earth: Matters of Spirit in William and Elizabeth Denton's The Soul of Things After the Post-Secular, " special issue
- Dana Luciano
In recent work, we have each addressed the animacy and the allure of nonhuman
objects, including stone. See Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering,
and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Dana Luciano, " Geological Fantasies, Haunting Anachronies: Eros, Time, and History in Harriet Spofford's 'The Amber Gods,' " ESQ: A Journal of American Renaissance 55, no. 4 (2009):
269 – 303; and Luciano, " Sacred Theories of Earth: Matters of Spirit in William and
Elizabeth Denton's The Soul of Things, " " After the Post-Secular, " special issue, American Literature 86, no. 4 (2014): 713 – 36.
Laura Aguilar at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
- Victoria Martin
Victoria Martin, "Laura Aguilar at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects," Artweek 31, no. 5 (2000): 24.
Performing the Other as Self
- Jones
Jones, "Performing the Other as Self," 93.
Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe
- Cherríe Moraga
Cherríe Moraga, "Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe," in Queer Cultures, ed. Deborah Carlin and Jennifer DiGrazia (New York: Pearson, 2004), 224 -29.
The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 40; Carlos Gallego
- Gloria Anzaldúa
- La Borderlands
- Frontera
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt
Lute Books, 2012), 40; Carlos Gallego, Chicana/o Subjectivity and the Politics of
Identity: Between Recognition and Revolution (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 74.
Cathy Griggers Lesbian Bodies in the Age of (Post)Mechanical Reproduction See also Griggers (as Camilla Griggers), " Phantom and Reel Projections: Lesbians and the (Serial) Killing Machine
- Monique Wittig
Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind: And Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1992); Cathy
Griggers, " Lesbian Bodies in the Age of (Post)Mechanical Reproduction, " Postmodern Culture 2, no. 3 (1992), muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/journals
/postmodern_culture/v002/2.3griggers.html. See also Griggers (as Camilla Griggers),
" Phantom and Reel Projections: Lesbians and the (Serial) Killing Machine, " in Posthuman Bodies, ed. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 162 – 76.
Introduction: Posthuman Bodies
- Judith Halberstam
- Ira Livingston
Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, "Introduction: Posthuman Bodies," in Halberstam and Livingston, Posthuman Bodies, 8.
The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, Politics Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America
- See Lauren Berlant
See Lauren Berlant, " The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, Politics, " in Cultural
Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 49 – 84; Dana Luciano, Arranging
Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New
York University Press, 2007).
Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century
- Lauren Berlant
- Cruel Optimism
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Brian
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002);
Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the
Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
The Brown Commons: The Sense of Wildness" (paper presented at the annual convention of the American Studies Association
- Muñoz José Esteban
José Esteban Muñoz, "The Brown Commons: The Sense of Wildness" (paper presented at the annual convention of the American Studies Association, San Juan,
Puerto Rico, November 16, 2012).
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
- Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," in Sister
Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2012), 42.
Molecularization of Sexuality
- Rosenberg
Rosenberg, "Molecularization of Sexuality."
What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?, " Social Text, nos
- Judith Halberstam
- José Esteban
- David L Muñoz
- Eng
Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and David L. Eng, " What's Queer about
Queer Studies Now?, " Social Text, nos. 84 – 85 (2005): 2.
1972); see also Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism
- Aimé Césaire
- Trans Joan Discourse On Colonialism
- Pinkham
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1972); see also Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, " Animal: New Directions
in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism, " Feminist Studies 39, no. 3 (2013):
669 – 85.
Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals Joy Harjo, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems
- Temple Grandin
- Catherine Johnson
Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the
Best Life for Animals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); Joy Harjo, How We
Became Human: New and Selected Poems, 1975 – 2001 (New York: Norton, 2002);
Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality,
and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Pink Vectors of Deleuze Rhizomes 11 – 12 (Fall 2005 – Spring 2006), www.rhizomes.net/issue11/cohenramlow.html. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans
- Jeffrey J Cohen
- Todd Ramlow
Jeffrey J. Cohen and Todd Ramlow, " Pink Vectors of Deleuze, " Rhizomes 11 – 12
(Fall 2005 – Spring 2006), www.rhizomes.net/issue11/cohenramlow.html. See Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), esp.
26 – 38.
Beasts of the Southern Wild
- Lucy Alibar
- Benh Zeitlin
Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Benh Zeitlin
(2012; Beverly Hills, CA, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment).