Mergoat Mag No.3: Kindly of a Queer Nature

KINDLY OF A QUEER NATURE

TRANSECOLOGIES

Photo by David Michael

Mergoat Staff

creative director & designer

design support

editorial support + photography

Mergoat Magazine is a quarterly magazine published out of Knoxville, Tennessee. The best way to support our work is to become a subscriber at mergoat.com.

mergoat.mag

writing

Margaret Spalding

Josefine Parker

Hazel Hoffman

Hillbilly Gothic / Clover

Rachel Milford

Andreas Bastias

Benjamin Titeras

Margaret Killjoy

Cate O'Connell-Richards

L. Hartsock

Flip Zang

cover art by Ryan McCown

art & photography

Rine Bloom

David Michael

Danielle Calibird Fernandez

NASA / James Webb Telescope

Madison Tunnicliff

Evan Poellinger

Mad Bishop

Keara Giannotti

Cate O'Connell-Richards

Alex Bonner

Hazel Hoffman

Ryan McCown

Kat Smith

Adam Mescher

Kym Mackinnon

From the Editor

August 1, 2023

Dear Readers,

Centuries of anthropocentric thought have led to the development of a binary: humans and nature. This binary has since solidified a misunderstanding that humans and nature are not one and of the same but two distinct and separable categories. Through the misconception of nature as being outside of humanity, nature became both a destination (a place to venture into) and a resource (a place to exploit). The most detrimental ideology of nature is precisely this.

A nature that is separate from humanity and to serve humanity causes a sense of indifference towards its overuse, manipulation, exploitation, and destruction. It is this precise ideology that has led to prairies being turned into lawns, oceans into fisheries, forests into deserts, and shale rock into fracking mines.

Just like the gender binary, distinctly either male or female, the ecological one has been created by man to perpetuate particular political and economic systems. There is nothing natural about it.

Nothing makes this binary more of a farce than the current mass extinction event and climate disaster. It is precisely this understanding of nature that has led to these events and many peoples’ denial. Although, we will inevitably realize the inseparability of ourselves and the earth as we experience the consequences of this ideology.

With a focus on futurity, Mergoat Mag denounces any understanding of nature as a binary. Mergoat Mag solely acknowledges Mother Earth as trans.

Transness destroys any form of polarity. Through queer and feminist thought we’ve developed this critique in regards to gender. With the application of queer theory to ecology, we work to eliminate the binary of humanity and nature — one that is artificial, inaccurate, and catastrophic. It is through trans-identity we can understand our positionality as within nature and not in opposition to it.

In this issue, we explore the concept of transecology and feature queer and trans writers and artists.

We welcome you to our queer nature.

Sincerely,

Kathryn Gruszecki Executive Editor

From the Publisher

Yes! Come in! Come in! The transition ceremony starts in just a few pages. We’re waiting for some others to arrive, but the transition will begin momentarily…

“Transition” is not an unfamiliar word for anyone who has spent their life in Southern Appalachia. The nonprofit industry has saturated our communities with the rhetoric of “a just transition” for many years. Even so, the federal government continues to use our region as a negotiating chip and sacrifice zone for big coal and oil, approving and fast-tracking disastrous projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the TVA fossil fuel swap from coal to natural gas. What’s more, our state and local governments continue to fail us over and over again when it comes to our ecological health, and the corresponding health of ourselves and communities.

This year, we are laying a conceptual foundation from which to build new strategies in the fields of politics, science, and conservation in our region and beyond. With this issue on transecologies, we arrive at the crux point in our first year as a publication.

To start this year, in issue no. 1, Hillbilly Ecologies After the Apocalypse, we acknowledged that Southern Appalachia has undergone a multitude of apocalypses. We rejected the notion that an apocalypse is some abstract long-awaited future event. Rather, we have already seen the absolute death of nature as we once understood it. In issue no. 2, Blue Hollers in the Shadow of the Holocene, we grieved. We grieved the loss of wilderness as something wholly other than human society, a romantic ideal that characterized Western society throughout the Holocene epoch. We grieved the loss of idealized nature, uninfluenced by industrial society. We also grieved the loss of specific ecologies and of the beloved forest defender, Tortuguita.

We do not understand transition as an abandonment of grief. Rather, grief itself is a portal for ecological transition. The wound itself becomes a threshold, a threshold we may or may not cross.

Ecological transition is not only a slippery concept but also a process that often feels completely futile. It isn’t futile, though. We believe it is worth asking again: What does it mean to transition? What does it take to transition? How can we transition? Science alone is not equipped to answer this question. Science provides observations and data sets that are integral for developing the mechanics of transition. Nevertheless, if we are unwilling to collectively implement science-based practices, science is dead—nothing but observations and data sets.

Science must be wed to a political practice that takes seriously the connection between ecological collapse, industrial capitalism, and imperial governance. Thus, a transition is not simply mechanical scientific knowledge, but also a psycho-social operation. Transition is not simply a set of facts, but an epistemological movement. How do we grasp this movement?

We believe a profound store of transitional wisdom saturates the marginalized lived experience of trans people in our region, and we seek to magnify that wisdom for the benefit of all beings in this issue of Mergoat Magazine.

In her seminal 1985 essay, Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway says:

Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs-creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that were not generated in the history of sexuality. . . . By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism-in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of "Western" science and politics -the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other-the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history.1

Haraway’s work is a ringing bell throughout this issue. We are familiar with the tired use of words like monster, abomination, and robot by right-wing pundits to refer to trans people, suggesting they are somehow unnatural. They lob aspersions, feigning to mediate the judgment of one deity or another. We affirm again what our executive editor, Kathryn Gruszecki, stated so well in our last issue: There is no outside nature. The proposal of something being unnatural is based on a flawed understanding of the material world. Rather, nature, and everything within it, is a constantly evolving set of relations— wind to rock, water to soil, insect to plant, one genome to another, predator to prey, mind to matter, individual to society. It is our task, now, to comprehend together what makes some relations healthy and others necrotic. To say it again using Haraway’s vocabulary: in the sense that all of nature is the product of one state of matter acting on another resulting in a variable product, all of nature is a cyborg. In a post-industrial society, as we watch the necrosis of industrial capitalism begin to take deep root in our winds, watersheds, oceans, forests, and society, we must rethink how we negotiate our relationship within the broader context of relations that we call “nature.”

We can also think of the cyborg discourse as a discourse on the plasticity of matter. Trauma studies in recent years have unearthed a massive amount of rich data exploring the plasticity of the human mind, making it possible to conceive of new models for alleviating the distress caused by various forms of traumas—ranging from single event trauma, the trauma of war, complex family trauma, and even addiction. Similarly, transitional medical practices have revealed an enormous amount of rich data on the plasticity of anatomical expressions of sex, whether it is through the use of supplementary hormones or surgical interventions. We believe the earth itself also exhibits this capacity for plasticity and recovery. While capitalists have used the earth’s plasticity in the form of development and

extraction to pad their profit margins, contemporary science affirms that we can collaborate with landscapes and nonhuman species to rebound the stability of our ecologies. Throughout this issue, we propose that a dying world is not dead and that the wrong relations that rot our world from the inside out can be corrected.

Last June, when we were mapping out this year’s conceptual arc, we knew the theme of transecologies would be the apex of our exploration. What we did not know is how violently our governing bodies would turn against queer people, particularly our trans siblings. Since we started planning this publication, we have been thrown into a wave of legislative violence against trans people, alongside a host of hate crimes committed against trans individuals. We have also borne witness to the state-sponsored murder of Tortuguita, a trans activist of color and forest protector in Atlanta.

In this moment, we each have a decision to make: we can either look or look away as mass extinction sweeps across our lands and waters. We can either look or look away as the existence and well-being of trans people are threatened in our society. We are choosing to not only look toward our trans siblings as they share their lived experience with us but also to listen and magnify their voices as leaders in the movement for ecological transformation.

Transition! Transition! We must transition! Once a strategy, now a demand: Just transition!! Appalachia deserves clean energy! Appalachia deserves biodiversity! Appalachia deserves justice for all species!

And let us begin…

In solidarity, Sorrel Inman

Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, 6-7.

Support our work

Here is a breakdown of our sliding-scale payment structure. We have made it possible to subscribe for as little as $4.58/ month. With this in mind, we ask those who have the means to subscribe at the solidarity level. Not only are solidarity subscribers a huge support as we start this project, but you are also helping to subsidize discounted subscriptions!

DISCOUNTED RATE

This price level is intended to serve working class, queer, disabled, and BIPOC folx.

PRINT & DIGITAL $75/year -or- $20 every 3 months

DIGITAL ONLY $55/year -or- $15 every 3 months

STANDARD RATE

This is retail price: what you would pay at the bookstore.

PRINT & DIGITAL $90/year -or- $25 every 3 months

DIGITAL ONLY $75/year -or- $20 every 3 months

SOLIDARITY RATE

This price is for subscribers who wish to invest in the longevity of our project.

PRINT & DIGITAL $150/year -or- $40 every 3 months

DIGITAL ONLY $120/year -or- $30 every 3 months

Want to carry our magazine at your store?

Message hello@mergoat.com for wholesale inquiries.

mergoat.com

Cop City Update

Rites of Transition

WSKJ: When Sorrow Kills Joy

Project Feature: Cattywampus

The End of Man

An Interview with Hillbilly Gothic Puppet Council

The Limp Wrist and the Anthropological Machine

I Used to Be a Boy Named Margaret

Homecoming

Craft, Queerness, and Hopefulness

Species Feature: Skunk Cabbage Into the Rift

COP CITY UPDATE

by Margaret Spalding, South River Watershed Alliance

JANUARY TO FEBRUARY 2023

In January of 2023 a land disturbance permit for the police training facility was approved by DeKalb County. Clear-cutting of the site began immediately after approval.

Land disturbance on the property of Cop City in the Weelaunee Forest violates state and federal environmental laws. Attorney Jon Schwartz represented plaintiffs Amy Taylor and Edward “Ted” Terry in submitting an appeal to the DeKalb Zoning Board of Appeals regarding the building permit and

Dthe subsequent filing for injunctive relief when work continued despite the appeal. Taylor serves on the City’s infamous SCAC committee while Terry is Commissioner of DeKalb super district 6 in which the former Atlanta Prison Farm and proposed site of Cop City is located.

The plaintiffs waited 3 weeks to receive an official ruling from the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) before an appeal of Land Disturbance Permit (LDP) could even be filed.

In February, Fulton County Judge Thomas A. Cox, Jr. denied the injunctive request to halt land disturbance at the site, despite DeKalb County law which requires

F

work to stop during the appeals process. Judge Cox cited that no irreparable harm was being done.

APRIL 2023

By April of 2023 the appeal was rejected. The rejection in April came after DeKalb County hired former

When an appeal is filed in DeKalb County, work on the site is required to stop. However, the Atlanta Police Foundation was allowed to bulldoze ahead with clear cutting and land clearing.

DE e N the

Chief Justice of GA Supreme Court, Leah Ward Sears, to defend DeKalb’s approval of the Land Disturbance Permit. In subsequent weeks, the Atlanta Police Foundation leveled no less than 85 acres of greenspace and forest.

FIntrenchment Creek and South River. Both waterways are on Georgia Environmental Protection Division’s 303-d list of impaired waters and are protected under the Clean Water Act and Georgia Water Quality Control Act. Despite the law, the permit issued by Dunn authorizes sediment pollution and allows for the violation of federal and state laws.

R

Ogathered from hundreds of area residents, indicating that the pursuit of environmental justice is a primary concern. In late February of 2023 the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) released the report: South River Forest Community Development Action Plan (SRF Plan).

MARCH 2023

The South River Watershed Alliance (SRWA) appealed the issuance of the Land Disturbance Permit to state Superior Court on behalf of plaintiff DeKalb County Commissioner Ted Terry.

SRWA is continuing to challenge the “all purpose” stormwater permit issued by Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) Director, Richard Dunn, which authorizes the discharge of sediment pollution from the clear cut site into

EOver a one-year period in 2022, the ARC conducted a community engagement process in southeast Atlanta in support of the South River Forest – a vision to create a conservation area including the 296acre former Prison Farm property. SRWA leadership, Jackie Echols and Margaret Spalding, served on the Project Management and Steering Committees. Public input was

By March 2023, Mayor Andre Dickens announced the formation of a Task Force in an attempt to merge the South River Forest Conservation Plan with Cop City. This attempt outright ignored the will of residents who, within the SRF Plan, stated

STconservation as their primary concern. Atlanta Mayor Dickens commandeered the SRF Plan upon its release with the formation of a Task Force to merge the 85-acre Police and Fire Training Center development with the SRF Plan. This was a blatant attempt to advance his own political agenda.

In early March, The Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC) won a free press battle over demands for documents from lawyers representing DeKalb County and Blackhall Studios (Ryan Millsap). The documents were demanded by the plaintiff’s attorneys in discovery phase of the civil case that contests the legality of the exchange of 40 acres of public land at Intrenchment Creek Park to a private entity, Blackhall Studios. The suit was filed in February of 2021 by the South River Watershed Alliance, the South River Forest Coalition and several residents of DeKalb County. The land-swap case is now in the postdiscovery phase.

Also in March, an independent autopsy report for Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita, was released. The report stated that Teran was seated with both their hands raised at the time of death— proving they surrendered and were not a threat to the arresting officers. In April of 2023, the DeKalb County autopsy report was released. This report showed that no gun residue

was found on Teran, disproving the police report’s claim that Teran was engaging in crossfire.

On March 20th, Rose Scott, host of “Closer Look” on WABE radio, interviews attorney Alex Joseph who debunks city council’s claims that nothing can be done to reverse the lease of the former prison farm property to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Shortly after, on March 23, Rose Scott interviewed Liliana Bakhtiari who admitted the majority of her constituency is opposed to the development of Cop City.

On March 24, 2023, DeKalb County CEO, Michael L. Thurmond, issued an executive order closing Intrenchment Creek Park due to “contraption traps.” Images released by the county show wooden boards with nails in them.

On April 10, 2023, Dr. Bernice A. King, daughter of Martin Luther King and CEO of The King Center, wrote Higher Ground, an open letter to Atlanta about Cop City. In the letter she states:

Atlanta’s division is a disheartening dichotomy of institutions against individuals and corporations against communities. Reasoned discourse for the collective good is hampered by insidious thirsts for power, control, and unilateral triumph. We are caught in a spiral of chaos, confusion, and confrontation, with a tale of two cities at odds about what ails us and what remedies will cure us. The reality is, we have yet to create models where ‘police reform’ is not simply a recommitment to the status quo in another form. Criminal justice system transformation and improving public safety must coexist, especially during a time marked by rising crime.

APRIL 2023

On April 1, 2023, Angela Davis vocalized her support in the Stop Cop City movement. “I urge people everywhere to join the campaign to stop Cop City,” Davis proclaims.

CIn late April, the South River Watershed Alliance and other environmental groups submitted a letter to the Chair of Soil and Water Conservation District supervisors to enforce state law. This happened after supervisors for the DeKalb County Soil and Water Conservation District (DCSWD), the agency responsible for enforcing Georgia’s Erosion and Sedimentation Act regulations, admitted in a meeting that they should conduct a review. Despite being state-sanctioned, DeKalb County did not allow DCSWD supervisors onto the property to inspect the site. In an

April DCSWD meeting, supervisors discuss the problem and state that the site is indeed a point source for sediment pollution—exceeding the legally allowed limit (TMDL: total maximum daily load) of pollution into Intrenchment Creek.

On April 25, 2023, the DeKalb County Commission deferred any decision to reopen Intrenchment Creek Park for 30 days despite a petition to reopen the park signed by nearly 900 people and supported by DeKalb County Commissioner Ted Terry.

On May 24, 2023, Atlanta City Council finance Committee approved $31 million in funding for the Cop City project.

On May 31, 2023, Atlanta Police and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided the home of Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers Marlon Kautz, Savannah Patterson, and Adele Maclean. All three were arrested and charged with money laundering and charity fraud.

JUNE 2023

AOn June 2, 2023, Bail was granted to Kautz, Patterson, and Maclean.

On June 5, 2023, Atlanta Council began hearing public comments from hundreds of constituents. Public comments continued through the night and into the early hours of June 6th.

of a website, CopCityVote.com, and a citizen-led campaign to collect the signatures needed to put the referendum on the ballot.

On June 21, 2023, the proposal for referendum was approved by the Atlanta Municipal Clerk’s office. To get the referendum on the ballot, organizers must collect approximately 70,000 signatures in support of the proposed referendum in 60 days. If successful, the campaign will put the referendum on the November ballot and will read:

MAY 2023

On May 11, 2023, it is reported that the United States Geological Survey had recently and quietly shut down the monitoring device, located on Intrenchment Creek at Constitution Rd, that collects data on various types of pollution including sediment and sewage occuring in the waterway. USGS monitoring devices are key to collecting the data necessary to enforce state and federal environmental law.

At approximately 5:30 am on June 6, 2023, Atlanta City Council approved funding in an 11-4 vote for the development of Cop City. The vote approved $31 million in funding for the construction of the sprawling 171-acre development plan.

On June 7th, a broad coalition of activists announced an effort to force a ballot referendum that would allow City of Atlanta residents to vote to approve or repeal the ordinance authorizing the lease of 381-acres to the Atlanta Police Foundation. The announcement included the launch

Shall the City of Atlanta Ordinance 21-O0367 authorizing the ground lease of 381 acres of forested land to the Atlanta Police Foundation for the construction of a $90 million police training facility be repealed.

JULY 2023

On July 2, 2023, @stopcopcity began Week of Action 6. This week of action included rallies, abolitionist workshops, and a music festival within the Weelaunee Forest.

#stopcopcity

Invocation

You who courses through twisting galaxies, planetary landscapes, churning civilizations, and our ever-altering bodies —this element we call transition— we ask to glimpse your wisdom, nestled in the mystery that is life in these times.

Photo by the NASA James Webb Space Telescope

rite of transition

by Josefine 'Voyager' Parker

While this rite is designed for use across faith traditions and secular contexts, it is based in traditions of expansive Christian liturgy tradition, like that of the Enfleshed Liturgy Library. Please adapt this text to your own community’s needs.

TRANSECOLOGIES

WSKJ: Where Sorrow Kills Joy 022

by Hazel Hoffman

Clover Lynn is a trans banjo player known as Hillbilly Gothic on both Instagram and TikTok. She plays in the Laurel Hells Ramblers, a bluegrass band hailing from the southern Blue Ridge Mountains. We met through social media earlier this year; our interview was conducted in June 2023 via Zoom.

Photos by Madison Tunnicliff

hazel: Clover, you are a widely known banjo player on Tiktok, with nearly 300,000 followers. Many of your most popular videos feature comical banjo playing interrupting the noise of right-wing speakers. How did that surge in popularity happen and what was that like?

clover: I was never trying to be a TikTok influencer. I was only trying to make funny videos. My initial goal was actually to raise money for laser hair removal for my beard. I heard TikTok was good for crowdfunding, so I made videos to go along with that, or videos that I thought were fun. I ended up raising $5,000, and then it kept getting bigger and bigger.

h: So you didn't start off posting banjo videos?

c: Yes and no. Actually, the first semi-viral video I made got 270,000 views. There was a trend at the time meant to show the “boys my parents expected me to date” versus the boys I actually dated. I thought it was incredibly funny, and decided to turn the trend on its head by showing the boy my family expected me to be growing up in the mountains versus who I actually became, a trans woman with my banjo.

I wasn't really playing at the time, but people started asking if I played, because of my profile picture. I immediately regretted choosing that picture, because where I grew up there are so many talented musicians. In my mind, plucking out a few chords on a banjo did not translate to “playing music.” The folks from my home play music; I just have an instrument.

h: Where did you grow up? Are there specific figures you remember who influenced you from the area?

c: I'm from a small place between Boones Mill and Callaway, Virginia, right off the Blue Ridge Mountains. We’re right there, nestled in the hills. Part of my family is from Franklin County and part of my family is from Floyd County.

If y'all know anything about Floyd County, then you have heard of places like the Floyd County Country Store or the Crooked Road, which is a traditional music heritage trail starting in Franklin County then looping all the way down to the bottom half of Southwest Virginia, eventually hooking back upwards into Dickenson County on the West Virginia and Kentucky border. So much music has come out of that trail—people like the Stanley brothers, and the Carter family. You've also got countless fiddlers like Peg Hatcher, whose grandson now fiddles for the Twin Creek String Band, once known as the Dry Hill Draggers. You've also got the Lonesome River Band from Patrick County, which is just south of us, and The Lost and Found, which was an influential bluegrass band in the 80s and 90s. These folks are from Franklin County; even my great uncle used to run around with one of them—if I remember correctly it was the banjo player Gene Parker, but my great uncle passed away 10 or 15 years ago now.

h: Did your family play music too?

c: As far as publicly, no. I have a working theory that Papa played privately, but he refuses to talk about it. I can't pinpoint it, but he has a strong vested interest in my banjo playing. Maybe it is because the banjo is an important element of our culture that he was raised with, but there is also one specific thing he does that I have only ever seen banjo players do: he'll bounce his thumb to the beat when he listens to me play. That's a very drivey thing. If you are doing that, you have probably played something. That generation, I think, had a very similar thought process to mine, though. Just because someone could pick a bit didn’t mean they were a musician. To people who are not from the region, though, if you can pick even a little bit, well, that's part of you.

h: Do you feel like you were forced to consider yourself a musician as a result of your visibility to the public as a musician?

c: I only started considering myself a musician over the last year, though I've been playing for three and a half years now. Over the last year or so I arrived at a place where I can comfortably say, “I'm a musician. I can play music.” I can keep up with other musicians, and I feel competent that way.

h: What drew you to the banjo over other instruments?

c: I had moved away from home, and was feeling very homesick after spending time with my family during Thanksgiving. I got to see a bunch of live music while I was at home for the holiday. When I got back to my new residence, I missed home, and I missed the region. So I decided to pick up an instrument. I didn't know what to pick up until I remembered that all the songs from Crooked Road were played on banjo.

h: So the choice to play banjo was connected to your southern identity?

c: Absolutely. With the banjo, there are so many different styles. It is easier to show than to talk about, so I'll play some tunes to demonstrate. I'm gonna need to retune a little bit because I'm in a traditional tuning right now, do you play banjo by chance?

[Clover asked this as she took out her banjo to demonstrate the regional characteristics of the banjo playing from her home.]

Not only is my identity connected to the banjo itself, but my style also comes from the way I was raised. Many modern, progressive players have a very specific style which is not my style at all. It is a newer way of playing. Bill Keith started that whole trend, but it's taken hold in more progressive bluegrass, like Béla Fleck and Tony Trischka.

I started learning progressive bluegrass at some point. When I went to show my Granny and Papa a progressive song, Béla Fleck's “Vertigo,” they responded by politely saying, “That’s nice.” Then my Papa followed up with, “Do you know Clinch Mountain Backstep?”

The moment he asked that question, it occurred to me that the reason I play this music is because I listened to the Stanley Brothers with Granny and I listened to Flatt and Scruggs with Papa. We'd go to the county fair or a fiddler's convention, and that was the music I heard growing up. When I started developing my own style, I stopped focusing on which cool licks I could play and started focusing on what would make my grandparents happy. For me, being from a region and a culture is not just about being a self, it is also about being part of a community. So I can't really separate myself from my community when I'm playing music, and the music that comes out most naturally is traditional to my community. If my Granny and Papa don't want to dance to it, or I don't see Papa bouncing his thumb, why bother?

h: Sounds like playing banjo is a way of connecting to your community and your family. Has your family been supportive of your transition?

c: It depends. My direct family, like Mom and Dad, have been very supportive, especially in recent years. It took a bit, but it has been an absolute blessing to see their journey to acceptance. When I first came out, my dad kicked me out. He wasn't happy, and he didn't like it. It has been such a blessing to see him grow and to see us grow together.

We used to butt heads when I was growing up, fighting all the time. Growing closer to him is something I didn't think I would get to experience. When I was first kicked out, I thought that was it. Then when I got away from the region, I realized how important family was. I never cut them off completely while I was away, but I didn't talk to my dad for almost a year and a half. Now I'm living at home before we go on tour, and I see him every day. We talk and he's really supportive.

He also learned to ask certain questions in better ways. For instance, he's a public school teacher. The other day he received his class list and said, “Oh, I've got one of them ‘they’ kids.” I responded, ”Oh, you mean a nonbinary kid?” And he said, “Yeah, a ‘they’ kid.” So, he doesn't always have the right language, but there’s never ill intent. There's no hate behind it.

My granny and Papa are the best examples of acceptance, though. When I go over to spend time with them at their home, they still call me “he” and they still call me by my dead name. I'm okay enough with that, especially from them, because they give me a special type of acceptance.

For instance, when I go hang out with Granny and Papa, we work on the truck, work in the garden, or break beans and shuck corn—activities that I don't need to dress up for. I don't wear much makeup over there. On one occasion, though, I was on my way to a gig and needed to stop by and see them beforehand. I was wearing a bodycon dress and a pair of fishnets. My papa looked at me and said “Now, [Deadname], I don't care that you dress like a girl, but in my house please don’t dress like a hussy.” Someone else might hear that as aggression, but, to me, that was the most loving thing I’d ever heard him say.

h: When you came out to your family and your dad kicked you out, is that when you left home? Did you feel like you needed to leave the region to find yourself?

c: I was away from home for about four years. It wasn't that I was trying to find myself, per se. I'll be honest: growing up, I hated being from here. I used to hide my accent as much as possible. I even used to shun the music. When I was eighteen, one of my proudest moments happened while I worked at a coffee shop in Roanoke. A guy asked, “Where are you from? You don't sound like you are from here.” At the time, I was so happy that someone didn't think I was from the area. Now, I would hate that.

h: Your chosen name is Clover, a beautiful name that carries a botanical reference. How did you choose that name?

c: I chose about fifteen different names over the course of two years or so. Eventually, I narrowed it down to either Clover or Chamomile, and I finally chose Clover. It was the name my friends gravitated towards, and everyone liked it. As much as I'd like to say that I thought of it while laying in a field of clover, that isn’t the case. Now, I was listening to “Dixieland Delight” by Alabama at the time, and there's a line that says “White-tail buck deer munching on clover…” and I thought to myself, “Clover. That would be a pretty name.” It was also right around the time Chris Stapleton had released “Starting Over,” where he sings a line that says, “I can be your lucky penny, and you can be my four leaf clover.” So as much as I would love for it to be connected to botanicals, it was just music. For me, everything is connected back to music.

h: And the name of your band also contains a botanical reference, right?

c: That one is very intentional. My fiddler came up with the name originally because she likes laurel hells. Do you know what a laurel hell is? It’s more of an East Tennessee word, from the greater Smokies area. People would get lost in these thickets of mountain laurel, and they would go mad or die. She thought we could use the name Laurel Hells Ramblers because we're wandering and trying to figure out some things our own way.

As I was putting together our first packet of promotional material, I found out that Mitski had actually released an album called Laurel Hell. People also asked her why she used the name Laurel Hell, and she said that she thinks there is something interesting about being lost in something that is so beautiful but can also kill you. No matter how beautiful it is, staying there may ultimately lead to your death. Sometimes, trying to escape will also lead to your death. I related strongly to that. The fact that we are a band with two Appalachian trans femme people at the core, there is something resonant about the analogy of a laurel hell. There is something resonant about being queer in the rural South and being caught up in your love for a place, even though it can be dangerous at times.

As an aside, I want to be clear that I'm not saying that I think our region is more transphobic than others. On a personal level, I think I've actually experienced more acceptance from people in Franklin County, Virginia than I have anywhere else in the world—including cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. The level of acceptance I've experienced from cis people in Franklin County is different from what I have experienced with cis people outside the region. I don't exactly know how to word it, but it's much like my granny or my papa.

I wouldn’t want to be trans and from New York City. I love that I'm from Southwest Virginia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains. Even when they don't get it, I think people here are more accepting and willing to stick up for you. People in metropolitan places will say they support you, but they're not always willing to stick up for you. They're not willing to actually sacrifice anything themselves. Here, if someone says they are on your side, even if they notice something is different about you, they are always there.

There is something interesting about being lost in something that is so beautiful but can also kill you. No matter how beautiful it is, staying there may ultimately lead to your death. Sometimes, trying to escape will also lead to your death. I related strongly to that. The fact that we are a band with two Appalachian trans femme people at

Photo by Hazel Hoffman

the core, there is something resonant about the analogy of a laurel hell. There is something resonant about being queer in the rural South and being caught up in your love for a place, even though it can be dangerous at times.

h: I also think there is often an innocence to how people here approach the topic—as if seeing something for the first time. Instead of having a preconceived notion about what it means to be queer or trans, they just don't know. And so, in a way, they experience it more directly.

c: You are 100% onto something. People always ask me why I have more tolerance for people saying something kind of hurtful here than I do in other places. A lot of times when someone meets me, especially in Franklin County, there's a very good chance I'm the first out-of-the-closet trans person they've ever met. Some people don't even realize I am trans until later on, then they have some ignorant stuff to say. When I say “ignorant” I don't mean they are being intentionally mean or hurtful. I mean it more in the sense that they naively ask inappropriate questions. I’ll entertain them a bit, but I take the opportunity to gently suggest that they shouldn’t go around asking other trans people questions like that. I allow myself to be the person who they can have those conversations with. I would hate for their view of trans people to be influenced by the media, or even by another trans person who might be fed up and snap at them for saying the wrong thing. Right or wrong, in a situation like that the country person probably does not understand why the trans person just snapped. So if I can be the person who has those conversations as much as possible with rural southwest Virginians, then, you know, that seems like a positive way to educate these folks.

h: Do you think being trans in the South has given you a unique perspective into the world of banjo playing?

c: I think there's a lot of interconnection there. First and foremost, most people in bluegrass circles, to my knowledge, don't know that I'm trans. I'm very lucky to be cis passing. You know, I'm 5’5” and I weigh 110 pounds. I am very lucky that I have a body that people can easily categorize as “woman”. No one has ever clocked me for my height. No one has ever clocked me for my weight, or my structure, or anything. I have a fairly feminine face, my voice isn't easily read as either male or female. So I think my experience in bluegrass and old-time circles is quite different from someone who might not pass as easily. To take it a step further, most people see me not only as a woman, they see me as a white woman. I experience traditional misogyny from time to time, and that sucks, but I've never been told I don't belong at a jam or a show. I know that is not the case for other trans people and other minorities in bluegrass and old time.

h: Given the history of the banjo, it's interesting how much the world of banjo playing has been co-opted by white men. Could you tell us a little bit about what you know about the history of the banjo?

c: Something I hear mentioned frequently that I think needs to be slightly clarified is the idea that the banjo came over with slaves on the ships. I think that does a disservice to those who were enslaved because it implies that the people who ran the transatlantic slave trade allowed slaves to bring an instrument. This is not true. The instrument came over in the minds of the enslaved people. It was not by some small grace of the slave owners. Rather, Black folks recreated the banjo from within a place of suffering, as a way to connect to their home, their spirit. They created the banjo based on an African instrument which was called the akonting. It was a gourd instrument with a hide head. I think they were typically three or four-string instruments, but the thing that was unique was the high, shortened drone string. You still see that today with five-string banjos.

The banjo was seen as a plantation instrument for the longest time, and then it started to intermix with other musical forms. It was taken up by minstrels, then it made its way into the mountains. From there, it moved into these hollers and people would play both modern and traditional music, be it Scotch-Irish fiddle tunes, German fiddle tunes, or music that they made up on the spot.

There's no way to talk about the history of bluegrass, or even American music in general, without talking about minstrels. A lot of surprising tunes like “Angeline the Baker” came from minstrel shows. I don't know that I'm the person to say whether or not we should do anything about that, but I think it is an important reality to be aware of.

h: Are you familiar with artists like Rhiannon Giddens and Don Flemmons, or the Black Banjo Reclamation Project?

c: Yeah, absolutely! Speaking of Rhiannon and Dom, the first time I got to see old-time music on stage was The Carolina Chocolate Drops. That was in 2015 or 2016. It was the first time I saw someone play old-time music who was not local to my part of Virginia.

h: How do you envision the future of banjo music and its role in promoting inclusivity and diversity within the southern musical landscape? Country and hillbilly music are often the last places people think to look when discussing queer inclusion, but we've seen something of a queer renaissance in country music. I am thinking of the emergence of powerful queer artists in our region, like Orville Peck or Adeem the Artist.

c: I love Adeem! There are so many others right now, too, like Sam Gleaves and Tyler Hughes. Locally, there's a band called Palmyra. They are from various parts of Virginia, but their front person, Sasha, is from Texas Holler—a place on the western end of Roanoke County. I could talk for days about the state of queer representation in country music. Willie Carlisle also comes to mind. There are also many people in the scene who I know are queer but have not come out publicly.

Don’t get me wrong: country music has always been queer. But there is a scene emerging in alt-country that is queer to the core, and a lot of that music is from right here in Appalachia. People like Adeem the Artist (Knoxville, TN), Palmyra (Virginia), Newport Transplant (Athens, GA), Tyler Hughes (Southwest Virginia), and Sam Gleaves (Southwest Virginia). Willie Carlisle is not from Appalachia, but he is from the Ozarks. There is a lesbian couple who plays folk music under a couple of different band names in Southwestern Virginia. They are from Patrick County. There are almost too many to talk about.

Of course, queer musicians play an important role in building diversity. I think a lot of queer musicians grew up rejecting our culture like I did. When they come back into it, they are often out and proud of who they are. I think it reflects the need to show off who we are in our fullness because for so long we have rejected one part of our identity for the other. It is an integration of those parts.

h: Can you tell us about your Instagram and Tiktok handle, @hillbillygothicc? It also seems like a fusion of two different cultural identities.

c: One of the first radio stations to play Bill Monroe and other early bluegrass music was a station out of Indiana called WJKS, Where Joy Kills Sorrow. I always thought it would be cool to have a goth bluegrass album titled WSKJ: Where Sorrow Kills Joy. When I brought this up to a friend, they asked if I knew anything about minor keys, and suggested I transpose some songs. At the time, I had no idea how to go about doing that. He gave me some tips, and the first song I transposed to a minor key was Cripple Creek.

I had grown up listening to the Stanley brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, The Lonesome River Band, and other acts like these. As I got older, I rejected a lot of that. I started moving toward bands like My Chemical Romance, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and Cradle of Filth. Later I would listen to more punk, like The Dead Kennedys, and The Velvet Underground.

Eventually, I found folk punk. There has been a kind of Nickelbackification of folk punk. There are plenty of really bad folk punk bands, and I am implicated in many of the jokes directed toward that genre. I still love bands like Apes of State or Days and Daze—it’s fun. But, more than anything, folk punk gave me a way back into traditional mountain music. For instance, there was a folk-punk cover of Mountain Dew. When I first heard that cover, I recognized it immediately because I listened to the Stanley brothers growing up. So folk punk gave me the opportunity to go back and explore the music I grew up with. Combining alternative influences with traditional music is basically what my band does now. We take inspiration from everything.

h: There is a book by David Haskell that came out recently, entitled Sounds Wild and Broken, that explores the evolution of sound. As he tells it, the story begins with these microscopic critters that barely make any sound at all, because to do so would be to alert predators to their location. These critters only communicated through sight and touch. Once these ancient bugs started developing adaptations that allowed them to escape or protect themselves from predators, they also developed more sound-making apparatuses and eventually vocalization to communicate with each other. I find this to be a beautiful parallel to feeling safe enough to use our voices in the modern era—to feel safe enough to come out or to share our transition on the internet for instance.

c: That is a really interesting comparison to the queer experience and learning how to feel safe enough to share ourselves with society. I think you put that beautifully.

h: You became well known on Tiktok for using your banjo playing to silence the tired mansplaining of misogynists and incels. In the face of ongoing trans exclusion and the political challenges that we're surrounded by, how does your music and banjo playing serve as a form of expression within and against these oppressive forces?

c: I think there is a lot to be said about a band of queer women playing old-time music. We've changed certain lyrics here and there to explore that theme. For instance, the original lyrics to the song Greasy Coat say, “I don't drink, and I don’t smoke, and I don’t wear no greasy coat.” This song has some floating verses that bands change from time to time. So if a straight person is singing, they may change a line to something like, “I don't dip, and I don't chew, and I don't run with girls that do.” But we changed the lyric to “I don't dip, and I don't chew, but, boy, I love the girls that do.” I think that line is a celebration of rural queerness, because, even if you're in an urban area where they more readily accept you as trans or queer, they might not accept the fact that you chew tobacco or hunt.

I had a recent flirt who could not handle the fact that I hunt. This is nothing against them, but I believe we need to learn to celebrate both the ruralness and the queerness of rural queers. I think Laurel Hells Ramblers' music is a place where that celebration can happen.

I’ve been working on a special project for about a year and a half, and it's almost done. It is a song that I've always wanted to write—a murder ballad about my own transition. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I am also the first-person narrator, singing the song as the perpetrator of the murder. The central line goes, “Oh, tell me, sister, what have I done? I've gone and I’ve killed daddy’s firstborn son.” That'll be released sometime... hopefully… eventually.

A challenge I am working to address now is the reality that Tiktok is a finicky platform where some things just don’t do well. It can be really discouraging as a creator. So whenever I feel done with the platform, I don’t want people to think I'm done with them. I would love for people to support me on Instagram, and I’ll also continue posting on Tiktok. But sometimes, with the algorithm, I feel like it doesn’t work unless I'm playing the same song and dance, quite literally in this case. Like most artists, I'm fairly multifaceted.

There is also another side of it, too, where I don't want to sell out my Appalachian identity or my roots in the rural South as a way to get a couple of extra followers on TikTok. I love telling my stories, and I don’t mind—but I don't want to become a caricature of the region.

One of my biggest pet peeves—and this is no fault of any individual—is to go on Spotify and search for Appalachia. Many of the top results are things like “the haunted woods of Appalachia” or “Don't whistle at night.” Those are fun stories that get passed down, but there is so much other history and culture that we can fall on. Why do we reduce Appalachia to

tell me, sister, what have I done? I've gone and I've killed daddy's firstborn son."

This all brings me back to a common question: What is Appalachia? I believe, at the end of the day, there are many Appalachias. The idea that we can only be portrayed as kitsch or scary stories is strange. Historically, we have heard, “Oh, there are terrible people up in the mountains who will kill you or eat you.” Others go the opposite direction, idealizing our ancestors as people with some profound, unreachable wisdom. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of old knowledge to be had here. I just feel like no matter what we do, people from outside of the region reduce us to a stereotype.

You have to remember, though: we're just people. The gentrification that is happening in the region, and has been for a long time now, is concerning. We've had gentrification in my county since the 1960s when the lake flooded—and I'm sure y'all in Tennessee know all about that. Appalachian Power flooded a system of hollers up in the northeastern part of Franklin County. My papa and his family lived up there for a while, sharecropping in a place called No Head Hollow. That place is now flooded, and the house where he grew up sharecropping is now a multimillion-dollar lakefront property. They never got to see any of that wealth. They never owned that property, because they were sharecroppers. They were tenant farmers. So, gentrification is not a new thing in Appalachia. It looks different from generation to generation, but I think we're gonna see an uptick as a result of climate-related migration.

I'm not a climate scientist, and I'm not going to pretend to know everything about it. I know that there are going to be migrants coming to America because of climate change. I also suspect that there will be a group of hyper-wealthy individuals who come to the region, especially Southern Appalachia. They're going to try to settle in those places because they're supposedly “climate-proof.” I don't know if I believe that, or if someone's just trying to make a buck off of land.

"Oh,

Cattywampus Puppet Council

PROJECT NAME

Various titles

CONDUCTED BY

Cattywampus Puppet Council

PROJECT TYPE

Parades, street parties, and performance art with giant puppets

HOMEBASE

DATE STARTED

Knoxville, TN 2014

MATERIALS

Trash and other found objects, paper-mâché, scrap foam, magic

SERVICES PROVIDED

Programs in giant puppet making, community-based theater, and storytelling

photography by evan poellinger

by Andreas Bastias and Rachel Milford

WAMPUS CATTY—

Parading up to its 10th year of existence, cattywampus Puppet Council is a living, breathing, dancing, shouting, honking, banging, transformative, magical party. Currently, the giant puppets rest in the 1400 Building on 6th Avenue in Knoxville, Tennessee, after a whirlwind yearand-a-half-long partnership with the Big Ears Music Festival and a spring collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma and his project entitled Our Common Nature: An Appalachian Celebration.

The essence of the Cattywampus Puppet Council is humanity. It is an expression of the deepest yearnings we all feel for connection and meaning in times of suffering, illness, loneliness, and despair. Our ancestors understood that living could be hard and often cruel. Nevertheless, in every wisdom tradition, we find the pursuit of joy. We find celebration, pleasure, and play as tools for resilience and survival. Cattywampus is a project rooted in this knowledge and the life-giving practices of creating, playing, and dreaming together.

When she first began imagining Cattywampus, Rachel Milford, the Council’s Executive, and Artistic Director, was profoundly ill and intuitively turned toward her background in giant puppetry and community-based art as a source of healing. She was suffering from environmental illness brought on by black mold poisoning and a family history rooted in the radioactive catastrophe that is Oak Ridge, TN. Rachel’s work as an herbalist, an artist, a performer, an organizer, and a storyteller, both then and today continues to be deeply and foundationally informed by her experience of chronic illness and the well of resilience we can tap into through joy and play.

On a warm fall evening amidst the patinated brick of Knoxville’s Old City, our first puppets, Grandma and Grandpa, casually made their debut—unannounced and arm-in-arm. As Grandma and Grandpa strolled among clusters of First Friday aesthetes, some people took a pause and giggled, while others took the opportunity to dance with the larger-than-life characters. Captivated onlookers found a surreal joy and life-giving excitement in these tender and absurd characters. They were funny. They were relatable. They were feeble yet vital, silly, and unexpected. Grandma and Grandpa became regulars in Knoxville’s downtown. As more attention was drawn to their spectacle, more friends and community members were recruited into The Council to make and play alongside us—leading to the emergence of characters like Possum, Raven, and a sixteen-foot-tall Big Dolly Parton. Thus, the Cattywampus Puppet Council was born.

Cattywampus continued to grow, with the search for ever larger containers for ever more diverse and intergenerational community participation leading to the first giant puppet parade in the spring of 2017. The parade marked a shift towards the transformative; centering justice, relationship building, raising joy and power together, and using art and play as vehicles for envisioning the worlds we want to create. Going on seven years, the parade and street party have entered the realm of tradition.

Core to these celebrations is the following community-based art programs that take place in the months leading up:

8 week-long youth arts residencies with community partners such as Centro Hispano, Canvas Can Do Miracles, the Boys and Girls Club; A paid Youth Intern Squad (which trains high schoolers to be teaching artists and cultural organizers); The Knoxville Honkers and Bangers, a new, raucous, hot pink, and inclusive community brass band project; Open Studio Days, Giant Puppet Making Workshops, and more!

Collaboration and deep partnerships continue to be the core values of Cattywampus and our work. A wildly successful example of this is the 2018 collaboration between Cattywampus and The Good Guy Collective, a Knoxville-based hip-hop community, to create the play What the Water Tells Me—a coming-of-age, environmental justicecentered theatrical puppet, dance, hip-hopera. Nearly 50 community artists had their hands in bringing this innovative play to life, resulting in many lasting relationships and partnerships. Five years later, we find ourselves working with One World Circus to create our newest community-based theater piece: Solastalgia, an outdoor circus of ritual and pageantry exploring grief, hope, and world-building in the context of societal unraveling and climate chaos.

In both of these productions, we’ve discovered again and again the power of puppetry as a form of magical realism. As a way to create containers for exploring pain, trauma, and injustice together and find pathways towards healing. As a method for opening up space to share our own stories of harm and imagine different, more life-giving worlds that we might create together.

PUPPET

COUNCIL

THE BIRTH OF A PUPPET

from a technical perspective, there is nothing new here. Large-scale papier-mache traditions can be found all over the world. In our studio, the process begins by mixing water and cornstarch to adhere strips of brown paper grocery bags on a clay, cardboard, or crumpled paper armature. After a couple of layers have dried, depending on the desired scale and effect, these paper-mâché creations will get paint, “bones,” and bodies made out of what is inexpensive and readily available (not unlike ourselves). Helmet-style puppets get filled with scrap foams. Old bed sheets can be dyed and hung between bamboo poles to create a largerthan-life character. Sometimes, a scrap external frame backpack is used as the platform for the puppet, as seen with Cattywampus’s own Bear and Big Dolly.

In the studio, we see the artistry and creativity of making the puppet look spectacular, look fabulous. Then there is the puppeteering. The puppeteer lends soul, agency, agenda, and life to their puppet. The puppeteer, with their subjective experience and history, comes into a rapturous, synergistic, swilling dance (metaphorical and often literal) between the character, the audience, and the self. The elements coalesce, producing the life and essence of the character as it comes to know and experience itself. There is a porousness and selflessness in this dance. The lines between self and other—or, self and puppet—are blurred. Puppeteering, in this sense, can be understood as a form of drag.

NATUREDRAG

In their brilliant, illustrated proposal Bloodtide: a New Holiday for Horseshoe Crabs, Eli Nixon, a trans puppeteer “clown who doesn’t like makeup,” writes beautifully on the practice of naturedrag through puppetry. In their book, Nixon describes feeling at once both drawn to the transcendent performance and joyful community of the drag world, while simultaneously feeling uncertain and frustrated by the “queer-but-binary” imposed in traditional drag. Distinct from the often hyper-binary expressions found in traditional drag culture, Nixon found their place in drag performance as neither “drag king nor queen, but more-than-human, a royalty of sorts but accessible to anyone with a body: drag kin.” By expanding their understanding of the transformative process at the heart of drag performance, Nixon demonstrates the profound opportunity for interspecies kinship at the heart of puppeteering. Nixon names this practice: naturedrag.

Nixon draws heavily on Una Chaudhuri’s concept of “boundary work” when exploring their idea of naturedrag. Nixon describes boundary work as “the use of animality to configure human subjectivity in performance.” Nixon takes this to mean “our ability to see and know ourselves in new/old ways by activating the space between ourselves and more-than-human creatures.” Naturedrag betrays the binary of traditional drag culture for a more expansive exploration: “[taking] on [the] body-plan of another life form activates feelings of being both a more and less human part of the ‘natural world,’ awake to an impulsive porousness as a beast among fellow beasts.”

When Nixon crafts and then dons a giant cardboard horseshoe crab, they expand the rich tradition of drag culture into naturedrag. This practice is timely and relevant, expanding the liminality of the queer zeitgeist. Naturedrag invites us into a nonbinary, interspecies experiment that is less “between” and more “among.”

INTERSPECIES UNITY IN INDIGENOUS SOCIETIES

We also find ancestral resonance in the practice of naturedrag. Many Indigenous communities include ceremonies that call for participants to ritually inhabit the forms of our more-thanhuman kin. In Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth, we find wisdom in dialogues between Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D. In identifying the 28 precepts, they contextualize and converse at length on 28 writings, powerful excerpts of works representing a diverse cross-section of Indigenous leaders. In this visionary collection, we see the deep vein Nixon has tapped into, particularly among the precepts of Respect for Gender Role Fluidity, Nonanthropocentrism, Humor as Essential, and Ceremony as Life Sustaining.

In the chapter on Ceremony as Life Sustaining, we encounter the following wisdom from Linda Hogan, “We remember that all things are connected. Remembering this is the purpose of the ceremony. [...] We speak. We sing. We swallow

water and breathe smoke. By the end of the ceremony, it is as if skin contains land and birds. The places within us have become filled. Inside the enclosure of the lodge, the animals and ancestors move into the human body, into skin and blood. The land merges with us. The stones come to dwell inside the person. [...] We who easily grow apart from the world are returned to the great store of life all around us, and there is the deepest sense of being at home here in this intimate kinship”.

Similarly, in the 1988 collection Thinking Like a Mountain, Pat Flemming and Joanna Macy recount their experience with a ritual they created for activists called the Council of All Beings. This ritual invites participants to make a mask and embody the voice and wisdom of a river, plant, mountain, or animal. To accomplish this, participants must reject anthropocentricity and enter into a place of empathy and co-occurrence with the more-than-human world. This practice fits within the larger body of Macy’s “The Work that Reconnects”, a transformative framework merging spiritual practice and systems thinking to equip us with the tools to creatively and constructively respond to the interconnected global crises we face.

PARADE AS RITUAL

The ritual space for Cattywampus Puppet Council is the parade. Parades are a powerful act of collective self-determination and self-expression, a taking up of space and of streets to communicate something about who we are and who we want to be. We draw inspiration from other community giant puppet parades that have come before us, such as the “May Day Parade” in Minneapolis, hosted annually by In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, as well as Philadelphia’s “Peoplehood Parade” organized by our dear friends and mentors Spiral Q, and many others.

Parade day is an exuberant and chaotic scene, lively and electric. Parade crews of 3 and sometimes as many as 100 children and adults gather with giant puppets and other creations to share with the community. Giant flora and fauna can be found dancing alongside mythical creatures (such as queer dragons and colossal alebrijes), social-justice-themed art (like giant power fists, factory smokestacks,

and portraits of beloved transcestors), stilt walkers, West African drums, and everything in between.

At the center of it all, or at the front, whichever is required, Rachel can often be found in her finest circus ringleader ensemble, complete with a flowery top hat lovingly crafted by Council member and milliner Mindy Cooper. Each parade has a theme sourced from the community (Past examples: I See You; Our Roots, Our Power; and Our Wildest Dreams), and in that theme, the intention of the ritual and the inspiration for the parade art are found.

On parade day, the spell is cast in the performance itself, with the music, shouting, and revelry. After so many hours with hands in goop, so many floors littered with glitter and craft paper scraps, the ritual objects of love and play and creativity form a critical mass of exuberant joy and imagination, breaking us free from the trance of the everyday and the mundane, allowing us to inhabit a space of unforetold possibilities.

Rachel first learned the art of giant puppets and parades 14 years ago while interning with Paperhand Puppet Intervention in North Carolina. Paperhand’s founders, Jan Burger and Donovan Zimmerman, follow in the lineage of their teacher Peter Schumann, of the legendary Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont. They, too, inhabit an ecosystem of countless far-flung puppeteers who converge at sites of profound harm and injustice to practice the transformative magic and spellcasting of demonstration puppetry. These grassroots practitioners believe, as do the Cattywampus Council members, that these humble means and materials are all you truly need to change the world. We are made of “trash,” playfully and intentionally making art out of “trash”, in community with one another to communicate a transformative message of radical love, solidarity, resilience, and joy.

This is the transformative and subversive magic in which Cattywampus invites us all to participate.

THIS MAGIC IS RECURSIVE. IT IS ITERATIVE. IT IS EMERGENT AS ADRIENNE MARIE BROWN DEFINES THAT TERM. IT IS DIALECTICAL AND DIALOGICAL. IT IS ART, AND IT IS CREATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING. IT IS A PRACTICE OF COLLECTIVE MEANING-MAKING. IT IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO BUILD COMMUNITY WHEN WE FEEL ISOLATED AND ALONE. IT IS GENTLE ENCOURAGEMENT TO CONNECT WHEN EVERY FIBER OF OUR BEING TELLS US TO DISSOCIATE. IT IS A WELL OF INSPIRATION WHEN THE CHALLENGES WE FACE ARE OVERWHELMING AND SEEM INSURMOUNTABLE. IT IS CARVING OUT SPACE TO BE WILD AND UNRULY, AUTHENTIC AND MESSY IN A WORLD OBSESSED WITH PRESENTING ITSELF AS LOGICAL, RATIONAL, AND PROFITABLE. IT IS QUEER AND TRANS IN A WORLD INCREASINGLY OBSESSED WITH AND CONSTRUCTED ON BINARIES. IT IS A LIFELINE FOR OUR DEEPLY SENSUAL AND SENSORY NATURES IN AN INCREASINGLY DIGITAL, IMPERSONAL WORLD. IT IS A REMINDER OF OUR CONNECTION TO THE EARTH AND OUR AGENCY IN CO-CREATING THIS WORLD THAT OTHERS WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE WE HAVE NO BUSINESS IN SHAPING AND BEING SHAPED BY. AS A POWERFUL AND RESOUNDING REBUTTAL, AS A TACTILE AND JOYFUL INVITATION INTO POSSIBILITY, WE ARE HERE. WE PLAN TO PARADE INTO AND THROUGH THESE UNRAVELING TIMES—WITH YOU, BESIDE YOU.

The End of Man

The

Limp Wrist and the Anthropological Machine

by Ben Titeras photos by Mad Bishop

Like A Cockroach

In 2012, Pastor Sean Harris from Fayetteville, North Carolina made headlines following a controversial sermon in which he advocated using violence to correct young boys who exhibit “girlish” behavior. Pastor Harris taught his congregation that effeminate boys must be “squashed like a cockroach.”1 The comparison Harris makes between a limp-wristed boy and a cockroach is fascinating as a rhetorical device. A complex and latent discourse about sexuality, misogyny, gender, and the human species are all tucked neatly into

this single analogy. Not only should the boy be squashed like a cockroach, but “the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist,” he says, mimicking the offending gesture, “you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok?” In the footage of the sermon,

the audience murmurs back with noncommittal laughter. The media descended upon an otherwise unremarkable Baptist pastor with such intense scrutiny that Harris was forced to apologize for preaching violence against children. What could possibly be so offensive about the “limp wrist” in question?

The limp wrist is a mysterious gesture with no definite origin. Some have suggested the limp wrist first became a point of contention in the Roman Republic, where public speakers were encouraged to

have wrists as firm and solid as their arguments. Others suggest the limp wrist may have emerged during the height of late 18th century Victorian fashion, in which women’s garments were so constricting that only their hands were free enough to gesticulate. While none of these speculations can be verified historically, we can say with certainty that the limp wrist is a stereotypical signifier of a gay man in contemporary society. The physiognomic posturing of the “gay wrist” is most recognizable when a gay man’s wrist falls limp, forming a 90-degree angle to the vertical forearm. The limp hand may also flick about involuntarily as the gay man explicates, laughs, or critiques. So, beyond its actual structure as a pose, it is, of course, the telltale sign of a big fag.

We can derive at least two strands of thought from historical accounts like these regarding the limp wrist phenomenon. The primary strand, or the Sean Harris model, suggests that the limp wrist stands for human degeneracy. In this line of thought, the limp wrist, in its flimsiness and infirmity, presents the lameness of humanity. The limp wrist is the type of gesture that threatens to drag humanity down into the undifferentiated abyss of “nature,” a nature in which the human form is contorted into grotesque angles, and from which people like Harris envision themselves as distinct, or separate. The second strand, or the dandy model, posits the limp wrist as a leftover gesture of the transcendent bourgeois class. As a denial of our all-too-human animal impulses, the dandy limp wrist emphasizes aesthetic values and social order over cruel reality. This hand is not one that grasps and manipulates its way through the morass, but is one that softly waves away any notion of struggle. Unaffiliated with the unstoppable horror of the abyss, the dandy lets his wrist dangle as he affirms his central place within the universe.

In his work Notes on Gesture, Giorgio Agamben explains how certain gestures are so loaded with social code and political meaning—that the very existence of these gestures imply an ascension above common nature, and thus beyond animality. This particular function of the limp wrist as a gesture reveals what Agamben refers to as the “anthropological machine.” The anthropological machine is the ever-present system in which the line between man (using Agamben’s term here) and “animal” is contested and constructed. As human society begins to recognize the arbitrariness of the boundary between human and animal, anthropological machines produce new distinctions, which work to affirm the existence of man—in all of his

problematic, convenient, medical, or genocidal causes—as a being that is distinct from animals. The anthropological machine functions as “an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him [man] suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human—and, thus, being less and more than himself.”2

In Agamben’s words, exhibiting a limp wrist reveals the contours of the “anthropological machine.” Indeed, our “homo” in question is devoid of an essence; he is neither natural nor transcendent. On one hand, he is an absolute degenerate, disrupting the functioning of human society. On the other hand, he is a myopic lover of culture. The gesture of the limp wrist has opened two distinct anthropological deductions: one suggesting that Homo is inhuman, and one suggesting that Homo is superhuman. In both cases, the limp wrist signifies something undesirable, but from what vantage point and to what end?

The Inhuman Agamben traces the origin of this tension between Homo and animal through Darwin’s seminal text The Origin of Species. Recognition of the common ancestry of humans with apes caused a major crisis in our understanding of Homo, and we have developed methods to mask the fragility of our supposedly exceptional humanity.

The anthropological machine, Agamben writes, “is an optical machine constructed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the features of the ape.”3 Like a form of trans-species dysphoria, we can imagine the anthropological machine as the means through which we resolve the unheimlich anxiety of witnessing our own human form bend into something grossly inhuman, yet fundamentally the same. By catching a glimpse of ourselves as inhuman, a convenient reaction is to reaffirm our humanity. Ultimately, the difference between us and what we see in the mirror remains slim.

We must return once again to the remarkable and influential pastor, Sean Harris, urging his community to break the wrists of young girly boys. The anthropological machine is a convenient tool to avoid psychoanalyzing Pastor Harris, the method queers often use to tackle homophobic politicians who seem to know all too well the kind of things homosexuals do. We will not characterize Pastor Harris as a closeted homosexual, although he is.

Instead, with Agamben, we can accuse him of blatant anthropocentrism (which is certainly worse!). Harris peered into the anthropological funhouse and saw something not so different from himself in the contorted mirrors, a cockroach. In Clarice Lispecter’s vivid text The Passion According to GH, the titular character GH is confronted by the broken body of a cockroach after crushing it. This single event triggers GH’s descent into another dimension, wherein she undergoes a long crisis of depersonalization. She is enamored by the body of the dead cockroach, hypnotized by the life she has just taken. She slowly begins to forget her own name, and the names of others who are in her life. Language slips from her, as she begins to speak nonsense. The limits of her humanity break at the seams, and she is forced into a realm of absolute neutrality, where the distinction between Homo and animal vanishes. She is no longer quite human. She asks herself, “Before I entered the room, what was I?... I was what others had always seen me be, and that was the way I knew myself.”4 In a moment of radical disavowal at the height of her mystical mania, GH rejects the reality of binary oppositional positions, consuming the oozing flesh of the cockroach she just smashed. She “adores” the unity of the cockroach’s flesh to her tongue, as it sheds her humanity, becoming-cockroach.

We can see the outline of Agamben’s anthropological machine—which is always lubed, intact, and running—in Lispecter’s text. GH’s fear and indifference to the life of the cockroach led her to kill it, thereby asserting her superhuman domination over the inhuman. After squashing the cockroach, the mystical trip begins, allowing GH to enter the representative space that Agamben calls the “empty center” of the anthropological machine.5

Anthropological machines function “only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers, within which… the articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being, must take place…”6 Here, within the “zone of indifference,” GH sees beyond the funhouse mirror of the anthropological machine. The crisis provoked by the death of the cockroach is indeed the crisis of the anthropological machine itself, as GH sees beyond the anthropological machine and peers into the unity of human and animal. GH has penetrated the “absent center,” the zone of neutrality, wherein Agamben says “the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their re-articulation are always dislocated and displaced anew.”7 Lispecter has dislocated GH into a realm of communication and unity with the cockroach, and in the end, a new type of human emerges in conjunction with the cockroach from the absent realm.

To see oneself in the worst of all creatures, the cockroach, necessitates a response. In the Sean Harris model, limp-wristing is becomingcockroach, to become an unwanted pest, and to infest the community at large. Like GH’s initial impulse to squash the cockroach, Harris advocates for the exclusionary principle of the Anthropological Machine, in which “isolating the nonhuman within the human….” affirms a human to compare it against.8 In communities where gender roles are rigid, an errant boy who mixes coded signals of gender is a risk and liability to the community. For the community to understand the boy as a risk, he must be animalized, turned into something other than what he is—the inhuman. He is produced by “the exclusion of an inside,” so to speak.9 A crisis is provoked when we enter the “absent center,” or the uncanny valley of recognizing our unity with the other.

A boy’s limp wrist signifies a threat to the very functioning of the propagation of the species. The hand, as it dangles from the erect forearm shows a certain vulnerability to the forces of the world. Whether corroborated or not by homosexual activity, the limp-wristed has no interest in reproductive capability. It has tasted the cockroach and “adored it,” in Lispecter’s terms.10 It has merged with the inhuman, turning its back to the generative principle of the human project. It allies with the sodomite, with incest, or with bestiality over its commitment to its own species. It is a degeneracy, the retardation of the species, and a plug to its own continuity. These are the unique properties of the Sean Harris model of the limp wrist.

The Superhuman

There is a kind of parasite different from the cockroach: the bourgeoisie. According to Agamben’s timeline, advances in imaging technologies in the late 19th century marked a considerable shift in the Western bourgeoisie’s understanding of gesture’s relevance to selfhood. Following Agamben’s thought, Deborah Levitt argues that “the Western bourgeoisie… are dispossessed of gestures that have historically worked both to constitute individuality per se and to allow individuals to relate to one another through a set of legible psycho-physiological postures…”11 Agamben similarly claims that “the mythical fixity of the image has been broken, and we should not really speak of images here, but of gestures.”12 We can argue from this basis that any articulation of the limp wrist today stems from a bourgeois gesturality. Contrary to the Sean Harris model of the limp wrist gesturing degenerately toward the collapse of Homo into the inhuman, this alternate interpretation of the limp wrist suggests that it gestures toward a class of human above and beyond the vulgarity of Homo. To understand this claim more completely, we must look at the limp wrist in its modern context.

In homophobic discourse, the limp-wristed homosexual curls his hand into the pose when he is appraising someone. We can imagine an individual with a limp wrist as he slightly adjusts flowing fabric on a mannequin, as he looks over a piece of stunning modern art, or when he critiques the interior decor of his wealthy girlfriend’s home. Ultimately, the limp wrist is detached from the feral barbarity of the world. The limp wrist offers instead a discriminating gesture that signifies femininity, and is associated with an understanding of class and taste. In this model, the limp-wristed person is the taste-maker, a trusted opinion on culture, someone who knows which colors match, and someone who practices ikebana.

The petit-bourgeois, in general, are detached from the visceral evolutionary relations that led to the development of what humans truly are as a species—Homo. The human hand has been classified as the most unique property of our species. Raymond Tallis classifies it as “chiro-genesis,” referring to the incredible range of grasps and manipulations human hands are capable of making.13 The ability to manipulate the world with our hands has allowed us to explore and shape our environment, climb trees, and build ladders, dams, and bridges. Human agency, according to Tallis, “is mediated through this bodily self-awareness.”14 The hand is incredibly influential to our species-being as a whole.

Therefore, to eschew the hand probably means another hand is doing the work for you. The limp wrist suggests a disgust with the world, our unaesthetic, unbeautiful, vulgar world. A world that, in the past, may have been dismissed with the flick of a wrist. To say “no” to the world is a bourgeois notion; especially in the marketplace, where we can be free to decide and discriminate among the other lesser goods. This is why the bourgeois class is historically associated with the limp wrist. The most intensive labor the limp-wristed must engage in is picking the ripest pear from the basket or the most precious silk from the bale. The recapitulation of this gesture in the 21st century, or its ability to remain, is perhaps a last attempt to grasp at a sense of uniqueness and individuality. The gesture, outside of the realm of class, enacts a way of standing above your surrounding situation, a way of critiquing it and saying no. The limp wrist could be perceived as an elevating gesture, one that boosts the standing and morale of the one who wears it.

However, we should not go too far into this critique, since certain codes must be employed for young gay men to communicate with other gay men discreetly. While we can surmise a bourgeois origin of this gesture, it is certainly a marker of gayness regardless of social class and standing. We must take issue with both the notion that homosexual men are not animals, and the notion that they are superhumans or close to God in some way. With a return to Agamben’s quote, the human is somehow suspended between the celestial and the terrestrial.15 Here, we can find the limpwristed on both ends of this spectrum. How did we learn to reconcile the

1 Senior Pastor Sean Harris, 2012. https:// nationalledger.com/2012/05/pastor-seanharris-rant-video-punch-gay-kids-cracktheir-limp-wrists/ (Surely by now the cockroaches have overrun the place and all but taken over.)

2 Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, translated by Kevin Attell, Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA. 2004. Pg. 29

3 Agamben, ibid. Pg. 26-27.

4 Clarice Lispecter, The Passion According to G.H., Rio de Janeiro: Editora do Autor. Pg. 27.

5 Agamben, ibid, pg 37-38.

6 Agamben, ibid, pg 38.

7 Agamben, ibid, pg 38.

8 Agamben, ibid, pg 37.

9 Agamben, ibid, pg 37.

homosexual’s historical status as a regulated, controlled class with the transcendent status of bourgeois life? The limp wrist unlocks and reveals how the homosexual has been rendered by the anthropological machine. Like the spectacle of the woman sawed in half, the homosexual is spit out at both ends by the anthropological machine. Or, on the contrary, when dipping one’s hand into the anthropological machine (like a blender or garbage disposal) out shall come the limp wrist.

10 Lispecter, ibid, pg 189.

11 Deborah Levitt. 2001, "Image as Gesture: The Saint in Chrome Dioxide", Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 23-39.

12 Giorgio Agamben. ''Notes on Gesture'' in Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron. (London and New York: VersoPress, 1993) 139.

13 Raymond Tallis, The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Being, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. 2003. Pg 226.

14 Tallis, ibid, pg 273.

15 ... an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him [man] suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human--and, thus, being less and more than himself. (Agamben, ibid, pg. 29)

Rite of Transition

They graft an apple tree to grow sweet fruit through techniques applied in the orchard. So too the body changes, a lush transition.

Through chemicals, herbs, surgeries, or adornment, we graft ourselves with what is available. So too the body changes, a potent transition.

This planet seizes relentlessly, the coral reefs, estuaries, and mountain peaks transmuting. So too the body changes, a pervasive transition.

We join changing fish, birds, slugs, and seahorses, as we have always been connected. So too the body changes, an ecological transition.

Photo by Adam Mescher

They have said, “We are an old people / We are a new people / We are the same people / Different than before.”

So too the body changes, a timeless transition.

Against all odds, we persist in this moment to receive such care before us.

So too the body changes, this nourishing transition.

by Josefine 'Voyager' Parker

Designed for group ritual surrounding gender affirmation surgery, exogenous hormone injections, ingestion of pharmaceutical hormone pills, application of hormone patches or gel, over a crockpot of herbal tea, or any communal gathering || group response in bold || can also be read in an individual context

I Used to Be a Boy Named Margaret

BY MARGARET KILLJOY ILLUSTRATIONS

BY RINE BLOOM

STEP ONE: A BOY NAMED MARGARET

I used to be a boy named Margaret, do you remember that? I had a beard and a dress and I wrote zines about how anarchist men can be better feminists and I wrote books under the name Margaret, because that name always felt right to me, the same as maxi skirts have always felt right to me.

I am in transition.

I am in transition in the way that I used to be a baby and one day I’ll be a corpse. Over the course of my life, I will change. I will gain and lose weight, but mostly gain. I will learn things, I will forget things. Society will view me differently. I will view myself differently. I am in transition.

The caterpillar is not less beautiful than the butterfly.

See, the world doesn’t end all at once. There isn’t a clear before and after. Revolutions don’t start, they don’t end. Everything is process.

I used to be a boy named Margaret and I was almost happy, but I was also afraid.

When I was a boy named Margaret I was more afraid of the fact that I was a woman than I was afraid of the collapse of the entire world’s economic system.

When I was a kid, before I was even a boy named Margaret, I hated drag movies, and the trans women I saw were pitied and no one wants to be pitied. Even when I grew up and changed my name and wore dresses and fought cops and lived in abandoned buildings and rode freight trains and did everything that was brave, I was afraid that I was a trans woman.

I was a boy named Margaret and I was almost happy, as happy as I’ve ever been. There’s no perfect. We gain things, we lose things.

STEP TWO: GENDERQUEER

Genderqueer worked for me and I sat on an abandoned train bridge in Oregon, the one where I caught Lymes, and I put on my makeup and a dress and a friend who knew me better than I knew myself took photos of me.

Isn’t it amazing, how many of our friends know us better than we know ourselves?

Genderqueer. It was the right word for me, surely.

I was already queer – a handsome man from the anarchist bookfair proved that to me years before. I was already queer, or I was always queer, or labels have no meaning, and none of this has any meaning. I liked queer because it’s the destruction of category, the refusal of identity. Who I fuck is between me and the people I fuck.

My friend took photos of me on that bridge.

Every few years, TERFs or Nazis (labels with less and less distinction as we drive this car further into the apocalypse) drag up those photos. This isn’t a woman, they’d say. He has a beard and a dress. It doesn’t sting because I don’t care. I look good in those photos, a handsome caterpillar, the same person that I became, just a little less fuzzy this time.

I don’t even like this metaphor, caterpillar/butterfly. Too binary. Maiden/Mother/Crone feels closer. I do like triangles more than dichotomies. Boy/Queer/Crone might work better for me, but what do I know?

I came out as genderqueer and I told the world and my family was confused but nothing changed. I went from awkwardly saying I don’t know, any pronoun is fine, during introductions at activist meetings, to confidently saying the exact same thing.

I came out as genderqueer and that made me almost happy.

One day, there was a handsome boy, he was good for me though we never fell in love. “I don’t mean this to come off badly,” he said, “but do you call yourself genderqueer the same way gay men call themselves bisexual before they work up the courage to come out?”

The answer was yes. Our friends know us better than we know ourselves.

See, in my head, my pronouns are I/me/mine. It’s those who perceive me who might find she or they more useful. Pronouns are for other people.

STEP THREE: THE GIRL

I’d made it so far in life without doing what I always knew I needed to do, what I was always afraid to do – admit to myself, let alone the world, that the world was ending and we weren’t going to stop climate change and all we could do was live our best lives.

Or become a girl. Whatever.

See, this woman I knew, her name was Feral, and she died. She finished her transition the same way every one of us does, from baby to corpse. She did it too soon, in a fire, and what if I went out that same way, and people remembered me wrong.

Sometimes we don’t want to be perceived, but when we do, it’s nice to be seen as who we are.

I came out.

I was almost happy.

That year, a far-right politician was elected president of the most powerful economic and military force in the world, and the world walked a little closer to the brink of oblivion.

Oblivion means forgetting.

When we die, we will be remembered, and then we will be forgotten.

All that changed is that I shaved my beard and went from any pronouns to she or they. All that changed was everything, because we are who we’re perceived to be, sometimes. All that changed is that the fascists came a little closer to admitting they were fascists.

The lifting of the veil. The queers are queer. The fascists are fascists. Margaret is a woman.

STEP FOUR: THE HERMIT

I built a black cabin in the forest, a triangle – the triangle is the strongest shape. I built a black cabin in the forest and it was a lovely bedroom. Then the world found a new way to end, a respiratory pandemic, and what had been a bedroom became my everything. I went weeks without talking to a person in real life, months without touching anyone.

With no one around, my pronouns reverted to I/me/mine and my gender dissolved.

I don’t think the eastern fence lizard I spent so much time talking to on my front porch thought much about my hormonal balance or how I presented. The Witch of Pine, who spoke to me in dreams, recognized me, and cared for me. I couldn’t tell you gender was part of that and I couldn’t tell you it wasn’t.

I made instruments and played them, I made languages and sang in them, I found wild greens and ate them, I saw people and I ran from them.

I told my father I was becoming a hermit. He told me that I was too online to be a hermit.

I started a podcast and it did well. I started another one and it did even better. My public life and my personal life split. My public life grew to thousands of people, my personal life shrank to owls and snakes.

Some changes we make are permanent. Even laser hair removal doesn’t last as long as memories of solitude.

This simulacra of me was everywhere and everyone knew her, while the rest of me tried not to get lost while standing still in a forest in the mountains.

There was beauty, though, and I was almost happy.

STEP FIVE: THE DEAD

I found a lot of things in those mountains. I found lizards and seers, I found gods, and I found where I’m from.

I found out, from the seer maybe, what happens when we die. I didn’t mention the seer earlier, because you wouldn’t believe me.

She’s real, not just in the metaphorical sense, but I was the only one who saw her, she was the only one who saw me.

She believed in God. She’s spoken to him. Who was I to say that was strange. She believed in God and she believed in heaven and that never made any sense to me.

When we die, time slows down and we live in the moment of our death for what will feel like an eternity, although it will end. The way that we have lived, and how we feel about how we have lived, is what will determine the joy or misery of that eternity.

Afterwards, our consciousness joins the void and our body rots into the earth, and that’s beautiful. No matter how much we hate ourselves, no matter what we’ve done or who we’ve been, our body will rot all the same.

I’ve been wrong about a lot of things over the course of my life. Most things. I’m probably wrong about this. My understanding is in transition too. It’s not the caterpillar and the butterfly, it’s the snake with its tail in its mouth.

This frame of reference gives me something useful, though. It sheds light on the process. Boy to girl, cradle to grave, and along the way, always, towards my best self. The Margaret who will die knowing she tried, always, to do what was right. Who often failed to succeed, but who ceased failing to try.

Our world will end, but the earth will not. The soil will wait, patiently, as we each finish our transition.

HOMECOMING: Craft, Queerness, and Hopefulness

Cate O’Connell-Richards, they/them

Artist + Educator, Broomsquire

Ihear the word field often. Being asked what I am contributing to the field. Fielding questions. Field of work. Field of vision. An asset to the field. Sculpture in the Expanded Field. Just staring at the word now, it looks wrong. Like information cloud, server farm, factory plant, collections of communications and technology given a name more pastoral and romantic.

I grew up surrounded by fields, large Kansas ones, eventually ending up in the more urbane fields of art and art jewelry with all their critiques, cliques, and contemplations. I have found that these fields, like many others, enjoy naming things and creating taxonomies. What is, and what is not.

clean me up Broomcorn, twine, wood, plastic, steel, nickel, brass, paint / 2022

Clean Me Up is the result of a conversation I had with my partner. I was despondent, and describing that I felt like I had failed at something, and the feelings of self-hatred that followed. My partner then posed the question to me: “Where does self-improvement end and self-flagellation begin?” This struck me—what do we sacrifice in the pursuit of perfection?

Photo: Cate O’ConnellRichards

For a long time, I struggled with being the right thing, up until and throughout my graduate school experience. I felt pushed, pulled, named. Wherever I was, I felt like I had to fight to belong, something I have been feeling since being a teenager, hearing the words freak or dyke yelled at me from open car windows.

I thought draconian purification through academic rigor was the only way to prove that I did belong somewhere. It seemed like the only path for a young person who only felt validated when they were being smart. What was right felt represented by a member of my graduate committee—notorious for how hard she was on students and the sense of dread she elicited. Smart, slick, contemporary, mean, and arrogant. A defined state.

Prior to graduate school, I was primed for the type of production mentality that art academia supports—make, photograph, line on the CV, apply, show, repeat. Do not stop. Publish or perish, exhibit or perish. I thought I had to make up for what I saw as a deficit of my circumstances and educational pedigree, so it was constant.

It was not sustainable. My body and mind eventually broke, compounded by unresolved traumas, unhealthy relationships, and dangerous coping mechanisms.

To academia’s credit, while it was the source of many anxieties, it was also in part an advocate. In academia I found that the space between what is, and what is not, can be probed. I thank the fields of queer studies and speculative fiction for this discovery— writers like Judith Butler, bell hooks, Jack Halberstam, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sarah Schulman, Octavia Butler, and more—and all the mentors I found in my education who were supportive, even if they did not totally understand what I was doing.

It was not until I found pleasure in eschewing the defined, not being one thing or another, that I found a bliss in both my queerness and work. I am hopeful of the potential of this continued in-betweenness for myself, for others, and for approaches to making and sustainability. It has felt like a homecoming, this new way of being and thinking, thirty-six years in the making. And it started with the broom.

broomcorn Wigginton, Eliot. Foxfire 3. Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York. 1975, 439.

THE BROOM

The mark of the utopian is the quotidian.

—Roland Barthes1

My first broom making class was led by broom maker Carole Morse at the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center in Mountain City, Georgia. My art practice has always taken a look at the intersection of objects of labor (usually agricultural and domestic) and objects of spirituality. I have done this to comment on romanticized history, and pay tribute to my childhood as a person raised by historians, librarians, and archivists. The broom was a perfect object to study. It is a ritual tool, a symbol of witchery, an omnipresent item of domestic labor, a weapon, and a false phallus. The workshop was so fruitful that I started regularly integrating Appalachian broom making techniques into my work.

It is hard to obscure the clocking of such a historic craft, even when obfuscated by calling it a 21st century piece of art. Try and make a broom that’s not a broom, I would tell myself. Though I tried not to make it one thing or the other, the first question from a viewer was almost always: which one is it, a broom, or art? To the viewer, the broom seemed to always be tied to its function, even

when flipped upside down and inside out. The object felt forever tied to its use.

Prior to working with brooms, I was no stranger to considering the art/craft binary so often set up. To be honest, I sometimes get tired of discussing it, not unlike gender. When we separate something from a perceived utility, it creates confusion, like a broom that will not sweep.

I am writing this in Berea, Kentucky, where I am visiting Berea College’s Historic Student Craft Program and their expansive Broomcraft Studio. Chris Robbins, Head of Broomcraft at Berea, told me that he had met old-school broom makers who considered brooms stitched with machine stitchers (rather than the more traditional by hand) to be cheating, or not authentic broommaking.2 As if this little bit of newer technology renders the process and object “not real.” Here, where history is leveraged to revoke validity, I think about queer people and our ability to construct our genders and presentations ourselves, without mainstream protection or precedent, in an act of selfrealization and preservation. To quote Jack Halberstam in his The Queer Art of Failure, “Orthodoxy is a luxury we cannot afford.”3

distaffectionate

Broomcorn, twine, wood, brass, sterling silver, raw and woven wool, salt / 2020

My interpretation of a medieval distaff (see: Dürer’s Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, 1502). Seen as a false phallus for the perverted who aligned themselves with the devil, distaffs were one of the many objects of domesticity associated with witchery.

Photo: Kyle Herrera

I continue to travel to American broom industry hotspots throughout the country— mostly southern Appalachia sites and Shaker Villages in New England. Both Appalachian and Shaker communities held the broom in special regard. They were also both concerned with a utopian potential in their own ways—though often separated from society geographically and spiritually. I have done research at spots like the Hadley Farm Museum, the Shaker Museum, Pleasant Hill Shaker Village, talking with historians, broom makers, and studying objects. All this fieldwork (so far) has resulted in a show at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, MA, showing my work alongside Shaker objects last year.4

What I have learned throughout these endeavors has been transformative. In my desire to know more about this object, the craft of making it, and its growth from cottage industry to international manufacturing system, I found something exemplary and fascinating. Broom history and broom making showed me that the quotidian can be exceptional, that there are many possible truths, and to look not just twice but again, and again. Things can go beyond only their perceived function, be remade. The broom is many things at once, and so am I.

Libman broom, broomcorn, twine / 2021

swept: this work i will do

Hancock Shaker Village, Chase Gallery, June 18th - November 27th, 2022

The exhibit’s subtitle is borrowed from a hymn written by a Shaker Sister that I encountered while researching. The specific line “this work I will do” felt, to me, a reminder that as an artist I am in service to both myself and others. To me, the research on broom making I was conducting needed sharing, and the resulting objects marked my continued self-actualization as a queer person through making—work that needs doing, alongside the questioning of romanticized practices and histories of craft.

Photo: Kyle Herrera

HISTORY

A key part of the definition of what is a traditional craft is historicism. It is the passing down of knowledge, a lineage of techniques from one maker to another that makes craft what it is. I have experienced this dissemination of craft knowledge to uphold a particularly limiting standard of beauty, inaccessibility. This pedagogical model shows off the “old ways” as somehow purer, leaning into the esoteric nature of a practice. I have also experienced traditional craft teachings in ways that recognize the humanist qualities of the media, in the interest of community, ecological stability, and social criticism. I am more interested in the latter.

—Cate O’Connell-Richards, Artist Statement, 2023

Like with any social history, there are singular stories about broom origins that make the rounds. For example, It is said that Benjamin Franklin introduced sorghum (broom corn) seeds to the United States.5 This is a folkloric anecdote, and almost every introductary passage on broom history I have read mentions some version of it. Though, interestingly, they vary in how they describe what actually happened. William Henry Young, in his book “Buy a Besom Broom: The Story of a Broom,” wrote “the history of the broom is limited and unreliable.”6

The potential truths are likely more complex. However, it’s difficult to provide necessary historical evidence when some histories are prioritized over others. For example, while

we have two letters providing first-person accounts from Franklin about bringing seeds to the US, authors of contemporary books on brooms raise the possibility that broomcorn was brought over to the US earlier by enslaved Africans (sorghum is a staple food in Africa), and that certain broom profiles and shapes were not a colonial invention.7

History and craft can be irresistible. I have had strangers approach me at exhibits featuring my work, excited to talk about their grandmother’s loom, or the objects that their family brought with them when they crossed over from another country. I’ve found this shared interest in the anachronistic, and the ensuing dialogue, useful in facilitating social instigation and understanding. Whatever background the viewer is coming from, there is that initial interest in objects from another time. I can start talking about the history of broom making, then end up on discussions of labor rights, cultural exploitation, NAFTA, and soil exhaustion. It is a passageway in, a way to connect and discuss.

History can be a weapon, both for good and ill.8 In the crafts, one can find a lot of “nostalgia porn” (as a mentor once put it). Think internet-manufactured dreams of halcyon living via a cottegecore aesthetic, piles of pristine rope and pitchforks nonsensically placed in the corner of a “rustic” cocktail lounge, or the strange urge to replicate exact methods of making from hundreds of years ago—easy enough when it is a choice, not a necessity. This surface appreciation for the anachronistic seems quaint when you look at the more vile ways history is held up politically, such as using limited memories of a “purer” or “greater” time to uphold white supremacy.

A key part of the definition of what is a traditional craft is historicism. It is the passing down of knowledge, a lineage of techniques from one maker to another that makes craft what it is. I have experienced this dissemination of craft knowledge to uphold a particularly limiting standard of beauty, inaccessibility.

This pedagogical model shows off the "old ways" as somehow purer, leaning into the esoteric nature of a practice. I have also experienced traditional craft teachings in ways that recognize the humanist qualities of the media, in the interest of community, ecological stability, and social criticism. I am more interested in the latter.

Because of all these treatments, I am often on the defensive with romanced history, particularly when reduced to such. Queerness specifically has looked at the rural with an eye for romance (I’m looking at you, Jack Smith).9 I am continually fascinated by the co-opting of the visual culture of countryside labor into cosmopolitan spaces, positioning the two in opposition to one another while reducing the rural to window dressing. I am thankful for the work of scholars like Scott Herring whose work is critical of the notions of queerness only flourishing in cities, upsetting preconceived ideas of the rural and the city in opposition.10

I am not pretending that romance for history is not present in my work; I actively use it, and this all started with me feeling it myself. However, I want us to investigate it.

MASTERY / ANTI-MASTERY

The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.

—James Baldwin, Here Be Dragons

Then there’s that word, the word that pricks each time I hear it. Mastery. Craft loves it. For me it is a burden. Like ideas of idyllic history, mastery is an anachronistic idea

held up as something to aspire toward. It manifests as a “right” way of doing things—though if you talk to five seasoned craftspeople working in the same medium, you would hear five different ways of accomplishing a technique.

What is mastery? In Europe, becoming a master was achieved through a titling system representing years of training in a particular trade: from apprentice, to journeyman, to master. This process often included copying a master’s work while training. One could be considered a master in a variety of ways, including paying some amount of money to a guild, or simply setting up an enterprise for themselves.11 Today, the word indicates technical prowess more than anything else.

Broom making once had its own system, from beginner (1-3 years) to journeyman (3-5), to broomsquire (5+).12 While there are well-established broommakers in the US, “master” is not thrown around a lot. Broommaking is an accessible craft, and features lots of ubiquitous forms. It has always felt populist to me, as opposed to my experiences in metals.

That word, mastery, feels like a side of a fixed binary. An ugly, all or nothing—you are either a master, or not. It is an absolute, leaving no room for the bliss of defining yourself for yourself. To be humble. To fail, and fail impressively. To fuckup the process and be continually undefined (or redefined) as you explore. After all, failure is queer, as Halberstam wrote.13 As I saw both myself and my students struggle towards perfection, dreaming of mastery, wanting to be defined by influences beyond their (and most peoples’) experience, my pedagogy shifted. I talk openly with my students about

the pressures we feel to make “perfect” work, as defined by privileged groups, while others’ works were ignored or plundered. Mastery is another binary I feel I cannot be bothered with.

I am most inspired by the work of Julieta Singh. In her work “Unthinking Mastery,’’ Singh calls for the practice of of Derrida, Butler and others, this methodology of thinking calls for a “displacing” of binaries, a resistance to enclosure in a singular discipline (Singh herself looks to works spanning the decolonal, queer, philosophical, art, and fiction), and is dehumanist away the violent foundations (both structural and ideological) of colonial and neocolonial mastery that continues to render some beings more human than others.” reading is to be vulnerable, embrace failure as a process, and eschew limited definitions by those who subjugate you. You can define yourself.

At my most vulnerable, I admit that my love for academia first came from a genuine love for learning, then a mastery-catalyzed urge to know, know, know. As if to know all about something is to master it, to dominate it. The western colonial approach to knowledge hoarding is slowly shifting as I critically evaluate why I feel the need to do so. I ask other academics, when we devour, when we want to know everything—why? To eschew desires of mastery, to define success for ourselves —in regards to health and wellness for ourselves and others—is the way. I now teach with these ideas of anti-mastery in mind.

approval

Wood, acrylic, broomcorn, twine / 2023

Photo: Kyle Herrera

This one is for the broom classicists. I once heard a traditional broom maker say that he doesn’t bother with brooms that have less than 5 rows of stitches. I can be recalcitrant when I hear maxims like that, so I stitched a broom so much that its function was then inhibited in response.

A HOPEFUL APPROACH

To make his dreams real he lives quietly through his reactionary emotions. He experiences desires to control his environment and he experiences jealousy when his pleasures are threatened and he experiences possessiveness of property. He accepts these emotions much as he accepts depression and the men’s brutality. They have to be acknowledged and gotten through.

—Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (Pinetree)

But what is there to do when we are set between hopelessness and apathy and pollyannaing?

In “Cruising Utopia’’, José Esteban Muñoz is more concerned with the continually approaching state of being; rather than, an unachievable utopic end. Through this, he is embracing a vision of hope and commonality, rather than singularity and negativity. Which reminds me of the messages of process-overresult, as with art making.15 Like Muñoz, I find the undertaking, the continuation, the process of learning, redefining, failure and forgiving together the most beneficial. The process becomes more impactful than any dreams of mastery and perfection. Which reminds me of what an artist-mentor once told me, that if he ever made something perfect, he’d quit making art. Because, what would be the point?

A clove hitch, for example, is one of the first steps I take when winding broomcorn onto

I think cynicism is rampant on the left.

—Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

a stick to make a broom. The more you pull, the tighter it gets. If you need to adjust, you must relax. It is the moment of relaxation, of contemplation in which good work can happen.

Instead of being named, being seen as only a tool with a particular historical utility, we can, as Legacy Russell states in her wonderful book Glitch Feminism, dis-identify and define ourselves. Queerness allows for this, and queerness gives me hope. Rejecting imposed binaries of all sorts, not thinking in absolutes, taking it each day with care and thought, relating to one another, the self, objects, and the earth. I know I’m not the first to realize this. I name this writing Homecoming, and it is a process always happening and never here, as shown in the progressive tense verb. Always in flux, with truth in each incarnation. And forever worth working toward.

1 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009). 22.

2 Christopher Robbins (broom maker) in discussion with the author, May 2023.

3 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 16.

4 Cate O’Connell-Richards, “Swept: This Work I Will Do”, www.caterichardsart.com.

5 Leonard W. Labaree, et al, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin Vol. 7 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), 134; 154-155.

6 Young, William Henry, Buy a Besom Broom: The Story of a Broom (Indiana: Treaty-Line Museum, 1976), Forward.

7 See: William Henry Young, Rhonda Cable, Karen Hobbs, Broom-Corn and Brooms and more.

8 “History is a Weapon'' is also the name of a special series of podcasts put on by The Antifada. Worth checking out. https://rss. com/podcasts/the-antifada/

9 Queer creatures find relation and frolic in an idyllic rural backdrop in Smith’s Normal Love, 1963, 120 minutes.

10 Scott Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

11 James Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press), 7.

12 I personally think anyone that makes brooms can call themselves a broomsquire, because how often can one get such a cool title.

13 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 3.

14 Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 4-5; 21-23.

15 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009).

16 Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism a Manifesto (London: Verso, 2020), 10.

pride broom Wood, latex paint, brass, broomcorn, twine, repurposed textiles, thread, batting / 60 x 22 x 3” / 2022

Photo: Kyle Herrera

Pride Broom was constructed from remnants of old clothing belonging to me, my friends and family, and members of my community. The broomstick is painted a rainbow of Shaker hues. The Shakers’ expressed their dedication to craft and beauty through their use of color—often choosing colors associated with spiritual light and transcendence. I was struck by how both groups (Queer and Shaker) shared use of color, with the rainbow as a symbol of dedication and utopian potential.

Species Feature L. Hartsock

COMMON NAME(S)

Eastern Skunk Cabbage, also: Swamp Cabbage, Bear Weed, Polecat Weed

SCIENTIFIC

FAMILY LIFESPAN

Symplocarpus foetidus Araceae (Arum family)

~20

years1

HABITAT

Least Concern. Recognized as endangered in Tennessee.

Destruction of wetland habitat through environmental degradation and lack of adequate clean water

Skunk Cabbage 03

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

Skunk cabbage flowers grow clustered along the length of the spadix, a rounded somewhat bulbous structure around 2-4 inches in length. The specialized form of the spathe curls around the spadix - creating a cavernous pocket with an elliptical opening. The spathe may be light yellow-green mottled with burgundy or purple, or wholly burgundyor somewhere in between. The entire form is around 4-6 inches tall and appears like a leaf bud or a pen nib with a rounded base and a curling tip. Due to its coloring and proximity to the ground, skunk cabbage blooms can be hard to spot.

Clusters of large, cordate leaves, 1-4 feet in length, emerge like fans from the base of the flowers. Their brilliant color and size make them noticeable even from great distances.

Photo by David Michael

The Preface

In May of 2023, the supreme court of the United States of America gutted the Clean Water Act—a decision which threatens the wellbeing of wetlands across the country. Over half of all wetlands in what we call the United States have lost what protections they once had. Wetlands sustain hundreds of species within their communities and have incredible powers such as the ability to trap and remove pollutants from water. They now face destruction at the hands of developers and the greed of those who wish to plunder and poison the land. This decision will impact the lives of all those who depend on water—especially the many species who only live in watery areas such as the lovely skunk cabbage.

Seeking further destruction and control, politicians have introduced a record number of laws across the United States aimed at the eradication of trans and gender nonconforming people. They seek to wrench trans and gender nonconforming people from public space, and cut away access to healthcare, jobs, housing, and social protections. Stirring up fear and disgust these politicians seek to define what is “natural” as a way to claim dominion over it. However, gender nonconformity and transitions across spectrums of sex are as old as the categories themselves. Plant, fungi, and animal communities contain many who transgress these boundaries. Like the 1.6 million trans people in the United States, they call this land home too.2

The people of Appalachia are no strangers to the deceit of politicians or power. These attacks are interconnected with the struggle for abortion access, the abolition of prisons and police, climate justice, indigenous sovereignty, and building the power of the working class. The fascists who seek authoritarian control of this land are afraid of what we can do with our bodies and wish to destroy our autonomy, our communities, and the earth. How foolish of them to believe our roots to be so shallow as to be easily rendered from our home. How foolish they should believe we do not burn when bitten. What are the laws of men compared to the magic of transformation—from mantle into mountains, from sex to sex?

We must fight back against the destruction of the earth, the caging of people and coercion into labor, the pollution of the waters which gives us life, and the denial of the range of human sexes, sexualities, and genders. We must do so for the sake of ourselves and our kin.

Let us learn from the Skunk Cabbage: When you find yourself deep into a winter without end, do what you must to bloom. Change your sex if you want to, honor your body’s perfection, your capacity for a full spectrum of gender. Feed those around you when resources are scarce. Build networks of mutual aid and reciprocity— how can your community come together to provide shelter, sustenance, lushness, and color for one another? How can you release the heat within you? How can we ensure the health and future of our homes and communities?

Symplocarpus foetidus

Where late winter bleeds into the early spring, in vernal creek beds and marshy areas filled with fallen leaves, the curled inflorescence of the Symplocarpus foetidus emerges. It is so early much of the surrounding woods are still wrapped in the slumber of winter. It is the part of the year when you find yourself yearning for color, for proof of life. There, amidst the lingering snow and ice, are little lanterns the size of your fist popping up out of the frosted mud—holding within them spring’s first flowers.

These dappled hoods are patterned the way light plays on the forest floor; they range in color from light green mottled with streaks of purplish-red to their own deep burgundy. The hoods, or spathes, are a specialized leaf which curl protectively around the inner flowers like a shell. Inside is the spadix: a bulbous knob with flowers squeezed together along its length. Up close the flowers are four sided, cuboidal, tessellating across the surface of the spadix. Tiny pistils and stamen protrude from their centers.

These flowers are the first of the spring ephemerals, blooming as early as February. Unstoppable by even snow and ice they generate their own warmth through cellular

respiration. Excess starch from their root systems becomes heat which can reach around thirty degrees above the frigid temperatures around them. This adaptation allows them to bloom in even the most hostile of early springs. The heat melts the snow in a radius around each spathe, creating dark haloes which dot the white snow.

These thermogenic blossoms aren’t named for their appearance but for their putrescence. Both the flowers and leaves have been said to give off a foul, skunklike scent, thus earning them the name “Skunk Cabbage.” Even their Linnaean name, Symplocarpus foetidus, was bestowed by scientists for their fetid perfume.

The warmth from their blossoms helps carry the odorous gasses across their wetland homes. Carrion flies, attracted by smells akin to rotting meat, venture into the shallow depths of the cave-like spathes. They become dusted with the pollen from the flowers which they then carry to the next spathe. This process of scenting oneself to attract decay-loving pollinators is known as sapromyophily. One of the most common of these visitors, Blue Bottle Fly, Calliphora vomitoria, is a key pollinator of both Skunk Cabbage and Pawpaws.

spathe A specialized leaf which curls protectively around the inner flowers like a shell

spadix A type of inflorescence, typically a spike, composed of small flowers squeezed together along its length

cuboidal Made of parts, or in this case, flowers, that are shaped somewhat like cubes

sapromyophily The process of scenting oneself to attract decay-loving pollinators

The Flowers

While some flowers contain only one sex, either the pistil or the stamens, skunk cabbage flowers contain both sexes required for their reproduction. This feature of multiple sexes in a single flower is known in botany as “perfection.” Skunk cabbage flowers perform yet another feat known as protogynous dichogamy. At first, a flower will only display its pistil. At this point they are considered “female” flowers. The pistil collects pollen from other skunk cabbage blossoms for the fertilization of the ovary, which will later become the fruit and seeds. After some time, the flower will also release its stamen for display. Pollen can then be carried off to other pistil bearing flowers. This sequence of the sexes allows the genetic information from different flowers and individuals to cross with one another, encouraging genetic variation of future plants.

Skunk Cabbage is not the only organism who transitions. Many plants, animals, and people change their sex whether it is an adaptation to certain conditions or simply a matter of life course. Just like our kin in the murk and mud we too contain a perfection in us. Humans have a variety of sexes—or expressions of chromosomal, hormonal, and phenotype variations. If someone chooses to take hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, they wake up an entire swath of genetic information inside of them and can effectively change their hormonal sex and phenotype. We also have ways of understanding our social and cultural expectations regarding sex and reproductive roles, or gender. As long as these expectations have existed so have the ways of playing with them, inverting them, and creating new ones.

Photos by Keara Giannotti

The Leaves

Following their perfect flowers, skunk cabbage leaves arise and unfurl in clusters. These brilliant green leaves color the late winter landscape and highlight creek beds. They fan out above the low growing spathes, reaching two or three feet in length. Their ovate shapes create shelter in the sparseness of early spring—an understory where birds can nest among the leaves and small mammals can travel under cover of luminous green.

The leaves also provide a vital food source, especially when other springtime fare is unavailable. Snapping turtles may nibble at the leaves as might black bears, Ursus americanus, waking from their winter sleep. In springs without enough acorns, skunk cabbage sustains black bears nursing their young cubs, making up ninety-nine percent of their diet.3

The leaves of skunk cabbage contain raphides, or calcium oxalate crystals, which make them burn the mouths of any humans attempting to eat them. Though many parts of the plant are toxic, they have also been used in medicinal preparations. In the nineteenth century skunk cabbage was used under the name “Dracontium” to treat a variety of illnesses including nervous disorders, dropsy, and rheumatism. Indigenous communities in the growing range of skunk cabbage hold a variety of relationships to the plant. Members of the Iroquois, Dakota, and other tribes have used the plant for different purposes—most commonly as a remedy for respiratory ailments.4

Photo by David Michael

Photo by David Michael

Contribute to pollination of other carrion flowers

food web + reproductive cycle Skunk Cabbage is one of the few temperate plant species with a carrion flower—exuding the smell of rotting meat to attract carrion flies as pollinators. Another regionally distinct plant employing the services of carrion flies is the Pawpaw tree. The spathe and pistil appear in the early spring, followed by the stamen. After flowering, the skunk cabbage leafs out, serving as a common early spring food source for bears when acorns are scarce.

Feeds on skunk cabbage leaves in early spring when acorns are scarce

Feeds upon paw paw fruit

Excess starch from their root systems becomes heat which can reach around thirty degrees above the frigid temperatures around them. This adaptation allows them to bloom in even the most hostile of early springs. The heat melts the snow in a radius around each spathe, creating dark haloes which dot the white snow.

eastern skunk cabbage distribution The Eastern Skunk Cabbage is a wetland species that grows in deciduous bottomlands, in marshes, by seeps, and along streams and creeks. If you're looking for it in higher elevations, mountain springs may indicate nearby populations. Their range is as diverse as Great Lakes watershed, northern Atlantic coastal plains, and diffusely spreads into the hanging bogs of Southern Appalachia.

Photo by David Michael

The Roots

The roots of the skunk cabbage grow in two specialized forms. The first are the fibrous roots which grow outwards in different directions seeking moisture to soak up and sustain the plant. The second is a larger singular root with curious wrinkles on it. With each season of growth this root pulls the skunk cabbage deeper into the ground, so they do not grow upwards so much as downwards and more securely into the ground. Many who have attempted to do so have claimed it is immensely difficult to dig the roots of a skunk cabbage plant from their swampy home.

The Origins

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the tectonic plates which make up the outer mantle of the earth were moving to create the lands we know today. Around 480 million years ago during the Paleozoic era, two continental plates collided, pushing the crust of the earth upwards with great force and forming the Appalachian mountains. 335 to 175 mya, what is now North America, Europe, and Asia made up a continental landmass known as Laurasia. During this time, these areas shared the species of plants which would later become the genetic ancestors of plants such as Dogwood, Chestnut, Skunk Cabbage, and Tulip Poplar. Around 60-30 mya these plates making up Laurasia began to shift again, breaking into Europe, North America, and East Asia. The space between them would become the North Atlantic Ocean.

During this time, the species of Symplocarpus foetidus and its close relative, S. renifolius (which grows in what is now China, Korea, Japan, and Eastern Russia) diverged. It is because of these radical land shifts that while there is a skunk cabbage which grows in the Western United States, Lysichiton americanus, our Eastern Skunk Cabbage is actually more closely related to the skunk cabbage of East Asia than it is the Western North America counterpart. By comparison, the last common ancestor between Western Skunk Cabbage, Lysichiton americanus, and our Eastern Skunk Cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, was roughly 55 million years ago—33 million years after the divergence of Asian and American Eastern Skunk Cabbages. S. foetidus isn’t the only one with close relatives either; Dogwood (Cornus florida and Cornus kousa), Tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipfera and Liriodendron chinense), and Chestnut (Castanea dentata and C. mollissima, C. crenata) are just some of the other pairs of species related from ancient convergence.5

Symplocarpus foetidus became a species twelve million years ago. It has since then grown through glaciation and global shifts, adapting and changing to become the species we know today. While they are a species of least concern in most regions, habitat destruction and loss of wetlands in Tennessee has threatened their status in the state. The scrapping of federal protections signals threats to S. foetidus across the United States. In a 2013 study, scientists in Ohio found that the presence of Skunk Cabbage, as well as cinnamon fern (Osmunda cinnamomea) and swamp rose (Rosa palustris), is a strong determinant for the health of a wetland. By counting the number of each species in a particular area they could, with reasonable probability, predict the well being of that area.6 This connection makes sense, given that S. foetidus is a wetland obligate species and water is vital to their life cycles. Even their fruits and seeds are lifted and carried by the rising waters of their homes to find new ground.

335 to 175 million years ago, what is now North America, Europe, and Asia made up a continental landmass known as Laurasia. During this time, these areas shared the species of plants which would later become the genetic ancestors of plants such as Dogwood, Chestnut, Skunk Cabbage, and Tulip Poplar.

1 Though the leaves and flowers of the skunk cabbage die back each year the roots live on. Anecdotal reports on lifespan say some individuals may live thousands of years. This source from the University of Richmond says nearly a century in age. https:// scholarship.richmond.edu/biology-facultypublications/145/

2 This number does not include those under the age of 13, or intersex people who do not identify as transgender but also face discrimination and harm from rigid sex and gender binaries. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/ publications/trans-adults-united-states/

3 McDonald Jr, John E., and Todd K. Fuller. "Effects of spring acorn availability on black bear diet, milk composition, and cub survival." Journal of Mammalogy 86.5 (2005): 1022-1028.

4 Moerman, Daniel E. Native American Ethnobotany. Timber Press: 1998.

5 P. Manos and J. E. Meireles."Biogeographic Analysis of the Woody Plants of the Southern Appalachians: Implications for the Origins of a Regional Flora," American Journal of Botany, May 2015. DOI: 10.3732/ ajb.1400530

6 Stapanian, Martin A., Jean V. Adams, and Brian Gara. "Presence of indicator plant species as a predictor of wetland vegetation integrity: a statistical approach." Plant Ecology 214 (2013): 291-302.

Photo by David Michael

photos by Mad Bishop

the Into Rift

by Flip Zang

In this piece, I attempt to tie together many ideas related to space, time and the (queer) body in order to get closer to a vision for a revolutionary trans ecological praxis that might carry us through to the other side of the ruins. Throughout the essay, I talk about the history of racial capitalism and its violent patriarchal origins. I also at times make explicit mentions of sex and other forms of queer ritual, keeping with the tradition of queer theory, which asks us to anchor in the material reality of sexuality and everyday practice. There are also sections that touch on violence and death, although I try to save vivid descriptions for more beautiful things. We live in a world of horrors, and I am writing in an effort to notice without “turning away.”1

Metabolic Fire

My friend and I arrived on the mountain just a few days before Beltane, the pagan holiday marking the peak of spring and the coming of summer. Each year the faeries and their friends (an aggregate of wayward homosexual, femme, queer, transgender and faggot misfits) congregate there, in the woods of so-called Tennessee, to revel in the power of the earth as it comes alive again after the long winter, celebrating fertility through a festival of fire, sex and music, casting spells and intentions for the next cycle of the seasons.

At the center of the Beltane ritual is the maypole, a specially selected tree stripped of its bark and placed into the mouth of a deep

hole. On the eve of Beltane, the old maypole is chopped down one ax blow at a time, the blade passed from hand to eager hand. The next day the new maypole is raised and woven into a sheath of colorful ribbon through a long process of song and circular dance.

At the faery Beltane festival, however, the hole is almost more important than the maypole itself, pointing towards what we might think of this as “a queer hole topology,” poking holes in orthodoxy.2 Before the new maypole is erected, the hole is cleared by the passionate few who wish to go spelunking in the cold and muddy past of last year’s offerings.

My friend and I swayed to the drumming and looked on as the naked diggers became more and more subsumed by the mud, disappearing into the hole completely at times and emerging with handfuls of indiscernible objects, presumably peoples’ talismans, ingredients for old spells and symbols of grief and growth from past ritual. One digger peeled a dress from the hole and promptly adorned themself with it. The dress, which had at one point been pink, was sopping wet and brown with earth, merging with their skin.

Over the course of the weekend, my friend became obsessed with witnessing something that they had heard would occur. At some point, they believed, there would be

cumming into the hole. Has it happened yet? Has anyone cum in the hole? Are you going to come in the hole, do you think? We kept wondering together and egging each other on, weighing the pros and cons of masturbating publicly—how it would feel to our genders, to our spirits. Our inquiries (thanks to the homophone) sounded as though we were asking each other if we were daring enough to climb inside the earthly opening. We were two young transgender fags amongst hundreds of strangers who were suddenly also our cohabitants and ceremonial partners. We were having this conversation, of course, while everyone around us publicly fucked and did not mind the littlest bit whether or not we came in the hole.

After the hole is cleared of last year’s offerings, there is a window of time where new things are to be ritually released into it. Indeed, it is common for people to release bodily fluids into the hole during this period. However, more impressive to witness than any one hole-oriented orgasm (and is that really so interesting anyway?) is the totality of the ritual, wherein hundreds of queers gather, grounded in place, deep in Appalachia, and participate in the rendering of spacetime.

Beltane is about returning back to the earth what you no longer want or need, and with it, planting seeds for the next cycle of time, with hopes we will be fed and nourished by what grows in the season to come. The ritual is performed with a sense that we all are tethered to the land and to each other through the cycles of the earth. Regardless of how the last year went—the sorrows and losses it may have brought with it—we must swallow it somehow. As long as the cycles continue, we must contend with, and lay our trust in, the reality of impermanence, of constant change and transition.

Amidst the weekend’s beautiful ado3, I came to realize the entirety of Beltane revolves around metabolism—which leads us, as all roads do, back to the soil. In 1842, German soil scientist Justus Von Liebig expanded the definition of metabolism, or “Stoffwechsel,” from a system internal to the human body, to the biochemical processes of natural systems.4 The word Stoffwechsel has two parts: wechsel, meaning change or exchange, and Stoff, meaning “stuff,” or material—but also in this case, nutrients in particular. Anyone who has ever gardened has probably had to consider how, when you run your hand through the dirt, you are touching a

living system, where vital nutrients are on the move, providing the (literal) grounds for life. It is this biochemical metabolism, a delicate yet robust dynamic, which enables the growth of plants and animals (including, it should go without saying, humans). If that balance is thrown off, it can make or break a growing season. If that balance is really thrown off, it can be hard to repair.

Knowledge of this relationship between humans and the soil has long been central to the agricultural understandings and practices of pre-colonial societies. It is quite common sense: we eat what grows from the earth, and then, over the course of time, we fertilize the earth again through decomposition—this happens when we shit and when we die.

But around the time of Liebig’s metabolism, political economist Karl Marx grew concerned with the role of humans in this cycle of nutrients. He called the interaction of society with nature “a universal and perpetual condition,” but saw that changes in the labor process were disrupting its stability.5 If you think back to what was happening in the British Isles in the mid19th century, you may already be noticing the contradiction emerging.6

Illustrating Marx’s concerns, throughout the 19th century the presence of the Beltane ritual diminished drastically throughout the British Isles. For pastoral Celtic peoples, the most important part of the Beltane tradition—which dates back at least 2,000 years—was the “lighting of Beltane fires on the first of May, which would recall the growing power of the sun and provide an opportunity to cleanse and renew the conditions of a community—both humans and their animals—that had spent the dark months indoors.”7

However, as industrialization moved into full swing, people receded from the land and its cycles, and the fire was doused by an epic damp.8 All around the British Isles, Beltane fires ceased to be lit, until by the turn of the 20th century, the tradition had nearly disappeared.

As darkness overtook the British Isles, and the lands beneath the English empire’s shadowy appendages, what had started as a barely perceptible faultline split into a chasmic rift.

Rift and the Need for Rebound

The transition from feudalism to capitalism was, like many transitions, much less a clean break and much more a process of fits and starts. Capitalism co-evolved with racialism within the dying body of feudal society, eventually expanding into the global system Marx dedicated his career to analyzing. In The Secret of Primitive Accumulation, Marx himself acknowledges that “the economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society.”9

He continues, “the dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former. The immediate producer, the worker, could dispose of his own person only after he had ceased to be bound to the soil, and ceased to be the slave or serf of another person,” (emphasis my own).10

In other words, as the feudalist order came to an end, peasants were again ejected into a system of force and compulsion, one that this time did not provide them with a place to live or a garden with which to feed themselves, but instead demanded that they concentrate in urban centers in a search for waged employment. In England, between 1801 and 1831, 3.5 million acres of common lands were stolen by landlords and sold to landlords.11

To be unbound from the soil meant to be “free” to sell your labor on the market, to become a productive member of society, but also to be severed from the very thing that made you alive in the first place. At once, the worker-as-being emerged in opposition to the land upon which he worked. In what image was this newfound freedom built?

Regardless of how the last year went—the sorrows and losses it may have brought with it—we must swallow it somehow. As long as the cycles continue, we must contend with, and lay our trust in, the reality of impermanence, of constant change and transition.

In her talk Beyond Work, Tiffany Lethabo King reads Marx alongside Leanne Betasomke Simpson’s retelling of the poem “Binoojinh Makes a Lovely Discovery.”12 In the story, Binoojinh lies down to rest and looks up at a tree with a squirrel in it. Binoojinh watches the squirrel repetitively nibble and suck on the tree branch and it surprises Binoojinh, who decides to try it too, mimicking Ajidamoo the squirrel. When Binoojinh nibbles and sucks on the tree branch like Ajidamoo, Binoojinh finds with delight that it tastes like sweet water.

King notices that this position of rest—lying down—allows Binoojinh to look up at the tree and the squirrel as teacher, in contrast with the Marxist worker whose orientation is at a downwards angle over nature as he works upon the land. In her work, King asks what can happen if, reading Marx through a Black and Indigenous feminist lens, we problematize the ontology of the “worker” in Marx’s analysis and attempt to move beyond work.

I bring in King’s critique of the Marxist worker here to emphasize the way that the capitalist labor relation implies a specific (raced, gendered) interpretation of the human as both separate from and oriented above land. With this analysis in mind, we can move further into the ecological dimensions of dispossession and enclosure, and see how they have mutually shaped the making of place and person in the colonial image of unboundedness, which refuses to acknowledge the interdependence between all living beings and the earth.

In the 19th century, we see an image of geographical rupture in England: the last of

the common lands were being privatized; the forests had been razed and turned into sheep walks; remaining farmland was consolidated into large-scale agriculture; and more and more people were flocking to cities to find work, solidifying the rural-urban divide. Meanwhile, the factory produced not only pollution but abstractions, a mechanized fallacy that things could be made out of nowhere, the fabrication of placelessness.

All time and space folded in on itself in the urban industrial center, where the livingness of life had shattered, leaving the shit to stream into the streets, and into the river Thames. During the Great Stink of 1858, the miasma had become so intense that the English Parliament had to shut down, and that year London legislated a unified sewage system under Queen Victoria. People were no longer eating and shitting, living and dying, in concert with the soil. There in the industrialized urban centers, all sense of reciprocity with the land—that is, taking what you need and giving back what you don’t—was lost to the force of capitalist exploitation, in the name of colonial empire. Also vanishing quickly was the memory of connection between the agricultural worker and communal lands.

Though nobody had everything that they needed, the shit and the death just kept on coming, building up with nowhere to go.

In Abolitionist Agroecology, Maywa Montenegro de Wit defines the metabolic rift as “a break in the interdependent processes of social and biological metabolism, by which large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture combine to impoverish the soil and the worker.”13

Here we might view something like the spread of cholera in urban centers as the reaction of the human body, and thus the biopolitical body at large, to the metabolic rift. However it was not just the humans losing out as they piled into overcrowded houses in overcrowded cities, it was the soil too that suffered. Industrial agriculture was laying ruin to the ecological balance between humans and nature by exhausting the soil, and, on an epistemological level, by ignoring that the soil might be alive and therefore get exhausted in the first place.

The metabolic rift proliferated through, and itself necessitated, globalization, developing the exact conditions of today’s industrialized agricultural crisis, which is marred by, to again reference de Wit, the

“disrupted cycles of nutrient flows between animals (secondary producers) and plants (primary producers) at the base of the food web.”14 De Wit urges us to view “the 19th century mining of guano and nitrates from Peru, and later Chile, by Britain and the US,” engines of ecological imperialism aiding soils no longer fed by the excrement of their inhabitants—in fields producing raw materials for the cities where the few extracted wealth from the many—as the “expansion of the metabolic rift to the global scale.”15

But where might queer theory intervene in this excavation of the global digestive cycle? For

this, we must turn back towards the hole.

(Come Into) The Hole

“When we’re born we are a patchwork of liquids, solids, and gels,” begins Paul Preciado’s telling of the origin myth of the heterosexual man in Anal Terror.16 “Wrapped around the digestive tube, the skin opens up at its ends, leaving two muscular orifices visible: the mouth and the anus.”17

Preciado goes on to explain how the anus was castrated from the man: “It was necessary to close the up the anus to sublimate pansexual desire, transforming it into the social bond, just as it was necessary to enclose the commons to mark out private property…The Holy Fathers, fearful that the born body would come to know the pleasure of not-being-man, of not-being-human…

[castrated] the anus… thus was the private body born.”18

Alongside the modern city, Preciado writes, heterosexual men were born at the end of the 19th century, as “wounded, mistreated bodies.”19

Though it may seem like a mere play on genesis, Preciado’s provocations urge us to think critically about how the body has been sexed, made productive, and depleasured under colonialism and capitalism, and beckon us to reconsider the natural primacy of cisheterosexuality.20 Rather than questioning how the homo- or trans-sexual subject came to be, he searches for the conditions under which the otherwise earthly body (patchwork of liquids, solids and gels

wrapped in skin) becomes dislocated from its joy, its freedom. He posits that this could only be through force, through violence at the hand of The Holy Fathers.

The parallel that Preciado draws between the body and the land as subjects violently enclosed and cut off by the state and capital helps us to identify how the metabolic rift lies at the core of the colonial image of nature. It also delineates how the metabolic rift references not only the co-emergence of a dooming ecological disaster alongside racial capitalism, but also the entanglement of the Human within a colonial, racialized, sexed and wounded ontology. In this rendering (which we might think of in terms of Sylvia Wynter’s Man1, homo politicus, and Man2, homo oeconomicus) Man is positioned as owning nature, women, children, and nation—and being human outside of this European representation of Man becomes a punishable perversity.21

The peril of the colonial idea of the Human is that it asks us to make ourselves as discreet, speciated individuals, separate and distant from the earth and one another. In this rifting, which must be reproduced again and again through routine violences, the ways that we are dependent upon the cycles that feed us are obscured, and we become dissociated subjects. It is only in rare moments of interruption—incidents like the orcas sabotaging ship rudders in the Strait of Gibraltar, events which are growing far more frequent as climate catastrophe becomes less geographically bounded—when we are forced to consider that we are an ecologically embedded species, and we are killing ourselves.

We may not have time to close the rift, but might we begin to traverse across it? How do we rebound to the soil, and what might transgender praxis have to offer towards this project?

When the Beltane ritual commenced, and it was time for the spirits of Short Mountain to be called upon, a trans angel ushered forth all the trans relatives and ancestors. Then, she brought her friends to the center, who ritually performed an estrogen shot in front of the crowd. If you’d ever considered that you might be trans, their mystifying beauty in that moment would have convinced you. And then the angel invited all of us trans siblings to emerge from the mass and move to the middle, to either receive an injection of hormones, or release a portion into the hole. If you had considered engaging in the rites of transition before this, the beauty of that confluence would persuade you to begin the experiment.

This ceremony was a demonstration of the trans body as both a social artifact, made and remade at the hand of the collective, and an extension of the organic, a complex network of chemical bonds mirroring those found in the rest of nature (hormones, like all medicine, are a biological technology). The ceremony threatened to destabilize the socalled “natural” order of Man-above-nature by calling participants to enter into spiritual and physical metabolism with the earth and one another.

What it looked like from the outside was a gaggle of uproarious transsexuals laughing, shrieking, dancing and enacting transition around one big hole. But, the phenomenon of hundreds of trans and queer people gathering in Appalachia to ritualize the

passing of time is important, particularly because it rejects the “separation of the Spirit and flesh” necessary in forming “homonormative identities compatible with heteronormative Appalachian culture.”22 It is specifically through the enfleshment of their queerness that transsexuals transgress the borders of binary gender, and throw the U.S. settler project and its order of the private body into existential question.

Trans-ing

Indeed, trans people are already very familiar with the metabolic. This dynamic is most notable in our relationship to gender, the body, and death.

gender

By starting out with one “given” gender and moving through/around/towards a different gender, we engage in a process of physical and metaphysical augmentation of the self as embodied subjects, and metabolize gender itself.

body

Also characteristic of trans experience is a keen attentiveness to the body and its existence in time. This is true both as a matter of care and survival. As Jules Joanne Gleeson writes in How do Gender Transitions Happen?:

Many trans people have grown near obsessively astute in noticing, and itemizing, gendered features of everyday presentation. Few of society’s arbitrary sexed associations of gender expectations today escape the discerning eye of anxious transsexuals.23

It may seem obvious and trivial to say that trans people pay more attention to their bodies, and more specifically, their embodiment. But in an ever-more disembodied society, the body’s primary role nowadays is as a territory of consumption and contention—never before has the theory of “the body as an accumulation strategy” been more prevalent.24 The body has become the thing we have to painstakingly reproduce in order to get on with generating capital, the site of agony we’d much rather avoid because it reminds us of the ways in which we are vulnerable to aging and debility.

To notice the body and the way its variable features mediate social encounter, and to view the body as an entity that can be remapped and resignified alongside or against society’s terms, is significant because it turns the body itself into a site of possibility. After getting top surgery, I was amazed by my body’s capacity to bounce back after experiencing a major physical trauma. It took a few months, but I was eventually able to go back to normal activities after a life changing event. My body was able to endure, process, and recover from the massive incisions, the stitches, the skin grafts. It left me wondering: what else am I (are we) capable of healing from?

Understanding the body as a transitory locus makes trans people particularly prone to innovating ways to unfix the categories of “body” in “time.” All this often directs us back to the earth and to the celestial in search of healing, pleasure, and different ways to inhabit the world.

death

And, trans people are accustomed to being with dying and death. This fact is situated in the reality that trans people have one of the lowest life expectancies of any group in the country—with that statistic falling disproportionately on Black and Brown trans people and transwomen. In Detransition Baby, the funeral is noted as “among the notable social events of a season,” morbidly becoming an important site for trans sociality.25 But beyond that, I want to highlight how the trans relationship to severance and grief positions trans people in close proximity to aliveness, and thus to the ecological.

Certainly, it is a construct of the cisimaginary that all trans people have to kill their past selves in order to live a new life (much like the idea that we are all born in the wrong bodies). Many trans people hold a complex continuity between their past and present selves, and do not wish to break completely from who they used to be. However, there is something to be said of being able to lay old versions of ourselves to rest. In cis society, the mid-life crisis is a well-known milestone of aging, and centers around suddenly having to live with the past. You wake up one day and realize that you are much closer to the end of your life than you are to the beginning, and, perhaps for the first time ever, begin to question all of the decisions you’ve ever made—your job, your marriage, your kids, your house. Was it all really worth it? Who are you, and what happened to those old dreams of who you meant to become?

When you are constantly confronting your own becoming—that is, when you take the matter of making yourself into your own hands, as trans people have to do—you must also reckon with the falsehood of immortality. This isn’t to say trans people are immune to existential dread—on the contrary, a default part of being trans is mourning and honoring the people we weren’t able to become, our stolen childhoods and forced puberties.

While egg is the colloquial term for a person who is trans but just doesn’t quite know it yet (symbolizing an embryonic stage of life that just needs to crack open to be born), dead name is the phrase for the names trans people no longer use. These dead parts of ourselves aren’t necessarily relegated to a space of exile. More often, we are called to live with both life and death simultaneously—even as we die, we hatch open, simultaneously baby and ghost, and begin to live a life beyond death.

Within this afterlife lies both a grave recognition of death’s certainty, and the playful rejection of its finality; a grief practice that is able to withstand multiple world endings, coupled with a tendency towards experimentation that pays very little mind to normative time, instead following the path of unfettered desire. What if this transitory praxis could be applied to a body larger than the person: a political body, a socialecological body, a worldly body? What if when we come into the hole, we bring the rest of the world down with us?

Thrashing and Ecstasy

In Grief in a Time of Not Knowing, Zen buddhist teacher Roshi Joan Halifax talks about the “threshold experience” as the second stage in a rite of passage.26 The first stage is separation, which entails physical and psychosocial isolation from the “pseudocertainty of our society.”27 But once we are outside of certainty, we are thrust up against a threshold. Halifax notes that the word threshold shares the same etymological root as thrash. To cross over might invoke a state of indecipherable movement, of fear and struggle.

Crossing over is not the part that we get to decide. The world as we know it is changing, becoming less inhabitable for humans along fault lines that we have provoked. The thrashing has already, in many ways, begun. And people are variously absorbing, or failing to absorb, this condition.

The failure to absorb the grief of the world, i.e. the ruins of white supremacy, is illustrated perhaps most extremely by the suicidal tendency of the mass shooter, who is already depersonalized, abstracted from his private body, by the time he moves to kill. One aspect of the ecological disaster that we are facing is the routine and gratuitous racialized violence that occurs at the hands of the state and its various arms, and by these citizen massacrists, who, much like settler militiamen of the early American colony, understand it as their duty to enforce the racial order and reproduce the frontier.

The frontiersman, which is only a metonym for the alt-right conspiracy theorist or the most recent mass shooter, is propelled first and foremost by his paranoia and access to unlimited violence, which lead him into overdrive. While the mainstream media and the state search for reasons and motivations behind the onslaught of gruesome killings— implying that they are reasonable in the first place—we know that this terror cannot be puzzled into sense. Instead, it is the tragic manifestation of thrashing gone haywire.

In another instance of unabsorbed grief, in S-Town, journalist Brian Reed details the life and death of a man named John, whose relationship with the passing of time becomes the centerpiece of a long and winding story about place, kinship, and in many ways, the end of the world. John is from Woodstock, Alabama, a town that he disparagingly dubs “Shittown,” but nonetheless refuses to leave. John is a genius clock restorer, who keeps an intricate and well-maintained hedge maze and is obsessed with climate catastrophe and the dying world. He lives deep in the woods in a deteriorating house with his aging mother and several dogs that he takes care of, knowing that if he didn’t, no one else would. Though he also takes care of a young man who he loves like a son, it is clear that John feels incredibly alone and wary of those who know him.

It is revealed over the course of the story that John is queer, and the listener is left to speculate about the role that this plays in John’s life and eventual decision to kill himself. As a queer man, John is accepted by the men around him as long as he separates Spirit from flesh, and maintains an identity “compatible with heteronormative Appalachian culture.”28 His thrashing is obvious and constant, but there is nothing to help sublimate his suffering, nobody to anchor against as he crosses through life.

Multiple times throughout the podcast, Reed inquires with John: if he hates Shittown so much, why not just leave? But for me, this was not a question that needed to be answered. I assumed that John felt similarly to the many of us who remain in places long after they begin to fall apart because even though they are hostile in certain ways, they are also beautiful—they are also home. Indeed, the world is sinking into a hole of its own making. But to echo a fellow trans Pittsburgher’s musing on hole theory, perhaps those of us who stay are looking for a gloryhole somewhere in the sinkhole, are staying to experience the “special transgression of romance in a place committed to anonymity and filth.”29

In her virtual talk “Looking for Language in the Ruins,” Black American poet Erica Hunt reflects on the current apocalypse by reminding us that the world has ended before. For those captured and enslaved in

the transatlantic slave trade, she says, the world ended in 1619, when the first slave ship touched the North American shoreline. With this historical reframing, we have already been living in an ongoing apocalypse for hundreds of years, where, in the ruins of white supremacy, life must be made in a lifeless space, life must be procured beyond certain death.

We might also think here of maroon societies—also known as palenques, quilombos, and many other names depending where you are—which were communities formed by Black, formerly enslaved people who ran away from their places of captivity. Maroon societies were often formed deep in forests or swamps. Plantation owners and settlers had trouble traversing these terrains, but the ecologies underfoot became grounds for hunting, foraging, and growing food for the liberated settlements. The people of maroon societies made a way out of no way; they made a life where it was seemingly impossible.

Hunt asks us to consider one piece of maroon culture still alive today, which is emblematic of a much longer history of archiving, survival, and rebellion: the art of braiding seeds into hair. Whether red pigeon peas or grains of rice, this tradition shows how saving seeds has also at times been a plot to escape capture; can also be the fugitive path to survival and freedom; might also provide the vision of another future.

In an interview with For the Wild podcast, brontë velez reminds us that “the revolution will be embodied.”30 brontë is committed to decomposition as rebellion, which is to say, in order to transition to the next world, we have to lay these ruins to rest. We have to accept that we do not know what will happen in the future—all we have to grasp onto is the certainty of dying.

In the same ways that we prefigure political futures by redistributing wealth, building mutual aid networks, and developing other components of dual power, we must figure out what it means to embody the revolution. To revolution may be another way to say to transition or to metabolize. In certain ways, trans people are already metabolizing the colonial body in order to let go of our attachment to its violence, by realizing other ways of being in the present that shuck the husk of the old world to the side.

Some of this involves making new rituals (or reviving old ones) with our friends and the earth—experimenting with hormones, with magic, with sex, with all things sensory, in design of an elsewhere within the hereand-now. A magical faery land within an old forest on an ancient mountain. A sanctuary within hostile territory.

But rather than sitting back and waiting for our queerness to take care of things, I suggest that we see transness as a sort of latent commons, to use a phrase coined by

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. “Latent commons,” she writes, “cannot redeem us.”31 She continues:

Some radical thinkers hope that progress will lead us to a redemptive and utopian commons. In contrast, the latent commons is here and now, amidst the trouble. And humans are never fully in control.32

In the latent commons, we are not an organized body, but a dynamic swarm of moving parts “amidst the trouble.” Perhaps, though, there is a way to step back and bring our flight patterns into focus, to activate the commons in a collective/choral refusal of the metabolic rift as condition, and an adamant embrace of a realness and sensitivity that we may otherwise be too afraid to commit to alone. What does escape to the (trans) commune look like if we do not go anywhere, if we choose instead to inhabit exactly where we are? What if instead of dropping out, we drop in?

To drop in will also require us to seriously challenge our notions of ownership and take up an anti-colonial framework of rematriation and agroecology. For many of us this will mean a painful break from the comfort of the familiar. As the Red Nation spells out in Communism is the Horizon, Indigenous Feminism is the Way, the struggle for trans bodily autonomy, land back, and ecological healing are one in the same:

Early accounts from colonizers displayed horror about Indigenous societies that did not regard the land as an object to be dominated. Alarmed by Indigenous peoples’ reverence for the earth as a relative with which humans could—and did— have relationships (sometimes sexual), settlers used the violence of heteronormativity to destroy these relationships.33

With this in mind, healing the metabolic rift should be seen as directly opposed to the U.S. settler colonial project, and should be understood as the only way to complete our transition.

No Future but Ecology

Trans re-territorialization will involve a transformation of time, space, and body (that is, flesh, or, ecology).

In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Jose Esteban Muñoz reminds us that the future is, first and foremost, a site of heterosexual reproduction. As in, the children are our future. The progress narrative of capitalism—though it may be crumbling as climate crisis worsens and exposes the weaknesses of the refrain that it will get better—always returns to the stronghold of the family to reinforce itself.

In an effort to stop regarding the future as a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction, Muñoz asks us to “summon a refunctioned notion of utopia in the service of subaltern

politics.”34 He argues that doing so would queerly disrupt the binary logic between the future and the present altogether. In one of my favorite quotes of all time, he writes “on oil dance floors, sites of public sex, various theatrical stages, music festivals, and arenas both subterranean and aboveground, queers live, labor, and enact queer worlds in the present.”35

Indeed, at Pittsburgh’s gay bathhouse, queer worlds are routinely enacted. It is of course just a sliver of what the city’s gay nightlife used to be: at one point, Pittsburgh represented a safe haven and social hub for rural queers throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Now, Club Pittsburgh is one of the few places where local queers can go for afterhours fun. It’s located in a desolate zone between the city’s Downtown and a neighborhood called the Strip District. Though the area is being rapidly gentrified out of its post-industrial silhouette, in the middle of the night it appears unmoored from normative time, floating in the twilight of memory and now.

On the dancefloor, through the sweaty haze, I usually see several people who I know from contexts other than the club, reminding me that in some ways, even though we live in a mid-size city, being queer in Appalachia will always mean that you live in a tiny town. That is also to say, when anonymity isn’t very reliable, a culture of solidarity has to exist.

There are still moments on nights like these, nights that feel like they could last forever, when I look around the dance floor and feel a remarkable sense of joy. Where I brush shoulders with a stranger and love them like a sibling. In To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch, Hortense Spillers begins, “the question of touch—to be at hand without mediation or interference—might be considered a gateway to the most intimate experience and exchange of mutuality between subjects… [it is] the absence of self ownership.”36

In the pulsing, collective body, I am anchored even as, at times, the edges of my subjectivity become unsettled, as I lose sight of my own borders. In these instances of touch—for example, when you are with a lover and the borders around gender melt away, or rather, that which engenders you becomes irreparably troubled—the body is no longer private; there is an absence of self

ownership; you belong at once to the other, and to no one but time.

The elsewhere-places of Muñoz’s queer temporality might be what Michel Foucault, thinking spatially, might have designated heterotopias: “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which… all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”37 Without the spatial dimension, the enacted utopia becomes placeless, ceases to be real.

I believe there is value in linking the queer, affective struggle of time travel and the material, earthbound struggle of metabolism because the two are mutually reliant. One delineates imaginary, allowing us to reclaim it from the stranglehold of the heterosexual fantasy of the future, and the other delineates territory, reminding us of the natural limits that shape human culture (we

have to eat, breathe, drink water, etc.), and the importance of our relationship to ecology in the broader effort to survive societal collapse.

Foucault writes that the garden is “perhaps the oldest example of [a heterotopia].”38

The garden, he elaborates, used to exist as a sacred microcosm of the world as a whole (and sacred spaces are almost always counter-sites, where time moves differently and space is not what it seems). Typical in these sacred gardens might be a fountain in the middle, for example, to represent the navel, with the vegetation around it arranged “to enact symbolic perfection.” Here, I am brought back to John’s immaculately kept hedge maze, with a wooden gate at the center. And I am brought back to the mountain, where we gather around the hole.

This time, it was our friend who climbed inside the opening. She was wearing an all white dress with a matching scarf around her head, performing trans southern belle camp so to-the-tee that we’d all moved beyond laughter and entered a space of worship, unable to say anything but wow, darling you sure look good, and yes we’ll help lower you into the mud, and we’ll do so with reverent caution.

And so down she went, into the earth, which was deceptively deep. She was lowered, body first, so that briefly her head bobbed, still clean. And then, she disappeared below the level of sight, all her lace and tulle swallowed with her, leaving only the drone of the drums and horns. After a few minutes passed, her arms raised, slowly, up and out. She emerged, glorious, changed.

1 I borrow this noticing practice from the Feral Atlas project. Feral Atlas as a Verb: Beyond Hope and Terror

2 Preciado, Paul. “Anal Terror,” Baedan 3; Issue 3, Vol. 1, 2015.

3 Let this be a quick reminder that the queers tend to be great at serious play—that is, rites or rituals aren’t required to take on a sense of puritanical gravitas in order to be effective. In fact, it is the power of participation that imbues ritual with the capacity to transform mental, physical, and spiritual states in the first place. In other words, the faery Beltane ritual is built by those who are present, and is also a giant gay party. It is both funny, and not a joke at all, that we all decide to get together and submit ourselves entirely to the rhythm of the music and the vibrations of the dance floor; to the rhythms of the seasons and the vibrations of the flesh.

4 Brock, William H. Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper, Cambridge Science Biographies, 2002.

5 Harvey, David. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Wiley, 1997.

6 The 1840s marked the peak of industrialization in England, the culmination of a long process of establishing enclosed private property as the basis of so-called modern society (and consequently, property ownership as the basis for the socalled ‘normal’ man). The notion of absolute property ideology had been on the rise since the late Middle Ages, but by the 19th century was calcifying as the dominant global order, spreading from Britain to Ireland and the New World. Imposed at once by a brutal system of privatization and industrialized urbanization at home, and egregiously violent acts of conquest, enslavement and resource extraction abroad, racial capitalism was enshrined largely through the dispossession of the land from its people and the people from their land. (Beatty, Aidan. Private Property and the Fear of Social Chaos, Manchester University Press, 2023.)

7 “A Detailed History of Beltane,” Beltane Fire Society; beltane.org/a-detailed-history-of-beltane

8 In her 1928 book Orlando, Virginia Woolf aptly describes the phenomenon of the “damp” that entered the British Isles with the onset of industrialization. “Under this bruised and sullen canopy…” (227).

9 506. Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1, Penguin Books, 1992

10 506, ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society; Vol. 3, No. 3, (1-25), 2014.

13 13, Montenegro de Wit, Maywa. Abolitionist Agroecology, Food Sovereignty and Pandemic Prevention, Daraja Press, 2021.

14 Ibid.

15 12, Ibid.

16 Ibid, Preciado.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 “Why is the transsexual or transgender subject to be explained, rather than the cissexual or cisgender one?” (Metcalfe, Xandra. “‘Why Are We Like This?’: The Primacy of Transsexuality,” Transgender Marxism. Pluto Press, 2021.)

21 Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” The New Centennial Review, Michigan State University Press; Vol 2, No. 3. (256-337), 2023.

22 75, Thomas-Reid, Matthew. “Deconstructing the ‘Quare’ Appalachian Archetype,” Storytelling in Queer Appalachia: Imagining and Writing the Unspeakable Other, West Virginia University Press, 2020.

23 Gleeson, Jules Joanne. “How Do Gender Transitions Happen?” Transgender Marxism. Pluto Press, 2021. (70-84).

24 97, Harvey, David. “Body As Accumulation Strategy,” Spaces of Hope, Berkeley, 2000. (97-116).

25 209, Peters, Torrey. Detransition, Baby, Random House, 2021.

26 Episode 63, Irresistible Podcast, April 2020

27 Ibid.

28 Thomas-Reid, Matthew.

29 Lemanski, Dade. “a sinkhole without a gloryhole is all trash and no pleasure,” Sinkhole/Gloryhole, 1 July 2022. (sinkholegloryhole.ghost.io/)

30 Episode 184, “Homebound: Embodying the Revolution with brontë velez,” For the Wild Podcast, 2018.

31 255, Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World, Princeton University Press, 2015.

32 Ibid.

33 Communism is the Horizon, Indigenous Feminism is the Way, The Red Nation, 2020.

34 49, Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York University Press, 2009.

35 Ibid.

36 Spillers, Hortense. “To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch,” Gerrit Rietveld Academie, March 2018. Lecture.

37 3, Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1, (22-27), 1986.

38 Foucault also lists the cemetery as an age-old example of a counter-site always present within society. He follows the history of the “individualization of death” as well as “bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery” in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century onwards, as an explanation for why many cemeteries came to be located outside of cities, in the suburbs instead of at their centers. This shift was largely due to the fear of contagion and illness believed to be spread by the dead. In this movement to the outskirts of the city, he writes, “cemeteries… came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark resting place.” It is not lost on me that the Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh is one of the largest sites of queer sociality in the city. Dates, poly check-ins, solo walks or walks with friends, picnics, organizing meetings, and other kinds of day-to-day social activities take place in the cemetery grounds. Upon crossing into the cemetery grounds, it feels almost instantly like there is less surveillance, more tranquility, and an odd sense of queer belonging. 6, Foucault.

Benediction

Oh immense teacher of these times! Embolden us to act courageously. Hold us through these times of both tumult and jubilation, that we may forever honor this wisdom in the body.

Photo by Kym Mackinnon

by Josefine 'Voyager' Parker

the concept of transition as element, which you find here, is shaped by Wild Transition: A Trans Woman Way to Nourish Ourselves with Herbs and Magic by Josefine (Voyager) Parker, We Have Never Asked Permission to Sing: Poetry Celebrating Trans Resilience by Forward Together (ed. Kemi Alabi), Transitional Times Transitional Body by M. Téllez, Outercourse: The Bedazzling Voyage by Mary Daly, and Menopausal Years: The Wise Woman Way by Susun Weed. While Daly and Weed exhibit transmisogyny and racist limitations in their works, I am shaped by their potent contributions of Radical Feminist Elemental Philosophy and the menopausal rite of Change.

“We Are an Old People” chant is the Shane Hill and Heron Saline version in Spirit Dancing: Radical Faerie Ritual Chants. The original lyrics from “We Are an Old People” were composed by Morning Feather and Will Shepardson.

illustrations by ryan mccown

kat smith

Sew Says the Lichen multimedia, 15"x12", 2021

artist statement Defying how we see what an organism can be, the Lichen embodies more than one being. Algae and Fungi come together in solidarity to withstand the harshest conditions, forming a new alliance and a new species. This coalescing of creatures pushes back on the western colonial mindset that favors the individual and stops short at the ideas of transformation. What can emerge from lives bound together? I look to Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Within these pages is where I first found this symbiosis blurring lines of the individual and community. “In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aid become critical for survival. So say the lichens.” In the current moment, these words have never rang more true for me. In a world where safety of selfhood is looking more scarce, I turn to those around me to find a deep wellspring of queer community. Here I find the collective body of love bigger than those foaming at the mouth with fear of joyful freedom.

With the rich and resilient bounty that comes with the collective, I stitched myself into the multiple beings that live within and around me, that have come and gone, that are waiting for us in the bright blazing warmth of the future. Each stitch in this piece served as a meditation on my own self, transmuting back into a more fluid form. How the boundaries of the binary, and rigidity of individualism can soften into something sweeter. How time with the lichen can bring us closer to this truth.

Kat Smith is a queer multi-media artist living in Lexington, KY. Their work intersects between fibers, print, and zines, often melding these mediums together. Their creative practice draws on themes of nature, ritual, mysticism, and justice work, with their process serving as a meditative act. Kat is also really passionate about vibrant community building, herbal medicine, and losing it on the dance floor. You can find their work on instagram @material.drifter.

Just transition!

2835-690X