The Queer Life of Things: Performance, Affect, and the More-Than-Human 1498541003, 9781498541008

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The Queer Life of Things

The Queer Life of Things Performance, Affect, and the More-Than-Human Anne M. Harris and Stacy Holman Jones

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-4101-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-4100-8 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Allness

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1  Affective Objects

19

2  Queering the Archive

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3  Queer Object Time

63

4  Queer Ecologies

83

5  Queering Human-Animal Kinship

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Conclusion: Becoming Queer as Liberatory Disorientation

127

References 131 Index 143 About the Authors

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List of Figures

Cover Image: The Stags, Patricia Piccinini Figure 2.1.  A Dog/Cat Thing with Fishes, Michael Crowhurst

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Figure 2.2.  The Bond, Patricia Piccinini

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Figure 2.3.  The Stags, Patricia Piccinini

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Figure 2.4.  Embryo 2016, Patricia Piccinini

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Figure 5.1.  Michael and Roxy, photo by Michael Levan

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Figure 5.2.  L  una and Murphy, photo by Anne M. Harris and Stacy Holman Jones

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Figure 5.3.  Still Life with Chicken, Michael Crowhurst

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Figure 5.4.  Chicken!, Michael Crowhurst

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Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been a source of so many wonderful conversations, connections, and worldings. We are grateful to the humans and other animals, things, plants, and mineral beings who have helped materialize the work you are now holding in your hands. We are so very thankful for artists Patricia Piccinini, Michael Crowhurst, and Michel LeVan for the inspiration of their work and for their generosity in sharing some if it inside and on the cover of the book. We’re deeply grateful to the writers and thinkers featured in its pages for their gorgeous contributions to our thought-worlds; we hope the words we’ve written in response are in some measure equal to the gifts of theirs. We are indebted to RMIT University’s School of Education, Design and Creative Practice platform and the Creative Agency research lab; to Monash University’s Centre for Theatre and Performance; and to our colleagues, whose support makes our work possible. We also wish to thank the amazing editorial team at Lexington Books including Nicolette Amstutz and Jessica Tepper for their support and encouragement, along with the anonymous reviewers, whose feedback shaped the manuscript for the better. We are, as ever, most appreciative of our home base and the multispecies menagerie it shelters and shapes, including the incredible dog duo, Tasha and Murphy. And to the still-present, much loved and missed oracle Luna: this one is for you.

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Introduction Allness

SHIFTING ATTENTION We Can’t Go on Like This It’s a familiar relational declamation that anyone who has ever been in a romantic relationship has probably heard at least once. And yet, we do. Might we be at a globally similar juncture now? Not an emotional breaking point perhaps, but a material one. It is not possible to drain all the oil and gas out of the earth’s veins and have it continue to function like a healthy body. It is not possible to starve and torture three-quarters of the world’s population and have the human tribe-body function as though it is healthy. Perhaps we are already here. Perhaps it was meant to be. Perhaps, as playwright Samuel Beckett told us, it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett 1954/1991, p. 414)

Perhaps, as has been said of Beckett’s work, that humanity is elevated in tragi-comic humiliation and degradation. Perhaps posthumanism and new materialism are only playing at shifting our attention from our anthropocentric obsessions just long enough to make us love ourselves as and always in relation to others once more. Or to begin doing so. How very human; how very queer. The Queer Life of Things: Performance, Affect, and the More-ThanHuman offers essays united by their affective and material loyalties to the 1

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Introduction

endlessly fascinating world of the more-than-human objects and things that fill our lives and with which we travel. They find and follow new materialist, posthumanist, affect and feminist theoretics, breadcrumb-trails through the rapidly proliferating range of cartographies of life-making in twenty-first century earth. They acknowledge the acceleration of anthropogenic symptoms which affect us as human, nonhuman, and emergent lifeforms, seek more ethical ways of sustaining ourselves while also sustaining the planet and our cohabitants, and reflect our ardent hope that better ways are possible and just around the corner. The Queer Life of Things investigates a range of intra-actions/encounters/ events between human and more-than-human actors, sometimes in research contexts and sometimes in everyday contexts. In order to do so, we look not only at what is “live” or “animate,” but also what is a body relation with other flesh and fur and stone bodies. Big change starts with small steps, and we believe this text is an embodiment and enactment of the temporal and material changes that we all so deeply long for and spiritually now urgently require. For this we rely not only on theoretical explorations and build upon philosophical forebears, but upon our artist-ancestors who offer us “future fables for now” (Go Behind-the-Scenes with Patricia Piccinini 2018), the kind of fantasmagorical transgenics that can soften us toward our increasingly hybrid lives and ease the material and virtual terror in which we currently live. We understand the need for more peaceful coexistence with the things of our lives in equal measure to the humans and other animals in our lives. Indeed, in our consistent failure to reduce, rather than increase, the conflict between humans on this planet we turn in hope to our nonhuman companions, devices, objects and things, with some renewed humility and gratitude, recognizing that overtly or not, they teach us lessons about empathy and care that we repeatedly fail to learn from/between other humans. In this, we recognize what our mothers used to call the “sacredness of human life” as being absolutely sacrosanct for all other beings, animate and non-animate. We offer this book as a meditation on the sacredness of all life, whether we recognize it as life or not. The current wave of new materialist and posthumanist literature (this book included) has tackled the concerns of animal (Haraway 2008, 2006; Chaudhuri & Hughes 2014), environmental (Braidotti 2014, 2013; Chen 2012) and sometimes microbial beings (Barad 2015; Bennett 2010), but not as often does it venture into the explicit realm of plant life. Michael Marder’s 2013 book Plant-thinking takes on vegetal beings directly, and together Luce Irigaray and Marder (2016) extend this foundational work by collectively asking “But what about plants? Do they, too, have or constitute a world?” (p. 112).



Introduction 3

Already more-than-human theoretics are developing their own hierarchies of value, of intelligibility, of a “grievable life” (Butler 2004). In this text, we seek to queer the emergent hierarchies of posthumanism and new materialism, bringing feminist, queer and performance studies theory to the coalescing conversation of what constitutes a valuable area of nonhuman study. For example, Rosi Braidotti has made the point in several talks in recent years that posthumanism now requires a critical approach, differentiating between the “human augmentation” of most artificial intelligence research and the more sustainability-committed ecological approach of critical posthumanist studies she is driving at Utrecht. If machines and technological enhancement become increasingly the focus of posthumanist study, or indeed even the fear of epidemics, pandemics, and contagion as a primary driver of scientific enquiry rather than how to establish and maintain more planetary sustainable practices in the face of technological acceleration, what might be lost in the opportunity of a new materialist approach to other life forms beyond the human? Part of the project of this book is to ask “what is the larger purpose and value—the ‘so what’—of posthuman and new materialist research and philosophical enquiry”? One possible response to this question is to ask another question that lies at the heart of this book: What is gained by working to queer these emergent ideas and ways of engaging enquiry, even as they are forming? There is value, we try to suggest here, in working to remain open, unforeclosed, and unencumbered by the scholarly imperative to “explain” things: for us, these theoretics go beyond explaining the world newly, indeed they redirect us away from a functional or use-value analysis of human and other animals, plants, and objects, whether extrinsic or intrinsic. Indeed, a simple or relativist take on new materialist and posthumanist thought can bend powerful concepts like intra-action into a reductive recipe for seeing everything as emergent and in the now, and miss the interdependency so crucial to thinkingwith. In other words, viewing new materialism and posthumanism as a means of shifting the reasoning away from purpose-focus is not enough; we are trying to twist and redeploy—to queer—the practice of these theoretics in the hope that they can move us even further away from the Cartesian dualism that “got us here in the first place.” Queer theory has always performed this anti-teleological work—it is a playful and nimble means of opening up philosophical and scholarly and disciplinary work that wants to seek surety, stability, and closure in the name of what might else be discovered, found, and possible. This breaking open and going beyond reason is a central element of this text’s mission. Part of the projects of both posthumanism and new materialism is to problematize the notion of liveness, as well as what constitutes “a life.” Is only

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an “inanimate” thing an “object”? At what point does a human or animal body become inanimate, and does that then relegate it to being an object? If humans are said to “objectify” women or others by making them other, then why isn’t a dog an object, if dogs are other? At what point to dogs become objects? And if we are truly moving into the Anthropocene, with its attendant shifts toward the agency of the more-than-human, perhaps change is needed in framing the practice of objectifying something as an insult; that “dehumanising” might not be such a bad thing after all. This book wonders about the edges of life and agency: do tears, for example, have their own material life separate from the body which emits them? More, this book understands life itself, in all its forms, as queer. And it is undeniably queer (or at least queerable in its moral and ethical relativism) that life exists differently in this anthropogenic moment than it has or will in other ages, and at different temporal and geographical intersections. When dogs, for example, perform well, they are still often humanized. The impulse toward anthropomorphising animals seems timeless. A recent Mexico City earthquake disaster saw dogs as heroes in which they were framed in some ways as super-humans, both as rescuers and also as victims. Reports had it that one dog had saved twenty-seven humans from the rubble (Jenkins 2017). And yet a white western notion of lives that have value retain hierarchies of value in which humans still have primacy. Then there is the rapidly-growing area of work into the lives of data, including for example the work of Sarah Pink on broken data (2016; 2018). She and others are extending the way we think about data as alive, and as such is involved, like other living things, in ongoing cycles of “decay, making, repair, re-making and growth, which are inextricable from the ongoing forms of creativity that stem from everyday contingencies and improvisatory human activity” (2018). Such inquiry is a kind of “queer life of things” for digital realms, but as we know digital lives and logics are impacting greater aspects of the everyday lives of non-digital beings. QUEERING LIFE ITSELF What would it mean to live a queer life? What does it mean for any being–animate or inanimate–to live a queer life? A life that is curious? That is strange and different, a kaleidoscope for re-configuring the business-as-usual of everyday life? What is a queer dog? A queer cup? A queer river or tree?



Introduction 5

These questions are not new, nor is queering humanism and materialism a new project: Mel Y. Chen leads us to think broadly about decentring the human in queer theory, exploring what it means to treat the human as nothing more than one element in a queer critical assemblage.1 For Chen, queer, in the United States at least, “has followed the two contradictory paths of re-animation (beautiful collectivity/assemblage/reengagement of self with animate force) and de-animation, which might help to explain the widespread fatigue with queer identity politics and internal racisms” (2012, p. 58). The queer fatigue that Chen confronts is certainly global, and hinges on not only the racialized maneuvers that have left not only some scholars of colour but also female-identified queers feeling unhappy with the term (and its failure to deliver on either its anti-teleological disruptive promises, but also on its community ones as well). Yet the work Chen does toward queering queer is at the heart of how this text seeks to deploy queer: to queer things and new materialist and posthuman theory more generally; that is, we are interested in queering the onto-epistemology of things in relation to humans and other animals, bodies, time, and space. The Vitality of (Nonhuman) Bodies At the same time as posthumanism and new materialism invites us to see the nonhuman world more agentically, disruptively, and therefore more queerly, changes in queerly-identifying public practices and global flows have led to changes in queer (and more mainstream) cultures that are sometimes framed as a democratisation of queer relations, familial constellations, and the so-called mainstreaming of LGBTIQ rights. Such hopeful human perspectives, like their nonhuman counterparts, have been challenged by research highlighting persistent disparities in human inequalities such as gender, sexuality, and race (Rayside 2008; Cruz-Malavé, A., & Manalansan), conservative backlashes against the global progression of sexual and reproductive rights (Park 2013; Weston 2005), and enduring tensions within increasingly homogenized LGBTQ, feminist, and postfeminist political ecologies and assemblages (Mezey 2015; Ringrose 2012; Yip 2004). And such shifts in the “logic” of queer politics and scholarship suggests new directions for interventions in sociocultural considerations and practices (Chen 2012), including object relationality and performativity. While we look elsewhere for signs of life, agency, and matter that matters, affect studies (Stewart 2007; Ahmed 2014; Siegworth & Gregg 2010) encourages scholars to look more critically at the emotions, intensities, flows and opportunistic natures of events and bodies. In this book, we take affect as a starting place, though not as a lens for putting ourselves in the place of

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Introduction

objects, things, animals, and other non-human subjects. Rather, we critically consider the affect of things-in-themselves. In so doing, we extend foundational concepts like Judith Halberstam’s notion of “technotopia” (2005, p. 124), by which she refers to the power of trans* bodies to “resist idealizations of bodily integrity, on the one hand, and rationalizations of its disintegration, on the other” (p. 124). Like other new materialists, we queer the animat-able possibilities of objects as things at all, building a logic of identity-formation “through decay, detachability, and subjectivity . . . of semi-living objects, semi-dying art pieces, and semi-coherent human bodies.” (Halberstam 2005, p. 124). Following Chen’s queer ecological formations, we re-combine this queering of the “non-logical self” (Halberstam 2005) and subjectivity itself with Jane Bennett (2010) and Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s (2008) demand for a reconsideration of vitalism, or what Bennett calls a contemporary “vital materialism”2 (p. 63). For us, Butler’s early deconstruction of gender from the material/biological into the performative helps us move new materialism beyond an anthropomorphic consideration of matter (whether physical or philosophical), and extends in/to the queerness of the relationship between matter and event itself. Bennett centralizes the political dimensions of a thorough posthumanist ethic as Donna Haraway previously suggested, and more recently Braidotti and Chen have done: How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies? By “vitality” I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. (Bennett 2010, p. viii)

The political dimension is perhaps more problematic than the philosophical one, although they are concomitant projects. Like contemporary environmental/human social movements like the “No DAPL” [Dakota Access Pipeline protest best known by the hashtag #NoDAPL] protest movement in the United States (Holman Jones & Harris 2018), social and political movements can at times have enormous “people power” and yet fail to make lasting political impact.3 Inherent in Bennett’s query is a centralization of the human experience, and human impact on the wider “world”; what she calls articulating a “vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans” (p. viii). A queering of things (or posthumanist and new materialist considerations of them) takes up the question of how “the world” might be different, regardless of how the humanist project and human activity continues or ends. We accept as delightfully queer some of the ways in which the world/s around us is/are vitally advancing, despite of or indeed in light of our inattention.



Introduction 7

Animate, If Not Alive The “liveness” debate has proliferated since perhaps performance studies scholars Philip Auslander (1999) and Peggy Phelan (1993) diverged on the idea that performance hinges on presence—it cannot be recorded or it becomes something else. Auslander’s challenge was that in mediatized society the definition of liveness must necessarily expand. Phelan’s insistence that her definition is ontological (that is, central to the essential nature of performance) meant that digital performance is “something other” than live due to its reproducibility. Phelan’s definition is grounded in Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. Not surprisingly, it bears similarities to some of today’s core new materialist concepts including intra-action, embodiment, becoming, and actants. Understandably this grows out of the attention to the body, matter, time and event in both performance studies and new materialism. But the emergence of new materialism in an age of digital media, an interdisciplinary field of study that does not always recognize its epistemological foundations in performance studies but instead looks more immediately to new formations of liveness in digital media cultures, affect theory, in some cases, brings performance to the conversation in interesting and vibrant ways. In 2010, new materialism became firmly ensconced in the academy through the first annual conference on new materialisms and digital culture at Anglia Ruskin University, UK, convened by Finnish (music performance) scholar Milla Tiainen and (digital media) scholar Jussi Parikka, called New Materialisms and Digital Culture. This conference brought together presenters interested not in defining “a stable referent for that term so much as to point towards some of the problems it arguably connects with” (Parikka, n.p.). In his opening remarks, Parikka flagged three upcoming books which have since become core texts for new materialist enquiry: Diana Cool and Samantha Frost’s (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics; Estelle Barett and Barbara Bolt’s (2012) Carnal Knowledge: Towards a New Materialism through the Arts and Rick Dolphjin and Iris van der Tuin’s (2012) New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. The conference and these publications marked the emergence and coalescence of new materialism as a field of study, and gestured toward some of its interdisciplinary preoccupations: embodiment through arts practice, the intersection of science and politics, and liveness, matter, and animacy. Scholars from proliferating disciplines have taken up this new focus on liveness, including feminism and new materialism (Alaimo & Hekman 2008); science and new materialism (Barad 2003; Bennett 2010), philosophy and new materialism/posthumanism (Braidotti 2013), and affect and posthumanism (Ahmed 2014; Stewart 2007) and digital performance cultures (Harris &

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Holman Jones 2016; Harris 2016). Chen (2012) tells us that as an adjective, animate means “endowed with life, living, alive”; “lively, having the full activity of life”; “pertaining to what is endowed with life; connected to animals”; and “denoting living beings” (p. 3). But as contemporary bioethics scholars and scientists know, pinpointing the moment of life, or the moment of death, is not simple or black and white. Perhaps Chen’s return to the Latin adjectival definition of live or animate comes closer to our needs, one which centers “to breathe, to quicken; f. anima air, breath, life, soul, mind” (2012, p. 3), echoing Mary Shelley’s measure of “life” in the monster in Frankenstein, a definition by which breath equals life. Chen chooses animacy over “life or liveness” because Using animacy as a central construct . . . helps us theorize current anxieties around the production of humanness in contemporary times, particularly with regard to humanity’s partners in definitional crime: animality (as its analogue or limit), nationality, race, security, environment, and sexuality. Animacy activates new theoretical formations that trouble and undo stubborn binary systems of difference, including dynamism/stasis, life/death, subject/object, speech/nonspeech, human/animal, natural/body/cyborg. In its more sensitive figurations, animacy has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy, engendering different communalisms and revising biopolitical spheres, or at least, how we might theorize them. (2012, p. 3)

As we explore in chapter 3, the politics of new materialism and posthumanism brings into new formations of Haraway’s (2008) “making killable”; grappling with questions of life and death are not only human concerns, but extend to other animals, the planet, and objects as well.4 In his 2003 text on “queer materialism” in theatre, David Savran asserts that “theatre is not and has never been a form of mass culture” (p. 18) (although outfits like Cirque du Soleil might disagree). Savran decouples “gay and lesbian theatre” of the 1990s from contemporary queer theatre, which he claims performs a wholly different function. Savran returns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1993) foundational definition of queer as polysemy: “‘Queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (p. 8). Savran’s use of queer in a move to “queer” the theatre offers a blueprint for the way we are queering recent posthuman and new materialist theorising. A rejection of binaries is at the core of queer theory, and a rejection of human/nonhuman (or animal/nonanimal), animate/ inanimate, live/dead5 binaries are too the “core business” of new materialism.



Introduction 9

It’s more than a shift to “decenter” the human; rather the shift is to see the human as always and already entangled with other animal bodies, organisms, terra, and things. For us, new materialism and posthumanism offers multiple opportunities to queer time, event, bodies, and matter, and indeed points to its inherent non-monotheism. We use queer as a way of relating that pulls open the mesh in ways that can only be stitched together imperfectly, tracing “a few of the uncountable and generative entanglements in their ongoing reconfiguring” (Barad 2015, p. 407). This is the ontological promise or utopia of new materialism. THE QUEER LIFE OF THINGS Chen (2012) acknowledges the hierarchies, or levels, of animacies that surround us; they offer a heuristic which “conceptually arranges human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value and priority” (p. 13). We argue the ways in which animal, plant, and other forms of life are enacting interconnected and nuanced ways of being “alive,” often more so that their human animal others. In a hegemonic notion of liveness, humans are central; and yet, perhaps not surprisingly, pressure cracks have appeared. Humans do not always act in ways that are animate, or full of life, but are demonstrably more tethered to Achille Mbeme’s notion of “necropolitics,” in which populations are divided into the living and the dead (2003, p. 17). Necropolitics describes the “way certain bodies are seen as either already dead or destined towards death; their lives are of little consequence . . . their deaths consolidate sovereign power” (Martin-Baron 2014, p. 51). One way of responding—hopefully and humbly—to such contemporary systems of detention, domination, and “making killable,” which impact queer and other minoritarian “others” with ever-increasing frequency and ferocity, is to turn, as we do here, to animals, plants, and ecosystems to understand the queer notion of life, liveness, and liveliness beyond the human. Queer Things at the Intersections New materialism and posthumanism have shifted attention to the affective relationships not only between humans in a range of contexts, but also between humans and our non-human others, including animals, objects, and ecologies. The new materialist turn also signals more expansive attention to ecological assemblages, both networked and sustainable, in ways that are multiply placeand spacetime-oriented (Manning 2013). Here we extend such ‘queering’ of

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cultures, performances, and objects (Ahmed 2014; Halberstam 2011) into a queering of networks, lifeworlds, and ecologies of practice (Manning and Massumi 2014; Barrett & Bolt 2014). It is important to remember not only the areas of inquiry here, but also the intersections. In particular, this text addresses the cross-pollination between queer theory and affect and performance studies, and extends these discourses into new materialist considerations of the posthuman and more-than-human. These intersections are not just a “mash-up” of discourses or streams of enquiry; the intersections themselves are intra-actions in which new knowledge occurs as event. The text means to move outside the binaries produced by the “habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings)” (Bennett 2010, p. vii) and seeks to do so by attuning to the ways in which objects play an agentic role in the performance of everyday life (Massumi 2015, 2002; Conquergood 2002; Stewart 2013a, 2013b, 2010, 2007). Crossing disciplinary boundaries allows us to highlight the layering of activities and orientations that characterize theoretical and practical interventions into these ontologies. New materialist, affect, and posthumanist conceptual frameworks, for example, celebrate fluidity of meaning, feeling, and representation including critical autoethnography and postrepresentational approaches (see, for example, Vannini 2015; Harris 2015; Steyerl & Olivieri 2013; Sternfeld & Zjaja 1997; Holman Jones & Adams 2010). We explore the affective power of ‘things’ to not only interrogate new ways of performing subjectivities in a posthuman era, but also new queer understandings of digital and machine-body performance and machine-augmented spaces, places, and ecologies (Holman Jones & Harris 2015; Clough 2012; Anderson & Harrison 2010; Beauchamp 2009; Thrift 2008). One of the things we are asking you, our reader, to consider is the relationality of things and things-with-humans and other animals, rather than to consider the more-than-human in isolation (the thingness of things, alone, however possible that might be). In other words, in writing this book, we want to consider what taking up nonhuman perspectives and attuning to things might offer us in understanding the relationships, ecologies, and the new performative possibilities our worlds. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson open the collection Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010) by noting the intersections between queer formations of diverse kinds, geo-political ecologies, and animals. This intersectional lens allows more than an acknowledgement that space, place, and temporality matter in queering nature or queering humans’ presence in nature. They suggest rather that it is important to identify this intersection as an important point of conversation between queer and ecological politics because they reveal he powerful ways in which understandings of nature inform dis-



Introduction 11

courses of sexuality, and also the ways in which understandings of sex inform discourses of nature; they are linked, in fact, through a strongly evolutionary narrative that pits the perverse, the polluted and the degenerate against the fit, the healthy and the natural. (p. 2–3)

They compile a range of essays which understands and articulates the intersections between queer formations of diverse kinds, geo-political ecologies, and animals, as we have tried to do in this book. For us it is not so generative to turn the eye away from the human, but rather to put the human back in its place, a simple co-participant in the cosmic queer ecology. The development of new materialism and posthumanism also allows us to think more broadly about non-human and more-than-human assemblages as affective nodes (Stewart 2007; Siegworth & Gregg 2010) of both doing and also being-becoming. Where phenomenological studies of materialism (for example, Ahmed 2014) have sought to understand things more deeply through an affective consideration of their impact (primarily on humans), in this text we aim to celebrate and entangle ourselves in the “thingness” of objects, moving away from strictly human considerations and queering the performance of new materialism in scholarly practice. Sara Ahmed (2014) has detailed the ways in which objects can perform love relationships and indeed intensities with humans. For example, in a consideration of the breaking of an object (a pot) in George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner, Ahmed writes, Silas is touched by his pot. Silas is not only shaped by the objects in his life he even takes their shape . . . it is not simply Silas’s conscious appreciation of the pot’s “potness” that registers the pot’s significance as company, or as a “companion species” to borrow Donna Haraway’s (2003) helpful expression for describing helpful encounters. Whether or not Silas is conscious of the pot, of its thingness; the pot matters. (2014)

The pot matters because it allows Silas to complete a task, and in doing so, to “actualize a possibility together” (Ahmed 2014). In this text, however, we celebrate the pot’s thingness whether it assists anyone or any other thing (in particular, humans) in completing any practice or action. What is the performance (in this example) of potness, or the pot’s thingness, without human subjectivity, companionship, or performance? What might the pot become, without human mediation? The pot, we argue, has its own affect and is engaged in a practice, whether it is observably a performance with or for any human collaborator or audience. That is, we advance in this book a logic of thingness which is not, as Karen Barad insists, that objects have the kind of agency we decide to map onto them, but rather agency as per Bruno Latour’s actants in which objects have an agency that may not yet

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be recognisable to humans. We articulate it as thing-thought, one in which objects are in relation to one another, carrying on with each other without regard to what the human animals might be thinking or doing or feeling in relation to those worldings. In the series editor’s preface to Queering the Non/Human, Michael O’Rourke quotes Jean-Francois Lyotard’s question “can thought go on without a body?” and muses that the editors of that book, Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird persuade us to question whether thought can go on not without the human but without the mythic understanding of the human as foundational, natural, of the bio-anthropological as the degree zero of the human. For Giffney and Hird, thinking begins not just there with the animal, as it does for Jacques Derrida, but with all non/human others, and with the reframing of traditional forms of humanism to make way for the becoming-human of humanity, its hominisation. Such a theoretical claim is incredibly sustaining but also remarkably difficult for many to accept. (2016, p. xviii)

In contemplating such “unobservable” practices, however, we suggest that a queer lens is required in order for non-things (such as humans) to experience (even affectively) and comment upon such non-human experiences. A Queer Story of Things We take up current considerations and uses of new materialism and posthumanism by linking the affective worlds of objects with performance and relationships of queer objects through their non-human acts. Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) analysis of commodity culture suggests that the thingness of thing’s agency goes beyond use-value circulation logics. It is helpful to critique the limitations of use-value and commodity logics, not only for a fuller understanding of the ways objects diverge from such flows, but also for the ways these arguments limit human ability to affectively attach to the things with which we co-habit, even eliciting revulsion and fear in the human world toward non-human others. As we see ourselves becoming less distinctively different from “things,” this fear and revulsion threatens our ability to perform selves that are satisfying, compassionate, or empathic. Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson (2010) can be effectively extended by suggesting the need for an integrated analysis of ecologies of practice that stresses the agency and autonomy of inanimate actors and new possibilities for thing-time, or what we are calling queer object time. Appadurai argued for the agency of things in themselves, saying “We have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories” (1986, p. 5). Performance stud-



Introduction 13

ies, phenomenology, and materialist literatures grappled with many of these same considerations on the way to contemporary posthumanism and new materialism. More recently, Bennett (2010) has argued that both affect and narrative are constitutive, in that affective states can be felt, and also participate in the creation of characters, stories, and theses (Bennett 2002, p. 3). A story of things, she says, “contribute[s] to the condition it describes. Its rhetorical power has real effects” (2002, p. 4). She calls us to a contemporary retelling of enchantment, evidenced by things such as “the discovery of sophisticated modes of communication among nonhumans, the strange agency of physical systems at far-from-equilibrium states, and the animation of objects by video technologies” (p. 4). Affect is tangled up with “time and bodily movement” (Bennett, p. 5; see also Manning 2013; Massumi 2002; Haraway 2008; Oliver 2008; Stewart 2007), but where and how are the roles of things in such human-centered considerations? Likewise, scholars including Ahmed (2014) ask us to attend to an object’s relationality, but often in relation to human orientations and concerns. Following Chen (2012) and Barad (2003, 2015), this book attends and attunes to the intersecting forces of bodies, affect, time and performance in the life of things. If Barad’s (2003) notion of the co-emergence of all things in intra-active events is to objects what Butler’s (1999) performativity was to gender construction, the assemblage and the reiterative nature of all encounters is at stake. Here we argue that in queer thing time, humans and other animals, organisms, terra, and objects intra-act in queer convergence, co-destructing teleological notions of evolution and species hierarchies. In Queering the Non/Human, Michael O’Rourke (2016) suggests that a nonhuman reorientation, which “shakes all our certainties is, we might say, a queer phenomenology” (p. xix). A queer phenomenology in which Ahmed (2006) and Haraway (2008) asserted the value of disorientation, is a kind of disorientation in which things can be as out of place or lose place as profoundly as human disorientations. Proximity between things and humans is an affective relationship in which both are changed; the fate of human and nonhuman actors (or actants, per Latour 1993) are inexorably intertwined. In this book we advance a narrative in which humans are inextricable from our planetary cohabitants, yet in an ecology that we can admit does not need us. A willingness, we would argue, to relinquish power requires a recognition (if not orientation toward) of other forms of knowing, being, as well as real recognition of a need for species diversity. This is not, as Haraway (2016) has written, an exercise in “animal rights” but rather in co-relating in which both human and animal (or any other nonhuman entity) is not only liberated from discourses and practices of oppression by humans, but whose equality

14

Introduction

(if difference) is truly acknowledged. Haraway recognizes the difficulty of this for humans, no matter how well we theorize it: The discursive tie between the colonised, the enslaved, the non-citizen and the animal–all reduced to type, all others to rational man, and all essential to his bright constitution–is at the heart of racism and, lethally, flourishes in the entrails of humanism. (Haraway 2016b, p. xxiv)

With our fellow-travellers on this terrain, we write not just about animals, objects and ecologies, but with and becoming with them. Yet the interest in posthuman and new materialist theories would suggest that this is not such a “queer” premise anymore. Haraway does not let “us” off the hook, preferring the term “‘companion species’ instead of human/nonhuman or humanism and its various prefixes. Queering has the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, and none is more critical than the “human/nonhuman sorting operation” (Haraway 2016b, p. xxiv). As with queer theory, even more rapidly new materialism and posthumanism are in danger of sliding into more fixed, less disruptive, “explaining” work than they started out wanting to do. Claire Colebrook urges us to think more broadly about what queer might bring to the more-than-human, and conversely what the more-than-human might do to queer theory: If we think of life beyond constituted bodies, as Elizabeth Grosz does in her re-reading of Darwin, Freud and Nietzsche (2004), or as Braidotti does in her notion of metamorphoses and transpositions that can be considered ecologically beyond the human (2002; 2006), then we have a new model of queer politics. (2016, p. 24)

If Ahmed’s attention to queering the work of disorienting objects (2006) can be reactivated in new materialism and posthumanism (which is not a far leap from phenomenology), objects must lead our way of understanding what (and how) they can queer life as it is, for all species and life forms. For Ahmed, queer (or becoming queer) is like (in performance studies terms6) “things becoming strange” (Ahmed 2006, p. 163). That is, a queer life of things suggests, a happening, something that has altered (some)thing, asking us to attend to the “strangeness that seems to reside somewhere between the body and its objects” (Ahmed 2006, p. 163). This book, we hope, is a happening that makes something queer happen between you the reader, and the world-as-object. We begin this work in chapter 1, “Affective Objects,” which lays out a theoretical foundation for considering the ways in which affect is able to queer objects, assemblages, and other nonhuman subjects (Ahmed 2014, 2006; Barad 2007, 2003). Through activist affect and the queer fade, artifacts perform affects and intensities that remain independent of human interaction,



Introduction 15

and sometimes of human observation. This chapter argues that a reconceptualization of the dynamism and animacy of nonhuman worlds is crucial to moving beyond the humanist straightjacket which Barad has problematized as a need for critiquing the latest binary, non/humanism. Following Barad (2003), and Deleuze & Guattari (1987), we argue that we experience objects, animals, and nonhuman subjects as animate and animating agents that refigure our understanding of the queerly performative possibilities of “things-inphenomena” (Barad 2003, p. 817). Chapter 2, “Queering the Archive,” draws on artifacts from the art world— Van Gogh’s chair portraits of himself and Gaugin as well as the posthumanist sculptures of Patricia Piccinini, in addition to the Internet of Things (IoT), to explore the notion of the archive, both online and offline. As data lives become more dynamic and more recognizable as living entities, human lives become increasingly intelligible as data. This chapter considers an ethics of accumulation and the ways in which life is lived as a curational event rather than a cumulative one. From fine art to the life of everyday devices, curatorial orientations may serve the machines and technologies themselves rather than performing only an interpretive role for human-centered experience. Finally, this chapter wonders whether the contemporary tendency toward archiving and curation is a symptom of consumer/accumulation logics under which human subjectivity still suffers, or points toward a new kind of materialist proxy. We question whether queer materiality might move beyond archiving and curation, and how a turn toward the posthuman might offer new entry points for thinking about the queer lives of things. The productive relationship among objects, queerness and time as an entanglement of matter and meaning is the subject of chapter 3, “Queer Object Time.” Rather that invert the focus on the human body and language (or it’s “outside”) in favor of an anti-anthropomorphic fascination with objects in and of themselves, we write to engage the messy, vibrant, and thoroughly queer relation we have to bodies, objects and time. Queer object time offers an encounter that rejects human/nonhuman binaries, seeing objects and humans as co-existent events rather than ontological categories in competition for resources or recognition. As event, the becoming-object of queer object time is invested in reconfiguring and regenerating what might yet be. Chapter 4, “Queer Ecologies” attunes to contemporary theorizations of the Anthropocene (or current human-influenced period on Earth), arguing that natureculture is not only inseparable and entangled, but also always-already queer, humming outside of any tidy humanist narrative of progress and coherence. In particular the chapter shows how feminist new materialist approaches lead us to more embodied, situated, and differentiated approaches to understanding anthropogenic climate (and other) change, ideas that are urgently needed to create the kinds of radical change necessary for reconfiguring the

16

Introduction

systemic genocidal and toxic poisoning of the earth as organism, as well as the ecologies it sustains. Thinking queerly about the ecological interrelationships between the more-than-human (with and without considerations of the human itself) shows us, as Chen (2012) observes, how the queering of objects and affects is often “accompanied by political revision, reworldings that challenge the order of things” (p. 237). In this chapter, we use the reworlding potential of queer ecologies to suggest new lives of things that have implications for the human, even as they no longer require our participation. The closing chapter 5, “Queering Human-Animal Kinship,” advances a vision for a queer human-animal kinship accomplished not by virtue of generation or descent, but instead through performative and iterative “embodiment and action.” As part of our articulation of queer animal-human entanglements, we draw on a range of scholarship about human-animal relations including Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of our “strange kinship” with animals (2003) and Haraway’s work on companion species. In particular, we explore the constitutively affirming force of human-dog relations, where human and other animals are held and transformed through “shared embodiment and the gestures of love” (Oliver 2008, p. 228). In our worlding, animals (specifically dogs) not only offer queers a reliable safe haven in a social world populated by dangerous and unsafe humans and institutions but also a performative way of queerly and lovingly turning kinship animal. TO BEGIN We might begin to see the process of queering or queering-with objects, things, animals, organisms, and the kaleidoscope of more than human others, as a new kind of process ontology . . . we open ourselves up to the sense of the world, are vulnerably exposed to the future, but are all singular plural, not substantial, settled, or stable subjects, but singular beings in a relational regime independent of identitarianism or anthropomorphism. Our transimmanence, or allness, a being-with towards others, all others, brings about new modes of sociability. (O’Rourke 2016, p. xviii)

So, to return, to our opening scene, we offer this book as a way of beingwith you and other animals and things as a way of creating queer shelter in today’s increasingly “disoriented,” alienated, and in some (perhaps many) annihilating flows. Our interest in things and their queerness is not an objectifying fetish, it is a relational one. How does the queerness of other things reinforce the incredible plurality of our own queerness, and the promises therein? The pursuit of the thingness leads us back to relationship.



Introduction 17

Perhaps, returning to Beckett, we’ve had a relationship all along. Perhaps, for all our words, nothing is new. Perhaps the other animals and the “natural” world has always understood this, the futility (and futurity) of no-words. Perhaps, as Beckett said, we just return to the knowledge that “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new” (1938, p. 1). NOTES 1.  In their original contribution to scholarship on the animate, Chen’s Animacies (2012) “rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness.” Chen is someone with a disability around toxicity, and this book brings together posthumanism and queer along the trajectory of fleshbodies, and for this reason the micro- to the macro-analysis of human and more-than-human flows is effectively integrated. Some readers may imagine it not directly relevant to their own experience if “abled” is how anyone self-orients. But we suggest that those who find Chen’s disability lens not relevant to ableism are like those who find queer culture not relevant to mainstream culture. Subaltern culture not relevant to colonial culture. The minoritarian, the subaltern, the diasporic, the abject is no longer irrelevant to the hegemony. We are remaking the hegemony, and we hope the text you are holding is a contribution to that reworlding. 2.  Bennett’s (2010) notion of vibrant materiality was foreshadowed by Louis Althusser as “a process that has no subject” (p. 91), opening the possibility of crossing the subject/object divide when considering the primacy of the event in more recent new materialist terms. 3. Shortly after taking office on January 24, 2017, President Donald Trump reversed the Obama administration’s block of the pipeline, and signed a presidential memorandum to advance construction. The Dakota Access Pipeline protests are grassroots movements that began in early 2016 in reaction to the approved construction of Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access Pipeline in the northern United States, particularly led by Souix tribal custodians who occupied the site at Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North and South Dakota. The first oil was delivered through the pipeline on May 14, 2017. Even before starting commercial operations several leaks occurred. On March 3, 2017, 84 U.S. gallons (2.0 barrels; 0.32 cubic meters) of oil leaked at the terminal of the feeder-line in North Dakota. (Wikipedia). 4.  See also Jasbir Puar’s (2007) “bio-necro” political analysis, which “conceptually acknowledges [Foucauldian] biopower’s direct activity in death, while remaining bound to the optimization of life, and [Mbembe’s] necropolitic’s nonchalance toward death even as it seeks out killing as a primary aim” (2007, p 35). 5.  It is possible in these spaces to theorize liveness not in terms of the old dead/ alive binary or even in some ways via liveness; we find Chen’s use of animacy generative and understand language to be central to the new materialist project rather than participating in what some have come to understand as a material/discursive binary.

18

Introduction

6.  For Bertolt Brecht, the “alienation/distancing effect” was a way of making the familiar strange in theatre and provoking sociocultural critique in his audience, rather than catharsis. Also known as Verfremdungseffekt, or V-effect, he adopted and extended the idea from Russian formalist theatre practitioners (Brecht 2014/1964, p. 151).

Chapter One

Affective Objects

QUEER AND ITS AFFECTS Interest in the relationship between affect and queer has been growing in a range of disciplines and geopolitical regions for nearly two decades. There has been substantial scholarship in recent times that has questioned queer theory through affect and affect via queer theory.1 A general queering of the object or nonhuman might start with Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), Hird & Giffney’s (2016) Queering the non/human, Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson’s (2010) Queering Ecologies, and Chen & Luciano’s Queer Inhumanisms (2015) which includes essays by several theorists from a range of disciplines decentering the human in queer theory. This recent work brings us to an explosion in queer perspectives of the nonhuman, and queer as a pivot for pushing explorations into new materialism and posthumanism further than it currently sits. Importantly, though, this book queers these theoretics by way of affect and performance theory. A messy or (what Haraway and Ahmed would call) disorienting intersection to be sure, but one we have found exciting and future-focused. What makes an object queer? Is it their sticky attachments, a queer resonance, history or use? Guy Davidson and Monique Rooney (2018) explore the global interest in queer lives and objects in a time of terror and foreclosure of human rights. For us, queer lives and affects offer an antidote to the reign of “dehumanizing” capital, and the global war on refugees, poverty, precarity and neoliberal notions of relationality. Attention to queer affect has been growing across multiple disciplines within the academy and more broadly, reflecting some of the tensions and opportunities we explore in this chapter. Broad general agreement may ex19

Chapter One

20

ist only in that affect and its adherents respond to the body, the power of embodiment, and emergence. Affect studies are included within the suite of non-representational theoretics, and, like queer theory, attempts to surpass teleological explanations for, or foreclosures of, experience. It is, above all else, emergent and pre-linguistic. But how does affect serve our investigation into queer objects and their relationships with the human? Brian Massumi’s affect is “the capacity to affect or be affected,” as an engagement, an encounter (2015, p. 91). Massumi places affect in an intersubjective, inter-relational space that is both interactive and primarily physical, concrete and corporeal, and yet can still be considered to be constrained by a binary approach to the us/them space of becoming in which, as transcendence, intersubjectivity presumes a preexisting subject/s which come/s together in the encounter (see also Barad 2007; 2003). Deleuze’s (2001) articulation of immanence rejects this binary, as we will explore in the next section. For us, queer objects and queer affects are immanent in their ability to move beyond preexisting selves and identities (even as objects). Queer objects, in this articulation, are more a becoming (or a becoming-with) than a thing. Like our colleagues, we are called to examine the intersection between affect, queer, and the material (or new material), and in the rest of this first chapter we will look at some ways in which others have brought these thoughts together, followed by our own understandings of queer objects, their queer affects, and what they suggest for a queer way forward in which the sociocultural includes all matter, not just the matter that can articulate how and why it matters in language (Barad 2015, 2012). IMMANENCE, TRANSCENDENCE AND THE MATERIAL Immanence and Materialism Two theorists who are often “mashed-up” in new materialist and new empiricist scholarly literature are Karen Barad and Gilles Deleuze. Serge F. Hein (2016) contrasts them by citing an “incommensurability” of their theorizations of immanence and transcendence, an analysis which provides a useful way in to these two core concepts for understanding materiality and the ways in which it is currently shifting. Deleuze’s “plane of immanence” and Barad’s “agential realism” form the cornerstones of each theorist’s central conceptual framework and represent conflicting ontologies. While Deleuze is a self-identified materialist, and uses a wide range of physical imagery, his materialism differs from the more mainstream Anglo-American materialism of modernist philosophy, tradition-



Affective Objects 21

ally humanist and interior. He contrasts modernist thought from poststructuralist thought in the different ways they decenter the human subject and understand immanence (Deleuze 2001), pivoting on a mutual moving away from the unhelpful binary of modernism in which immanence was about interiority, and transcendence about exteriority (or a going-beyond). Deleuze’s conceptualization of materialism and immanence is quite distinct from others who increasingly use these terms. Conventional materialism claims to be able to reduce all “processes or realities” to their more fundamental constituents, such as molecules and atoms (i.e., “the molecular sphere”). In this way, matter (i.e., physical nature) is reduced to a single stratum, the molecular. Yet Deleuze rejects this “reductive molecular materialism,” and instead preserves each stratum of reality, without prioritizing one stratum over another, by materializing the “molar sphere without reducing it to the molecular,” which he describes as “universal machinism” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p. 90). Surprisingly perhaps, Deleuze’s materialism lacks any direct relationship with conventional materialism. Nevertheless, Deleuze’s radical materialism has the advantage of avoiding the false material/immaterial binary, and “immanence itself is the necessary condition for all of life (understood as including both the material and the immaterial) in its becoming” (Hein 2016, p. 3). Deleuze and Guattari uniquely formulate a “plane of immanence,” in which there can be no two-world ontology; rather, a “pure plane of immanence” (1987, p. 311) that must be constant and irreducible. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is no separation between immanence and transcendence, no false representational or perspectival difference. Wherever immanence is theorized as immanent to something, there is transcendence, so Deleuze and Guattari warn us away from that kind of notion of immanence. For them, immanence is immanent only to itself and is therefore complete. Further, Deleuzian chaos is “formless, but it is not undifferentiated” (Parr 2010, p. 48). Can chaos serve to queer the ontological reorientation of new materialism or posthumanism, without abandoning language? In affective terms it can, as embodying both the material and the immaterial, as immanence is both a becoming (event) and a condition (material). Yet Barad’s critique of language offers transcendence as the event, the reliable, the liberated-from-language state of human conceptions of agency. Transcendence Transcendence has in conventional philosophy been associated with/arisen from theology. Barad’s notion of agential realism (2007) is a philosophy of identity, and it establishes a two-world ontology. Barad believes that language

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Chapter One

has been given too much power, that matter and materiality is always subsumed into a linguistic domain for its very being, and that we should not accept that. “For Barad, agential realism avoids privileging discursive considerations over material ones and instituting the nature/culture dualism that she discerns in work such as Butler’s (1990, 1993). She critiques how she thinks discourse has replaced ‘reality’” (Hein 2016, p. 4). Barad’s philosophy of agential realism (2007) looks on the surface like a “realist philosophy” whereas Deleuze’s is a “philosophy of immanence.” However, a closer look shows that Barad’s philosophy “avoids reinscribing a material/discursive dichotomy (i.e., a material/immaterial) binary. Instead, the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in a process of intraaction” (Hein 2016, p. 4). Barad says that neither material phenomena nor discursive practices are “ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other . . . matter and meaning are mutually articulated” (2007, p. 152). One does not exist before or outside of the other. Barad’s articulation of intra-action (“the mutual constitution of entangled agencies”) (2007, p. 33) is different from interaction because interaction presumes pre-existing things that then come into contact. In intra-action there is no pre-existence, only the encounter, the entanglement. Agency bears a close relationship to intra-action (Barad, 2007). For us, Barad’s articulation of agency and agential realism offers intriguing possibilities for a kind of “queer agency.” For example, if Barad rejects an im/material binary, then via Deleuze her re-theorization of agency serves to queer Deleuze’s notion of immanence. Barad tells us that in agential realism, agency neither is limited to humans, nor is it simply expanded to include nonhumans or other forms of agency that have both human and nonhuman elements. Rather, the human and nonhuman are seen as not fixed, so that agency encompasses all the possibilities for reconfiguring the materiality of these and other forms. (in Hein 2016, p. 5)

We read this as a queering of the notions of human and nonhuman more generally, and an invitation to reconceive of matter and materiality in human and more-than-human forms and events as always fluid, always becoming. Barad and Deleuze differ significantly in the ways in which they articulate “becoming,” “differentiating,” and even how they address the beyond-human. Agential realism, Barad says, provides a posthumanist performative account of technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices. By “posthumanist” I mean to signal the crucial recognition that nonhumans play an important role in naturalcultural practices, including everyday social practices, scientific practices, and practices that do



Affective Objects 23

not include humans. But also, beyond this, my use of “posthumanism” marks a refusal to take the distinction between “human” and “nonhuman” for granted, and to found analyses on this presumably fixed and inherent set of categories. (Barad 2007, p. 32)

Although Barad rejects the traditional human/nonhuman binary, she uses the term “posthuman” to encompass both the “nonhuman” and “human” and thus remains entirely within the sphere of (binarized interior/exterior) transcendence. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use the term “prehuman,” conceptually similar to the posthuman in poststructuralist thought. Deleuze’s is a philosophy of immanence and difference, while Barad’s is a philosophy of transcendence and identity. Barad’s is more closely aligned with conventional materialism. If “Barad’s matter is not virtual or formless, as understood within Deleuze’s philosophy, and her becoming is not Deleuze’s immanent becoming,” then there can be no genesis “even if understood in the form of intra-action—on the plane of immanence,” (Hein 2016, p. 6). Barad retains the binary: from the perspective of a philosophy of difference, even if matter and discourse are mutually constituted or articulated, as Barad asserts, a binary logic is still implicitly at work (i.e., the matter/discourse binary has not been undone). Deleuze sees all as difference, Barad as identity, and intraaction as an “identity.” The persistence of the binary, however, is not just a humanist problem, or construct. Some new materialist thinkers are certainly pursuing the goal of ridding ourselves of the binary, but some are not. Remember Haraway’s irritation with the whole posthumanist project and her injunction to become “compostists.” Even those who work to redeploy, twist, or queer the binary, reify it in so doing. So what are the implications of these differences, for this chapter and our discussion here of queer, affect, and objects, or the material more generally? We believe that non-binary enactments of material agency—that is, the agency of objects—offer openings for escaping binaries completely, including agentic/non-agentic ones. As Latour has theorized, actants, in this text we explore different approaches to the possibility that queer catalyzes the notion of agency for affect and new materialist scholars—that is, a nonhuman agency might not resemble human agency in the least. Rather, nonhuman agency is an agentic resonance, including Barad’s agental realism, that moves beyond nature/culture or material/discursive debates, or indeed any notion of a “pure” idea of agency. If objects have their own lives, but more so have their own impetus linked to affect and emotion, and if a deeper understanding of this complex agency can help us decenter human exceptionalism in ways that are urgently needed, might “queer” be the thread that makes it through the eye of current new materialist, posthumanist, and affect theory “needles”?

24

Chapter One

BODIES, MOVEMENT, AND OBJECT(IVE) AFFECTS Ahmed has theorized, through doing, her notion of affect and its relationship to materiality. She writes, “Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (Ahmed 2010, p. 230). For Ahmed, emotion, affect, and materiality are co-constitutive, a queer assemblage in which “Emotions are not ‘after-thoughts’ but shape how bodies are moved by the worlds they inhabit” (Ahmed 2010, p. 237). Like Kathleen Stewart, Ahmed stories worlds in which matter is conjured through movement and doing, through a version of Deleuze’s becoming, in ways that understand the symbiotic relationship between objects, intensities, and movement. For example, airplanes are technologies of flight, signalling what goes up and away . . . you become an individual: you acquire the body of an individual, a body that can move out and can move up. . . . In other words: in becoming an individual you acquire a sense of freedom. . . . This is how happiness becomes a forward motion. . . . To become an individual is to assume an image: becoming free to be happy turns the body in a certain direction. (Ahmed 2010, p. 137)

Ahmed helps us understand emotions such as happiness as a doing, an orientation. Stewart (2007) narrates the body/movement relationship as: “The body surges, out of necessity, or for the love of movement . . . the body knows itself as states of vitality, immersion, isolation, exhaustion, and renewal” (p. 113). If, for Ahmed, the orientation is the movement of bodies and objects and bodies-as-objects toward something, calling to mind as it does Manning’s affect as pre-acceleration, we suggest that in entanglements such as, for example, queer subjectivities and activist assemblages, the animate and inanimate objects are moving toward one another in dynamic but differentlyintelligible ways. We see inanimate objects moving toward their collaborators in a kind of queering of an activist affect. To explore intra-actions that decenter the human in activist entanglements, we turn to two artefacts: the immanence example of the “activist bridge” and the transcendence example of the “queer fade.” THE ACTIVIST BRIDGE The Westminster Bridge in London spans 250 metres across the River Thames, stretching from County Hall and the London Eye on the east to the House of Commons and the Palace of Westminster on the west. Built in 1862,



Affective Objects 25

it has kept a strong and silent watch over the brackish water below. While the bridge might seem inanimate, an object made of iron and stone, an affectively queer reading of the Westminster Bridge might suggest a different perspective on its life and the ways in which its own story and the events of history are more actively intertwined than first meets the eye. We turn to the Westminster Bridge in London as one flashpoint in queering how we might do social movements and cultural resistance; the bridge as a material object which agentically seems to suggest (by its presence) new ways of creating activist publics. Consider the bridge as Stewart would, a “space of shared impact” (Stewart 2007, p. 39). Consider the multitude of experiences a single walker can have on/with the bridge, how it can offer an entry, and exit, a material collaborator or a launch pad into the cold waters below. Consider as well two related events, two affective performances in which the bridge, is a space of shared impact, a crucial player. On March 22, 2017, Kahlid Masood drove through a crowd of tourists walking over the Thames before crashing the gates at Parliament, taking the lives of five people and injuring fifty before he came to a stop. Four days later, scores of Muslim women wearing blue as a symbol of hope, linked arms and formed a human chain of resistance. Without a word, they rejected the driver’s use of the bridge as an instrument of fear. By making a bridge over the bridge, they resisted the business as usual that pretends the car and the driver and the impact they made had never happened. In that simple, silent action, the women and the bridge broadcast to the world a different kind of activist affect. So we ask: If one were to identify an affect of terrorism, and an affect of activism, what might they look like, and might they have more in common than we think? We wonder, in recalling our own crossing of that bridge at a less precarious time, about the affect that sticks to artifacts like the Westminster Bridge, and social movements we believe and participate in. Gregory Siegworth and Melissa Gregg (2010) suggest that “Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon” (p. 1). In the midst of a workday afternoon—as the women locked arms and the mist of everyday life (and death) swirled below them in the Thames, above them in the clouds, and amongst them on the bridge, they chose to refuse the refusal that is terrorism. Affect “is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human and non-human), in those resonances that circulate about, between and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds” (Seigworth & Gregg 2010, p. 1). The bridge is a willful subject, one that plays a role in both the terrorist act, and the activist act (Ahmed 2014). At first blush, both the terrorist act and the activist act have a familiar— and similar—emotional tenor: angry and defiant. A gathering of emotion

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that eventuates inevitably into a cathartic public event. The emotionality that drives people to the streets can be galvanizing but threatens to replace long term activism. Aristotle taught us the power of collective emotion and catharsis. But Bertolt Brecht warned us of the danger of replacing sustainable social action with emotional identification and quick-fix collective catharsis. And Stewart argues that affect offers us broad-ranging ways of exploring “what happens to people, how force hits bodies, how sensibilities circulate and become . . . collective” (2013a, p. 661). In other words, emotion is a circuit, not an endpoint. Butler (2015) reminds us of the power of bodies coming together in public spaces, and the differences between these collective, corporeal acts and other forms of resistance. These are public assemblies that seek to change the material conditions of public spaces, not just “send a message.” The women on the bridge—and the bridge itself—offer us a different kind of activist affect, different kind of action—more particularly a re-action that is not reactive, but instead a resistive reclamation of that space. Their agentic, if quiet, refusal might be one way to overcome the danger of syphoning off the energy expended by raging bodies—over and over again—and avoid the battle fatigue we are all feeling now. The overwhelm itself becomes a kind of terrorism, and there’s no time or space for being overwhelmed. Since the proliferation of online/offline social movements and marches across the globe, many have asked how to turn a march into a movement. The women and the bridge pose a slightly different question—how do we turn the energy of a march into a movement? Movement, as Erin Manning has it, is really a question of readiness potential, the “immanence of movement moving [or] how movement can be felt before it actualizes” (2009, p. 6). So the power of the “event on the bridge” is a suggestion of how to keep that movement moving. Their re-action involves taking a stand on and with others. The bridge becomes a player on the human stage—it is not only public space, it is a public body that keeps the immanence of movement moving. Hannah Arendt argues that politics is bodies acting together (1958/2013). The women and the bridge connect—the “singularity” of one person’s experience and one event’s meaning in time into what Massumi (2002) describes as a “vital movement” that can be “collectively spread” (p. 250). And although the women filed off the bridge that day in March as darkness fell, the energy they set in motion remains, not just as a memory but also as a future—in the readiness potential of a march that becomes a movement. In standing with the bridge and not only on it, linking arms in solidary over the brackish water below. Return to the bridge, night falls, the bridge has been changed—set in motion by the women, the movement of the brackish water below, the terrorist appropriation dissipates. Places have memory. And they have an ability to



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shift the future. Story is not just memory but becoming. Women formed a bridge on a bridge to tomorrow, becoming the bridge in solidary with the bridge, in both public memory and the future. How does the story change when the object is queerly in charge? How might a shift from the humanist subject to the object-subject help re-center relationality over the hierarchical oppression of the relentlessly humanist project of scholarship? For Stewart, the activists in the story above are human-objects in service to the bridge, and this kind of event/entanglement/ action is “the daydream of a subject . . . who is literally touched by a force and tries to take it on, to let it puncture and possess one, to make oneself its object, if only in passing” (p. 116). For Stewart, it is an everyday occurrence, an experiment that starts with sheer intensity and tries to find routes into a “we” that is not yet there but maybe could be. It’s a facility with imagining the potential in things that comes to people not despite the fact that it’s unlikely anything good will come of it but rather because of that fact. It’s as if the subject of extreme vulnerability turns a dream of possible lives into ordinary affects so real they become paths one can actually travel on. (2007, p. 116)

If we can imagine an activist project in which the very power of it is that nothing “good” will ever come of it, and our vulnerabilities become the tangible/material roads upon which we walk, then the activist bridge is an allegory for the ways in which not only humanist subjects can experience these ordinary affects, but more-than-human subjects can, in entanglements, conjure experience and perform such ordinary affects in/as the material roads upon which we walk. These “inanimate” objects can themselves begin to show us what an activist affect might be. An ordinary activist affect, a road to “no good” beyond itself. IDENTIFYING AN ACTIVIST AFFECT Yet another way of understanding affect is offered to us by Manning, as the force of “movement moving” (2009). This can and does occur in not only humanist subjects but all subjects. If an activist affect can be understood as not only a becoming-movement, but also as a remaining, organic and inorganic things are activists by their very presence in a world that would just as soon see the back of us/them, a world that would prefer to forget about connection, emotion, and memory itself. A world that increasingly fetishizes newness and innovation but has made no progress on integrating the artefact, the remnant, the survivor. Human and nonhuman collaborators such as the activists and the bridge change the social and cultural air and world, and in so doing changes

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our movement from the outside in, and the inside out, all at the same time. This is immanence, in which there is no prioritising of one over another, of outside over inside, of human over others. We are interested in looking more closely at the ways in which “activism” is presumed to be (always, already) empathic, wondering when and how activism is more like an affect, an intensity, a sensation (Massumi 2002). The Muslim women who locked arms on the bridge in London were not there to show empathy (though surely, they were doing that), they were doing it to show resistance, to have an effect, to create an affective ripple. A humanist affect for contemporary activism can hover between such un-nuanced spaces as “rage” and “outrage fatigue,” a kind of war-weariness that is now dispersed and “democratized” through social media engagement with the rolling waves of activist reactions to globally relentless terrorist and other violences. In this new digital/virtual ability to be “active” to global violations and violences, and the still emotion-driven nature of social media engagements, as well as face to face engagements on the street, it is important to interrogate the place of catharsis. Brecht’s alienation effect (in German, Verfremdungseffekt, see introduction) of making the familiar strange in order to provoke a more critical audience response and avoid a simple cathartic release that, Brecht felt, pacified the audience—or rather, redirected their rage and falsely released it before real social activism or social change could be achieved. In this way, Brecht felt that catharsis was an enemy of social activism. We too question whether “simple activism” of marches, social media exchanges and circulations dissipates the energy/ force/emotion that must be retained to drive sustained social movements. Managing emotion becomes part of an activist agenda or activist ethics of care as we seek to move from a march to a movement. Yet what about those who do not wish to move into something more coherent, more sustainable? Or those who don’t wish to find words for the intensities that drive them into and out of sociality? Can activism create affect strong enough to move past anything like empathy or emotions, to move the body directly into action without a need for “rage,” resentments, us/them logics, or discourse even of forgiveness, all limited by the rhetoric and discourses of emotion? Or is affect is attached to instinct more than feeling or emotion? To the ripple that breaks the flow of the ordinary, rather than the disaster? Indeed, for Deleuze, “affect is in many ways synonymous with force or forces of encounter . . . affect more often transpires within and across the subtlest of shuttling intensities: all the miniscule . . . events of the unnoticed. The ordinary” (Murphie 2014, n.p.). Answering these questions means tuning into the intensities and instincts shuttling between and among the driver, the rental car, the dead bodies, the houses of parliament, the women, and the bridge. The uniqueness of an event, and its particular affect, is contingent upon and embedded within its own pe-



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culiar time, place, and action (Harris 2015). In affective moments, sites and encounters like these, an assemblage of people, weather, objects, time both past and future, and feeling in the present moment combine to send a metaphysical refusal of terrorism out into spacetime (Manning; for more on this see chapter 3). The “collective emergence of tactical performance charged by public, communal action,” one in which feelings, emotions, and bodies and things “become palpable, viscerally pressing forth” (Madison 2010, p. 5) generates both activist and affective reverberations that ripple around, through, and up against the impenetrability of terrorism. So too can the animacy of terrorism be seen as a wall, abutted by our wall, and the quiet actions of the women and the bridge be felt as a pulse of small tremors that might topple the wall, piece by piece, bit by bit. Even as we feel the force of activist affect and its power to pull down the wall of terror, we also feel a growing inability to experience affect in a world of increasing outrage, despair, alienation, and suspicion. These are sensations as well as emotions all doing different work. If one were to formulate a posthuman affect of terrorism, and an affect of activism, what might they look like? Would they look? Looking to the bridge, the car, the Houses of Parliament: The driver never tried to get Theresa May, the prime minister. Still, the car speeding along Bridge Street, near the Houses of Parliament, gives it a different weight, the car a different kind of acceleration. How does the location give the act a different weight, and acceleration a different vibrancy? Contrast that with the women who stood their “ground,” on the bridge, seemingly alienated although proximate with parliament, who got no response from parliament. If these multiple activist affects were different kinds of pre-accelerations toward each other and acting with and against each other in an ecology (or networked map) of activism-making, how might we consider affect as an event occurring between these objects-in-time differently by removing the binary of human and nonhuman, of animate and inanimate? The possibilities go beyond Deleuze’s articulation of an immanence that is a plane, that is complete in itself, that is not based upon pre-existing objects or subjects, and for which there is no beginning and no end. In our second example, we take up the possibility of queer immanence “versus” Barad’s articulation of transcendence, both using the genderless hair style known as the “queer fade,” by way of affective personal narrative. THE QUEER FADE When people are “misgendered” these days it is some misreading of the alchemical combination of gender performance and thingness. Part of trans*2

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un/intelligibility comes from the incomprehensible juxtaposition of thingness and performance that defies socialized ways of “thinging” and performing gender. Trans* subjects often “pass” until they smile or laugh or talk—these are the more difficult performances of transition than shifting the thingness of breasts, jaw, or hair. For example, what is the difference in thingness between a butch dyke and a trans* or genderqueer subject? Intentionality, sure, and self-definition. But there’s more: how is the materiality of the genderqueer body changing in its performance and sliding around and along that spectrum of un/intelligibility? We offer the following narrative which positions hair as a genderqueer object with its own agency and its own life, perhaps even its own identity that “frames” its human host and informs human observers. *** I recently went to get my hair cut in Melbourne and to my delight found that my new barber knew how to cut my hair. The barber—Rhea—was recommended to me by a dyke friend who has trouble finding an appropriate hair cutter. That might make you laugh, considering what makes an “appropriate” hair cutter for gay, lesbian or trans* people. I honestly never thought about it much. What I did think about was how much money I waste going to new cuttters hoping to find someone who will one day understand my queer head and my request for a “short back and sides” in a way that somehow—inexplicably—might fit this head. My head. I don’t know why the hairdressers I’ve known have never worked out for me. “Well because you’ve gone to hairdressers, for a start,” Rhea said to me. “I’ve gone to queer hairdressers though,” I said. “It’s not the same,” Rhea said. “You need a barber. A queer barber.” It got me thinking. Zhe3 explained to me that first of all, hairdressers are different than barbers, and almost never is a hairdresser going to be appropriate for a masculine person. I am a masculine person. I’m a masculine person who wants to look masculine but not scare people off the street (which made hir laugh) and every time I get anything even approaching what I would call a masculine hair cut, it is so harsh that it gives the wrong impression. I don’t want to appear threatening or military, I just want short hair. Sometimes when I get the “short back and sides” I ask for, my colleagues go, “Oh wow, you really went for it hey!?” Or: “That’s brave!” In this world, you can supposedly now be trans* or even at times nonbinary, as long as it’s not “scary.” Read: other. Scary is never good, and as all people of color know, no matter how unfounded it is, or rather how founded in bias. Normative society has its own ideas about what is scary, even when



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one is trying to just be one’s self. If majoritarian folks become uncomfortable, it all start to go downhill and we’re back to the aggressive transman or brown person ruining everyone’s day. Secondly, zhe explained to me that even some barbers are also not right because they can only see heads as male or female, and although what I possibly want would be considered a male cut, most barbers somehow have an internal resistance to cutting a female head in a male way. Or cutting a female head at all, for that matter. So, they are kind of like doctors with a Hippocratic oath; that is, they will do no harm and because (in their eyes) to cut a female like a male is doing (her) harm, they simply cannot bring themselves to do it. But thirdly, zhe explained to me, even when some female-identifying people go to “barber” school and learn how to cut hair in perhaps a more (trans-) gendered/friendly way, they are often not welcome in traditional barber shops, which are decidedly male spaces. That is why zhe opened her barbershop because there is both a need for non-gendered barbering skills, and there is also a need for safe spaces for queer barbers, and queer barBEES (that is, those of us who want a queer haircut). The barbershop had become something of a drop-in centers for queers looking for sanctuary. There was a nail section, where mostly M2Fs4 came for getting their nails done, although Rhea admitted she now gets her eyebrows done but draws the line at nails. There is a hair coloring section (perhaps surprisingly the most diversely gendered, sexualized, and intergenerational part of the shop), there is a tattoo section, and then there are her chairs. The shop is filled with retro furniture and graffiti’d walls. It is small and intimate. It is right across the street from the only queer bookshop in town. Zhe said they hired a male-identifying barber at the shop once but he just couldn’t cope with the spectrum so they had to let him go. That was a few years ago. Last month, zhe hired a “male-identifying person on the spectrum,” and that seems to be going much better. She said mostly what they struggle with are the pronouns, but he’s doing well, so. Everyone is comfortable. Comfort is the barometer. Is comfort an affect? Is comfort the affect of a queer barbershop in this generation (hint: it was not in the 1990s; in the 1990s it was more like rage)? Of queer sanctuary? Of good queer hair? Where can genderqueer hair thrive? *** Rhea is English and was trained to cut hair in England but has lived in Australia for over ten years, like me. Zhe despairs at the resistant gendering of haircutting, which zhe considers worse here than back home.

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I described the hair that I wanted, and zhe told me immediately it has a name: “It’s called a Queer Fade.” “Oh, it is?” “Oh hell yeah. It’s very popular.” Great, I said, thinking “it can’t be this easy after like decades of being misunderstood” (this is another problem queers encounter: sympathy suspicion—we are so used to being misunderstood that we can’t hardly believe it when we are, so it sometimes leads to confusion or conflict, but not today). Rhea went on: “Look, it’s like I told you: nonbinary people want a barber to approach their head like a canvas. It is blank. It can be anything you want it to be. Not make any assumptions about what certain genders—even transgenders—usually do or want. People want to walk in here and say “cut it like a female cut today” or “buzz it like an army cut” but still expect me to take into account their female features of body characteristics, or things like that. So for example you want a fade haircut, but I can’t cut your hair like a 100 pound twenty-year-old, because that would look ridiculous, and I can’t cut it even like a straight-presenting male army sergeant because then. . . .” Yes well then what? I contemplate looking like a male army sergeant which sounds kind of fabulous. “But what if I don’t care how I look?” I ask hir. “Well,” said Rhea, “everyone pretty much cares how they look. It’s just that some people don’t care if they offend others by how they look. Or some people enjoy to offend or shock others. So, there’s a spectrum with that too.” A shock spectrum. How wonderful. As I sat on the stool getting my queer fade, I started to think about the ways in which everything, everything is gendered, and read through gender. And yes, I could think about that in terms of Butler and gender performativity and indeed it is a repetition of acts, certainly it is. But also, I started to think about the gendering of objects. And those languages in which everything has a gendered article, and how in English we think that’s so weird and sometimes we say it’s old fashioned or confining or I don’t know what but you know we do the same thing. And it’s not just that pink stuff is for girls and blue stuff is for boys and if I’m nonbinary then do I have to wear yellow forever and oh god I look so bad in yellow. It’s worse than that. I loved how the barber took my head and my face and my body as a canvas, yes, but also an artwork. Zhe put all these elements together as zhe was working:



Affective Objects 33

My jaw is not so straight as it once was, and my face is rounder. Even my hair has a different texture now, and my body too is less muscular. The queer fade, zhe explained, is about putting all of those elements together to create a picture, an impression. One picture can be short but masculine. One can be hard and leave me still looking like a woman. One pet peeve of mine is that most hair cutters if I can even get them to cut my hair in a “masculine” way then go sort of overboard, and they always somehow cut the back of my hair in a straight line across the back. I hate that. It looks boxy and harsh and inelegant and just because I am masculinepresenting doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate elegance. The taper into the back of a neck is such a sensual and tender and sexy part of a person, one that I’ve always loved, and I hate to think of my poor taper being boxed off—it feels violent and disrespectful. I sat and watched Rhea buzz and snip, snip, snip and I heard a small gentle masculine sigh escape my hair that day, a sigh of relief at the touch of a barber who saw it, felt its queerness, understood its individuality. Finessed its masculine want. After Rhea finished, I slid my familiar sunglasses back on and took in my appearance. There was a look that was different, certainly, than my poor hair on those days after another shitty heteronormative buzz in a regular salon. But there was also a way in which I felt that my hair had found itself, was sitting up a little straighter (no pun intended), was more itself than it had been for some time, or ever. “It’s happy, your hair,” Rhea said with a smile. “It feels.” It does feel, I thought. “A masculine cut on a trans* person is particular. On you. It’s a particular cut. It’s different.” I agree. I feel sad for all the years that my hair was mauled by someone who didn’t understand this, us, in this moment. Like I felt sorry for my childhood self who had to wear dresses, once I realized that my resistance was a viable thing. The queer fade is a cool cut, but its more than that. The queer fade is a haircut on the spectrum, a gathering in the hair itself. It’s the hair being seen, being felt, honored. Becoming intelligible to the rest of my body, and to other bodies. Genderfluids and genderqueers and those of us non-binaries talk about barbers. Somehow barber is queer, hairdresser is not. Hairdresser was like so 90s for fags and drag queens but now barber is my neutral-not-neutral home away from home. But if hair has its own life, its own journey, and Rhea and my queer fade were both an event for my human person, while at

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the same time an event for the living object of my hair, then the queer fade is an intra-action, an example of Barad’s agential realism while at the same time queering the notion. It is both binary and non-binary, both queer and in the being seen/done by Rhea it is, finally, not queer at all. It is “normal,” for lack of a better word. THE LIFE CYCLE OF (A) HAIR There is a large and dynamic body of scholarly and popular literature about hair and its many performative lives, particularly in African American culture. Queer hair has not been addressed as thoroughly. But there is also such a thing as “hair science,” in which we can learn about the object life cycle of hair (its thingness). All hair, not just queer hair. Hair has its own stages, needs, wants, normativities. Hair loss, hair thinning, and hair problems abound. For F2Ms, hair thinning and baldness may come from taking male hormones after a lifetime as a “woman” with no relationship to the idea of hair loss at all. Hair shock. Hair reconceptualization, as part of the trans* journey. I have enjoyed learning that the life cycle of hair has three phases: anagen, catagen, and telogen. Each hair has an average life cycle of two to seven years—that is, much less than an average human lifespan. So, we can say, in the first instance, that the life cycle of hair is different and distinct from the life cycle of its human carrier. Which in itself is a kind of agental autonomy. Each day, most people lose fifty to eighty hair strands, and each hair follicle produces a new hair which grows to maturity before falling out. So that is, each hair follicle has its own life span, which is also distinct from the human carrier, and from the hair strands that emerge out of the follicle. Indeed, each strand of hair has its own life cycle which is independent of all other hair strands on that head. How remarkable. The period of active hair growth is called the anagen phase. It lasts from one to three or four years. Hair grows approximately 1 centimeter per month. The second phase is called the catagen phase or transitional phase, which lasts two to three weeks. This is the end of the hair fiber production cycle, when the follicle retracts from the surface of the scalp. The hair stops growing, and remains in this phase for a few weeks before moving into the resting phase, or telogen phase. Who knew hair has a resting phase? It makes sense, all that growing, it’s hard work. In this resting phase, the hair is no longer growing, but is still attached for approximately three months, after which it starts to fall out when brushed or washed or when the human carrier is pulling their hair out after another trans- or homophobic encounter. After the hair falls out, a new strand begins to form in the follicle, a cycle that is repeated twenty-five



Affective Objects 35

to thirty times throughout the life cycle of the human carrier. This individual cycling of the hair growth and loss makes sense: if all the hairs on our heads grew at the same time, in synchronicity, we would go through bushy periods and bald periods. The staggered nature of the hair life cycle offers yet another example of the power of individuation and difference, an animate object lesson the value of which human subjects seem still to misunderstand. While hair doesn’t continue growing after death (despite the urban legend), there are many ways in which hair demonstrates its agency and autonomy in non-normative or queer ways. Alopecia for example is a hair loss disease which while understood as an auto-immune condition (like rheumatoid arthritis or diabetes) has no known cause, or cure—it is a condition we might talk about as queering the hairy body. Spots of baldness on the head but also elsewhere on the body, alopecia has a particularly public quality about it. That is, like queerness in heteronormative culture, alopecia cannot kill you but it can threaten your wellbeing through depression, social ostracization, and lowering of self-esteem. The queer life of hair is autonomous in numerous ways including its object ability to impact on the human subject. Its lives are connected to the human subject, but independent of it. Its own life cycle, character, and even absence are expressions of its autonomous agency and public performativity. THE QUEERNESS OF SILENCE IN ACTIVISM Hair, haircuts, bridges. The affect of activism, the banality of terrorism, and the object relations of the everyday. How do these “object lives” inform the human subjects which they impact, or indeed and perhaps more importantly how do they ignore, supersede, or wilfully abandon us? Is it possible to think productively about the affect of these objects as an intra-active collaboration between the work “done” by humans and things? In that collaboration, attention to the spaces, the silences and the not-yets are important activators. Performance studies and social movement theory have contributed to complex understandings of “performing rage” or the performance of anger. Yet what of the silence of the bridge in our earlier example, the Westminster activist bridge, or Emma Gonzalez’s silence (Holman Jones & Harris 2018)? Might there be affective and activist lessons there for how affect is passed not only between multiple humans, but also between human and non-human? Unlike language, the carrier of meaning between humans, “versus” the material, might silence be the carrier of affect between species? Anthony Giddens has called the separation between object and subject “ontological security” (1991) a notion that Barad has untangled through her now

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well-known notion of “agential cut,” a concept for describing the “apparatus of observation,” in which the subject-object are recognized as separate and therefore able to interact with one another (see also the discussion of intraaction in terms of the archive in chapter 2 and queer object time in chapter 3). For her, the material body that has predominated as a focus of feminist research, is always separate from and in relation to practice. Researchers can only reach a kind of reality that is not objective (“things-in-themselves” or “things-behind-phenomena”) but rather as “‘things’-in-phenomena” (Barad 2003, p. 817), a subjectivity that is performed and fluid rather than static (you can hear Butler in this work). She has made the point that laboratory (and other) research is investigated through humanist eyes: our so-called empirical evidence is evidence always already as it relates to us. Barad suggests that things do not yet effectively exist outside of human observation or “experimental arrangements” (2003, p. 822) or as she puts it: “matter is instances in its intra-active becomings—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency . . . matter refers to the materiality/materialization of phenomena, not to an inherent fixed property of abstract independently existing objects” (2003, p. 822). In this book, we argue that things—whether observed or not by human researchers/collaborators/intra-actors—are their own affectively queer performances. We leave you with these multiple theorists’ arguments for the ways in which objects are already agentic (or agential) without and beyond their “sticky attachments” to humans, other animals and objects (Ahmed 2004). For now, we hope we can agree that things have lives that, whether it seems queer to us or not, are dynamic, observable and often entirely independent from human influence. CRITICAL QUEER ASSEMBLAGES Mobility is a foundational element of queer life, queer ideas and concepts as well as of queer scholarship. As such, queer mobilities—literally and conceptually—characterize modernity (capitalist, terrorist and activist) and its academic interpretations. Queer epistemologies, for example, often emerge out of popular events while also being critically distant from them, both in and out, both subject and object, activist and acted-upon. Heteronormative reactions to queer mobilities as well as the marking of migrants, refugees, vagrants, and travelers as perverse and dangerous, have been constant drivers of social change and its scholarly analysis, a condition of modernity that is only accelerating through digitally-inflected online/offline worlds/encounters. Queer theories, affects, activisms, and objects can be understood as co-constitutive in response to the rise of nationalist and con-



Affective Objects 37

servative religious ideologies, accelerating global warming and expanding global markets. The intertwined dynamics of queer mobilities have critically changed the ways in which we consider and advocate for human and morethanhuman subjects as urgently and affectively interconnected as well as queerly interdependent. With an explosion of queer from concepts, scholarship, disciplines, mobilities, technologies, geopolitical migrations, onto-epistemological sites of labor, and global intimacies, we are thinking queerly with and through things that affectively spin us into entanglements that ask us work responsively to the worldings around and in us. By decentering the human in queer and affect theory, we respond to Chen and Luciano’s (2015) call to treat “the human” as simply one of many elements in a queer critical assemblage, as well as understand critical storytelling practices as inherently queer practices in times of terror (Harris & Holman Jones 2017). We have explored some ways of investigating the complex relations between queerness, objects, and “affect” as they emerge in the shifting geopolitical landscape of contemporary terrorist/ capitalist culture, and its analysis and activism by queer agents (both human and more-than-human), as a door-opening invitation to chapter 2 and the rest of the book. NOTES 1.  See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), Sara Ahmed (2004, 2006, 2014), Lauren Berlant (2011), Heather Love (2007), David L. Eng (2010), Ann Cvetkovich (2003), Chen (2012), Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano (2015), Anthony Siu (2013), Shaka McGlotten (2013), Judith Butler (2015), and David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub (2009). 2.  Here we use trans* to denote all identifications and subjectivities along the noncisgender continuum, not only binary ones. 3.  Gender-neutral pronoun. 4.  Male-to-female transgender people.

Chapter Two

Queering the Archive

THE ARCHIVE—DIGITAL AND OTHERWISE In this chapter, we consider the ways in which things/artefacts/objects increasingly and collectively constitute an archive. This era—the first quarter of the twenty-first century—is typified through digital technology as an era of “the archive,” and characterized largely in response to the ways in which that archive demands to be curated (by humans racing to keep up). At the same time, the agency of the digital archive threatens to overwhelm the increasing anachronism and precarity of the non-digital archive. What cannot be algorithmically searched, parsed, and curated increasingly does not exist. Though as Kathryn Ricketts writes, “If I am a museum of my own lived experiences, what are my artifacts?” (Ricketts 2011, p. 4). In this chapter, we argue that this process of re/making as “digitally intelligible” is a kind of queering of the archive of human and nonhuman experience; a presumptive sign of “progress” which leaves in its wake the ephemera of narrowing relevance and ballooning obsolescence, a threat to not only the material world but to thought-worldings, relational practices and the notion of sustainability itself. What matters—and consequently what is perceived to be worthy of “keeping”—is coming to be more and more narrowly defined. For example, at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, a clever interweaving of his classic and other contemporary digital works hangs in the foyer, pointing toward ways in which Van Gogh’s work remains contemporary but also suggests future directions for visual art and non/representation. The many Van Gogh-inspired selfies in this exhibition space provoke us to consider Van Gogh’s numerous early self-portraits as not just expedient due to his poverty (never sufficient funds for models), but also an iterative search for self-representation, potentially an endless loop of creative autoethnography, 39

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and a signal of the impossibility of any fixed notion of self-representation, differently embodied in the nineteenth century and now. That is, the archive may look different, but the human, posthuman, and creative impulse to accumulate, store and re/cover “historical knowledge and forms of remembrance” is persistent and familiar (Merewether 2006, p. 10). The growing field of critical consumer studies attests to the need for more reflective approaches to user-experience and archiving, and brings attention to the ethics of accumulation. The ability to accumulate things—images, commentary, histories, opinions, perspectives, communities and voices— demands a change in our relationship with knowledge and the politics that drive and shape such knowledges. Where Foucault’s (1969/1992) “archaeologist of knowledge” aimed to learn about and re/cover and re/construct our knowledge about the past by culling and sifting material remains was never interested in knowing stuff or accumulating knowledge as a monolithic entity but rather in re/covering an re/constructing knowledge of the past by sifting through material remains, an important shift has perhaps occurred in popular culture. Contemporary archivists have moved their attention away from understanding knowledge or facts, toward making them, or what some in hybrid social movement theory, DIY, and digital cultures research formulate as curating them. Such teleological shifts trouble questions about expertness, user experience, and prosumer cultures. Some posthumanists, new materialists, and artificial intelligence scholars wonder about the impact of the possibility that increasingly the best experts of knowledge accumulation and interpretation are machine and/or nonhuman. Research contexts and relationships have also been deeply impacted by this shift in thinking. Recent innovations in how we look at data, especially in more agentic ways, nudge researchers toward ever dynamic, multi-directional and interactive relationships with the data we formerly may have thought of as “ours.” Today, data is increasingly framed as “having a life,” even while the dehumanization of organically human subjects deteriorates through environmental displacement, religious and other conflict. Yet data can also be vibrant, big, or “broken” (Pink et al. 2016). This suggests new ways of thinking about life as having/being data. A recurring question in this book is the distance/difference between transactional or utilitarian approaches to research, and to artistic, aesthetic, or creative practices with and through things. We find the self-conscious and sometimes oppressive need to intervene in everyday practices in order to make them “data” to be harmful, colonial, and imperialist. We wonder what data might show us about humanizing creative practice and our affective and intimate relationships with things. To begin, we draw on the popular and well-known example of two paintings by Vincent Van Gogh as material manifestations



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of the commonalities of both data and art, relationship and knowledge. While Van Gogh and his work have been the subject (and object) of countless artistic and analytic queer treatments, many focus on his troubled and inconclusive intimate life. Here we turn to Van Gogh’s body of work, as a material body or archive which stands as a trace of the intra-active event of his lifeas-performance. It is a body of work that remains vibrantly indeterminate and defiantly unintelligible. VAN GOGH AND HIS ARCHIVE The intense and problematic relationship between Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, most particularly their last parting, offers an example of an aesthetic and affective event which might be seen best through the paintings which both anticipated and remain from that encounter, rather than the narratives that are so often drawn upon. In late December 1888, merely two months into their 1888 house-sharing arrangement in Arles, Gaugin left in a rage. Van Gogh entered his last, protracted, and relentless spiral downward into his eventual mental breakdown and death eighteen months later, on July 29, 1890. According to Van Gogh, they fought and Gaugin left, and in despair Van Gogh went walking, cut off his ear, then brought it to a local sex worker. However, other accounts suggest that perhaps Gaugin himself cut his friend’s ear off, a fact which Van Gogh may have hidden. Either way, there is no real or exact evidence of events based on narrative accounts. Still, such “historical” accounts continue to drive or frame our understandings of events, even in the postmodern recognition that narratives are subjective, incomplete and told by those with a vested interest in portraying the events in power-drenched if not self-congratulatory terms. And, in relation to these stories, what do material objects have to say about the archive or the unfolding of an event or sequence of events? Art historian Charles Merewether wonders whether what is “materially present, visible or legible” might be “adequate to an event that has passed out of present time” (p. 12). The relation between an artifact and an archive is that of a residual trace or traces which “contain the potential to fragment and destabilize either remembrance as recorded, or history as written as sufficient means for providing the last word in the account of what has come to pass” (Merewether 2006, p. 10). Looking to the archive for traces of “what has come to pass” belies our obsession with what Walter Benjamin (Benjamin & Underwood 1936/2008) called the aura and the totemic value of artefacts that outlive their original contexts.

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Gauguin’s Chair In November 2017, we visit the Van Gogh museum on a blustery day as part of our first trip to Amsterdam. We linger before these two chairs-in-conversation, this pair, this companionable duality that eluded Van Gogh in “real” life some 130 years before. In anticipation of the Gaugin’s visit to Arles in October 1888, Van Gogh painted hopeful and exuberant sunflower canvases to decorate the house. He painted the chairs in November while they were together. Instead of painting portraits, straightforward renderings of himself and his idol, Van Gogh painted chairs, two symbolic portraits that contained all the ephemera and all the timeless symbolisms of the two men. They were, in a sense, in the tradition of the vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the Netherlands. They subtly showed both the vibrancy and decay of both men and their oeuvres. Van Gogh painted them as companion portraits, “Gauguin’s Armchair,” and his own “companion painting,” “Vincent’s Chair with His Pipe.” Gauguin’s chair conveys a sense of shadow; deep, earthy reds, greens, and browns punctuated by bright yellow and blue; and two candles glowing and modern French novels on the seat of the chair—a nod to Gauguin’s imagination and use of dream imagery. The walls in the Arles cottage were white but Vincent painted them a deep green as a tribute to “mystery and the night” (“Gaugin’s Chair” 2018). Gauguin’s visit was a big moment for Van Gogh as an artist, and Van Gogh was never easy in the company of his fellow artists, seeking and often failing at friendship and collaborative community. He had been inviting friends, artists, and colleagues from his time in Paris to come stay at Arles, to help him establish it as an artists’ colony, and it was slow going, perhaps owing to his frequent quarrels with friends and family members. In the lead-up to his mentor Gauguin’s arrival, Van Gogh painted more than 200 works, including the more famous “Sunflowers” and fruit trees. But it is Van Gogh’s chair, and not Gauguin’s that draws my attention. I’m pulled in by its everydayness. Its movement. Van Gogh’s brushstrokes somehow both materializing the liveness of that beautiful (perfect?) anticipation of his mentor and friend and their coming together gone wrong, all at once. Van Gogh’s Chair Van Gogh’s own portrait was in bright yellow and blue, on the seat lay a simple clay pipe with tobacco and crumpled piece of paper, both humble things of the earth. Of the two Vincent’s chair is the more rustic, made of cheaper wood, symbolic of his view that Gauguin was more sophisticated, worldly and successful.



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Van Gogh had technique, but Gauguin was considered a master of the conceptual. Which is more fully an ontological project, that which repositions humans outside of the means of making knowledge, of understanding and being? Or that which positions us as part of the workings of knowing, understanding and being, as enfolded into its very performance? Perhaps Vincent’s pain can be considered the ontological center of meaning-making in creative intra-action rather than the workings of an individual human mind (or talent), so deeply confused, seeking to “represent” meaning, being painted into sense for outside others. Perhaps, too, the chairs taken together, the companions they were meant to be, teach us about our desires to know and the show the world in all its dynamism and indeterminacy. How can inanimate things be companions? What does art know about affect that humans do not? We wander along shadowy cold November (2017) Amsterdam streets exploring these quandaries and considering how disappointed Gauguin must have been to finally acquiesce and go to Arles with the promise of heat, burning sunsets, and companionship, only to find a cold, windy, and unfriendly place. We duck into a warm café near the canal and watch the light fade; rain begins to fall. We debate whether the impressionist movement itself, or more accurately, impressionism as a practice that seeks to make impressions rather than “accurate” representations, is a doing of affect theory. ART-AFFECTS (ARTIFACTS) AS RELATIONSHIP; THE MATERIAL(IST) PROXY We discuss the chairs (and the men) over dinner. We weep at Vincent’s suffering. He remains an enigma and we are not convinced or satisfied by the elliptical commentary on our headsets, limited as it is to dates and times and so-called historical “facts.” Even while the historical narrative mains partial, and subjective, it claims to something more: the paintings tell a story that feels more complete, if less comprehensible. Narrative fails, but the chairs are resilient. We say Van Gogh was concerned with the “theory” (or technique) of painting more than the content. His obsession was with brushstrokes and light; we compare this to formal versus theoretical innovation in our own worlds of scholarship. We debate the impossibility of Gauguin “versus” Van Gogh as the dreamlike versus the real, the qualitative versus quantitative, the mathematics of painting. Of the persistent and immature binary imperative of any us versus them. Van Gogh was committed to the “real” conditions and precarity of his first subjects, yet equally committed to the burgeoning Impressionist

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and modernist movements, wishing create the mood and the resonance of “The Potato Eaters” rather than any “realist” portrait. Gauguin, by contrast, was concerned with content, yet believed that the form was an imaginative rather than a space for “rendering” anything real. Gauguin sought to represent the dream life, the abstract. He encouraged Van Gogh (and others) to paint from memory in order to stimulate the imagination. Vincent and Paul fought over this. We wonder (and disagree) at dinner whether this could be likened to scholars who are differently interested in or focused on theoretical or formal experimentation (the theorists, the philosophers) versus those who are primarily concerned with “applied” research, that is the content, relationship, and mode. In this formulation, we decide that Van Gogh would be an affect scholar, and Gauguin a methodologist. There are myriad analyzes of the chairs and their symbolism as both representing the two men as well as psychoanalytic considerations of Van Gogh’s homoerotic attraction for Gauguin as well as his less-symbolic differentiation between them along class lines. Rather than these tacts (or tactics), here we are interested in Van Gogh and his intra-action with a number of objects and beings: the chairs, the house, the ear, Gauguin, his brother Theo, the prostitute and the hospital. The links provide a breadcrumb trail that resists analysis and affectually queers the archive. They co-constitute an archive that, in its collectivity, tells other stories in remnants and material traces. No words, only traces. We reject the meta-narrative of Vincent as mad, and his brother Theo as “together.” We appreciate and notice their interdependence (whether noted by art historians or not), noting that Theo died so soon (six months) after the loss of Vincent. We note the juxtaposition of Theo dying of an STD while Vincent remains “chaste” in the literature. We recognize them as two sides of the same material and spiritual and practice-led body. We recognize the inability of Vincent to offer his ear (his vulnerability) to Gauguin, or his brother, or any intimate other—he cut it in a field, and offered it to a stranger. In grief and despair, Van Gogh was still offering others objects, material manifestations of a desire for what? Recognition? Connection? Differentiation? Care? Whatever his desires, each and all of his attempts fail to cement any effective emotional tie to follow. In their solidity, perhaps Van Gogh was hoping to find a queering of the emotional unmooring that he was feeling: Perhaps Gauguin should have worried about what his friend was feeling when he portrayed both of them like this—gone, vanished, leaving only their old familiar chairs. After all, Van Gogh, who loved English graphic art, got the idea from an obituary image. At Christmas 1870 the Victorian magazine the Graphic published a valediction for an absent fixture of Christmas past: Charles Dickens had died that year, and Luke Fildes’[s] illustration The Empty Chair, Gad’s



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Hill—Ninth of June 1870 depicts Dickens’s chair at his desk, pulled back, but empty, no one there to write that year’s Christmas story. . . .Van Gogh smoked a pipe because Dickens advised it as a cure for melancholy. His pipe lies abandoned here. (Jones 2004)

Yet objects can be lives and worlds in and of themselves of course, not just as symbols of human lives lost, lived or emergent. Gaston Bachelard’s famous Poetics of Space (1964/1994) leads us to consider the house as body. The need for (or illusion of) refuge, a basic need for most animals, is evoked by the functional but also symbolic power of the house or home, but also of such affective objects as Van Gogh’s paintings from late 1888 at Arles. THE POSTHUMAN POWER OF THE PAINTING RETURN In one of Van Gogh’s most famous Arles paintings, Sunflowers, the flowers are dying. For the two of us wandering in the Van Gogh museum on this rainy day, it’s a self-told tale of sunflowers, by the sunflowers. An autoethnography of sunflowers. We feel their insistence of their own truth, not an artist’s depiction of an idealized bouquet for the enjoyment of others, but this is a fantasy, isn’t it? The paintings are painted by Van Gogh’s hand, painted for himself perhaps, and an audience of other non-sunflowers. Still, we love it because there is truth in self-telling, self-representation, even when it is mediated, as by Van Gogh. Simple, radiant, heavy flowers, all facing different directions. There’s a feeling of power in their heavy heads. The sunflowers, the house, and Gauguin, were all a part of Van Gogh’s vision of building an artists’ community in the house at Arles, a place where he might finally belong, a place of his making, his belonging, an alternative space—a gift, he might have thought—and yet, no one wanted his gift. Later, he offered his ear but that gift too was unwanted. To have Gaugin come, finally, after so much cajoling, and indeed only once Vincent’s brother Theo agreed to pay a monthly stipend to the destitute Gauguin, and him staying so briefly, was worse than perhaps not coming at all. In the end, all Van Gogh had was an empty house. Two empty chairs. And the sunflowers. He painted five versions of “The Sunflowers” between August and September of 1888, all full of dazzling light. He preferred the dying, the rundown, the rustic, because he said it was, to him, more true to life. We vibrate with Vincent in these identifications of life in death, light in shadow, beauty in the rustic, the broken-down, belonging in the abject. These are not vibrant sunflowers in full bloom, but they are sunflowers demanding to be heard and seen in their dying light. We are moved by their vulnerability, their humility,

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their truth in decay. We are held fast by these sunflowers in a busy gallery space with humans moving quickly past, buzzing, a word here or there. We find a posthuman insistence here, a refusal to move on as Van Gogh and other humans have (inevitably) had to do. The paintings remain in ways that we cannot. We are comforted by their heavy materiality and resilience. We rejoice in the cross-breeding between paint and human and the hybrid beings like sunflowers that can come of these border-crossings. In May 1889, after his bad time with the ear, Van Gogh entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy, not far from Arles. In that single year before he died, he created approximately 142 works. One of them was The Irises in May 1889, while still in the asylum. This painting is bright blue on a yellow contrasting background and also some of the dying flowers are falling over (he did two distinct versions, but only the one at the museum in Amsterdam has the dying flowers, the other is more cheerful). Needless to say, he preferred the irises in their decline. It is one of his most famous works, and in 1987 (temporarily) became the most expensive painting ever sold, going for $54 million (Reif 1987). This painting life, this commodity life, is inextricably tied to Vincent’s and yet is independent as well. Its vibrancy is often overshadowed by Van Gogh’s biography, his timeline, his mental and emotional life narrative. The materiality of the work—like the chairs, and the sunflowers—struggles to be encountered in its own time, taken on its own merits, even in this so-called postmodern moment in which the author is no longer foregrounded in considerations of works of art. Even the totemic value, the aura of the work, is not its primary calling card in popular contexts and conversations but rather its place in relation to Van Gogh. And like all family members, surely The Irises has its own identity, its independent agency, its queer life apart from it co-creator, its maker, its material parent Vincent. Yet Vincent’s relationship with the environment, as opposed to the consistently disappointing human race, is also evident in the trend of subject in his final works. His focus near the end, in such paintings as Wheat Field with Reaper (September 1889) as well as Almond Blossom (Feb 1890), is increasingly tied to the sky. No longer intent on peasant faces or human life in literal ways at all (as he began), he goes back to his love of nature, his comfort in beauty and the outdoors, a place of belonging. Tree Roots (late July 1890), Wheat Fields with Crows (July 1890) and others during this last period take the viewer back into the earth. Vincent’s more-than-human orientations and sources of comfort document not just ways of seeing and encountering, but also of core relationships between the human and nonhuman, our deep need of the nonhuman, and the endlessly unconditional belonging and renewal to be found there. The wheat fields in which Vincent spent so



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much of his final months painting, and in which he eventually shot himself, might have their own ways of holding and re/telling what Van Gogh brought to them. Images of these works are now in the public domain, given the length of time since the artist’s death. We review them online after our intimate encounter with so many of them at the Amsterdam museum, and compare the disembodied experience with the proximate one. So much is lost. And why, we wonder, is the agency of these representations taken (or given) in relation to their human maker still? At a time when the “personhood” of an increasing range of sea animals and natural environments are being recognized and protected by the United Nations and other international rights’ bodies, we wonder at the rights of these images (if not their expensive material bodies) to be circulated without their permission. Artworks like these might play their own role in digital and disembodied posthuman agency, and the queering of nonhuman rights. If, for example, such works’ original incarnations can sell for tens of millions of dollars, and yet their digital reproductions can be circulated and “used” without permission, how does that alter the relationship between iterations of Wheat Fields with Crows, for example, if not between the works and Vincent himself? Here, in the pages of this manuscript, itself a digital and material work, Van Gough’s paintings have created yet other image bodies and relationships—in this case, Michael Crowhurst’s painting A Dog/Cat Thing with Fishes, a material and virtual response to Van Gough’s chairs, our account of encountering those chairs, and the conversations the collision of those images and ideas sponsored. In each iteration, digital works are altering material works in ways that queer the category of relationship between virtual/material more generally. We read Van Gogh’s preoccupation with form to be a corollary of the evolution of his content, in the same way that theory and practice work together and mutually-inform one another in scholarly work. Van Gogh started with portraits of peasants; when he moved to Paris, he began to experiment with color, composition, and brushstroke in still-lifes mostly concerned with beauty and affect, and near the end of his life created increasingly abstract renderings of nature that evoke emotional states more than reach for symbolic representations. The vast majority of the (seemingly endless) curatorial commentary on Van Gogh and his troubled work and life focuses primarily on the masterful, completely experimental, stylistic aspects of his late works, but neglects to wonder why he becomes increasingly abstract, possibly because despite his extensive body of letters left behind, it remains mostly conjecture. But isn’t the inconclusiveness of conjecture, even (and perhaps most interestingly) when we are faced with indeterminateness and abstraction still a central concern in creative (and theoretical) work?

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Figure 2.1.  A Dog/Cat Thing with Fishes, Michael Crowhurst Image courtesy of Michael Crowhurst.

Perhaps Van Gogh’s move toward abstraction reflects a liberation from a psychic or intellectual need for sense-making in any traditional sense. We consider whether this creative trajectory can be considered alongside theoretical moves between “pure theory,” or philosophical inquiry untethered from the demands (or constraints) of the material. Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Reaper was to him a funny painting, seen through the bars of his “cell” at the hospital where he was confined. The grim reaper, cutting down all of humanity, was “almost smiling” and the painting reified the cycle of nature, no cause for fear or sorrow (despite the dark and tumultuous sky overhead) (“Wheatfield with a Reaper” 2018). Yet the green sky followed by the completely abstract and unfinished Tree Roots say so much about drilling down into the essence of nature from which we all come and to which we all return.



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No sense-making required, just an earthly affect. The curatorial commentary on Tree Roots says: A persistent myth has arisen that the more dramatic Wheatfield with Crows is Van Gogh’s last work. However, Tree Roots is the more likely candidate, for he was unable to complete the painting, as is clear to see at the lower left. The virtually unrecognizable forms, powerful lines, and vivid colours have been forwarded to demonstrate that Van Gogh was an important forerunner of abstract art. This is the painting that was propped on his easel when he died.

What can be said about the materiality or the queer life of this painting’s position on the easel at the time of the artist’s death? In Van Gogh’s death, the queer life of Tree Roots offered a contrasting narrative about art. As the human body dies, the posthuman body remains; as the painting body more gradually disintegrates, the virtual body remains, perhaps “forever.” Frames of time expand in undulating waves, like Van Gogh’s wheat fields, or rhizomatically burrow like The Roots. This is just one of the ways in which art and its material practices can inform—not just be changed by, but change— emergent virtual creative and human-attenuated archives. Just over a hundred years later, contemporary Australian artist Patricia Piccinini continues to experiment with human/nonhuman interfaces, and the ways in which these intra-actions are co-constituting change. Her “transgenic” sculptures are themselves a kind of archive or sculpture storehouse for the ideas that most concern her: reproduction, representation, and ecological sustainability. TRANSGENICS Piccinini says she finds it surprising when people find her works grotesque, scary, or abhorrent. For her, nature is far more shocking and unsettling than anything like her sculptures. She makes sculptures, photographs, videos, drawings, installations and panel works concerned with themes of fertility, relationships and reproduction, the effects of technology on human experience including biotechnology, and futurism. She creates what she has termed “future fables for now,” thus blurring not only geospatial and species delineations but temporal ones as well. There is nostalgia and classicism in her works, while painting future (although never dystopic) scenes in which we are called toward empathy and understanding, rather than fear, isolation, and aversion. Her work problematizes advances in biotechnology and digital technologies as ethical challenges for human nature in an increasingly “artificial” world, highlighting the ways in which the blurring of boundaries between species and ecological actors both decenter human-centered culture, pushing

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humanity to find new ways of enslaving the non-human world in our service, and also exploring creative responses to the endangerment of so many species. Haraway considers Piccinini’s work in her treatise on companion species and the ongoing threat of human exceptionalism, noting, “that “Piccinini knows, living beings knotted in dynamic ecologies are opportunistic, not idealistic, and it is not surprising to find many native species flourishing in both new and old places because of the resources provided by interlopers from other lands and waters” (2008, p. 288). Indeed, Piccinini’s sculptures of human-pig hybrid beings have been described as “sculptures of life forms that don’t exist” (Heyman 2016), reflecting concern with the proliferation of pigs as subjects for biogenetic testing. Empathy and connection are foregrounded in her work and equally distributed amongst human and non-human subjects. In the video accompanying her Brisbane 2018 solo show at the GOMA arts center, Piccinini says, “Even when a character is alone, there’s a relationship. They are part of an ecosystem.” She shows humans interacting with hybrid beings that have both human and animal characteristics, sometimes with an element of the unknown. Her sculpture The Bond features a mother figure holding a young child who is “part human, part pig and part running shoe” (GOMA 2018). In The Bond, Piccinini explores how people can understand and connect with other beings despite their differences.

Figure 2.2.  The Bond, Patricia Piccinini

Image courtesy of Patricia Piccinini, Tolarno Galleries, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.



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She anthropomorphizes machines with both animal and human characteristics, famously in her scooter sculpture The Stags (2008) and elsewhere, which also consider the implications of consumer culture. In the GOMA exhibition, the curator’s notes on the sculpture The Struggle (2017) observe: This heightened animal-inspired drama has been modelled after the work of eighteenth-century Romantic painter George Stubbs, famous for his cycle of “Horse and Lion” subjects. Here, Piccinini replaces the horse with one of her Vespa “deer.” Piccinini states of this work: “In a world where the cultural and the natural—the technological and organic—are ever more intermingled, this wilderness is my symbolic representation of a space where technology has become so natural that it takes on a life of its own.” (GOMA 2018)

Figure 2.3.  The Stags, Patricia Piccinini

Image courtesy of Patricia Piccinini, Tolarno Galleries, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

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Piccinini’s work also explores the implications of technological advancement. The curatorial notes on her “Embryo 2016” remark on the invocation of spirits of wild animals in the design and promotion of luxury consumer items, especially cars—Jaguar being one of the most obvious—but what if new machines grew animal instincts? In Piccinini’s Embryo, we face the serious notion that artificial intelligence might eventually find a way to closely imitate organic reproduction, growth and development. (GOMA 2018)

The queerness of Piccinini’s worldings might just be in their effectiveness to flatten accepted human/animal/machine/environmental hierarchies, a deeply sociopolitical project executed with creative empathy that reaches across genetic, historical and industrial divides. Piccinini has long been inspired by another nineteenth-century artwork, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/2003). Piccinini feels empathy for Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, as she does for her own monstrous creations. She has spoken many times about the monster and how confusing she finds it that it’s not worthy of love in Shelley’s world. She creates human-centered and yet more-than-human creations that vibrate with empathy and pathos. She invites audiences to love and identify with the creations rather than be repulsed. She uses familiar “humanizing” characteristics like “kind eyes”

Figure 2.4.  Embryo 2016, Patricia Piccinini

Image courtesy of Patricia Piccinini, Tolarno Galleries, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.



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and tender positions and vulnerability, to encourage affective responses to her sculptures. Her works also make room for non-human-centered worlds, whether they are worlds in which no humans exist, or where new kinds of human-other hybrids predominate. In each of these moves, the works ask visitors to consider how nature has its own way of transmogrifying, and that those evolutions— despite being profoundly affected by human intervention during the Anthropocene—are not contingent upon ongoing human existence. Evolution, she seems to suggest, will just keep doing its thing whether “we” are here, or not. Piccinini helps us imagine new hybrid combinations beyond the rather reductive digital (online/offline) considerations that seem to dominate today’s discourses of queering human and posthuman relationality. Her new worlds, new relationships and “future fables for now” are both a warning and a celebration of what may be to come, a queering not only of humanity but of the beautiful and monstrous intersections of human and posthuman in corporeal as well as digital ways. For Piccinini, the evolving human body becomes a queer archive of (mythologized) perfection and purity; she queers the notion of “normal,” and of species hierarchies, and of the human as the primary holder of love and other affective attachments. This future-focus so present in Piccinini’s work underpins Braidotti’s concern with “not to know who we are,” but “what, at last, we want to become” (2002, p. 2). Braidotti attends to both “enfleshed materialism” and “difference and transformation in nonnegative, non-perjorative terms” (Pelletier 2004, p. 202) as evidenced in animal, insect, cyborg and machine bodies. These intersecting queer lives are driven by queer becomings in both discursive and material ways. And while digital reconsiderations of agentic materiality are expanding hybrid ways of being, it is important to remember the dangers of reproducing social codes in online worlds that once promised liberation from offline oppressions.

QUEER APERTURES Michael O’Rourke writes that “All of the orifices of materiality are open to companions. Companions are in company; they accompany each other in their finitude and thickness” (2016, p. xxiii). We are interested in spaces and thickenings that are queer, and that queer other actants (human and definitely otherwise). The interstitial spaces where queer bodies and queer circuits intersect are typified by flows and spaces like the queerly-confounding Internet of Things (IoT), a growing network or sensors and archives of thing-lives. In this final section, we turn to two more-than-human flows which we see

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working transversally across the notion of thing-lives and time: the Internet of Things (IoT, including Bruno Latour’s “the Parliament of Things”), and the philosophy of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). The IoT, also sometimes known as the internet of objects (IoO), refers to the networked interconnection of everyday objects, and machine-to-machine communications, or what we refer to as thing-lives. The IoT, as a thing, was first articulated in 1999 by Kevin Ashton and refers to any device connected to the web (internet), from personal devices like phones, to superhuge devices like China’s new 93 petaflop Sunway TaihuLight at the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi, China, which performs approximately 93,000 trillion calculations per second. Indeed, the vast and diverse network and range of things is rapidly expanding to include all sorts of things that in recent but bygone eras would have been considered household items or electronics even like lightbulbs, as the world moves ever-closer to a ubiquitously-networked state, most commonly now euphemized as smart homes or smartCities (which in actuality might be better termed “surveillance-enabled cities,” homes, cars, and lives). What is an internet-enabled environment, and why is it good beyond being able to tell your television set to turn itself off? There is not unanimous agreement about what the IoT is, or what it means for the planetary near future, either for humans or everyone else. One simple way of articulating its character is that of “giving a network address to a thing and fitting it with sensors” (Bunz & Meikle 2018, p. ii) in order for “these things [to] gain new skills that are expressed in new forms of communication” (Bunz & Meikle 2018, p. iii). The IoT includes physical things as well as virtual things, things deployed by and for both individuals and corporate/government interests. While the IoT rapidly develops and expands, it is creating an archive that has more uses and dangers than previously thought, but also queers time in the archive’s ability to both outlast and out-perform human-time. Corporatized culture and research/development into artificial intelligence and augmented reality can’t wait to further technologize the living environments of “civilized society.” We have all read about self-driving cars (possibly the most popular focus of “smart technology” at the moment), but corporate and government investment is squarely human-centered and the move toward an IoT only reifies humans at the center of an ever-faster, evermore-networked circuit of service to humans and human productivity. Most literature about the IoT has focused on comparing the “good” benefits (improving quality of life for humans) versus the “bad” or potentially destructive or alienating qualities of it. Much of the rest of the research in this area focuses on data lives, big data, and data curation due to the everincreasing generation of data through these ever-more-networked lives. From a human-centered point of view, there are concerns about security, where and



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by whom the data is being used (or will be used in an unknowable future), privacy concerns, and surveillance/tracking/compliance culture. HUMAN OBSOLESCENCE Latour has said that objects are the human race’s co-producers.1 Devices like smartphones allow users to connect to billions of other things, all the while recording data, voice, video, audio, motion, location and more through technologies of self-tracking (Spicer & Cederstrom 2015). As Samuel Greengard points out, the convergence of rapid advancement in multiple types of immersive and embedded technologies as well as wireless and cloud computing “has introduced the concept of robotic insects and animals, nanobots and microbots that can exist inside humans, and drone fleets that can accomplish tasks in the sky above” (2015, p. xiii). The affordances of both big data and nano-data are most often framed as enabling human understandings to surpass anything imagined only a few years ago; yet we are interested in the affordances of these technologies in making human-centered and human-directed activity obsolete. In this way, the success of human-developed technology may, perhaps for the first time, queer ourselves out of existence. This wild new world which allows us to “make sense of the motion between and among things, including people, animals, vehicles, air currents, viruses” is exhilarating until it becomes terrifying (Greengard 2015, p. xiv). At the same time, the IoT can “support systems that operate independent of human oversight and, incredibly, get smarter on their own over time by adapting an underlying algorithm” (Greengard 2015, p. xiv). The IoT does represent a revolution, and one which will have far-reaching consequences, but it is not the first time humans have been terrified by our own fabulousness or insistence on pushing forward into ethical and moral no-persons’ lands for the sake of conquering the unknown. For example, the United States’ government committed to the development of a hydrogen bomb, which was first tested in 1952, a decision that began a global arms race that changed our view of the human race as well as the planet. The so-called “Doomsday Clock” was a symbol for how close humanity was to self-annihilation, or nuclear destruction “midnight,” representing the first time that the total destruction of the planet was discussed at both the macro and micro levels. School children were trained in how to brace for a nuclear attack, from the 1950s until well into the 1970s in the United States. Thus, the rapidly-expanding agency of things and nonhuman entities is assured. In this text, we are seeking to add to the enquiry into how agency might have things, looking at how humans may continue to have agency

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in an environment of accelerating obsolescence. If “today, to write theory means writing code,” not only objects but coding itself is emerging as the new onto-epistemological driver for diversifying forms of knowledge as well as lifeforms. In its agility to replicate, self-adjust and adapt to rapidly changing conditions and requirements, coding can explode traditional notions of normativity, including “heteronormativity,” as code can morph to endless choices of queer non-essentialism (Galloway & Thacker 2007). Like the internet, accessibility is an issue for the IoT. Legal and cultural theorists have identified a need to address the “digital divide” at a globe scale, recognizing and accounting for the gap amongst “individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels” (Weber & Weber 2010, p. 103). If the proliferation of data at the personal and global level means that curation and searchability of the archive is emerging as a primary concern, accessibility of both hardware and software will create increasing divides between the networked and the digitally isolated. Though just because the IoT is proliferating by users at the level of billions per year, this proliferation doesn’t mean that old archives of data and things are no longer valuable: Consider the ongoing commercial value of Myspace. To many, this social media platform is only of historical interest, with its brief prominence in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century now long eclipsed by larger networks such as Facebook. Yet Myspace continues to change hands for eight-figure sums because its decade-old archive of user data remains valuable to advertisers—those data prompted Time, Inc. to purchase the owner of Myspace, a company called Viant, in 2016 (Jackson 2016). More than a decade after many users last logged into Myspace, the digital traces they left behind—contacts and connections, likes and dislikes, emotions and opinions—still offer lucrative data. In this context, the future trajectories of the personal health data that users of internet of things tracking technologies share with so many unknowable third parties are at best uneasy. (Bunz & Meikle 2018, p. ii)

We consider the IoT—or the Parliament of Things, for Latour—as capacitating things-in-community, both communicatively and actively, making possibly not only human assistance but also and already to (at least in part) replace humans in many (and only now emerging) ways. Latour’s articulation of a Parliament of Things (1991) has long connected the agency of things, the non-duality of nature-culture and our own inescapable hybridity as a kind of connectivity. His notion of the “Constitution”2 includes his [self-identified] category of “nonmodern,” that is “anyone who takes simultaneously into account the moderns” Constitution and the population of hybrids that that Constitution rejects and allows to proliferate,” including monsters, cyborgs, and tricksters (1991, p. 47).



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If coding and code is replacing human language—if not human functionality more generally—Katherine Hayles’s claim that “language alone is no longer the distinctive characteristic of technologically developed societies; rather, it is language plus code” (2005), can be extended to include language plus code plus algorithm (as language and action combined). Hayles’s (1999) discussion of the 1952 novel Limbo demonstrates her understanding of Haraway’s claim that “cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions” (qtd. in Hayles 1999, p. 114). This is an idea that resurfaces at times of national anxiety about borders, contamination, privacy violations and dehumanising practices in relation to national/global “advancements.” The novel offers some startlingly prescient assertions about human nature that bear upon this current discussion of human-thing hybridity, archiving and deploying data, and the uncontrollability of scientific insatiability for innovations’ sake. Hayles reviews how in Limbo (1952), Humans are essentially hyphenated creatures, he asserts, creative-destructive, peaceful-aggressive. The appearance on the island of “queer limbs,” men who have had their arms and legs amputated and replaced by atomic-powered plastic prostheses, brings Martine’s philosophy of the hyphen into juxtaposition with the splice, the neolinguistic cutting, rejoining, and recircuiting that makes a cyb/ ernetic org/anism into a cyborg. (Hayles 1999, p. 116)

Dystopic or not, computer code represents the first real machine-language that can deploy language as executable action-instruction, and extends J. L. Austin’s speech act theory into a kind of language-as-code that is capable of physically altering those things with which it is in communication. Similarly, Latour’s notion of actants (2005) distinguishes between actors who “take action” and actants that put action in motion, and which leave a trace, which helps us redefine “action” and thus agency, as beyond traditional human notions of “intentional” action. He formulates action as collectively-rippling (as in groupthink, fads, and zeitgeists, for example). Perhaps most helpfully for our consideration of archive, and if we take actants to be any things or entities that put action into motion, and which often have or create an affective trace at the same time, actants can easily have agency beyond or without humans. Actants queer notions of (the) archive without human intentionality or intervention. TRANSCODING AND A LOVE OF OOO AND WWO Transcoding3 is another area of digital activity and archiving in which machine relationships and language are impacting human understandings of

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gender, sexuality, and intelligibility. For example, Gerald Stephen Jackson (2017) draws on Katherine Hayles, as well as the “queer code art” of Zach Blas’s transCoder (2018), in order to argue a “gender performativity of code.” Jian Chen (2016) too researches transcoding as a nimble concept moving between gender and digital media practices. Chen has looked at the “trans embodied, transnational digital media” of Cheang Shu Lea. For more than 30 years, Taiwan-born queer digital nomad Cheang has produced new media art that highlights and plays with the boundaries of “gender, racial ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, cultural genre, and technological medium” (Chen 2016, p. 83). In particular, her “post-porn” digital film I.K.U. (2000) and its sequel UKI (2009–2012), a live video performance and online game, attends to “networked media technologies and their new interfaces with viewers, who become users and players” (Chen 2016, p. 83). Cheang’s work asks viewers to consider racially, gendered, sexed, “embodiment and biogenetics as motive forces in the restructuring and globalizing of political economies of the US, Western Europe, and the global North” (Chen 2016, p. 83). Digital media practices and technology infrastructures are providing new ways of humans seeing not only the world but ourselves; less clear is how an IoT might contribute to advancement in things seeing themselves differently, and more autonomously from humans. The IoT suggests some ways in which things might be better predisposed to establishing and maintaining effective and ongoing connectivity that is mutually-beneficial, unlike humans’ difficulty with maintaining global ties without frequent ruptures and war. One way of synthesizing these somewhat disparate considerations of the archive, agency, and IoT, is through the notion of OOO (object-oriented ontology). Dialling “triple O” in Australia is the police emergency number, so we love that the OOO acronym for Object-Oriented Ontology looks the same as “help-seeking humanity.” Perhaps as networked life advances, the idea of speed-dialling an emergency phone number in case of ontological emergency will become obsolete and a voice-activated call for help in smart-homes will be de rigeur. It’s been called the “object turn” and like all “movements” considerations of OOO are emerging across a wide range of disciplines including science, arts, and most obviously within computer and digital technology. As this book explores in a range of ways, it is not a huge leap from considering a “life of things” that is in service to (or compatible with) human supremacy and needs, to a consideration of things with their own independent lives that are neither driven by, nor much concerned with, humans at all. Whether anthropocentric experience is becoming obsolete as quickly as Myspace or not, the convergence of theoretical, philosophical and practical/ technological advances in the early twenty-first century has made such considerations more palatable, yet here we argue that the notion of completely unseating human subjects remains ontologically queer, or even monstrous.



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After all, contemplating one’s own annihilation is terrifying enough; considering our obsolescence is perhaps even more frightening. OOO4 (and its companion thread speculative realism) considers all nonhuman subjects (including immaterial) to be “objects” or what we have here called things. Ideas are objects in OOO. This contrasts with some of the core principles of phenomenology which considers experience in relation to humans. OOO calls us to get out of our own heads, and into the “minds” of everything else around us (both seen and unseen). While OOO can be considered part of a (new) materialist or posthumanist approach to nonhuman egalitarianism (everything is equal), it also strives to separate the parts of an object from its effect. That is, an object is valuable and agentic as is, without a reduction to its constituent parts, or in relation to its impact (most usually on humans). OOO is useful for bringing together strands of thought about what is generatively queer in the idea of things having lives (traces, resonances) independent of us. If (either digital, conceptual or material) things have increasingly dynamic networked lives which advance without the impact or influence of humans, how might that queer our consideration of the Anthropocene? IoT and OOO are like the children who blamed their (human) parents for everything that is wrong with their lives, and then begin to grow up and see how, despite an anthropogenically-driven ecological mess, the machinistic and terrestrial lives in their own productive ways, despite us. Foundational OOO scholar Graham Harman describes his work as a tendency to “treat the inanimate world as a philosophical protagonist” (2011, p. 25), and has urged us that “to think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but obligatory” (p. 26). However, recognizing the persistence of things as things in and as themselves, despite the havoc wrecked by (human) “parents,” doesn’t, as Tim Ingold (2015) points out, have to allow things to simply “be themselves,” thus subjecting them to a “blobular ontology” that fossilizes and isolates “things” in space and time (p. 16). In response, Ingold offers us a World Without Objects (WWO)—an ontology that holds on to the dynamism, animacy, and interconnectedness of things without object-ifying them. “But we say,” he writes: Things do not just exist; if they did, then they would indeed be objects. The thing about things, however, is that they occur—that is, they carry on along their lines. This is to admit them into the world not as nouns but as verbs, as goings-on. It is to bring them to life. . . Lives . . . can tie themselves into knots. The world of things, I propose, is a world of knots, a world without objects. (p. 16, emphasis in original)

For the purposes of this book, thinking through things as both the agents of their own lives (through OOO) and as actions that both “put out” and “carry

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along” lines in a world of knots which includes the composition of nodes, interstices, and memories of their formation (in a WWO), is, for us a pretty queer proposition. ACTANT ARCHIVES AS BECOMING-WITH In an age of virtual and material morphology, in this chapter we’ve consider some, though not all, of the changing characteristics of the archive, and whether the notion itself is a static and outdated artefact of thingness. Archives by their nature imply pastness, and contemporary research into the queer lives of data stress instead their dynamic and emergent agency as actants. From the material proxy of artworks for inexpressible human emotions and relationships, to the agentic community of an Internet of Things, what was previously known as “life” may increasingly become understood as the queer lives of data in which ontological distinctions between “live,” “dead,” “nonhuman,” and “archived” are only stops along the way for digitallyenhanced humans and animals, and affectively-enhanced machines. Object- and digital flows are not only agentic and networked but affective (Doveling et al. 2018). Things flow but so too do feelings, emotions, affects, events, and becomings-with. Even seemingly “outdated data” such as a Van Gogh painting continue to circulate and recirculate in cycles of intra-action and archival reincarnation, like Jorge Luis Borges’s universe/ multiverse Library of Babel. If contemporary hybrid society is learning to balance integrated “online” and “offline” lifeworlds, then the notion of the archive becomes a living thing that not only has agency but the potential for autonomy. In such a worlding, humans may become just more databodies; the enfleshed repository for the digital archive that accompanies each of us. More, as humans increasingly become digitally enhanced physically as well as more virtually networked, our lives as events become archives of “broken data.” Though too, we must think of archives as traces and repositories of not only material objects but also the need for empathy and understanding. NOTES 1.  For more on the relationship between materiality and digitality in nonbinary human/nonhuman communication, see Lischka 2007; Latour 1991, 2005; and Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012. 2.  Latour’s notion of the Constitution defines “humans and nonhumans, their properties and their relations, their abilities and their groupings” (1991, p. 14).



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3.  Transcoding is a computing term referring to a process used to adapt digital files so they can be read on different platforms and devices. As a term addressing switching, translating or moving from one “side” to another, the term has increasingly been taken up by gender theorists and community groups/discourses to describe the experiences of gender fluidity and transgenderism. For example, see Katherine Hayles. 4.  The leading theorists and proponents of object-oriented ontology (OOO) have been Timothy Morton and Graham Harman. For more, see Harman 2018, 2016, 2011 and Morton 2018a and 2018b.

Chapter Three

Queer Object Time

TUNING INTO QUEER OBJECT TIME Can queer be said to exist as a becoming in time? Queerness can, in hindsight, have a cumulative temporality, a queering of past experience as a catalyst to envision a potential future. Though this, too, is out of time—the awareness that queer agency isn’t what we imagine, in that “pure agency” sense of “marching forward, like a zombie going doggedly after what it wants” (Stewart 2010, p. 6; Terada 2001). But it’s not a passive becoming, either—a kind of becoming-whether-you-want-to-or-not—becoming as “couch potato passive,” as Stewart (2010) puts it (p. 6). Becoming queer isn’t like the softening and proliferation of potatoes left too long in a paper bag at the back of the refrigerator, growing eyes and limbs in the darkness until someone remembers to pull them out into the light. It’s more like a state of attunement, when we attend “to what might be happening . . . to possibilities opening up and not necessarily good ones. But maybe” (p. 6). This chapter wonders about the relationship between queerness, bodies, time, and objects, writing toward a queering of bodies, time, and objects in what we are, for now, calling “queer object time.” We begin with an exploration of the productive relations among objects, queerness, and time as an entanglement of matter and meaning (Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012). Rather than invert the focus on the human body and language in favor of an anti-anthropomorphic fascination with objects in and of themselves, we write to engage the messy, vibrant, and thoroughly queer relation we have to bodies, time, and objects as they unfold in the spaces of our work and our lives—at home, in airports, in rehearsal, on the page. In bringing the critical scholarship of performativity and performance, queer and affect theory, and new materialism together, our queer object time dances 63

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at the edges of indeterminacy, matter and identity, radically open and infinite in its possibility (Barad 2015, p. 401). DANCING WITH A MERMAID A woman seated on a rock. A mermaid. A woman in bronze, reclining, one hand behind her hip, taking the sun. A woman reclining, open, her gaze fixed on an unknown horizon. A woman in bronze, nude, her breasts warmed by the sun glinting off the water. Her eyes squint, her vision blurs. She looks at me from her perch on my grandmother’s dressing table. She is the most alive thing in this room, this house, this small Iowa town. A symbol of the movement and spacetime1 of my grandmother, her eventfulness, evidence of her having gone somewhere, once. Once, my grandmother went to Denmark and purchased a naked bronze woman on a stone. She packed the mermaid neatly into a suitcase between rolled socks and cotton underwear and travelled back, back, back to the small town and the house at the crest of a hill on the only gravel road between here and there. The mermaid sits on grandmother’s dressing table. She looks at me from her perch, her gaze fixed, and tells me that she is the evidence, the hard, rocksolid evidence of getting out. Of the possibility of spacetime travel. Of returning, if you want to, to a world that is both larger and smaller for having gone. Ahmed (2006) reminds us, though, that objects do not move us in and through spacetime—that is, they do not take us “back” to a place or a past that is over and gone, nor do they compose a future by their arrangement in our homes or familiar geographies (p. 150). Rather, objects “keep the impressions” of the past alive and in that keeping-on, make “new impressions in the very weave or fabric of the present” (p. 150). Objects are transistors, rather than transportation. When we travel and bring an object “home,” we enact the displacement and difference of our comings and goings; we make and remake home in the entanglement of here and there, now and then, strange and familiar. Indeed, homes and the objects that gather in their making, are material manifestations of the “entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’” (Brah 1996, p. 16). When the objects that compose a life are passed down, they are also passed around—from hand to hand, and home to home, an inheritance and a becoming. Objects are passed around as well as down; their inheritance is less about preserving the past or inhabiting the present and more about welcoming an arrival from another, possible world (p. 150). *** I am looking for the woman seated on the rock, the bronze mermaid taking the sun, her gaze fixed on an unknown horizon. She is nude, open, warm; a



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symbol of my grandmother’s movement outside her every day. I am looking for her, the bronze mermaid, as my father and his sisters tear through my grandmother’s apartment, packing up her things, just hours after the last mourner left her funeral service. My father brushes past me in the living room carrying a carton overflowing with handbags. “Do you want any of these?” he says without stopping or slowing down. I’m not sure, but I don’t have a chance to say, no way to slow down the movements of children eager to box up their grief. My father moves past again, this time in the direction of the kitchen. “Don’t you want anything of hers?” he says as he pulls open drawers full of silverware and napkins. “She’d want you to have something of hers, to remember her. What about her jewelry? Or her clothes? She had a lot of nice things.” “No. I don’t want her clothes. And your sisters have split up the jewelry. I would like the mermaid, though.” The noise in the kitchen stops. “What mermaid?” “The mermaid that used to sit on her dressing table. The bronze mermaid sitting on the rock.” “I don’t think your grandmother had any mermaid.” “Did mom have a mermaid?” My father yells in the direction of the bedroom, where his sisters are removing pantsuits and sweater sets from hangars. The noise in the bedroom stops. My aunt peeks her head around the doorjamb. “The trinket from the trip to the Denmark? The one from the airport souvenir shop?” I’m not sure, but I nod. “Look in the box with the odds and ends. There on the floor next to the couch. She might be in there.” I look down at the box sitting at my feet. Inside I see Uno cards in a crossstitched box, a travel sewing kit, a paper fan, several monogrammed handkerchiefs, and the woman sitting on a rock. Even in a collection of odds and ends she looks different. Odd among the collected objects of my grandmother’s life. Out of place and spacetime. I pick her out of the box and hold her up to the light and see her for what seems like the very first time. I turn to the grieving siblings assembled in front of me. “I’d like to have this.” Sometimes objects arrive—in our hands and in our lives—and we are thrown by their appearance, even though we have encountered them before (Ahmed 2006, p. 40). Even when we think we’ve known “them” all along. Sometimes, their arrival takes time, “and the time that it takes shapes ‘what’ it is that arrives; the object is shaped by the conditions of its arrival” (p. 40). Objects are shaped, too, but how we attune to them—to see them perhaps for

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the “very first time,” to see them differently. Shaped by the “direction” of its matter, of how it has come to matter to us, now; or perhaps reconsidered all together—not as thing we can hold, possess, or have, but instead as the “direction” of matter itself, an orienting, attuning force (p. 40). *** We’re walking through the food court in the Copenhagen airport on the way to our gate. We stop at the convenience store and wait in line to buy magazines and a pack of gum. I stare idly at the people across the way who are posing for a selfie. I smile when they say smile and hold my breath until I hear one of them say “Got it.” They gather their suitcases and roll away. Behind them, in the space opened up in their departure, a large bronze woman sitting on a rock snaps into view. She reclines, her gaze fixed on an unknown horizon. My lover puts one hand on my shoulder and points with the other. “Look! It’s the woman—the woman on the rock on your night table. There she is!” I smile and hold my breath. Grandmother’s bronze mermaid is here, in the Copenhagen airport. She is a replica of Little Mermaid, the bronze and stone statue by Edvard Eriksen who has reclined waterside, waiting patiently for her human lover at the Langelinie promenade in Copenhagen, for more than one hundred years. Though I didn’t know this until just now, until her arrival into my line of vision in an airport so far from home. She—and my grandmother and me—are disorientated and dislodged in time and in relation. It’s said that the little mermaid is a material manifestation of the character in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale of the same name, though she is, of course, a hybrid of many mermaids, women, and lovers— the mermaid of the story the ballerina Ellen Price, who danced her onto and across the stage at the Royal theatre, Eline Eriksen, who posed for her sculptor-husband after Price refused to model in the nude (“The Little Mermaid” 2018). She is also a hybrid of many mermaids perched in many places— her “original” casting at water’s edge at Langelinje Pier her smaller bronze replica in terminal C in the Copenhagen airport her capitalist sister, named BIG Mermaid and designed by Bjarke Ingles Group, an “archipelago of [plywood shelves holding] Scandinavian products amidst the flow of people” moving through the airport’s duty-free zone, (“BIG Mermaid” 2013) her small materializations, sitting in row upon row on souvenir store shelves throughout Denmark her very particular manifestation on my grandmother’s dresser and now, as an inherited object sitting in honor on my bedside table.



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In all of her materializations and matterings, she is what Ahmed (2006) describes as a “sticky object”—what she picks up on her surfaces, both “‘shows’ where she has travelled and what [and who] she has come into contact with” (p. 40). Encountering the mermaid here, in the airport, is both strange and familiar. The mermaid in my line of sight telescopes out to all of the mermaids—sitting on shelves, here, in the airport, and on dressers, there, in homes throughout the world. The mermaid leaps from the background of my vision and attention (what it is to know and be at “home”) and into a vibrant present, suddenly come to life. Ahmed says we make objects queer by attending to them, moving them from the background to the foreground and regarding them in spacetime (2006, p. 166). And more, objects become queer in their strangeness—in the encounter of bodies and things—that can bring them to life and make them dance (2006, p. 163). And queer in relation to objects and time (and object time) become a matter of “how things appear, how they gather, how they perform, to create the edges of spaces and worlds” (2006, p. 167). MAKING TIME, MARKING TIME Those of us who “perform,”—that is, place ourselves in spaces we consciously mark off as “stage time”—know what it means to work toward a future that seeks to make something happen. And when we ask how that happening happens, we seek to understand “what is going on” not only when we are performing but also when we repeat a series of actions in the belief that such goings-over will eventuate into a performance. We describe the “strange temporality,” of making performance with a backward-looking, facing forward word: rehearsal. From re, again, and hercier, to drag, to trail on the ground. To rake, harrow, rip, tear, wound. Repeat.2 When we rehearse, we go over and go through some thing, a “piece” of music or a “play,” preparing for a future event, situation or performance (OED). When we rehearse, “we recollect forwards whilst remembering backwards. We rehearse the future—“something that doesn’t yet exist”—“into being” (Schmidt 2015, p. 5). Performance maker Tim Etchells (2012) writes of rehearsal room and the contemplation of those of us who gather there. We sit, staring into the emptiness, trying to imagine the things that might fill it. We engage in ‘low-level’ fooling around, rearranging things in space; being stupid with props and costumes” (p. 34). We wait. There is something queer about waiting—those who wait are out of time in at least two ways—we are “out of straight time’s rhythm” and we make worlds in that waiting (Muñoz 2009, p. 182). Halberstam’s central assertion in A Queer Time and Place (2005) is that “queer temporality disrupts the normative narratives of time that form the

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base of nearly every definition of the human in almost all of our modes of understanding, from the professions of psychoanalysis and medicine to socioeconomic and demographic studies on which every sort of state policy is based, to our understandings of the affective and the aesthetic” (p. 152). The meaning and value we assign to time and temporality are forged out of “vibrant and volatile social relations” (p. 7). By way of example, Halberstam contrasts “family time,” organized around the heteronormative re-production of “family, longevity, risk/safety and inheritance” with “queer time,” nonnormative modes of relationality and embodiment that emerge once we leave the disciplining structures of “straight” time behind (p. 6; see also Harris, Holman Jones, Faulkner, & Brook 2017). By comparing object time with human time (as an extension of the queer time/straight time dialectic), we try to make visible the insistent waiting that characterizes so much of anthropocentric perspectives and practices. While we are not arguing that objects are free from waiting (or perhaps more accurately, the performance of waiting), we argue that queer object time might offer a more expansive notion of the not-yet than does human-time or straight-time. The material entanglement of queerness, queer objects, and queer temporality is a “doing for and toward a future that is not yet here” (Muñoz 2009, p. 1). Etchells writes, too, of the frustrating, circular, and seemingly endless discussions that happen in rehearsal rooms spaces as a kind of gathering of energy—which could be mistaken for treading water or rage or mild insanity, suggesting that such discussions and waiting and fooling around are necessary for something to snap into focus. He says it’s a performance-rehearsal version of the “talking cure.” He writes that time passes slowly in the room with no windows, in which you spend your days whether it is raining or sun-shining outside. You make things, slowly, very slowly, leaving behind a trail of failed attempts as nonsense and, if you are lucky, slowly, very slowly you accumulate a store of scenes and fragments that you love, that have puzzled and perplexed you in the good way, that have made you smile, that have made you weep, shake your head or that have made your heart beat faster. (p. 36)

Rehearsing is the timespace of re-collecting forwards, into the not-yet. In the rehearsal room, our mission is more potato than zombie—we are not single-minded or zealous but rather multiple, sending out sprouts and feeling our way. It’s a going-over that engages us in attunement—we tune in to what might be happening by waiting; by making things slowly, bit by bit. We accumulate a storehouse of things that puzzle and perplex us in the best way, the good way. They may not necessarily be “good” things. But maybe.



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In another field, not so far away from the rehearsal room, Barad considers time and temporality through the lens of science experimentation. She affirms that even in science experimentation what we can see is that what is going on actually is the making of temporality . . . What we are seeing here is that time is not given, it is not universally given, but rather that time is articulated and re-synchronized through various material practices . . . So what is going on here is that physicists are actually making time in marking time, and that there is a certain way in which what we take to be the “past” and what we take to be the “present” and the “future” are entangled with one another. (qtd. in Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012, p. 67)

In science and in performance we make time by marking time, feeling our way toward the not-yet by making some-thing as the material entanglement of past, present, and future. Barad is well-known for her considerations of agency, and the separation between subject and object—that is, self and other (human and non-human) in the research or observational relationship. For Barad, agency is not restricted to the “human” or the causal or the “fixed” (in time, movement, matter or amount). Rather, agency is a doing, an iterative and intra-active enactment of accountability and responsibility that happens in and through time—though time here should be thought of as an operator, and not a parameter (2007, pp. 220, 437, emphasis ours). INTRA-ACTION AS OBJECT TIME Barad has popularized the physics of things, objects and their existence or materiality as an encounter, or what she calls and intra-action, in accessible ways like this: When we make a measurement, what happens is that it is not a matter of disturbing something and our knowledge is uncertain as a result, but rather there are not inherent properties and there are not inherent boundaries of things that we want to call entities before the measurement intra-action. That is, Bohr is saying that things are indeterminate; there are no things before the measurement, and that the very act of measurement produces determinate boundaries and properties of things. So, his is an ontological principle rather than an epistemological one. In other words, for Bohr particles do not have a position independently of my measuring something called position. (Barad in Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012, p. 63)

One of Barad’s primary projects is to shift mindsets around individualism and objectivity. For her, it is crucial to not think of objects or things in and of themselves, but rather in relation to, or in correlation to, human perception.

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In this sense, objects are agentic in their intra-actions with other forces— human and non-human alike. However, Barad’s project is not to bestow objects with agency “just like” that of humans—a “thing” we possess or an ability to act with the purposefulness of “pure agency.” She writes, Just as there are no words with determinant meanings lying in wait . . . for an appropriate representational moment, neither are there things with determinant boundaries and properties whirling aimlessly in the void, bereft of agency, historicity or meaning, which are only to be bestowed from the outside. . . . “Things” don’t pre-exist; they are agentically enacted and become deteriminantely bounded and propertied within phenomena [and] particular agential intraactions. (2007, p. 150)

Things, like words, are not storehouses of possibility waiting to be activated when the “agency of Man” performatively “pronounces the name that attaches to specific beings in the making” (p. 150). Things, like words and like subjects, are performative—that is, they are reiteratively rehearsed into being. And while it may a “bit queer” to ask questions about the intra-active, performative agency of nonhuman forms in the “active and not just discursive materialisation of a body-sex,” (Parisi 2008, p. 286) Barad asks us to do just that. Barad’s ideas about performativity lead us away from the becomings of individual entities and toward collectivities; queer object time might represent one aspect of Barad’s entangled “material-discursive intra-actions” across spacetimemattering,3 a proposition that presumes no prior existence of the phenomena intra-acting in their inseparable encounters/entanglements, thus challenging conventional notions of an ontology of determinacy. Her assertion that all bodies and things (and not just human ones) matter asks us to see, queerly, performativity in all its iterative, perverse, and indeterminate intra-activity (2012, p. 32). QUEER CONTACT Sedgwick argued performativity’s genealogy is inherently queer (Parisi 2008, p. 286; Sedgwick 1993). Here, queer is a pivot, shifting a conversation about the linguistic force of speech to a consideration of the relational resonances things and words have with time, orientations, and subjects: A word so fraught as “queer” is—fraught with so many social and personal histories of exclusion, violence, defiance, excitement—never can only denote; nor even can it only connote; a part of its experimental force as a speech act is the way in which it dramatizes locutionary position itself. Anyone’s use of “queer” about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else. . . .



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“Queer” seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation. A hypothesis worth making explicit: that there are important senses in which “queer” can signify only when attached to the first person. One possible corollary: that what it takes—all it takes—to make the description “queer” a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person. (1993, p. 9)

Right from the beginning, for Sedgwick queer was at once an “experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventure” that attached itself to ideas of (new) materialism and affect. Her use of impulsion echoes Erin Manning’s (2009) articulation of affect as pre-acceleration, “the vital force of movement taking form”; the “body-becoming,” a performance of self that is at once material and temporal, and relational (p. 6). Sedgwick (1993), like Butler, was interested in “the implications for gender and sexuality of a tradition of philosophical thought concerning certain utterances that do not merely describe, but actually perform the actions they name” (p. 11). Her investigations into “linguistic performativity” became “a place to reflect on ways in which language really can be said to produce effects: effects of identity, enforcement, seduction, and challenge” (p. 11). Sedgwick moves beyond J. L. Austin’s (1962) overt (and perhaps obsessive) focus on the marriage vow as the proto-example of the performative utterance4 to focus on the affectively dynamic and intra-active performance of shame to demonstrate the queer potentiality of performativity. She writes, “Shame floods into being as a moment, a disruptive moment, in a circuit of constituting identificatory communication” (2003 p. 36). In the affective flush and force of shame, Sedgwick reads not a passive happening but an active “strategy for the production of meaning and being” (p. 11). In other words, queerness is intra-active agency, a doing in time, rather than a destination. That doing is a practice of attunement—attending to “what’s happening, sensing out, accreting attachments and detachments, differences, losses and proliferating possibilities” (Stewart 2010, p. 4). Ahmed reads Sedgwick’s attention to shame—rather than the heterosexual promise of an “I do” or the positivity of gay pride—as the “primary queer affect” because it holds onto “the not” (and the negation of ordinary culture) that is, for better and worse, a part of the intra-active “doing in time” of queerness (Ahmed 2006, p. 175). Or as Sedgwick put it now so long ago in Tendencies (1993), queer is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (p. 8). Queerness as a refusal to let go of the not/negation and to turn bad feelings into (only) good ones (Ahmed 2006, p. 175) also reminds of how things— not necessarily good ones—both happen and accumulate in spacetime and

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on surfaces and in our hands. Ahmed’s writing table. Chen’s (2012) couch. Sedgwick’s silk and shit (2000). Sedgwick links performativity with the material relations of queerness, asking us to think about, as Ahmed later puts it, how queer objects are available as “things” to “do” things with (Ahmed 2006, p. 168). Ahmed (2007) notes: “A queer object hence makes contact possible. Or, to be more precise, a queer object would have a surface that support such contact. The contact is bodily, and it unsettles that line that divides spaces as worlds, thereby creating other kinds of connections where unexpected things can happen” (p. 169). That support—that contact—hinges on the “sticky” touching integral to the intra-activity of queer objects, subjects and time. It’s also a highly pleasurable—some might say “perverse” take on the worlding of the world (Barad 2012). Indeed, Barad uses of the notion of “self-touching” to describe the pleasure and sociality of self-other relations, writing: Self-touching is an encounter with the infinite alterity of the self. Matter is an enfolding, an involution, it cannot help touching itself, and in this self-touching it comes in contact with the infinite alterity that it is. [Freud’s] polymorphous perversity raised to an infinite power: talk about a queer intimacy! What is being called into question here is the very nature of the “self,” and in terms of not just being but also time. (Barad 2012, pp. 399–400)

Nature, Barad writes, “is perverse at its core; nature is unnatural” (Barad 2015, p. 412). The unpredictable and in some ways inexplicable actions socalled “natural” phenomena, for example in the behavior of atoms, becomes a “moral violation” of what humans want or expect to see in nature. She writes (paraphrasing Richard Feynman) that an “electron’s monstrous nature and its perverse ways of engaging with the world”—both in its behavior but also, perhaps more compellingly, in its infinitude, “threatens the very possibility of calculability” (p. 400). Such incalculability, according to Barad, is “a queer theorist’s delight. It shows that all of matter, matter in its ‘essense’ (of course, that is precisely what is being troubled here), is a massive overlaying of perversities: an infinity of infinities” (pp. 400–401). She concludes: “perversity and monstrosity lie at the core of being—or rather, it is threaded through it” (p. 401). Barad urges us to move beyond using the same old reductive arguments to argue for/against marginalization of certain humans and nonhumans over others; she urges us to move into new logics which attend to the material and more-than-dualistic: In particular, the “posthumanist” point is not to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman, not to cross out all distinctions and differences, and not to simply invert humanism, but rather to understand the materializing effects of particular ways of drawing boundaries between “humans” and “nonhumans.” (2011 p. 123)



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Where performativity has been central to the anti-teleological project of queer theory, Barad’s quantum ontology shows us “how language and discourse are haptic encounters . . . suggesting a massive intimacy across a spectrum of possible envelopments” (de Freitas 2017, p. 744). She pushes us to think about category-making practices (always a verb) themselves, asking after the nonhuman in our accounts of “abjection, subjection, agency, and materialization” (Barad 2011, p. 124). Our boundary making itself is a materializing practice that matters. The distinctions and difference we make and mark between human/nonhuman, animate/inanimate and cultural/natural— include “the materializing effects of boundary making practices by which the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’ are differentially constituted” (p. 32). Both Elizabeth de Freitas (2017) and Braidotti (2014) have used Barad’s version of polymorphous perversity to discuss the new materialist shift to sexuality to “explore more specifically the notion of sexuality beyond gender” (Braidotti 2014, p. 242). For feminist new materialists, Barad’s conceptualisation of polymorphous perversity is an ontological door through which to move into an experimental practice, one that makes a difference in how it holds us together through “quantum touch” (de Freitas 2017, p. 747). Barad is careful to point out that her exploration of the queerness of atoms, nonhuman agency, and “queer critter behaviours,” “does not ward off panicked attempts to contain, tame, or normalize nature’s queerness, which will not be quarantined and [are] always threatening to leak out and contaminate ‘life as we know it’—turning the funhouse, freak show of atoms’ perverse putterings into an anxiety-inducing largescale ‘catastrophe’” (2012, p. 45). Though, again, Barad’s quantum ontology and agental realism cautions us against bestowing any kind of pure agency to the self, matter, or the quantum theory that puts us in contact. As interesting as it is to “speculate about the capacity for animacy, vitalism or consciousness in the non-human world” (Davidson & Rooney 2018, p. 2), Sedgwick, Barad and Ahmed (and others) urge us reconsider the relationship of the material, psychodynamic, linguistic and performative, asking what matter matters as onto-epistemological opening to the reciprocal relations among queer objects and subjects. In asking the question what matter matters, we must also consider how turning matter into [mere] objects catches us up in the relational shell game Haraway (2008) describes as “making killable” (p. 80). MAKING KILLABLE/TOXICITY AS AN ASSET It’s the kind of snapping into attention that happens when we least expect or want it. Like the kind of attention our friend Craig Gingrich-Philbrook writes about on social media the morning after taking a beloved pet to the

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emergency vet in the hard hours of the night. The pause and spreading dread of what-ifs set off by the spouse/co-owner line on the intake form. The form and the representation of kinship and/as sovereignty becomes singular and charged, at once weighty and diffuse like a “headache induced by a shift in the barometric pressure” (Stewart 2013b). Time “speeds and slows”; “space stretches out and pulls in as an immediate surround” (Stewart 2013b). Questions crowd out the alarm bells ringing in the body: Will writing Jonny’s name set in motion its own alarm bells—homophobic fear and rage and with it the denial of emergency care for a beloved under the “right” to refuse service? In what other waiting rooms does such “intimate terror” reign? What is the calculus of counting which or whose lives matter in such shape-shifting moments of potentiality and loss (Berlant 2011)? In When Species Meet, Haraway (2008) introduces the concept of “making killable,” or “development of categories to contain those, human and nonhuman, who are dispensable and killable” (p. 38). Making killable “turns people and animals into always already objects ready for violence, genocide, slavery” (Tuck & Ree 2013, p. 649). However, the mass production and destruction of beings-as-objects does not happen elsewhere—in some cubicle or cupboard where categories are made and instantiated. It happens, instead, in the boundary materializing work of facing each other. When we look into the eyes of an other. This facing is both heartbreakingly ruthless and hopeful—ruthless in Emmanuel Levinas’s sense that when we look into the eyes of “the other in its precariousness and defenselessness” and at once feel “the temptation to kill,” and hopeful in the relational and ethical pull of the “call to peace, the [commandment] “you shall not kill” (Levinas 1996, p. 167). The simultaneous “temptation to kill [and] demand for peace” (Butler 2006, p. 135) evidences need to “face up” to human exceptionalism that lies at the heart of Haraway’s (2008) discussion making killable. She writes: . . . what my people and I need to let go of if we are to learn to stop exterminism and genocide . . . is the command “Thou shalt not kill.” The problem is not figuring out to whom such a command applies so that “other” killing can go on as usual and reach unprecedented historical proportions. . . . Perhaps the commandment should read, “Thou shalt not make killable.” . . . Facing up to the outrage of human exceptionalism will, in my view, require severely reducing human demands on the more than human world . . . [and] require working for the mortal entanglements of human beings and other organisms in ways that one judges, without guarantees, to be good, that is to deserve a future. (pp. 80, 106)

If the industrial complex (and the normative heterosexual orientation that (re)produces it) turns all living beings into objects—“things” to “do things”



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with, it also helps us see the relational intra-activity subject and object. In facing up to making-killable, we reckon with how bodies are bounded and entangled, precarious and enmeshed, infinite and ephemeral. And by bodies here we mean individual bodies as well as collective bodies. A case in point: In November 2017, we join the “victory” march the day after clearing the final in an excruciating number of hurdles in the fight for marriage equality in Australia. After our plans to gather and celebrate with others right-then-and-there were dashed by rain and a long-delayed vote in parliament, we turned up the day after and joined a march through Melbourne’s CBD. Already we felt both time-weary and out of time. As we marched, we chanted in verse with the slogans coming through the megaphone—we’re here, we’re queer, we’re getting married next year . . . we’re here, we’re queer, we’re getting married next year . . . we’re here, we’re queer . . .” With each repetition, we became more and more . . . uncomfortable. What about our queer friends and family who weren’t here—because they don’t have the time or ability to turn up to a march that began before the working day ended, because they don’t want to get married, next year or ever, or because they were no longer alive, after having waited so long for this day, these [and so many other] rights, to come? We wondered if the time for “we’re here, we’re queer,” had passed; if it was a kind of “overkill” that overlooked just how hard it’s been to imagine such the future, turning it into a “specter, a pure virtuality” (Fisher 2014, p. 22). Though the border between “life” and “death,” and “here” and “queer,” as we’ve noted above, are not certain or sure; “making killable” and “overkill” are intra-active encounters, rather than time-bound happenings. And the fuzzy borders we try to put up around life and death/here and queer can happen “without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification” (Chen 2012, p. 265). In their consideration of toxicity and contamination, Chen takes up queer debates about life and death, proposing the idea of toxicity as “an extant queer bond” that complicates “utopian imagining” (p. 265). Chen considers their own sensitivity to toxins to think about not only how queer people are, in many ways, made killable in how they are “treated as toxic assets,” but also to “ask after the desires, the loves, the rehabilitations, the affections, the assets that toxic conditions induce” (p. 281). In Chen’s rendering, toxic assets and intimacies are not the exclusive realm of the sentient or the animate but extend to the inanimate and the blurry borders we put around “living and dead.” They write: What is lost when we hold tightly to that exceptionalism that says that couches are dead and we are alive? For would not my nonproductivity, my nonhuman sociality, render me some other human’s “dead” . . . ? Or must couches be cathected differently from humans? (p. 281)

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Chen writes contamination and toxicity as a performative thing-in-time, an “asset” that instantiates “queer bonds already here: the living dead, the dead living, antisocial love, in inanimate affection” (p. 265). In its best versions, queer toxicity “propels, not repels, queer loves, especially once we release it from exclusively human hosts” (p. 281). Barad questions whether “queerness might be seen to reside not in the breech of nature/culture, per se, but in the very nature of spacetimemattering,” with the meta goal it seems (at least in part) of “laying bare the ways in which moralism feeds off of human exceptionalism, and, in particular, human superiority and causes injury to humans and non-humans alike” (2012, p. 53). In other words, queerness as a verb, not an object, not an identity, resides in its nature as a doing—or in nature itself, as a doing. She famously and effectively uses physics and biological sciences to revisit the problematic dichotomizing of individualism/collectivism, micro/ macro scale organism behaviors, and perhaps most importantly for the queerness discussion, the power of mutation. “Social amoebas queer the nature of identity, calling into question the individual/group binary” (2012, p. 26), a starting point which helps her move from the microscopic to the enormous and everywhere in between. Over and over she proves that nature is not anything like what humans think we know, but instead active “co-workers,” thanking the amoeba for its flexibility, resilience and assistance in her argument. Perhaps in her most populist flourish, she asks “But what if Nature hirself is a commie, a pervert, or a queer?” (Barad 2012, p. 29). Ironically anthropomorphic, given her interest in “. . . ‘anthropomorphizing’ as an intervention for shaking loose the crusty toxic scales of anthropocentricism, where the human in its exceptional way of being gets to hold all the ‘goodies’ like agency, intentionality, rationality, feeling, pain, empathy, language, consciousness, [and] imagination” (p. 27). Barad’s meta-project of deconstructing human-centeredness hinges on laying bare the “stinging character of moralism, particularly as it is directed at securing the nature/culture divide” (2012, p. 28), a system of thought and sociocultural construction that statically places humans at the “sacred” center of the need for this divide. To support her argument, she draws on a host of jaw-dropping (but not new) examples of persistent sodomy laws and frustratingly patronizing institutionalizations of how queer sex is a “crime against nature,” continually reinforcing the links between nature, heterosexism, and patriarchy for its logic. In support (unsurprisingly, but satisfyingly), her argument about the queerness of nature itself is underpinned by a long series of examples of homosexual, bisexual, and trans* sexual behaviors from “nature” . . . (in fact, citing over 450 animal examples now known)—and this only in animals per se, not organisms more broadly.



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NOT YET A LIGHTNING BOLT “Birth and death,” Barad writes, “are not the sole prerogative of the animate world; so-called inanimate beings also have finite lives” (2012, p. 394).5 Consider, for example, her meditation on lightning: A dark sky. Deep darkness, without a glimmer of light to settle the eye. Out of the blue, tenuous electrical sketches scribbled with liquid light appear/disappear faster than the human eye can detect. Flashes of potential, hints of possible lines of connection alight now and again. . . . Against a dark sky it is possible to catch glimmers of the wild energetics of indeterminancies in action. . . . Lightning bolts are born in a lively play of in/determinancy, troubling matters of self and other, past and future, life and death. It electrifies our imaginations and our bodies. If lightning enlivens the boundary between life and death, it exists on the razor’s edge between animate and inanimate, does it not seem to dip sometimes here and sometimes there on either side of the divide. (2012, pp. 387–388)

Barad’s sexy connection between the build-up of lightning as/and a sexual attraction between the (atoms and their components) in the land and the clouds reminds us that humans and our embodied, intellectual, and emotional landscapes are part of the vast replications of nature’s patterns, rather than the other way around (nature mirroring “us”). It also demonstrates in beautiful detail how dynamic and “alive” the so-called inanimate and world is. The event that is lightning doesn’t happen in a continuous (in time) or contiguous (in space) or hierarchical (from cloud to ground) fashion. Instead, lightning is an example of a strangely animate inanimate relating in a process of an enlivening attunement: “When ‘awareness’ occurs, a traveling spark is initiated from the point to be struck and propagates upward to meet the downward” moving sparks cloud and the spurts of electrons they set off (2012, p. 398). These are “first gestures” of a lightening, but they are not lightning bolt just yet. The lighting, the way it comes together, in a play of difference and waiting, is call and response performance in which awareness gathers in a process of attunement to that surplus charge and traveling spark. Lightning as a performance of attunement in and across time resonates with José Esteban Munoz’s theorization of queer futurity. He writes: Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. (Muñoz 2009, p. 1)

While we may never touch queerness, we can feel it in the sparks and responses, in the ways we rehearse on the ground our connection to “with

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what’s coming down,” attending to “the clouds seductive overtures” (p. 397). Barad asks, “What mechanism is at work in this communicative exchange between sky and ground when awareness lies at the crux of this strangely animated inanimate relating? . . . What kind of queer communication is at work here?” (Barad 2012, p. 398). Munoz’s answer might be that it’s a “doing . . . the performative as a force of and for futurity” (p. 182). The queer temporalities in Munoz’s theorizing are, like Barad’s lightning, “different and outside,” insistently pulling in “time and place that is simultaneously not yet here but able to be glimpsed on our horizon” (p. 183). Elsewhere, Munoz (2015) writes that the “incommensurate thought project” of queer—that is, “casting a picture of arduous modes of relationality that persist in the world despite stratifying demarcations and taxonomies of being” and classification—is “the active self-attunement to life as varied and unsorted correspondences, collisions, intermeshings and accords between people and nonhuman objects, things, formations and clusterings” (p. 210). In the not-yet of lightning and queer futurities, we get caught up in the process of attuning to “the potential and actual vastness of being-with” objects (p. 201). In other words, we get caught up in queer object time. QUEER REGENERATION AND FLESHY HOPES We openly contemplate the possible tautology of something like queer object time. Still, we have tried to consider how the lives of objects queers normative time relations, object relations and relational orientations. We take Dolphijn & van der Tuin’s (2012) invitation to search not for the objectivity of things in themselves but for an objectivity of actualization and realization . . . for how matter comes into agential realism, how matter is materialized in it. [We are] interested in speeds and slownesses, in how [an] event unfolds according to the inbetween, according to intra-action [and] studying the multiplicity of modes that travel natureculture as the perpetual flow it has always already been. (2012, p. 113)

In linking Barad’s meditations on the queerness of “being-time indeterminancy” and Munoz’s queer potentialities, we are rehearsing an imaginative and, yes, hope-ful play of binaries (here/there, now/then, subject/object, animate/inanimate) that reads the disparate “parts” of queer—object—time as entangled and intra-active. We feel into why entanglements so often come back to binaries, even while we move and live in multiplicities. We wonder if queer object time might be a useful way to hold the binary-not-binary in the forefront of our thinking. By making things slowly, bit by bit, we are going over what promise the “uncountable and generative” the parts and pieces



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of queer—object—time hold in their “uncountable and generative entanglements” and “ongoing reconfiguring” (Barad 2015, p. 407). The queerness of nature envelopes us all, disrupting predictable or “straight” notions of time, bodies, and relations. It is an instantiation of becoming-object, an always-already encounter that is both static and dynamic, fluid and material, relational, and multi-directional. In its multiplicity and multidirectionality, queer object time offers an encounter that rejects the human/nonhuman binaries, seeing objects and humans as co-existent events rather than ontological categories in competition for resources or recognition. As event, the becoming-object of queer object time is invested in reconfiguring and regenerating what might yet be (Barad 2015, p. 402). *** The mermaid—the one at Langelinje pier—and also the others, has persisted and regenerated. She’s been banned from Facebook for breaching its nudity guidelines (“Little Mermaid” 2017). She has been the backdrop for protest, dressed in a burqa in protest off Turkey joining the EU, splashed with red paint in protest of whaling in the Faroe Islands and covered in blue and white paint to draw attention to the case of Abdulle Ahmed, a Somali man who has been held for more than a decade in a Danish psychiatric hospital (“Little Mermaid” 2017). She has also been the subject of all manner of violence: her arm was sawn off by drunken men and she was beheaded twice—first by the artist Jorgen Nash in a fit of rage after his lover left him and again by an unnamed “Radical Feminist Faction” seeking to “create a symbol of the sexually fixated and misogynist male dream of women as bodies without heads” (“Little Mermaid” 2017). At the age of ninety, she was found floating face down in the harbor after explosives placed by anti-war protestors angry about Danish involvement in Iraq blew her off her rock (“Little Mermaid” 2017). After each defacement and dismemberment, the mermaid has been cleaned and polished, her parts recast and reattached. Her body has been pulled from the water and refixed to its stone perch. More than enduring in time, the mermaid is “an ongoing reconfiguring of spacetimemattering” (Barad 2015, p. 411). She doesn’t change, evolving from “this” to “that” version of herself; instead what the mermaid in the harbor, and on the dressers of grandmothers and queer women scattered around the world might be, as a becoming-object, is an “iterative reworking of past, present, future integral to the play of the indeterminacy of being-time” (Barad 2015, p. 411). *** In underlining nature’s queerness, Barad focuses our attention on the power and immeasurable beauty—and not only the terror, the making-killable—of

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the interdeterminate, the unintelligible, and the monstrous. Pivoting on the importance of lightning in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Barad reflects on the shock of the unintelligible and the monstrous if not for nature, then for natureculture: “Shocking brute matter to life. What makes us think matter is lifeless to begin with?” (Barad 2012, p. 389). For Barad, Frankenstein’s “monster” and other “‘ultra-queer’ critters with their quantum quotidian qualities queer queerness itself in their radically deconstructive ways of being” (Barad 2012, p. 25). Queerness explodes not only material binaries, but also temporal and spatial ones. Barad’s notions of emergence and agential realism both attend to queer’s power to galvanize and animate the potentiality of the electric circuit between bodies, time, and objects, she writes: The (re)generative possibilities are endless. Fodder for potent trans* imaginaries for reconfiguring future/past lived realities, for regenerating what never was but might yet have been. Can we cultivate bioelectrical science’s radical potential, subverting Dr. Frankenstein’s grab for power over life itself, aligning (neo)galvanism with trans* desires, not in order to have control over life but to empower and galvanize the disenfranchised and breathe life into new forms of queer agency and embodiment? Can we (re)generate what was missing in fleshiness but materially present in virtuality? Can we (re)generate what our bodies sense but cannot yet touch? . . . And if these fleshy hopes feel cruel to us sometimes, especially perhaps when reality seems impossibly hard and fixed and our own naturalcultural bodies and desires feel immobilized, if there are times when we have to face the knife, tear ourselves open, draw blood, might a regenerative politics with all its monstrously queer possibilities still serve to recharge our imaginations and our electric body-spirits, helping us transition from momentary political and spiritual rigor mortis to living raging animacy? . . . There is no illusion of queer regeneration being a bloodless affair. (Barad 2015, p. 411–412).

When we tune into the “fleshy hopes” of what queer agency and embodiment cannot yet feel and touch, recognizing that the now is not enough while imagining a future, we “reconfigure anew seemingly disparate parts” (Barad 2015, p. 407). In this chapter, we have accumulated a storehouse of “things” that puzzle and perplex us in the best way: mermaids and monsters, intimate terrors and toxic assets, potatoes and lightning bolts. And in writing these things in queer object time, we have re-collected them forwards while remembering backwards (Schmidt 2015, p. 5), tracing their entanglements, responding to their (and our) yearnings for connection, assembling them (and ourselves) into fields of longing/belonging, regenerating what never was but might yet be. They might not necessarily be “good” things. But maybe.



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NOTES 1.  In the preface to Erin Manning’s (2013) Always More Than One, Brian Massumi describes Manning’s concept of spacetime as the inseparability of space and time; spacetime brings “seriation and contingency together in the unfolding of the event” (p. xvi). Manning writes that the movement of bodies and the bodying forth of thought—the immanence of movement moving and thought becoming movement— creates the possibility in which “spacetime itself begins to vibrate with movement expression” (p. 101). In this book, we bring together spacetime and, writing toward moments and orientations of attunement when objects “exceed their form” and create the “capacity to dislodge the you that you thought you were” (pp. 101–102). We are attuned to and write toward Sarah Ahmed’s work in Queer Phenomeology (2006), in which she considers the relation among orientations and objects, writing about queer objects, or perhaps more precisely queering objects. She notes that “queer objects” “come to life” (p. 163) when they come into contact with bodies; they “exceed their form” unsettling the lines that divide “spaces [and spacetime] as worlds, thereby creating other kinds of connections where unexpected things can happen” (p. 169). 2.  Etymology of rehearse from etymonline.com. 3. Barad’s (2012) notion of spacetimemattering offers a way of thinking about how both size and time collide in/as matter, a very queer disruption of that particular binary indeed. 4.  The “I do” as an instantiation of a presumed and individually agentic heteronormativity—one thinks here, again, of the zombie marching ever forward in dogged pursuit of the inheritance and privilege that is heteronormative relationality. 5.  For more on the lives of “inanimate objects,” see chapter 4, “Queer Ecologies,” on stromatolites.

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THE NONHUMAN BREATH: ROCKS (AND OTHERS) THAT BREATHE In northwest Australia, about a day north of Perth at Hamelin Station Reserve in Shark Bay UNESCO World Heritage Area, there is a large colony of living stromatolites (Greek for “layered rock”), which are reportedly the oldest known form of life on earth, and which some claim are the main reason oxygen-breathing beings such as humans can live on this planet today. They are “microbial reefs created by cyanobacteria (formerly known as blue-green algae)” (Bush Heritage Australia 2017). They were believed to be extinct until recently when living stromatolites were discovered in Shark Bay, and they have become quite a (human) tourist draw. Not to confuse the Shark Bay stromatolites with DEAD ones, which are visitable in a range of places in Australia and other locations like Canada. Dead stromatolites are commonly known as FOSSILS and are of lesser interest, apparently due to our collective obsession with the animate in all its formations. Stromatolites are the oldest living organisms on the planet, and as persistent breathers, have something to tell us about not only nonhuman animacies but also queer time. Bush Heritage Australia tells us that Stromatolites are the reason why we’re alive today! Before cyanobacteria, the air was only 1 percent oxygen. Then, for 2 billion years, our photosynthesising Stromatolites pumped oxygen into the oceans (like underwater trees, before trees existed). When the oceans’ waters were saturated, oxygen was released into the air, and with around 20 percent of oxygen in the air, life was able to flourish and evolve. Even today you can see Stromatolites “fizzing” underwater, releasing oxygen. (2017) 83

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There are only two places left where Stromatolites thrive: the Bahamas and Western Australia, but the Western Australian colony is far bigger and more robust. Climate change and human interference are the two greatest threats to the Stromatolites. To think about the Earth as its own subject or ecology/network that had a first breath is both anthropomorphic and also beautifully absent of the ubiquitous human-focus of “the breath” as a notion of animacy. As new materialism separates notions like agency and affect from humans, the possibility of pursuing the breath and a thread for unravelling the human in all forms of animacies is generative for us. In our formulation of queer object time (chapter 3), we focused on the theorization of things’ temporal queering of human-centered notions of linearity and temporality. In this chapter, we integrate current discussions on the Anthropocene, the entanglements of things and thoughts, and animacies into our broader consideration of queer ecologies (that is, as we have it, ecologies which effectively move beyond the human). Extending Shannon Winnubst’s “normative” ideas of time and space (2006), this chapter establishes the foundations of humanity’s queering of the range of natural/biological to digital environments (ecologies) in which we find ourselves. The notion of this era as the Anthropocene, a period in which human impact is increasingly clearly having irreversible and destructive effects, is the backdrop before which this chapter is laid out; our writing seeks to link micro with the macro understandings of the queerness amidst this age of terror. QUEERING THE ANTHROPOCENE There is general agreement that we are now living in a period increasingly defined by negative human impact on global ecosystems. The Anthropocene1 refers to the most recent geologic time period on Earth, characterized by human influence, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric, and other earth system processes are now altered (mostly negatively) by humans. Not to capitulate to epoch-binaries (or any other binaries that we continue to work against here), but the Anthropocene can be considered in contra-distinction to what geomicrobiologist Kurt Konhauser, at the University of Alberta, calls The Great Oxidation Event, a moment approximately 2.5 billion years ago which roughly marked the beginning of oxygen-breathing life (Thornhill 2011). Since its articulation in 2000,2 the notion of the Anthropocene has taken hold for a global population buffeted by political, economic, military and perhaps most importantly, environmental instability. Haraway (2015) reminds us that



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it’s more than climate change; it’s also extraordinary burdens of toxic chemistry, mining, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, vast genocides of people and other critters in systemically linked patterns that threaten major system collapse after major system collapse after major system collapse. Recursion can be a drag. (p. 159)

Discussions of the Anthropocene abound, with critical interrogations of consumer cultures, digital disembodiments/dismemberment, and a raft of other queer considerations. Haraway along with others believes “the Anthropocene is more a boundary event than an epoch” (p. 160), typified by an erasure of places of refuge. Haraway’s desire for the Anthropocene is brevity, with a view toward future epochs in which refuge can be reestablished or restored. Haraway calls the “past, present and to come” (p. 160) the Chthulucene, a period in which “all the thousand names are too big and too small . . . we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections” (p. 160). The plurality of the Chthulucene points to the non-binary, multiplicity, and creatively chaotic orienting principles at play in both her work and trans* and queer communities, activists, and research. Her reminder that no singular heuristic or onto-epistemological solution is going to work returns us to the need for empathic proliferation and coexistence rather than rigid definitions of rightness and wrongness. She critiques the posthuman zeitgeist in praising its intention but criticising what she perceives as a cycle of reflection without urgently-needed action. Haraway’s identification as, “a compost-ist, not a posthuman-ist: we are all compost” (2015, p. 161), returns attention to humans’ inescapably fictile nature and her belief that composting remains the central metaphor for this and any future epochs (if any are) to come. She urges humanity to eschew procreation and urgently “make-with—become-with, compose-with—the earth-bound” (p. 160). Her work remains committed to ecofeminisms (Alaimo 1994; Leavy & Harris 2018) and the feminist liberatory project; in so doing, she highlights the need for systems renewal as an ongoing process that is both generative and degenerative. Through the example of feminist activism and spirituality, Haraway insists we must imagine new futures through theory, action and collaboration with nonhuman others. Her purpose, she declares, is to make “‘Kin,’ meaning something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy” (2015, p. 161). Only through kin-making can we practice the compassionate collaborations the planetary ecosystem now requires. In deploying the metaphor of a spider, Haraway says “the tentacular are also nets and networks . . . tentacularity is about life lived along lines—and

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such a wealth of lines—not at points, not in spheres. The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers” (2016, n.p.). In challenging posthumanism, Haraway, like Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and others reject linearity and binarism, including the fascination with anything in human-led terms, claiming it is “past time to turn directly to the timespace-global thing called Anthropocene” (n.p.). In contrast, Alaimo says her view of the Anthropocene falls perhaps between Braidotti’s hopeful and Haraway’s dystopic forecasting. Alaimo opens her book Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, with the provocation that “the Anthropocene is no time to set things straight,” but suggests that it is a time for feminist, new materialist and posthumanist responses to the crisis. Alaimo sees these theoretical approaches as pro-active as well as philosophical work, and argues that The recognition that human activity has altered the planet on the scale of a geological epoch muddles the commonsensical assumption that the world exists as a background for the human subject. New materialisms, insisting on the agency and significance of matter, maintain that even in the Anthropocene, or, especially in the Anthropocene, the substance of what was once called “nature,” acts, interacts, and even intra-acts within, through, and around human bodies and practices. (p. 103)

If, as Alaimo claims, environmentalists, feminists, and other queer subjects are also adept at improvising, the possibilities of the Anthropocene include the freedoms of dissolution, and the celebration of a contingent and emergent present in which “fundamental boundaries have begun to come undone, unravelled by unknown futures” (n.p.). Her notion of trans-corporeality advocates the model of the ethical subject as one who is “rooted in the ordinary practices of everyday life” (p. 174). For Alaimo, as for Barad (2015), there is nothing queerer than nature itself, and the Anthropocene may be the tipping point at which the nonhuman world proves once and for all how failed the heteronormative human fantasy of control, consumption, reproduction and order really is or might become. QUEER ANIMALS In addition to the work of Barad, a range of recent texts3 look at the “queerness” of animals, offering an emergent counter-narrative to the western imperative that queerness stands in contrast (or affront) to “nature” and heteronormativity. These authors explore possibilities for queering nature through recognition of the many nonhuman species that engage in or display same-sex



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sex acts, same-sex child-rearing practices, intersexuality, multiple “genders,” “transvestism,” and transsexuality. Both Barad and Alaimo have written from a new materialist and feminist perspective about the queerness of animals, microbial and other non-human actors in planetary ecologies. Alaimo has celebrated ecological and biological diversity as “an affirmation of life’s vitality and infinite possibilities: a worldview that is at once primordial and futuristic, in which gender is kaleidoscopic, sexualities are multiple, and the categories of male and female are fluid and transmutable” (2016, p. 46). Alaimo discusses the notion of scientific and popular encounters with “queer” animals4 which contests the Western foundation of heteronormativity as that which came straight from Nature. The fact that science, cultural theory, and common sense have reacted to the sexual diversity of nonhuman life by denying, dismissing, closeting, segregating, and otherwise explaining it away, could entice us to add to rather than subtract from the reality, as Latour puts it, of queer animals. (Alaimo 2016, p. 42)

Queer animals, or the ways in which they queer human framings of nature and the “natural order” can assist in re-establishing a less anthropocentric Anthropocene. As Barad contends, matter “is promiscuous and inventive in its agential wanderings” (2015, p. 387), and these queer beats in nature help liberate humans from our quirky narcissism. Both Barad and Alaimo re/claim queer for the non-human subject, or what Barad has called a queer origin story—for the posthuman. The binarily-inherited social/natural divide that Latour has unpacked so extensively is present here in Alaimo’s debunking of social’s hold of queer, even in queer social self-constructions: Western, Euro-American thought has long waged “nature” and the “natural” against LGBTQ peoples, as well as women, people of color, the colonized, and indigenous peoples. Just as the pernicious histories of social Darwinism, colonialism, primitivism, and other forms of scientifically infused racism have incited indispensable critiques of the intermingling of “race” and “nature,” much queer theory has bracketed, expelled, or distanced the volatile categories of “nature” and the “natural,” situating queer desire within an entirely social, and very human, habitat. This sort of segregation of “queer” from “nature” is hardly appealing to those who seek queer green places. Discussing the “biopolitical organization of life,” Catriona Sandilands argues that to conceive of “life as queer opens the world to a reading in which generativity is not reduced to reproductivity, in which the future is not limited to a repetition of a heteronormative ideal of the Same, and in which the heterosexual couple and its progeny—or some facsimile thereof—are not the privileged bearers of life for ecocriticism. (Alaimo 2016, p. 42)

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ECOTERRORISM AND QUEER FREEDOM We are aiming here at an understanding of the ways in which queer human ecologies impact—and are impacted by—queer natural ecologies, including animal and non-animal objects, things, and flows. To move beyond the human requires not only a Latour’s relinquishment of human subjectivity even when considering the agency of things, but also an ongoing interrogation of the ways in which the history of human thought continues to bias our efforts. Winnubst (2006) reminds us in her book Queering Freedom of the two dominant models of human subjectivity in western cultures since the Enlightenment, “Locke’s liberal individual and Lacan’s authoritative ego” (p. 76), both of which operate within an economy of scarcity that is grounded in a model of desire that can never find any external satisfaction. Both models are driven by lack, which each thinker conceives as the ontological condition of humans, and which develops further into an explicitly aggressive drive in Lacan’s accounts. (p. 76)

The tension between the Lacan’s psychoanalytic on the one hand, and Locke’s empiricism on the other, is the space into which posthumanism and new materialism foment a more general dissatisfaction with human-centered subjects and meta-narratives. Locke’s empiricism (the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth and is constructed through experience) did not link his advocacy for introspection with any kind of real critique of the possibility of unlimited accumulation of wealth. He focused on advocating for “durable goods” like money, or gold, that wouldn’t spoil. For Locke, the wastage (spoiling goods) was the only offensive aspect of unlimited accumulation of wealth. He offered us no class critique, nor ways of thinking governmentally or individually about addressing these persistent human inequities. Winnubst draws on Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, in which he argues that children become over-identified with mirrored images of themselves (first performed by the parents) in order to experience satisfaction or full identification/belonging.5 For Winnubst, eco-antagonism for all that surrounds the neurotic mirror-seeking subject inevitably follows: Standing out in the ontologically empty space of this aggressive and threatening social scene, one must mark one’s territory and construct strong and clear borders around it. The self becomes the fortress that must be protected. And the narcissism that initiated the aggressive formation of the ego closes itself off from the wider social world into a cultural solipsism: the self must be contained and the social world must protect its fragile containment. (pp. 76–77)

That is, for Winnubst the formations of eco-terrorism of all kinds are to be found in psychoanalytic notions of self and the liberal individualism which



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follows. Her notion of “normative ideas of time and space” (2006) also argues for the role that the “future plays as the endlessly pursued horizon of satisfaction that lack never achieves; the future cannot be the temporality of queering” (p. 230). Her queering of politics is itself a kind of queering of time, although her maneuver is to separate them. In so doing, Winnubst positions “queer along two primary axes that are necessary to its historicized emergence in contemporary cultures of phallicized whiteness, and its historical lack of specificity: its decentering of utility, through its degenitalizing of sexuality; and its orientation toward pleasures, not desire” (p. 140). De-coupling queer from its LGBTIQ origins, Winnubst suggests, may offer new approaches to spatiality and temporality, “given how the logic of desire locks us into concepts of the self as a discretely contained unit that projects itself into the future” (p. 140). Extending Winnubst, we link the individual’s quest for spatial and temporal freedom (experienced as pleasure) with the ecologically queer, asking how human and nonhuman subjects live out the multi-modes of these axes of event/ encounter in not only queer but ceaselessly disruptive ways. DIGITAL ECOLOGIES AND HIVEMIND How does this get performed as a queering of digital ecologies? Online and hybrid online/offline worlds offer a range of ways in which the digital is helping queer the notion of ecologies, offering new configurations of human/ nonhuman interaction, for example in the form of the swarm. One small example is increasingly the way social media affords opportunities for “hive mind” to contribute to individual’s private experiences or projects. Consider a family going on holiday asking for recommendations for hotels; a twenty-something asks for advice on which first car to buy; a parent asks for parenting feedback. One popular way of improving or developing a course syllabus is by vetting it through Academia.edu or social media sites beforehand, to source the best ideas and practices from the hive, a familiar form of queer ecology. Manning is no exception, and she has recently shared one of her syllabi-in-development via Facebook, asking for feedback and contributions on her course on affect theory. Specifically, she told her thread, the course takes affect as a starting point to ask, following Spinoza, how affect opens up, challenges, or reorients ecologies of existence? By placing affect in relation to questions concerning the Anthropocene, the course will do three things: 1.  explore in detail how what Brian Massumi calls “missed conceptions” highlight the excess of human-ness in affect, an excess that challenges our tendency to place experience solely within the bounds of the human

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2.  explore how affect can open the way for an ecological encounter with experience that engages with the limits of the Anthropocene, perhaps even challenging its nomenclature 3.  ask how such an account of the more-than human share of experience alters our experience of, and study of, cinema. (Manning 2015)

The post not only got many people thinking, but sparked a digital exchange in which ideas, titles, responses, emotions and other nonhuman forces pinballed between lines, geographies, thoughts, statements, and relationships and formed an improvised social media ecology, in addition to improving a syllabus-artefact. One of the respondents on the thread mentioned the Brazilian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro and a reference he made at conference about the possibility of a non-human point of view in cinema, specifically Godard’s dog Roxy’s role in his film Goodbye to Language and the filmic innovations and disassembling of 3D effects the dog had stimulated him to consider. Similarly, in this book we ask queer questions to guide us to new understandings of how we, as human thinkers, can get out of our own way and learn through the example of nonhuman others in our environments and era. For example, we’ve taken up Stewart’s “speculative attunement” as a way to write “slow theory” that “pauses the “quick, naturalised relationship between thinking subject, concept and world” in order to “align with the commonplace labours of becoming sentient to whatever is happening” (2013c, p. 32). Stewart’s speculative attunement couples Martin Heidegger’s concept of “worlding” and Henri Lefebvre’s attention to the labors of that worlding, in which things “matter not because of how they are represented but because they have qualities, textures, tracks and rhythms” (Stewart 2013c, p. 32; Lefebvre 2004). This move away from a view of thought and reason as distinctly human and toward attachment and attunement as modes that allows for feeling, sensing and perceiving of all life forms—is one mode for “getting out of the way” of what we might learn from and think through worlds, desires, objects and ways of living.

THOUGHTS AND THINGS In her “7 Propositions for the Impossibility of Isolation or, the Radical Empiricism of the Network” (2011), Manning uses William James’s (1912) discussion of the pen as object and as an idea with function, in order to advance her notion that thoughts and things are one. For Manning “the event is the terminus through which the process of taking-part begins to take form” (2011, n.p.). Manning’s discussions of “the event,” of affect’s intersection with new materialism as/at an always-emergent “event” in which all actants are co-emergent in



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the here-and-now are often cited sites for exploring intra-action. Other including van der Tuin and Dolphijn, Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, Braidotti, all explore some version of the notion, as Manning puts it, that “things aren’t as stable as you thought they were” (2011, n.p.). And in her effort to materialize her ideas, she turns both to James and to the object—in this case, of James’s pen which in some respects is generatively queer. Manning homes in on the connection between the fact of a pen, versus the perception of the pen, all pivoting upon the function of it. She writes that for James, the function of the pen changes its materiality, it’s fact. She highlights his sidelining of the human as the instantiator of the pen—the validator, the activator—the master of the pen. The pen has its own life, she illustrates. These are core concepts for the contemporary new materialist. So what is queer about a pen having its own life in 2011, if William James philosophized about it more than one hundred years ago? For us, Manning’s discussion suggests a movement from human-centered objects to objects which are, in one sense, coming of age. She links this wellestablished challenge to the fact status of things (from last century) to a more contemporary iteration of it in the twenty-first century: the human/computer interaction. Thoughts and things. Things and thoughts. The thought-thing interaction. We find in Manning’s claim that “knower and known are co-constituted in and by the event itself,” (2011, n.p.) the possibility of the event as queerness itself, or an enactment of queerness-as-the-not-yet. That in the emergence of object-becoming-thought the exciting interstitial expression of Muñoz (2009) queer futurity as a queering of both time and future. Queer futures are social/ecological/networked emergences, in which “the knower is not necessarily the human” (Manning 2011, n.p.), and the thought is not necessarily a human-event. Rather, “the pen-event is the experience of how the pen as thing becomes pen as thought, and vice versa” (Manning 2011, n.p.). For us, queer objects become as queer as thought; materiality begets ideation, and vice versa, without beginning or end. A queer rendering of the pen would, for Muñoz, be performing—indeed reforming—“both the not-yet-here (the future) and the no-longer-conscious (the past)” (Muñoz, p. 83). The slippage is simultaneously not only between thought and thing (spatially), but between the idea of pen (constructed in and through time) and the emergence of penas-object (temporally). Thus, the intra-action of James’s pen in Manning’s narrative is queering time, place, materiality and thought. To separate experience into consciousness and content (according to James and Manning) is to situate consciousness on the outside of experience, always

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in the human, and always as secondary. Through Manning’s logic, “instead of situating the bearer/knower in the human subject and the thing/known in the pen, James makes pen-ness the junction through which thought and object collide. Conscious experience is the event. In the pen” (2011, n.p.). Thingthoughts and thing-lives. Manning calls on Gilbert Simondon (1958) to interpret James’s thingthought in its doing as a technique which, Manning says, is a “thought in emergence” (2011, n.p.). We love Manning’s discussion here for technique as becoming, because it returns us to global conversations about creativity and design thinking in which, “All techniques require iteration, repetition, but no technique can survive without difference. A rigorous technique makes felt the interval of the not-yet-thought in thought. Such a technique not only intervenes within existing processes—it creates new modes of thought” (Manning 2011, n.p.). The interval to the event, a kind of futurity that Muñoz theorized as queer, and that we understand as queering materiality-in-thought. ONTOGENETIC, OR THE “THOUGHT-THING CONTINUUM” How can queer help us think newly about time-in-relationship with things? We take Manning’s assertion that “indeterminate and ontogenetic,6 thought is active in the multiplicity of its time-slips. But it does this always in tandem with the thing” (2011), and yet we wonder whether time must slip if it is always already folding in upon itself as in queer time (Halberstam, 2005), as “nonnormative logics and organizations of community” (p. 6), “a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (p. 6). Generative disruptions that still need, however, to move beyond the human. Sticky attachments, Ahmed might say, of the ways in which human animals refuse to let nonhuman things go or better, to get on with their business, through our habit of staying “saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension” (2004, p. 11). Thought-things. Thing-lives. We think we make progress, then backslide. Manning tells us that “thought is feeling-with” (2011, n.p.), but again we are troubled by its decidedly anthropocentric orientation. Who thinks? The human. Not the pen. The pen does not think the human—or does it? “The thought-thing is the event” Manning claims, but the thought is always a human thought, about an other-thing (2011, n.p.). We trudge on.



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For James, time is immaterial; the things in his present room, and the things in his boyhood room, are affectively the same. One’s experience of the thing, the event, is the same, regardless of temporality. Yet the feeling of the experience is what dispels time, and yet the human is situated within time, so can never be beyond or without or outside of, time. The “not-me” of James’s nostalgic recollections, Manning claims, is “a singularity. This singularity is relational.” But how is the relationality achieved? This is the queerness of the new materialist argument, for us. Because the relational seeks to de-center the human, and yet queerly always already returns the human to the center by initiating the event, the thought-thing for now, remains the thought of a human, and as such is always the inciting event. For now. And then its sticky attachments find the thing, but eventually (even we can see), the thing will find the human-thought, and evolve it into a thought-thing. How very queer. WAITING AS MAKING The interval can be understood as waiting from an experiential perspective. For Manning waiting is not only spending time, but also can be making time. Manning (2011) talks about the relationship between user (for her, human) and network (in this case, social media) as the network setting up new time, and a new set of relations, with the human. She says, “The connective tissue that networks sites is experienced by most as little more than the frustration of waiting. . . . It activates a new set of relations, sparking new modes of thought . . . make[s] the knower the relation itself” (2011, n.p.) That is, the event of “networking” via social media or other digital technology tools, makes new kinds of relations which include but are not limited to, humans. For James, it’s the relations that connect experiences that become the experiences themselves—at least as equally as anything else in the event—including waiting. Waiting is a multitude of possibilities, a time of “emergent relations,” of what James calls “different degrees of intimacy,” or what Manning she calls the site “where experimentation remains open,” prior to the occasion culminating or closing down the potential of the other events into the actualisation of the singular event (2011, n.p.; see also Harris, Holman Jones, Faulkner, & Brook 2017). Manning works into the exciting posthuman possibilities of the non-dual human-computer relations possible in online (or even online/offline hybrid) worlds: that is, web life encourages us to reject dualism and “work instead with the ever-changing sets of knower-known relations, [where] thoughtthings collide most forcefully in the not-yet of a node’s actualization. The

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networking happens not in the actualization of the node, but in the connective tissue of its tending-toward” (2011, n.p.) And yet, she continues to indirectly focus on human experience in her discussion, unpacking the ways in which the network has changed our understandings and experience of “real” and in user relations. We are most interested in the agency of the network, how it seems (sometimes terrifying, sometimes thrilling) to be changing not only human self-image, but the notion of “real” (which of course we see as synonymous with human) characteristics. That is, we still see the network serving humanity, rather than the network becoming ascendant and directing our actions and goals. Manning does end with just such possibility, suggesting that the network is building itself a different kind of network. She writes, “It may lead to the kitchen for a glass of juice which may lead to the cat which may lead to the couch which may lead to a nap. Or simply back to the computer to check the status of the latest tab” (2011, n.p.). But what if the human (even if unstated) was no longer the actor? What if the new network possibilities do not include human “users” at all? Certainly, the flush of infatuation with artificial intelligence shows us that in the first instance humans are always central: we build things to serve us. But there have been more than enough dystopic novels to remind us that it’s not difficult to supersede human intelligence, and in fact it has been happening for years in computational design, algorithmic complexity and elsewhere. Posthumanism as a theoretical project concerned with the logical progression toward living and non-living things becoming more selfdetermining, fits in some manifestations with the concurrent rise in activist and legislative advocacy for the rights of non-human others including oceans, and animals. So, is it such a “queer life” for computers to begin to advocate for their own rights, and can we imagine the ethical and moral challenges of such a turn, now, when we are still socioculturally in the phase of rapidly developing them for our own ends? It is the twenty-first-century industry and moral quandary of slavery—but a slavery of, and perhaps to, things. Morally, this it can only go one way as well because even humans can see—as we did with the enslavement of other humans (eventually)—that it is indefensible to argue the enslavement of any other beings in service to any other set of beings. The conditions that are now being established, and its prime indicator, which will eventually make this significant “thing rights” issue a central issue of this century, is the ways in which we are simultaneously exploring the agency of non-human things while “humanizing” or anthropomorphising things (think the film Her). So, we say yes to Manning’s claim that the event is the thing, that waiting is just one example of a new kind of humanthing relation, but at the same time remembering the event is being directed



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by our insatiable hunger for developing “the thing.” That event—all those infinite possibilities—are still, at this point, being directed by the instigating actions of the human. This will not always be so. WHERE ARE “WE” IN QUEER ECOLOGY? Manning acknowledges (through extending her example of waiting) that “when knower becomes the field of relations itself, it is no longer the human subject who makes all decision.” “Is there agency?” she asks. “Of course,” she answers, “But not solely or even primarily in the human subject” (2011, n.p.). Manning again draws on James and his metaphor of the wave, saying that we are riding a wave in human experience, imagining ourselves headed somewhere and only mostly conscious of the crest of that trajectory. She urges us to remain open to infinite possibilities, even/especially in digital worlds, and perhaps we will. But human tendency seems to be to foreclose, and why would we consider online worlds to be different? We are in some way inherently agoraphobic beings: we want to delimit the parameters of our existence, all the while still marvelling at its infinity. Machines (and animals we would argue) have no such neurotic or egomaniacal impulses. Perhaps this is why they seem to stay “in the event” much more easily than we do. Bennett (2010) draws on Derrida instead in her discussion of agency and waiting. “To be alive is to be waiting” writes Bennett (2010), and human experience is typified by “straining forward toward the event” (p. 32). Such straining toward the event is an anticipation that can never be fully realized, a happening which never arrives. She establishes the concept of ecology as a “same-stuff claim, this insinuation that deep down everything is connected and irreducible to a simple substrate” (p. xi). She seeks to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and to detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic, or divinely infused substance. This vibrant matter is not the raw material for the creative activity of humans or God. It is my body, but also the bodies of Baltimore litter . . . Prometheus’s chains . . . and Darwin’s worms . . . as well as the not-quite-bodies of electricity . . . ingested food . . . and stem cells. (p. xi)

Bennett (2010) has focused closely on the relationship between humans and things, queering our understandings of vitalism theory, bio-technology

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and social relations in a time of eco-crisis. Most famously, perhaps, she invites us into the philosophical project of reconsidering “matter as passive stuff, as raw, brute, or inert” (2010, p. vii). This habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things), and vibrant life (us, beings) is a “partition of the sensible” to use Jacques Ranciere’s phrase, and forming the foundations of her own notion of a vital materiality. She rejects binaries like “the quarantines of matter of and life” (2010, p. vii). In Three Ecologies, Felix Guattari (2005) observes that a “social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology” (2005, p. 41) work together to co-construct the dynamic environment that we call home. Bennett reminds us that Guattari “first categorically distinguishes the human (or social and mental ecologies) from the nonhuman (mechanosphere or environmental ecology), but then he immediately calls this division into question and calls for a ‘transversal’ mode of perception” (Bennett 2010, p. 114). He is not the only one who is ambivalent about the human/nonhuman split, as we explore extensively throughout this book. Elsewhere Bennett has drawn our attention to worms, trash, “gadgets,” Hurricane Katrina, and fire as the “milieu,” if not ground and stakeholders over and around which political decisions are made (2010, p. 39). The vitality and self-interest present in such flows are, her analysis suggests, decidedly queer. We’re most interested in her demand for a more robust activism than “environmentalism” to meet the new ecological crises, and she—like others—draws on Latour who has laid out in such beautiful detail some ways of thinking differently about beyondhumanism (for more on Latour’s ideas on the Parliament of Things, see chapter 2). THE NONHUMAN BREATH: ROCKS (AND OTHERS) THAT BREATHE To think about the Earth as its own subject or ecology/network that had a first breath is both anthropomorphic; and yet, thinking about “the breath” as a notion of animacy is also beautifully absent a ubiquitous human-focus. As new materialism separates notions like agency and affect from humans, the possibility of pursuing the breath and a thread for unravelling the human in all forms of animacies is generative for us. Still, there are many popular examples of increased attention to the ways humans are re/turning to natural processes for answers to our own anthropogenic mishaps. For years, oil spills have wreaked havoc on the natural world and in particular on oceans. The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 is widely considered the worst environmental disaster in his-



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tory. “Cleaning up” or reversing these disasters has continued to prove the limitations of human ability to manage or contain our misjudgements and hubris. Recent research at East Anglia University (UK) pointed toward how “microscopic organisms could be a huge help in cleaning up oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon disaster. . . . They’ve figured out how ‘rock breathing’ bacteria . . . that live below the Earth’s surface survive by, well, breathing rocks” (Liggett 2010, n.p.). Journalist Brit Liggett suggests in a jaunty and casual tone that: The organisms actually attach themselves to heavy metals with small biological wires and basically steal energy from the mineral’s electrons. They derive their energy from the electrons in minerals by breathing them almost—but not quite—like we breathe oxygen. The bacteria are able to live in the Earth’s subsurface because they have no use for oxygen and have long been a confusing phenomenon to scientists. Now that researchers at East Anglia have discovered their sneaky ways we could start using these little guys to help us clean up areas contaminated with toxic heavy metals. It just so happens that we are in need of a heavy metal cleanup at the moment with the still uncontained Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Perhaps we could round up a bunch of these subterranean dwellers and dump them in the Gulf to help us remedy this disastrous oil slick. (2010, n.p.)

Yet five years later, the same publication has this to say about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill: As we mark the fifth anniversary of the explosion that rocked the Deepwater Horizon rig, claiming 11 lives and sparking a 87 day-long, 200-million-gallon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, studies continue to reveal the devastating impact of the oil—and dispersants used in clean up—on marine life. Recent reports show that the dispersants were more damaging to corals than the oil itself, and continue to diminish shellfish and sea turtle populations, while large questions loom over the ongoing unexplained deaths of dolphins along the Gulf Coast. And, as the NRDC points out, it will take years, if not decades longer to fully understand the effects of the disaster. (Cameron 2015, n.p.)

The spill, five years on, is known to have affected over 1,000 miles of coastline. BP confirmed that they “were working to clean up a 25,000-pound tar mat” off Louisiana, and acknowledge that there are still 2 million barrels of oil floating in the Gulf of Mexico (Cameron 2015, n.p.). The use of the dispersants underwater (unlike applying it to the surface, the more conventional approach) did not clean up the oil as intended, but rather “mix with it and accelerate the dispersal process, but the combination of oil and dispersant has now been shown in research by Temple University to be more harmful to corals than the oil itself” (Cameron 2015, n.p.).

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The evidence now amassing about significant loss of animal, coral and microbial life is distressing. In addition, there is still no clear evidence about how long or just what the extent of the poison impact will be. Yet it doesn’t seem to be an urgent concern for anyone but environmental organisations and activists. Why? Speaking to NPR, Cynthia Sartou, executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network said, “nobody really is able to say what we may find in five years, ten years. It’s really distressing to me. It’s not publicly seen but it is out there” (Cameron 2015, n.p.). Sartou’s notion of what is “seeable” provides a link to considerations of intelligibility in trans* and queer communities and discourses. What does it mean to have evidence of a thing’s materiality, a body (in this case, the Gulfbody, or/including the poisoned body), and yet have that body remain unintelligible to the general public? For us, this is an example of Butler’s (2004) grievable life and echoes Haraway’s injunctions against “making killable” (for more on these ideas, see chapter 3). Chen’s (2012) analysis of this same oil spill focuses on the humancentered response (from BP and the media itself) and the abnegation of responsibility to the non-human victims of the disaster.7 Chen focuses on the market-driven obsessions of the human players in this drama and the “deathly—and lifely—language” used to produce relief and trust in a public addicted to believing in containment and victory (2012, p. 225). Chen then asks us to begin thinking, instead, about the well itself, and the oil as living and agentic—and victimized—in this disaster. The oil’s uncontainability is a marker of it’s a/liveness. Chen uses this example to discuss the differences in how we define “aliveness” and “deadness,” often through a discourse analysis of popular media coverage and industry or government documents. Chen relies on dualisms/binaries to make their point: “on the one hand, life and death and, on the other hand, dirtiness and cleanliness, where ‘dirtiness’ was paired with ‘death’ and ‘cleanliness’ with ‘life’” (p. 225), as well as the BP pattern of separating threat/impact into either “human” (largely economic) versus “environmental” (which Chen characterizes as “aesthetic preservation”).8 The interconnection of toxicity and contamination is evident in how “the oil that ‘contaminated’ the landscape had to be cleaned up by human workers, and a further contaminant was represented by the dispersants themselves” (Chen 2012, p. 226), despite a popular media and government that would prefer to keep them separate. Chen then deftly links this discussion to their previous work queering nature, materiality, and animacy: It came down to queer’s status as either matterlike (a noun) or something that affected, modified, the meaning, the very materiality, of other things (an adjective, verb, adverb). I began to realize that queerness had everything to do with animacy: it was an operator that shiftily navigated gradations of matter, includ-



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ing things, actions, and sensibilities. At the same moment, I took seriously the lessons of feminist, antiracist, and political-economic assertions that privilege had become solidified into a lexeme that otherwise got a lot of credit for being unfixable. (2012, p. 233)

Chen’s work (always in conversation with Barad and Haraway) helps us ask what might be learned from problematizing the line between “animate” and “inanimate,” queering the animate, while simultaneously problematizing queer. TREE-LIVES AND THE HUMAN CONTRACT Another ecology of nonhuman living beings are trees. They seem to have an endlessly long history of anthropomorphic interest to humans. They are evocative and feature large in the (secret) lives of humans as well, but there is certainly a fascination with what trees are doing when we are not around.9 One of the most interesting aspects of this current preoccupation is the ways in which trees as inanimate ecologies are finally beginning to be understood as communicating and relating. Not in an anthropomorphizing way, but in their own way. One of the earliest examples of an exploration of this notion in contemporary popular culture was the film Avatar (dir. James Cameron). Cameron’s veganism certainly has informed his views on how art, science, and human diet can converge in de-centring human exceptionalism in supporting the lives of things and the planet as an ecology or set of micro-ecologies. Cameron has said that “By changing what you eat, you will change the entire contract between the human species and the natural world” (Wikipedia) and it’s one way to approach not only fighting climate change, but a hierarchical approach to planetary co-existence overall. For Cameron to use his popular public platform to talk about changing the human contract with nonhuman others is not unique, but it is exceptional. Many movie stars and popular figures including politicians use their public profile to promote veganism, ecological and animal rights platforms/activisms. But Cameron’s suggestion that a new contract is required takes us to the ecological level, quite distinct from the personal everyday practices level. So, what might it mean to make a new contract between the humans and the natural world? In Chen’s 2015 special issue on “queer inhumanisms” Barad writes: What is needed is not a universalization of trans or queer experience stripped of all its specificities (as inflected through race, nationality, ethnicity, class, and other normalizing apparatuses of power), setting these terms up as concepts that float above the materiality of particular embodied experiences, but to make

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alliances with, to build on an already existing radical tradition (a genealogy going back at least to Marx) that troubles nature and its naturalness “all the way down.” . . . Queer kinship is a potent political formation, crucial to Stryker’s forceful analysis. Imagine how the possibilities for alliance with nature’s ongoing radical deconstruction of naturalness might enable the (re)making of queer kinship with nature. What would it mean to reclaim our trans* natures as natural? Not to align ourselves with essence, or the history of the mobilization of “nature” on behalf of oppression, but to recognize ourselves as part of nature’s doings in its very undoing of what is natural? (Barad 2015, p. 413)

Here queer kinship (like Haraway 2016a) becomes an ecology, a network that reaches far beyond the human-human relations that sustain LGBTIQ people when heteronormative and industrial complex imperatives seek to “make killable” (Barad) all queer subjects and practices. It is a new kind of compact, a new social contract between humans and nonhumans in which queer understandings in the human world might lead the way—might lead us, as Barad would have it, to the inherent timeless queerness of nature itself. QUEER ECOLOGIES In this chapter, we’ve sought to engage with new Anthropocene-attuned (or attenuated) theorizations of nature and culture as inextricably enmeshed, and inherently queer. In other words, if natureculture is inseparable and entangled, it is certainly always-already queer, humming outside of any tidy humanist narrative of progress and coherence. We have sought to show, in particular, how feminist new materialist approaches lead us to more embodied, situated, and differentiated approaches to understanding anthropogenic climate (and other) change, and are now urgently needed and perfectly situated to lead radical change that addresses and reconfigures the systemic genocidal and toxic poisoning of the earth as organism and all ecologies it sustains. As Alaimo and Hekman (2008) have noted, the intersections between the fields of “corporeal feminism, environmental feminism, and feminist science studies” (p. 17) are generative as sets of practices, even while they resist essentializing or constraining categorical imperatives. Such approaches suggest new logics, we argue, for attending to how “materiality erases the common-sense boundaries between human and nature, body and environment, mind and matter” (2008, p. 17). Thinking queerly about the ecological interrelationships between the more-than-human (with and without considerations of the human itself) shows us, as Chen (2012) observes, how the queering of objects and affects is often “accompanied by political revision,



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reworldings that challenge the order of things” (p. 237). In this chapter, we have tried to use the reworlding potential of queer ecologies to suggest new lives of things that have implications for the human, even as they no longer require our participation. NOTES 1.  We follow each author’s custom in capitalising or not the A in Anthropocene, thereby creating inconsistency throughout the chapter but reflecting the author’s intent: Haraway does, Alaimo does not. 2.  By Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, initially in the newsletter publication: “Opinion: Have we entered the ‘Anthropocene’? In International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme IGBP, Published October 31, 2010. http://www. igbp.net/news/opinion/opinion/haveweenteredtheanthropocene.5.d8b4c3c12bf3be6 38a8000578.html. 3.  In addition to Alaimo (2016) whom we draw most fully on here, others include: Bruce Bagemihl’s (1999) Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity; Joan Roughgarden’s (2013) Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People; Jennifer Terry (2000) Unnatural Acts’ in Nature: The Scientific Fascination with Queer Animals, as well as Bell (2010, MortimerSandilands & Erickson (2010) and Hird & Giffney (2016). 4.  See also Alaimo 2010. 5. Formulated in the 1930s, Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage is his most wellknown theoretical contribution. It is closely aligned with the Freudian power/agency of the ego, and most importantly for Lacan is that the “ego is an object rather than a subject. In other words, the ego, despite conscious senses to the contrary, is not a locus of autonomous agency, the seat of a free, true ‘I,’ determining its own fate. . . . Lacan views the ego as thoroughly compromised and inherently neurotic to its very core” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/). Here we are arguing a queering of both Freud’s articulation of the ego, but also of the “Anglo-American” obsession with the ego as independent, agentic and free. For us in this chapter, the ego is inherently queer, and its presence in larger ecologies—both digital and terrestrial—also provides or enacts a queering of those ecologies. That is, the ego continues to queer not only itself but its environment, ceaselessly. 6.  “Sensing bodies in movement are ontogenetic. They are ontogenetic because they are always in genesis, in a state of potential becoming. An ontology of the body presupposes a concrete category of Being” (Manning 2007, p. xxi). “The qualities of the political in and through friendship are ontogenetic, that is, equal to emergence. They are not qualities derived in mediation, secondary to other primary qualities” (2007, p. 25). 7.  Chen’s (2012) analysis is effectively paired with a discussion of “the humanwannabe-fish protagonist of the animated Hayao Miyazaki film Ponyo in looking at cosmologies that are imbued with ‘unexpected affectivity’” (p. 16).

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8.  While the limits of language are ever-present in writing about affect and animacies, we wonder why discussions of nondualisms so often return us to a reliance on them. 9.  For example, just in the past decade or so there has been an explosion of associated books both popular and scholarly. See for example: Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What they feel, how they communicate, discoveries from a secret world (Greystone Books 2016)—also from Wohlleben The inner life of animals, 2017; Tudge’s The secret life of trees: How they live and why they matter (Penguin, 2006); Chevallier’s The secret life of trees (Dorling Kindersley Limited, 1999); Stafford’s The long, long life of trees (Yale Univ Press, 2016); Zambra et al.’s The private lives of trees, 2015); Shyam et al.’s The night life of trees (Tara, 2006); Ketchum’s The secret life of the forest (New Word City, 2017); Tompkins’ & Bird’s The secret life of plants (Penguin, 1974); Rossmassler’s The Hidden Life of Trees (2017), and Haskell’s The songs of trees: Stories from nature’s great connectors (Black Inc, 2017) to name just a few.

Chapter Five

Queering HumanAnimal Kinship

LOOKING BACK Of the dog-human relation, Milan Kundera (1984/2004) writes, “Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace” (p. 297). Kundera’s evocation of dog-and-human Eden keeps the human at its center; dogs are conduit, transport, and link to peace, if not paradise. Where Kundera does not anthropomorphize dogs with human failings—evil, jealously, discontent—he does not, as Derrida (2008) or Levinas (2003) do not, “trouble the ontological boundary between the humanist subject and the nonhuman animal” (Kendall 2008/2016, p. 186). So while sitting with a dog might indeed deliver a human with an example of how to live more peacefully and contentedly on this planet, it does not move us to live more responsibly or relationally with other animals. However, as Haraway’s (and other’s) relationally entangled and intraactive approaches to human-dog encounters demonstrate, new materialist, affect and post-human scholarship ask us to become curious about what a dog or a cat or a cow might “actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to [us] in looking back” at us (2008, p. 21). Here we build on our earlier discussion of the Anthropocene and queer ecologies in chapter 4, and we play with the tantalizing possibility that paradise (even the Christianized notion of Eden per Kundera) is a human-animal becoming-with, a dynamic ecology in which one does not know where one being (human, or animal) ends and the other begins, without collapsing difference or other. As Haraway (2008) beautifully puts it in her consideration of where she and

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Australian cattle dog Ms Cayenne, both “products of white settler colonies,” begin and end: Who knows where my chemical receptors carried her messages or what she took from my cellular system for distinguishing self from other and binding outside to inside? . . . We make each other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. This love is a historical aberration and a naturalcultural legacy. (p. 16)

Though it’s perhaps inaccurate to use words like begin or end—tangled up as they are with instantiating the kinds of neat boundaries of here/now and life/death that we are working and writing to destabilize in this book. Drawing on a range of scholarship about human-animal relations including, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (2003) notion of “strange kinship,” and Haraway’s (2008) work on companion species, in this chapter we advance a vision of queer human-animal kinship, a heuristic which relies on a kinship accomplished not by virtue of generation or descent, but instead through performative and iterative “embodiment and action.” As part of an articulation of human-animal entanglements, we explore the constitutively affirming force of human-dog relations, where human and other animals are held and transformed through “shared embodiment and the gestures of love and friendship” (Oliver 2008, p. 117). In our worlding, animals (specifically dogs) not only offer queers a reliable safe haven in a social world populated by dangerous and unsafe humans and institutions but also a performative way of queerly and lovingly turning kinship animal. OUTSIDE ANIMALS I grew up in a time and place where by geography, generation, and Christianity, animals were considered inferior to humans. We always had pets when I was a child: cats for me, and dogs for my brothers. We loved them, certainly, but it was a different kind of love than I have for my dogs today. Back then, dogs (and most often the cats) lived outside. They were “outside animals” as my mother would say, although we never had inside animals so I don’t know why the distinction. She believed animals were dirty. We lived out in the country, and animals were part of the landscape in ways that belonged more to farms than to city companion-living. As a child, I had many experiences of seeing our animals die or dead in front of me: hit by cars, disappeared then found shot by a nasty neighbor; frozen cat bodies in the thawing spring snow. My dad even backed over one of our cats once coming out of the garage, and I stood next to him as he held it while it died. Because we were too poor to



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go to the vet, my parents themselves operated on our calico mama cat to get a growing worm out of her neck, and she survived the gruesome operation but died shortly after. I shudder to think of these things now, but I also remember how centrally and passionately they were part of our lives. My parents were Catholic, though, and it was always made clear to me that no matter how much I may love our pets, they had no souls. That was what distinguished humans from pets: that when we die, we go to heaven but pets just end. Even then, I thought that was a bullshit story. Now it seems incomprehensible that my compassionate parents even told such tales. *** There are those in our worlds who argue that working and writing toward generating an ethics of empathy and responsibility for animals and turning performances of kinship animal is out of touch or line in at time of such human-to-human brutality. Indeed, today, as we write, the outrage and disbelief over the latest Trump administration human rights violation that’s meant that thousands1 of children have been separated from their parents and “detained” (read: incarcerated) at makeshift “immigration centers” and “tender age” shelters in fifteen US states suggests that such human-on-human violence has reached a crisis point. The youngest child separated from parents at the border was eight months old; each of these “unaccompanied alien children” has suffered—will suffer—from the stress and trauma of forced separation. What kind of world builds such hostile shelters for its most vulnerable inhabitants? Or creates a system of kinship in which the words “The Trump Administration has set up at least three ‘tender age’ shelters to detain babies and other young children who have been forcibly separated from their parents” report a reality (Burke & Mendoza 2018)? Or fails to remember the millions of babies and young children who have been detained or forcibly separated from their parents—in the US and elsewhere—over the course of “human” history? That outrage and disbelief is reflected in the news reports we see and hear and in the social media feeds of friends. We ask each other why and how this can be happening and what can we do about it right now, today, including how we respond to the people supporting the barbarism for one ethically bankrupt reason or another. Our friend Devika Chawla posted online, “Where you are born, the country and continent in which you are born, the family in which you are born is all a genetic lottery, just the luck of the draw. Which means, we could potentially have been those kids or those parents in those detention centers. No one has a say in where and to whom they are born. Show some goddamn humility” (Chawla 2018). There are also the posts that remind us that what’s happening to these children doesn’t just impact those of us who are parents or immigrants to this

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country or another; that it isn’t happening outside—to someone else. It’s happening to people we know, people whose families live in our neighborhoods; it’s happening to us. Why is such perspective taking difficult? Is it easier to find love for others than the ones closest to us? Though what is “closest”? And what or who is “outside” or “other” in this equation? Some would argue that what’s closest or intimate might be the furthest away—beings and things do not remind us of ourselves too much and so can be located somewhere down the line in the ethical hierarchy of human exceptionalism that allows us to draw boundaries around who or what is worthy of our care and concern and who or what is dispensable. Though even in the human-animal divide that keeps some of us comfortable, sheltered, and safe and makes others of us into labor or food or raw material, categories and exceptions proliferate; these categories reveal the impossibility of disentangling the knot that binds us together in time, relation, and matter. Consider, for example, the old chestnut about not eating “animals with a face” as a kind of boundary-marking impossibility. What constitutes a face and for whom? Levinas’s offered his notion of “face” as a means for understanding precarity and the ways the injunction “Thou shalt not kill” (or separate or detain or incarcerate based on race, geography, religion, gender, sexuality, ability—and the list goes on) creates in us the seemingly paradoxical temptation to kill, which must be overcome if we are to face the other.2 As we noted in chapter 3, Levinas asserts that understandings of suffering—both of others and also our own—are created in the “face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness . . . at one the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the ‘You shall not kill’” (1996, p. 167). The idea and the meaning of “face” has been narrated by Levinas (1988) and read by others as a thoroughly humanist take on ethics, drawn as it is from a Judeo-Christian tradition in which our responsibilities lie first and foremost to “human” beings (made as they are in the “image” of God) and not extended to animals or other non- or more-than-human beings. Still, Levinas’s use of the face as a tool for understanding the ethical responsibilities we have to others is both relational and open to more expansive interpretations, including an extension of those responsibilities, however paradoxical, to (other) animals. For example, Derrida has noted that Levinasian ethics disrupts “traditional humanism” by “unsettling assumptions which historically have defined and delimited the category of the human” (1995/1988, p. 279; Kendall 2008/2016, p. 189). Butler too reads our ability to respond to the face as being “awake to what is precarious in another life, or, rather, the precariousness of life itself” (2006, p. 134). In this formulation Karalyn Kendall (2008/2016) reads “both the anti-speciesist and queer potential” of Levinas’s humanism” (p. 189). In their co-evolutionary similarities and symbiosis with humans, dogs



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“persistently and irresistibly queer the human form, revealing its profound revolutionary contingency through their very presence” (p. 202). The dogs in our lives have “always-already permeated [our] bodies and therein lies [their] power to queer the boundary between human and animal” (Kendall 2008/2016, p. 202). Therein lies their power to queerly and lovingly turn kinship animal. STRANGE KINSHIP We’ve been tuning in, too, to the ways people express grief upon losing their animal companions on social media and the ways in which others respond to their suffering and loss. This is most notable in the memorializing of dogs and cats (though other animals with which we are not so entwined in a coevolutionary or cellular sense are also lovingly eulogized). loss of their pets online, particularly social media. For example, our friend Michael posted this loving tribute to Roxy, her death the third in a hard year of loss in which the family pack was reduced one by one by one: I had to say goodbye to my sweet Roxy yesterday. She had been with me since 2002, making her the being who has lived with me for the longest time in my life, at least in my conscious awareness. We got her from the Humane Society of Tampa Bay. She was 4–5 months old and had been relinquished for being untrainable. She wasn’t untrainable, though; she was deaf. She was smart as a whip and quickly learned dozens of signs for training commands and other kinds of communication. One of my favorite things about her was that when she was being headstrong she would be sure to avert her gaze so as to not be able to receive a command. “Sorry, I can’t see you.” She was energetic, funny, loyal, and mischievous her entire life. At 15 years, 8 months, her body was failing her, but her willful spirit and humor was intact until the end. Her death is an end of an era for me, as she was the last of the dog pack of Roberta Circle, preceded in death by Fanny (May 2016) and Louie (November 2016). I buried Roxy yesterday in our back yard, in an open spot between the Japanese laceleaf maple and a flowering magnolia. The vet swaddled her tightly in a burial shroud sheet. I placed her in the grave and spread Fanny and Louie’s ashes over her before completing the interment. I’m going to throw a bunch of flower seeds in the area. I’m going to miss her so much, as I still do with Fanny and Louie. I feel blessed to have had so much time with her. She added a richness to my everyday life, and that hole will be there for quite a while. . . . Making this call is one of the terrible and awesome responsibilities of our relationships with our companion animals. It isn’t as easy as it seems to put another’s dignity and quality of life above our own emotional connections and longings. (Levan 2017)

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Figure 5.1.  Michael and Roxy, photo by Michael LeVan Image courtesy of Michael LeVan.

Michael’s words brought us both to tears, and not because they “humanized” Roxy or made her status as a companion animal equal to that of her human counterparts, but rather how they meet Michael-and-Roxy in their entanglement as pack. And we love these words for how they get us to think about the ways decentring human-focused inquiry asks us to explore our entanglements with and love for animals. And more, how these explorations queer not only notions of “human” and the boundaries between human and animal, but also our very ideas about kinship. Kelly Oliver (2008) explores the question of whether animals can be kin through a reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “strange kinship.” Strange kinship is not based on evolution, bloodline, pedigree or descent, which can erase both all difference and all similarity between animals and humans. Rather, kinship is “an intimate relation based on shared embodiment [of a shared world] without denying differences” (2008, p. 115). In this



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sense, kinship is performatively accomplished in human-animal intra-action. However, in asking questions about whether and how animals can be kin— brothers and sisters or perhaps parents or children—Oliver reminds us that Merleau-Ponty is not interested in establishing an impassable divide between animals and humans; nor is he invested in anthropomorphizing animals by extending human characteristics or consciousness to them. Instead, human bodies, consciousness and desires resonate with animal bodies, consciousness, and desires. Strange kinship recognizes that “there is an intimate but different relationship between human and animal bodies that varies depending on perspectives. [Merleau-Ponty] is more concerned with what embodiment qua embodiment entails than he is with the space between the canines and other teeth” (p. 114). Thus, instead of assuming that human beings are always-already kin to one another, we should take the notion of kinship as an ideal grounded in embodiment. And though Oliver’s writing about animal kinship is situated in her consideration of phenomenological thought (and not with new materialism, vitalism or post-humanism, per se), we might say that strange kinship is founded in the intra-active entanglement of animal and human beings. Oliver argues that Merleau-Ponty might’ve said as much: There is a fundamental kinship between all living beings through our shared embodiment, which includes both reflective and unreflective consciousness . . . Consciousness for Merleau-Ponty is the body folding over onto itself, touching itself, seeing itself, and therefore is not separated from the body. Once consciousness is radically embodied in this way, it cannot be denied to other forms of embodied life. (p. 114)

Once we consider kinship an ideal embodiment, we become “open to the possibility of ‘strange kinship’ based . . . shared embodiment and gestures of love and friendship among living creatures made possible by bodies coexisting in a world in which we are all dependent” (p. 117). If animal-human relations make strange notions of kinship, they do so in contrast to relationships structured and sustained between people and the state. Such relations depend on descent, blood lines, and inheritance. They serve dominant heteronormative structures and narratives concerned with continuity, heredity, and biological genealogy that are, in turn, propagated and propped up by language, borders, governments, “the law,” schools and most notably, family (Eng 2010, Peterson 2013). Indeed, our notions of family as a “natural” arrangement between human beings are based on presumptions about heterosexual attraction and reproduction that articulate with governmental structures (Hill Collins 1998, p. 63). Thus the “family” is the site and social structure through which “naturalized” hierarchies and the

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need for privatized and segregated “home” spaces, the presumed supremacy of “blood ties,” the entitlements and responsibilities for support and care, the transmission of wealth, and the regulation of reproduction are both learned and carried out (Hill Collins 1998). Ahmed (2010) demonstrates how the idea of the family is also a “pressure point,” a necessity of having a good and happy life, “which in turn is how we achieve a certain orientation toward something and not other as good . . . the point of the family is to keep family the point” (p. 46). The family binds and is binding, an inheritance that asks us to orient toward some things and not others and to “reproduce what we inherit” in form as well as in affective landscapes (Ahmed 2010, p. 45). A “happy family” is both an object and an affective orientation that circulates through objects (family homes, photographs, dinner tables—objects which are inherited and passed down/around). Inside heterosexuality as both a home and as a family, some objects are “in reach” and others are out of reach or not meant to meet. That is, “straight” objects point us toward making our own straight/hetero families and homes which we might fill with our inheritance (Ahmed 2006, p. 87). By contrast, queer objects are those that support rather than point. The queer object—home, a photograph, a dinner table, brings bodies together, supporting proximity “between those who are supposed to live on parallel lines, as points that should not meet” (2006, p. 169). While the family is a projected and institutionalized object/orientation designed to reproduce naturalized hierarchies, for those of us who find such families hard places and spaces to survive, we can—we do—find kinship in unexpected and strange places that are resoundingly and importantly material and embodied (Ahmed 2016; Freeman 2007, p. 298). We build “strange kinship” networks outside of heterosexual “nuclear” family structures; these networks reflect temporally (not always durational or sequential), productively (not always producing “offspring” but rather other entanglements including shared animal families), and corporeally different kinship (Weston 1997). Though what does it mean, to be in kinship, in family with other animals? Surely family, for some of us, does include our animal others in “shared embodiment and gestures of love” (Oliver 2008, p. 117). That shared embodiment not only queers enactments of family but also, as Una Chaudhuri (2014) argues, moves us closer to addressing the “epistemological crisis” around what we claim to know about interspecies entanglements and what they mean for animal-human relations. One way—one remarkable and vibrant way—to address that crisis, as Chaudhuri and other performance scholars and makers have perhaps long known, is through “interspecies performance.” That is, when we “play the roles of other animals or talk about our interactions with them,” as we do in performance, we take up our work consciousness “that

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when animals are used by humans to make meaning—be it in art, philosophy, or everyday life—that discursive use of them inevitably shapes and impacts the real lives of the actual animals in question” (p. 7). ANIMAL ACTS, OR: A BONE CAN BE A BROTHER MURPHY sits up suddenly sniffing, looking around frantically. He shoves LUNA, who wakes up dazedly. LUNA looks around, licking lips, swallowing, taking a while to come to. MURPHY: [with disdain] Jesus. Completely out of it. I mean, no offense but, the house could be burning down and this girl would be like, “my mouth’s dry. I need a drink of water.” You see what I’m dealing with here? LUNA: [Looks at Murphy, licks her lips, and back to sleep.] MURPHY: I heard them talking once. I heard them saying how they went to the British Museum. Oh no, maybe it was the National Gallery? Anyway, they went and saw these portraits. Paintings of people—their faces, their homes—all their beloved things around them. Portraits of a life.

Figure 5.2.  Luna and Murphy, photo by Anne M. Harris and Stacy Holman Jones Image courtesy of the authors.

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How do you decide what shows a life? A whole life in one picture? Anyway, they went. I heard them talking once. About how in this museum there were so many portraits that you really get to see what people think are important. What they want to be remembered for. What they wanted to pass down to their kin. Family. And I assumed—I just assumed hearing them talk around the dinner table that night—I that these portraits would be full of all the dogs and cats, rabbits and fish and tigers and horses and guinea pigs—all the beings that these people in the portraits loved. All their loves would be there. But they weren’t. Of course, you expect humans to put their human children right there in the portraits, of course. One expects that. But where were the animals? Were they not part of their lives? Their loves? Of course they were, but they were not in the portraits. Maybe they were afraid, they thought their friends would say they were weird. Crazy. Oh sure, there were some portraits with animals. One. Some rich person included his hunting dogs. Hunting dogs. We all know a thing or two about hunting dogs, don’t we? Not much more than objects for the upper class, if we’re honest. But dogs like us, well. We’re family. I’ve been told that. I’ve heard it too. “You’re family,” they say. Stacy herself said as much, she said, “I raised Murphy like my baby.” And she did. LUNA: [Opens one eye and yawns. Licks her lips. Glances over at Murphy. After a long while, she speaks, slowly with long pauses; tired.]

When Murphy first came into the house.

I felt like throwing up. There’s a photo of me—of Stacy. Me. And him. Him, on my couch at our old house on Hall Street. Stacy’s sitting there, patting Murphy, who’s snoozing like he’s lived there forever. Me, I’m sitting upright and you can see how nonplussed I am. Nonplussed. Stacy calls the portrait “Australian gothic.” She says I’m the one with the imaginary pitchfork. I was pissed, I’ll admit it. When Murphy came to live at our place, I was old already, and sick. I have cancer. And—I mean, nobody likes change in their later years. Seriously. Especially when it’s some young fuzz ball, cocky, white. Meatloaf. He was all like, “Look at me! Look at me!” Like he’s so special. The thing is, Anne and I had been together for many years. We were a welloiled machine, us two. We had our patterns, our habits. Of course, there had been changes—the move down to Melbourne from Alice Springs, and then from the apartment to the house. But it was Anne and me against the world and it had been like that for a long, long time. We understood one another. No language was needed.



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So, when she brought Murphy home to my place—when we both knew I was on my way, I was not impressed. No, not impressed at all.

*** In “The Dog and Pony Show (Bring Your Own Pony), performance scholar and maker Holly Hughes tells us up front that the performance—the show— is “just about dogs. I want to warn you. The title is not a metaphor” (2014, p. 13). She tells of her particular relationships with a number of particular animals—her partner, Esther, and the other animals they make their home with. Her kin, her pack. That’s the thing about interspecies performances—animal acts—they bring a literalness to our entanglements as/with animals. Because performance depends on materiality and embodiment it’s a particularly apt context and form for considering human-animal relations (Chaudhuri 2014, p. 10). What’s more, performance asks us to focus on the reality and specificity of “animal lives—their shapes, colors, patterns, movements, sounds, behaviors, habits, and habitats” (p. 5). As Chaudhuri puts it: the “animal acts” of “our changing times are interested in these specifics as much as the vital human meanings they produce” (p. 5). Hughes teaches us a thing or two about how interspecies performance all at once changes us (human other-animals), our lives, our histories, and futures (Chaudhuri, p. 2). Our “historical” relationship with dogs and “other” animals is not a thing of the past; rather, “our story is so knotted and tangled with theirs [that] if [we] want to talk about history, [we’re] going to have to talk about animals” (p. 17). When we consider the “work” that dogs do and the ways in which class mediates all relationships, including human-animal ones, we must remember that the idea of a working dog has not passed, now part of some long-ago history. Indeed, Hughes points to John Katz’s observation in (2003) The New Work of Dogs that “dogs work now as much as they ever did. But it’s a new kind of work. The work of loving us” (p. 23). But dogs don’t just do the work of loving, they teach us as well about living and about death. Hughes writes, “Dogs bring death into the house. Every week they drop off some half-eaten thing at your feet. So happy, proud. ‘Look what I got for you! Why are you not looking! I saved you the best parts!’ They watch as you pick it up and throw it away” (p. 28). MURPHY [Sniffs the air with excitement]: The smell of chicken explodes my brain. Chicken chicken chicken. Here it comes again: chicken! I love chicken. Who doesn’t love chicken? I mean, what’s not to love about chicken? I dream of chicken.

Figure 5.3.  Still Life with Chicken, Michael Crowhurst Image courtesy of Michael Crowhurst.



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Is there such a thing as, like, “chicken affect”? I mean seriously. Though in my opinion, your obsession with affect might have gone too far. The jumpy relays, the intensities, the contagion and tangle of connections. Dogs don’t care about affect. We ARE affect, we are just one big furry chicken affect. You guys can talk about it, and you do. A lot. A LOT, yes. But we are just going about our chicken business—I’m watching Luna to see if anything is going on that I should be aware of, anything at all. Like is she still breathing? Like is there any sign that I am now TOP DOG for example, when all of a sudden, completely unexpected, CHICKEN! That’s affect. LUNA: What does it feel like to know you are dying? Well. Oh, you think you how we feel. You look at us with those eyes. But dogs don’t worry about dying the way you do. I knew that I felt different. Things smell different. I noticed that when I go out for walks I don’t see or smell things the way I used to. When dogs decline in health—which I should say is not how we think about it—but when things start to change—we don’t feel so bad about it, I’d say—as the humans do. Why do humans always feel so heartsick about the inevitable? We feel different in our bodies, sure. But we don’t start scribbling down bucket lists or think about who should inherit our worldly possessions. The objects of a life. No. We dogs know that the moment—any moment—is complete: complete fear, hunger, rest, joy. Now, joy isn’t only or maybe even ever fun. It is not. It “knows suffering, bearing, action and passion, failing and risking” (Haraway 2014, p. 32). Still— and because of this, in the “cracking space” of joy, we carry on (p. 32). We make ourselves present. Here and now. There’s no there and then for us. Just here and now. For all of the moments.

*** Hughes writes, speaks, performs: Dogs are what happened when we stopped. When we stayed in one place. A space opened up beside us. And dogs are what happened. (Hughes 2014, p. 28)

The space that opens up is one of attunement, contemplation, astonishment—at how our lives with dogs become entangled, like love (Simmons 2016, p. 88). The ways in which our movements together enact what Muñoz would

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call the not-yet, the humbly utopian space we make by standing still in a present that is not enough and opening.3 How we come to be/do/love in a present that is “insolvent” and often “poisonous” for us, as queer people, and for other marginalized and disregarded others, is all about performance and performativity— a “‘doing’ that is a becoming” (Muñoz 2009, pp. 30, 26). It is, quite simply, an animal act—an embodied and hopeful attempt to “reboot” our sense of what it means to be and to be family in the contemporary world. The undeniable joy of dogs, when we stop and pause long enough to let such entanglements happen, is akin to what Jill Dolan (2005) has described as a utopian performative: small but profound moments in which the performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking and intersubjectively intense. (p. 5)

But our entanglements with dogs and other animals aren’t simple or romantic or (only) full of hopeful affect. They are, instead, vulnerable relationships that challenge and change us all. As Haraway reminds us, “this is not easy living. A space opening up grinds and cracks everybody who falls into it. A human woman’s learning to perform, learning to run with a flesh-andblood canine partner. . . in the mundane sport of agility makes that clear. . . . Becoming-with each other across species defining difference, partners do not pre-exist the run” (Haraway 2014, p. 32). Becoming-with is, as we’ve discussed elsewhere in this book, a deeply ethical and always embodied process (Chaudhuri 2014, p. 10). It’s in the cracking (open) space of our inter-active relationships with dogs and other animals, we do, indeed, performatively become-with, and in so doing, must “act on behalf of the real animals of which we speak” (Chaudhuri 2014, p. 6). Our ethical response-ability to and for other animals reminds us of Jake Simmons’s (2016) consideration of the xenophobic fear that anthropomorphizing animal others inevitably perpetuates. He writes of how, seeking to avoid xenophobic love in becoming-with a dog called Venice, they both get caught up in another kind of cracking open space, one in which protecting the ones we love puts us face-to-face with the other: When you were young, about nine months old, you were chasing leaves. . . . [An] other dog . . . stalked his way into our September spin, circled us with his teeth laid bare. . . . I tried to grab you, to get you inside, but your goofy body, too big for its young self to manage, stopped in hesitation of the new presence. He ran our way and you headed him off as he lunched and clenched down on your smiling face. With too much hesitation, I worked my hands between his angry teeth and your bloody snout in an asinine attempt to pry his jaw open. My



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fingers became lacerated in the struggle, and your face and my hands flowed together like language. (p. 86)

Simmons tells of walking through the human world the next day, feeling ashamed and being shamed for his interspecies intervention (p. 28). People told him over and over that he could have lost his hands; that he could replace his dog, but not his hands. And what of the “other” dog? Who or what has replaced him? Or is he a replacement for another being—a predatory, perhaps his canine cousin, the wolf? What is replacement in the face of the other? What is “looking back” and becoming with in the competing discourses about wolves and dogs and the consequences these narratives have for who lives who dies and how (Haraway 2008, p. 38)? Which animal-others are disposable and killable? One friend, perhaps someone “aware of the ways in which [our bodies are] always ephemeral, like a dying river,” looked at Jake’s bandaged hands and said plainly, “that’s what we do for those we love” (Simmons 2016, p. 28). When Venice and the other dog became a tangle of teeth and force and blood, Simmons’s philosophical and material attempts to move away from a humanist orientation toward his relationships with both animal-others brought him joltingly awake to “what is precarious in another life” as well as the “precariousness of life itself” (Butler 2006, p. 134). The loss of animal kin, too, awakens us to the preciousness of those relations and the material ways connection reverberates in bodies. Craig Gingrich-Philbrook captures the beautiful strangeness of embodying life without feline companions O.W. and Robbie in a recent Facebook post: Grief is a journey, with unexpected stops waiting in the body and its possibilities. This morning I tripped over a box in the kitchen, momentarily losing my balance and then regaining it in a flash. During that micro moment of risk, habit lept up to try not to step on the casts—for more than a decade my primary cause of tripping in the kitchen as they wound around and between my ankles. There they were, unforgotten, preserved by some more primordial sense—record in my flesh. And then they were gone again, their absence rediscovered and strangely refreshed by the time I found my footing and did not fall. This is, isn’t it, in the end, the time scale of love and mourning? It all happens in the blink of an eye, or what might as well be—ephemeral, but worth it, a dance of falling and recovery set to the polyrhythms of different life spans beginning and ending. I caught my breath. I went on with the day, heading (willingly, willingly) to my next encounter with those little becomings I miss. So. Very. Much. (Gingrich-Philbrook 2018)

For Craig and O.W. and Robbie, as surely as for Jake and Venice, Michael and Roxy and for us in our relations with Murphy and Tasha and Luna before

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her, living responsibly and lovingly with the animal others in our lives—all of them—makes us lucky to live and to die in and with “humananimal grace” (Haraway 2014, p. 33). Love and mourning are the timestamps of our becoming-with, record in our flesh. *** LUNA: Everything is slowing down. Not stopping, only Slowing. My freedom is getting smaller. Not a choice, not an act/ion, just my body. Slowing. It’s not painful. Not particularly unpleasant. Only sometimes like when Murphy starts laying on my bed because He senses that it’s time for someone else to be “top dog,” to take over. It’s just the way it is. He knows, even simple Murphy. And I don’t mind. It upsets the humans, but not me. There is just no point in fighting nature. It’s a kind of freedom to give into it, actually. Freedom and constraint. My relationships with my humans is both. Love is freedom. Need is constraint. Murphy? I can handle him, but the humans? Tricky. Ever-changing. Emotions everywhere. Such a drain. But at least I did get humans who know: “animals are their kin.” Not kin as a substitute for family. A placeholder or a replacement. No. It’s like what Merleau-Ponty says about our kinship—our connections with humans. He says our relation as family isn’t the result of deeds or decisions (or generation or descent. No. It’s the structure . . . the form of embodiment (Oliver 2008, p. 116). To be embodied as dog, as family. It is a doing. Animals love gay families, because gays have already been abandoned by their human families in some form. They totally get dogger realities. The vulnerability The loyalty. The freedom. The constraint. Gay families are flexible and resilient. Who says animals can’t be brothers or sisters or parents or children? I do a lot more for them than their families do. Kin. That’s what we are, me and Anne. And I suppose Stacy. Possibly Murphy. Possibly.

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MURPHY: It’s like—sometimes in the park? Other dogs do make snide comments about what? Our weird family. Our “strange kinship” Like somehow their families are normal or something. So rude. I try to explain to them, if I’m in the mood. You know— [Murphy suddenly FREEZES, looks around manically, sniffs intensely.] CHICKEN!

Figure 5.4.  Chicken!, Michael Crowhurst Image courtesy of Michael Crowhurst.

Where was I? I try to explain to them; all families are like this. It’s like this. It’s like what Kelly Oliver says: we are family to each other not because of blood or birth or um, or. . . LUNA: I believe she said we’re family based on “love and friendship [shared] among living creatures.” Based on the fact that we are “bodies coexisting in a world on which we all depend” (Oliver 2008, p. 118). MURPHY: That’s the one. Strange kinship. Queer kinship. And it’s not just dogs, it can be other things. Even things themselves. LUNA: For example? MURPHY: Well I was thinking—I was thinking about my bone. LUNA: Excuse me? MURPHY: My bone, the one I love. The one I carry around everywhere.

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LUNA: What about it? MURPHY: Well it’s kind of a brother to me. LUNA: It doesn’t work that way. MURPHY: Why not? LUNA: Because. A bone can’t be a brother. MURPHY: Why not? People are writing about potatoes as affective beings, I mean, why not a bone? LUNA: Well I don’t. I’m not writing about that. MURPHY: But you’re a cocker spaniel. LUNA: What’s your point? MURPHY: Look, all I’m saying is we’re examples of a kinship that just refuses to accept this whole “us” and “them” thing. If philosophers say that animals and humans can be brothers, then we must be a real family. LUNA: We don’t need philosophers to tell us what is and isn’t real. MURPHY: That’s right. Though maybe that’s why queer people get us, because they make family like that too. Humans, animals, bones—brothers! LUNA: I don’t think they do that exactly. MURPHY Yes, they do. LUNA: Well that’s maybe a bit of an exaggeration. MURPHY: No, it’s not. LUNA: Well. Weren’t we talking about me? About my slow decline and—you know—crossing over? MURPHY: Well, maybe in the beginning but it’s not all about you, you know. We were also talking about how humans think they know it all. About themselves. And us. And things. Families. Death. Chickens. So freaking arrogant. LUNA: Anyway. What I was saying, trying to redirect toward a bit more positivity perhaps, what I was saying is that for dogs, dying isn’t the same as for humans who really get upset about it and try to avoid dealing with it. MURPHY: You get upset! You totally get upset. LUNA: No, I’m not saying that— MURPHY: You got totally upset when I first came here. But I knew you were sick and needed some . . . shall we say assistance? I was just trying to be helpful. LUNA: You were trying to ascend the hierarchy in the household. You were trying to become top dog.

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MURPHY: I was not! LUNA: When we found out I had cancer, Anne was very upset. I wasn’t. I knew I was sick. MURPHY: Which is EXACTLY what I was saying! LUNA: I knew I was sick because I couldn’t smell the same way as before, and smell is a really important thing for us. For cocker spaniels. MURPHY: For Havanese too! Not just spaniels you know. LUNA: And I tried to comfort Anne because I knew she was upset, and so— MURPHY: Well I think you were a little upset yourself Ms. Luna. LUNA: [Sighs.] Oh, forget it. [Luna falls asleep]. MURPHY: [Stage whisper to audience.] She is near the end. And sometimes? Sometimes she’s a pain in the neck, complaining about the temperature and me being . . . too CLOSE. But other times? Other times she’s totally open and says the most amazing things. Things like we should stand up to the hierarches that animal and human cultures produce. And—AND—at the same time, um, keep our senses open to. What? It’s not chicken. I know that. It’s keeping our senses open to, ah, WHAT? LUNA: [Rousing to speak.] The emergent and unknown forms of belonging, connectivity, intimacy, the unintentional and indeterminate slippages and productivities of domination (Puar 2007, p. xxviii). [Luna falls asleep again.] MURPHY: See what I mean? Amazing. [Murphy sniffs, looks around.] Well maybe that’s not all totally HER. Totally Luna. I think she might be plagiarizing Jasbir Puar to be honest. Still. What she says makes sense. I mean, for them. For their affective “research.” Affective politics. When Luna explains it, I see how this whole turn toward posthumanism, if you can call it that— LUNA: [Speaking with eyes closed.] You could call it companion species. MURPHY: Ok, companion species. The turn toward companion species, and interspecies life. Anyway, when you explain it that way, I see how it’s a politics for being and becoming in the world together. Of course, we gotta do that by living—what’s the word again? LUNA: Intersectionally. MURPHY: That’s it, intersectionally. So, um yeah, what were we saying? [LUNA SNORES.] MURPHY: Ah. See? This is what I’m dealing with on a daily basis. We got like four, almost five more hours until they get home from work. Jesus.

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[Murphy sighs, stares out the window, barks half-heartedly.] I was thinking about how we are kind of this group here of like individuals, like me, an iconoclast— With our own feelings, emotions, affective attunements, but also, a kind of collective. Like part of dogness everywhere. Like we are individuals—Havanese. Cocker Spaniel—but also family. We are different in our own dog ways of being. Attending. Doing. And also entangled as they would say. As the humans—or at least some of them—would say. And I guess people might see us as like . . . um, ANIMALS. Less evolved or less complicated. Whatever that means. You know the funny thing about humans is that they say “animals” like they’re not animals themselves. Right?! Hilarious. LUNA: [Luna sits up suddenly and half-barks.] Hey! Something is HAPPENING! MURPHY: No, it’s not. You’re having a nightmare. Go back to sleep. LUNA: I thought I heard you say we were animals. We were like . . . wolves or something, all—or only—hunger and fear (Hughes 2014, p. 29). All—or only— in search of lunch, rather than affection, companionship, or a “cross-species romp” (Haraway 2008, p. 322). MURPHY: No. I’d never say that. I’d never say those things about wolves. LUNA: Well no, you wouldn’t. Holly Hughes and Donna Haraway said the things about wolves. You said we were like animals. MURPHY: Well I would say that. We are—all of us—animals. But that doesn’t mean we don’t feel love. Or empathy for God’s sake. How’s the tumor? Are you in pain? LUNA: Oh. Oh no I’m fine. I’ll just close my eyes for a min— MURPHY: [Irritated]. See? It’s practically like living alone. This is what I’m dealing with here. Sometimes I just want to. [Murphy pings Luna’s ear.] Right. So. Affect? Well: Go to a dog park. Watch. Listen. They are like affect parks, seriously. No talking about it. No analysis. No bullshit. Just sniffing, running, the sudden chorus of dog barks from inside the park and out. That kind of thing. And death? When death is on its way, like with Luna?

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LUNA: Bodies. Breath. Family. MURPHY: Bones. Don’t forget bones. LUNA: That’s all you need. In the end. Just breath. And kin. MURPHY: [Murphy lays down next to Luna and snuggles up.] And maybe, if you’re lucky? A bit of chicken.

COMPANION SPECIES, GOING QUEERLY FERAL, AND TURNING KINSHIP ANIMAL It’s bittersweet, this “dogoloue” between Murphy and Luna, who we lost to cancer in November 2015. She is no longer lounging on the couch or grousing for her dinner, but her animal spirit and wisdom lives on in our family. Her dog-siblings, Murphy and Tasha, and her other-animal parents (us), continue to look for Luna, calling out to her in the morning and at the park, perhaps by mistake. Perhaps not. Luna taught us nearly everything we know about companion species. Haraway (2008) articulates the knowledge in dialogue (dogologue?) with her own animal-others. Once “we” have met, we can never be “the same” again. Propelled by the tasty but risky obligation of curiosity among companion species, once we know, we cannot not know. If we know well . . . we care. That is how responsibility grows. (p. 287)

Companion species links kind as kin. And for queer and so many disenfranchized, detained, and seemingly disposable others, companion species captures how strange kinship sustains hope for the (a) future us in an insolvent and often poisonous now. To know and have companions in interspecies relations, we knot “together in encounter, in regard and respect” (Haraway 2008, p. 19). When we do this, we “enter the world of becoming with, where who and what are is precisely what is at stake” (p. 19). Becoming with companion species is not, as this chapter means to point out, simple, unencumbered, or uncomplicated. It is quite literally often a question of who lives, who thrives, who dies, and by what hands. These are moral, ethical, emotional, class-driven, and material questions, not only intellectual ones. On having cared for a litter of “feral” cats for several years, Haraway (2008) writes: One thing seems clear to me after four years of living out—and imposing—faceto-face mutually opportunistic and affectionate relationships with critters who are no more and no less alien presences on this land than my human household

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and who would otherwise have died four years ago outside our ken: becoming feral demands—and invites—becoming worldly just as much as any other species entanglements do. “Feral” is another name for contingent “becoming with” for all the actors. (p. 281)

Feral: That which exists in “natural state”—animals or plants not domesticated or cultivated. Wild. Or that which has reverted to the wild state, as from domestication.4 Alyson Campbell, who is, like us, is a queer-identifying artist and researcher, writes of the domestication of our work in arts institutions and in the academy. She asks us what it means to make a homeplace (and perhaps find family) “within a normative system when your principles as an academic and a human being are to resist and even rage against the normative?” (Campbell 2018). In response to this question, Campbell offers us the concept of feral pedagogies—strategies for exploiting our privileged positon within a system—a family, the academy, natureculture. In embodying feral pedagogies, we can look to take up the tools of privilege (money, knowledge, access) and “run wild” (Campbell 2018). For those of us who feel we have been “utterly domesticated”—and have made ourselves comfortable in the stability, status, and salaries that the academy provides us—feral pedagogies point to strategies making strange kinship with our queer human-animal other inside the academy and out. One strategy of “going feral” is to consciously move outside normative guarantors of academic “success” (marked by an impersonal, recognizable, safe, and “straight” research program, with its status, big audiences and street cred), electing instead to go the other way, making work that resonates with and regards work as inseparable from life and human suffering and thriving inseparable from the pain and vibrancy of our animal kin. Further, recognizing how the academy is a place of deeply felt exclusions, one in which we many of us have never felt quite comfortable or “domesticated,” claiming the position of the “feral outsider” is a personal and political strategy that allows us to operate powerfully through that from which we are excluded. In “going feral,” in this chapter and in this book, we hope to exploit whatever “domesticated” knowledge and privilege we might have acquired in our academic lives to create work that features the experience of queer family and animal-others who have been excluded or left to fend for themselves inside the academy and out. With Haraway and Campbell, we see how the feral is a very powerful position to be in. And while “de-domesticating is hard, and actually may require relinquishing the spoils of capital instead of merely writing about the perils of it”; the work of queer scholarship is “inextricably bound up with life in an unavoidable, but also galvanising, way” (Campbell 2018). Who or what



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are we for, as queer scholars and artists, if we do not use our training and privilege to think through our own positions and lives as they intersect with (animal) others, “harnessing the potential and possibilities of the domestic turned feral” (Campbell 2018)? If we think about our work in the academy and at home, “going feral” not only offers us a reliable and safe haven in a world populated by dangerous and unsafe humans, but also a performative embodiment of queer kinship. The intellectual, emotional, and ethical labor of going feral is not outside of or adjacent to our work. It is the work. It’s the work of marshalling, borrowing and stealing the resources of the rich academy to feed our kin—beings so many institutions (the academy, the family, natureculture) has kept out or left to fend for themselves. It’s the work escaping domestication, going queerly feral, and turning kinship animal. NOTES 1.  Estimates are that at least 2,500 children have been separated from their parents when the “zero tolerance” policy for crossing the Unites States-Mexico border without documentation was reversed (Gerhart et al. 2018; “Trump backs down” 2018). These children are being “detained” in tent cities, military facilities and in converted Walmart stores in 15 US states. Salvador Rizzo (2018) writes, “Some of the most intense outrage at the measures has followed instances of parents deported to Central America without their children or spending weeks unable to locate their sons and daughters,” The Washington Post’s Nick Miroff reported. “In other instances, paediatricians and child advocates have reported seeing toddlers crying inconsolably for their mothers at shelters where staff are prohibited from physically comforting them.” 2.  For more on this idea, see the discussion of “making killable” in chapter 3. 3.  Muñoz writes that while utopian thinking often (very rightly) is maligned for being “naively romantic,” his theorizing of a “queer utopian hermeneutic” (p. 27) (following Ernest Bloch’s ideological critique of the tautological nature of the “present” through a critical examination of the past), his project is to find “a queer feeling of hope in the face of hopeless heteronormative maps of the present” (p. 28). He grounds such ideological idealism in an “epistemologically and ontologically humble” hermeneutic that does the work of “not settling for the present, of asking and looking beyond the here and now” (p. 28). 4. Drawn from Dictionary.com definitions of feral: http://www.dictionary.com/ browse/feral?s=t

Conclusion Becoming Queer as Liberatory Disorientation

Sometimes we talk about how long it took us to find one another. Occasionally we wonder what is in store for us, always framed as How long do we have together? While time and temporality are certainly not static or linear, they still dictate in so many ways the story/stories of our lives, much more so than understandings of spatiality which are so quickly shifting in this still-young twenty-first century. Time and place, embodiment and affect, matter and form. In our shared work, we have our own preoccupations; as Ahmed does with stones (2016), we do with dogs and bridges, haircuts and mermaids. Some time ago, one or us, or the other, reread her bringing together of phenomenology and queer theory, musing on pebbles becoming queer, in which she uses the humble pebble to urge us past the matter/form binary, or what she calls hierarchy, “which locates what is dynamic in form and leaves matter ‘for dead’” (2006, p. 187). Ahmed prefigures the intra-action of time, agency and matter with her pebble-talk: But the pebble acquires its shape through contact; and it is this contact that reshapes the pebble such that it is becoming something “other” than what it is. Time “gives form,” which suggests that “matter” is not inert or given, but is always in a process of “materialising.” (Butler 1993, p. 9) . . . The object assumes the form of contact, as a contact that takes place in time, but is also an effect of time. The “becoming” or “arrival” of the object both takes time and involves contact with other objects, and it is an arrival that, perhaps, may come to pass as the opening g up of the future to forms that have yet to emerge. (p. 187)

The pebble becomes-with, a part of an assemblage of human and nonhuman agents becoming-together. In the encounter, “objects become alive not by being endowed with qualities they do not have but through a contact with 127

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them . . . it is a touch that returns to the body, as the skin of the object ‘impresses’ the skin of the body” (2006, p. 164). Holding a pebble at the sea created a “sort of sweet disgust . . . [as] it passed from the pebble into my hands” (p. 164), a coming-into-contact between objects and humans that “involves disorientation: the touch of the thing that transmits some thing. The pebble becomes queer in such an encounter” (2006, p. 186), through the liberatory queerness of disorientation. This book is our pebble, cast onto the beach—ours and yours. We hope it brings you a delicious and productive disorientation. We hope the intra-action of the theorists and objects and thing-thoughts here helps make strange and disorient not only new materialisms, posthumanism, and affect and performance theories, but also yourself in the encounter, an emergence that both entangles your thoughts and sets them free. We have enjoyed the overlaps and contradictions in the conversation between theories, things, stories, objects, and performances both live and virtual, and we have used queer to push past the human in considerations of assemblages, events, and ecologies in which humans and humanism persistently attempt to re-center them/ourselves. The Anthropocene, for all its fascination, continues to hold humans at the center of where “the world is heading,” and we challenge that formation. Perhaps it’s our nature, as queer animals, to do such challenging, as we’re never been, felt, or become central to where the world is or wants to be. While acknowledging that we can’t in some ways get past our own orientations, we also believe in the urgency of our project in all of its messy emergences and queer ways of doing things. In this work, we have not sought to advance some “new” structure of queer posthumanism (believing, indeed, that there is nothing “new” under the sun), but rather have endeavored to return to the original promise of queer theory and its intervention as an anti-teleological project. That is, queer theory and queering practices are not explanations or embodied justifications of what’s human (or humane) and doesn’t address harms we have done, and continue to do to animal and object-others. Part of the project of this book is simply to call out the danger of seeking teleos, and the intellectual machine of the academy has done its own harm in fetishizing explanations, rather than looking for interventions or at least a “harm minimization,” as Haraway continues to demand. We offer this text as a theoretical and narrative admission of our own participation in human-de/centered de/con/structions while staying “true” to belief that the listening and acting in humbly humane ways and embodiments, however “feral,” can indeed contribute to making things better and perhaps right. Knowledge can be helpful when it is useful. As Ahmed and others continue to remind us, disorientation is a powerful antidote to mastery and to colonizing certitude.



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We’ve been on a wild journey in creating this text, and while we don’t pretend to have hard and fast “conclusions” or “solutions,” we offer, by way of opening (rather than concluding) the conversation, the provocations we’ve advanced in this book, namely: • Reading theorizations of transcendence and immanence as guides to queering new materialism in rejecting binaries of im/materiality, which help us queer notions of the human and nonhuman more generally, including objects. Believing in the idea that objects have their own affective and material lives helps us decenter human subjectivity in ways that are urgently needed if we are to sustain the kind of activist embodiments necessary to make change in the contemporary world. • Considering “the archive”—both material and digital—as an inter-active embodiment of not only what knowledge counts, but also what knowledge is needed in a world. Such an archive sees human and nonhuman lives as unintelligible traces broken (data). Reading artefacts as intra-active relationships created as both form and techne, we understand the “work” of art as an enfleshed materialism caught up, as it must be, in creating “future fables for now.” • Wondering about the relationship between queerness, time, and objects, as a means of transisting (or performing), rather than transporting (or disposing with) indeterminacy, matter, and identity. These are important questions not only for seeing animals (human and other) and animate and inanimate objects as distinct, co-existent, and mutually valuable but also integral to a future enacted and sustained in becoming-with (rather than becoming at expense of an/other). • Working the impossible binaries of human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, live and dead for the political possibilities and other worldings these impossibilities open up for queering understandings of what it means to responsibly and vibrantly inhabit the Earth. • Joyfully—though not without complication, consideration, and accountability—embracing and embodying our relationships with other animals in kinship model that sustains us in an often unkind, unsafe, and annihilating world. Only in the queer entanglements of responsibility and regard can we constitute an us—as kin and as ken. We offer these words, ideas, and movements as an invitation to not only talk about the queer life of things, or animals or objects, but also to get stuck into attuning and attaching to them more robustly and meaningfully that we—or you—might have before. Night is closing in on another day in Melbourne—a day in which we did not walk along the beach or kneel down in the

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grass or ask, as Mary Oliver (1992) does in “The Summer Day,” who “made the world” or the swan or the black bear or the grasshopper (p. 94). The dogs are getting restless, wanting their evening walk and their supper. And while we ask each other what else—and what more—should we have done in our efforts to put words to the blessing and responsibility of being in the world today, when everything seems to be dying “too soon”—we offer them up anyway. As a prayer, if not a gift. We ask, as Oliver does, what it is we—and you—“plan to do/with [this] one wild and precious life”? (1992, p. 94).

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Index

actants, 7, 11, 13, 23, 53, 57, 60, 90 activist, 14, 24–29 affect/affective, 1, 2, 5–14, 16, 19–31, 33, 35–37, 40, 41, 43–45, 47, 49, 53, 57, 60, 63, 68, 71, 75, 76, 84, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96–98, 100–103, 110, 115, 116, 120–24, 127–29 Ahmed, Sara, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, 19, 24, 25, 36, 37, 64, 65, 67, 71–73, 79, 81, 92, 110, 127–28 agency, 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 17, 21–23, 27, 30, 35, 36, 39, 46, 47, 55–58, 60, 63, 69, 70, 71, 73, 76, 80, 84, 86, 88, 94, 95, 96, 101, 127 Alaimo, Stacy, 6, 7, 85–87, 100 alienation/alienated, 16, 18, 28, 29 animacy/ies, 7–9, 14, 17, 29, 59, 73, 80, 83, 84, 96, 98, 102 animals, 2–6, 8–17, 36, 45, 47, 52, 55, 60, 74, 76, 86, 87, 92, 94, 95, 101– 13, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 128, 129; animal-human entanglements, 16 animate/non-animate, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 15, 17, 24, 25, 27, 29, 35, 43, 59, 73, 75–78, 80, 81, 83, 99, 101, 129 Anthropocene, 4, 15, 53, 59, 84–87, 89, 90, 100, 101, 103, 128 anthropocentric, 1, 58, 68, 76, 87, 92

anthropogenic, 2, 4, 15, 59, 96, 100 anthropomorphize/-morphic/morphizing, 4, 6, 15, 51, 63, 76, 84, 94, 96, 99, 103, 109 archive, 15, 39–41, 43, 44, 47, 49–50, 53, 54, 56–58, 60, 129 artificial intelligence, 3, 40, 52, 54, 94 assemblage, 5, 9, 11, 13, 14, 24, 29, 36, 37, 127, 128 autoethnography, 10, 25, 39, 45 Barad, Karen, 7, 9, 11, 13–15, 20–23, 29, 34–36, 64, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76–81, 86, 87, 99, 100, 129 becoming-object, 15, 79 being-with, 16, 78 Bennett, Jane, 6, 7, 10, 13, 17, 95, 96 binary/non-binary, 8, 15, 17, 20, 21–23, 29, 32, 34, 37, 43, 60, 76, 78, 81, 127 biological, 6, 76, 84, 87, 97, 101, 109 body/ies, 2, 5, 6, 9, 13–15, 17, 24–26, 28, 29, 33, 47, 53, 60, 63, 67, 70, 75, 77, 79–81, 86, 95, 101, 104, 107, 109, 110, 115, 117, 119, 123 Braidotti, Rosi, 2, 3, 6, 7, 14, 53, 73, 86, 91 Butler, Judith, 6, 13, 22, 26, 32, 36, 37, 71, 74, 98, 106, 117, 127 143

144

Index

cartographies, 2, 7 Chen, Mel Y., 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 16–19, 29, 37, 58, 65, 72, 75, 76, 94, 98–101 companion/companion species, 2, 11, 14, 16, 42, 43, 50, 53, 59, 104, 107, 108, 117, 121–23 consumer logics (consumer culture), 15, 40, 51, 52, 85 curation/ curator/ curatorial, 15, 47, 49, 51, 52, 56 cyborg, 8, 53, 56, 57 data/data lives, 4, 15, 40, 41, 54–57, 60, 129 dead, 8, 9, 17, 28, 60, 75, 76, 83, 98, 104, 127, 129 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 20–24, 28, 29 digital, 4, 5, 7, 10, 28, 36, 39, 40, 47, 49, 53, 56–61, 84, 85, 89, 90, 93, 95, 101, 129 disorientation/disorienting, 13, 14, 16, 19, 66, 127, 128 dog, 4, 16, 48, 63, 81, 90, 103, 104, 107, 112, 113, 115–20, 122, 123, 127, 130 dualism, 3, 22, 93, 98, 102 dynamism, 8, 14, 43, 59 ecologies, 5, 9, 10–12, 14–16, 50, 81, 84, 87–89, 96, 99, 100, 101, 103, 128 ecosystems, 9, 84 empathy, 2, 28, 49, 50, 52, 60, 76, 105, 122 encounter, 2, 11, 13, 15, 20, 22, 28, 29, 32, 34, 36, 41, 46, 47, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 79, 87, 89, 90, 103, 117, 123, 127, 128 entanglement, 9, 15, 16, 22, 24, 27, 37, 63, 64, 68, 69, 70, 74, 78, 79, 80, 84, 104, 108–10, 113, 116, 123, 124, 129 epistemology/ological, 7, 22, 69, 71, 73, 110, 125 ethics, 28, 40, 105, 106, 15; bioethics 8

event, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 21, 22, 25–27, 29, 33–34, 36, 41, 60, 67, 77–79, 81, 84, 85, 89–95, 128 evolution, 11, 13, 47, 53, 55, 101, 106–8 feminist 2, 3, 5, 15, 36, 79, 85–87, 99, 100 feminist new materialist, 73, 79, 86, 87 fluid/fluidity, 10, 22, 33, 36, 61, 79, 87 futurity, 17, 77, 78, 91, 92 gender, 5, 6, 8, 13, 29, 30–33, 37, 58, 61, 71, 73, 87, 101, 106 genocide, 74, 85 Guattari, Felix, 15, 21, 23, 96 Halberstam, Jack, 6, 10, 67, 68, 92 Haraway, Donna, 2, 6, 8, 11, 13, 14, 16, 19, 23, 50, 57, 73, 74, 84, 85, 86, 98–101, 103, 104, 115–18, 122–25 hegemonic, 9, 17 heuristic, 9, 85, 104 humanist, 6, 11, 15, 21, 22, 27, 28, 36, 100, 103, 106, 117 human-centered, 15, 49, 52–55, 84, 88, 91 human-dog relations, 16, 104 intelligible, 15, 24, 33, 39, 41, 80, 98, 129 intensities, 5, 11, 14, 24, 25, 28, 115 internet of things (IOT), 15, 53, 54, 56, 60 intimacy, 8, 72, 73, 93, 121 intra-action, 2, 3, 7, 10, 22–24, 34, 36, 43, 44, 49, 60, 69, 70, 78, 91, 109, 127, 128 kin/kinship, 16, 74, 100, 103–10, 118– 20, 123–25, 129 Latour, Bruno, 11, 13, 23, 54, 55–57, 60, 86–88, 96 life, 2–5, 8, 11, 13–15, 17, 21, 25, 30, 33–35, 40, 41, 42, 44–46, 49–51, 54,



Index 145

58, 59, 60, 64, 65, 67, 73, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83–87, 90–91, 93–98, 102, 104, 106, 107, 109–12, 115, 117, 121, 124, 125, 129, 130 lifeworlds, 10, 60 live/liveness, 3, 7–9, 17, 42, 98 logics/logic of thingness, 4, 12, 15, 28, 72, 92, 100 love, 92, 104–6, 108, 109–19, 122 machine, 3, 10, 15, 40, 51–54, 57, 60, 95, 112, 128 Manning, Erin, 9, 10, 13, 24, 26, 27, 29, 71, 81, 89–95, 101 Massumi, Brian, 10, 13, 20, 26, 28, 81, 89 materiality, 6, 15, 17, 20, 22, 24, 30, 36, 46, 49, 53, 60, 69, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 113, 129 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 16, 104, 108, 109, 118 messy, 15, 19, 63, 128 more-than-human, 1–4, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 22, 37, 46, 52, 53, 100, 106 natureculture, 15, 78, 80, 100, 124, 125 necropolitics, 9 new materialism (including new materialist), 1–3, 5–15, 17, 19–21, 23, 40, 59, 63, 71, 73, 84, 86–88, 90, 91, 93, 96, 100, 103, 109, 128, 129 nonhuman (including non-human), 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10–15, 19, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 35, 39, 40, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 55, 59, 60, 69, 70, 72–75, 76, 78, 79, 83, 85–87, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 103, 127, 129 nonliving material, 9 object/s, 5, 6, 8–17, 19, 20, 23–25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 34–37, 41, 44, 45, 54–56, 58–60, 61, 63–70, 72–81, 84, 88, 90–92, 100, 101, 110, 112, 115, 127–29; objectifying, 4, 16; objectoriented ontology (OOO), 54, 58, 61;

object time (queer object time), 12, 15, 63, 67–70, 78–80, 84 onto-epistemology, 5, 37, 56, 85, ontological, 7, 9, 15, 21, 22, 35, 43, 58, 60, 69, 73, 79, 88, 103, 125 oppression, 13, 27, 53, 100 organisms, 9, 13, 16, 74, 76, 83, 97, 100 performance, 3, 7, 8, 10–14, 19, 25, 29, 30, 35, 36, 41, 43, 58, 63, 67, 68, 69, 71, 77, 105, 110, 113, 116, 128 performance studies, 3, 7, 10, 12, 14, 35 performativity, 5, 13, 32, 35, 58, 63, 70, 71–73, 116 phenomenology/ical, 12–14, 19, 59, 81, 97, 109, 127 Piccinini, Patricia, 2, 15, 49–52 plant/plant-life, plant-thinking, 2, 3, 9, 102, 124 posthuman/ism/ist, 1–3, 5–15, 17, 19, 21–23, 29, 40, 45–47, 49, 53, 59, 72, 85–88, 93, 94, 121, 128 postrepresentation, 10 proximity, 13, 110 queer, 1–6, 8–14, 16, 19–20, 23, 24, 29–34, 37, 39, 44, 46, 47, 49, 52–60, 63, 67, 68, 70–73, 75–82, 84–96, 98–101, 103, 104, 106–8, 110, 116, 119, 120, 123–25, 127–29; queerable, 4; queer fade, 14, 24, 29, 32–34; queer fatigue, 5; queering-with, 16; queerlyidentifying, 5; queer materiality, 15; queer object time, 12, 15, 63, 68, 70, 78, 79, 80, 84; queer phenomenology, 13, 19 reworldings, 16, 101 same sex, 86, 87 Siegworth, G., & M. Gregg, 5, 11, 25 space, 5, 10, 17, 20, 25, 26, 28, 31, 35, 39, 44–46, 51, 53, 59, 63, 66–68, 77, 84, 86, 88, 89, 109, 110, 115, 116

146

Index

spacetime (including spacetimemattering), 9, 29, 54, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 76, 79, 81 species (including interspecies), 11, 13, 14, 16, 35, 49, 50, 53, 74, 86, 99, 104, 106, 110, 113, 116, 117, 121–24 Stewart, Kathleen, 5, 7, 10, 11, 13, 24–27, 63, 71, 74, 90 strange, 4, 13, 14, 16, 18, 28, 44, 64, 67, 77, 78, 104, 107–10, 117, 119, 123, 124, 128 strange kinship. See kin/kinship

time, 19, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41–43, 46, 47, 49, 54, 55, 59, 63, 65–72, 74, 77–80, 83, 84, 86, 89, 91–96, 101, 104–7, 112, 117, 127 toxic, 16, 17, 73, 75, 76, 80, 85, 97, 98, 100 trans*, 6, 30–34, 37, 76, 80, 85, 86, 87, 96, 98–100, 103, 104, 110, 128 transcendence, 21, 23, 24, 29 transgenics, 2, 49 transcoding, 57, 58, 61

technology/ies, 39, 49, 51, 54, 55, 58, 93, 95 teleological/anti-teleological, 3, 5, 13, 20, 40, 73, 128 temporal/temporality, 2, 4, 10, 49, 63, 67–69, 71, 78, 80, 84, 89, 91–93, 110, 127 thingness, 10–12, 16, 29, 30, 34, 60 thing-time, 12 things-in-phenomena, 15

vibrant, 6, 7, 10, 15, 17, 40, 41, 45, 63, 67, 68, 95, 96, 110, 129 vitalism/vital materialism, 6, 73, 95, 109 virtual, 2, 23, 28, 47, 49, 54, 60, 75, 80, 128 vitality, 5, 6, 24, 87, 95, 96

utopias, 9, 75, 115, 116, 125

world-as-object, 14 worlding, 12, 16, 17, 37, 39, 52, 60, 72, 90, 101, 104, 129

About the Authors

Anne M. Harris is associate professor, Principal Research Fellow (RMIT University), Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Honorary Research Fellow at University of Nottingham (UK), and adjunct professor at Monash University (Australia). Anne researches in the areas of gender, creativity, performance, and video, and is a native New Yorker who has worked professionally as a playwright, dramaturg, and teaching artist. Anne has authored or co-authored over ninety articles/chapters and sixteen books on creativity, arts, and gender, and has won over $1.5m in competitive research funding. Anne is series editor of Creativity, Education and the Arts (Palgrave), and the director of Creative Agency, a transdisciplinary research lab at RMIT University, focusing on creativity and creative making practices within a community of artists and scholars for social change (search Creative Agency or go to: www. creativeresearchhub.com). Stacy Holman Jones is professor in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses broadly on how performance as socially, culturally, and politically resistive and transformative activity. Her work is situated in multiple sites and contexts including gender and sexuality, intimate relationships and adoption, and performance. She specializes in critical qualitative methods, particularly critical autoethnography and critical and feminist theory. She is the author of more than eighty articles, book chapters, reviews, and editorials and the author/editor of thirteen books and is the founding editor of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, a journal dedicated to publishing innovative, experimental, aesthetic, and provocative works on the theories, practices, and possibilities of critical qualitative research. 147