(SON1) Alternative Kinships at the End of the World (and the Beginning of the Next One)

From Bergman and Montgomery’s Joyful Militancy: “The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships” (p. 49, 2017). As political systems of white-supremacy, capitalism, settler-colonialism, and heteropatriarchy fuel ecological, political, and genocidal crises, we must critique our relational systems and their roles in our lives. This session presents work on SOGI refugees’ navigation of the UK refugee claimant process; Crip and Mad content notes on collective voicing; and the tension of settler kinships with the more-than-human, to explore new/old relationalities and their generative possibilities. Tags: Communautés, Réseaux, Théorie

Organizer: Aidan Blockley, University of Alberta; Chair: Aidan Blockley, University of Alberta

Presentations

Paschal Gumadwong Bagonza, De Montfort University

Sexual and gender minorities asylum seekers and refugees' experiences of the UK's refugee determination process

This research is a new materialist exploration of sexual and gender  minority asylum seekers and refugees lived and embodied experiences of the UK’s refugee status determination process. It specifically explores experiences of sexual minorities forced to flee their homeland to the UK and later sought sanctuary on grounds of Sexual Orientation and/ or Gender Identity (SOGI), because their countries outlawed consensual same-sex activities. Twenty asylum seekers and refugees from nine countries were interviewed for this study using semi-structured interviews. Data were also collected through photovoice- participants submitted self-generated images, capturing their ephemeral experiences. These images were analysed alongside interview data to generate the most significant intensities. A significant number of the 20 research participants fled from former British colonies, where Britain introduced criminalisation of consensual same-sex activities starting in India from 1800s. I draw on and extend the new materialist notion of assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) as an overarching theory in conjunction with a ‘conceptual assemblage’ of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2013), slow death (Berlant, 2007) and slow violence (Nixon, 2011) to explore participants’ asylum experiences. Assemblage theory acknowledges that multiple bodies- both animate and inanimate interact and merge at specific points to assemble the most salient affects. Some of these salient affects include multiplicity of persecutions, internal displacements, intimate encounters and connections, assembling the intangible, navigating welfare un/certainties, agentic ways of challenging asylum brutalities, and mechanics of transformation. In materialist terms, participants’ production of contemporary migratory experiences can be (historically) linked to 1290- 733 years ago, when the first known English law criminalising consensual same-sex activities was recorded. This thesis established that violence was heterogeneous, boundless, recurring and metamorphosised and rooted in necropolitics which demarcated who was disposable or not. Violence was also a productive force. More so, in pre-and post-flight segments, participants contributed to the production of complex, messy and unique sexual identity subjectivities. Overall, this research established that the refugee status determination process did not end after participants got sanctuary, they moved beyond victimhood and participants becoming something else. 

Danielle Peers, University of Alberta; Nathan Viktor Fawaz, University of Alberta

Criply, Madly, Deeply: Salty Cultures of the Left Behind

Crip and Mad community (and our scholarship) converge and diverge in spite of (and because of) the ways in which our lives are socially imagined as expendable and permit our deaths and their frequency to be rendered both meaningless and inevitable. Collateral. Sure, death is the only certainty for us all, but in a world where people generally hope to live a little before they die, it is perhaps a defining characteristic of Crip and Mad community to also die (over and over) before we are killed. In the both/and/and of it all, there is something magnificent and vital about the ways in which we live in care – the ways in which we live and care. A coordinating species of interbeing (Hanh, 2020), care haunts, hurts, heals (Eales, et al., 2021), and also: it holds. Care, “alters light, pH, and other conditions that dictate what can grow and how well” (Katz, 2012, p. 41). Our arts and our technologies springing up over and again from the if-only. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. In The art of fermentation: An in-depth exploration of essential concepts and processes from around the world , Sandor Katz wrote, Every traditional fermentation practice involves communities of microorganisms. Over the past 150 years, microbiologists have isolated and bred many individual fermentation organisms, but it is only as communities of organisms that they have existed otherwise, and as evolved communities they exhibit the greatest stability and resilience over time (p. 41). In this paper – one part critique, seven parts love-letter, two parts performance piece, we present fermentation as a kinship enactment of Crip and Mad theoretical and methodological alternatives to the rigid (and often violent) docilizing impositions of compulsory ablebodiedness (McRuer, 2010) and sanitization (Eales, et al., forthcoming) that in some ways of telling (and experiencing) govern and delimit our lives. Dear you, Thank you for being here, now, as you are[.] Content notes, for Clare (2017), “are in essence tools for self-care and collective space care” (p. xx). [You should know,] we swear sometimes. We engage with wide-ranging pandemic experiences, with eugenics, racism, settler colonialism, sanism, ableism, fatmisia, and queer-and-transmisia. “We tell these hard, complicated, beautiful stories because they matter. Care matters. Like bones, and skin, and lungs, and blood, and spirit, and meaning, [and breath, and salt,] and dreams, it matters.” (Eales and Peers, 2021, p. 164-165) (Eales, et al., forthcoming). The ways in which we have come to learn from and live in (Crip, Mad, Queer, Trans) kinship not only resists (Able-, Sane/Typical, Hetero, Cis) framings of our lives, but through Mad citational generativity and (Crip, Mad, Queer, Trans) joy and pain, outright refuses the power(s) of their coordinating and governing intentions. We draw from our Re-creation Collective collaborators in voicing this work: we speak from the collective ‘we’ for ideas around which there is consensus and collective resonance [...] Like singing together, the collective sound that emerges shifts, swells, and quells; different voices take more of a lead, or take a break, a breath. But we do not always write in collective voice [...] there is no meaningful consent or consensus without invitations and affirmations of dissent, discordance, and divergence (Eales and Goodwin, 2015) (Peers et al., 2023, p. 29) Always, and especially now, in year five of the pandemic.  What pandemic? We’re endemic now. Yeah. That one. Live a little. Die. Stay home. Love a little. Live. Live. Live. Be killed. Carry on.

Jennifer MacLatchy, Dalhousie University

In Memory of a Small Tree: An Exploration of More-than-Human Kinship in a Clearcut

Through describing one piece of a project of arts-based research that took place in a clearcut, this paper explores what it means to make kin with more-than-human beings in landscapes of destruction, and questions how this might contribute to building livable future worlds in sites that seem beyond hope. The project described in this paper was one of a collection of connected performance acts that began as a part of an artist residency and continued as a part of my doctoral research. It involved observing and tracking changes in a landscape as it transformed from an unremarkable forest of mostly small trees and brush to a clearcut and then blasting zone by focusing on one tiny white pine that survived the first round of destruction. In a capitalist and colonial system that prioritizes caring for or protecting only the more spectacular, iconic, or rare environmental features while casting the rest of the living world as mere “resources,” the act of paying attention to and making gestures to celebrate the life of a scraggly two-foot-tall tree asserted the possibility and importance of making kin with the multitude of small, complex, and often overlooked parts of life-sustaining ecosystem entanglements. The work described in this paper was in response to calls such as Haraway’s (2016) to “stay with the trouble,” and Lee’s (2016) to find that wastelands are not necessarily beyond hope. It was a way of questioning, along with Rose (2013), what it means to grieve for more-than-human kin amidst a mass global extinction event. From the theoretical foundations of ecofeminism and queer ecology, this project understands that cisheteronormativity, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, and hypermasculinity are part of interlocking systems of colonialism and capitalism that perpetuate ecological destruction and unevenly distribute environmental benefits and detriments along striations of privilege and oppression (Waldron 2018). It was further informed by the live-sustaining forms of queer kinship that exist beyond and in resistance to normative forms of kinship (LeBel 2020). This project thus took up an intersectional understanding of systems of oppression and looked to learn from the wisdom of those whose environmentalism emerged from places of Indignity, queerness, disability, and neurodivergence. This project took place in unceded Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, Nova Scotia), and therefore looked specifically to the ways in which the Treaties of Peace and Friendship call upon settlers to come into relationship with the living world in Mi’kma’ki. Working from the tensions inherent in being a settler who benefits from and is therefore complicit in the capitalist colonial system that is the cause of so much ecological destruction (Davis, 2017), I used arts-based methods to experiment with possible ways of decolonizing my own settler relationship with land and place. This paper argues that paying attention, witnessing losses and destruction, and caring for seemingly unremarkable elements in an unremarkable landscape are ways of resisting their illegibility as losses (Gillespie 2015). It further argues that paying attention to the layers of past multi-species assemblages that are bulldozed into so many present landscapes is a method of resisting shifting baseline syndrome (Challenger 2012; Gan et al. 2017; Papworth et al. 2009; Svenning 2017). This project found that, despite what seems like many failures to prevent further destruction and an inability to stop destruction in chains of events that are already underway, “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) by witnessing and remembering informs the enactment of care (Conley 2016). The project described in this paper defies narratives that frame the small tree, its landscape, and other similar landscapes as expendable or unworthy of attention, protection, or care. It demonstrates that, by paying attention, documenting, and making performative acts of care in the actual site of destruction, building relationship with more-than-human kin is an act of mattering that can resist further destruction. It argues that this practice of enacting forms of care beyond normative (capitalist, colonial) modes of kinship works to form the building blocks that are vital to constructing livable futures from the ruins of the present.