The day’s conversations moved between queer spaces, queer forms of practice, ecological intimacy as a form of politics, and cruising as a space of experimentation for this kind of intimacy.
The day opened with a presentation by Ama Josephine B. Johnstone, whose focus was to ask:
Where does the sensual live within an interdependent, black ecology? In what ways has blackness been removed, severed, from the non-human world? How to find the presence of these ecologies? Why the urgent seeking of intimate ecologies and a return to pleasure when queer and black worldbuilding towards interspecies future has never been more precarious?
Johnstone understands intimate ecologies as relations acknowledging stewardship, interdependence and becoming with the non-human – “as kin, as lover” – in opposition to the individualism and anthropocentrism of colonially-based Euro-American societies. She argues for a move from a ‘need’ for interdependence, as an imperative in the context of climate breakdown, to ‘desire’ as a driver towards this coexistence, echoing Sara Ahmed’s framing of desire as a line to move along towards another (Ahmed 2006). The ‘wild’ becomes a way of reaching this situation, rather than simply a state of nature, drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the wayward: striving towards pleasure, in ways that are “inimical to those deemed proper and respectable” (Hartman 2019). This suggests privileging physical contact, the ‘frottage’ of physical closeness achieved by “moving through the flesh to elsewhere” (ABJ). There is an immediacy to these impulses, contrary to the teleological ecological ethic of saving an unknown future: “the later, the someday, is never” (ABJ). This resonates with Cy Lecerf Maulpoix’s critique of a future-oriented, protectionist, heterosexual ecology – ‘protecting the planet for our children’ (Maulpoix 2021). The notion of intimate ecologies argues for an ecology of coexistence and care now, driven by an immediate desire for the pleasure in this way of living.
Johnstone’s presentation thought through the work of Black artists (referenced within the presentation) whose images suggest aesthetics as ways of carrying these erotic possibilities of entanglement, and work against a ‘colonial erotics’ which “reduces the oppressed into thinghood” (ABJ). Pornography as the denial of the power of erotics as feeling. These images, Johnstone argues, challenge dominant classifications of Blackness and “expand the realms Blackness can inhabit “in the context of ‘climate instability”, in the sense of this interconnectedness rather than through aesthetics of gain and consumption. Sexualised, ecstatic, and queer aesthetics or practices, as embodied in the images shared by Johnstone, are then not imports from ‘modern’ westernism but are indigenous to multiple pre-colonial worlds and contexts. Working with and through these, she argues, is an opportunity to create speculative aesthetics to “animate tomorrows” (ABJ) of interspecies and climate justice, but means an “attempt to elude capture by not settling” (Hartman), continually renewing and disturbing these representations so they remain open.
This final warning, about the danger of ‘capture’ brought about by representation, connected with debates raised in the second presentation by Alexander Auris. Speaking about several ‘queer mapping’ projects he raised a tension between the need to offer concrete counter-mappings that visibilise alternative narratives of the environment, and the danger of fixing queer sites to a conventional top-down map like Google Earth. “There is a responsibility in deciding what to and what not to show”, he argues. In the Cuirtopia map, Regner Ramos chose not to show specific locations of the stories collected – “not everything has to be known” as Auris argued. ‘If we map all the cruising spaces, it’s dead. If we map all the queer spaces, maybe they’re not safe anymore. If we make everything public, I don’t think there’s space any more for this alternative way of doing things” (AA).
Auris raised the possibility of an alternative reading of queer space. Instead of the idea of geographical spaces of queer life – the ‘gaybourhood’ model creating a downtown zone of ‘queer’ consumption mostly devoid of other ways of being together – he points to the marking and making of space through the enacting of queerness. The example of ‘coming out’ as an act creating its own defined space-time of queer meaning, one that is different for all queer people (and indeed ongoing and unfolding for many), or doll’s house as a space of reverie for those unable to come out. Emma Bigé responded by connecting the idea of ‘coming out as a commons’ to the ‘waywardness’ invoked forward by Ama B. Johnstone. Coming out is ‘going astray from a space that is given to you’, and offers ‘ways out of the given architectures’. Undercommons - juris-generativity producing spaces for their own sake. Coming out, Bigé suggested, could be seen as ‘jurisgenerative’ (remaking law), meaning it could fit Fred Moten’s notion of ‘undercommons’. “We commit to undo. That’s why we can’t find a space of queerness, because the mode is the undoing not the doing” (EB).
The conversation turned to connections of these issues of mapping, with representation of queerness, erotics and ecology. How can representation be used to multiply possibilities, without fixing and commodifying the forms it attempts to visibilise: whether ‘sexual deviances’ (the term used in Cy Lecerf Maulpoix’s book), or the forms of ‘wild’ nature they are possible within. The elusion and unsettledness called for by Hartman wants to avoid enabling “those in positions of power in city-making, for example, to say we’ve done queer ecology because it looks like this” (JBH). For starters, we can embrace the impossibility of wildness and queerness being mapped fully, and acknowledge the inherent instability of these conditions. Designers will never be able to map wildness or queerness as they are not spaces but modes of life that have the capacity to leak into other places and situations. On the other hand, both speculative and real representations might enable things that otherwise sit outside the normatively visible scope of possibilities, in a context where queerness is becoming less visibly distinct.
Stage for a queer performance. Intervention in the Bois de Vincennes for Theatrum Mundi’s Movement Forum. Credit: à la sauvette
Taking the Bois de Vincennes (the focus of our afternoon walk) as an example, the question was raised as to how certain zones become reproduced as meeting spaces for gay cruising without being visually represented or documented. There are websites available that give locations for cruising in simple terms of access to sex, with no concern for the wider cultures that might exist in and around those sites. There is an unwillingness to see cruising spaces beyond sex, and to make representations that multiply the imaginary of what is happening in them – their potential interpersonal and trans-species politics. This point raised a question of the political scope of the emerging concept of ‘queer ecology’ (Gandy 2012). Sites of queer ‘wildness’ such as cruising spaces are viewed through a heternormative lens of pure hedonism that limits their perceived political scope. Cy Lecerf Maulpoix suggests applying a framework of commoning to collective care for these spaces that are both culturally and naturally precious, and puts this in contrast to the concept of ‘responsibility’ which encodes a patriarchal, dominant relationship to nature, such as that in a national park under state ownership and control. Queerness, Maulpoix argued in the conversation, has no impact as a banner unless it carries a view of a political project, reminding that spaces that are not marked as ‘queer’ can still emerge from queer types of social and political process, with the occupation of the Fleche d’Or cultural space as an example.
A presentation by Nia Manoylo turned the conversation towards intersections of queer ecology and urban planning, and indeed ‘anti-planning’. Referring to strategic plans such as the major Thames Gateway regeneration area, Manoylo showed how wildness is delineated into discrete zones, continuing the binaries that have long been built into urbanism. For Manoylo, a queer ecological approach to urban design is based the destabilising of powerful positions and overcoming of binaries more than it is queerness as a description of sexual orientation. As such, boundaries between ‘wild’, ‘planned’, ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ for example, could be left aside in favour of an understanding of the potential multiplicity in usage and meaning of all elements of the built environment. This resonates with Pushpa Arabindoo’s discussion of the Outer Ring Road in Chennai (see the Green Infrastructures working paper) whose possibilities are multiplied once its tight definition as an infrastructure for motor transport is unlearned, allowing other identities to be recognised.
The concept of queer ecological urban planning raised several unresolved questions. Regen Koch asked whether codifying queerness into a manifesto might rub against this desire for it to be about marginality and undoing. Does queerness as ‘flickering and fluid’ negate its ability to influence solid, infrastructural modes of development. He asked: “how can we construct agency around queerness?” The fact that marginal practices struggle to impact city-making processes should perhaps, though, be a critique of those processes more than an indication of a lack of agency within the marginal. “Queerness and wildness should be able to influence these things without needing to become fixed and dominant” (JBH). On the other hand, an infinitely changeable and fluid notion of queerness (even in gender terms) becomes compatible with neoliberal economic ideas such as flexi-security and endless consumer choice. Emma Bigé offered a counterpoint to this fluidity: “there’s an insistence in staying, a refusal to move in some instances, that can be a gesture of queer inhabitance”. In response, Anna-Louise Milne asked: “what does it mean for the wilds to stay?” Countering queerness as an immutable identity, Alex Auris raised the concept of ‘imprecision’ as a queer ethos, an idea of creative form-making (in architectural design for example) that navigates heterogeneous forms of presence, awkward histories, and waywardness, rather than imposing fixed structures on city-making in the ‘tabula rasa’ mode of building on a blank canvas. The ways that animals can inhabit human worlds quite purposefully, rather than simply being subject to them (species that have thrived in cities by adapting to benefit from human waste and infrastructures for example), recalls a queer idea of ‘code switching’ (changing voice and language to pass as straight or acceptable in a heteronormative space), knowing how to adapt to stay safe in environments that do not account for you.
The question of queer ecological urbanism also raised debates around the location of these kinds of counter-tactics within the long process of urban design. Queerness not just about design but everything that happens before it - funding and education. The possibilities under discussion here are all constrained in reality by language of briefing by clients of urban design – public bodies and private developers (JBH). Rather than wild spaces, thinking of wilding as a kind of process within design responses to these constrained briefs, embedding open-ended possibilities and unexpected outcomes into these projets. Wilding is also ‘non-design’ – shaping processes by which the non-human can become autonomous. But does this further distance humans and non-humans in cities? To what extent can wilding be turned into a formalised process, or is it destroyed by being operationalised?
Before heading out to walk, Benny Nemer presented his practice and the audio guide Trees Are Fags, which was to be enacted together in the woods. He spoke about his multifaceted interest in cruising: as subject matter, as method, as aesthetics. Echoing Ama B. Johnstone’s presentation, he also thinks with Sara Ahmed, in developing oblique lines of desire and queer affectiveness beyond the human, building bridges between human voices, flowers, trees and so on. Intimacies with botanical life are central to his practice, the ways flowers for example mediate human relations becoming representations of life moments and ways of exchanging sentiment and care. Once in the woods, gathered under the tree that would be our home for the afternoon, and before listening to Trees Are Fags, Benny also proposed a deep listening exercise following Pauline Oliveros, that asked us to try to listen exclusively to something we liked, then to something we did not like, then to try to hold both of these sounds in equal foreground in our minds. The group dispersed to follow Nemer’s audioguide, which can be listened to at treesarefags.eu, each following an individual path informed by its suggestions to notice and move towards trees as if they were potential lovers or friends, holding in mind histories both violent and intimate, linking firewood (fagotto), gay men (fags) and witches. The culmination of the walk is an invitation to think about touching a tree, but with its consent, and asking oneself whether the tree offers this.