Keywords: queer and trans* ecology, crip time, environmental justice
Abstract
The following photo essay reflects on the carework of organizing the Queer and Trans* Ecologies (QTE) Symposium at the University of Minnesota in 2023. It records the events from the QTE symposium with brief descriptions of activities: roundtables, conversations, workshops, and the Queer Ecology Hanky Project exhibit. The final section reflects on the access considerations of hosting a hybrid event that gathered together multiple marginalized disabled and chronically ill people three years into the Covid-19 pandemic.
Photo by Michelle Garvey
The following photo essay reflects on the carework of organizing the Queer and Trans* Ecologies (QTE) Symposium at the University of Minnesota—on the ancestral and contemporary homelands of the Daḳota people—for the Trans* Ecologies issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly. The introduction to the print issue describes the emergence of the Queer and Trans Ecologies Interdisciplinary Initiative whose members organized the symposium.
Photo by Peter Johnson
Gathering:
The QTE Symposium gathered artists, activists, scientists, scholars, and practitioners in the nascent fields of queer and trans* ecologies with deep commitments to racial justice, indigenous self-determination and sovereignty, and intersectional social justice praxis. The opening panel explored contemporary trends in these fields as well as illuminated conversations that have been obscured thus far through the research and practice of six scholars from different kinds of academic institutions—pictured above. For example, Anahi Russo-Garrido [second from left] conducts ethnographic research about BIPOC wellness practices, including community gardening. (She describes this work in a roundtable in this issue that features several presenters from the QTE Symposium Queer Food panel.) With the hope of facilitating interdisciplinary exchange in fields that tend to be siloed, we included an artist (Corinne Teed), a natural scientist (Patricia Kaishian), two humanities scholars (Jenne Schmidt and Heather Davis), and two social scientists (Anahi Russo-Garrido and Erin L. Durban) whose training and work already queerly blends and bends those easy identifiers and distinctions. This intention to get beyond the disciplinary conversations of queer and trans* ecology symposia/conferences and publications carried throughout our gathering.
Photo by Peter Johnson
Relationships:
While many presenters only knew each other through publications (if they knew each other at all), some have been in conversation and relationships—as mentors/mentees, colleagues, friends, lovers—for a while. M. Murphy and Mel Y. Chen decided to use the opportunity of the QTE Symposium to deepen their friendship through birdwatching and discussing overlaps in the concerns about gender, race/racism, colonialism, and chemicals/chemicality that animate their scholarship. They generously invited us into their intimate and relaxed exchange at the Institute for Advanced Study, an edited version of which appears in the TSQ Trans* Ecologies print issue with the title, “Holes on Holes, What is What?”
Moving Close to the Ground:
As one of the activists and cultural workers to whom the fields of queer and trans* ecologies is indebted, Eli Clare joined us to present work-in-progress, “Moving Close to the Ground: A Messy Love Song.” Clare’s new writing explored scooting, sliding, crawling, and other ways of moving close to the ground as crip ways of inhibiting the world and creating intimacy with the more-than-human world. It was a beautiful meditation on what can be learned from a shift in perspective and proximity, with attention and care informed by disability and environmental justice.
The whole conference worked to remake and resignify university spaces that have contributed to the dispossession of BIPOC people and that remain exclusive and elite environments. This was particularly meaningful for this event: Clare read his work at the Bell Museum, a natural history museum that has substantially and meaningfully worked to contend with racism (especially racial science like eugenics), colonialism (especially land and cultural dispossession), ableism, and other ongoing forms of oppression. As an organizer, I was impressed by how open museum staff were to thinking through these dynamics and revising their ways of doing things based on our feedback.
The requests Megan and I made to partner on QTE Symposium events with STEM units often—though not always—went unanswered or were met by incredulous responses, like what does gender or sexuality have to do with our work? While a few realized at least that their faculty and students might be queer and trans*, the Bell Museum approached us with excitement in recognition that intersectional queer and trans* ecologies are relevant to their mission and public programming. And through the building and deepening of these relationships, we could collectively revel in the provocative and brilliantly detailed work of Eli Clare together.
Photo by Peter Johnson
Photo by Peter Johnson
Water/Life:
"Water is Life (Mní Wičóni)" Our Queer and Trans* Ecologies Symposium convened in the “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” alongside the Mississippi River, in a place whose indigenous names reference water as a primary signifier. Water protectors continue to draw our attention to this vital life force under threat of enclosure and increased toxicity as part of contemporary racial capitalism. They insist: We are water. Water is sacred.
The second-day opening panel convened four anti-racist and decolonial scholars in queer and trans* ecologies—Eva Hayward, Cleo Woelfe-Hazard, Macarena Gómez-Barris, and Abraham Weil—who were invited to engage with water: aquatic ecosystems, “submerged perspectives” (Gómez-Barris 2022), water play and leisure, and more. Beautiful meditations floated to the surface, and with encouragement of facilitator Stuart McLean, the panel became less about aquatic encounters (though it was that, too) and more a place to explore narrative, style, and creative work. In other words, how do we theorize watery bodies, sea life, breath-sweat-tears, leakage, drainage, damming, and more through our writing and reading practices? One of these pieces is available in the print TSQ Trans* Ecologies Issue: Woelfe-Hazard’s “The Trans Bath: Toward an ecological approach to trans water / life Water*life water<>life
Photo by Peter Johnson
Intimacy with Extractive Economies:
Following lunch, an all-bodies movement workshop, and a long break, the second afternoon of the Queer and Trans* Ecologies Symposium was dedicated to a writing workshop with Eli Clare focused on intimacy with extractive economies. The workshop description from his website reads: “Eli grew [up] in a fishing and logging town on the coast of Oregon. As a teenager, he worked, hiked, and cut firewood on clearcuts. Those experiences shaped both his love of trees and mountains and his environmental politics. He knows that many people have intensely personal and intimate relationships with extractive economies—logging, commercial fishing, coal mining, monoculture agriculture, factory dairy farming, oil drilling, fracking, and more. This workshop creates space to explore and tell stories about those personal relationships.” In particular, participants were prompted to consider what might constitute queer and trans* ecological relationships to extractive economies.
My partner and research collaborator, Miranda Joseph, found the workshop helpful to think about her personal and familial relationship with real estate and from there the extractive economy of land grant or “land grab” universities. These spaces of higher education are founded through the violence of settler colonialism, profit from enmeshment with other extractive economies, AND create spaces of resistance and fugitive knowledge.
Photo by Peter Johnson
Hundreds of masked people packed into the University of Minnesota Quarter Gallery for the opening reception of the Queer Ecology Hanky Project (QEHP) organized by Vee Adams and Mary Tremonte. As Adams and Tremonte describe on the QEHP website, the exhibit contains the work of more than one hundred and twenty artists across North America. “Through exhibitions and interdisciplinary community-centered programming, QEHP showcases a diverse array of artist responses to Queer Ecology—an emerging area of inquiry which unites the study of biology, environment, and sexuality with a framework of queer theory—and celebrates a wide spectrum of print mediums and methods.” The large selection shared with symposium participants showcased a wild and exuberant display of multicolored hankies with queer more-than-human intimacies around every corner.
A lichenized library filled the back room of the exhibit where attendees were encouraged to read a variety of zines and books in the fields of queer and trans ecologies on comfy chairs with lichen cushions. Adams and Tremonte created the space with local artists Corinne Teed and Dez Bilges, who also helped install the exhibit. A table was set up for anyone inspired to manifest their own queer ecology design to contribute to Teed’s print publication, “Strange Mutualisms.”
Animals/Animalities:
Animals, animality, and interspecies relationships have been features of feminist, queer, and trans* ecological scholarship over the last several decades. In the decades since the publication of Biological Exuberance Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (1999), we’ve learned through/with/alongside/as animals in a multiplicity of ways. This panel brought together Juno Salazar Parreñas, Jennifer EunJung Row, Dylan McCarthy Blackston, and Kale Bantigue Fajardo with discussant Jean Langford to extend those interdisciplinary threads. They collectively invoked pigs, birds, “bears,” donkeys, all while wild turkeys peeked through a window into the Queer and Trans* Ecologies Symposium.
Parreñas provided an essential orientation to the topics of the panel by thinking through queer and trans* ecological engagements with nonhumans in biology and philosophy. Her contribution to these fields is now published as “When Our Tulips Speak Together: More-than-Human Queer Natures” in Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures (2024).
To the great delight of symposium participants, Jennifer EunJung Row shared her analysis of the French fairy tale “Peau d'Âne, which features trans-species marronage. Row slowed down on a clip from a 1970s film adaptation of the story with a magic donkey that poops coins and jewels—the “money shot.” The wealth generated by this donkey’s alchemy might trap a princess in an incestuous marriage, though the princess is able to escape her fate by cloaking herself in the donkey’s hide and making a new life for herself.
Photo by Peter Johnson
Instagram story collage (right) by Erin L. Durban incorporating photos by Mary Tremonte and Corinne Teed
Fermentation Fun:
World-renowned “fermentation revivalist” Sandor Katz led fifty people through a frenzied and fun sauerkraut fermentation workshop. We created plenty of queer messes while learning basic fermentation skills from someone who spent most of his adult life embracing fermentation as part of an HIV healing journey and nestled inside—and then nearby—a Radical Faerie commune. We cultivated intimacies with each other by collaborating on the labor of chopping cabbage, carrots, and onions, taking turns pulverizing the ingredients in buckets and jars, and sharing our secret spices, herbs, and other ingredients with each other. And as you can tell from the photos, there were plenty of opportunities for fun!
Queer Food:
Interdisciplinary food studies rarely overlaps with queer and trans* ecologies despite the critical role of food production in relationship to ecosystems and many ways into the shared concerns animating these fields. We convened this cutting-edge roundtable discussion with Sandor Katz, Martin Manalansan, Lorena Muñoz, Carly Thomsen, and Tracet Deutsch to explore points of connection and build a basis for scholarly inquiry with mutually beneficial insights. A remixed version of the conversation—with the additional insights of Anahi Russo-Garrido and Stina Soderling—is published in this online issue, "Food as an ‘Ingredient’ in Queer and Trans* Ecologies: A Roundtable.”
Dance Party:
Diverse queer and trans* people have long connected in dark crowded spaces with thumping music. Yet these vital and energetic nightlife spaces are not often part of academic events. But with the spirit of Emma Goldman guiding us into joy and pleasure, the Queer and Trans* Ecologies Symposium officially ended with a late-night dance party at an arts warehouse with DJs Mary Mack and Sci-Fi. The adjoining room offered less sensory overload for people who could enjoy beverages and good company on comfy couches or check out a pop-up infoshop with materials connected to queer and trans* ecologies and radical social movement work.
Access:
Long-term social justice activist organizing and cross-disability collaboration on events with the University of Minnesota Critical Disability Studies Collective shaped the QTE Symposium. Over more than a year, Megan Moore and I carefully considered logistical options to create a welcoming, safe, accessible, and fun gathering space in the university during the COVID19 pandemic. Here I describe some of that labor and decision with the hope that it might be useful to creating more spaces of connection in the future:
We enabled dynamic hybrid participation through high- and low-quality technology for all possible activities. The photo above shows Megan and I testing the audio and video capabilities at the University of Minnesota Liberal Arts Engagement Hub where two days of events took place.
We insisted on masking for in-person events. This required educating our many institutional partners on the necessity for breaking the rule on optional masking in university spaces to create gathering spaces open to everyone by prioritizing the needs of immunocompromised and high-risk groups. Presenters did not mask in order to support audience understanding. We provided them COVID19 tests for each day of the event.
All events included CART and/or ASL interpretation.
We welcomed presenters and participants to inhabit the spaces to best support their comfort, to make use of fidgets, heating pads, and quiet spaces, to stand up or lie down, to move around, to bring their children.
The QTE Symposium followed the general principles of UMN Critical Disability Studies for accessibility: scheduling long breaks, providing visual descriptions, access copies available physically and electronically for prepared comments, multiple ways to indicate access needs to organizers without official accommodations, only hosting events in spaces that are wheelchair accessible, and much more.
We provided snacks and meals for the three-plus days of the conference that accounted for allergens, food sensitivities, and preferences.
Presenters and participants from outside Minnesota who were known to be attending in person were offered options of staying in a homestay, a shared house, or hotel.
Our schedule of daily event emails included maps and directions.
All events were open to the public. However, we circulated information about the symposium through institutional partners and non-university queer and trans* networks. We minimized press coverage, except for one Minnesota Public Radio News story about the Queer Hanky Ecology Project exhibit, to decrease the risk of outside anti-trans provocation or aggression.
And while I believe that we successfully created an event that worked for most of our presenters and participants, it wasn’t perfect. Of course we had all kinds of bumps along the way: unanticipated parking fees, too few snacks at an event resulting in hangry interactions, missed WhatsApp calls from an international presenter who had difficulty connecting on Zoom, transportation SNAFUs, participants who were mad that an environmental justice conference didn’t offer exclusively vegan food, and people frustrated that they were unable to register for the symposium while it was taking place. Even with all the organizing experience between us, the QTE Symposium presented challenges around accessibility and social justice praxis that provoked us to imagine new practices. For example:
While we had intended to share videos from the event with registered participants as an accessibility measure (that I regularly benefit from having chronic illnesses that impact my ability to show up for live events), some presenters expressed their discomfort with recorded videos circulating of their presentations because of the current political climate. We ultimately decided that the potential harm of the videos outweighed the benefits of circulating them.
Our university initially refused to pay the honorarium of a presenter who needed it to go to a foundation instead of them directly. We often have to come up with creative ways to pay presenters with restrictions based on their immigration status and/or disability benefits, but we did not know about this one ahead of making the arrangements. After fiercely insisting that the honorarium needed to be paid as requested, the administrator who helped us with logistics found a way to work with the University of Minnesota to make it happen.
One of the presenters experiences extremely painful migraines from wearing masks. While Megan and I knew this information, she felt that she had to disclose on her roundtable because of the negative interactions she had with other people at the symposium who mistook her for being a political mask resistor. It would have helped to have a system for people to know that the presenter needed not to mask for health reasons, as well as to indicate other levels of comfort around physical interaction at the conference. For example, I have since learned that conferences have used visual indicators on name tags (that would need to be altered for greater accessibility for people who are blind/visually impaired) for people who are comfortable shaking hands.
About the Author
Erin L. Durban is an associate professor of anthropology and critical disability studies at University of Minnesota. They founded and directed the Queer and Trans* Ecologies Interdisciplinary Initiative and edited the Trans* Ecologies Issue of TSQ with Megan Moore. Their research explores interconnections of trans-embodiment, disability, and environmental injury.
Citation
Durban, Erin L. 2024. “Queer and Trans* Ecologies Symposium: Germinating Environmental Justice in Crip Times.” TSQ*Now, Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4. https://www.tsqnow.online/post/queer-and-trans-ecologies-symposium
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