Keywords: intimacies, scale, trans*ecologies, visual rhetoric
Abstract
I photograph small moments of intimacy and relation between and among human and non-human bodies in the neighborhoods where I live. Using my cell phone and macro lens attachment, I photograph what might otherwise exist on the margins of a gaze to circulate non-dominant narratives of nature. My work is premised on the notion that colonial conceptualizations of the environment (including those created visually) contribute to pressing environmental issues. Colonial myths include definitions of land as: property, resource for extraction, a “pristine untouched wilderness,” a category separate from humans and humanity, and/or a heterosexual cisgendered “nature” as “natural.”
My images aim to assert queer and trans* relational visions of nature and they exist in conversation with artists and scholars whose visions also strive to destabilize pervasive notions of the environment. I wonder: within colonial systems, how can we look and learn to look at land differently in ways that pry open possibilities for trans* ecological futures?
In these images, Sonoran Desert plants in Tucson, Arizona communicate sexual suggestivity, offering a vision of erotic landscapes that do not simply fall into tropes like “mother nature” or that of the “feminized landscape” that appear to be “pristine” or “untouched.” Partial and whole, present and absent, hopeful and hopeless, connected and displaced, these images envision a kind of trans* elemental intimacy that may be productive, however momentary or small.
In these various renderings of intimacy—between photographer/subject, various elements, forms of bodies—the scale of intimacy is, as Alexis Pauline Gumbs notes, “the sustainable scale,” the small scale of care. May these small lenses contribute to larger understandings of our environment as an ongoing palimpsest of constellated relational becomings, of “stories so far” (Doreen Massey), between and among kinds of bodies and scales. What might happen if we learn to see the environment through trans* ecological lenses and value their lessons?
Touched Landscapes reflect my ongoing commitment to the value and potential of environmental art to disrupt, reflect upon, and re-imagine visions of land through trans* ecological intimacies by expanding stories of human/land relations and considering their rhetorical potential towards different environmental futures.
About the Artist
Anushka Peres is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. They are a multidisciplinary rhetorical scholar and photographer, invested in the environmental and social repercussions of colonial conceptualizations of land and sites of possible intervention. They work across media and with a range of collaborators on public queer feminist projects that seek more sustainable ways to see and be with the environment and each other. Their work has been published in The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetorics, and their photographs have been shown in galleries globally. They are an award-winning educator, active in community engagement initiatives, artist/activist networks, and coalitional environmental projects.
Citation
Peres, Anushka. 2024. “Touched Landscapes: Trans* Ecological Intimacies.” TSQ*Now, Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4. https://www.tsqnow.online/post/touched-landscapes
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