Keywords: visual art, multisensory, trans ecologies, interspecies, metamorphosis
Abstract
Womb/Tomb/BooM is a multisensory, trans-ecological art installation that invites human visitors to share space, air, and flesh with styrofoam-metabolizing beetle larvae and the plastic waste they inhabit and consume. Wherever possible, barriers between human, insect, and plastic have been removed to create a shared sensory wormspace of metamorphosis-friendly light, sound, and material. Where those barriers could not be removed, the barriers themselves become key actors in the space, frustrating the cisgender gaze's desire for a good-hard look at these shape-shifting insects and structuring the ways that humans can and cannot move through the space.
Utilizing cast purple and magenta light emanating from overhead fixtures of earth and plastic, a sonic field of consumption and metamorphosis resonating from the walls and ceiling of the Refuge, a collection of styrofoam beds and benches that humans can touch and sit upon, and an assemblage of architectonic styrofoam towers inhabited by a colony of more than 10,000 metamorphosing mealworms, Womb/Tomb/BooM positions the “viewer” as a part of a larger sensory system of contaminating repair that consumes and metabolizes them as much as they consume and metabolize it.
Situated in a moment of unprecedented de facto and de jure animus against past/present/and future trans youth, Womb/Tomb/BooM also embodies an aesthetics and something like an erotics of pollution, perpetual metamorphosis, disorientation, abjection, and (dis)repair to construct a speculative world of (dis)comfort as queer refuge. This world depends on the performativity of the cisnormative fear of darkness, contamination, and disassociation to disturb - and maybe even repel - the comfortable, while comforting the disturbed in an obscuring and pleasure-oriented embrace of synthetic purple light, fake fur curtains, foam-as-marble resting surfaces, and perpetual chewing.
Like Susan Stryker’s anarchic trans womb and Karen Barad’s quantum-field-as-lively-void, Womb/Tomb/BooM’s speculative world vibrates in generative negation: both queer tomb - where received structures, hierarchies, and norms, pollution and the “polluted”, can come to be undone; and queer womb - where these undone pieces may find rest, protection, and space to recombine, forming new, less pure, bodies, animating new, more plastic, worlds.
I had to become purple in order to see and hear the purple things
I had to give my body to their mouths, before I could speak
I had to touch this contaminated ground, lay myself down on it, and become
plastic,
before I could stand
So, surrender me this Womb/Tomb/BooM
of plastic bodies
kneeling shiny,
sticky vinyl
Bring me to their hunger and let them
eat
Down me in this temple
stinking, churning,
desiccated, wet
Touch my contaminants and decompose my
poison
Bury my violence in a field of worms
Womb/Tomb/BooM invites human visitors to share space, air, and flesh with styrofoam-metabolizing beetle larvae and the plastic waste they inhabit and consume. Wherever possible, barriers between human, insect, and plastic have been removed to create a shared sensory wormspace of metamorphosis-friendly light, sound, and material. Where those barriers could not be removed, the barrier itself—here a porous, handsewn mosquito net that plays as an evocative veil, a draping canopy, and a more-than-human burial shroud—structures the ways we move through and perceive relationships in the space, materializing and activating core themes about the human gaze, opacity, desire and frustration, protection and restraint.
Womb/Tomb/BooM – A Refuge for Plastic Bodies | live mealworms, live darkling beetles, partially consumed styrofoam, egg tempera, handsewn mosquito netting, pine, faux leather, aluminum flashing, sound equipment, synthetic fur, plywood, violet vinyl and acrylic sheet, stereo cable, contaminated dirt, carrots, and flowering weeds | 15 x 18 x 20’ | 2023
This essay sketches out the theoretical and socio-ecological context of Womb/Tomb/BooM, an experimental, interspecies, multi-sensory work, including: (1) its conceptualization as a demonstration of the plasticity and transness of matter itself; (2) the structuring of this exhibition as a resistance to the cisgender/human/colonial gaze as it operates against nonhuman beings and dehumanized people; (3) the potential of queer affect/aesthetics/erotics embodied in this exhibition to sculpt social space and generate temporary refuges for trans, queer, and other marginalized people; (4) Womb/Tomb/BooM as a collaborative, interspecies effort to grow queer, embodied, ecological knowledge that disrupts hegemonic, state-sanctioned knowledge; and (5) queer failure and the potential of art to vision speculative futures—
including queer/trans futures—born from the ashes of this dystopic present.
1. Plastic bodies (queer materialism/queer ecology)
We are all contaminated now. All becoming/unbecoming each other. This material we call “body”—just bubbles in a churning field of plasticity. A field that incorporates, envelopes, consumes, metabolizes, and births structure and form itself. Including all the birthing, shifting, growing, chewing, groaning, disintegrating bodies that animate this Womb/Tomb/BooM. Effervescent beings, all provisional and dependent, brought to this fleeting time and slippery place by an impossibly large multiplicity of factors and agents, swimming in a dense, dark tangle of pulsing hyphae and signal, flying through this field at the speed of light. Or lightning.
Womb/Tomb/BooM is a demonstration of the perpetual material metamorphosis of matter/energy that centers the nonlinear flow of carbon through geological time and across synthetic and organic bodies. [1] The work references petroleum in the sound of pump-jacks whirring through the womb/tomb space and in the “Statement of Facts” bound and hung as wall tablets in the adjacent fully-lit space.
Petroleum-based styrofoam is present as food and housing for the mealworm insects, as beds and benches for human viewers, and as the subject of partially obstructed patents on the wall. The draped worm towers at the center of the darkened chamber present the process of this styrofoam-becoming-insect live. The sound of this metamorphosis is transmitted into the architecture of the space, turning the four walls and ceiling of the chamber into a resonating body that holds the worms, the styrofoam, and the humans in a shared sensory embrace.
The synthetic polystyrene in this installation is a product of organic material transformed through geological time and pressure into petroleum. But here we see, hear, and smell, how this iconically synthetic material, which we are accustomed to thinking of as quintessentially human and permanent, might return to its organic origins in the fullness of geological time. Thanks to the alchemical powers embodied in the guts of mealworms.
The mealworms use this styrofoam to fuel their own metamorphosis, which is given center stage and the microphone in the darkened womb/tomb, where visitors can sit or lay on styrofoam benches to watch the mealworms slowly transform the styrofoam under the veil while they slowly transform themselves, shapeshifting from egg to larval “worm-form” to pupa to mature “beetle-form.”
Their bodily plasticity is echoed in the human bodies that visit the installation. First, in the presence and references to bodies that shift form, including trans bodies, including my body.
Second, in the bodies of other human visitors, who are invited to consume humanely processed mealworms from this colony as part of their engagement with this work. Humans who have consumed these mealworms—insects who have consumed and metabolized plastic—become plastic (or at least post-plastic) in a material sense, as their bodies transform the energy, protein, and other post-plastic nutrition contained in the mealworms’ bodies into power and matter to build their own body.
Third, as pointed to in the Statement of Facts, all human bodies living on Earth today regularly ingest microplastics (whether we want to or not). All human bodies, therefore, include synthetic plastic as part of their tissue: an uncomfortable and disorienting fact I have highlighted throughout the show, as a way of pointing to the impurity, “unnaturalness,” and “plasticity” of contemporary human embodiment.
This queer ecosystem of plastic bodies-human, insect, and styrofoam-making and unmaking each other in a perpetual, non-linear cycle of interspecies, organic and synthetic, (un)becoming, is the core performative sculpture of this show. It’s an engine of perpetual becoming that fuels, metabolizes, and consumes everything else.
The DirtBath (Pure Filth Machine) in the adjacent fully lit room performs a related queer material ecosystem that echoes and extends the abject material (dirty trash) -> abject non-human (insect) -> human -> abject material (trashy dirt) cycle in the purple chamber. The DirtBath is composed of a cast iron tub, which holds a heap of burlap forms, stuffed with municipal mulch, and inoculated with pollution-consuming fungi and seeds. The biomorphic sacks are bound together with black vinyl hosing and perpetually watered by me or other humans to facilitate a slow (un)making of both the forms and the pollution inside them.
This Pure Filth Machine plays at least two roles. It is a demonstration of the power of nonhuman fungal agents to consume and assist healing from human-created toxicity, including microplastics and pesticides found in this earth. It is also a wounded and polluted compound body—crudely sewn and lashed together—seeking cleansing and healing in a bathtub, but finding that partial repair not in some impossible material purity or sanitization, but in the blossoming and vitality of impurities.
“Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.”
Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.
2. Power and the Human/Cisgender Gaze
Utilizing cast purple and magenta light emanating from overhead forms of earth and plastic, a sonic field of consumption and metamorphosis resonating from the walls and ceiling of the chamber, a collection of styrofoam beds and benches for human use, and an assemblage of architectonic styrofoam towers inhabited by a colony of more than 10,000 mealworms, Womb/Tomb/BooM positions the “viewer” as a part of a system of contaminating repair that consumes and metabolizes them as much as they consume and metabolize it.
This positioning of the “viewer” as subject to these human and nonhuman forces alongside the other plastic bodies in the Womb/Tomb/BooM is part of an effort to trouble the power dynamics and expectations of the cisgender/human/colonial gazes, as they manifest in the encounter of the human “subject” with the nonhuman (or dehumanized) “object.” This cisgender gaze might be theorized as the gaze that expects its object to lay still, fully naked, and submit to the viewer’s long, hard look, like a specimen to be examined and dissected to reveal its hidden “truth,” or an object that exists merely to titillate, outrage, or entertain the viewer. [2]
In an interspecies art context, this cisgender gaze could be located in the sense of indignant entitlement to a full view of all the action that so many viewers bring to work that incorporates nonhuman actors, including norms demanding “clean” sitelines, “good” lighting, and microscopes, even, to better visualize the bodies and behavior of the nonhuman participants, plus a generalized preference for legibility, tidy conceptual and material congruity, and clear demarcations between “art” and “viewer.”
Womb/Tomb/BooM refuses these expectations, presenting instead a multi-sensory field of darkened spaces, distorting colored light, ambiguous immersive sound, and variable objects in a state of perpetual transformation. Put differently, this work refuses the demands for “transparency,” “honesty,” and personal “vulnerability,” embracing instead visual opacity, [3] semiotic ambiguity, phenomenological disorientation, and conceptual complexity.
Womb/Tomb/BooM also subverts customary spatial and positional hierarchies to trouble normative notions about the relative power, position, and worth of the human and nonhuman, the human and dehumanized. Three ceiling-sculptures-cum-lighting-fixtures, stuffed with contaminated earth, partially consumed styrofoam waste, and the shed and frass of mealworms above translucent purple plexi planes, are suspended directly over the spaces where humans stand, sit, and lay. This positioning is designed to point to the materiality and objecthood of the human viewers’ bodies, who are lit like art objects, while the mealworm and styrofoam installation in the center of the room are lit like unmarked subjects who might wield the gaze, as much as they receive it.
The positioning of the ceiling sculptures is also a performance of the relative “highness” of these insects, their waste, the contaminated dirt they emerge from, and the styrofoam they are transforming back into nutrients capable of supporting life v. the “lowness” of the humans who have created these heaps of almost-permanent waste. They perform, then, as a kind of threat or suggestion of nonhuman domination that works only as well as the objects are perceived as precarious. The styrofoam beds and benches below the sculptures reinforce this power play—inviting visitors to rest within the sensory field of the womb/tomb while also accepting a position of relative and literal lowness, closer to the ground, the underworld, and the grave than the positions occupied by insects in this installation.
3. Queer Affect, Aesthetics, and Erotics as Social Sculpture - using the abject, taboo, trash, the threat of bodily contamination, synthetic materials and color to indirectly sculpt Queer/Trans Sanctuary
Womb/Tomb/BooM is not a guilt chamber. Or a courtroom. There is no one on trial. There will be no verdict. And no relief. Shame has been eaten out of this body.
In a world where guilt, shame, and moral outrage are trafficked like candy and popcorn for mass “hate-tainment”— especially the homophobic and transphobic varieties— Womb/Tomb/BooM attempts to avoid individualized guilt and shame triggers, in favor of formal strategies that emphasize the entangled, interconnected, interdependency, and plastic fluidity of all bodies. [6] To use Sedgwick’s memorable theorization (2003), Womb/Tomb/BooM focuses on the entangled “reparative” aspects of material reality (especially the interdependent/contaminating relationships between plastic, insects, humans, dirt, fungi, and water) at the expense of “paranoid,” individualistic, dissecting ways of viewing and thinking relationships. Or, as Timothy Morton might say, this is a work of intimacy. Or, a work that threatens participants with intimacy. [7]
Situated in a moment of unprecedented de facto and de jure animus against past/present/future trans youth, Womb/Tomb/BooM also embodies an aesthetics and something like an erotics of pollution, perpetual metamorphosis, disorientation, abjection, and (dis)repair to construct a speculative world of (dis)comfort as queer refuge. [8] This world depends on the performativity of the heteronormative fear of darkness, contamination, and disassociation to disturb—and maybe even repel—the comfortable, while comforting the disturbed in an obscuring and pleasure-oriented sensory embrace of violet light, foam surfaces, and textural sound.
It tests out the sculptural power of these agents and phenomena, asking: Could the presence of live decomposition, open-air worms, crawling beetles, the immersive sound of incessant chewing, and the drifting smell of decay (from egg tempera, fungal paint, and mycofiltration systems) repel some visitors who find the threat of bodily contamination too uncomfortable? Could the systematic denial of a clean look at the naked, freakish “other” frustrate some so much that they choose to leave prematurely, annoyed and dissatisfied? Could the same assemblage of sensory information, darkness, opacity, and performative/semiotically dissonant surfaces, attract and comfort others? If so, who will be comforted and who will be disturbed? Who will stay and who will go? Could the resulting space become a temporary refuge for some in a time of need—or at least a place of rest?
Could the space go further to become a site of queer sensory pleasure—a pleasure that confronts the viewer with the artificiality and impurity of its sources, but offers itself to the “viewer’s” body without regard to gender, sex, or sexual orientation. What does it do to provide a place of rest that looks like marble, but feels like styrofoam and is more comfortable and pleasurable for it? What does it do to require every person who enters or exits the space to touch and move through a set of very silky soft, but very fake, very cheap, and very clumsy, synthetic fur curtains? What does it do to surround visitors in a complex, ASMR-like, textural soundscape that evokes the soothing patterns of rainfall or snow melt, but position that listening experience within a chamber that contains 10,000 live insects actively chewing that sound into existence? What does it do to bathe visitors in a field of purple light, but position that light source within a precarious-looking overhead sculpture full of loose dirt, styrofoam, and insect parts? Will visitors be able to settle into these dirty/impure pleasures? Or will they be too disturbed by the dissonances? Will they feel tricked? Or will they feel cared for?
“From the margins, queers have picked those things that could work for them and recoded them, rewritten their meanings, opening up the possibility of viral reinsertion into the body of general discourse. Denied images of themselves, they have changed the captions on others’ family photos. Left without cultural vehicles, they have hijacked somebody else’s. They have been forced to trespass and poach. To be queer is to cobble together identity, to fashion provisional tactics at will, to pollute and deflate all discourses.”
Nayland Blake, Lawrence Rinder, and Amy Scholder (1995)
4. Queer Knowledge/Trans Epistemology: questioning “science” and other authorities as monolithic/unilateral sources of knowledge, privileging embodied knowing and sensory experience, interspecies connection, and pleasure/pain as pathways to forming knowledge
Do not tell me that something painful and brutal and isolating and violating is “true” or “must be.” Do not tell me that you know better. I refuse your knowledge and this text you have attempted to write on my body.
Do not tell me that I do not make “sense,” that this medley of parts and sensations is confused/confusing/doesn’t match. I do not need to make sense for you. I do not need to resolve my ambiguities and contradictions for you, so that I am easier to pin down and control. [9]
I don’t want to learn your language of sex, authority, control, and moral superiority. Your laws and methods—your “logic”—are not my mother tongue. [10]
I will listen to my body to know what is. I will honor the pleasure and the pain that it brings—finding wisdom and knowledge in this iterative, applied, experimental process. I will write new languages and build new bodies of wisdom and language from this listening and testing. I will honor the pleasure, pain, and knowledge of other bodies as they listen past institutionalized, hierarchical knowledge systems, feeling in the dark for the truths that bring vitality, pleasure, curiosity, connection. [11]
I will remember that knowledge is not static. It flows and shifts, like the bodies of these insects, becoming a line, a drip, a beam of light, flickering, then gone. I will not build a hierarchy of truth, structured in a pyramid of logic, to shove down the throats of my interlocutors.
I will offer them a dehydrated insect body instead, nourished by styrofoam, and cared for by me for months. I will hold up this salty, crunchy, worm-shaped body and ask them to take of it and eat. (Or, maybe, I will collect them in a glass bowl and place them on the refreshment table, beside the pretzels and the Sour Patch Kids.) The delivery system is not as important as the knowing eating of these plastic-consuming creatures. This is how they will know, through taste and embodied intimacy and some kind of dirty/broken/kinky queer sacrament. They will know something different about themselves and the world because they allowed their bodies to be built of and with the material of a metamorphosing insect’s body that was itself built of and with synthetic polystyrene plastic. Or because they refused to let that happen.
5. Queer Failure (TOMB) and Queer/Trans Futurity (WOMB)
We will not rid the world of styrofoam with mealworms, at least not in my lifetime and probably not before the end of humanity. Polystyrene foam makes up 30 percent of the volume of Earth’s landfills. Yet, it has taken several generations of mealworms (approximately 100,000) almost 2 years to partially metabolize this small 10 x 10 x 6 ft heap of styrofoam. All the “art objects” that we are drawing, sculpting, and painting in this durational interspecies project are built to fail—cracking, crumbling, and disintegrating into particulate and worm bodies—just like the plastic bodies that are (un)making them.
But, this failure to save the present (with either scalable worm composting protocols or materially stable art objects), [12] this welcoming of the end of things, this performance of TOMBhood for all these heaps of humanity’s toxic legacies (styrofoam, intellectual property law, de facto and de jure transphobia) is not just adolescent nihilism.
As Legacy Russell has said, there is life, joy, and longevity in “breaking what needs to be broken.” [13] Especially now, when the pile of things that need to be broken seems to be growing faster than ever, it is satisfying, empowering, and fun, even, to oversee the destruction of some part of it. Not because we are going to get rid of the heap on our own, but because it brings joy and pleasure to baptize anti-drag legislation in a bubbling brew of brown fungal water, contaminated with the city’s landscaping-debris-cum-free-mulch. And I want to share this pleasure and vitality with you.
Look how satisfying it is to watch this cheap ink that pretends it can define “gender” leak into illegibility. Watch while these pollution-consuming fungi slowly eat away at this poison. Let’s defile this document together - obliterating its sense - and bask in the satisfaction of converting an effort at domination, fear, and political bullying into food for fungus and visual pleasure.
These gestures of unmaking humanity’s toxic laws, and toxic trash, and toxic Gods, and toxic anthropocentrism, and toxic beauty standards, and toxic individualism, and toxic gaze, might also perform a kind of necessary negation that allows the real work to be born:
[F]or we have done the hard work of constituting ourselves on our own terms, against the natural order. Though we forgo the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself spills forth. (Stryker 1994, 251).
Like Stryker’s anarchic trans womb and Barad’s quantum field of vibrant void (2015), Womb/Tomb/BooM’s speculative world vibrates in generative negation, playing as both:
a queer tomb - where received structures, hierarchies, and norms—pollution and the “polluted”—can come to be undone; [14] and
a queer womb - where these undone pieces may find rest, protection, and power to recombine into new, less pure, bodies, animating new, more plastic, worlds.
Like Muñoz’s queer futurity (2009), then, Womb/Tomb/BooM is a failure and a success. The world it sketches into being is not here and not yet, but an embodied wish for a future that moves ‘beyond the prison house of the here and now toward a then and there that might burn a hole in the retinas of today’s dystopic totalizing reality. It is an invitation into a vision of the future built in that burnt out blind spot, a place of visual disruption where we may find permission to see like an eye-less mealworm, privileging desire and collectivity over “the real truth,” darkness and pleasure over legibility, and embodied growth and trans-species connection over the drive for a good-hard “look”.
Notes
[1] Or, as Timothy Morton (2010) puts it: “All life-forms, along with the environments they compose and inhabit, defy boundaries between inside and outside at every level. When we examine the environment, it shimmers, and figures emerge in a ‘strange distortion.’ When the environment becomes intimate—as in our age of ecological panic and scientifically measurable risk (Beck)—it is decisively no longer an environment, since it no longer just happens around us: that’s the difference between weather and climate…. Evolution means lifeforms are made of other lifeforms. Entities are mutually determining: they exist in relation to each other and derive from each other. Nothing exists independently, and nothing comes from nothing” (274).
[2] From McKenzie Wark (2021): “I want to focus not so much on the male gaze, but on the cis gaze — a looking that harbors anxiety about the slippages and transformations between genders, but which also harbors desires for those transitions as well. I don’t want to think from the point of view of this dominating, controlling, and yet fragile cis perspective, nor even to critique it. I want to think, and feel, and imagine from outside of it. It’s no longer possible to think about the gender of the gaze without also thinking about race. I want to think beyond how ambivalent desires and anxieties structure the field of vision around race, sexuality, and gender, and decenter the sovereignty of the gaze itself.” (emphasis added)
[3] From Édouard Glissant (1997): “Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures…. Thought of self and thought of Other here become obsolete in their duality. Every Other is a citizen and no longer a barbarian… This-here is the weave, and it weaves no boundaries”) (190).
[4] From Sara Ahmed (2003) on queer phenomenology as a “disorientation device” that allows the oblique to “open up another angle on the world” (72).
[5] For more, read Mel Y. Chen's Animacies or co-edited GLQ issue on Queer Inhumanisms.
[6] Moral purity and fears of contamination have also fueled genocidal violence against racial, ethnic, and religious minorities across history. (Moore Jr. 2000); (Keirnan 2014). This essay focuses on the weaponization of morality and “purity” against trans and queer people, but Womb/Tomb/BooM is not so neatly limited. All who are surveilled, vilified, and hunted may find shelter and rest in its darkness, opacity, and performative threat of contamination. I also hope that anyone who has felt dehumanized by the forces of white supremacy and its hierarchies of value, beauty, and goodness - including specifically its reverence for whiteness, cleanness, and purity as inherently “superior” features (closer to Godliness) and darkness, dirtiness, and impurity/ambiguity as inherently “inferior” attributes (closer to Evil) - may also relate to and connect with the political and affective content of this work, including its direct subversion of “white cube” aesthetics. To invoke Mary Douglas’s anthropology of dirt and purity, if dirt is “matter out of place,” then Womb/Tomb/BooM is meant as a “dirt-affirming” refuge for all bodies who have been rejected as “inappropriate” by the dominant culture’s “systemic ordering and classification of matter.” See Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger. (Douglas 2002, 36, 165).
[7] “If being ‘environmental’ only extends phobias of psychic, sexual, and social intimacy, current conditions such as global warming will persist. Instead of insisting on being part of something bigger, we should be working with intimacy… Ecological humiliation (of the human) spawns a politicized intimacy with other beings. This intimacy is a polymorphously perverse belonging (and longing) that doesn’t fit in a straight box[.] … Such intimacy necessitates thinking and practicing weakness rather than mastery, fragmentariness rather than holism, and deconstructive tentativeness rather than aggressive assertion, multiply differences, growing up through the concrete of reification.” (Morton 278).
[8] For more on the queer erotics of transformation, discomfort, and insects, see Braidotti (2002): “Transformations and metamorphoses are the true site of desire, asymmetrically embodied ecstasy in and of difference, not the articulation of the libidinal economy of the same. Lust and pleasure in the nomadic mode melt down the cohesion and unity for the body, allowing for the cricket in you to sing, and the cockroach in you to endure[.]” (page 159).
[9] “We are encrypted: how we are coded is not meant to be easily read. We recognize that the care-full reading of others is an exercise of trust, intimacy, belonging, home-coming. We reject the conflation of legibility and humanity.” Legacy, Russell. Glitch Feminism. Verso, 2020. p. 147.
[10] “To speak is to invent the language of the crossing, to project one’s voice into an interstellar expedition: to translate our difference into the language of the norm; while we continue, in secret, to practice a strange lingo that the law does not understand.” Preciado 26 (2020).
[11] (Sedgwick 121-151) (on the ecology of knowing and pleasure as a pathway to reparative knowledge).
[12] For more on the queer possibilities of failure, see Halberstam (2011).
[13] From the searing “Glitch Survives” chapter of Glitch Feminism: “We will let our liquidity roar with the deep decibels of waves. We will cruise as wild, amorous, monstrous malfunctions. We will find life, joy, and longevity in breaking what needs to be broken. We will be persistent in our failure to perform in pursuit of a future that does not want us, enduring in our refusal to protect the idea, the institution of ‘body that alienates us. Here is where new possibilities gestate.” (Russell 2020, 152).
[14] See also Casid 2019.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2003. Queer Phenomenology. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Barad, Karen. 2015. “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21: 387 - 422, https://people.ucsc.edu/~kbarad/Barad-GLQ%20article-Transmaterialities.pdf
Blake, Nayland, Lawrence Rinder, and Amy Scholder. In a Different Light : Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice. San Francisco : City Lights Books, 1995, https://archive.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/InaDifferentLight/Curating_In_a_Different_Light_by_Nayland_Blake.pdf.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. “Met(r)amorpohses: becoming Woman/Animal/Insect.” Metamorphoses - Towards A Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity.
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History. Princeton University Press.
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Preciado, Paul B. An Apartment of Uranus - Chronicles of the Crossing. Semiotext(e), 2020.
Russell, Legacy. 2020. Glitch Feminism. Verso.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003.“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ 1(3): 237–254.
Wark, McKenzie. 2021. “The Cis Gaze and Its Others (for Shola).” E-Flux, no. 117, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/117/387134/the-cis-gaze-and-its-others-for-shola/.
About the Artist
Ashton S. Phillips is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA, working
directly with the earth, metamorphosis, pollution, and (dis)repair as primary
materials. He is interested in the wisdom hidden within the material environment,
including physical bodies, and in the promise of trans ecological praxis, including
interspecies collaboration, embodied “play,” and speculative (un)making, as pathways
for making meaning, building resiliency, and generating new forms of
knowing/feeling/being in the late Capitalocene.
Ashton’s work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and artist-run spaces around
the United States, including the Torrance Art Museum, Cerritos College, SoLA
Contemporary, the New Mexico Cancer Center, Southwest College of Visual Art, and
Santa Maria de Vid Abbey in New Mexico, and the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Public art commissions include Feast and Famine, a collaborative interspecies
performance at Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook in Culver City, CA, and Arlington
Gardens in Pasadena, CA; Reflections, a 2020-21 participatory sound art installation in
Glendale Central Park; and Helios Rising, a 170 x 7′ mural responding to the path of
the sun in Albuquerque, NM.
Ashton grew up in the “Chemical Valley'' of South Charleston, WV, where Union
Carbide and Dow Chemical developed many of the world’s first petroleum-based
plastics, while polluting the local air, water, and soil with known carcinogens and
“forever chemicals.” He studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art,
anthropology and queer theory at the University of Maryland, where he served as the
first trans president of the university’s LGBT student caucus, and interdisciplinary
sculpture in the Maryland Institute College of Art’s MFA in Studio Art program.
Citation
Phillips, Ashton S. 2024. “Womb/Tomb/BooM: a refuge for plastic bodies.” TSQ*Now, Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4. https://www.tsqnow.online/post/womb-tomb-boom
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