Re)Imagining Life in the Anthropocene: Sexuali ty, Veganism, and Eating Dirt by Qingyuan Deng

(Re)Imagining Life in the Anthropocene:

Sexuality, Veganism, and Eating Dirt

QINGYUAN DENG

Part I: Conceptualizing Imagination Twenty-seven years ago, Slavoj Žižek famously and provocatively in his essay “The Specter of Ideology”, a Freu-

do-Marxist commentary on the state of being under late capitalism, formulated a sweepingly pessimistic declaration, now

heavily divulged, that

Up to a or two ago, the system production-nature (man’s productive-exploitative relationship with nature its resources) was perceived as a constant, whereas everybody was busy imaginig different forms of the social organization of produc-

tion and commerce (Fascism or Communism as alternatives to liberal capitalism); today, as Frederic Jameson perspica-

ciously remarked, nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer, whereas popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the forthcoming ‘breakdown of nature’, of the stoppage of all life on earth—it seems easier to imagine ‘the end of this world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal-capital-

ism is the ‘real’ that shall somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecologic catastrophe...1

as a trenchant critique of contemporary cultural imagination’s failure or unwillingness to grapple with its own culpability in masking capitalism’s historical contingency and reproducing its ideological hegemony. While Žižek rightfully pinpoints the uncanny reification of Capital in our post-Fordist economy, he nevertheless repeats a reductive gesture of ontological bifurcation that misrecognizes Death as a radical exteriority to Life itself. In fact, Žižek’s erroneous constitutive division of the apparatus of creation/destruction fundamentally fails to pictorialize a full ontological picture of the actuality we find ourselves in. Against the Imperial metropole where an elaborated governmentality of compartmentalizing and quarantining is imposed

upon Death so as to render it unrecognizable to the public sphere of consciousnesses, living directly in the (after)lives of Empire affectively and experientially takes on a conceptually different set of relationalities and meanings for the effected subject. Particularly vulnerable to exploitation and dispossession yet specifically targeted by its ravaging, Indigenous bodies encounters racial capitalism in its very materiality—a certain life-eliminating violence that brings end to life through subduing non-human others in proximity to and affinity with indigenous communities to ecological degradation. The Indigenous subject does not imagine end of life as the teleological denial of being in its fullest sense and damage to the world as the ground for mean-

ingful claims to subjectivity conditions the contours of everyday Indigenous politics. From the settler-colonial health system

with its epidemiological assumption of Indigenous “naturalized marginality (‘too isolated to be served’)” and “supposed vulnerability to change by ‘contact’”2 to the naturalized colonial heteropatriarchy that subjects Indigenous peoples disproportionately to HIV/AIDS epidemic through “eliminatin[g] all memory of the gender roles and kin ties that informed traditional

1 Žižek, Slavoj, editor. Mapping Ideology. Verso Books, 1994, pp. 1. 2 Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “Indigenous Transnationalism and the AIDS Pandemic.” Theorizing Native Studies, 2014, pp. 191

Indigenous community and governance”3, the Indigenous lives with death, of traditions, worlds, and relations.

Living as an “affectable other”4 within a discursive regime of ethnographic entrapment and materially on a “horizon of death”5, the Indigenous, along with other communities living on the margins of Life as well, must confront the end

of some life produced by the social order and by extension the possible end of all life. In No Future, the queer theorist Lee

Eldman criticizes emancipatory politics’ tendency of aligning with “reproductive futurism” (3) in which a futurity solely

thought in the positivist self-same terms of overcoming Capital without a referent of death in the present. By suggesting that radical change to capitalism is more metaphysically real than mass extinction and climate disaster, Žižek dramatically flattens or collapses “the present field of possible experiences”6 that is the phenomenal micropolitics of affective conducting and being conducted into a nominalized hierarchy of actionable items. The ruins of World that we inhabit, irreducible to a set of know-

able axioms, at its territoriality is no longer an Immutable Myth of which the kernel houses Absolute Knowledge awaiting Man, but a relational field of entities and realms that are formative of complex interconnectedness, not readily accessible or structurally inaccessible as an object of knowledge to the observer. It requires us to think and imagine that which is worked through the past, belongs to a futurity beyond authentication and affirmation, and evades the settler-colonial real. In this sense, imaginative mediation of worlds, be it an elusive semiotics of Logos or a crystal image of Space-Time, for the subject is a transitory practice occupying the underdetermined intersection of pre-reflective and reflective. To imagine is to induce modifications and transformation at the threshold of the finitude of being and the infinitude of World. The spatial imaginary of an “outside” or “beyond” cannot be simplified as an liberatory geography recognizably exterior to or different from the symbolic order of racial capitalism. In Queer Times, Black Futures, Kara Keeling urges that the affective economy of imagination must leave behind its utopian fixity and embrace its temporally noncorresponding radicality. Specifically, Keeling is invested in arts of the body aimed toward the opaque “after-the-future”, the ghostly conjuring up of “something presently absent: a new relationship between and within matter” (22). Žižek’s Lacanian reading of apocalyptic imaginations as a phantasmatic investiture of the libidinal economy of contemporary capitalism reductively conflates his study of imagination with symptomology, a diagnostic tool that seeks to reveal that which is emerging there and ignores what is here. In “On the Concept of of History” (1940) Walter Benjamin already warned us: “The tradition of the oppressed taches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”7 Capitalism is the end of the world.

Imagination is not a metaphysical given; instead it can be best read as an affective register of its own ontological fluid-

ity in refusal of biologizing or pure social constructivism. Embodying an investment in Imagination seeks neither regression

into the past nor the great leap forward into the future. Therefore, the modern(izing) decree of designating varying categories

or zones of intelligibility in parallel to imaginative larger-than-life potentiality runs into an epistemic cul-de-sac. Unbound by crudely technical embodiment, imagination, in flight from a managerial construct of the psychological man, incites and exerts pressure upon the outskirts of normativity.

Returning to specificities of imagination itself, I would like to postulate that the ontological trauma of Death born 3 Lauria, pp. 195. 4 Smith, Andrea. “Native Studies at the Horizon of Death.” Theorizing Native Studies, pp. 209 5 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 2007, pp. 27. 6 Foucault, M. (1983). “What is revolution?” In S. Lotringer (Ed.), The politics of truth (pp. 83-95). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 7 VIII.

tionary language of ending capitalism. The capacity to imagine another life exterior to or in the aftermath of this life is in itself

conditional upon the imagined temporal horizon in which capitalism will be denaturalized. More importantly, the speculative imaginary of surviving the Anthropocene and the ontologizing imaginary of reviving class struggle define each other in terms of vocabulary available for such intra-psychical activity.

Part II: What is the Anthropocene?

In May 2019, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), consisted of thirty-four members, voted by a large margin of twenty-four to submit a proposal to the International Committee on Stratigraphy in which “Anthropocene” will be recommended as a “true” geological epoch whose starting date should be located in the mid-twentieth century—most likely July 16, 1945, the day of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, or August 5, 1963, on which the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed. The retroactive proclamation of our entrance into the Anthropocene by AWG has had its fair share of criticism and objection.

Who is the Human of the Anthropocene? One might ask. The Human of History only encompasses a particular history of Western hegemony achieved through enslavement and genocide. Following this line of inquiry, Janae Davis offers an exposé of the all-too-privileged, universalized figure of “Human” and proposes an alternative term of “Plantationocene” that captures plantation economies of racial differences inherent to the world-system since the Age of Discovery. She contests that theorizing “embodied plantation ecologies in the United States South and Caribbean [can] demonstrate how an attention to the ways that the enslaved cultivated alternative ways of being while confronting, refusing, and resisting racial violence disallows a move toward multispecies flattening.”8 Challenging the concealment of a racialized and gendered hierarchy of animacy conceived as the fabric of the present-day global World-System, Zoe Todd (Métis/otipemisiw) contests that the Anthropocene should be dated back to 1610 so as not to divorce our present conditions of environmental catastrophes from the history of

colonialism and imperialism itself. She speaks of the colonial logic of transforming Nature: the Anthropocene as the extension and enactment of colonial logic systematically erases difference, by way of genocide

and forced integration and through projects of climate change that imply the radical transformation of the biosphere.

Universalist ideas and ideals are embedded in the colonial project as it was enacted through a brutal system of imposing

“the right” way of living. In actively shaping the territories where colonizers invaded, they refused to see what was in front of them; instead forcing a landscape, climate, flora, and fauna into an idealized version of the world modelled on sameness and replication of the homeland.9

The colonization of present-day Americas already marked the entrance into the Anthropocene, long before the Great Accel-

eration of the twentieth century. Hence, to think about the Anthropocene as an extension of colonial modernity and imagine

its afterlife is to again encounter a strange temporality residing in-between biology and sociality: the non-linear unequal distri-

bution and transmission of dispossession and elimination across times and spaces that never quietly retreats into the mythical

backdrop of Nature onto which the Carbon Ages enact its Technology. The past violent reorganizing of lifeforms and worlds

8 Davis, Janae, et al. “Anthropocene, capitalocene,… plantationocene?: A manifesto for ecological justice in an age of global crises.” Geography Compass 13.5 (2019), pp. 7. 9 Davis, Heather, and Zoe Todd. “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: an international journal for critical geographies 16.4 (2017): pp. 769.

ghostly haunts the present. Traces of former layers of violence secretively resurfaces in the present, conditions our actuality in a manner elusive to the visual field of Multicultural Difference, and binds itself to the future.

We are living with corpses from the last upheaval of Apocalypse. The ontological afterlife of the dead, in spite of our denial, continues to create conditions of possibility for climate change and toxic embodiments. Our current ecological crisis,

far from accidental acts of greed or miscalculation capable of being repaired by Science and its expertise, will not resolve until

a collective recognition that the ongoing end of world is and has always been among us arrives. Apocalypse is here.

I would like to return to Walter Benjamin’s mystical anthropology here to fully elaborate on the troubled historicity of the Anthropocene. In “On the Concept of History” Benjamin speaks of the urgency to recuperate our memory from its

continuous extraction by capitalist modernity. For him, it is as an intergenerational task of interpretation and beyond one’s

present time. He wrote in his second thesis: The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded

earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there echo of now silent ones? Don’t the women we court have

sisters they no longer recognize? If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.

Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a

weak Messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. Such a claim cannot be settled cheaply. The historical

materialist is aware of this.

Aerial and esoteric, Benjamin’s second thesis on History elegantly is a cautionary tale against the teleological anthropology

of Man as Agent of Progress. For Benjamin, moving through and surviving History charges the modern subject with obligations, the remembrance of loss and the gesture toward reparation. The evocation of past suffering in the present shakes up Modernity’s illusory pretention to a fetishized temporality of impermanence. Uncritically reading the Anthropocene only as a material condition, defined by the excess of carbon emission in the atmosphere, per the understanding of AWG, freezes cli-

mate change and mass extinction as materialized abstraction, up in the air, one could say, only to be idealized again as statistics

and graphs in the service of green capitalism and global environmental governance. The decolonization of the Anthropocene both as an atemporal transhuman event and a transcendental signifier necessarily requires a particular kind of historicizing that traces the sonic reverberations of distant eruptions of life-and-death struggle and ontologizing that directs attention to the microphysics of bodily immediacy and spiritual specificity. Part III: Detangling Anthropocentrism from Sexuality In 1905, toward the very end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber eloquently offered an eschatology of modern life under Capital, the new God of Modernity, who is equally, if not more, ineffable and transcendental. Quoted in its completeness, Weber wrote: The Puritan wanted to work in calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells

into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the

modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine produc-

tion which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly

concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of

More than one hundred years later after Weber’s prediction, the “last ton of fossilized coal” has yet to be extracted and burnt yet our conditions of being have scald up beyond Weber’s imagination. Yet the danger of our ongoing ecological crisis has become an utterance of opacity to the Western subject, albeit the vocalized callings of the greatest urgency on the part of climate scientists. Right-wing populisms of the Global North, mobilized by racial melancholia

and post-industrial abandonment, have declared a war of disinformation and conspiracy theory upon the very reality

climate change.

An ecofeminist genealogical investigation into the etymological and ideological paradigm of the originary

term “Anthropos”, derivative of the name for our current geological epoch, has long revealed that its symbolic domain, composed of skyscrapers, offshore oil-drilling rigs, coal-mining hydraulic jacks, pipelines, and so on, is a detached, disembodied, omnipotent, permanently erected Phallus. If Marx and Marxism have revealed for us the

ways in which God was transposed onto Capital during colonial modernity, then our current theoretical project can

be best summarized as a (re)mapping of the desiring subject, per Michel Foucault’s analysis in The Will to Knowl-

edge, in which the boundary among God, Capital, and (Phallic) Desire become porous and indistinguishable to the

modern subject.

Desire is the symbolic economy of the Anthropocene, defined by a heterosexual, male chauvinist logic of penetration and conquer. The interplay of desire and neoliberal political economy subjugates the subject to the Iron Cage that is the self-same, repetitive, endlessly flowing circuit of money-labor-property, heteropatriarchal nuclear family, and consuming-as-survival. Indeed, the desire for self-referential accumulation in the Anthropocene, disavow-

ing its lack of a telos, has become a tautological machinery of self-citation and incitation, a self-referential imperative

for producing and consuming more. It Oedipalizes the biopolitical logic of “making live, letting die” insofar as the material and social relations of such desire (re)affirms and authenticates some lifeforms as the universalized, legitima-

tized enjoying subject and pushes others toward the edge of death and extinction. This language of sex-murder, taken

as the very structure of our ethical consideration, has saturated the neoliberal imaginary of global environmental gov-

ernance: The Mother Earth is weeping, for her unscrupulous, demanding (male) child is sucking life-granting blood

(Oil!) out of her breast for his own enjoyment and emptying out her Life.

Who is the Mother Earth? Gendered (perhaps racialized) language of ethical consumption and neoliberal environmentalism depicts her as a sexually passive caretaker victimized by her own nurturing impulses. A moment of

conscience is all it takes for the frivolous child of Humanity to realize his own condescension and entitlement. “Save

the Plant!” With a turning heart, the reformed child proclaims. Against such heteropatriarchal imaginary, ecofemi-

nist Jane Caputi demands a Planetary reimagination of Earth, more than the humanistic notion of the globe under The White Man’s stewardship. Caputi mockingly pinpoints that the psychosexual drama of the Anthropos against the Earth Mother is nothing but an elaborately staged suicide mission: The Anthropocene discredits these and other powers of the Earth Mother, projecting her as enfeebled, as replaceable

much the Anthropocenic culture tries to ‘fuck’ the Mother to death, it is not capable of this – though it can do enormous amounts of damage to other beings and ultimately may take out all of humanity as well. But Earth/Nature is no passive victim, unable to resist. Indeed, Earth herself is the ultimate ‘Muthafucka.’11

Making a broader and more expansive connection between sexuality and the Anthropocene than Caputi’s dissection of the psychical transference of the discursive field of contemporary ecological imaginary, I would like to suggest that recent proliferations of identarian social-religious-ecological movements that explicitly reject the narrative of Species

Man and demands a (re)turn to the pre-Enlightenment, aestheticized, and depoliticized sensibility of sacred Nature.

Be it the more animist Deep Ecology or the neohippie Fuck for Forest, ecological movements inspired by New Age

revival and modern paganism, in spite of their sometimes blatant fetishization and appropriation of Indigenous

cosmic order, cannot achieve its fundamental aspiration that is the restoration of Nature unmediated by Technology,

a reframing of technological determinism that fails to consider Technology as an independent horizon of agency that

is irreducible to the story of the Toolmaking Anthropos. Contemporary counterculture’s misrecognition of Nature

as a wounded or lost ancestor that can recovered or rediscovered through a shifted positionality of care and love is perhaps its greatest pitfall. Neo-paganism and neo-animism must confront its own replication of the Nature/Culture divide, achieved through allowing questions of Technology to befall its sphere of consciousness.

Revisiting the figure of Gaia, a primordial deity and the ancestral mother of all life from Greek mythology, Bruno Latour in Facing Gaia (2017) speaks of the mythical power derivative of story-telling. In spite of Gaia’s marginal status within the canon of Greek mythology, Latour insists that he is resistant to the anthropomorphist and

naturalizing language of reviving a vanished deity and on the contrary is concerned with a novel narrative of climate

politics in the time of crisis. According to Latour, Gaia’s stories are our geohistorical stories, neither a secular invest-

ment in the explanatory jurisdiction of organic biology nor a theological commitment to the master manipulator of earthly affairs exceeding human agency. Instead, Latour, against the zeitgeist that is the artificialization of Earth that “is making the notion of ‘nature’ as obsolete as that of ‘wilderness’12, is in Facing Gaia sketching out a picture

of futurity that will radically repoliticize the environmental situatedness of our very being. Despite an insistence on characterizing Gaia as an event in the Badiouan sense, Latour finds his environmental philosophy reaching its affective/effective peak when Gaia is approximated through the ambivalently misogynistic and decidedly modern figure of femme fatale. Gaia is a dormant goddess of time immemorial (“a force from the time before the gods”13) who shall not be named by her mortal counterpart (“a thousand names”14). However, Latour denies a maternal represen-

tation of Gaia common to modern environmental language only to reduce Gaia to her sexuality. The very threat or

intrusion advanced by Gaia that Latour attempts to warn of us is her masterful seduction and cruel castration of her

enemies. Latour circles back to mythologizing Gaia as a goddess of great intrigue who can see to the downfall of gods

and monsters who can physically overpower her:

11 Caputi, Jane. “Mother Earth meets the Anthropocene: An intersectional ecofeminist analysis.” Systemic Crises of Global Climate Change. Routledge, 2016, pp. 30. 12 Latour, Facing Gaia, pp. 121. 13 Latour, Facing Gaia, pp. 8. 14 Latour, Facing Gaia, pp. 82.

Gaia was the first to invent the horrible stratagem that would allow her to get rid of the oppressing weight of her husband Uranus…Her cunning is manifested first of all in the fact that she never commits abominable crimes herself, but always makes use of those in whom she inspires vengeance as intermediaries. She endlessly goads her immense progeniture of monsters and gods into assassinating one another!15

Latour relies on the Orientalist trope of fetishizing non-white feminine bodies (“A chthonic power, dark-skinned, dark-haired and somber”16), and Oedipalizes her as a “cruel and bloody stepmother” who will “drive her children crazy”17. If Latour’s readers strip away the voyeuristic metaphysics of Gaia, which falls back on Freud’s dark conti-

nent of femininity and Lacan’s Antigone, a point of excess as pure lack, that which cannot be universalized through Sovereign, from his ontologizing the new Nature as an entity exceeding the binary logic of System/anti-System, One/ Multiple, or Life/Death, one would soon realize that Latour is, at best, proving that an ahistorical anti-modernism contains the failed disavowal of modernity within itself, or at worst, celebrates a reactionary apocalypticism that

demands a return to the Commons for the coming Judgement. The universal, cosmopolitan fantasy of resurrecting a

transnational, trans historical destiny won’t sell anymore. Living in the ruins is not our futurity; it is our present.

Latour’s more materialist conceptions of life in the Anthropocene, however, can be appropriated as political

leverages for the project of decolonization. In Down to Earth (2018), Latour criticizes the privileged role of historical materialism within environmental socialism which reduces politics into class relations and systems of production.

To Latour, a materialism without materials will fail to grasp the nature of life in the Anthropocene. Advocating for

a new kind of subjectivity termed “the Earthbound”, Latour asks the modern subjects of economics to rematerialize

their belonging to land as a situated dwelling. Think locally, Latour urges us, which is to identify our physical depen-

dence on soil, air, and water, animals, plants, and many other acting agents and to recognize that each one of them has different needs and desires that in spite of possible overlapping or intersecting ultimately are intendent of our needs and desires. Each one of us is bound within “a system of engendering”18 that encompasses all localized movements of genesis and effect. Each system of engendering is distinctly differentiated, ungovernable by a Global politics that fantasizes a non-differentiated horizon of progress. Yet politics is not an empty signifier but simply is trans-

formed into a consideration of how each localized system can externally act on and be acted on by adjacent systems.

No system can be spatially and temporally isolated.

The 2013 documentary Goodbye Gauley Mountain illustrates the proliferation of subjectivities when the very

materiality of life itself becomes a concern of politics, or in Latour’s words, when the modern subject is reanimated as the

Earthbound, whose ground of becoming depends on soil and mud. A poetic meditation on post-industrial abandonment,

cancerous bodies, and living in ruination, Goodbye Gauley Mountain chronicles the returning of artist Elizabeth Stephens to grief-stricken towns in West Virginia, her home state, along with her partner Annie Sprinkle. Through interviewing local an-

ti-mining activists, Stephens and Sprinkle explore the otherworldly subject who escapes the neoliberal imaginary of consump-

tion and possession as subjectivity. As one interviewee recalls with sorrow how mountain top removal (MTR), understood

15 Latour, Facing Gaia, pp. 82-83 16 Latour, Facing Gaia, pp. 83 17 Latour, Facing Gaia, pp. 280 18 Latour, Facing Gaia, pp. 86

of the ruins of harmed mountains, who are now sold to international mining corporations. Throughout the documentary,

MTR has been described as a form of interference with bodily autonomy of mountains and people who have generational ties with mountains. Reflecting on a racialized history of mining accidents—bodies of non-white foreign workers were usually silently left underground and ignored by environmental documentaries about former mining towns—Stephens lamented how one is always with the mountains of Appalachia. For the elderly neighbors of Stephens, it means a familial tie that cannot be severed. The river, filled with sludge, has become undrinkable for and thus alienated from them. Appalachian herbal medicine, reliant the fecundity of mountains, would soon be a lost tradition to future generations. For Stephens, who now live based in San Francisco, the mountainous landscape taught her lessons on resilience and inspired her to flourish in a world hostile to queer women.

Undoing mountains is undoing subjectivity. The psychical ecology of Appalachians is imbued with an intersubjective openness to the place of dwelling and its affective potentials. Unlike the Anthropos who represents Nature as a pure, unmediated ground that only enters the social though being abstracted as an object of thinking for the disembodied spokesperson of Capital, subjectivity in Goodbye Gauley Mountain thoroughly rejects the Cartesian dualism of Nature/Culture divide: The mountains of Appalachia are always already a thinking agent that produces knowledge. Rejecting the Western notion of knowledge that privileges thinking and abstraction, Vanessa Watts (Bear Clan, Six Nations) instead affirms PlaceThought, animating knowledge production as a circuit of receptivity and interconnectedness where human and non-human beings derive agency from matters of “alive”19 land.

In an act of refusal to be estranged from matter and place, Stephens and Sprinkle married themselves to Appalachian

Mountains. Vowing to take on the non-visible under-the-skin respons(e)ibility of a partner who listens, thinks with, and lets

in an otherly touch, Stephens and Sprinkle are determined to defend Appalachian Mountains against pollution. The terms of survival of both parties, although drastically different, convene in a fight against the infectious foreign bodies of poison and toxicity.

Pollen-amorous and ecosexual, the duo of Stephens and Sprinkle has married multiple partners, from the Moon to

the ocean. Perhaps their most prominent lover/partner is the Earth, whom they married back in 2008. Eleven years later, an-

other documentary Water Makes Us Wet was released, taking a more personal yet no less political turn. Water Makes Us Wet

covers a range of topics integral to the ecosexual position, ranging from the gender politics of the Earth to the racialized imaginary of purity that forcefully maintains a binary opposition of clean/unclean. Reframing the ecosexual subject as an economy of pleasure grounded in everyday interactions with Nature, Stephens and Sprinkle resist, qua Foucault in History of Sexuality, the Western scientia sexualis which since Freud has instituted the subject’s detachment from the maternal figure as Law and move toward an ethics of erotics that reanimates the body as a ground of (re)attachment to the radical alterity of the Earth.

The two ecosexuals admit that they know nothing about the Earth. In the documentary, speculations regarding the

Earth are raised, with little result. The Earth is certainly not the Mother Earth. Is the Earth transgender? Does the Earth love

Stephens and Sprinkle back? The duo confesses that the Earth is a radical alterity who demands a reimagination of care. One 19 Watts, Vanessa. “Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2.1 (2013).

of their experimentation with practicing care is confronting the materiality of water, referred to as H2O in the documentary. Touring an H2O purification plant, Stephens and Sprinkle critically reexamine the racial mandate of sanitation that constructs certain bodies lacking access to purified water (in itself a myth) as impoverished and unclean. However, as the duo playfully resuscitates the erotic messiness of matter in bodily contact with H2O, the inside-outside, subject-object divide that sustains ontological purity becomes undone. The a priori uncontaminated self to which the subject can be restored is a colonial ideality that conceals the specificities of affective entanglements with other time-spaces. Embracing the pleasures of impurity necessarily activates “destabilization [outside the libidinal economy] effected on the subject of power”20 and a dirty,

dusty, and ultimately messy (eco)cyborg-becoming.

The ecosexual position, operating under the ontological indebtedness of the cyborg, disavows the self-owning sub-

ject’s possessive demand for recognition. Stephens and Sprinkle’s matrimony with the Earth rejects the inauthentic authenticity of reciprocity of affection; instead it is a mode of identification that circulates “through multilateral asymmetrical agencies that don’t follow unidirectional patters of individual intentionality”21 and problematizes normative categories of sex and love

by exposing the natural, reproductive family as a site of oppressive power relations. Rewriting Donna Haraway’s (in)famous

motto “make kin, not babies”, Stephens and Sprinkle urge us: Make love to trees, clouds, or the Moon, but not humans!

To that end, Turtle Mountain Chippewa scholar Melissa Nelson denaturalizes the logocentric, phallocentric settler sexuality by foregrounding “getting dirty” or Indigenous eco-erotics—biophilic encounters with non-human others and inanimate objects that are pansexual, transspecies, carnal, kinship-forming, and knowledge-producing—as the sexuality proper. Infinitely beyond the psychoanalyst’s couch or the empire’s homonormative intimacy, eco-ecrotics, located in Anishinaabeg and Coast Yuki stories of women forming intimate relations with star, stick, wind, beaver, and so on, completely bypasses the

queer refusal of sexual subjectivization that ironically posits sexuality as the erotic register through which “transitive logics” of “transracial transformations”22 of settler colonialism become possible. Nelson’s stories desexualize the queer, not as a subject-

less figure, but as an animating placation that regenerates our corporeal movements outside the ego. Eco-erotics literally goes beyond the pleasure principle as there is no subject to begin with. Nelson declares: “Nature is sex, sex is nature, and we are

nature” and posits the ethical dimension of eco-erotics: Walking barefoot on the earth; drinking a cold glass of water; eating a fresh summer peach; breathing in warm air— these basic, often unconscious daily acts are not in fact mundane but are sublime and sensuous eco-erotic connections

to the more-than-human world. If we truly felt this, in our guts, in our cells, would we continue to poison our soils and water? Mine our mountains? Genetically alter our seeds? I think not.23

In this passage, Nelson considers the connection between logics of purism and paternalism that discursively con-

struct the neoliberal subject as a micro-sovereign capable of mastering bodily desires and becoming and the sexual politics of Cartesian subjectivity that manages sexuality as a site of fixity founded upon spirit/matter binary opposi-

tion. 20 Trumbull, Robert. “Freud Beyond Foucault: Thinking Pleasure as a Site of Resistance.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 32, no. 3, Penn State University Press, 2018, pp. 531. 21 Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 121. 22 Byrd, Jodi A. “Loving Unbecoming.” Critically Sovereign. Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 225-226. 23 Nelson, Melissa K. “Getting Dirty” Critically Sovereign, pp. 233-235.

Instead, we must imagine sexuality as our very ontology, decentered, omnipresent, and fluid. Playing on the phonological adjacency between oral sex and eating food in her grandmother’s language, Nelson challenges the

unnatural privileging of modern sexuality as the analytic through which a subject of truth is revealed. Drawing on In-

digenous science which posits Deep Love as Law of Nature, Nelson demonstrates that modern sexuality onto which a desiring subject finds its ground is an empty category, as the cosmology of Indigenous is fundamentally operative through the gravitational movements of pleasure and affection that connect us on the level of electrons, molecules, and particles. Eco-erotic is autoerotic because the cosmos does not differentiate a sensing self and an other that is be-

ing sensed. Thus, decolonization of the body-mind-land necessarily theorizes everyday practice by which life achieves and sustains its materiality as an infinitely more expansive and generative practice that is always already situated in a relational web of respons(e)ibility.

Eating is pansexual not in the Freudian sense but in the sense that it cannot, according to logics of neo-Car-

tesian dualism, be framed as an individual choice. Eating itself is a system of engendering that ethically and ontolog-

ical entangles the eating self with chains of agents and matters. On a biochemical level, the body shapes and is being

shaped by bacteria and virus. On the level of ethology, the very act of searching for food, such as hunting, is not ontologically independent, as demonstrated by Zoe Todd, who argues that fishing should not be understood as preying upon per Western traditions. Instead, Zodd examines the negotiation and resistance of fish populations by looking at Paulatuuq people’s knowledge of fishery and their gratitude for fish’s sacrifice.24 In terms of ethical consideration,

eating must necessarily involve thinking modern subjectivity through animals, who status is shaped settler colonial

expansion and its byproduct animal agriculture.

Mi’kmaq scholar Margaret Robinson connects decolonization with veganism through a critique of the

meat industry’s patriarchal masculinist imaginary that subjugates animals as objects of appropriation and the ways in

which corporatization of food supply chain destroys the environment and Indigenous people’s kinship with non-human others25. Similarly, scholars of imperialism and colonialism have analyzed the dairy industry in North America

as an ideological vector through which land-grabbing, whiteness, and colonial family ideologies are justified—the shaping of modern eating practice is intimately connected to the power relations imperial settler sexuality26. Con-

testing the individualist, consumerist practice of veganism, often co-opted by racial logics of moral purity, Dakota

scholar Kim TallBear locates dispossession of land as a material reality that disallows Indigenous people’s traditional formation of kinship with animals27. For many members of Indigenous communities, eating mass-produced meat

made through exploitation is an act of survival in the aftermath of economic marginalization and dispossession.

In conclusion, Decolonization requires us to leave surpasses politics of recognition/reconciliation behind

24 Todd, Zoe. “Fish pluralities: Human-animal relations and sites of engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Canada.” Études/Inuit/Studies 38.1-2 (2014): 217-238. 25 Robinson, Margaret. “Veganism and Mi’kmaq legends.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 33.1 (2013): 189196. 26 Deckha, Maneesha. “Veganism, dairy, and decolonization”. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 11.2: 244-267. 27 TallBear, Kim. “Being in Relation.” Messy Eating: Conversations on Animals as Food, edited by Samantha King et al., 1st ed., Fordham University Press, 2019, pp. 54–67.

lonialism is located in everyday practice that connects subjects of resistance together in kinships and relationalities. In

this paper, situating the three threads of sexuality, food, and ecology under the scope of imagination, I attempted to explore another earth where responsibility to and accountability for different worlds of being and becoming, unable to be collapsed into a singular realm of existence, can be located and postulate specificities of onto-epistemological positionalities, conditioned by materiality yet exceeding currently existing social and economic relations.

que(e)ry spring 2022

Editors of this Journal

Antonio Antonelli Qingyuan Deng Sam Hyman Eilidh MaLeod Elm McKissick Joe Meyer Leah Robins

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