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00:01:41.040Hello, and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with Alok.
00:01:49.020The political and the intellectual don't hit deep enough. And I'm calling and hearkening for a kind
00:01:54.920of spiritual reckoning. That spiritual reckoning is beauty. I'm asking the world, are you ready to
00:02:00.800find beauty in the parts of yourself that you've marked for dead? And in doing that process, what
00:02:05.200I promise you is that the world will be so much more beautiful. I'm still depressed. I'm still
00:02:11.280lonely. I'm still anxious. I still am self-hating. All these things, but god damn, I see the beauty.
00:02:18.300Alok is a gender non-conforming writer and performance artist. Their distinctive style0.98
00:02:24.340and poetic challenge to the gender binary have been internationally renowned. As a mixed media
00:05:44.500And a lot of my colleagues in South Africa would tell me that traditionally, gender transition
00:05:49.620was less about a physical practice and more about going to a sangama or a traditional
00:05:54.780healer and asking if it was okay to change their gender role.
00:05:59.840And if they got approval, then people would respect their identity.
00:06:02.900And it was seen less as what you look like and more about your role within a social community.
00:06:09.080The truth is that actually this suturing of gender to bodies comes from 18th and 19th
00:06:18.480century European science, which comes from an explicit agenda to justify sexism and racism.
00:06:26.180So you have the Great Enlightenment, you have this idea of inalienable rights come out of
00:06:31.260the French Revolution, how then do you justify mass genocide of indigenous peoples, enslavement,
00:06:37.800denying women autonomy, and the right to vote? You begin to argue that anatomically and biologically,
00:06:44.440there are natural differences, and that the social hierarchies that you're creating
00:06:49.160are actually God's plan that's evidenced through biology. We're still haunted by this tradition
00:06:56.080and lineage of imagining people to be the summation of their body part. And when I'm
00:07:01.540saying movie on the gender binary, what I'm actually insisting is that we are far more
00:07:06.340tremendous, expansive, celestial than could ever be contained by a body. And that actually some of
00:07:14.140the most powerful, awe-inspiring, earth-shattering ways to exist in the world will never be visible,
00:07:20.500not because they're not there, but rather because we don't yet have the tools to decipher,
00:07:26.260understand, and tabulate them. Wow, Alak. What a way to start this conversation.0.52
00:07:34.260Thank you so much. Yeah, and as we understand the expansive dimensions of recognizing the
00:07:41.860fluidity of our person and move into the spiritual dimensions, I think about what it says about
00:07:48.120countries and societies like the United States and any settler colonial society really that
00:07:54.700demonstrates a tremendous amount of resistance to really begin exploring this space. So can you
00:08:01.480speak to how pervasive the gender binary is in our country as well as what it signifies about
00:08:07.480a society's future if they choose to remain stuck in a very stagnant understanding of gender?
00:08:14.140I can think of no better illustration of this right now than in 2021, there are actually
00:08:19.940over 20 states that have introduced anti-trans legislation.
00:08:23.840Right now there's over 30 of these that are trying to do things like ban teachers in Iowa
00:08:29.320from speaking about trans people in the classroom, trying to do things like ban trans people
00:08:34.880from having access to comprehensive, life-affirming health care, and in fact, seeking to criminalize
00:08:40.900health practitioners for providing it.
00:08:43.140Trying to do things like banning our ability to change our identity documents, banning us from restrooms, saying that they have to have evidence of our chromosomes in order to enter the restroom is what they're doing in Indiana.
00:08:54.480And I'm thinking we're facing over 500,000 people more who have died from the coronavirus in this country alone.
00:09:03.440We're facing massive economic recession, people struggling with houselessness, poverty.1.00
00:09:10.360were facing a coordinated orchestrated backlash against the emergence of Black and Indigenous
00:09:16.380people and racial justice movements. And I began to realize this is all part of a calculation,0.87
00:09:23.700that gender binary works as a strategy to reorganize people's legitimate anxieties,0.71
00:09:30.660fears, into fearing and villainizing a small, vulnerable minority, rather than working together
00:09:38.880to demand the conditions that challenge the largest crises of our time, like climate apocalypse.0.84
00:09:46.700So what happens is the gender binary has been created specifically as a way to make people
00:09:53.620more concerned about what I'm wearing outside than the fact that they're not being given economic
00:09:59.480relief. What becomes the crisis is my sartorial appearance and not racial and economic apartheid.
00:10:08.280And that's not incidental. That's the product of centuries-long paradigm that actually is hurting all people. And so the reason that there's so much resistance to moving beyond the gender binary is because what we're actually arguing is no one else has the right to tell you who you are, which one, people have not understood that consent is even a framework that they're worthy of.
00:10:37.560And then second, we're saying, who are you? And most people have never been able to even ask that question because the systems that be try to make it impossible to ask that question. And most people only know themselves out of what they've been told that they should be.
00:10:55.940So I reframe the crisis of anti-trans violence as having actually nothing to do with trans people. It has to do with non-trans people who don't know their own embodiment, their own spiritual being outside of the costumes that they've been fitted into, predetermined without their choice.0.61
00:11:17.800hmm yes what an important perspective yeah well i want to ask you a bit about the limitations of0.71
00:11:31.220lgbt mainstream politics and in a post titled my body belongs to me not heteronormativity
00:11:39.380you write, quote, so far mainstream LGBT politics has not posed a challenge to heteronormativity,
00:11:48.160but has instead participated in it for legitimacy. This opinion makes it so that we have to come out
00:11:56.000as anything other than straight, but more insidiously, it maps onto our bodies and
00:12:01.900instrumentalizes all of their parts in service of heteronormativity. What I'm saying is that
00:12:08.700the only way we are taught to view our bodies is in so much as their heteronormative reproductive
00:12:15.280capacity, end quote. And in my mind, this also really calls us to interrogate the superficial
00:12:24.920ways that heteronormativity interacts with queerness as something that is sensational
00:12:31.360and for spectacle. So what would you like to see in terms of folks talking about queerness
00:12:37.540without it being a reflection of heteronormativity?
00:12:41.480So the idea that LGBTQ people as an identity are a minority rehashes this heteronormative
00:12:52.640project, which imagines people to be born straight and cis and then become something
00:13:00.400In fact, what I would like us to move towards is saying gender and sexual diversity is a
00:13:06.440natural, intrinsic, and essential part of our species and of our ecology. And that any imagining
00:13:13.860that sees being trans, being intersex, being non-binary as somehow less natural than being
00:13:21.840straight or cis is heteronormative. And I really want to explain, because I think a lot of people
00:13:28.480don't understand what I'm saying around how heteronormativity has mapped our own relationships
00:13:32.860to ourselves. We still only understand womanhood as it is related to reproduction. And this is
00:13:41.740actually an equation that comes once again, from 18th and 19th century, white European scientists.0.73
00:13:48.680After the French Revolution, you begin to see white women in France ask for the inalienable
00:13:53.120rights that people were so rallying around. And you'd see physicians literally make arguments like
00:13:58.400The word femme, which is woman in French, is like fetus because women's anatomical function in the world is just to give birth.0.99
00:14:07.960And they would say that's why women can't go to school or vote because it will distract vital nerve energies away from their sole role of being mothers of the nation.
00:14:17.180So this equation of making womanhood into reproduction is actually part of a longstanding historical project of capitalism and colonialism.
00:14:29.780And now, whenever you see gender variant people who are actually reclaiming traditionally feminine objects and actually wearing what people associate with womanhood, people will say, you're not really a woman because you can't reproduce.
00:14:44.940And I ask, where does that equation come from?
00:14:47.180So actually, what we're trying to do here is to recognize that femininity and masculinity don't have to be determined by heteronormativity. They get to be determined by you. You get to articulate what masculinity means to you, which means there is as many ways to be masculine as there are masculinities.
00:15:08.540So heteronormativity actually flattens the range of what woman, man, masculine, feminine could be and should be. And what we're actually arguing for then is the proliferation of possibility. And what heteronormativity also does, which really frustrates me, and we see this even in queer community, is offer an incorrect assumption of what reproduction is.
00:15:32.360Heteronormativity says reproduction is just conception,0.68
00:16:24.860So one of the things that I find in all of my historical research is queers have always1.00
00:16:30.220been involved in caretaking and in the creation of just humane ethical society how dare you0.98
00:16:39.480dislodge us from by saying that we are somehow not about the future or that we're going to die
00:16:46.220out because we're not caring about the future generations whenever in so many ways the things
00:16:51.800that we're birthing and creating are making that future possible so in the same ways i think that
00:16:57.520people are critiquing how when people say that they're pro-life, they're not actually speaking
00:17:04.100about how challenging incarceration and climate change and pollution, those things have to be
00:17:10.480consistent. If you're going to say that you're pro-life, they're taking a single issue narrow
00:17:14.400perspective. What I'm offering is that heteronormativity actually eclipses what the joyous
00:17:20.220work and the joyous struggle of making life actually is. And it therefore disqualifies
00:17:27.700queer and trans people from not just our legitimate, but our necessary contributions
00:17:32.480to the work of life making. Absolutely. Yes. And, you know, more and more,
00:17:40.620I hear movements talk about gender fluidity, non-binary and trans identity as being really
00:17:48.540vital to ushering us through this movement of complication, which I absolutely agree with.
00:17:54.920And that can be a really powerful way of framing the conversation for us to think about how this
00:18:01.440moment is calling queerness as an answer. But this also raises the question of tokenization
00:18:08.820or just reflecting on how utilitarian our approach to understanding can be.
00:18:14.720And so I'm sitting with this thin line between celebration and tokenization and just wondering if you see potential problems here or if ultimately any sort of way in which folks come to queerness is net positive.0.53
00:18:30.000I think we're in a very perilous moment right now where the ideas and aesthetics that are templated by visibly gender non-conforming people are being abstracted without the due diligence of caring for our material lives.
00:18:46.920So what I notice is that people will be speaking about gender fluidity, but that has done nothing to make it safer for people like me to exist in public.
00:18:56.860And in fact, what it actually allows is people who can be assumed traditionally in the binary to become seen as expertise, decontextualize with those of us who are being spat on for this.
00:19:11.680And so for me, the dangers of tokenization are symbolic economies reduce me to a prop and ornament, when in fact, instead of being ornamental, visibly gender nonconforming, trans feminine, black, indigenous and racialized people have to be instrumental, not ornamental.
00:19:32.360And what it means then is that it's not just about the circulation of new ideas, of new theories, of new fashions. Obviously, those things are important. But I'm also saying the circulation of resources, the circulation of responsibility, instead of making it the onus on us to be triumphant, brave, resilient, how about we move the onus to be on those who perpetuate constant violence against us to actually stop?
00:20:00.800What would it look like to take seriously the ongoing crisis of anti-trans murder and violence?
00:20:07.720In 2021, at the time of this interview, there have already been eight reported trans murders, and it's not even been two months.
00:20:14.000Last year was the most deadly year in the United States ever recorded of anti-trans violence.
00:20:20.580I'm receiving this information and this grief alongside the circulation of so many of our ideas, so many of our imaginations.
00:20:30.060And it's terrifying because it speaks to how the act was never actually about comprehension.
00:20:37.480And this is why I returned to the spirit question, because the way that tokenization has worked
00:20:42.320is it's made the political ask, know us, learn our pronouns, learn our knowledge.
00:20:54.680And that's the work that people won't do.
00:20:56.760they'll look at us and that's how spectacularization works and they'll exceptionalize us but they won't
00:21:03.280actually say wait this means that i must necessarily shift the way that i conceive of my own
00:21:10.040self and my own being and that is the spiritual work that's not being done and that's the lack
00:21:16.760of that spiritual work not being done is actually creating the conditions of violence for us
00:21:20.360Because it continually makes it for us to artfully and sartorially escape the grasp of violence, rather than for the people to stop doing violence to us. And I know that the reason that they do violence to us is because they've done violence to themselves first.
00:21:38.520I know that the first perpetuation of gender-based violence is to the self. It is to cis men who have0.78
00:21:46.880divine femininity, who seek to destroy and obliterate that in order to be read as legitimate0.95
00:21:52.480men. It is all people killing their own fluidity, such that when they see it templated in us,0.62
00:21:58.780instead of saying, oh, wow, this is possible, they have to destroy it because our existence
00:22:05.120calls into question their own performance art. So I guess we're in a very scary moment where on
00:22:10.960the one hand, I feel gratitude and excitement that more people are having this conversation,
00:22:16.340but then I feel grief and fear and existential dread that it's not actually creating the
00:22:22.720cultures of insulation, of protection, and of care of the people who deserve it most.
00:22:28.820alak that was chilling and so yeah just thinking about the projections that people create because
00:22:40.860of self-hatred and discomfort it's really so important for us to understand that angle and
00:22:48.800you write quote yes i know it's difficult to shift habit and language but this is something
00:22:56.360TGNC people are doing as well. We were not magically bestowed with these knowledges and
00:23:02.120sensibilities. We are coming into them through struggle, trying to excavate over time a more
00:23:08.120kind and gentle way to recognize and affirm ourselves and one another. Heed our invitation
00:23:13.800to this work and receive it as a blessing, not an inconvenience. One that allows you to journey
00:23:19.980beyond the tedium of the visual, the fatigue of the normative, and the brutality of the assumptive.
00:23:26.360we surpass all of this. We occupy more than physical space. We transcend convention and form.
00:23:33.540We birth language and ritual. We defy, and in that refusal, we create, end quote.
00:23:42.800And this is in reference to a lot of the conversations around pronouns, but it also
00:23:50.740leads me to think about the importance of a culture that is creative and imaginative and how
00:23:57.180our capacity for creative expression is deeply intertwined with our ability to navigate language
00:24:03.320and terminology. And in thinking about moving forward and what world we want to create,
00:24:11.080one where no one is attached to gender, one where queerness becomes the norm, you know, etc.
00:24:17.580I wonder if you could speak a bit about how you'd like to see folks participate in this creation.
00:24:25.180Yes, this is where I'm at in my life right now, is I'm kind of exhausted by critique that's separate from creation, because I think the most incredible and important and potent forms of critique actually happen with creation.
00:24:45.200And this is what it means for me to be an artist is I could just be a scholar that learned in critique, but I'd rather fashion something else. I'd rather design something else.
00:24:59.220And what I'm finding when I facilitate creative arts workshops across the world is that most
00:25:06.880people have been made to feel as if art is something that they can't do, that art belongs
00:25:13.080to the artist. So they say, I'm not good at drawing. I'm not good at singing. I'm not good
00:25:17.980at, and I, first of all, I'm saying, this is less about being good. It's less about being liked.
00:25:24.260It's less about being accomplished. It's actually more about you. What I believe is that creative
00:25:29.020creative education and creative literacy is essential for humanity. And I'm deeply concerned
00:25:35.580about how the privatization of the arts has actually made people feel as if art has to be
00:25:41.760a career and not a spiritual mode of being. And so what I find is that people have never been
00:25:47.320given permission to create. And that often in these writing workshops, I'm the first person
00:25:52.080that says you are a writer, or you are a painter, you are a singer. And what if we all are singers,
00:25:56.820painters, writers, novelists. And then I also validate the idea that survival is the ultimate
00:26:02.500act of creation in a world that has reduced us to the fascist arithmetic of being a quantitative
00:26:10.020statistic, not a human soul. So we still found a way to care, love, and create. Isn't that art?
00:26:17.640And so I teach people, decipher the art that you're already doing. Recognize the artistry around you
00:26:23.980and the everyday miracles of life around you
00:33:04.880That the real sickness is actually a kind of ideology
00:33:08.740that reduces people to rope machinery,
00:33:12.140not a kind of celestial humanity that I think that we are.
00:33:15.980and have always been. And so I think that what we'll begin to recognize is that the stigma is
00:33:22.680actually what is killing so many people, is that people have so much shame and so much trepidation
00:33:29.920and fear and anxiety about being alive. By which I mean, being alive means that we're constantly
00:33:36.160impacted and imprinted in by the things around us, by which I mean, trauma has always been
00:33:40.500physical and material. I think what it would look like is we understand what gets called
00:33:46.060mental health, quote, conditions as not just individual privatized experiences, but actually
00:33:51.880collective experiences that when someone that we love is depressed, that is about all of us
00:33:59.800because it's about a world that has allowed that to beat. And so then the work then doesn't become
00:34:07.680about a kind of individual model of diagnosis and a fixing, quote unquote. It becomes about
00:34:16.280a collective struggle to create a world where loneliness isn't possible, to create a collective
00:34:23.420world where isolation is impossible. The way that I speak about it in my work is strangers are
00:34:29.720potential friends. And what I mean by that is that every system of power that's been erected
00:34:35.700has made me fear and feel that the only people I can trust are somehow blood family, which is just0.85
00:34:43.920ridiculous. And I think the potential of queerness is it actually taught me in a physical and
00:34:49.500embodied way, okay, you're being followed home right now. No one is here to protect you. So ask
00:34:55.980for help. So I had to learn how to ask for help. I had to learn how to take random people on the
00:35:01.200street as potential best friends. I had to learn to clue people in, hey, I'm getting harassed right
00:35:06.580now. I need you. And this is, I think, the beauty of trans and disability justice is that we had
00:35:12.720to break up with the mythology of Western individualism because we needed to create
00:35:17.440economies of care in order to get through the day. And so what I found in all of that is actually
00:35:22.140strangers are my potential friends. And what I found in all of that is that actually the economy
00:35:27.420of care is as big as there are people in the world, what happens if we become each other's
00:35:33.800Pokecenters? I love Pokemon, so I'm really glad to throw in that metaphor, where we become the
00:35:40.320place that we can recharge. What would a world look like if you're hungry outside and technology
00:35:46.460was actually created around interdependence? So you just say, I'm hungry. And then someone who
00:35:50.800had extra food from lunch is like, oh, come on over. And we trusted each other and we fed each
00:35:55.460other. What would it look like if my space was your space? There was no possessive investment
00:36:00.660in those kinds of fictional borders. It would look like the most beautiful thing in the world.
00:36:05.960And I think that's what I'm fighting for, is for people to recognize that we actually have
00:36:09.140the potential to love everyone in the world, and that everyone is lovable, and that everyone is
00:36:13.500capable of giving love, and that that's actually the natural order of the universe. It's not
00:36:18.080this kind of competition, kind of Hobbesian conflict as nature way of being. I actually
00:36:24.700think that we're cooperative and we're collaborative and we're so careful with one
00:36:28.800another. And it's these toxic ideologies that have made us forget that our organic predisposition
00:36:34.580is that when we were children weeping, someone heeded our call, which for me suggests that the
00:36:40.320fundamental intrinsic subject of humanity is one of profound and routinized interdependence. So
00:36:47.200what would it look like to go back to that? An interdependent world, I think, would be a world
00:36:51.520in which the mental, the physical, and the spiritual
00:36:53.840were no longer separated and isolated from one another.
00:36:59.900So much emotions came up for me in that last response,
00:37:04.800just wanting to cry out of a hope of that type of world
00:37:11.440and the feeling of what would it feel like
00:37:17.400if one is feeling depressed to have that communal connected way of of us all holding it together
00:37:24.420it's oh yeah I'm excited to re-listen to that and sit with it more and in a post called
00:37:33.360queerness is why I live you write I learned that my lonely was our lonely I discovered an underworld
00:37:41.860that lives beneath the things we say but do not feel they hunt us because we feel and what is
00:37:48.560more dangerous than that in a world that anesthetizes our souls into thinking they are
00:37:53.600merely bodies we were taught to view each other as sculptures we spend so much time in fear that
00:38:00.480we forget how to live but every stone still has a spirit i swear it end quote and yeah i'm thinking
00:38:09.840about the many different forms of loneliness that we choose from and have to negotiate with.
00:38:17.300For example, do we choose to feel lonely because we would rather suppress ourselves in the name
00:38:22.660of conformity? Or do we choose loneliness that comes from going against the grain?
00:38:29.040And so for listeners who are navigating between this loneliness, what advice would you offer?
00:38:35.040I love having you read my words. They take on a new vivacity. I appreciate that.
00:38:43.580Look, I'm not going to romanticize that the life that I've chosen is not arduous and painful. It is.
00:38:53.840Every day I'm in public space and I'm the only person who looks like me and it's devastating
00:38:59.960to have everyone stare at you but not see you and to never be witnessed as if there's just a red
00:39:07.680carpet or staged every step that I take like I only can exist in this country on a billboard0.99
00:39:15.320or fashion runway not on a fucking subway train it's painful and exhausting and debilitating0.96
00:39:21.000it's made me suffer physically emotionally spiritually but alongside that pain I have a0.98
00:39:29.440kind of purpose that I never had in my life. What I need people to understand is that for the first
00:39:34.320half of my life, I didn't exist. Or rather, I existed and I wasn't alive. Or rather, I was so
00:39:40.960disassociated, I was a fictional character in someone else's movie. And now, even if I'm getting
00:39:46.540laughed at on the street, the joke is on them because it is me walking down the street, not a
00:39:52.940fantasy of someone else. It is me grieving. I wasn't able to grieve when I was younger because
00:39:58.900I didn't have any relationship with my emotion because the only way that I survived was numbing
00:40:03.940and desensitizing myself to every feeling such that now I cry every day and I feel every day and
00:40:11.740I wouldn't give that up for anything. So this is a kind of loneliness that is actually a better
00:40:18.980form of loneliness than the other one because I can feel it. Before I didn't even know that I was
00:40:24.660lonely. And now I do, because I can feel it. And so I guess what I'm arguing is not that this is
00:40:31.400going to be happy, that this is going to be triumphant, that this is going to be easy,
00:40:35.640but that this is going to feel. And I'd rather feel than desensitize myself, because I know what
00:40:41.020desensitization leads to. It leads to what I'm alluding to in this conversation about the mass
00:40:46.200genocidal imaginations of these nation states, where people are just expendable. And I think
00:40:52.900about why is it that there's no real ceremony around grief in the United States, and then you
00:40:58.860begin to realize the United States is institutionalized violence, such that grief is
00:41:03.940antithetical to American culture. In fact, repressed grief is the American condition.
00:41:09.860And we are so accustomed to mass liquidation of bodies here, because that is the inception
00:41:15.440of this cultural and imperialist project. So we know where desensitization leads us. I think
00:41:21.620we forget that in every violent encounter, there's also a kind of violence that has happened
00:41:28.140spiritually to the person committing the gross act of injustice, because they have been severed
00:41:33.420from their own capacity for compassion and empathy. And I know that when we are desensitized,
00:41:38.680we wreak havoc on ourselves and one another. So that loneliness is genocidal. This loneliness
00:41:44.660is something more tender. And like I said, I don't want to be a false prophet here that says
00:41:51.720like, come and join this vulnerable spiritual revolution. People will love you. It's not true.
00:41:58.780They're going to doubt you. They're going to isolate you. But what I can say is that the way
00:42:02.800that I keep going is I find my ancestors. Every new year, I write a new series of New Year's
00:42:10.840resolutions. And this year, I had that same line of someone else has felt your loneliness before
00:42:16.140find your ancestors. And what I was framing is that ancestors are not people who necessarily
00:42:22.300were connected to by lineage or blood or kinship, but are people who felt the same kind of fear and
00:42:28.400hesitation and pain and anxiety and heartbreak that there was someone who did. And so I read
00:42:33.680people like James Baldwin. I read people like Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde, and I read novels.
00:42:39.960And I think there are people out there who have felt this kind of loneliness before, so I'm not lonely anymore, because someone else felt it. And I think that's why we make art is to make evidence of our loneliness and to find one another and to say, the thing that you felt most impossible in, I felt it too, so therefore it can't be impossible.
00:42:59.000And that's my daily act of miracle, is I try to remember that this world says that people like me don't exist. And by people like me, of course, I mean non-binary people, but I think more extensively, I mean, people who give a shit, people who care, people who grieve, people who cry, people who are earnest, people who are idealistic.0.58
00:43:16.540The world disciplines us out of our idealism, calls it childhood innocence, when I actually0.97
00:43:43.500Maybe you just feel things more intensely.
00:43:45.920And then I knew with a type of purpose and vigor in me, everyone has the capacity to feel this.
00:43:53.700It's just that this culture has made us desensitized from this feeling because when we feel it, nothing could ever be the same again.
00:44:00.180And so what I'm saying is that, yes, this loneliness is here, but it's allowed me to feel a type of deep and resonant and empathetic love that will sustain me for the rest of my life in a way that anger and fear and trepidation would never have.
00:44:12.860I don't think that I will burn out who knows but because I'm burning in me there's a kind of
00:44:19.680flamboyant passion that comes from a kind of earnest commitment to the human condition that
00:44:26.420I feel like I've been able to discover because I shed all the preconceived fantasies and
00:44:32.180articulations of what I should be and instead embrace what I was and it cleared space not
00:44:38.660just for the people I was waiting for my entire life, but for a type of intimate relationship
00:44:43.120with myself that I wouldn't give up for the world.
01:04:13.700Like I am my best, most true self in what I'm wearing.
01:04:18.940what I'm wearing allows me to show up in the world as myself which means that I can and will
01:04:25.640deliver an academic lecture and a gown and a seven-inch heel practical functional which means0.50
01:04:33.020I can and will still identify as trans and be trans even if I'm wearing gym shorts and a freaking
01:04:40.580t-shirt because it's not about what we're wearing it's about how it makes us feel and it's about
01:04:47.740I think that's the recurring motif for me alongside love is an alternative to
01:04:54.100the visual realm is the realm of feeling and the sensations are more important
01:05:00.880than the sense-making and the sensations that I get when I'm adorned in my
01:05:06.160ultimate divine form they're allowed there they're what allow me to keep
01:05:09.700going and I think for a long time I felt a lot of shame about that because
01:05:13.440people i mean my parents would be like why do you care so much about what you look like and the only
01:05:19.440relation that we have to conversations around aesthetics is that there's always an audience but
01:05:25.200i wonder maybe some of us are actually getting dressed for ourselves or maybe some of us are
01:05:32.320actually getting dressed for something that you can't see i don't think that we have the vocabulary
01:05:38.160to describe self intimacy. The only ways that we understand intimacy is about the other but
01:05:42.960what does it actually mean to recognize that our relationship with ourself could be and maybe should
01:05:48.100be one of the greatest romances of our lives. When I get dressed it's like I'm dressing for a date
01:05:53.400with myself and that helps me not just keep going but helps me celebrate and thrive. The world might
01:06:00.520be bleak and apoplectic but my blue lip makes it worth it oh gosh I'm feeling so inspired to
01:06:09.480up my game and yeah and I think when we feel in our divinity we also can treat others better
01:06:18.580we can treat ourselves better I mean it's I think there's such a beautiful ripple effect
01:06:24.600when we can just feel in our in our I don't know yeah I just am really with you there but
01:06:35.440I do want to tie this back into the gender binary and you extensively speak and write about how
01:06:42.600colonialism and gender exploit fashion to do its bidding through the gendering of clothes
01:06:48.500And so I'm wondering who benefits or what thought reigns supreme as long as we continue to understand our dress through a gendered lens?
01:06:59.440Yeah, you know, I try to teach people that everything has a history. And people think that the gendering of fashion has always been and it's not. It's a calculated project.
01:07:08.140what fashion historians will teach you is that the suit became solidified as the male garb in
01:07:14.760the western world in around 1820 and the reason that people did sort of design the suit the way
01:07:20.560that they did is because they're inspired by greek sculptures and they wanted to actually
01:07:23.980shape the male torso to be visually distinct from the female torso with the invention of the sex
01:07:30.920binary the phenomenon that males and females were meant to be anatomically opposite and distinct so
01:07:36.280fashion became a way of elaborating and proving a sex-based distinction, which was a cultural
01:07:41.680project and invention. So actually at its inception, the gendering of fashion was an0.67
01:07:48.440act of artistic subterfuge to naturalize what is an arbitrary distinction between bodies. There's
01:07:55.540more anatomical, physiological, genetic variability among the category female than there is between
01:08:02.240male and female. It's a social and cultural decision to divide the world into male and0.99
01:08:08.240female, not a biological one. As Dr. Anne Foster-Sterling argues, the body, in fact,
01:08:13.200is one of the biggest arguments against the sex binary because testosterone is involved in
01:08:18.700ovulation. So many of the physical and physiological features that we gender are actually
01:08:23.660found among bodies. But I digress. So fashion then is not just about the resuscitation of a
01:08:31.660kind of cultural invention of gender binarism. It's also about a marker of colonial distinction.
01:08:38.260One of the primary ways in which indigenous people would be demonized across the world
01:08:43.820was the sartorial and aesthetic choices, which white Europeans saw as markers of degeneracy
01:08:50.360or of savagery. And the ways that fashion was positioned was, as Alfred Luce argues in
01:08:56.840ornament in crime is that men quote unquote fought for the right to wear pants in order to
01:09:01.460basically enter modernity. So the goal has always been about the right to wear pants, the right to
01:09:06.580have binary gendered in order to be good capitalist modern workers. So that's why the degendering of
01:09:12.840fashion is not for me just about gender. It's actually about all these larger things we've
01:09:18.320been speaking about, cultures of control, cultures and economies of race and colonization. It's
01:09:24.160actually about creativity and self-authorship. Fashion for me becomes a really convenient
01:09:28.580metaphor to describe how the uniform is not just a physical look, it's a cultural mentality.
01:09:35.280How have we normalized and conditioned people into literally gendering arbitrary articles of
01:09:42.440fabric and color? That shows how flimsy gender binarism actually is, is that the color pink0.89
01:09:49.940used to be associated with masculinity until after World War II, is that actually lace and
01:09:55.020heels and makeup were historically worn by men in Europe first, is that actually all these kinds
01:10:00.620of things that posh themselves as natural are actually political propaganda meant to create
01:10:07.620the kinds of efficiencies you're speaking to that allow the kind of rote mechanization of these
01:10:13.720political projects. So I noticed, though, a lot of people will join me in an intellectual
01:10:19.120declaration of degendering fashion, but so few people will join me in the actual sartorial
01:10:24.580pleasures of doing it, which suggests to me what I was speaking to before about how this moment of
01:10:29.780tokenization allows people to feel like an intellectual commitment is the same as a kind
01:10:34.280of praxis of solidarity. If you really understood what degendering fashion meant, you would realize
01:10:40.580that your gender is a cosmological, universal, spiritual principle that is not actually determined
01:11:16.200from the apocalypse of the gender binary.1.00
01:11:17.900I digress. I've got more interesting things to do with my day than save people who would rather0.97
01:11:22.980not save themselves. So what my hope with de-gender fashion is, is that there's a way to acknowledge0.89
01:11:29.160the historic contributions of non-binary people in being on the front lines of this kind of
01:11:34.640cultural, political, aesthetic conversation, while also recognizing that this is a mandate for all
01:11:39.500of us to ask, why are we dressed the ways that we are? And how can we shift a culture that genders1.00
01:11:45.300arbitrary objects, and actually author ourselves from a place of creative vibrancy and potency,0.54
01:11:52.140not real cultural conformity. I do want to talk about this fashion topic a little bit more.
01:12:01.200And the expression of the divine through fashion lends itself for us to inquire about beauty a bit.
01:12:10.340and this question is open-ended so please answer it in the way that feels most pertinent at this
01:12:16.960moment but I think about how so much of our conversations swirl around the concept of
01:12:24.000beauty standards and understanding how they operate but your writing pushes us to look at
01:12:30.300beauty in terms of its power and danger too and that framing encourages us to think beyond beauty
01:12:37.520standards, that we don't need new standards. We need to approach beauty in a fundamentally
01:12:44.440different way. And I think about beauty in an ecological sense, and it's simply a testament
01:12:51.040to being alive. So what does beauty mean to you today? And is that definition deeply wrapped up
01:12:59.460in notions of dignity as well. Absolutely. I'm not trying to overthrow one set of gender norms
01:13:09.540by enforcing a new set of gender norms that says everyone must be non-binary. Like, no,
01:13:15.800that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to respond to one regime of beauty norms by saying
01:13:21.040this is the new beauty standard. No, I'm trying to make standard that there is no beauty standard
01:13:25.960because there's as many ways to be beautiful as there are people as there are sentience as there
01:13:31.760are objects beauty is honesty and the cultures of beauty we've been indoctrinated into are cultures
01:13:39.920of fantasy and fiction that only love us for emulation of a kind of archetype don't love us
01:13:47.920for what is. Isness is beauty. Is being able to be like, oh, I have stubble because that's my is.
01:13:56.480This is what is. And finding beauty in that, that's the shadow work I was speaking to.
01:14:03.200I have a poem where I say, your wound is my garden. I have found life here in the places
01:14:09.420you have marked for death. And that's what beauty work is about for me. It's to actually recognize
01:14:14.160where have we been taught to allocate darkness and despair and hope and disrespect and ugliness
01:14:21.420and how do we still find some kind of redemptive vitality in that how do we recognize that the work
01:14:29.040then is about recognizing that there's a kernel of possibility and therefore beauty in everything
01:14:34.360beauty is the catalyst that allows us to keep going every system in this world told me that I
01:14:43.040should obliterate myself edit myself out of the composition of this country of this land of this
01:14:48.640movement of this world to make things more convenient or easier decipherable or efficient
01:14:53.580for other people and yet i didn't and what was responsible for my rebellion it was a commitment
01:14:59.640to my beauty i speak in a sort of talk i gave around the gender fashion of stephanie yellow
01:15:05.720hair native american trans woman who when being arrested by the police said excuse my beauty
01:15:09.960And in that moment of a carceral encounter where they were trying to disappear her, they were trying to disappear her beauty. So what if we then reframe the projects of incarceration, the projects of systematic racism, of detention, of deportation, as projects of expunging beauty?
01:15:25.480And that's what I want us to reframe for is that we are not just fighting for civil rights, for racial justice, for environmental justice. We are fighting for beauty because beauty comes from an acknowledgement of the celestial diversity of being. It's not a beautiful world. If people all look the same, yikes.
01:15:44.560And that kind of recalibrative work is actually what my job is as an artist. When I keep on saying in this conversation that the political and the intellectual don't hit deep enough, and I'm calling and hearkening for a kind of spiritual reckoning, that spiritual reckoning is beauty.
01:15:59.460I'm asking the world, are you ready to find beauty in the parts of yourself that you've marked for
01:16:04.280dead? And in doing that process, what I promise you is that the world will be so much more
01:16:09.640beautiful. I'm still depressed. I'm still lonely. I'm still anxious. I still am self-hating. All
01:16:15.640these things, but God damn, I see the beauty. And every day I go outside and I see beautiful things0.99
01:16:22.000in nature and in the world, and I'm so grateful for it. This work has allowed me to embrace the
01:16:28.440beauty in myself. It's a kind of unruly beauty, feral beauty. It's a kind of beauty that seeps
01:16:34.720into the pores and in between your toes and leaves stains and smudges and sand on the ground.
01:16:40.680It's a beauty that recognizes that this is where we belonged all along. And now that I have my own
01:16:48.900kind of beauty, I'm never going back. Sure, there's temptations to jump into the quicksand
01:16:53.940and disappear myself for the easy and road approval of instant validation, but that will
01:16:59.580soon dry up and evaporate. What is eternal, I think, is a relationship to a kind of beauty
01:17:05.500that shifts alongside you. My hope is that when I'm 70 and 80 and 90 and 100, I can look at my
01:17:12.340skin and still find it beautiful because it's honest to what I am at those ages. My hope
01:17:16.780is that increasingly I become comfortable with the creases under my eyes, around my lips,
01:17:22.520because they're honest. They're markers of what it means for me to have lived. My hope is that
01:17:28.160the quote discolorations won't be seen as discolorations. They'll just be seen as variations
01:17:33.120in my skin tone, which are honest because I'm not sleeping. My hope is that we don't have to
01:17:38.160lie and pretend about the collateral weight that capitalism has on our bodies that of course we're
01:17:44.000exhausted. And it shouldn't be my responsibility to conceal that exhaustion. I should be able to
01:17:49.100say I am exhausted. I guess it's just honest bodies. And that's always what's motivated me.
01:17:54.160In fact, I've never said this, but my first collection of poems I wrote living in Cape
01:17:58.460Town the summer of 2012. And I called it Unapologetic Bodies because I caught on fire
01:18:03.740that summer. I suffered from intense burns in my legs and arms and I was bandaged and I couldn't
01:18:08.900really walk or dance or cook. So I wrote. And what I found myself writing from that place of
01:18:13.960incredible pain is god damn it i love this burned body and it was such a strange revelation to be0.93
01:18:21.500like in one imagining this would be impairment this would be pain this would be something i0.92
01:18:26.940should spend my life avoiding but in the other it was reincarnation it was a kind of like i'm
01:18:32.520speaking to a flamboyant fire within me where i emerged from those flames and i looked at myself0.96
01:18:38.320bandaged and unbandaged and unruly with all those scars and i said god damn i love these scars0.52
01:18:43.600and that's what beauty is for me is to actually recognize that the indentations on our bodies0.59
01:18:49.040are just as precise and wonderful and exquisite as the makeup we put on to conceal them
01:18:55.640Malak I am so moved by all that you've spoken to and on the other end of this1.00
01:19:07.020technical connection at the moment i'm oh i i would i just want to weep really a weep
01:19:16.600out of a type of openness like a cracked openness um and a like this deep feeling of being cradled
01:19:25.340by your words and i think when i was preparing for this interview i had a sense of what you were
01:19:32.980talking about when you spoke to the spiritual dimension of this work but hearing you in real
01:19:39.100time in this conversation that spiritual question is just hovering and circling me
01:19:47.760it's uh and i think every time you respond i get deeper and deeper into this understanding
01:19:53.680of the spiritual dimension and how earth changing humanity changing this work really is
01:20:02.300So I just want to thank you so much for your time. And as we come to a close, I'd love for you to either share how listeners connect with you further, or if you'd like to share any final sentiments.
01:20:15.520hmm I guess one final sentiment is I'm rooting for you I think that the way that we respond
01:20:24.520to a culture of harassment is a culture of affirmation and I just want everyone to know
01:20:28.920I don't need to know you to love you and I believe in you and your infinite transformation I'm so
01:20:34.040grateful that you're here because you create a world that's worth living in for me and in that
01:20:39.620way you are my world and I'm just so grateful for your curiosity for your stubbornness for your
01:20:46.260ignorance and for your becoming and it makes me emotional to know that you are alive and I'm
01:20:52.920rooting for you if people want to keep in touch I believe in TMI too much information as a cultural
01:20:59.880life force. So catch me on my social media. My Instagram is at A-L-O-K-V-M-E-N-O-N. And thank
01:21:09.240you for your astute and thoughtful questions. It feels so rare that I'm actually in spaces where
01:21:15.640I'm challenged and creatively compelled. And I really appreciate you doing your research and
01:21:22.420actually engaging with my work and its forms. I felt really seen and validated and
01:21:28.820excited that this is going to exist in the world.
01:21:39.540Thank you for listening to For the Wild podcast. The music you heard today was by Soda Light,
01:21:44.680Rising Appalachia, and Lady Moon in the Eclipse. For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young and
01:21:50.680Francesca Glaspell with special research assistance by Julia Jackson.