00:07:29.520people struggling with houselessness, poverty.1.00
00:07:32.320were facing a coordinated orchestrated backlash against the emergence of Black and Indigenous
00:07:38.360people and racial justice movements. And I began to realize this is all part of a calculation,0.87
00:07:45.700that gender binary works as a strategy to reorganize people's legitimate anxieties,0.71
00:07:52.680fears, into fearing and villainizing a small, vulnerable minority, rather than working together
00:08:00.860to demand the conditions that challenge the largest crises of our time, like climate apocalypse.0.84
00:08:08.700So what happens is the gender binary has been created specifically as a way to make people
00:08:15.620more concerned about what I'm wearing outside than the fact that they're not being given economic
00:08:21.480relief. What becomes the crisis is my sartorial appearance and not racial and economic apartheid.
00:08:30.300And that's not incidental. That's the product of centuries-long paradigm that actually is hurting all people.
00:08:40.680And 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.
00:08:59.560And 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.
00:09:17.940So 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
00:09:39.800hmm yes what an important perspective yeah well i want to ask you a bit about the limitations of0.97
00:09:53.220lgbt mainstream politics and in a post titled my body belongs to me not heteronormativity
00:10:01.380you write, quote, so far mainstream LGBT politics has not posed a challenge to heteronormativity,
00:10:10.160but has instead participated in it for legitimacy. This opinion makes it so that we have to come out
00:10:18.000as anything other than straight, but more insidiously, it maps onto our bodies and
00:10:23.900instrumentalizes all of their parts in service of heteronormativity. What I'm saying is that
00:10:30.700the only way we are taught to view our bodies is in so much as their heteronormative reproductive
00:10:37.280capacity, end quote. And in my mind, this also really calls us to interrogate the superficial
00:10:46.920ways that heteronormativity interacts with queerness as something that is sensational
00:10:53.360and for spectacle. So what would you like to see in terms of folks talking about queerness
00:10:59.540without it being a reflection of heteronormativity?
00:11:03.480So the idea that LGBTQ people as an identity are a minority rehashes this heteronormative project,
00:11:15.500which imagines people to be born straight and cis and then become something else.
00:11:22.400In fact, what I would like us to move towards is saying gender and sexual diversity
00:11:27.440is a natural, intrinsic, and essential part of our species and of our ecology. And that any
00:11:34.740imagining that sees being trans, being intersex, being non-binary as somehow less natural than
00:11:43.540being straight or cis is heteronormative. And I really want to explain, because I think a lot
00:11:50.240of people don't understand what I'm saying around how heteronormativity has mapped our
00:11:54.180own relationships to ourselves. We still only understand womanhood as it is related to
00:12:01.860reproduction. And this is actually an equation that comes once again from 18th and 19th century
00:12:08.700white European scientists. After the French Revolution, you begin to see white women in1.00
00:12:13.480France ask for the inalienable rights that people were so rallying around. And you'd see physicians
00:12:18.780literally make arguments like the word femme, which is woman in French, is like fetus because
00:12:25.320women's anatomical function in the world is just to give birth. And they would say that's why women0.98
00:12:31.700can't go to school or vote because it will distract vital nerve energies away from their1.00
00:12:36.940sole role of being mothers of the nation. So this equation of making womanhood into reproduction1.00
00:12:44.780is actually part of a longstanding historical project of capitalism and colonialism.0.94
00:12:51.800And now, whenever you see gender variant people who are actually reclaiming traditionally feminine0.89
00:12:58.300objects, and actually wearing what people associate with womanhood, people will say,
00:13:03.920you're not really a woman because you can't reproduce. And I ask, where does that equation0.89
00:13:08.440come from? So actually, what we're trying to do here is to recognize that femininity and0.90
00:13:14.560masculinity don't have to be determined by heteronormativity. They get to be determined
00:13:20.880by you. You get to articulate what masculinity means to you, which means there is as many ways
00:13:28.080to be masculine as there are masculinities. So heteronormativity actually flattens the range
00:13:34.000of what woman, man, masculine, feminine could be and should be. And what we're actually arguing for
00:13:40.600then, is the proliferation of possibility. And what heteronormativity also does, which really
00:13:46.140frustrates me, and we see this even in queer community, is offer an incorrect assumption0.76
00:13:51.620of what reproduction is. Heteronormativity says reproduction is just conception,0.76
00:13:57.400it's just pregnancy, it's just birth. But we know as cultural workers, what helps people survive
00:14:03.960is not just the reproductive act, it's cooking, it's care work, it's cleaning, it's art,
00:14:11.420it's trauma-informed mental health practitioners, it's people who you can process grief, loneliness,
00:14:17.600and heartbreak with. It's all of these things that get cut out of a single issue framework
00:14:23.160that only defines reproduction in such a simple and simplistic and myopic way.
00:14:28.700So actually what I'm arguing is that there's so many ways to create life and that actually when we just make the creation of life about conception and pregnancy, we are losing the dynamicism and the artistry of what it means to be alive and to be in community with one another.0.84
00:14:46.360So one of the things that I find in all of my historical research is queers have always been involved in caretaking and in the creation of just, humane, ethical society.
00:14:59.820How dare you dislodge us by saying that we are somehow not about the future or that we're going to die out because we're not caring about the future generations.
00:15:11.340Whenever, in so many ways, the things that we're birthing and creating are making that future possible. So in the same ways, I think that people are critiquing how when people say that they're pro-life, they're not actually speaking about how challenging incarceration and climate change and pollution, those things have to be consistent.
00:15:32.900If you're going to say that you're pro-life, they're taking a single issue, narrow perspective.
00:15:37.040What I'm offering is that heteronormativity actually eclipses what the joyous work and
00:15:43.440the joyous struggle of making life actually is.
00:15:47.460And it therefore disqualifies queer and trans people from not just our legitimate, but our
00:15:52.940necessary contributions to the work of life-making.
00:15:59.940And, you know, more and more, I hear movements talk about gender fluidity, non-binary, and trans identity as being really vital to ushering us through this movement of complication, which I absolutely agree with.
00:16:16.740And that can be a really powerful way of framing the conversation for us to think about how this moment is calling queerness as an answer.
00:16:26.600but this also raises the question of tokenization or just reflecting on how utilitarian our approach
00:16:35.240to understanding can be and so i'm sitting with this thin line between celebration and tokenization
00:16:42.420and just wondering if you see potential problems here or if ultimately any sort of way in which
00:16:49.640folks come to queerness is net positive i think we're in a very perilous moment right now where
00:16:55.900the ideas and aesthetics that are templated by visibly gender non-conforming people are being0.51
00:17:02.480abstracted without the due diligence of caring for our material lives. So what I notice is that0.98
00:17:11.200people will be speaking about gender fluidity, but that has done nothing to make it safer for
00:17:17.320people like me to exist in public. And in fact, what it actually allows is people who can be
00:17:24.480assumed traditionally in the binary to become seen as expertise, decontextualize with those
00:17:33.680And so for me, the dangers of tokenization are symbolic economies reduce me to a prop
00:17:42.400and ornament when in fact, instead of being ornamental, visibly gender non-conforming,
00:17:48.260trans-feminine, Black, Indigenous, and racialized people have to be instrumental, not ornamental.
00:17:54.480And what it means then is that it's not just about the circulation of new ideas, of new theories, of new fashions.
00:18:01.120Obviously, those things are important.
00:18:02.400But 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?
00:18:22.780What would it look like to take seriously the ongoing crisis of anti-trans murder and
00:19:16.660And that's the work that people won't do.
00:19:18.760they'll look at us and that's how spectacularization works and they'll exceptionalize us but they won't
00:19:25.280actually say wait this means that i must necessarily shift the way that i conceive of my own
00:19:32.040self and my own being and that is the spiritual work that's not being done and that's the lack
00:19:38.760of that spiritual work not being done is actually creating the conditions of violence for us
00:19:42.360Because 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.
00:20:00.520I know that the first perpetuation of gender-based violence is to the self. It is to cis men who have0.78
00:20:08.880divine femininity, who seek to destroy and obliterate that in order to be read as legitimate0.95
00:20:14.480men. It is all people killing their own fluidity, such that when they see it templated in us,0.62
00:20:20.780instead of saying, oh, wow, this is possible, they have to destroy it because our existence
00:20:27.120calls into question their own performance art. So I guess we're in a very scary moment where on
00:20:32.960the one hand, I feel gratitude and excitement that more people are having this conversation,
00:20:38.340but then I feel grief and fear and existential dread that it's not actually creating the
00:20:44.720cultures of insulation, of protection, and of care of the people who deserve it most.
00:20:50.820alak that was chilling and so yeah just thinking about the projections that people create because
00:21:02.860of self-hatred and discomfort it's really so important for us to understand that angle and
00:21:10.800you write quote yes i know it's difficult to shift habit and language but this is something
00:21:18.360TGNC people are doing as well. We were not magically bestowed with these knowledges and
00:21:24.120sensibilities. We are coming into them through struggle, trying to excavate over time a more
00:21:30.120kind and gentle way to recognize and affirm ourselves and one another. Heed our invitation
00:21:35.800to this work and receive it as a blessing, not an inconvenience. One that allows you to journey
00:21:41.980beyond the tedium of the visual, the fatigue of the normative, and the brutality of the assumptive.
00:21:48.360we surpass all of this. We occupy more than physical space. We transcend convention and form.
00:21:55.540We birth language and ritual. We defy. And in that refusal, we create. End quote.
00:22:04.780And this is in reference to a lot of the conversations around pronouns, but it also
00:22:12.740leads me to think about the importance of a culture that is creative and imaginative and how
00:22:19.180our capacity for creative expression is deeply intertwined with our ability to navigate language
00:22:25.320and terminology. And in thinking about moving forward and what world we want to create,
00:22:33.060one where no one is attached to gender, one where queerness becomes the norm, you know, etc.
00:22:39.580I wonder if you could speak a bit about how you'd like to see folks participate in this creation.
00:22:47.180Yes, 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.
00:23:07.200And this is what it means for me to be an artist is I could just be a scholar that learned in
00:23:16.000critique, but I'd rather fashion something else. I'd rather design something else. And what I'm
00:23:22.280finding when I facilitate creative arts workshops across the world is that most people have been
00:23:29.500made to feel as if art is something that they can't do, that art belongs to the artist.
00:23:49.480What I believe is that creative education and creative literacy is essential for humanity.
00:23:55.880And I'm deeply concerned about how the privatization of the arts has actually made people feel as if art has to be a career and not a spiritual motivation.
00:24:05.760being. And so what I find is that people have never been given permission to create. And that
00:24:11.720often in these writing workshops, I'm the first person that says you are a writer, or you are a
00:24:16.480painter, you are a singer. And what if we all are singers, painters, writers, novelists? And then I
00:24:22.020also validate the idea that survival is the ultimate act of creation, and a world that has
00:24:27.660reduced us the road fascist arithmetic of being a quantitative statistic, not a human soul. So we
00:24:35.500still found a way to care love and create is in that art and so I teach people decipher the art
00:24:42.600that you're already doing recognize the artistry around you and the everyday miracles of life
00:24:48.760around you and create from that place and what you find is that that is some of the most generative
00:24:55.460meaning in the world like that's what makes me wake up in the morning is I'm thinking how am I
00:25:02.460going to create the world that I want to see? I'm thinking, how can I practice the way that I want
00:25:08.120people to relate to me with how I relate to other people? Every crisis for me is an opportunity
00:25:14.720for compassion, is an opportunity for creation. But what I notice is that the sickness of this
00:25:23.160kind of regime of power is that it's a kind of cynicism that postures itself as some sort of
00:25:30.420moral or ethical authority, the voice of reason comes into the chat. And they'll dismiss those
00:25:37.340of us who speak about the power of creativity as just idealistic, as naive, as far-fetched,0.87
00:25:42.560as foolish, because, insert, the severity of the present. And I always just respond0.95
00:25:49.980with the prolific and kind of prophetic words of Goran Zodua, who says, nothing happens in the
00:25:56.980real world until it happens first in the images in our own head. And I think what she was trying
00:26:02.580to articulate with that is that there's this way in which Western secular technoscience
00:26:09.900has made us obsessed with physical form as if things aren't spiritual and energetic before
00:26:18.580they become physical form. I'm thinking here about imaginal cells. When caterpillars become
00:26:24.660butterflies, they have cells that essentially are called imaginal cells that are the transformative
00:26:30.540potential that catalyze that transformation. I'm thinking a lot about that potentiality in each of
00:26:37.360us is material to me, is substantive to me, is urgent to me. So what would it look like to create
00:26:45.380a world then that challenged the ways that cynicism and nihilism have created a vice grip
00:26:52.160around anyone who has the audacity to dream and believe
00:26:55.200and instead invest in the daydreamers,
00:26:58.640invest in the people who have the audacity
00:29:22.620and how because of rampant disconnection,
00:29:28.300so many of us are really on the brink of mental and emotional collapse.
00:29:33.500The system sets us up to have mental breakdowns, but it then provides no measure of care.
00:29:39.960For the most part, people are not willing to take the time to pay attention, nor do
00:29:45.200they have the capacity to say, I'm going to be here for you as long as you need.
00:29:49.960You know, I'll spend time with you as we move through this.
00:29:54.020And so my question is, what would our mental health look like if we truly could address
00:30:00.940this problem through sustaining networks of care? I think that if we were really careful
00:30:06.800with each other, and I appreciate how this conversation is making me really understand
00:30:11.360the double valence of that word careful, full of care with one another and cautious at the same
00:30:16.480time, there would no longer be a framework of mental health. Mental health is already
00:30:22.280counterintuitive to the goals of a mental health wellness movement because it imagines the mind
00:30:28.400is somehow outside of the body and outside of the spirit and rehearses not just the Cartesian
00:30:33.880dualism of mind and body, but also the Cartesian colonial project of erasing and denying the
00:30:41.380presence of spirit. So if we were careful with one another, I think that we would be talking
00:30:46.640about wellness. We'd be talking about love. We'd be talking about community. We wouldn't just be
00:30:53.020talking about mental or physical health. That is a grammar that has been written for the purpose
00:30:59.320of genocide, not for the purpose of gratitude or regeneration. I think what it would look like is
00:31:05.440we understand sickness and illness as a natural response to structural insubordination. Western
00:31:13.920biomedicine blames people for being sick, rather than understanding that sickness makes so much
00:31:19.260sense and a world that only values you for the summation of your body and labor and not actually
00:31:25.420your spirit. That the real sickness is actually a kind of ideology that reduces people to rope
00:31:33.100machinery, not a kind of celestial humanity that I think that we are and have always been.
00:31:40.440And so I think that what we'll begin to recognize is that the stigma is actually what is killing so
00:31:46.920many people is that people have so much shame and so much trepidation and fear and anxiety about
00:31:53.860being alive, by which I mean being alive means that we're constantly impacted and imprinted in
00:31:59.700by the things around us, by which I mean trauma has always been physical and material. I think
00:32:04.780what it would look like is we understand what gets called mental health, quote, conditions
00:32:09.720as not just individual privatized experiences, but actually collective experiences that
00:32:16.620when someone that we love is depressed, that is about all of us because it's about a world that
00:32:24.500has allowed that to beat. And so then the work then doesn't become about a kind of individual
00:32:31.700model of diagnosis and a fixing, quote unquote. It becomes about a collective struggle to create
00:32:40.560a world where loneliness isn't possible, to create a collective world where isolation is
00:32:47.920impossible. The way that I speak about it in my work is strangers are potential friends.
00:32:53.580And what I mean by that is that every system of power that's been erected has made me fear,0.54
00:32:59.380fear and feel that the only people I can trust are somehow blood family, which is just ridiculous.
00:33:06.400And I think the potential of queerness is it actually taught me in a physical and embodied way, okay, you're being followed home right now. No one is here to protect you. So ask for help. So I had to learn how to ask for help. I had to learn how to take random people on the street as potential best friends.
00:33:24.800I had to learn to clue people in, hey, I'm getting harassed right now. I need you. And this is, I think, the beauty of trans and disability justice is that we had to break up with the mythology of Western individualism because we needed to create economies of care in order to get through the day.
00:33:41.840And so what I found in all of that is actually strangers are my potential friends. And what I found in all of that is that actually the economy of care is as big as there are people in the world. What happens if we become each other's Poke centers? I love Pokemon, so I'm really glad to throw in that metaphor.
00:33:59.580where we become the place that we can recharge like what would a world look like if you're hungry
00:34:06.340outside and technology was actually created around interdependence so you just say I'm hungry
00:34:11.560and then someone who had extra food from lunch is like oh come on over and we trusted each other
00:34:16.600and we fed each other what would it look like if my space was your space is there was no possessive
00:34:22.180investment in those kinds of fictional borders it would look like the most beautiful thing in the
00:34:27.100world. And I think that's what I'm fighting for, is for people to recognize that we actually have
00:34:31.140the potential to love everyone in the world, and that everyone is lovable, and that everyone is
00:34:35.500capable of giving love, and that that's actually the natural order of the universe. It's not
00:34:40.080this kind of competition, kind of Hobbesian conflict as nature way of being. I actually
00:34:46.700think that we're cooperative, and we're collaborative, and we're so careful with one
00:34:50.800another. And it's these toxic ideologies that have made us forget that our organic predisposition
00:34:56.640is that when we were children weeping, someone heeded our call, which for me suggests that the
00:35:02.320fundamental intrinsic subject of humanity is one of profound and routinized interdependence. So
00:35:09.200what would it look like to go back to that? An interdependent world, I think, would be a world
00:35:13.520in which the mental, the physical, and the spiritual were no longer separated and isolated
00:35:17.960from one another. So much emotions came up for me in that last response, just wanting to cry out of
00:35:30.320a hope of that type of world and the feeling of what would it feel like if one is feeling depressed
00:35:40.960to have that communal connected way of of us all holding it together it's oh yeah I'm excited to
00:35:50.020re-listen to that and sit with it more and in a post called queerness is why I live you write
00:35:58.000I learned that my lonely was our lonely I discovered an underworld that lives beneath
00:36:04.760the things we say but do not feel. They hunt us because we feel. And what is more dangerous than
00:36:11.480that in a world that anesthetizes our souls into thinking they are merely bodies? We were taught
00:36:17.780to view each other as sculptures. We spend so much time in fear that we forget how to live.
00:36:24.280But every stone still has a spirit. I swear it. End quote. And yeah, I'm thinking about
00:36:32.400the many different forms of loneliness that we choose from and have to negotiate with.
00:36:39.280For example, do we choose to feel lonely because we would rather suppress ourselves in the name
00:36:44.680of conformity? Or do we choose loneliness that comes from going against the grain?
00:36:51.040And so for listeners who are navigating between this loneliness, what advice would you offer?
00:36:57.040I love having you read my words. They take on a new vivacity. I appreciate that.
00:37:05.580Look, I'm not going to romanticize that the life that I've chosen is not arduous and painful. It is.
00:37:15.840Every day I'm in public space and I'm the only person who looks like me and it's devastating
00:37:21.960to have everyone stare at you but not see you and to never be witnessed as if there's just a red
00:37:29.680carpet or staged every step that I take like I only can exist in this country on a billboard0.99
00:37:37.320or fashion runway not on a fucking subway train it's painful and exhausting and debilitating0.96
00:37:43.000it's made me suffer physically emotionally spiritually but alongside that pain I have a0.98
00:37:51.440kind of purpose that I never had in my life. What I need people to understand is that for the first
00:37:56.320half of my life, I didn't exist. Or rather, I existed and I wasn't alive. Or rather, I was so
00:38:02.960disassociated, I was a fictional character in someone else's movie. And now, even if I'm getting
00:38:08.540laughed at on the street, the joke is on them because it is me walking down the street, not a
00:38:14.940fantasy of someone else. It is me grieving. I wasn't able to grieve when I was younger because
00:38:20.900I didn't have any relationship with my emotion because the only way that I survived was numbing
00:38:25.940and desensitizing myself to every feeling such that now I cry every day and I feel every day and
00:38:33.740I wouldn't give that up for anything. So this is a kind of loneliness that is actually a better
00:38:40.980form of loneliness than the other one because I can feel it. Before I didn't even know that I was
00:38:46.660lonely. And now I do, because I can feel it. And so I guess what I'm arguing is not that this is
00:38:53.400going to be happy, that this is going to be triumphant, that this is going to be easy,
00:38:57.640but that this is going to feel. And I'd rather feel than desensitize myself, because I know what
00:39:03.020desensitization leads to. It leads to what I'm alluding to in this conversation about the mass
00:39:08.200genocidal imaginations of these nation states, where people are just expendable. And I think
00:39:14.900about why is it that there's no real ceremony around grief in the United States, and then you
00:39:20.860begin to realize the United States is institutionalized violence, such that grief is
00:39:25.940antithetical to American culture. In fact, repressed grief is the American condition.
00:39:31.940And we are so accustomed to mass liquidation of bodies here, because that is the inception
00:39:37.440of this cultural and imperialist project. So we know where desensitization leads us. I think
00:39:43.620we forget that in every violent encounter, there's also a kind of violence that has happened
00:39:50.140spiritually to the person committing the gross act of injustice, because they have been severed
00:39:55.420from their own capacity for compassion and empathy. And I know that when we are desensitized,
00:40:00.680we wreak havoc on ourselves and one another. So that loneliness is genocidal. This loneliness
00:40:06.660is something more tender. And like I said, I don't want to be a false prophet here that says
00:40:13.720like, come and join this vulnerable spiritual revolution. People will love you. It's not true.
00:40:20.780They're going to doubt you. They're going to isolate you. But what I can say is that the way
00:40:24.800that I keep going is I find my ancestors. Every new year, I write a new series of New Year's
00:40:32.840resolutions. And this year, I had that same line of someone else has felt your loneliness before
00:40:38.140find your ancestors. And what I was framing is that ancestors are not people who necessarily
00:40:44.300were connected to by lineage or blood or kinship, but are people who felt the same kind of fear and
00:40:50.400hesitation and pain and anxiety and heartbreak that there was someone who did. And so I read
00:40:55.680people like James Baldwin. I read people like Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde, and I read novels.
00:41:01.960And 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.
00:41:21.000And 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.0.56
00:41:38.540The world disciplines us out of our idealism, calls it childhood innocence, when I actually0.97
00:42:05.500Maybe you just feel things more intensely.
00:42:07.920And then I knew with a type of purpose and vigor in me, everyone has the capacity to feel this.
00:42:15.700It's just that this culture has made us desensitized from this feeling because when we feel it, nothing could ever be the same again.
00:42:22.180And 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.
00:42:34.880I don't think that I will burn out. Who knows? But because I'm burning in me, there's a kind of flamboyant passion that comes from a kind of earnest commitment to the human condition that I feel like I've been able to discover because I shed all the preconceived fantasies and articulations of what I should be and instead embrace what I was.
00:42:58.240and it cleared space, not just for the people I was waiting for my entire life, but for
00:43:03.360a type of intimate relationship with myself that I wouldn't give up for the world.
00:43:08.140That was so beautiful. And I love how this conversation has really emphasized the reality
00:43:15.420that we can't just operate on an individual level. And yeah, I've heard you speak about
00:43:21.920leaving a legacy of healing behind and you know I'm thinking the term legacy infer is that it
00:43:29.300doesn't end it's unfinished work and that there's beauty in that you know that we can leave behind
00:43:36.860a bit of a map or guidepost for a world in which we're less cruel to ourselves and in turn less
00:43:46.700cruel to each other. And yeah, I feel like something that comes up for me in context to
00:43:53.520mental and spiritual wellness is the fact that a lot of public reckoning is currently transpiring.
00:44:01.060And you speak about disposability culture, which is something that I think people have formed
00:44:06.400really polarizing opinions on because it's so much easier than working through the intricacies
00:44:12.400of the topic. You point out that it might be beneficial for us to sort of reassess our
00:44:18.700approach to this because it can be a very oppressive mentality to continuously decide
00:44:25.760who is allowed to remain in what spaces. But then this, of course, begs the question of
00:44:31.640responsibility and who bears the burden. So what might an authentic attempt at accountability look
00:44:39.680like? I believe that it's possible to simultaneously hold a conviction in the redemption of everyone
00:44:47.960and everything and the transformation of all matter and matters, while also practicing a kind
00:44:55.860of vigilant boundary making that says that is not my work to do. And my imagination of a kind of
00:45:03.260society that I want is one in which we think about the locations that we have power in
00:45:09.300And instead of just being fluent in the language of injury, we also claim complicity and we say, this is my work to do. So what that looks like is we think, okay, this person who messed up, they messed up because of the kind of cultural, social, political ecosystems that people like me have helped create.
00:45:29.480So I share in this bruise and it's my job to transform this person. And I notice that it's so much easier for us to just all look away. And then we get confused about how we've created a world with so much incarceration and detention and isolation.
00:45:48.100but it's because we have to shift the modes of perception.
00:45:54.200And what shifting the modes of perception actually looks like
00:45:56.680is instead of looking away and saying, that is not me,
00:45:59.900that is singularly bad, that is exceptionally awful.
00:46:03.160What would it mean to actually say, this is me?
00:46:05.320The evil that we see in the world is in us too.
00:46:07.900So maybe it's my responsibility to do that transformation work.
00:46:13.360And once again, I'm not saying that that's everyone's responsibility.
00:46:16.620Of course not. But it is some of ours and in some capacities. I also feel like it's difficult for me to articulate like what a universal paradigm around this should be, because I think our experiences of injury are so particular and distinct.
00:46:30.640But I'll speak from my own perspective. If I was to harbor a kind of disgruntlement with everyone who has transgressed me, I would be dead. Because the way that my body responds to that looks like cortisol, stress, chronic pain, flare up, trauma, because people treat me like shit.0.82
00:46:57.140And so actually choosing love was less about other people as much as it was an act of self-preservation because when I began to believe in love and practice it for the other people, my body regulated itself and became a pharmacy and I no longer harbored the kind of toxicity in me that led to a kind of depletion.0.76
00:47:20.880So love actually was an act of self-love first. And so I think that what I'm also trying to gesture to with my life and my work is that any political project that will win has to necessarily collapse the artificial boundary between self and other.
00:51:54.680you gotta know you gotta grow you gotta feel it you gotta know
00:52:03.880gosh i feel you and i yeah i'm with you with committing to love and similarly you know some
00:52:23.540of the stories you've been sharing about being with your friend eating dumplings having the
00:52:29.600existential moments of like how is anybody feeling these things and what you brought up around
00:52:37.420complicity I just want to say I I really feel aligned with that and definitely have struggled
00:52:43.400through the mud in my ways and continue to come back to the earth and come back to that
00:52:49.000wild and feral and all-encompassing love of being alive and just all of the other imperfect perfect
00:52:59.960creatures and beings around us that can hold us through this and yeah I just have so appreciated
00:53:07.460what you've been saying and I wanted to circle back to a conversation that you were touching
00:53:15.100on earlier on expression and right relationship and how being empowered to express ourselves
00:53:21.900fully can bring us into right relationship, which for many is a really foreign space to
00:53:28.800think into because we've grown up in a culture that pushes conformity because it's beneficial
00:53:34.500for a very capitalistic understanding of efficiency, but it isn't great for the collective
00:53:41.440heart. And I know you've been asked this question before where it's framed as your own self-expression
00:53:48.500in terms of bravery, but I love how you sort of turn that on its head and respond with your own
00:53:55.800question of, well, how is it possible that one can practice an active denial of self day in and day
00:54:03.300out and expect to have good relationships. And so I'd like to ask you what ramifications you see
00:54:11.260in terms of squelching self-expression and how the queer community is really pointing out that0.97
00:54:17.680the denial of self-expression is both gravely unhealthy and doesn't have to be a permanent0.90
00:54:23.780fixture of society? I think that there are many worlds that are possible.
00:54:30.800And the world that we have been ritualized and routinized and normalized and naturalized into
00:54:37.920is one that has taught us that the things that are the most intimate and dear to us
00:54:44.280are the things that people will hate the most. So we have to protect them from one another,
00:54:49.620which means that we can be in relation with one another for 20 years and never actually speak
00:54:55.140about what we feel and that's a disassociative world for me and that language is really important
00:55:01.780for me as someone who's struggled and suffered from disassociation my entire life the sense of
00:55:07.120being here but not quite being there it's a world that actually is illusory and there's nothing more
00:55:15.540real to me than the kind of pang of ugliness of vulnerability of breaking down of inconsistency
00:55:25.160of imperfection and that's what i believe is actually the organic self an unruliness or as
00:55:32.160you were saying before kind of feralness is where we began and so when i see people who are so
00:55:39.220well contained like this is who I am I'm just confused because I'm like how do you know who
00:55:47.480you are in a world that's dispossessed us of the grammar to even articulate that I'm a mess
00:55:55.380and I love messy people and I love people who are honest about being messes and my sort of
00:56:01.040hypothesis is that actually everyone's playing pretend and trying to use all these jobs and
00:56:06.780identities and labels to give some sense of ontological security. But my security doesn't
00:56:12.000come from that. It comes from actually saying, I don't know, therefore I am. Not I know, therefore
00:56:19.280I am. I suspend all know. It comes from actually cultivating ignorance and harnessing it. I love
00:56:25.000ignorant people. Hot take, but I think the people who are most fluent in their ignorant are the1.00
00:56:30.380smartest people. Because how dare we even think that we know in a universe that is so huge and
00:56:36.680expansive. I guess this is my way of saying what I was trying to get to earlier today in this
00:56:42.800interview about moving the onus away from empowerment of trans people towards actually
00:56:48.540making gender unknowable. I think that right now, there's a coordinated and understandable effort
00:56:55.200to try to explain gender. This is what it is. But I actually am breaking up with that. And I'm
00:57:02.940trying to say, I don't know. I may never know. I don't know who I am. I don't know really what
00:57:08.120gender is. I don't know. But I love I don't know, because that means that I can try. And trying for
00:57:15.260me is the mode of existence that I want to be in. Maybe it won't work, but at least I'm trying.
00:57:21.080Maybe I'll never, but at least I'm trying. And that's the kind of people I've met. When I started
00:57:27.820to actually prioritize my joy over other people's shame I met people who tried and we're all trying
00:57:34.360to do the same it's inconsistent it's posting a selfie on Instagram and being like I love myself
00:57:39.380and then 20 minutes later look in the mirror and being like psych it's it's a back and forth it's
00:57:45.600frenetic but it's something I would never give up I guess it's given me purpose and dignity and
00:57:54.040spirit in a way that I didn't have before because it's actually attracted to me magnetized people
00:58:00.900who are trying and attempting and have mercy and delicacy with one another because we recognized
00:58:08.120how fragile it is to try in a world of house of mirrors yes yes I'm so with you and
00:58:20.780On the topic of expression, I'd like to move into the realm of fashion. And I know you do a lot of work around fashion industry capitalism and degendering fashion.
00:58:33.660And as I prepared for our conversation, I thought about how in many societies today, fashion has been so far removed from the spirit and shuffled into maybe two main arenas, one which is very elitist and the other which is rapidly consumptive.
00:58:54.640But that wasn't the origin. And I recall my conversation with Martine Prechtel years ago, who shared how indigenous communities throughout Guatemala adorn themselves in regalia to farm because it's dressing up for the divine.
00:59:12.280And so this is one of the ways I come into this conversation, thinking about the divinity of our expression through adornment.
00:59:19.960And so to begin, I'm wondering if you could share what you see as the very essence of fashion in terms of its poetic beauty.
00:59:30.820I would scream like, yes, but I'm worried about confusing my roommates in the other room.
00:59:38.440But you really hit the nail for me, which is fashion for me is about embracing my divinity and the divinity of the world.
00:59:46.340When I'm putting together an outfit, I'm making an altar.
00:59:48.700I make an altar to myself so that when people treat me with so much blatant disrespect,
00:59:55.560I'm treating myself with respect. And I'm saying in a world that has marked me for various forms
01:00:00.900of social death, I am worth life. And that is nothing superficial. And that's why I get so
01:00:06.780irritated by the kind of rote misogyny and the dismissal of aesthetics as a legitimate terrain
01:00:12.380of political resistance. Sure, read your books, but how do you survive? You survive by finding
01:00:19.140beauty in impossible and bleak situations. You survive from self-improvisation and authorship,
01:00:26.660and fashion has and continues to be a part of that for me. Then I notice in a lot of my work,
01:00:32.800trying to trace gender dissenters across the centuries, that time and time again,
01:00:38.720when colonial authorities would arrest gender non-conforming people for colonial era sodomy
01:00:44.320or cross-dressing legislation, something here like the Portuguese Inquisition. They would ask people,
01:00:50.680why are you wearing that? And people would often answer, this is what I wear to receive God. So
01:00:56.700much of what we've been taught femininity is, was actually ceremonial wear. And so there's this way
01:01:05.440in which what I've been tracing in my research in the early 20th century,
01:01:09.600there's a dress reform movement where white women basically argued for the right to wear
01:01:14.420pants to join white men in the pursuit of empire and work. And they would often say femininity
01:01:20.440is primitivity. They would say, unlike these quote unquote savage quote unquote natives,1.00
01:01:26.320we don't practice adornment. In fact, the idea was criminal adornment. Alfred Luce,1.00
01:01:31.440This famous Viennese architect literally writes that you can tell criminals based off of the ways that they adorn their bodies across colonial projects, tattooing, piercing, beauty, color became markers of a kind of savagery that was incompatible with the machinery of capitalist work.
01:01:50.440And so when I read this history, I'm like, okay, why did the British write down every artifact that gender variant people were wearing, their earrings, how they dressed, how they walked? Could it be that these things are doing something?
01:02:06.080so now my relationship with fashion is it's about creating a spiritual ecology with these
01:02:14.500non-human objects and recognizing the kinds of bodies that we're creating i'm not just adorning
01:02:20.780my body i'm creating a new body when i speak about how important self-expression is for me
01:02:27.140people will do this thing like well there's your body and then there's your outfit but to me there's
01:02:33.000not, they're not separate. Like I am my best, most true self in what I'm wearing. What I'm
01:02:42.320wearing allows me to show up in the world as myself, which means that I can and will deliver
01:02:48.540an academic lecture and a gown and a seven inch heel, practical, functional, which means I can
01:02:55.500and will still identify as trans and be trans, even if I'm wearing gym shorts and a freaking
01:03:02.580t-shirt because it's not about what we're wearing it's about how it makes us feel and it's about
01:03:09.740i think that's the recurring motif for me alongside love is an alternative to the visual realm
01:03:17.280is the realm of feeling and the sensations are more important than the sense making
01:03:23.900and the sensations that i get when i'm adorned in my ultimate divine form they're allowed they're
01:03:30.660they're what allow me to keep going and I think for a long time I felt a lot of shame about that
01:03:35.040because people I mean my parents would be like why do you care so much about what you look like
01:03:40.960and the only relation that we have to conversations around aesthetics is that there's always an
01:03:45.940audience but I wonder maybe some of us are actually getting dressed for ourselves or maybe
01:03:53.360some of us are actually getting dressed for something that you can't see I don't think that
01:03:58.560we have the vocabulary to describe self-intimacy. The only ways that we understand intimacy is about
01:04:04.220the other, but what does it actually mean to recognize that our relationship with ourself
01:04:08.820could be, and maybe should be, one of the greatest romances of our lives? When I get dressed, it's
01:04:14.280like I'm dressing for a date with myself. And that helps me not just keep going, but helps me
01:04:19.900celebrate and thrive. The world might be bleak and apocalyptic, but my blue lip makes it worth it.
01:04:28.560Oh, gosh, I'm feeling so inspired to up my game. And yeah, and I think when we feel in our divinity, we also can treat others better. We can treat ourselves better. I mean, it's I think there's such a beautiful ripple effect when we can just feel in our in our, I don't know. Yeah, I just am really with you there.
01:04:57.060But I do want to tie this back into the gender binary. And you extensively speak and write about how colonialism and gender exploit fashion to do its bidding through the gendering of clothes. And so I'm wondering who benefits or what thought reigns supreme as long as we continue to understand our dress through a gendered lens?
01:05:21.500Yeah, 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.
01:05:30.160what fashion historians will teach you is that the suit became solidified as the male garb in
01:05:36.760the western world in around 1820 and the reason that people did sort of design the suit the way
01:05:42.560that they did is because they're inspired by greek sculptures and they wanted to actually
01:05:45.980shape the male torso to be visually distinct from the female torso with the invention of the sex
01:05:52.920binary the phenomenon that males and females were meant to be anatomically opposite and distinct so
01:05:58.280fashion became a way of elaborating and proving a sex-based distinction, which was a cultural
01:06:03.680project and invention. So actually at its inception, the gendering of fashion was an0.67
01:06:10.440act of artistic subterfuge to naturalize what is an arbitrary distinction between bodies. There's
01:06:17.540more anatomical, physiological, genetic variability among the category female than there is between
01:06:24.240male and female. It's a social and cultural decision to divide the world into male and0.99
01:06:30.240female, not a biological one. As Dr. Anne Foster-Sterling argues, the body, in fact,
01:06:35.200is one of the biggest arguments against the sex binary because testosterone is involved in
01:06:40.720ovulation. So many of the physical and physiological features that we gender are actually found among
01:06:46.320bodies. But I digress. So fashion then is not just about the resuscitation of a kind of cultural
01:06:54.480invention of gender binarism. It's also about a marker of colonial distinction. One of the primary
01:07:01.280ways in which indigenous people would be demonized across the world was the sartorial and aesthetic
01:07:07.760choices, which white Europeans saw as markers of degeneracy or of savagery. And the ways that
01:07:15.680fashion was positioned was, as Alfred Luce argues in Ornament in Crime, is that men quote-unquote
01:07:20.720fought for the right to wear pants in order to basically enter modernity. So the goal has always
01:07:26.480been about the right to wear pants, the right to have binary gendered in order to be good
01:07:30.520capitalist modern workers. So that's why the degendering of fashion is not for me just about
01:07:36.760gender. It's actually about all these larger things we've been speaking about, cultures of
01:07:41.620control cultures and economies of race and colonization. It's actually about creativity
01:07:47.320and self-authorship. Fashion for me becomes a really convenient metaphor to describe how the
01:07:52.060uniform is not just a physical look, it's a cultural mentality. How have we normalized and
01:07:59.600conditioned people into literally gendering arbitrary articles of fabric and color? That
01:08:06.920shows how flimsy gender binarism actually is, is that the color pink used to be associated
01:08:12.860with masculinity until after World War II, is that actually lace and heels and makeup were
01:08:17.920historically worn by men in Europe first, is that actually all these kinds of things that
01:08:23.360posh themselves as natural are actually political propaganda meant to create the kinds of
01:08:30.640efficiencies you're speaking to that allow the kind of rote mechanization of these political
01:08:36.040projects. So I noticed, though, a lot of people will join me in an intellectual declaration of
01:08:42.380degendering fashion, but so few people will join me in the actual sartorial pleasures of doing it,
01:08:48.180which suggests to me what I was speaking to before about how this moment of tokenization
01:08:52.460allows people to feel like an intellectual commitment is the same as a kind of praxis
01:08:56.780of solidarity. If you really understood what degendering fashion meant, you would realize
01:09:02.580that your gender is a cosmological, universal, spiritual principle that is not actually
01:09:09.600determined by what society arbitrarily dictates and what kind of clothes you should be wearing,
01:09:15.480which is a way of saying, we need more men wearing skirts and dresses and makeup because
01:09:20.140that doesn't invalidate your manhood. And we need more women not removing their body1.00
01:09:24.580here because that doesn't invalidate their womanhood. But yet the labor, the physical1.00
01:09:28.880labor of gender nonconformity is outsourced to us as gender variant people, as if we are some
01:09:34.900sort of non-consensual Noah arc trying to rescue the world from the apocalypse of the gender
01:09:39.540binary. I digress. I've got more interesting things to do with my day than save people who1.00
01:09:44.580would rather not save themselves. So what my hope with de-gender fashion is, is that there's a way0.96
01:09:50.520to acknowledge the historic contributions of non-binary people in being on the front lines of
01:09:56.060this kind of cultural political aesthetic conversation while also recognizing that this
01:10:00.320is a mandate for all of us to ask why are we dressed the ways that we are and how can we shift
01:10:05.760a culture that genders arbitrary objects and actually author ourselves from a place of
01:10:11.820creative vibrancy and potency not wrote cultural conformity i do want to talk about this fashion
01:10:21.720topic a little bit more. And the expression of the divine through fashion lends itself for us
01:10:30.320to inquire about beauty a bit. And this question is open-ended, so please answer it in the way that
01:10:37.140feels most pertinent at this moment. But I think about how so much of our conversations swirl
01:10:44.560around the concept of beauty standards and understanding how they operate. But your writing
01:10:50.900pushes us to look at beauty in terms of its power and danger too. And that framing encourages us to
01:10:58.500think beyond beauty standards, that we don't need new standards. We need to approach beauty in a
01:11:05.860fundamentally different way. And I think about beauty in an ecological sense, and it's simply
01:11:12.440a testament to being alive. So what does beauty mean to you today? And is that definition deeply
01:11:20.660wrapped up in notions of dignity as well. Absolutely. I'm not trying to overthrow one
01:11:30.560set of gender norms by enforcing a new set of gender norms that says everyone must be non-binary.
01:11:37.400Like, no, that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to respond to one regime of beauty
01:11:42.360norms by saying this is the new beauty standard. No, I'm trying to make standard that there is no
01:11:47.180beauty standard because there's as many ways to be beautiful as there are people, as there are
01:11:52.700sentience, as there are objects. Beauty is honesty. And the cultures of beauty we've been
01:11:59.540indoctrinated into are cultures of fantasy and fiction that only love us for emulation of a kind
01:12:07.980of archetype. Don't love us for what is. Isness is beauty. It's being able to be like, oh, I have
01:12:15.640stubble because that's my is. This is what is. And finding beauty in that, that's the shadow work
01:12:23.820I was speaking to. I have a poem where I say, your wound is my garden. I have found life here
01:12:30.840in the places you have marked for death. And that's what beauty work is about for me. It's
01:12:35.360to actually recognize where have we been taught to allocate darkness and despair and hope and
01:12:41.680disrespect and ugliness and how do we still find some kind of redemptive vitality in that how do
01:12:49.460we recognize that the work then is about recognizing that there's a kernel of possibility
01:12:54.580and therefore beauty in everything beauty is the catalyst that allows us to keep going every
01:13:01.000system in this world told me that i should obliterate myself edit myself out of the
01:13:07.940composition of this country, of this land, of this movement, of this world, to make things more
01:13:13.160convenient or easier, decipherable or efficient for other people. And yet I didn't. And what was
01:13:19.020responsible for my rebellion, it was a commitment to my beauty. I speak in a sort of talk I gave
01:13:25.780around the gender fashion of Stephanie Yellowhair, a Native American trans woman who, when being
01:13:29.860arrested by the police, said, excuse my beauty. And in that moment of a carceral encounter where
01:13:34.540they were trying to disappear her. They were trying to disappear her beauty. So what if we
01:13:38.820then reframe the projects of incarceration, the projects of systematic racism, of detention,
01:13:44.460of deportation, as projects of expunging beauty? And that's what I want us to reframe for, is that
01:13:51.080we are not just fighting for civil rights, for racial justice, for environmental justice. We are
01:13:55.920fighting for beauty, because beauty comes from an acknowledgement of the celestial diversity of
01:14:02.060being. It's not a beautiful world. If people all look the same, yikes. And that kind of
01:14:07.440recalibrative work is actually what my job is as an artist. When I keep on saying in this
01:14:11.820conversation that the political and the intellectual don't hit deep enough, and I'm calling and
01:14:17.120hearkening for a kind of spiritual reckoning, that spiritual reckoning is beauty. I'm asking
01:14:22.160the world, are you ready to find beauty in the parts of yourself that you've marked for dead?
01:14:26.500And in doing that process, what I promise you is that the world will be so much more beautiful. I'm still depressed. I'm still lonely. I'm still anxious. I still am self-hating, all these things. But God damn, I see the beauty. And every day I go outside and I see beautiful things in nature and in the world. And I'm so grateful for it.
01:14:47.460This work has allowed me to embrace the beauty in myself. It's a kind of unruly beauty, feral beauty. It's a kind of beauty that seeps into the pores and in between your toes and leaves stains and smudges and sand on the ground.
01:15:02.200it's a beauty that recognizes that this is where we belonged all along and now that i have my own
01:15:10.880kind of beauty i'm never going back sure there's temptations to jump into the quicksand and
01:15:16.120disappear myself for the easy and road approval of instant validation but that will soon dry up
01:15:22.620and evaporate what is eternal i think is a relationship to a kind of beauty that shifts
01:15:28.120alongside you. My hope is that when I'm 70 and 80 and 90 and 100, I can look at my skin and
01:15:34.800still find it beautiful because it's honest to what I am at those ages. My hope is that
01:15:39.400increasingly I become comfortable with the creases under my eyes, around my lips, because
01:15:44.820they're honest. They're markers of what it means for me to have lived. My hope is that the quote
01:15:50.660discolorations won't be seen as discolorations. They'll just be seen as variations in my skin
01:15:55.880which are honest because I'm not sleeping. My hope is that we don't have to lie and pretend
01:16:01.240about the collateral weight that capitalism has on our bodies that of course we're exhausted.
01:16:07.060And it shouldn't be my responsibility to conceal that exhaustion. I should be able to say I am
01:16:11.600exhausted. I guess it's just honest bodies. And that's always what's motivated me. In fact,
01:16:16.700I've never said this, but my first collection of poems I wrote living in Cape Town in the summer
01:16:21.120of 2012. And I called it Unapologetic Bodies because I caught on fire that summer. I suffered
01:16:26.900from intense burns in my legs and arms and I was bandaged and I couldn't really walk or dance or
01:16:32.120cook. So I wrote. And what I found myself writing from that place of incredible pain is, God damn
01:16:38.700it, I love this burned body. And it was such a strange revelation to be like, in one imagining,0.97
01:16:45.040this would be impairment. This would be pain. This would be something I should spend my life
01:16:49.800avoiding but in the other it was reincarnation it was a kind of like i'm speaking to a flamboyant
01:16:56.000fire within me where i emerged from those flames and i looked at myself bandaged and unbandaged0.84
01:17:01.740and unruly with all those scars and i said goddamn i love these scars and that's what beauty is for
01:17:07.780me is to actually recognize that the indentations on our bodies are just as precise and wonderful0.87
01:17:13.460and exquisite as the makeup we put up to conceal them.
01:17:19.580Malak, I am so moved by all that you've spoken to.
01:17:26.400And on the other end of this technical connection,
01:17:31.400at the moment, I just want to weep, really.
01:17:37.880A weep out of a type of openness, like a cracked openness.
01:17:43.460and a like this deep feeling of being cradled by your words and I think when I was preparing for
01:17:51.560this interview I had a sense of what you were talking about when you spoke to the spiritual
01:17:57.460dimension of this work but hearing you in real time in this conversation that spiritual question
01:18:05.680is just hovering and circling me it's uh and i think every time you respond i get deeper and
01:18:14.080deeper into this understanding of the spiritual dimension and how earth changing humanity changing
01:18:21.780this work really is so i just want to thank you so much for your time and as we come to a close
01:18:29.620I'd love for you to either share how listeners connect with you further, or if you'd like to
01:18:35.900share any final sentiments. I guess one final sentiment is I'm rooting for you. I think that
01:18:45.540the way that we respond to a culture of harassment is a culture of affirmation. And I just want
01:18:50.260everyone to know, I don't need to know you to love you. And I believe in you and your infinite
01:18:54.380transformation. I'm so grateful that you're here because you create a world that's worth living in
01:19:00.100for me. And in that way, you are my world. And I'm just so grateful for your curiosity,
01:19:06.400for your stubbornness, for your ignorance, and for your becoming. And it makes me emotional to
01:19:12.160know that you are alive and I'm rooting for you. If people want to keep in touch, I believe in TMI,
01:19:19.860too much information as a cultural life force. So catch me on my social media. My Instagram is
01:19:26.500at A-L-O-K-V-M-E-N-O-N. And thank you for your astute and thoughtful questions. It feels so rare
01:19:34.800that I'm actually in spaces where I'm challenged and creatively compelled. And I really appreciate
01:19:42.960you doing your research and actually engaging with my work and its forms. I felt really seen
01:19:49.620and validated and excited that this is going to exist in the world.
01:20:01.480Thank you for listening to For the Wild podcast. The music you heard today was by Soda Light,
01:20:06.960Rising Appalachia, and Lady Moon and the Eclipse. For the Wild is created by Ayanna
01:20:12.080Young and Francesca Glaspell with special research assistance by Julia Jackson.