writings on TENSES:
CONSEQUENCES
SUCK MY SENSES
PASTY PODIUM SPILLING FENCES
LUMBERING, HARKENING, PRETERITE TENSES
TENSES TENSES TENSES TENSES
AT ONCE! WOBBLY EXISTENCES
AT ONCE! PRO TIP
CAME YOU WHENCES
I ARE WOBBLY
HAVE EXPENSES
—May 2017
“Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.”
In the days after the election, I saw this quote from writer, activist, and sci-fi scholar Adrienne Maree Brown, and it stays with me.
This post-election moment is at once potent and draining. More than ever before, I am feeling the effects of my own participation in the deep-rooted system of white supremacist hetero-patriarchal capitalism. I am recognizing my loss of sense, or non-sense, that comes when fascism finally blooms, after years of neoliberal nourishment.
But the resistance is intoxicating. Long-burning movements for justice are only getting stronger and building more power. People who have historically held more privilege are starting to join protests and organize for the first time. Some are starting to think about the role they play within the current system of extreme disenfranchisement, and they want to divest.
I don't think I've ever felt so scared, so full, so violent, so loving— all at the same time. I want to honor and respect this tension; this simultaneity of feeling the cold pain and humiliation of repression and complicity, alongside the warm and bitchy brazenness of putting up a fight.
So much of my work is about the translation from political and sexual fantasy to reality, and I think a lot about queer femininity within this translation. For me, femme is about care-taking and world-making; producing love, nourishment, community, and resistance from whatever it is we’ve got—or holding each other tight, so to speak.
And in order to make fantasy into reality, in order to make dream into image, in order to make image into object, I have to care for that initial fantasy, and I have to work for it. This kind of loving labor comes from a long lineage of femme work. Others before me cared for and honored their desire, their politic, their community, their dream, their image. They cared and fought so hard they pushed them into existence, which is why I have what I have, and work the way I work.
—February 2017