The Queerness of Not-Quite Parrots

• In Event: Queer Elements

Abstract

The queerness of not-quite parrots who live in an indoor sanctuary in midwestern USA is visible in cross-species flirtation, same-sex intimacies, self-plucking, maternal egg-smashing, aversion to flying, self-isolation, injurious biting of fellow flock members, and chaotically unproductive nesting (tearing up cardboard boxes or pieces of wood in random locations) to name only a few psittacine pastimes. From the perspective of the sanctuary's human volunteers some of the actions and (borrowing from Karen Barad) intra-actions of these captive parrots (e.g. self-mutilation, social withdrawal, and excessive aggression) are read as signs of distress and eased through psychotropic medication, cultivation of relationships, flight lessons, and other improvised quasi-therapies. Other queer habits, however, are affectionately tolerated, as long as they appear to enhance creaturely vitality rather than dampen it. The parrots are interpellated not to normalcy or species authenticity, but rather to minimal participation in a collectively extemporized multispecies sociality. This sociality, moreover, is guided neither by an ethos of wildness and human non-interference, nor by an ethos of Oedipal domesticity (a la Deleuze and Guattari) whereby birds and humans are encouraged to form heteronormative and filial kinships. Instead, sanctuary volunteers enjoy parrots' defiance of “reproductive futurism” (borrowing from Lee Edelman) -- whether understood as the reproduction of species (as in Juno Parreñas’ work), families, genders, or cultures – and cheer the birds on in shifting horizontal alliances of queer flockiness.

Author

• Jean M Langford, Univ. Minnesota