Queer Temporalities in River Sciences

• In Event: Bad Queers, Bold Crips, and Black Femmes - II: Sexual and Gender Deviance in and Beyond Biomedicine

Abstract

What might a queer river science for river struggles and repair projects? In response to Tavia N’yongo’s paper about the artist and drag performer Kalup Linzy: “Is there something black about waiting?” José Muñoz replies “Yes!” and also contends that waiting links queer, Latinx, transgender, disabled, Indigenous, Asian, and poor people’s experiences of time: “We have been cast out of straight time’s rhythm, and we have made worlds in our temporal and spatial configurations.” North American field scientists, overwhelmingly white, straight, and not poor, have not been cast out of straight time in the same way as Kalup Linzy, Muñoz, or Nyong’o describe. Nor are their bodies or lifeways at risk because of racialized violence. Yet, in reflecting on their field encounters with threatened species, scientists seem to enact qualities Muñoz finds in Linzy’s and his contemporaries’ queer performance: “practiced failure and virtuosic.” Thinking across radically different kinds of performance, I want to suggest that scientists, via intimate relations other species, virtuosic field choreography, and meloncholic failures to avert extinction and climate change, might also know something about waiting (as salmon wait offshore for rains to breach a sandbars so they can swim upriver, or bears waiting at waterfalls to catch salmon in their claws). Capitalist logics leave little  time for attunement to different temporalities—of species’ life histories, ecological cycles, or geologic warming and erosion. I propose that this multispecies melancholia might be transformed into a “hopeless hopefulness” (Muñoz) by means of queer-trans field practices.

Author

• Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, UW Seattle