Being Barrier: Islands, Reefs, and Other Trans Life

• In Event: Decolonial Queer and Trans Ecologies Part I (HYBRID)

Abstract

Barriers can be blockades, barricades, walls, impediments: they often seek to confine and limit. Environmental barriers such as barrier islands and coral reefs, to the contrary, serve as land and life protectors by cycling sediment, absorbing the bigger blows of storms, and protecting plants and animals who live close to shore, on shore, or somewhere in the midst. Climate change and related rising ocean temperatures, largely driven by Global North-led extraction and waste production, have severely damaged many of these barriers, advancing the further ruin of many to the benefit of ultra wealthy, predominantly white agents of empire.

Thinking analytically-materially with trans and environmental barriers such as south Georgia’s Cumberland Island and south Florida’s coral reefs, this paper uses the framework trans*plantation to examine the lingering operations of the plantation in contemporary instances of barrier shift. That is to say, what we are experiencing in our current political moment shows how barriers are constantly moving: the species entanglements of the plantation—including the sped-up growth patterns of plants, re-routing of waters, dispossession of lands from Indigenous peoples, and the forced, rapid labor of enslaved peoples—are clearly reflected in the current anti-Black and brown, anti-trans, anti-immigrant political and environmental landscapes in which we are increasingly consumed.

Analytically, trans helps us to find paths where there are none. In fact, if trans marks for most the changing of one’s sex or gender, our essay names trans as both a threshold of emergence and a mode of analytic and political upheaval capable of offering us ways to reinvent the language of identity, the environment, and so much more. Further, as barrier bodies, trans people and our varied historical ways of maneuvering around, beyond, below, through, and across the barriers that we encounter, highlight how paraontological entanglements (Bey 2020) and new patterns of relation may be our only way to survive. In this paper, we develop an experimental political choreography, one that seeks to transform analytic practices of extracting and naming by exploring other methods of being and relating.

Authors

• Dylan McCarthy Blackston, New Mexico State University

• Abraham B Weil, University of Kansas