Stone Walks: Inhuman Animacies and Queer Archives of Feeling

• In Event: 52.023 - Quantitative and Qualitative Methods Are Not Enough! The Ethics of Research Beyond Methodocentrism

Abstract

In this paper we examine complex gendered, racialized, and queer politics of walking methodologies, specifically attending to a research-creation project called Stone Walks (see walkinglab.org). Stone Walks counter the pastoral and convivial nature that typify humanist approaches to walking research. Existing scholarship on walking methodologies understand the human walker as the animate agent on a walk. To counter this approach, we focus on the animacy of rocks, which have been conceptualized in Western philosophy as inanimate, in order to rupture taxonomic structures that privilege some forms of knowledge and life more than others (Bennett, 2010; Chen, 2012).

Excavating what Jeffrey Cohen (2015) calls “lithic ecomateriality,” we illustrate how rocks have traditionally been conceptualized through three tropes: rocks as insensate; rocks as personified; and rocks as transformative. We take up the concept of the inhuman to challenge human-centric taxonomies of rocks and animacy. If rocks are not lifeless, or only considered as ‘resources’ or ‘threats,’ to humans, then thinking with rocks as vital extends our ethical and political response. In the final section of the paper, we consider archives, not as a logical form of organizing knowledge, but as material, vital, and affective (Cvetkovich, 2003). We argue that when stones as queer archives are examined as something more than stable things – as interfactual, transcorporeal, and transmaterial co-compositions – different ethical relatings to the inhuman world become possible. If rocks, as we speculate, are fully animate, affective, quivering, and reproductive then what we know or what we assume about taxonomies must unravel. Stone Walks as queer archives of feeling engender an ethics that is not human-centred. It is an ethics that is “accountable to a material world that is never merely an external place but always the very substance of ourselves and others” (Alaimo, 2010, p. 158). Once education recognizes that animacy is not “restricted to humans but must be seen as an attribute of all matter, then “politics” undergoes a dramatic, even vertiginous expansion” (Snaza, Sonu, Truman, & Zaliwska, 2016, p. 6). Inhuman animacy and queer archives of feeling engage with different political propositions: they resituate ‘in’ – inhuman, in difference, intimacy, involution – as a responsibility that is situated, in context, and affective.
References
Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chen, M., Y. (2012). Animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cohen, J. J. (2015). Stone: An ecology of the inhuman. Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press
Cvetkovich, A. (2003). An archive of feeling: trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.
Snaza, N., Sonu, D., Truman, S. E., & Zaliwska, Z. (2016). Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies. NY: Peter Lang.

Authors

• Sarah E. Truman, University of Toronto - OISE

• Stephanie Springgay, OISE/University of Toronto