Poetics of Trans Ecologies

Abstract

Poetics of Trans Ecologies micha cárdenas (bio) For the survival of all our ecologies, we must refuse human centricity and build networks of care across lines of species and liveliness. The study of trans media art can be a study of something other than transgender people; it can instead focus on films, artworks, and digital games that use what I call "trans operations" to decenter or expand beyond the human subject. Any injunction for queer and trans studies to go beyond humanism must reconcile with the history of trans, gender nonconforming, Black, and Indigenous people and people of color being deemed less than human. In this essay, I use the method of algorithmic analysis proposed in my forthcoming book Poetic Operations to explore the operations that make up the poetics of two contemporary artworks—Sin Sol (No sun, 2020), an augmented reality installation I created with the Critical Realities Studio, and Acoustic Ocean (2018), a short film by Ursula Biemann.1 By engaging these two works, this essay stitches a line from trans people to an expanded conception of trans, invoking trans ecological poetics to exceed a focus on the human alone. This essay broadens the operation of trans in trans media studies to include nonhuman movements, such as those made by animals and viruses, across the boundaries between different environments.2 Trans media studies can extend the fields of media studies, transgender studies, and trans of color studies to connect more deeply to and through nonhuman entities. These connections continue along lines of thought in Indigenous and Black studies. Sin Sol and Acoustic Ocean were both presented in the exhibition Between Bodies at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle between October 2018 and April [End Page 206] 2019. Curator Nina Bozicnik's statement argues that the works in the show "delve into intimate exchanges and entwined relations between human and more-than-human bodies within contexts of ongoing ecological change. … [T]hese artworks blur the false divide between nature and culture."3 The very formulation of an age of the human in the word Anthropocene suggests that this age will have an end. COVID-19 has brought the potential end of humanity closer to being imaginable.4 As this global pandemic has radically curtailed human cultural expression and sociality around the globe, the uprisings for racial justice in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Nina Pop have also revealed that the normal order of things is not the necessary order of things.5 Asking how we can prevent the next pandemic, biologists and ecologists have described the links between climate-related deforestation and the increased spread of zoonotic viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) across species lines.6 Environmental media art can bring more attention to these movements of species across environments and challenge the anthrocentricity of colonial Western thinking. This essay asks how, by studying environmental media art, trans media studies can be relevant for the next hundred years as we face the realities of expanding mass extinction and the possible end of our own species. Ecological thinking that refuses distinctions between human subjects and nonhuman entities has long been part of Indigenous scholarship, such as the work of Métis scholar Zoe Todd.7 Todd writes, "Indigenous thinkers … have been writing about Indigenous legal theory, human-animal relations and multiple epistemologies/ontologies for decades. … In order for … posthumanism, cosmopolitics to live up to their potential, they must heed the teachings of North American Indigenous scholars."8 Bringing together Black and Indigenous studies, Tiffany Lethabo King writes in The Black Shoals on "becom[ing] an ecotone." An ecotone is "a space of transition between distinct ecological systems and states," an example of a trans ecology that allows one to see the operation of trans in environmental media art.9 King cites Édouard Glissant's poetics of relation, existing as a flow of matter and energy [End Page 207] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. micha cárdenas and the Critical Realities Studio, Sin Sol, 2020. Image by author. between people and geographies. She writes, "Glissant's archipelagic thought in Caribbean Discourse that moves away...