Together in the future wilderness: CAConrad’s queer appearances

Abstract

In the performance and written work of trans nonbinary poet CAConrad, queerness is explicitly a practice of anticipatory relation through which we must not only dream but also begin to enact better possible futures in common with the world’s living and nonliving others. Reading works from Conrad’s Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (2014), this article argues that the poet’s performative conjunction of queerness, ecological consciousness and anti-war activism at the shareable sites of the body and the poem aligns with, and even exceeds, Judith Butler’s call for an extension of the political order or realm of appearance beyond the representational order as conceived by Hannah Arendt. I show how Conrad’s practice critically distinguishes queer visibility from queer appearance, insisting that a liveable future demands and deserves the oppositional relation made possible by bodies appearing queerly together, over against visibility’s complicity with the status quo. If Butler works ‘toward a performative theory of assembly’ (emphasis added), trying to theorize the body as not merely a ‘sign’ of vulnerability or injury but as politically potent in itself, I suggest that Conrad is already leading the way with their provocative, alliance-oriented experiments in both public and print.