"Trans Arts of Cultivating Resilience": Trans Care and Climate Emergency

Abstract

"Trans Arts of Cultivating Resilience":Trans Care and Climate Emergency Davy Knittle (bio) 1. Trans Arts of (Wildfire) Resilience In September of 2018, the state of California passed Senate Bill 901, which focuses on fire prevention, forest health, fuel reduction, and other initiatives related to wildfires. Among the initiatives supported by the bill is the design and implementation of the Wildfire Resilience Program. Resilience, in its applied ecological valence, is "the capacity of an ecosystem to regain its fundamental structure, processes and functioning despite stresses, disturbances, or invasive species" (Cushman and McGarigal 2019, 142). The Wildfire Resilience Program works to enlist residential and commercial property owners in California forests in the project of managing forest ecologies so that when they burn, they can continue to be forests, rather than being changed so much as to become another ecological category. The program responds to the fact that wildfire damage has been exacerbated by the effects of climate change in concert with fire management approaches that have privileged fire suppression and relentless construction in the wildland-urban interface.1 The ecological resonances of resilience are also integral to Hil Malatino's discussion of resilience as a primary focus of trans care. As he describes trans care webs, Malatino writes, "I want our care webs to be as resilient as possible" (2020, 5). The goal of a trans care ethic is to build "a resilient care web," which "coheres through consistently foregrounding the realities of burnout and the gendered, raced, and classed dynamics that result in the differential distribution of care—for those receiving it as well as those giving it" (2). A trans theory of care emphasizes "trans arts of cultivating resilience" (7). Trans care is a method focused on enabling the resilience necessary for trans people to help one another survive. As he describes trans care, Malatino relies on a series of ecological concepts. Trans care is about resilience, but also about "flourishing," and "cultivating" [End Page 188] and "webs" and "collective survival" (5, 7, 5, 34). These ecological resonances, however, are not merely metaphorical. As Malatino explains how trans people make life survivable and even gloriously mundane for one another, he articulates an approach to care that centers trans life as it is sutured to networks of interspecies support and belonging. Care, for Malatino, is a concept that exceeds human relation. He asks, for instance, "How could we ever actually quantify the daily acts of care that circulate in the interspecies milieu we inhabit" (45)? Malatino's description of trans care underscores that our survival as trans people requires the resilience of our interspecies relations. Those relations take the form of connections with non-human animals (my mutually sustaining relationship with my dog, Hobbes, for instance, but also with the squirrels that ate my neighbor's Halloween pumpkins). They also take the form of relations with other species including bacteria and plants, with which we engage collaboratively in systems from the circulation of communicable diseases to the modes of agriculture and food production on which our lives depend. As he describes the characteristics and necessity of trans care webs, Malatino reiterates that for many trans people, it is the fissures created by trans-exclusionary conceptions of family that require trans care webs to develop and become resilient. Many trans and gender non-conforming people, Malatino argues, are harmed by a "heterocisnormative investment in the family as the primary locus of care" (6). Trans care webs help us "when our lives fall into the gaps between institutions and conventional family structures" (3). The failures of a heterocisnormative investment in the family to provide care to trans people is intensified by larger scale forms of harm. As Malatino describes it, the goal of trans care is "to develop an ethic of care that ensures trans survival and flourishing in the midst of ongoing racialized depredation, rampant and metastasizing economic inequality, and imminent environmental collapse" (44). Malatino invites us to think towards trans resilience by "decentering the family" to more accurately describe trans care webs (7). Thinking with Malatino, I found myself wondering how the environmental resonances of the "trans arts of cultivating resilience" make the process of decentering the family both more...