Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice. By Cleo Wölfle Hazard

Abstract

“Rivers matter for queer trans life,” begins Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, by Cleo Wölfle Hazard (3). The concluding sentence of the introduction responds: “Queer trans lives matter for rivers” (35). The interplay between these two ideas structures the book, which brings together feminist science studies, Indigenous science, queer theory, and river ecology to advance both a method and an overlooked research subject: the hidden yet vibrant movements—both material and political—that percolate beneath surfaces. For Wölfle Hazard, these underflows encompass both the unseen hyporheic zone beneath a river’s bed and “latent discourses that lie hidden or disregarded,” from queer and trans sciences, to the Indigenous protocols ignored by settler-colonial governance regimes (8). The concept of underflows unites these various concerns and guides Wölfle Hazard’s assertion of queer trans thought as a vital strategy for “transfiguring settler-colonial riverine science into a tool for justice” (8). Embodying a dynamic approach to the “promiscuous ecological productivity of amphibious landscapes,” Wölfle Hazard’s methodology is itself wonderfully promiscuous as it embraces the interplay between metaphor and materiality (xvii). For example, they figure their methodology as the “raindrop nucleus” of Indigenous and co-generated research methods surrounded by the “condensate” of “kitchen table ethnography”—a playful, queer, and feminist response to traditional field ethnography—along with queer trans critical physical geography and ecopoetics (28). This dynamic methodology yields an exciting study that traverses five sites of water conflict and river restoration along the US West Coast. Through an ethics of collaboration with human and more-than-human communities, Wölfle Hazard explores how rivers—through their simultaneous sense of direction and unruliness—embody “resistance to Manifest Destiny projects” (8). Chapter 1 engages “hyporheic imaginaries” and multispecies commons while thinking alongside salmon and beavers about riverine ecology in California’s Scott River. The second chapter imagines a field praxis informed by queer-trans subjectivities spanning “fishy feelings from the field to sites of scientific performance” such as conferences, journal articles, and policy debates (82). In Chapter 3, Wölfle Hazard traces the contours of queer trans collaboration with beavers, noting how beavers “flout boundaries” and inspire their human collaborators to do the same, suggesting a “beavery trans ethics” that rejects settler management regimes (123). Chapter 4 thinks alongside queer performances of grief and mourning as a way for ecologists to affectively attune to species extinction. In the subsequent chapter, subtitled “Cruising a Waterfront with José Esteban Muñoz,” Wölfle Hazard engages queer ecopoetics to theorize queer ecologies in urban river waterfront spaces. He reflects here on “cruising the Duwamish in search of its specific histories and futurities of resistance to enclosure,” while thinking alongside Indigenous and environmental justice politics (191). The epilogue introduces a new collaboration with Karuk practitioners along the Klamath River to develop a river model of justice. Even as the book is organized into discrete chapters, six prefatory sections titled “Underflow” invite ways of thinking under, through, and beyond the chapters.