I begin writing this from Terminal A of the Sacramento International Airport, which is not too bustling today, with almost four hours until I board for Vancouver. I elected to come here early instead of finding a café near the University of California Davis, where I spent the last few days. I am perhaps more comfortable inside an airport. Well not all of them. I particularly remember Newark airport, the couple of times I’ve been through, and it smelling heavily of fried onions and sub meat. How unpleasant. My perch here at high top counters with good stools and lots of electrical outlets across from a Peet’s Coffee and some fresh salad and rice bowl place is more appealing.
This week I was one of the keynotes along with my co-thinker Simon(e) van Saarloos for the 2024 UC Davis Performance Studies Graduate Group Spring 2024 Symposium. We did a reading of excerpts from our newer and not-yet published “Non-Monogamy Letters.” We published earlier letters on the site Artseverywhere.org. Simon(e)’s provocative new letter on nonmonogamy, transness, and what I would call relationality, contains the raw material for an entire book that questions several foundational ideas about binaries, risk, and certainty that we both think about, but through different theoretical and personal genealogies. I am moved by how we keep trying to communicate across our varied languages. I commit to finishing my letter soon, which was only partially written for our presentation; I ad-libbed the rest. Simon(e)’s ideas are provocative and affirming, and the rest of the world outside of the performance studies conference this weekend should read them. We’ll try to publish this newest round on the Artseverywhere site too. Stay tuned!
Simon(e)’s ideas were generative for me in ways that approach ideas of gender, but more importantly for my own thinking, ideas about the spectrum of existence. I refuse the binary of “life” versus “death” that I see in settler ontology, be it the religious or scientific aspects. My conversations with van Saarloos are pushing my thoughts further in this area. I was so exasperated during COVID-19 with the liberal and progressive settler denial (“But I did everything right!”) of the reality of being organisms. We are co-constituted historically with infections that sometimes kill us. I mean, you can do everything “right” to lower the risk of infection. You cannot eliminate risk. Since COVID-19, I became focused on the idea of how a good life relates to a good death—not NO death. And on the other hand, how never being allowed to flourish or live well in the first place produces disproportionately bad deaths. But death in and of itself is not bad, not a weakness or failure.
On the topic of gender though, I have always been comfortable, as far as I could tell, with being assigned femaleness at birth. Although I recently heard about how in the language of one prairie Indigenous people, a woman changes gender when she hits menopause. I want to investigate this idea more. I have not studied that people’s language, but my feelings of femininity are changing as menopause re-sculpts my body and my desires, both social and physical. This surprises me. I was mostly raised by my grandmothers. I knew well old women’s bodies, the crepe paper look of their skin, the contours of their bones, flesh, and fat beneath their skin on all the visible parts of their bodies. I knew their bodies covered by cotton or polyester dresses or pantsuits, the skin beyond their collars and cuffs, below the hems of their dresses. I knew their bodies beyond the straps and material of their hefty bras and full satin slips with lacy edges, the topography of their hands with old gold bands on them, and their bare feet in summer. And still, I am surprised at how my shape-shifting form affects my feelings of femininity. This, I did not expect. I thought of my grandmothers as old WOMEN. I definitely don’t feel more masculine as I age, but I may feel less feminine. I wonder what that tribe’s word is and how it translates—what does it mean in detail?
I not only had my thinking nourished in these last couple of days by my co-keynoter’s ideas, but also by the UC Davis Performance Studies PhD students. I watched over a dozen of their performances and creative presentations. I concluded that their performances seemed less “performative” than many of the performances of authoritative intellectualism and correct political respectability that I see at the usually scripted panels of academic disciplinary meetings—social science and humanities meetings to be precise. A different type of performance goes on at scientific meetings. I said to the students that in my eyes their performances seemed to be enacting another way of being and moving in the world as opposed to what I think of as “performance.” One particular presentation/performance that I am still thinking about was called “AI Séance” by Avital Meshi. There is a lot I’d like to say about this performance, but I am not sure the author has revealed as much about it online as I saw in the studio yesterday. In short, it redefines for me the concept of “spirit” as not only the “energetic remains” of a human body that may continue to BE in the universe. Meshi’s performance helps me to see that a “spirit” can also consist of the AI-re-called “remains” of a person from the interwebs. Since I think of “spirits” after my Dakota upbringing as some sort of celestial materiality, I don’t see a fundamental divide between that and the e-remains of a human on the internet.
To return to my impression about not seeing the Performance Studies students doing performance as much as I saw them moving (literally and figuratively) through the world differently, I admitted that I might be revealing my ignorance of performance theory. There are certainly interesting conversations in the field about what defines “performance.” A couple of people focused on what they do —their performance—as “practice.” That resonates. For example, one performance studies PhD student also told me that my definition of polyamory as a “practice” versus an “identity” really helped them think about the role of polyamory in their life. Not defining it as an identity means we can engage with it more relationally, I think. We don’t have to feel we cannot move through the world with or without it depending on what we need and desire. Another PhD student replied that they see “performance” as “more than everyday life.” I LOVE that description.
On the other hand, the performing academics I see in my head, do not seem to consciously perform “more than everyday life,” but I think they are doing just that. I regularly witness scholars of many colours and genders perform similar scripts to one another as they sit at panel tables at the front of hotel meeting rooms or ballrooms. They cross their legs in their well-pressed pants with euro-fashion sensible-expensive shoes. Especially in flamboyant humanities fields, some of the younger femmes wear flashy high heels with their fashionable spectacles. (I was guilty of that before my aging feet and podiatrist mandated running shoes.) I see them cock to the side their well-coiffed heads, or nod as they perform their erudite attention to similarly attired speakers. I hear their standard academic words like “unpack,” “problematic,” “complex,” “messy,” etc. Non-academics will think, “messy? Really?” Yeah, really.
Everything is complex and messy.
This is one reason that Jacqueline Keeler charges academia with being a “pretendian factory.” Self-identified self-indigenizers can’t be challenged on their vague or patently false stories of “Indigenous” connection because it’s all too complex. But complexity is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe “complex” in academic parlance and regarding “Indigenous identity” means they are just outsiders. The Natives I know with lived affiliation with Native families and tribal communities could talk to you all day long about the ins-and-outs of tribal enrollment rules, their histories of inclusion and exclusion. And it would tax most of your minds. You’d have a hundred questions. But I digress. I don’t want to write or talk about “pretendians” or “identity” today. I’ll have to do that again next week. Let’s rest our thoughts instead on AI Séance!
I finish writing this on a smaller jet en route to Vancouver. I needed to work on my next co-presented keynote at the Global Indigenous Leadership in Genomics Symposium, which my Indigenous STS lab and our SING Canada program (Summer internship for INdigenous peoples in Genomics) has co-organized with SING programs from the US, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and Mexico. We are bringing over 100 people together for presentations from Indigenous scientists, students, and science policy and ethics thinkers from around the world. What are they all doing to assert Indigenous governance in genomics research and data sovereignty?
Perhaps I’ll have some new insights to share here at the end of the week along with links to speakers’ and organizations’ social media. But for now, I need to get to helping write that next talk. How does one jump between performance and genomics? Everything is related, as they say. Stay tuned for the next Posts from en route. Thank you as always for reading and/or listening.
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