BPA, spread on thermal papers that are widely used for printing receipts, is also known as xeno-estrogen. Xeno here is the same ‘xeno’ from xenophobia, which indicates that this hormone is produced outside human bodies, but when ingested, binds to estrogen receptors in human bodies and causes very similar effects as estrogen produced in human bodies. Having this in mind, how can a publishing practice involving thermal printing can work as a meaningful strategy of queering?
“A roll of thermal paper almost resembles toilet paper. Rub your dirty orifice with this poem. Wipe your tears with this paper. Xenoestrogen, the other name for Bisphenol A, will permeate through the anal membrane, mingle with your estrogen receptor, and disrupt your endocrine system. Let it queer you, make you infertile, decouple your intercourse with gestation, obscure your way between binary bathroom doors. Then flush this poem into the toilet bowl, dissolve the hormone into the water. The gay liquid swirls, drips, flows, overflows, evaporates, rains, freezes, and snows through the plumbing system. When a sea slug, an oyster, a frog, or a penguin drinks this, they will discover gay joy. When this flows through a shower head, water faucet, or toilet tank, let’s wish it will fuck up the oppressive infrastructure of peepeepoopoo, so fucked up that it uncasterates our revolutionary anus while turning cis-heteronormative capitalism infertile.”
The Toilet Paper Poem by Noam Youngrak Son
“The hormone is what the French thinker of technics Gilbert Simondon (1958: 52) calls “a technical object,” the threshold between the human and the machine as well as between race and trans; it relates trans to race through their enmeshed embodied processes while nevertheless maintaining their positive difference.2 As an emergent ecology, the total circulation of testosterone molecules on the planet functions as what Timothy Morton (2013) might call a hormonal hyperobject, one too massively distributed in time and space to be apprehended by human consciousness as a totality yet not for that diminished in its insistent, if spectral, presence. Rather than being too overwhelming, this ecology finds its consistency in the fact that the circulation of the hormone molecule is always technologically mediated. Through technology, thought opens onto the racialization of trans bodies via a common analysis that does not subordinate race a priori or retrospectively to the conceptual protocols of theories of transgender embodiment but rather attends to how they both receive their historical animacy from an endocrinological engagement with the body’s hormonal technicity.
If forms of trans embodiment are expressions of the originary technicity of the body, then body modification cannot be transphobically exceptionalized as a betrayal of the human’s integrity. For example, sex reassignment surgery—or, indeed, all desired surgeries, whether deemed “elective” or “medically necessary”—are a participation in the body’s open-ended technical capacities, the ways in which its physical matter, biological systems, and affective components exceed conscious will through receptiveness to change as difference, as nonidentity. The intervention of the surgeon’s technologies is not opposed to the body’s systems but rather informs and is informed by them. Hormone therapy, likewise, is a participation in the technical capacity of the endocrine system. The difference between synthetic hormone therapy and the endocrine system’s autonomic functioning is that hormone therapy involves a subject’s technological intervention upon its own body—a situation akin to Nancy’s example of the skin touching itself.”
Excerpt from The Technical Capacities of the Body: Assembling Race, Technology, and Transgender, by Julian Gill-Peterson
“At some point in the early 2010s, variations of a pop-science news story about birds began to circulate online. “Study says pollution makes birds gay,” or “Gay by mercury,” read the headlines. Scientists had observed that high levels of mercury in wetland habitats had been altering the “pairing behavior and reproductive success” of a species of white ibis. This was just one of many recent examples of how pollutants leaking into the environment have been changing animals’ hormone systems, traits, and behaviors—here, the story was disproportionately sensationalized due to its tinge of salaciousness. In this case, it appears that some white ibises now prefer same-sex relations over straight ones. One frequently circulated image shows a pair of male ibises strolling together along a shoreline, looking very gay indeed.
The tone of such stories is one of alarm. And it is surely alarming that human-made pollutants are altering the endocrine systems of other species. White ibises who do not breed with one another are more likely to go extinct, further reducing the planet’s rapidly diminishing biodiversity. The gay birds represent yet another example—part of a long list—of human behavior damaging the planetary ecosystem in unexpected ways.
Yet the consistent focus on the birds’ sexually “atypical” behavior indicates another type of alarmism, too. Queerness, here, is presented as a direct result of a toxic environment, a freakish aberration from the birds’ “natural” straight orientation and egg-laying lives. Aligned with the toxic and the unnatural, the birds are anthropomorphized and their sexualities moralized according to human biases, their gayness taken as proof that the environment is poisonous. In an essay about the ibises, health scientist Anne Pollock points out that seeing gay birds as emblematic of “harm to our environment is a move steeped in heteronormativity. According to Pollock, commentators may couch their concern in terms of environmental awareness, but the seemingly deviant sex lives of animals (and by proxy ours) is the underlying scare.
Pollock argues further that if we are to anthropomorphize animals to the extent that we can even call them gay, we also have to consider the possibility that their new sexual identities (assuming, probably wrongly, that their gayness is entirely novel, rather than previously unobserved) are pleasant for them. Perhaps the gay birds are enjoying their new carefree, childless lifestyles. Perhaps some of these birds, like some humans, find aspects of reproduction a burden and have no desire to bear young. “For biologists, reproductive success is often understood to be the final cause of animal existence,” writes Pollock. “Yet from whose perspective is reproductive success the ultimate definition of ‘success’? God’s, Darwin’s, ecologists’, or the animals’?” We can’t know what satisfaction feels like to a bird. More to the point, human desires differ within the species—can’t theirs?
While sympathizing with preservationist concerns and lamenting the possibility of ibis extinction, Pollock inquires why some behaviors, and some environments, are deemed natural or unnatural, why human-caused climate change tends to get so much attention in circumstances like these, and why bird sexuality is any of our business. It’s true that the birds have not had a choice in the matter when it comes to their environmental pollution or hormonal regulation—but then again, who does? Most people on the planet absorb a number of extremely toxic pollutants without prior consent, too.
Ideas about what is clean versus toxic, as in what is healthy versus unhealthy and by extension good versus bad, are constantly in flux. One day a newspaper touts the health benefits of chocolate and red wine in moderation; the next day it advises abstinence. While many people are suspicious of funny-looking apples, others purposefully buy “ugly” produce because imperfection seems like it must be organic. The line between sanctioned and unsanctioned shifts so often as to seem almost arbitrary; what is continually reinforced is the fact of the line itself. Yet with our leaky bodies and already-mutated ecologies, we can hardly pretend that there is a state of unmodified, unpolluted, sober nature in which animals like us could (or should) exist and bear fruit.
There are also intoxicating effects to the toxic. “Yeah, maybe these birds are ‘fucked up’ by their polluted environment,” Pollock writes, but “it can be fun to be fucked up.” What is recreation and what is poison is entirely a question of cultural attitude. A state of intoxication might be dangerous, but it might also be pleasurable, and there is nothing particularly aberrant about it: when it comes to sobriety as a default “natural” state, the “last centuries have been a historical exception in the West. Throughout the Middle Ages, for example, people in many parts of the world drank fermented, alcoholic beverages because most water wasn’t potable. Even if drunkenness doesn’t fit into our current understanding of purity, many other chemically altered states do. Pharmacological substances are sanctioned when they contribute to productivity, wellness, or neurotypical “normalcy.”
In response, some have reclaimed pharmapower in opposition to conservative purity politics and endlessly shifting “natural” baselines. Consider the gleeful, if ironic, chemical liberation implied by the title of Paul B. Preciado’s 2008 book, Testo Junkie, which describes his experience reinventing his body through use of testosterone. Somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of U.S. Americans take a form of hormonal birth control—just one example suggesting that to modify a supposed baseline chemical state, when one has the choice to do so, can be liberatory. The closing line of the The Xenofeminist Manifesto, a text first published online by the collective Laboria Cuboniks in 2015, sums up this perspective: “If nature is unjust, change nature!
Despite their endocrinological metamorphoses, and despite their declining reproductive rates, the gay ibises seem to be living long and healthy lives. Pollock likens their state to what some theorists might call “queer sociality,” where any moral, and in this case anthropomorphic, distinctions between toxic and safe, pure and artificial, chemically neutral and chemically enhanced, may be reclaimed and/or rendered irrelevant through the intoxication of togetherness. The birds are still having an erotic and social life. Especially in an age of mass extinction, should not every form of life be celebrated, congratulated?
In the landmark book of queer theory No Future (2004), Lee Edelman claims that politics as we know it operates on the “presupposition that the body politic must survive” and that queerness provides an alternative political framework. As a term and a lived experience, queerness “names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism”—and this is where “queerness attains its ethical value.” Like Edelman and many others, Pollock provokes us to rethink “the capacity for intergenerational life” as the telos of all life, but takes this further to suggest this question applies even when it comes to other species. This is of course a provocation for humans to think anew about our own teleological drive toward intergenerational life in relation to all other life, especially when human activity is exactly what has fucked up the birds so much.”
Excerpt From Death by Landscape, Elvia Wilk
This is an unofficial reader and we do not hold the copyrights for the excerpts. Please contact us if you would like your content removed.