The Human Animal’s Wild Kin
creative collaborators, embodied entanglements
For the next few quarter-moon posts, I thought I’d focus on a few key words and concepts that come up frequently in my work. I’m including artworks of mine in these posts to keep us sensorially entangled in these concepts. When writing or making art, I am not looking to separate, pin down, define or illustrate, a gesture I call “pinning the butterfly.” I am, instead, seeking out and feeling into an awareness of all of the ways in which I am already entangled with that butterfly as it wings its ways through my breath, changing both of our environments with each beat of its tiny, shimmering wings.
embodiment
Embodiment is having a moment. Fueled by global health and environmental crises as well as questions about the ways in which technology alters our relationships to our environments, ourselves, other people, the more-than-human inhabitants of this planet, our concepts of work, truth, religion, and spirituality, we have seen a collective increase of articles, books, talks and conferences on embodiment in recent years. In the intersections between the fields of ecological and multispecies research, social action, trauma therapy, somatic, contemplative and mindfulness practices, and many others, embodiment has emerged as a way of thinking, feeling, and acting in relationship with ourselves, with other people, and in relation with the more-than-human world.
Evoking embodiment as a term, sensibility or practice requires awareness of its histories and discursive power. Historically, the concept of embodiment as a framework for theorizing human capacities has been enacted differently with and on different bodies. Feminist writers and theorists in Black and African diaspora and postcolonial studies have notably spoken to the ways in which embodiment has been weaponized by patriarchal, colonialist and racist power structures to dehumanize and disempower, structures which claim biological difference as the basis for diminished capacity for self-determination and rational thought.
Embodiment means, to me, engaging in a praxis that regards sentience as fully physical and relational. The recognition of our physical sentience is an act of laying claim to living. It is not, however, an end to itself. The question for me that arises out of this awareness is: what do we do with these embodied bodies of ours? You may notice your own body responding to this word as you read and take in these ideas and histories. How do you experience embodiment as an idea, as a way of reading, thinking, and making?
the human animal
It is not uncommon to hear, in contemporary writing located in or informed by embodiment theories and practices, the human body referred to as the human animal. The purpose of this is to elocute humans back into relation with the world of nature, to show that we live interdependently with our environment and are neither separate from nor superior to the myriad forms of life in and around us. The very notion of human animality, however, is threaded through with heavy histories of sexism and racism that might engender a protective pause or resistance when encountering this way of considering ourselves.
When I refer to our human bodies as animal bodies in my work, it is not intended to be a reduction of the human into “merely” animal, i.e. incapable of the full range of capacities we collectively tend to attribute to being human. Nor does it mean to become a tiger, i.e. to take on the form of a different kind of animal (although I very much enjoy playing with those boundaries in my artwork). For me, evoking animality is a means of drawing kinship with other sensing beings as we engage in reciprocal relations of sensing one another.
Take a moment, again, to notice how you respond to this idea. Do you feel a stiffening or a softening? A tugging between affiliations?
kinship
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who describes herself as “a queer Black feminist love evangelist and a marine mammal apprentice”, poetically intervenes in the violent legacy of a dehumanizing colonialist animality in her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals. The relationships evoked by Gumbs activates an expansive embodiment whose power is in evoking kindred across boundaries of species and history. Gumbs, on her process:
My hope, my grand poetic intervention here is to move from identification, also known as that process through which we say what is what, like which dolphin is that over there and what are its properties, to identification, that process through which we expand our empathy and the boundaries of who we are become more fluid, because we identify with the experience of someone different, maybe someone of a whole different so-called species.
Read Undrowned
Multispecies Feminist theorist Donna Haraway, who describes herself “a compostist, not a posthumanist”, on her notion of kin:
My purpose is to make “kin” mean something/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy…I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time). Kin is an assembling sort of word. All critters share a common “flesh,” laterally, semiotically, and genealogically.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, who describes herself as a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, draws attention to the way kinship is framed in language:
In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi, and most other Indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we do for our family. Because they are family…English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, has a he or a she. Where are words for the simple existence of another living being?
Read Braiding Sweetgrass
Who do you feel a kinship with? Who are the others that you feel as family, that you hold intimately in all of their unknowable strangeness?
Working from this position, as a human animal with wild kin, reminds me that I am not alone when I am looking at a blank screen, a fresh sheet of paper, an empty room. There are so many relations already there, ready to collaborate.
Follow this portal for this week’s Drawing on the Senses exercise.