Gender manifestation and decontamination.
an area of interest and practice focus is gender processing, whether it’s help embodying one’s gender manifestation more fully embodying gender a nonconforming existence. whether non-binary, trans, gender expansive, agender or just decontamination from the gender binary. i am person who was female assigned at birth and have lived in queer and gender expansive expression for my whole life. but none of us live in a bubble, i have experienced gender based violence and sexual assault and have done much work to heal and to reinhabit my body through somatic awareness and other practices. i work to create an environment where people can explore and process their gendered experience in a relatively safe container. i believe that we need connection, closeness, and comfort to be able to fully embody the way we want to be in the world. the social construction of gender can be an impediment to embodiment, the way that we are socialized or have experienced oppression because of the way we are showing up in our body takes much care to unravel. this work is for people of all genders!
queer ecologies and creating containers where we can be the lichens we are.
or what is a somatics practice of queer ecologies?
we love lichens, in all of their frilly, crusty, stringy glorious diversity. they cover a good amount of the planet, were quite key in creating the soil on the earth, and can stand extreme conditions. (our spacesuit is made of lichens because many of them can survive the harsh conditions of outer space.) lichens are beautiful, complex and simple multispecies assemblages which consistently defy attempts at traditional taxonomic categorization. These organisms, or collectivities comprised of various fungal, bacterial, algael, and even yeasty partnerships in symbiosis can represent the queerness of “nature” itself which undo the “natureculture” of the socially situated project of (hetero)normativizing biology with its overemphasis on (hetero)sexual reproduction over the vast array of production and reproduction happening at various scales in the world at every moment.
taking after the lichen, a possible gender identification one could inhabit is “multispecies collectivity” or “assemblage” or simply “multiplicity”, which de-emphasize the centrality of the human parts which comprise the superorganism or holobiont (holobiont is an assemblage of a host and the many other species living in or around it, which together form a discrete ecological unit) which we call a body and take to be a self. It is in the spirit of the lichen that tender space creates containers for queer ecologies, as a space for decentering normativities and opening to polymodal ways of being. acknowledging that each of us contain multitudes and are ourselves queer multispecies assemblages, this space does not locate queerness in gender or sexuality specifically.
tenderspaceelementalsomatics 