Eli Brown
Issue No. 22 • Spring 2021
Museum of Queer Ecologies
The historical displacement, erasure, and criminalization of indigenous communities, people of color, queer, non-binary, and trans folks are proof of our inability to understand ourselves as collective matter, matter that is also dependent upon the earth’s health. How we see collectivity depends on our understanding of individual and shared responsibility, and on our decision to value (or not) a shared future.
I think of Queer ecology as a strategy for shared responsibility, and for tying together conceptual and scientific frameworks. It has to do with tending to the relationship between biodiversity in nature and in people, as a means of survival.
The words, “Queer” and “Ecology,” both describe populations at risk, geographies which are already shifting or disappearing. It is precisely the felt risk of inhabiting our queer and trans bodies and the strength that results from living from that place daily that aligns queerness, even if incidentally, with vulnerable ecologies. When I see the community as a species, I see we lack the cross-generational connections and access to knowledge production that comes from studying previous adaptations of ourselves which make most plant and fungal species resilient. (This is in part due to the loss in population we suffered during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.) The following aspects of the Museum seek to address this particular vulnerability.
The Museum of Queer Ecologies is expansive, and includes bio art, sculptures, sound installations, a zine, and a community organizing project. It is at times speculative and at times grounded in the acts of planning, organizing and facilitating communication. I have come to understand that Museum of Queer Ecologies revolves around understanding trans-ness as a lineage, and as an evolutionary phenomenon that is not always human. I now think of trans people as some of the first human-born multi-species organisms. (Synthetic testosterone, for example, which I self-administer weekly, is a liquid extract derived from bull or horse testicles, phalluses of marine animals, or soybean and yams.) Much is unknown about what the use of synthetic hormones will do to our bodies over time.
Similarly, the science behind multi-species and symbiotic organisms such as fungi and bacteria is still not fully understood. I see these gray areas of science as a result of the problematic foundations of evolutionary biology, speciesism, and ecology, methods of understanding bodies and geographies that are inextricably tied to configurations of race, gender, and power. These methods continue to inform our experiences with each others’ bodies and produce the misconception that liminality in and of itself is criminal.
The Interspecies Intimacy Survival Kit, part of the Museum of Queer Ecologies, imagines a techno-sexual future in which human beings have learned to procreate with fungi, the more advanced sexual and reproductive organism. For this installation, a phallus was constructed from a vacuum mold filled with sterile substrate and inoculated with Schizophyllum commune, a species of commonly-found fungi that contains over 28,000 sexes. Accompanied by a leather harness, inoculating equipment, a candle, and a collaged-over romance novel, this phallus can be utilized by all bodies.
The Kit speculates on hormones and the end of times: how high levels of estrogen continue to be detected in our streams due to plastics and pesticides seeping into waterways, how, as a result, fertility has dropped 50% between 1960 and 2015, and how often we now look to assisted reproduction technology to help us produce offspring. I was wondering if the suggestion to embody ecology, to literally strap on a fungal phallus, could provide a sense of impending reproductive doom? Could the ridiculousness of the act fade to horror in a fun way?
The future for The Museum is mycelial: continuing to expand, remembering past failures, adapting to fit various sites, and producing space for multigenerational queer and trans community-building.
Ladelle McWhorter, “Enemy of the Species,” in Queer Ecology, ed. Catriona Mortimer Sandilands (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2010), 75.
Cahalan, Susannah, “Why more men are suffering from infertility than ever before,” https://nypost.com/2021/02/20/why-more-men-are-suffering-from-infertility-than-ever-before/ (accessed February 21, 2021)
Eli Brown is a Gemini based in Boston, and an interdisciplinary maker working in living media, sculpture, comics, sound, and participatory projects. Brown received an MFA from SMFA at Tufts. Recent work has been featured at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and Creative Time Summit X. Upcoming work will be flown with Tailgate Projects in Tampa, FL.