Even there, there are stars. Curated by Allie/A.L. Rickard.

Even there, there are stars Chitra Ganesh Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski Emily Oliveira Tuesday Smillie Curated by Allie/A.L. Rickard Mentor: Daniel J Sander January 14-February 17, 2021 CUE Art Foundation 137 W 25th St. New York, NY 10001 cueartfoundation.org

Chitra Ganesh Her 3 Sparkles, 2020 Archival digital print 14 x 29 ⅗ inches

No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars…1 Allie/A.L. Rickard

This exhibition and publication have been a long time coming. Begun in 2019, we delayed our opening in June 2020 due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As weeks became months, we found ourselves recommitting to engagement in mutual aid and harm reduction, to support of the fight for Black liberation, and to care for ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities. And, we found ourselves continuing to dream, imagine, and bring into being the ways we want to be able to live in the world.

For me, these dreams and imaginings carried me through 2020. Dreams of liberation and justice, imaginings of love and interdependence. They were stars for me: behind their sometimes feeble flickering, threatened as they were by being snuffed out by their surroundings, I chose to believe that strength and an incredible power lay within them.

The power to create change, to spin new forms of being into the world, to closely reflect on the present. I chose to pay attention to them, believing in their ability to guide. I learned to better understand the inherent interconnectedness and interdependence that sustained them.

Many of these dreams and imaginings took root within and from the work of Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, Chitra Ganesh, Emily Oliveira, and Tuesday Smillie. So, it is with deep gratitude that I introduce them here as the four artists of Even there, there are stars.

Borrowing the words of its title from Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantasy novel The Farthest Shore (1972), Even there, there are stars centers visions and dreams of possible, and more just, futures arising in dialogue with visionary fiction, and how we get there. These futurities are generated by and sustain queer and trans people, femmes, and people of color: those of us who have learned to live by and through our longings, those of us who were never meant to survive and do, by our collective resilience and our collective dreams.

Even there, there are stars follows the work of Walidah Imarisha in Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015) in understanding visionary fiction as that which has “relevance toward building new, freer worlds [rather than] the mainstream strain of science fiction, which often reinforces dominant narratives of power,” and that which “encompass[es] all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice.”2 Sometimes, bringing more just and free worlds into our imaginations is a process of envisioning something new, something utterly

different than what and where we find ourselves to be now. And, sometimes it’s a process of remixing, of starting where we are, even if that is within a narrative that reinforces dominant powers, and fucking that shit up! In any case, it’s a creative, radical imagining that is as much about helping us see pathways to our futures as it is about helping us reflect on our present realities and multiple pasts. The work included in this exhibition, and the thoughts in this publication, take up these tactics to help us be bold, center pleasure, and stay connected and interdependent so as to be able to live guided by our wildest dreams of liberation.

Now, of course, no utopia we dream is perfect, no futurity we imagine is flawless. Our most fantastic dreams and imaginings are also mired in the complicity and complexity of our present realities which is, I think, all the better for them. Because we should, and must, grapple with the ways in which our very desires and pleasures, the more just ways we wish to be in the world, can still be complicit with forces of oppression.

Take this show’s title, for instance, and the futurity it imagines. Does it rely too much on a binary opposition between darkness and light, with attendant resonances of race in our cultural imaginary? Yes. Is it from a novel whose storyline privileges a masculinist, patriarchal monarchy?

Well, yes. And yet. And yet, I chose it because of what it also holds: the promise of change, the practice of resiliency amidst struggle, the capacity to recognize nuance in the face of a totalizing force, the multiplicity of points and communities of resistance at all times, even, or perhaps especially when, we feel our world is at its bleakest. This show is also imperfect: the futurities and pathways of change imagined by four artists are but glimpses into the plentitude of futures dreamed by all of us who are told we shouldn’t have one. I invite you to bring your desires for our collective futures into your encounters with their work.

Sitting with all of this complexity and imperfection, and the capacity to bring forth more stars, more resilient visions of resistance, is part of why I was so drawn to the work of Amaryllis, Chitra, Emily, and Tuesday. In each of their practices, they do just this: choose to directly grapple with all of the messiness of the present, pasts, and the futures we desire, and come out with resplendent visions that beckon to us, and demand of us that we reckon with what stands between us and the very possibility of those futures.

Multiple works from Tuesday’s series, Reflecting Light into the Unshadow, engage with Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Le Guin’s science fiction novel was acclaimed for its undoing of gender and race. And yet, the novel is also critiqued for failing to go far enough, and thereby reifying the very forms of oppression it sought to unmake. Tuesday takes up the complicated legacy of The Left Hand of Darkness, and Le Guin’s practices of self-

criticism and self-accountability, in her prints, banners, and essay to envision how we can move forward through mistakes and fuck-ups, and how radical imagination is central to our political work. Her textile banner, Reflecting Light (2018), begins the exhibition on a note of nuance, layering many shades and textures of blackness and whiteness to question supposedly neat dichotomies. A series of her watercolor studies of the many covers of The Left Hand of Darkness are a meditation on science fiction representation across time and culture, and two additional prints attend to Le Guin’s process of autocritiquing the political ideas and missteps in her own work, and meditating on how we move through the messy processes of political change.

Chitra’s work also begins the show alongside Tuesday’s banner with Totem (2018). A pillar made up of many femme faces connected to and morphing out of one another, Totem references the roles of monumental statuary in the visual cultures of South and Southeast Asia, from the 10th century Ajanta and Ellora Caves to contemprary statuary in urban India. Reveling in multiplicity and interdependence, Ganesh’s sculpture also responds to contentions surrounding figurative sculpture in the construction and memorialization of history in the United States and India. A selection of six prints from her Sultana’s Dream (2018) series are included that engage with Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s science fiction story Sultana’s Dream (1908). Begum Rokeya envisioned a feminist utopia, Ladyland, in which women live in intimate harmony with nature and one another, and men are kept in seclusion.

Ganesh’s linocuts depict the vibrancy and abundance of such a possible realm, and also engage with contemporary issues of environmental degradation, gender-based violence, and economic inequality. Her newest print in the show, Eclipse (2020), envisions future embodiments alive with femme creativity, celestial and technological communications, and interdependence with the vibrancy and abundance of the natural world.

A new site-specific mural by Emily graces the entrance hallway of the exhibition and beckons us deeper into the world of Even there, there are stars. Part of a new series of works exploring an otherworldly universe accessible through a portal inside of Ginger’s, one of the last lesbian bars in New York City, the mural shows a queer protagonist of color crawling through the portal and being greeted by a many-breasted, one-eyed being, shrouded in billowing cloth. A large textile work, The Goddess is Born in a Column of Fire (2018), and a two-channel video installation, A Vision of the Leisure-Dome (2019), further enliven the multiplicity of futurities in the show as they bring forth visions of queer and trans of color kith and kin lounging in a sensual animated paradise, and a two-headed goddess casting us in multiple directions amidst the heat and intensity of creation.

In her essay, Emily invites us all into the 24th century to glide alongside her at warp 6 in Alpha Quadrant as she considers the trajectories, possibilities, and pleasures of futurity in her own work. Moving between the resonances of the imperfect utopias of Star Trek fan fiction, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions (1977) with her work, Emily revels in the power of utopian dreaming and action and desire, capacities held and tended to by all of us cast out and constrained by oppression.

Amaryllis’ works spill out from the publication and into the galleries as a dream sequence of pleasure, abundance, and queer femme of color resiliency and creation. A new illustration by Amaryllis adorns the cover of this publication as a glorious dreamscape of femme resplendency in which 2

two figures pleasure each other while holding a collective dream-vision between them. Later in this publication, Amaryllis and Chitra welcome us into the intimacy and vibrancy of a conversation together in which they discuss the capaciousness of femme of color identity and creation, the radically transformative power of rainbows, and more. Her large-scale works on view in the show include Alarm Clock (2019), which depicts a femme covered in innumerable shimmering eyes, and with sword in hand, kneeling amidst flames in a cave. Perhaps she is urging us on toward the tunnel’s opening, toward all of the possibility of the world outside of the cave. Perhaps she is sounding the alarm that it is time for us to wake up and join her on our journey to another world.

Alongside the contributions from each artist, you’ll also find two additional essays in this publication. My curatorial mentor, Daniel J Sander, offers his thoughts on the exhibition alongside mine. My friend, danilo machado, offers their brilliance, their poetry, and their care in their essay, to build another world. Taking its title from one of Tuesday’s works, danilo’s essay calls us all into relation with one another, into relation with the work of these four artists, to ask us what our futures are building, who we are taking with us, and where we are going.

To close this space and open to the words of my collaborators, let me end by giving thanks. I am grateful for the support and guidance offered by many people dear to me over the past two years. Especially, Mom, Dad, Brother, Bahpa, Lulu, Peggy, Abbie, Brooke, Talia, Raphi, Quai, Sondra, Cori, Lauren, Ian, Catherine, Carmen, Margo, Lindsay, Lauren, Yi, Bernardo, Krista, Camilo, Zoe, Elizaveta, Rachel, Rebecca, and Jean.

Thank you Lilly, Josie, Daniel, and the whole CUE team for believing in my work and the visions of Amaryllis, Chitra, Emily, and Tuesday. To Amaryllis, Chitra, Emily, and Tuesday, thank you for trusting me. Thank you for opening up your thoughts and dreams to share with me and the world. Thank you for being stars for me in my own darknesses. And to you, the reader, thank you for joining us here. I hope the work of these artists may be stars for you, too, in whatever darknesses you may move through. I invite you to bring your wildest imaginings into each encounter you have with the work and words of Amaryllis, Chitra, Emily, and Tuesday, and to find and create your own stars wherever you are. For it’s not only even there that there are stars, but even here, too, they flicker, shine bright, and beckon to all of us willing to find them and be guided by them.

With gratitude, A.L. * Allie / A.L. Rickard (she/her/hers; they/them/theirs) curates and organizes in the arts. Their recent projects include co-curating Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall with Margo Cohen Ristorucci, Lindsay C. Harris, Carmen Hermo, and Lauren A. Zelaya; organizing around sexual harassment, wage equity, and labor rights at the Brooklyn Museum; and co-hosting Queer Art Radio on KPISS FM with Zelaya. They have also recently contributed to publications for the 2019 Whitney Biennial; We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85; and Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And. They are currently completing graduate work at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, where they continue to organize around racial justice, accessibility, and wage equity. Their thesis, Cripping Curatorial Studies, practices accessibility as a constitutive part of, and interference with, curatorial practice and study.

Unseeable Heroes Daniel J Sander I’ve never seen a hero like me in a sci-fi.

—FKA twigs, “home with you” Asked to explain this lyric in an interview, singer FKA twigs refers to her music’s unlikely combination of strength and vulnerability, asserting that “It’s ok for me, as a woman of color, not to feel like a Nubian queen all the time, who’s perfectly sitting on my throne of greatness.”1 Author Octavia Butler also embraces ambivalence when she describes herself as “a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”2 Both artists are potentially reacting with an affectual emulsion to the unified ideality that whiteness and masculinity present. twigs’ lyric also marks the dearth of representations of minoritarian subjects in popular forms of science fiction.

However, at a time when cultural representation is verging on an inverse relation with political representation, there might be another reason that twigs has never seen a hero like herself.3 If our culture is newly abounding with superficial representations of queers of color, without structural change, then we might recognize in the works of the artists of this exhibition a resistance to the co-optation of their images.

Maybe you’ve never seen heroes like the ones in Even there, there are stars. And maybe, by design, you never will. But you might be able to feel their presence. It might be something touching, something that touches you, something haptic and erotic.4 Something you happen upon in the interstices of Chitra Ganesh’s linocut storyboards, in the iridescence of Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s mythological scrolls, in the illumination of Emily Oliveira’s teletechnological pleasuredomes, in the idiosyncrasies of Tuesday Smillie’s hand-painted typographies, and in the inspiration of A.L. Rickard’s curatorial vision, to whom we owe this fleeting glimpse of what could be.

1 FKA twigs, “FKA Twigs Live at Maida Vale,” Interview by Annie Mac for BBC Radio 1, Maida Vale Studios, London, November 6, 2019, https://youtu.be/ Tfr6luGYViE.

2 Octavia Butler,

“Interview with Octavia Butler,” in Conversations with Octavia Butler, ed.

Consuela Francis (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 49-64.

3 Hito Steyerl, “Let’s Talk

about Fascism,” in Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2017), 171-180.

4 Audre Lorde, “Uses

of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 53-59.

* Daniel J Sander, PhD, is an independent curator and academic. Recent projects include Brontez Purnell: 100 Boyfriends Mixtape/ Episode 3: FUCKBOY ANTHEM: HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION (2020), Remote Intimacies (2020), Kalup Linzy Pride Performance (2020), the LeslieLohman Queer Theater & Performance Residency for Emerging Artists (2018-2020), Arch (2019), Ben Ross Davis: Endosymbiosis (2019), Alex Schmidt: Group Fail Pony Play (2018), Haptic Tactics (2018), and a special issue of the journal Women & Performance entitled “Queer Circuits in Archival Times” (2018), based on a conference of the same name he co-organized in 2016. He has taught courses at New York University and Yale University and been a guest lecturer, critic, and/or reviewer at the Rhode Island School of Design, the International Center of Photography, Hunter College, University of Mississippi, New York University, Pratt Institute, Maple Terrace, Parsons School of Design, Bard College, and the Wassaic Project.

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“There’s a better life, and you dream about it, don’t you?”1 Emily Oliveira

In Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Marge Piercy lays out a detailed vision of a utopian future. If we interpret the novel as a work of realistic fiction, then this utopia is simply the protagonist Connie’s persistent and all-consuming hallucination, the rationale for her imprisonment in an inhumane psychiatric hospital. Woman on the Edge of Time is instead a work of science fiction, an urgent allegory about power, temporality, dreams, and revolution.

In the novel, Connie is visited by a queer, butch time traveler named Luciente who transports her psychically through time and space to the anarchist future society of Mattapoisett. In the book’s final chapters, doctors implant Connie with a dialytrode, an experimental mind control device designed to replace, among other things, Thorazine and conversion therapy. After the implantation, she accidentally projects herself into a hellish corporate-fascist future made possible by the proliferation of the dialytrode mind control device. Connie realizes that Mattapoisett is not a certain future, but a vision of one potential future that she must assure through a single revolutionary act: she must poison the doctors before they can further develop the dialytrode.

The novel’s conclusion is not an indictment of technology; technology interwoven with compassion and cooperation makes the gender-equal culture of Mattapoisett possible and pleasurable. The fundamental difference between the dystopian future and the utopian one is not a rejection of, or a Puritan adherence to, what is “natural” (in Mattapoisett, infants are grown in synthetic uteri with three parents of any gender), but rather differing valuations of embodiment, desire, hierarchy, and imagination. Connie’s view of the world, the future, and her power to change it are transformed exclusively through a departure from her physical body into an experience of a possible future that values desire, embodiment, and the vulnerabilities and unique flaws of all bodies. This is not to say that Mattapoisett’s relationship with technology (present in both the utopian and dystopian futures) is without flaws. It is clear that, even removed from any profit motive, there is an undercurrent of ableism: a group within Mattapoisett wants to use the technology to “breed for selected traits.”2 Imagination is a term often confined exclusively to the world of the child, hijacked by entertainment conglomerates to corral the anarchic imaginings of childhood and recast them with profitable and homogenous archetypes of Protestant morality. This dismissal of the “not-real” establishes a hierarchy of perception that asserts that all that is real and worth knowing is perceptible and measurable to human beings. This, despite the fact that those intangible systems upon which capitalism draws its power and justifies its violence (the stock market, debt, the gender binary, gender essentialism, white supremacy, borders, etc.) are also products of the mind, if oppressive rather than expansive ones. Imagination provides pleasure, reminds us that the world that we perceive is not all that there is, and, most frightening of all, reveals the power of our minds to remake the world anew.

In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode Far Beyond the Stars (1998), Captain Benjamin Sisko (played by Avery Brooks, the first ever Black captain in the Star Trek franchise) is immersed in a vision of 1950s New York. In this vision, he becomes Benny Russell, a struggling science fiction writer with no conscious knowledge of his life as a Starfleet Captain. Russell writes a story titled Deep Space

Nine, but his editor objects to the story’s Black protagonist, Captain Benjamin Sisko. Russell’s writing is a radical act and a revolutionary disruption for which he is materially and physically punished by the white supremacist power structure. Directed by Avery Brooks, Far Beyond the Stars frames dreaming as powerful and necessary work. It reminds us that the world we live in is composed of stories we have told ourselves, and that the tools necessary to tell other stories lie within our minds and our dreams, which are constantly under direct and indirect assault by those in power. Hallucinating that he is Benjamin Sisko, Benny Russell asks “Who am I?” to which another character replies, “You’re the dreamer, and the dream.”

In Alexis Fagan Black’s Kirk/Spock slash fiction novel Dreams of the Sleepers (1985), Kirk and Spock are transported back in time to 1963, where the villainous corporation Futura Technics places them into life suspension units.

Bent on world domination, the corporation plans to harness the power of the dreaming minds of captive “sleepers” as a psychotronic mind control device. Kirk and Spock fall in love while in a hallucinatory paradise in which their astral forms can travel at will through space and time. Like Connie, in their disembodied psychic travels Kirk and Spock glimpse a possible dystopian future. The lovers thwart this future through an astral encounter and subsequent Vulcan mind meld with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who goes on to create the Star Trek series, which plants the seed for the future from which Kirk and Spock are stranded and their subsequent rescue from psychic slumber and return to that future. While this time-travel narrative and all of its paradoxes involves a pacifist rather than radical response to institutional violence, Dreams of the Sleepers emphasizes the power of immersive visions of alternative futures and revolution as a continuous, rather than linear, act. Woman on the Edge of Time, Far Beyond the Stars, and Dreams of the Sleepers all have narratives that loop back on themselves, dealing with the simultaneous here and not-yet-here of the path toward utopia. A utopian future is dependent on direct action in the present, inspired by dreams and imaginings of the future. In order to have this utopian longing, we must cast off capitalist constraints on the imagination and become immersed in a utopian future that can only be manifested through direct action in the present, and so on into infinity. The producers of Deep Space Nine considered ending the series with Benny Russell waiting outside a television soundstage, holding a script titled Deep Space Nine.3 I am currently working on a series of seven large quilts depicting the tenets of, and steps toward, a queer, utopian future. The image in each quilt takes place at a different time of day, influenced both by the idea of revolution as a continuous act, a rejection of the colonial conception of linear time, and by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s description of the Anishinaabe conception of time as “not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again…in circular time, these stories are both history and prophecy, stories for a time yet to come. If time is a turning circle, there is a place where history and prophecy converge—the footprints of First Man lie on the path behind us and on the path ahead.”4 Like Spock’s mind meld with Gene Rodenberry, Benny Russell’s visions of himself as a Starfleet captain, and Connie’s visits to Mattapoisett, the roadmaps to utopia in my work are non-linear, they double back on themselves; characters and artifacts have an ambiguous relationship to being and not-yet-being, to cause and effect. The title of my installation Mundo Irrealis (Wish You Were Here) (2019) refers to a world that has not yet occurred—the irrealis moods are grammatical forms used to describe events

Emily Oliveira There Is No More Work in the Shadow of the Holy Mountain That Has Become the Volcano, 2020 Hand-dyed silk and cotton with glass beads and crystals 74 x 74 inches Photo by Max Branigan

that are not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking. In the installation, textiles installed over the windows depict a circular time travel narrative: Earth becomes hellscape and then paradise and back again; humans are both our own rescuers and the rescued. In The Goddess is Born in a Column of Fire (2018), a doubleheaded goddess figure gazes simultaneously at the future and the past, with one foot in the river of forgetfulness and the other crushing a serpent. In my quilt series, leisure and frivolity at first light are made possible by the revolutionary acts in the late afternoon, which are made possible through the events of the quilts both following and preceding the revolutionary acts. We are figures in our own mythology— both the gods and the parishioners, the saints and the supplicants. In my work, history and prophecy converge and I am both artifact-maker and archaeologist. Revolution is a circle; reciprocity between ourselves and the earth, and ourselves and others, is as well; “the more you share, the less you need…THE MORE THAT GOES AROUND THE MORE YOU GET BACK.”5 In my video A Vision of the Leisure-Dome (2019), highly saturated figures lounge in a paradisiacal, futuristic land-

scape. I perform in this video alongside friends from my extended queer community in New York. Our bodies and gender expressions are a celebration of the anarchic fluidity of identity and a deliberate rejection of dominant standards of beauty. In 2017 and 2018, I experienced the sudden deaths of two young friends. Grief thins the membrane between worlds, it blurs the boundaries between the here and not-here. People who are “no longer with us” are in “a better place,” or maybe they are (as in the Greek origin of the word utopia) “no-place.” Descriptions and visual representations of paradisiacal afterlives are almost indistinguishable from those of utopias. In the afterlife, all of your needs and desires are met, there is no pain or cruelty, and, most importantly of all, there is no work. The power and ubiquity of capitalism is such that it is easier for us to imagine our own death and subsequent departure to a non-material paradise than it is to imagine creating the material conditions for that paradise on earth.

Embroidery, beading, rug-making, quilting, and other textile processes I use in my work all involve repeatedly piercing a substrate, integrating new fibers into the existing structure of a textile. This methodical work serves as not

only a meditative and devotional practice, but as a performance of the act of piercing the veil between our world and the world as it might be, to pull or draw threads and fibers from one side to the other. “The thread is the instrument that Ariadne offered to Theseus to find the way from the outside towards the center of the labyrinth and from the center towards the exit from the labyrinth… the crane knows the path that leads to the Hereafter and, like Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth, determines the connection between the beginning and the end, the visible and the invisible, the human and the divine.”6 For me, quilting—stitching together disparate materials into a unified whole—has a relationship to the Buddhist concept of Indra’s Net. The net holds a jewel at each nexus of its infinite matrix, and each one of those jewels reflects the reflection of all of the other jewels into infinity. In this way, quilting becomes about the interconnectedness and dependent origination of our consciousnesses, and in this quilting and stitching together of consciousnesses, we become all that which makes up the divine. This inextricable blending together of materials creates quilted portals between our present and a potential utopian future, and it is a utopian longing that implores us to walk through those portals.

In my quilts, I almost exclusively use hand-dyed and mono-printed fabrics. In this dyeing process, the colors

blur and meld together unpredictably, recalling the blurring of lines between the past and the present, borders and binaries, the ego and the infinite, and the worlds of heaven and earth. I use silk charmeuse and crystal rhinestones as a material manifestation of desire, the pull toward refracted light. Materials that refract light in this way are “a manipulation of humans’ inherent desire for fresh water. An intangible light effect made physical.”7 My work frames desire as a force for remaking the world. I make objects and immersive environments that harness the disruptive power of the human imagination to redraw the map of the world with desire as the polaric magnetism pulling us toward utopia.

Capitalist constraints on the human imagination relegate utopian longings to inconsequential daydreams and flights of fancy rather than granting them the powerful superposition of simultaneous existence in the not-yet-being of the future, and in the present as a textual or physical artifact.

Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (1977) positions itself as such an artifact-outof-time, and the mythologized, underground distribution of the text itself is strikingly similar to that of Star Trek slash fiction novels and fanzines. Both texts are imbued with the same utopian longings, and both are the ephemera of intentional communities that honor desire as a guiding principle and transmissions from the not-yet-here; and in both

Emily Oliveira Mundo Irrealis (Wish You Were Here) at Wave Hill, NYC, 2019 Multimedia installation Dimensions variable Photos by Stefan Hagen

we, the readers, are the unlucky faggots asked to come join them in the beautiful places.8 The imperfect utopias of Star Trek, Woman on the Edge of Time, and The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions are places that I find myself mentally returning to again and again. As I write this, I am listening to an eight hour loop of isolated ambient sound from the bridge of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation, as I sometimes do when I am working or meditating. My body is here in Brooklyn, but my mind is in the 24th century, gliding through the Alpha Quadrant at warp 6.

In Woman on the Edge of Time, imaginative experiences of utopia are not dry blueprints of an alternative world.

Connie’s visits to Mattapoisett are not ones of urban planning, but rather immersive awakenings toward the desire for utopia that serve as the catalyst for an act which radically alters the future. Connie frames her revolutionary act in this way: “I murdered them dead. Because they are the violence-prone…I killed them. Because it is war.”9 Like the psychotronic weapon in Dreams of the Sleepers, the mind control device in Woman on the Edge of Time is a means for the exponential expansion of domination, hierarchy, and control to the point that any way of living or organizing outside of this system becomes unthinkable, not unlike capitalism’s iron grip on our imaginations. Connie’s view of

disruptive acts and their relationship to structural violence was not manifested by reading theory, but through the immersion of her mind in an alternative future that triggers an imaginative imperative and a deep utopian longing, not unlike the experience of reading Woman on the Edge of Time.

That Connie is in a position to change the future by poisoning a pot of coffee emphasizes that these radical means of redirecting power and repositioning the future are in the hands of even the most vulnerable among us. Utopia is a locked room and all of us have the key. * Emily Oliveira is an interdisciplinary artist and performer.

She uses textiles, sculpture, video, and installation to explore narratives of communion and disruption in a queer, sci-fi utopia. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and a current MFA candidate at Yale. She has exhibited and performed widely in venues including Vox Populi, Wave Hill, Disclaimer Gallery, SPRING/BREAK, and Judson Memorial Church. She has received awards and residencies from institutions including MAD, Yaddo, Ars Nova, and BRIC. She was a 2019 Van Lier Fellow at Wave Hill and a 2020 NYFA Artist Fellow. In 2023, she will be the Abbey Awards Fellow at the British School at Rome.

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Chitra Ganesh

8

Eclipse, 2020 Archival digital print, edition of 3 42 x 59 â…— inches

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski and Chitra Ganesh in conversation Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski and Chitra Ganesh sat down to have this conversation together via Zoom on November 8th, 2020. This exchange, originally planned for March, had been postponed along with the exhibition due to COVID-19 shutdowns across the United States. They recorded this conversation in the midst of the US election week, and held space for the following curiosities.

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski: I want to frame this conversation first by saying that I am really excited to be speaking with you, as you know.

Chitra Ganesh: As I am with you!

ADM: Your work has been a big influence for me as an artist and maker. I listened to a recent interview of yours and appreciated your naming of the multiple pandemics we are experiencing: COVID-19, racial violence, and one of authoritarianism and censorship. I would add the ongoing climate crisis as well. This week, we are also dealing with an intense presidential election. This exhibition is looking at future narratives and both of us as artists turn toward futurity as well. What does it mean to you, to deal with the future in this moment when our present is so urgently calling for our attention? Is this feeling familiar to you? Have you been here before?

CG: The value of thinking towards the future even as the present urgently calls for our attention is that all of these temporalities are deeply layered and intertwined. Even the political conflagration and urgency that surrounds the multiple pandemics we are living through is a direct result of a refusal to acknowledge the multiple axes of violence that underpin American history and settler colonialism. So moving toward the future is just as much about looking at the past with our eyes open and being able to put it in its proper place. And as we proceed and evolve in this moment, the legacies and lineages of what is making our future possible also stand out in greater relief to me. An anchor to this process is considering multiple temporalities in the same frame, showing us where history repeats itself, is written towards power, and becomes entangled with misinformation, xenophobia, or colonialism.

ADM: Yes, exactly. I love how you talk about a 360-degree relationship to time: understanding time as a spiral, a mass, or existing simultaneously. It comes out in your work, too.

For me, that is a really important part of being able to generate future mythologies in this present moment by the fact that the future exists in us presently. And it’s something too about just queerness and queer folks, living in the conditions of constantly needing to imagine what doesn’t yet exist for us. It becomes a practice of being alive in multiple realities. Projecting fantasy and the experience of other possibilities in the moments of living in a really, really intense or severe reality. There’s a lot of value in that.

CG: It makes me think about how queer youth survive adolescence by accessing pop music as an escape hatch, sometimes inhabiting super conventional narratives about love and longing to an end of fantasy and liberation, queering the bodies and desires that song lyrics might evoke along the way. As processes and as tools, fantasy and play can help us to better articulate ourselves in relation to the world, and that is a vital process of understanding queerness from early on. There is also the fact of the dystopian

edge of today—of the daily realities of living during a pandemic and in capitalism which gives the sensation that the future is right here and now. Look at today: it is almost November and it’s 70 degrees Fahrenheit outside. I was just telling my partner earlier today how it blew my mind that the Greenland I learned about as a child was an Arctic place, named that because eons ago it was once temperate—it was completely unimaginable to me as a child! I thought, wow, eons ago the terrain was actually green, just like the Sahara was also green and a jungle. Now, within decades, human climate destruction has brought us to a prepicipe that compresses millenia of erosion as ice melts today at a rate no one could have imagined. The importance of how the past bears upon the present is also reflected in authoritarian governments’ compulsion to rewrite history textbooks, to remove and exclude from history all alternate modes of governance, sexuality, religion, and class. Instead, they seek to imprint the past in the mode of present hierarchies and power structures.

ADM: Hmm. Yeah. And that all of it was also imprinting into this present, which was a future at one time.

CG: Yes, absolutely. What you say makes me think of how one never knows when things will activate. In both art and education, it often feels like the work may be acknowledged in a time far away from the present, with ideas igniting like a sleeper cell. Or sometimes the activation is late, but it was ahead of its time, and then there are multiple sparks over the course of time.

ADM: Yeah, that brings me to my next question about your work and reflecting on the urgencies of the past. I’m wondering about what maybe felt activated for you at one point that no longer feels alive. As I’ve said, your work has been an important influence in my own practice and life. For one, it was the first work I saw that centralized queerness and femmeness as brown protagonists who are both autonomous and complicated, here and future, historical and mythological. (Also just to add: every time I say femme, I also mean queer. Femme is and always will be queer to me.) What are the stakes of figuration for you? Has that changed? What have you kept and what have you let go of?

CG: For the longest time, there was such a limited scope of representation where my own subjectivity was part of the narrative. A true understanding of how this happened emerged from learning about the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917, which expanded the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to prohibit immigration from any country that was on, or adjacent to, Asia, and was “not owned by the United States.” That means from 1917 to 1965 people of Asian descent were barred from immigrating to the U.S. with rare exceptions, primarily for elite and highly educated people.

I finally connected how xenophobia woven into history and law underpinned my own sense of subjectivity. I grew up on the one hand in a tight knit and relatively homogenous new immigrant community, alongside an enormous absence of representation in the U.S., which felt like a contradiction in terms. Putting the past in proper perspective deepened my understanding of how these erasures came into play and continued to accumulate for decades on end. That reminds me of one of my number one childhood fantasies which involved finding out that the only way I could be truly American is if I became the adopted or secretly revealed child of Pam Grier and Eric Estrada.

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ADM: Yaaaaaassssss!!

commitment of mine to explore and articulate iterations of femmeness, and narratives of disappearance, that are CG: Initially, a lot of my work attempted to capture images I curiously absent from the mainstream political and elecwished I could see in the world: stories and their actors that toral discourse. Attention to this particular shadow narraare very much in the air, but curiously absent from contem- tive very much shaped the sensibility of the QUEERPOWER porary art or mass media representation. I was motivated Facade commission which envisions a utopia where spaces by the idea of putting my finger on the pulse or pulses of a of dissent are welcome, and which is anchored in recognizshadow narrative. One of the most transformative experiing the labor and sacrifices of those who came before and ences I’ve had seeing art was visiting a Robert Colescott those around us who remain invisible, illegible, or unacexhibition at the Queens Museum in 1992. I was completely knowledged. mesmerized by the works, which imprinted my sensibility for years to come. I didn’t know what exactly gave me ADM: This is so important. Thank you for sharing that with so much joy; I certainly didn’t have any language for it. But me. I’m really moved by how you are creating space for the looking back on it, it was the combination of a few things: multiplicities of past, present, and future, and also spaces of brown and Black bodies with dynamism and energy, and of death and remembrance that are in service of the living with a sharp eye to social justice and power. The color, the and resist erasure. This makes me think about something complexity of interlocking forms, the joy, and the humor I’ve heard you say in relationship to answering a question were also part of that defiance. Now there is so much more about femme representations in your work and how femme room for what Colescott, Faith Ringgold, Wilfredo Lam, embodiments work in the world, too. And you are describMartin Wong, and so many others were doing. Recently, I ing femme as a refraction, a multiplicity. Why is femme have also been moved by forms in architecture and nature necessary? that reflect the layered complexity and radical potential of feminist or queer utopian spaces.

CG: I loved how you clarified earlier that “by the way, I’m talking about queer femme and yeah, femme is always ADM: Mm-hmm. I’m curious whether being where we are queer for me.” Yes, yes, and yes!! This asterisk is so imnow has changed your devotion to figuration or your proportant, as we see femme and other categories of identicess? Or has that complicated it? fication expand to include bodies that are not necessarily queer-identified, or BIPOC, and also used as new marketing CG: I still find the body as a vital way to think, and the kinds categories. My affinity with femme is definitely generationof subjectivities that we both explore in our work are quite al: butch/femme was the first time language offered me a capacious and continue to feel expansive. Figuration is a framework for, and reflected formations of, desire and ways rich space to explore collectively held subjectivities and of moving in the world that I had a lot of affinity with, but vision, and for being in balance with environment/ground, had no words or mirror for. When I came out in high school, and new approaches—material or conceptual. Through this around 1990-91, the only queer communities whose culyear, I’ve been thinking also about architecture, sustainable tural production was being given visibility felt very, very plant life, urban biodiversity, queer narratives of protest white. And certainly not reflective of the constant presence and dissent, and these have also come into the work. Reof butches and femmes around the city that I would clock cent works I made for the Public Art Fund and the Lesliein the Puerto Rican communities that came out for Pride, Lohman Museum of Art feature the envisioning body, folks I saw on the subway, in the Meatpacking district, and biodiversity, and urban environments emerging together, in the clubs. As a gender-conforming brown person, I very drawing upon iconic visual tropes in South Asia, such as the much felt like an interloper to the kinds of white queertiger and the tree of life. There’s more topographical space ness being given visibility. Femme on the other hand, in the and architecture in my work now which is a recognition of context that I was introduced to it, was extremely political. how once significant architectural forms can allow us to The femmes I met were critical of the culture wars and antiaccess a different narrative of civilization. Or evoke one, as pornography femininsts, radical in their vision of how womthe African Burial Ground National Memorial does in New en engage with sexual economies as active agents, and York City, and historic engravings of Lenape agriculture and invested in making a space for sexual pleasure that moved settlements do to reframe and offer up a story of American beyond subject/object binaries. Femme was quite capahistory and New York City that I never learned in school. cious, almost a little bit of a flashlight for me to learn about This, alongside world-building and queer utopias, is what ways of being outside of second-wave and mainstream keeps me thinking as much about the body as the space feminisms. To your initial point I would also add this distincthat surrounds it. tion: that femme and feminine are often conflated...

ADM: Is this the project where you are drawing figures not only of folks who are alive, but of people, specifically trans people, who have been murdered this year?

CG: Yes, my project for the Leslie-Lohman Museum’s QUEERPOWER Facade commission, A city will share her secrets if you know how to ask, weaves together queer and trans activist icons like Miss Major, Pauline Park, local elders who died of COVID-19 such as Lorena Borjas and Mona Foot, and historic community figures such as Ernestine Eckstein, June Chan, and Stormé DeLarverie, alongside images of the 36 trans and non-binary folks who were murdered between January 1 and October 1, 2020. Seeing this shadow narrative of 2020 emerge, one in which trans lives exist under threat of erasure, and how Black trans women are disproportionately the targets of multiple forms of violence, all of this felt very much in line with a long-held

ADM: Exactly. Thank you. And they are not the same!

CG: Now femme is a richer multiverse than it was twenty five years ago. It opened up a counterpoint to challenge prevalent representations of brown feminine bodies as objects of rescue, curiosity, or pity. Femme made a space to move beyond replacing a corrective or “positive” image to counter a “negative” one.

ADM: Yeah, that’s really important to me as well. I really appreciate the way that you’ve been able to talk about your work because you are holding space for femme being complicated and for being messy. And with that, rejecting the need for it to be limited along that polarity of “good” and “bad.” And that’s what femme does. It exists in rebellion to constriction, it expands beyond femininity and beyond gender.

Chitra Ganesh

Totem, 2018 Aqua resin, foam, plaster, fiberglass, steel, and cement 86 x 33 inches Installation view of Her garden, a mirror at The Kitchen, NYC, 2018 Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle, courtesy of The Kitchen

CG: Much like queerness, it’s a capacious category with the elasticity and room to hold multiple iterations. Can you tell me a little bit about what femme means for you and how it comes into your work?

ADM: Yeah! Femme is really important to me actually. In terms of the queer generation that I grew up in, I also inherited the butch/femme or femme/stud terminology. And those terms felt like home for a time. But when I started focusing on that in my work, and in figuration, I wanted to understand if it was possible to name femme or to anchor femme in some way that wasn’t dependent on butch, that wasn’t defined solely through the signifiers and experiences of other people. Something autonomous and of its own damn self. I wanted to understand if it was possible to use the graphic language of symbols and mythology to name femme without trying to fix it into one thing.

CG: Yes! I love this about your work.

ADM: In a lot of my work I’m nerding out on all the weirdass ways we name a spiritual experience and how we are visually describing the conditions and trauma of being alive.

All of the surreal-ass work that comes out of trying to understand what we can’t know and those questions of where do we come from? Why are we here? What is beyond? And then, how do those origin stories impact our lives and our livelihoods, and impact our abilities to relate to ourselves and each other in the world? And what would our lives and our livelihoods be like if we had inherited a different genesis, a femme genesis of humanity? And how would we fuck and fight and find our sense of belonging to ourselves and each other? How would we build architecture? How would we build cities and places and community if we were working with a different point of origin?

CG: Absolutely to all of those questions! So, I’m excited to talk rainbows with you...

ADM: Let’s talk about it.

CG: Did you ever see the animation I made, Rainbow Body (2018)?

ADM: Hell yeah. I went to the Rubin Museum show, I loved it!

CG: When you asked me the other day about rainbows, the rainbow body phenomenon was the first thing that came to mind. Across many different mythologies, the rainbow visualizes a bridge between our reality and another. There are deities that guard bridges, and there are several deities who are the bridge. The rainbow body is an elevated state, where the body, upon attaining enlightenment, turns into a swirling rainbow of light.

ADM: I would love to see it. It also reminds me of a Taíno myth of the creation of the rainbow, in which a god was beheaded and the head was just existing and bouncing around the universe. So everyone was like, yo, you got to become something else besides a floating head. And so, the god was like, let me become something that doesn’t exist yet.

And then he became a rainbow and the creation of the rainbow triggered the creation of death.

CG: That intertwining of creation and destruction is stunning! There is so much I love about the rainbow body: its idea of shapeshifting through color, the prismatic aspect of transformation, and its relationship to the moment between life and death, often arriving just as the spirit de-

Chitra Ganesh Animation stills from Rainbow Body, 2018 2 minutes 10 seconds

ADM: Yep, exactly. This video is made to be played on an infinite loop. Ever feel like you just got your ass whooped in the name of diversity? I think a lot about Puerto Rico as ADM: The rainbow body is sooooo amazing!!! I love it. I love a psychic state of battling and becoming the rainbow. We how ancient it is, and how psychedelic it is. are called the “Rainbow Island” or the “Rainbow People.”

Mostly it feels like a way to erase or bury the legacy of CG: I’ve also been thinking with this image of Isaac Newslavery, colonialism, genocide, forced miscegenation, colton holding a prism which refracts as a rainbow, and about orism, and economies of sexual violence that we carry in femme as prismatic—it feels like there’s a connection. our DNA. Hurricane Maria mapped the island as a rainbow.

The rainbow is also a symbol of pride, and we are asked to ADM: There absolutely is a connection. Can I show you a perform that a lot, even when our mouths are full of blood. video that I made of Wilfred Benítez boxing a rainbow (and I work a lot with the rainbow. Most of the time it’s taken at getting brutally defeated), and read something that I wrote face value as happy and utopic, and sometimes I wonder about it and rainbows? if that’s because I insist on a femme aesthetic, and we are programmed to read anything femme as surface and vain, CG: Yeah, please! unintelligent and dismissable. And actually I’m cool with that, because that’s part of it too. But the rainbow, like all spectral apparitions, is way weirder and more complicated than that. I’m working a lot around ghosts and phantoms, that unshakeable sense of living in a haunted body/place/ planet, always coming back to the rainbow as home, as that giant in-between, that fat ghost, that spectrum, that bridge, that no-place. Even the concept of utopia as the original definition beyond and before dystopia: No Place.

Utopia simply means that it doesn’t exist yet. parts. And I love that it’s been around as early as the 9th century—over a thousand years at least.

CG: Amazing. * Chitra Ganesh is a visual artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Ganesh’s drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art.

Her wall installations, comics, animation, and mixed media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms. Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States, Europe, and South Asia. Her installation, A city will share her secrets if you know how to ask, is currently on view at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art through October 2021. *

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski Stills from Heavyweight, 2019 Infinite video loop Dimensions variable

ADM: I’m 1,000% about everything we are talking about with rainbows. And there’s another part of the rainbow that I’m thinking through, too: the racialized mythology of the rainbow as racial mixing, as an utopian ideal, and what a lie that is. And I’m thinking a lot about that as a way to talk about a body that exists in an in-between space but is also haunted in some way by those mythologies.

CG: Yes, of course, totally. I mean, it’s also like the relationship here that I love is also between like, the rainbow and the shadow. And another thing that I was going to talk about that I appreciate about the shadow is what happens in the shadows, and shadow narratives, which comes up again and again in relation to the current pandemic(s).

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reimagines femmes of color as protagonists of historical, spiritual, and religious narratives that make up the foundation of today’s societal beliefs and culture.

Whether through drawing, video, performance, or installation, DeJesus Moleski experiments with how to name the conflation of celebration and mourning when being racialized, liminal, and alive. DeJesus Moleski grew up moving from city to country to city in the American East Coast, South, and Midwest. Spending her most formative years in a constantly shifting landscape has tethered her work to interests in multiplicity, belief systems, and bewilderment.

She has an ongoing practice of tending to the in-between, and those that know the trouble and pleasure there. Employing flamboyance as an exercise in utopic fantasies for the future, her work is a dream sequence triggered by our current time. She graduated with an MFA from the Yale School of Art and has exhibited with the Brooklyn Museum and with MoCADA. Her work has been featured in Teen Vogue, New American Paintings, Art of Choice, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, and Momma Tried Magazine.

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Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski ABOVE (LEFT AND RIGHT) Who Broke The Sky, Who Fell Through (Femme Ghosts), 2019 Photo documentation of ongoing work first performed on Cherry Grove, Fire Island RIGHT A Ghost Was A Body Once (Slumber Party), 2020 Gouache, watercolor, collage, colored pencil, graphite, acrylic, and airbrush on paper 22 x 30 inches

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Radical Imagination, Autocritique & Accountability: Ursula K. Le Guin’s construction of Gethen and the modeling of creative practice as a radical tool Tuesday Smillie

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is a complicated and compelling cultural document.1 Since being published in 1969, the novel has continued to capture the attention and imagination of politicized readers, while simultaneously being an ongoing target for socially situated critique. The world building within The Left Hand of Darkness; the configurations of society, of culture, and of human bodies, offers respite from the hierarchical constrictions and exploitation of human life on Earth. In building the fictional world of Gethen, Le Guin undertakes a number of politically charged investigations into markers of difference. These investigations focus on the particularities of gender and race, or rather, on their absence. The Left Hand of Darkness explores what a world could look like without these markers. Despite the potency of Le Guin’s project, the novel has a number of limitations, particularly when read through a contemporary transfeminist lens.2 The moments of imaginative and political failure are painfully problematic, re-inscribing the very hierarchal social structures Le Guin set out to unmake, as well as structures adjacent to them. Through these constrictions however, something else is made visible. A string of texts written by Le Guin, in constellation around the novel, capture a larger narrative. While the depiction of gender, the negation of racial hierarchy, and the absence of exploitation on Gethen first captured my attention, what holds my attention is Le Guin’s dynamic practice of radical imagination, and its interweaving with a rigorous process of autocritique. Such politicized endeavors were inevitably informed by Le Guin’s social location, but they present strategies for ways of moving through the world that supersede the specifics of identity.

By daring to dream another world and by being willing to take ownership of the deficiencies within that dream, Le Guin models a use of radical imagination as a critical tool for envisioning how the hierarchical social structures of our world can be remade.

A transfeminist reading of The Left Hand of Darkness

I first read The Left Hand of Darkness late in my 20s.

A latecomer to science fiction, the novel felt like a gift. The book comes early in the trajectory of Le Guin’s career and focuses so intently on world building that it can be hard to become invested in the protagonists, a barrier reinforced by the blatant misogyny of the novel’s primary narrator.

Despite these challenges, I was thrilled to fall into a world of malleable gender, a world devoid of rigid gender roles and hierarchal stratification based on race. As a white, transgender woman who is suspicious of stable configurations of binary gender and invested in social equality, the rich world building of such a society was more than enough to capture my attention. The unique biological and cultural configurations of life on Gethen are present throughout the course of the story, but Le Guin does not exploit them as plot points. The un-gendering and un-racing of Gethenians serves as a backdrop against which the novel unfolds.

In an essay reflecting on the novel from 1976, Le Guin refers to The Left Hand of Darkness as a “thought experiment,” writing, “I eliminated gender to find out what was left. Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply hu-

man.”3 This leveraging of creative practice as a means of radical inquiry is central to the text’s ongoing potency some 50 years later. She uses her writing as a means to reach beyond the constructs of gender and race, looking for the “simply human.” In doing so, Le Guin models imagination as a radical practice, a means of feeling her way to another world. Despite the potency of this gesture and the text’s ability to continue to engage the political imagination of artists and activists, The Left Hand of Darkness simultaneously presents a constrictive, heteronormative, deconstruction of gender, and a two-dimensional deconstruction of race.

While Le Guin attempts to write her way beyond the social constructs of her world, this project is unavoidably informed by the social configurations she has been steeped in. Her positioning as a white, cis-gendered, straight woman inevitably influences her perception, and imagining of what is “simply human.” These painful rearticulations of power configurations familiar to Earth are numerous and varied.

It is easy to pick a 50-year-old text, read it through a contemporary political lens, underscore its deficiencies, and dismiss its potency, but Le Guin’s deployment of her creativity as a liberatory tool is powerful and as such, merits thorough critical investigation. The analysis that follows looks at Le Guin’s construction of Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness through a contemporary transfeminist frame. The essay then broadens in focus, encompassing the larger constellation of Le Guin’s texts that revolve around the novel, in order to explore her self-reflexive reengagement with her work. By claiming The Left Hand of Darkness as a proto-transfeminist text, I point to the novel’s contribution to conversations about gender, race, and identity, through Le Guin’s imagining and the criticism of that imagining. These debates and Le Guin’s willingness to participate in them rigorously and thoughtfully ultimately contributed to the development of the critical vantage point utilized throughout this essay.

Genly Ai’s Misogyny The first stumbling block feminist readers may encounter is that the novel’s primary narrator, Genly Ai, a cis-gendered human male, and an envoy to Gethen from Earth, holds deep-seated misogyny. Throughout the novel, when Ai describes ungendered Gethenians in an unfavorable way, these descriptions are couched in the feminine and when he describes ungendered Gethenians in a positive light, they are presented as masculine.4 This bias is made clear in the first few pages of the novel, narrated by Ai, “…and I felt that he was meant to overhear. Annoyed by this sense of effeminate intrigue I got off the platform and lost myself in the mob…” and later, “Estraven’s performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit.”5 Ai’s disdain and distrust for the feminine is caustic, making the novel difficult to access for female, femme, and feminist readers alike. While presenting a barrier to the enjoyment of the text, Ai’s misogyny does not mark the novel as misogynist, though it does in moments provide a platform for such a social vantage point.

Le Guin’s use of her narrator’s social worldview is strategic; considering her audience, the readers of science fiction in the West during the late 1960s, to be presumably largely cis-men. Ai carries the sexist biases he learned on Earth with him to Gethen, but in doing so he also provides a bridge to Earth-bound, primarily male readers who may harbor similar sentiments. Ai’s sexism, though irksome and potentially painful for some readers, is meant to make the ungendered world of Gethen more accessible to similarly sexist readers.

Encountering sentiments like “womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance” can be irritating and evoke painful correlations to women’s and femmes’ lived experiences, but this gesture of making an unfamiliar world more accessible to other misogynists and in turn inviting them into Ai’s gradual political and emotional evolution is a strategic maneuver.

Tuesday Smillie

LEFT: 黑暗的左手, 2017; 2018. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 11 ⅜ x 8 ½ inches. Courtesy of Kjerstin Rossi.

MIDDLE: Duisters Linkerhand, 1971; 2016. Watercolor and ink on paper, 9 ⅝ x 6 ¾ inches.

RIGHT: The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969; 2016. Watercolor on paper, 9 ⅞ x 6 1/2 inches. Courtesy of David Getsy.

Pronouns Le Guin’s rearticulations of sexed biological binaries and of heteronormativity are less strategic, and being unintentional, are all the more painful. Throughout the novel, Le Guin refers to ungendered characters with male pronouns.

The bulk of this gendered projection happens through Ai, whose upbringing on Earth steeped him in heteronormative, which is to say patriarchal, gender norms. The use of male pronouns for ungendered subjects however is not exclusive to Ai. In various retellings of Gethenian myth and folklore Le Guin also asserts “he” as though it were gender neutral.6 In doing so, her socialization on Earth presents itself. Le Guin builds a universe out of thin air, but cannot imagine inventing a singular, gender-neutral pronoun.7 Furthermore, this newly constructed world is presented to the reader through an outsider’s anthropological frame, but despite Ai’s narrative notes on religious practices, government, and social structure, there is notable lack of acknowledgement about the use of pronouns or the void of verbal and cultural gender signifiers on Gethen.

range of potential than found on Earth. Le Guin’s configuration of how sexed bodies can manifest appears to dispose of a scientifically recognized spectrum of sex and gender related attributes acknowledged (though not necessarily respected) on Earth, including chromosomal, philological, and hormonal variation.12 Second, the writing of an either/ or binary all but eliminates the potential for homosexuality.13 Le Guin’s constriction seems to only consider the pragmatism of producing children, and while reproduction is crucial to the survival of a species, so are the social bonds and connectivity that any sexual exchange can engender.

Le Guin’s pragmatic erasure of homosexuality disregards the commonality of homosexual exchange found not only among humans on Earth, but also throughout mammalian species and the broader animal kingdom.14 Despite the queerness of Gethenian biology, Le Guin’s experiment in radical imagining ultimately narrows to erase the queerness and diversity present in her and her readers’ world.

Societal Institutions The question of how human culture on Gethen is disBiological Binary & Heteronormativity tinct from those found on Earth is complicated. Gethen The uniqueness of Gethenian biology is fascinating. On presents some explicitly utopian aspects: there is no war a roughly monthly cycle Gethenians go into heat, a stage (though the potential for the first seems to be brewing in 8 they call kemmer. Once in kemmer they develop distinct the course of the novel), and there is an overarching abgendered and/or sexed characteristics. The formations of sence of exploitation: economic, environmental, sexual, or these characteristics are primarily influenced by their inter- otherwise. Reference is made to communities being strucactions and flirtations with those around them, preferably tured primarily around somewhat interdependent groups with another subject or subjects also in kemmer. Despite of people in the hundreds, referred to as hearths.15 Overall the malleability of Gethenian biology, and the stark conhowever, the reader is offered very little insight into how trast it presents to the gendering and sexing of human bod- families are structured, how child rearing transpires, or how ies on Earth (where the majority of subjects make very few communities are configured.16 Le Guin’s imagining of how comparable transitions),9 Le Guin’s deconstruction of genlarger cultural configurations could or would vary does not der ultimately rearticulates cultural norms painfully familiar reach into the structuring of governmental bodies. The two to those dominant on Earth. governments encountered on Gethen are a monarchy and The sexing of Gethenian bodies in kemmer appears to a bureaucracy, forms of government very familiar to life on manifest in a strictly either/or configuration. In The Left Earth. I do not wish to assert that a genderedless society Hand of Darkness, the bulk of the information about kemwould inevitably result in distinct governmental entities, but a society devoid of social exploitation and based primer is filtered through the field notes of an early envoy, 10 Ong Tot Oppong. Oppong’s notes indicate that sexual marily around relatively small communities of people would partners only form in binary, heterosexual pairings adding indeed construct unfamiliar governmental structures.17 as an aside, “(? without exception? If there are exceptions, resulting in kemmer-partners of the same sex, they are so The Absence of Race rare as to be ignored).”11 The implications for Gethenians Le Guin describes Gethenians as brown skinned and the here are twofold. First, while the biological cycles of GethEarthling envoy’s skin tone as somewhat darker. Beyond enians are markedly distinct in their fluidity, the resulting these assertions however there is little in the novel that sexed bodies appear to present a much more constrictive explicitly engages questions of race. Le Guin’s position-

ing here takes the shape of a post-racial analysis, naming her characters’ brownness and then proceeding to write a world, and a narrative without reference to race. Given the overwhelming whiteness of science fiction literature in the West from the 1960s and 1970s, Le Guin’s dismissal of radicalized hierarchies through the omission of light skinned people presents a radically different world. Explorations of how this world is racially configured and how those configurations might mirror or diverge from cultures on Earth, however, is entirely absent. This omission serves as a declaration of race’s irrelevance, but can leave readers wanting more.18 Le Guin’s socialization as a white person likely limits the scope of this project, but constructing a future that is predominantly brown undercuts recurring, white supremacist erasures of Black and brown people from the future of humanity.19

essay by attempting to distance herself from the politicized nature of the novel, stating that she “was not a theoretician, a political thinker or activist, or a sociologist. I was and am a fiction writer.”27 Le Guin goes on to assert that “he” is English’s singular, gender-neutral pronoun, without naming the patriarchal power imbedded in such language. She writes, “I utterly refuse to mangle English by inventing a pronoun for “he/she.”28 In “Is Gender Necessary,” Le Guin does concede that she could have been more creative in her formation of governments. Pointing to the social structure of the hearth, as I have above, she writes, “I doubt the Gethenian governments, rising out of the cellular hearth, would resemble any of our own so closely. They might be better, they might be worse, but they would certainly be different.”29 She does not address the questions of biological binaries or of her enforcement of heterosexuality, though neither of these concerns were raised in the critiModeling Self-Reflexive Autocritique cism of her work from the early 1970s.

Le Guin’s defensive positioning makes “Is Gender Neces My critiques of Le Guin’s construction of Gethen have sary?” a deeply disappointing document from a transfemifocused exclusively on The Left Hand of Darkness. There nist perspective as well as from other vantages, though not is however a constellation of texts by Le Guin which revolve around the novel. Other renderings of Gethen include an entirely surprising one. The antagonism of the criticism leveled against her was pointed. The science fiction writer “Winter’s King” and “Coming of Age in Karhide”: two short 20 Alexei Panshin, for one, called the novel “a flat failure” in a stories, one predating and one postdating the novel.

Le Guin also wrote an analytic essay responding to criticism review from 1969, citing Le Guin’s use of masculine proof The Left Hand of Darkness, initially published as “Is Gen- nouns.30 Furthermore, the most prominent feminist voices in the United States during the early 1970s belonged to der Necessary?,” then heavily annotated and republished 21 as “Is Gender Necessary? Redux.” Through these texts, Le cis-gendered white women, who championed essentialist gender narratives. Through the novel, Le Guin, herself a Guin simultaneously provides a window into her evolving politic, while modeling thoughtful, critical self-reflection for heterosexual, cis-gendered, white woman, presents a divergent feminist narrative, positioning gender somewhere her readers. closer to social-construction than essentialism. Such a departure from the party politic was part of what marked A Constellation of Texts The short story “Winter’s King,” which was also first pub- her for critical ridicule. Given her social location and the broader cultural context, it would have been remarkable if lished in 1969, preceded the novel and acted as a seed for 22 Le Guin had evoked a more radical deconstruction of genthe longer text. ”Coming of Age in Karhide,” first published decades later in 1995, sought to address a number of der, race, and identity.

In 1988, Le Guin returned to “Is Gender Necessary?” The criticisms leveled at the novel, many of which are touchedresulting document, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” clearly on here, and reflects Le Guin’s political evolution. Readers’ outlines her shifting politic and perspectives. Le Guin mainaccess to life on Gethen varies in all three of these texts, tained the original essay in its entirety, but added extensive but “Coming of Age in Karhide” provides the most generfootnote commentary. In these addendums Le Guin does ous window into Gethenian social structures. As Le Guin not directly comment on her attempts to distance herself reworks aspects of the world she had created and the human culture on it, she simultaneously strives for continuity from the politicized nature of the project undertaken with between the distinct tellings. This consistency is thoughtful The Left Hand of Darkness, reflected in her assertion that she “was not a theoretician, a political thinker or activist,” and treats her earlier writings with care; she does not simbut the essay as a whole honors the socially situated sigply undo, or unmake the parts of previous texts that no longer serve her, but rather seeks to build on their realities, nificance of the novel. Le Guin does concede that new, with an attention to detail. At times this means suggesting singular, gender-neutral pronouns are needed in English, or subtly pointing to a previous narrator’s bias or unreliabil- and highlights that prior to the 16th century, they/them/ their were commonly used as genderless singular proity, and in doing so Le Guin underscores her own fallibility nouns.31 She goes on to apologetically acknowledge that as a writer and narrator, mirroring the autocritique she she locked Gethenians into heterosexuality, stating that deploys in her analytic writing.23 Le Guin explicitly engages with the criticism of her novel, this was based on a “naively pragmatic view of sex.”32 while simultaneously tending to her own evolving politic.24 Countering this, Le Guin asserts, “In any kemmerhouse The progression of Le Guin’s thinking can be most explicitly homosexual practice would, of course, be possible and traced in the essays “Is Gender Necessary?” and “Is Gender acceptable and welcome….” In a society without concretely Necessary? Redux.”25 The first essay, originally published in gendered bodies, it feels hard to imagine the grounds on which homophobia could or would substantiate itself. Le 1976, responds to early critiques on the novel leveled by second-wave feminists and patriarchs of the science fiction Guin’s reflection on the matter is likely in response to more recent criticism of the 1980s like the article, “Again, The community alike. The opinions from these two subject Left Hand of Darkness: Androgyny or Homophobia?” by pools were varied and at times contradictory. Many femiPatricia Frazer Lamb and Diana Veith, published just two nists, including Joanna Russ, took issue with the masculinyears prior to “Redux.”33 ist air of the novel and deemed Le Guin’s depiction of her In neither the original text nor the “Redux” does Le Guin protagonists as masculine, while science fiction writer comment on the relevance (or irrelevance) of race in the Stanislaw Lem found the destabilization of gender deeply 26 novel. The essay largely responds to the novel’s critics, and troubling.

In the initial publication of “Is Gender Necessary,” Le Guin discussions of race, as far as I have seen, were not a significant part of this critical dialogue. Given this context, the takes a staunchly defensive posture, guarding her conomission is not glaring, but its absence in the critical recepstruction of Gethen and its inhabitants. She opens the

tion of her work highlights the whiteness of the science fiction community at the time, and the whiteness of the most widely recognized second-wave feminist debates. Its absence from Le Guin’s own self-reflection suggests the limits of her post-racial imagination.

“Is Gender Necessary? Redux” does not present a politic perfectly aligned with a contemporary transfeminist perspective, but as a strategy it offers cultural critics something far more useful. In her modeling of autocritique, Le Guin demonstrates a process of public accountability. This process allows space for external critical analysis to be thoughtfully considered, while honoring and owning the work that made such critical engagement possible. Le Guin underscores the limits of her imagining of life on Gethen, through a public platform where her readers can clearly trace and consider the evolution of her thinking. Through engaging her creative practice and her past works in public autocritique in response to her critics and her own evolving worldview, Le Guin presents an invitation to her readers to interrogate their own opinions and politics, cultivating a dynamic field of critical self-reflection.

With the short story “Coming of Age in Karhide,” Le Guin implements a number of her conclusions from “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” and does so by building upon the world she’d constructed, instead of rewriting it.34 Le Guin does not implement an invented pronoun, but rather manages to gracefully avoid pronouns almost entirely for Gethenians who are not in kemmer, identifying characters by name, and by familial or social relation. While sexual exchanges are almost entirely absent from The Left Hand of Darkness, “Coming of Age in Karhide” provides a generous window into a kemmerhouse as well as into the social structure of the hearth, depicting the communal process of child-rearing, and the interweaving of communities into networks of extended family. While heterosexual engagement is still given priority in the arc of Le Guin’s narrative, the story’s protagonist does partake in a homosexual exchange. “Coming of Age in Karhide” is not seamlessly congruent with a contemporary transfeminist politic, but showcases Le Guin’s willingness to thoughtfully engage with criticism of her work and her own evolving politic.

The Unshadow – How We Proceed Late in the novel Genly Ai and Therem Harth Rem Ir Estraven, Ai’s Gethen-born friend and ally, attempt to cross the Gobrin Glacier. Extreme circumstances have forced them into this situation, and neither is certain they will survive. During their journey, the weather conditions produce a snow-covered expanse with light evenly reflected in all directions. Ai describes the difficulty of attempting to traverse the tundra without any shadows to indicate depth: At first the overcast was thin, so that the air was vaguely radiant with an even, sourceless sunlight reflected from both clouds and snow, from above and below. Overnight the weather thickened somewhat. All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. A whitishgray void, in which we appeared to hang.… We should have been making good time. But we kept slowing down, groping our way across the totally unobstructed plain, and it took a strong effort of will to speed up to a normal pace. Every slight variation in the surface came as a jolt – as in climbing stairs, the unexpected

stair or the expected but absent stair – for we could not see it ahead: there was no shadow to show it. We skied blind with our eyes open. Day after day was like this, and we began to shorten our hauls, for by midafternoon both of us would be sweating and shaking with strain and fatigue. I came to long for snow, for blizzard, for anything: but morning after morning we came out of the tent into the void, the white weather, what Estraven called the Unshadow.35 This frustrated and fumbling attempt to move forward toward a shared goal echoes individual and community based efforts to confront systems of power. It resonates with Le Guin’s attempt to write her way to another world; it resonates with community based efforts to build a shared politic; and it resonates with movements striving to dismantle and restructure systems and institutions of power. We push forward not knowing exactly how to get there or where there even is. We are so steeped in the violence of our present cultural, socio-political circumstance that it can be hard to envision or understand what our end goal tangibly looks like, but we try with each step, not knowing where our foot will land. Sometimes we hit the unexpected stair, sometimes we miss; sometimes we use male pronouns for a planet full of beautiful androgynons and get called out by our peers. We keep trying, because we are hungry for a just world.

For readers invested in unmaking social systems of power, Le Guin’s use of creative practice as a tool of radical imagining presents a powerful example of how we might proceed. In The Left Hand of Darkness, she deliberately negates gendered and radicalized hierarchical social structures in an attempt to feel her way toward what such a world could be like. Throughout the constellation of texts around Gethen, there are painful moments of erasure and reinscription, both reflecting the social structures of Western culture and perpetuating them. While these imaginative and political failures merit critique, we lose much more than we gain by dismissing the work outright.

Despite moments within The Left Hand of Darkness that speak to gender fluidity, the absence of racialized social stratification, and the depiction of a human culture devoid of exploitation, Le Guin has not constructed a flawless utopia. Instead, she models how creative practice can and should be integrated into political work. Le Guin offers a model where fucking up and being called out by our peers does not mark the end of a project, but provides the opportunity for a crucial turning point in the imagining of what that project could accomplish. To build another world, we must first be brave enough to imagine how that world could be, knowing we will make profound mistakes in the process. The potential for radical action, and for radical transformation is embedded in how we proceed as our failure becomes clear. * Tuesday Smillie is a visual artist working in a variety of mediums including textiles, collage, printmaking, and watercolor. At the core of her work is a question about the individual and the group: the binary of inclusion and exclusion and the porous membrane between the two. Smillie lives and works in New York. In 2018, she had solo exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum and Participant Inc. Her work has also been shown at the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), and Haus der Kunst, Munich. Smillie has been an artist resident at the Rauschenberg Foundation (2020) and Abrons Art Center (2018-19).

Her work has been featured in ArtForum, New York Magazine, and the Boston Globe.

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Tuesday Smillie A Slow and Arduous Progression, 2016 Print on paper, watercolor (printed with polymer plates) 11 Âź x 14 Âź inches

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to build another world

Here, we are. I am kitchen table, open window, record just and not yet spun. My household is pandemic and canned goods and washing hands dry. Purple gloves on the sidewalk; ambulances wailing down Brooklyn Avenue. Extended intimacies are kept at an extended distance; we only leave to walk the dog.

The stakes are high, but they have always been. Violences have always threatened vulnerabilities. There has always been urgency in dreaming inclusive futures and pasts.

The artists in Even there, there are stars pose vulnerability as a source of potential, create from a place of abundance, and insist on multitudes. Let’s follow them. * In his book Documents (2019), Jan-Henry Gray ponders essay and poem through exchanges with his friend Jennifer S. Cheng. She asks, I’m curious, what does the form free up?

He responds: I used to think that poetry = freedom. Freedom out of the sentence, proper grammar, or reasoned reasoning. I used to think that a poem, more than other types of writing, allowed for leaps, disjunction, mystery, even magic. I thought that the poem was the best (and cheapest) way to create collage...The poem as sketch. As document. As a walk. As a conversation with oneself.

This is why I inhabit poetry.

But for Gray, there’s rupture—I’ve begun to grow fatigued, he writes. I’ve learned that writing poems is possible and possibility diminishes exploration.

The space between possibility and exploration is one of the cruxes of feminist and queer futurity, and of the artwork in Even there, there are stars.

For example, Emily Oliveira’s new mural depicts a spinning portal at the back of Ginger’s—the Brooklyn dyke bar my barber Ruthie frequents—opening up into a new world. A brown femme crawls through and is greeted by a multi-breasted, one-eyed alien. Here, the explorer is not white or male, and the physical possibilities of a known space are expanded.

danilo machado

* Perhaps in some futures we’ll forgo exploration when we’ve become fully familiar with our surroundings (natives, even).

Perhaps to arrive there will require full detachment from that exploratory impulse, maybe forever linked to its colonial baggage.

Perhaps in some futures we will be bored by the constructs that dictate possibility.

Perhaps some futures are possible, regardless of their proximities or whether we will reach them, and perhaps it is that possibility that demands exploration. * Gray continues: When I arrive elsewhere, say, to the essay, I feel at play...

I wander. I hold an idea longer. I think freer. I don’t look for the exit door as quickly as I would in a poem.

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He describes something oceanic: queer, dense, full of strange currents with different temperatures, something immersive, at times panicky . . . Essay as a vast, limitless, edgeless, impossible-to-keep-in-one’s-head-all-at-once phenomenon . . . a break, a reprieve.

Freedom from forms.

This vastness and freedom are central to the artistic and political approaches in this exhibition. Rejecting the bounds of borders and binaries, the artists work across media and in series. Much of their work imagines something queer, playful, and seemingly limitless. They counter the trope of the scarcity model often projected onto marginalized communities with abundance and fullness.

sword-holding femme with two ponytails and countless blue eyes is shown in a cave. The figure and the setting could be of ancient origin or a vision of things to come—or, even more likely, both at the same time.

Chitra Ganesh and Tuesday Smillie reach into the past to consider futuristic texts. Ganesh adapts Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 1905 feminist story Sultana’s Dream, in which women lead a utopian society, into lush linocuts that are dense with symbols and signs of community. Smillie engages with Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness through an array of works including an essay, a textile banner, and a series of watercolor, gouache, and ink paintings of the book’s various covers. In one piece titled A Slow and Arduous Progression (2016), Smillie annotates a page from Le Guin’s 1988 revision of her 1976 essay Is Gender Necessary? Le Guin places her update, titled “Redux,” alongside the original essay in a second column on the same page, to which Smillie adds her handwritten annotations. The print presents three layers and moments of grappling with a single text, which, rather than being something stable, becomes especially elastic.

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s three-eyed erotic femmes take up colorful space in her mixed-media works, surrounded by layered landscapes and starscapes. Oliveira’s The Goddess is Born in a Column of Fire (2018) is made out of hand-dyed cotton and velvet with Swarovski crystals, while Tuesday Smillie’s banner Reflecting Light (2018) is composed of textile, oil paint, sequins, and embroidery floss. These works represent richness, both compositionally and materially. *

These artists reclaim space for Black and brown femmes, Kafer also describes how, in ableist constructions of the starkly against historical and current constructs that fore- world, a future with disability is a future no one wants. ground identities of power.

I think about this as I lay in bed. Hanging above me is Romily * Alice Walden’s Notes From The Underlands: A Manifesto for a Queer Future. The poster proclaims a queer future as an Some of us bend time. accessible one, an interdependent one, one that is messy, limp, lame and leaky, one that centers the most vulnerable Queer folks experience heteronormative milestones (mar- and prioritizes care, an inclusive future. riage, owning a home, children) later, differently, or not at all. Many of us have unsubscribed from prescribed expecta- I look at it often. tions, instead embracing more fluid ways of moving through the world. In Jack Halberstam’s words, writing in In a Queer * Time and Place (2005), queerness is an outcome of strange temporalities.

Our imaginings take place between the walls of a single bedroom, on entire planets, and in spaces that upend or ignore My undocumentedness also twists time; constant consider- differences between the two. ation of protections and permissions lingers between periods of application and authorization.

In this exhibition and in many experiences of queer embodiment, structures of space bend and break. Scale scrambles.

My body, too, shapes temporality. As for many, periods of The mundane becomes cosmic and the cosmic, mundane, sickness shake future planning. My impulses for calendars as in Oliveira’s two-channel animation A Vision of the Leiand control are undermined by a body on its own timeline. sure-Dome (2019), which depicts a color-saturated, otherworldly landscape full of people lounging.

This has been characterized by scholars and activists including Alison Kafer, who, in her book Feminist, Queer, Crip Leisure as liberation (protest, even) is also part of the uto(2013), describes crip time as flex time not just expanded pian world of Sultana’s Dream, which begins sleepily and but exploded, necessitating a reimagining of what can and liminally: One evening I was lounging in an easy chair in my should happen. bedroom and thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood. I am not sure whether I dozed off or not. In Ganesh’s Kafer writes about how illness and disability cause time to linocut adaptation, the reclining figure dozes with one foot slow, or to be experienced in quick bursts, how they can lead up, as wisps of dreams leave or enter through the open winto feelings of asynchrony or temporal dissonance . . . dow.

These shifts in timing and pacing can of necessity and by design lead to departures from ‘straight’ time.

*

Whether they’re cartoonish or sinister, aliens are a constant In her essay “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” (2017), Ellen in science fiction. The artists in Even there, there are stars Samuel writes, crip time is time travel. destabilize this trope, questioning who is an alien and why, asking: under whose gaze is something unfamiliar (scary, * even)? DeJesus Moleski’s figures, for one, could be seen as alien, with their many eyes and not-fully-human bodies, but The artists in Even there, there are stars queer straight time, perhaps in her world they are the norm. tangling past, future, and present.

For me this trope also conjures the nativist term illegal alien, In The Goddess is Born in a Column of Fire (2019), Oliveira’s which has been weaponized against undocumented and reftwo-headed goddess looks forward and back simultane- ugee bodies. During one of the Democratic presidential deously. In DeJesus Moleski’s Alarm Clock (2019), a sensual, bates, the former vice president referred to undocumented 22

aliens before twitching to undocumented people. While the another tree. Outside, the sirens have slowed and, for a few term is rooted in racist tactics of othering, I have been think- weeks this summer, all we heard was fireworks. Museums and galleries all shut, then slowly reopened. ing of the possibilities of its reclamation.

As I write this, more than 220,000 are dead in the United States from the virus and even more face hospitalization, Let’s be aliens. Let’s be foreign to the nation-state and its long-term complications, and grief. The numbers are increasing and undercounted, spiked by preventable incomunderpinnings; let’s be others to be feared. petence and compounded inequities. I’m restless watching Let’s join these artists in expanding and shuffling time, lan- the reckless and irresponsible endanger already vulnerable guage, and lineage. Let’s make queer sense of past texts and communities with selfishness and conspiracy. images, create new ones that we may see ourselves in, and The pandemic continued and continues, along with the state future-build together. violence against Black bodies and daily protests for justice.

Smillie concludes her reflections on The Left Hand of Dark- Tear gas, non-indictment, chokehold. Names are incantations of mourning and rage: Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, ness like so: Nina Pop. To build another world, we must first be brave enough to imagine how that world could be, knowing we will make pro- * found mistakes in the process. The potential for radical action, and for radical transformation is embedded in how we Signs point to more loss and upheaval to come. The world is bound to have been flipped and turned back and around proceed as our failure becomes clear. more than once by the time this is printed. I’ve been thinking about how our warped experience of time these last * months can further open us to futures like those imagI build future collaboratively and communally, sometimes ined by the artists in Even there, there are stars. Perhaps with reams of white paper and too many words. My future is the simultaneous dizziness and fog of pandemic makes at my kitchen table, sturdy despite its shaky legs, between the potential of fluidity clearer, and even more necessary. pink bed sheets, in poems, and, sometimes, in essays.

Through all this, conjuring and sustaining legacies of care and mutual aid has felt grounding—like a kind of futurity it* self. Queer and trans communities insist on our survival, but beyond that, we insist on our abundance and our pleaWhat is your future building? sure, not unlike the universes of the exhibition. We continue to show up and gather in new ways. Sometimes, in virtual Who are we taking with us? rooms of video rectangles—my frame is often a pink corner, behind me a shelf holding a potted, dotted Hypoestes (also Where? pink) and a neat acrylic painting by a friend titled Post Scarcity—I feel possibility. I feel like I am building another, better Here? world. * * Afterword With deep gratitude to Jillian Steinhauer, A.L. Rickard, Lilly October 2020 Hern-Fondation, Josephine Heston, the entire team at CUE This essay was started in February and completed in May. Art Foundation and the Art Critic Mentoring Program/AICA Now, parts feel like relics. I am still—here, within my walls. USA, Malcolm, Jan-Henry Gray, Romily Alice Walden, and all The constellation of our living room furniture has shifted of the queer and trans artists and writers in this exhibition and and shifted. I now write this looking out another window, at beyond—I’m so glad to be creating futures with all you stars. *

This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.

Born in Medellín, Colombia, danilo machado is a poet, curator, and critic on occupied land interested in language’s potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power. A 2020-21 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, their writing has been featured in Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, ArtCritical, TAYO Literary Magazine, among others. A Producer of Public Programs at the Brooklyn Museum, danilo is also the curator of the exhibitions Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text (Franklin Street Works, 2019-20) and the upcoming support structures, featuring the 2019-20 cohort of Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency. danilo is the co-founder and co-curator of the reading series Maracuyá Peach and the chapbook/broadside fundraiser already felt: poems in revolt & bounty. They are working to show up with care for their communities.

Mentor Jillian Steinhauer is a journalist focused on art and politics. Her work appears in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and other publications. She’s a recipient of a 2019 Arts Writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital, and won the 2014 Best Art Reporting Award from the US chapter of the International Association of Art Critics for her work at Hyperallergic, where she was formerly a senior editor. She curated In the Presence of Absence, an exhibition about grief, at EFA Project Space in spring 2019. Jillian received her MA from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program in NYU’s journalism school.

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Notes from “No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars…” by Allie/A.L. Rickard 1. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (New York: Saga Press, 1972), 236.

2. Walidah Imarisha, “Introduction” in Octavia’a Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, editors adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha (Oakland: AK Press, 2015), 4.

Notes from “There’s a better life, and you dream about it, don’t you?”

by Emily Oliveira 1. Dolly Parton, 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, (Nashville: RCA Records, 1980).

2. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, (New York: FawcettCrest, 1976), 683.

3. T. J. Erdmann, & P. M. Block, “Seventh Season,” in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, (New York: Pocket Books, 2000), 713.

4. R. W. Kimmerer, “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place,” In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 251.

5. Larry Kramer, The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions, (New York: Calamus Press, 1977), 38.

6. Gaudenzio Ragazzi, “The Crane, Ariadne’s thread, labyrinth and dance,” Le Origini della Danza, October 18, 2019. Accessed on November 12, 2020, https://danzadelleorigini.com/2019/04/01/the-craneariadnes-thread-labyrinth-and-dance/.

7. Caity Weaver, “What Is Glitter?,” New York Times, December 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/style/glitter-factory. html.

8. Kramer, The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions, 11.

9. Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, 683.

Notes from “Radical Imagination, Autocritique and Accountability: Ursula K. Le Guin’s construction of Gethen and the modeling of creative practice as a radical tool” by Tuesday Smillie *An earlier version of this essay, titled “Radical Imagination and The Left Hand of Darkness,” was published in Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology 12 (2017). That essay grew out of a presentation made at the 2016 Tiptree Symposium hosted by University of Oregon, discussing both the concepts engaged here as well as my then still in progress body of artwork: Reflecting Light into The Unshadow (2012-18), which visually and conceptually engages much of what is discussed here.

Acknowledgment: Deep gratitude to Alexis Lothian for nurturing and facilitating the growth of this essay through multiple stages of development.

1. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, (New York: Ace, 2019).

2. Emi Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” in Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, ed. Rory Dicker, Alison Piepmeier, and Katha Pollitt (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), 244-259. Activist and rogue intellectual Emi Koyama defines transfeminism at its core as “a movement by and for trans women who view their liberation to be intrinsically linked to the liberation of all women and beyond.” While I appreciate the broad reaching inclusivity of Koyama’s statement, I want to underscore that to achieve “the liberation of all women and beyond” we must recognize the layering of various systems of power and prioritize the safety and wellbeing of those most vulnerable to state and social violence, in both concrete and abstract forms.

3. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Wood, (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), 158, 160.

4. Charlie Jane Anders, “Afterword by Charlie Jane Anders ,” in The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin (New York: Ace, 2019), 336-8.

Charlie Jane Anders eloquently discusses Ai’s misogyny.

5. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 8, 12-13.

6. Le Guin, “The Nineteenth Day,” “Estraven the Traitor,” and “On Time and Darkness,” in The Left Hand of Darkness, 45-48, 132-138, 174-176.

7. Le Guin discusses the question of pronoun use extensively in the analytic essay “Is Gender Necessary? Redux.” Her positioning on the use of pronouns pivots over time and is explored later in this essay.

8. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 95-103.

9. Puberty and menopause both present hormonal and physiological transitions that bear some resemblance to kemmer.

10. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 95-103.

11. Ibid., 96.

12. It should be noted that this spectrum of variation was not widely acknowledged in the West during the 1960s, though the exclusion may feel glaring to readers today.

13. Le Guin would later recognize and apologize for her insistence on heterosexuality. Her acknowledgement is explored later in this essay.

14. Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2004). Like the acknowledgement of biological variations among humans, Le Guin’s erasure of homosexuality aligns with the erasure produced throughout dominant Western scientific discourse of the 1960s.

15. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

16. Joanna Russ, “The Image of Women in Science Fiction,” in Images of Women in Fiction; Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon, (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973), 90. A feminist and science fiction writer, Russ critiqued the novel’s lack of engagement with child-rearing and family structure.

17. Le Guin makes a similarly structured argument in “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” in response to early criticism of the novel by second wave feminists including Russ. This and other reassessments of her own work are discussed in depth in the following section.

18. Le Guin’s post-racial vantage sits easily in a world with minimal racial differentiation. Le Guin, however, is a storyteller from Earth, where the histories of contact between different races and distinct cultures are rife with violence and exploitation. Furthermore, the moments where those cultural differences include differing configurations of gender often result in targeted violence. European colonial encounters with various “third gender” identities present a testament to the interweaving of colonial conquest, control, and gendercide. For a rigorously researched account of British attempts to eliminate Hijra in India, see: Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850-1900, (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

For a queer analysis of Spanish gendercide within the American Indian tribes of what would become California, see: Deborah A. Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1–2 (2010). Academic interest in this subject matter is relatively recent, though Alfred Louis Kroeber, Le Guin’s father, was an American Indian anthropologist, and her development of the Ekumen (the inter-planetary trade alliance that has sent Ai to Gethen seeking the planet’s participation) deliberately runs counter to the exploitative colonial narratives of Earth. The similarities and differences in the meeting of worlds in The Left Hand of Darkness, the persisting colonial histories of Earth, and Le Guin’s deliberate focus on conflicting gendered norms beg further exploration.

19. The act of centering Black and brown protagonists and societies is one that Le Guin repeats throughout her oeuvre. Readers of color have discussed the meaningful impact of this gesture. April Baer, “Changing The Container: How Le Guin Shaped Representation In Sci Fi,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, June 12, 2018, accessed October 5, 2019, https://www.opb.org/artsandlife/article/ursula-le-guin-raceethnicity-politics/.

20. Ursula K Le Guin, “Winter’s King,” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 85-108; Ursula K Le Guin, “Coming of Age in Karhide,” in The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories (New York, Perennial, 2003), 1-22.

21. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux.”

22. Le Guin, “Winter’s King.”

23. Le Guin, “Coming of Age in Karhide,” 2-3. This can be seen in Sov Thade Tage em Ereb, the story’s narrator, discussion about the “Aliens,” their strangeness and their familiarity.

24. This practice of reengagement and thoughtful revision can be seen throughout the arch of Le Guin’s career. For a broader look at the ways that Le Guin’s evolving politic impacts her writing of the worlds that occupy the same universe as Gethen see: Alexis Lothian, “Grinding Axess and Balancing Oppositions: The Transformation of Feminism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Science Fiction,” Extrapolation 47, no.3 (Winter 2006): 380-395.

25. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux.”

26. Joanna Russ, “The Image of Women in Science Fiction;” Donna R. White, Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Critics (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999). White provides a helpful outline of the critical debate surrounding The Left Hand of Darkness, tracing the nuances of criticism from various writers and reviewers.

27. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” 156.

28. Ibid., 169.

29. Ibid.

30. White, Dancing with Dragons, 47.

31. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” 169-170.

32. Ibid., 169.

33. Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith, “Again, The Left Hand of Darkness: Androgyny or Homophobia?,” in Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, ed. Donald Palumbo (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 221-231.

34. Le Guin, “Coming of Age in Karhide.”

35. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 279-281.

CUE Art Foundation is a visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists, writers, and audiences with sustaining, meaningful experiences and resources. CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all disciplines.

This exhibition is a winning selection from the 2019-20 Open Call for Solo Exhibitions. The proposal was unanimously selected by a panel comprised of curator Marcela Guerrero, artist and critic David Humphrey, curator Michelle Yun, and curator Daniel J Sander. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition. We are honored to work with Daniel J Sander as the mentor to Allie/A.L. Rickard.

CUE Art Foundation's programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals.

MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Anholt Services (USA), Inc. Aon PLC Chubb Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP Clifford Chance Compass Group Management LLC Merrill Corporation The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation Wilhelm Family Foundation New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

ADVISORY COUNCIL

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

STAFF

Polly Apfelbaum Katie Cercone Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass Sharon Lockhart Juan Sánchez Lilly Wei Andrea Zittel Irving Sandler (in memoriam)

Theodore S. Berger Kate Buchanan Vernon Church Marcy Cohen Blake Horn Thomas K.Y. Hsu Steffani Jemison John S. Kiely Vivian Kuan Rachel Maniatis Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen Lilly Wei Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus

Corina Larkin Executive Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director Lilly Hern-Fondation Programs Director Sharmistha Ray Development Manager Josephine Heston Programs Associate

All artwork and text copyright the artists and authors.

Cover image: Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, Even there, there are stars (2020).

Catalogue design by Lilly Hern-Fondation.