Salmon-costumed

One more…the review hosted by LSE blogs:

In Underflows, Cleo Wölfle Hazard invites us into the hydrological, cultural and epistemological dynamics of both public imaginaries of water and water-related networks as well as the researcher relationships and ‘straight science’ norms that excise affect, care and kinship from the processes of knowledge production and communication. In doing so, he unpacks the settler-colonial land relations that shape water imaginaries and, by extension, water governance throughout the increasingly drought-stricken, dammed and extracted west coast of the US, tying in critiques and analysis with a queer and trans orientation to the world.

Or, to put it less flatteringly, attaching the absurd and decadent pseudo-politics of “trans” to a real and terrible ecological disaster. There is plenty to say about the drought-stricken, dammed and extracted western US (the reviewer errs in saying west coast, because the damming is mostly inland), but a connection to “a queer and trans orientation to the world” is decidedly not one of them.

Through the story of a salmon-costumed confessional performance art project undertaken by the author and his collaborator and partner July Hazard, we glimpse what even the ‘straight’ scientists working within the disciplinary bounds and normative scripts of their field might gain from ‘queering’ or ‘transing’ science in a way that makes room for affect, care and interspecies kinship.

Do we though? Do we glimpse that? Somehow I doubt it.

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