Flunderows
Oh hey, the queer rivers book is published by my neighbors at the University of Washington.
A snip at $30 for the paperback.
Rivers host vibrant multispecies communities in their waters and along their banks, and, according to queer-trans-feminist river scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazard, their future vitality requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty, and dynamism. At the intersection of river sciences, queer and trans theory, and environmental justice, Underflows explores river cultures and politics at five sites of water conflict and restoration in California, Oregon, and Washington.
What intersection is that exactly? In what way do river sciences and trans theory intersect? For that matter what is “trans theory”?
The politics of rivers in the west is in fact both important and interesting. There’s a lot of real content in that subject. What it has to do with people who think they’re the opposite sex is…opaque.
Incorporating work with salmon, beaver, and floodplain recovery projects, Wölfle Hazard weaves narratives about innovative field research practices with an affectively oriented queer and trans focus on love and grief for rivers and fish. Drawing on the idea of underflows—the parts of a river’s flow that can’t be seen, the underground currents that seep through soil or rise from aquifers through cracks in bedrock—Wölfle Hazard elucidates the underflows in river cultures, sciences, and politics where Native nations and marginalized communities fight to protect rivers. The result is a deeply moving account of why rivers matter for queer and trans life, offering critical insights that point to innovative ways of doing science that disrupt settler colonialism and new visions for justice in river governance.
Yeah I don’t believe a god damn word of that. I think the result is, on the contrary, an obnoxious change of subject from something that matters to something that is utterly trivial and narcissistic. Put it in a box and bury it.
After your preceding post, I looked for it on Amazon. Only $22 on Kindle, or if you need a nice gift for someone, you can get it in hardcover for $110. Amazon lets you “look inside” but, um, no. Three readers gave it a thumbs-up but nobody actually wrote a review. Maybe they only looked at the pictures.
The first time I read that, I thought she was actually working with the salmon and the beavers. Now that would be interesting!
River health management matters for all life; the only thing ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ have to do with it is that they are making it worse by unnecessarily pissing dangerous hormones into the water table.
All along we’ve been calling the Mississippi a river, but has anyone ever thought to ask it if it identifies as a creek?
Or, even more disturbingly, a slough? Wouldn’t that be embarrassing.
Oh dear, what if all these years we’ve been genociding (ripariciding?) our waterways.
.
There aren’t a lot of books that I’ve given up on, but two that I’ve done so with recently* were both non-fiction ones in which the authors decided it was vital to inject themselves into the stories they were telling, placing themselves between me and the subject matter about which I had mistakenly thought I’d be reading. I know that there’s always going to be some degree of this with any subject, but these instances were obviously trying to be self-conciously “literary.” I found each’s approach to be intrusive and disruptive. Interestingly, after the fact, many of the critical reviews on Amazon had felt the same way about each writer’s style. There were plenty of five star reviews of each, so there were lots of people who enjoyed these books, but they both just rubbed me the wrong way, so they weren’t for me. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood or frame of mind, but a swing and a miss from one side of the page or the other. I can’t imagine how much more insufferable a book would be combining irrelevent self-centeredness, needlessly overblown vocabulary and delusional, bullshit politics. All the more frustrating if the subject matter would otherwise be important and interesting.
* The books in question were David Hoare’s Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World and Rebecca Giggs’ Fathoms: The World in the Whale.
Why does that make me think of Underoos?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underoos
Maybe appropriate given the author’s salmon-costumed forays into performance art: https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2023/salmon-costumed/