trapline feminism: follow the desire lines
10-01-20
Dear Hannah,
By the time you finish reading my first note to you, there will be regret that we agreed to handwritten notes. Evidence of not learning written language and a delay in penmanship skills until I was 12. Further bad habits reinforced by a career in carpentry. No one has ever commented on the femininity of my writing but many have asked what ten year old boy wrote my words. I can’t quite recall the context of our note writing agreement but I’m taking this opportunity to organize my thoughts with the only peer I have in our cultural studies phd cohort.
I am organizing my dissertation into three blueprint plan views, or perspectives of inquiry, to structurally queer the queens expected formatting. The “top view” (the queens view) will be organized into anticipated regulated chapters for lit review, theory, methods, so on. The veneer of a dissertation. An orthographic view. Carpenters know blueprints are the only common form of communication across building construction disciplines. Architects and structural engineers communicate with general contractors who are usually carpenters. These carpenters then communicate with plumbers, electricians, drywallers, painters, masons, safety managers, city planners, and building code inspectors. All use blueprints to translate building code into physical space.
It is most often not possible to read a blueprint by looking at a single view. To provide another perspective, I am using Shadow Feminism to structure another floor plan for my dissertation. In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam talks about shadow feminism as radical acts of passivity to turn the violence of oppressive systems back upon themselves like a funhouse mirror (queens). Using shadow feminism, my dissertation chapters will be a series of letters and obituaries documenting bodies of queer social death, building a bibliographic obituary of my (trans)gender/fluid queer subjective self. This second perspective is what carpenters and other blueprint translators call a cutting plane; a perspective “cut” through the interior of an object to give an inside view-in detail-from a specific desired standpoint.
But. Because my mind works the way it works, it is not complicated or troubled enough to provide two plan views. A third perspective provides a projection plane for a blueprint. Well planned building construction also considers Desire Lines, the invisible lines human habit and intuition carve into architecture spatially through common repetition. Desire Lines are generally overlooked until that one time you put your living room chair on the invisible path everyone “naturally” uses. This invisible and forgotten perspective is my concept of trapline feminism. Desire lines are the obscure prints I track within shadow feminism. Trapline feminism serves to trace the red thread of death binding post-humanism to our relationship with death, always close-nearby. Trapline feminism is the dirt under my fingernails, a finely honed hunting blade, a rural ethic of sorts. These notes to you will be my own desire lines--trapline feminism following a quickly disappearing track in the melting snow, chasing the relationship with the more than human, woven by sense, through sense, sensing toward.
Let us begin with listening. As a way of Seeing. About ten years ago I thought I was going deaf from operating table saws, mitre saws, circular saws, jig saws, chain saws. My ears longed for peace when they vibrated at the pitch and frequency of all those saws, drowning out external sounds like human voices. After extensive testing, an audiologist asked if I had grown up in the far north because my hearing was too pristine for my urban age. My rural ears were compensating for constant urban sound levels. The constant vibrating ache in my ears was a way of filtering out some of the unwanted sound. Simply put, I could hear too much so I stopped hearing at all.
The audiologist reminded me of a childhood in a community of subsistence farmers who hunted and trapped for food security over long Northern Saskatchewan winters. Of course, I am using academic language when I say food security. On the farm it was called “getting by” winter (read: surviving). Trapping also provided an alternative masculine economy for the folks who were on the outskirts of the plumb logging jobs with Biro Brothers logging. Women tanned hides, cleaned the blood of fresh kills, guarded family sausage recipes, made use of every scrap, and of course fed the hunters the meat they thought they alone “conquered”. Always “the help” of hunters and trappers, there was no economy for women.
When I was a young child in the 1970s, the conservation officer, mr. brooks, starched green uniform, brush cut peppered with authority, rifle strapped military style, lectured me on the impropriety of girls running around shirtless and savage. My early disregard and budding suspicion of authority (and brush cuts) enraged mr brooks, as I sped away, shirtless and savage, on my bicycle to my child=labour of clearing the broken land of roots and rocks. One day we will talk about narratives of racism-adjacent through patriarchal mechanisms of domestic slavery and child labour. For now I’m not sure when I started trapping but it was in spite and retaliation of mr brooks. It was also in part the less misogynist lone wolf trappers willing to pass their skills along to me. Looking back, I now know or suspect most of these trappers were Metis, but no one talked about those things in the 1970s. These trappers shared their skills and my own trapline feminism began to track in the snow, locating desire lines along the way, somewhere in the bush of northern Saskatchewan. The first thing these trappers taught me was how to listen without seeing and how to see without listening. These notes to you will be a cutting plane between the letters and obituaries-the chapters between chapters. Breadcrumbs on the trapline to find my way home.
-devin
