This morning I was reading Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez. She writes so movingly about Jeanne Córdova, a butch Chicana Los-Angeles-based writer and organizer who passed some years back, a forebear to Raquel. She writes about butch intergenerational love, how the previous generation of queers enabled us to live, and how we forget them at our own peril. Reading Raquel reading Jeanne, Raquel writing through Jeanne's writing, Raquel living through Jeanne's living is what it means to forge lineages, not just inherit them, to fashion them out of the mud and the tears and the blood and the joys, the loss and the beauties.
Raquel writes, "...as [Jeanne] neared her fortieth year and saw all the ways the movement was moving right along, with new blood coming to tend the outgrowth from the seeds of change she had helped to plant in the early seventies, it made sense for her to interrogate her truer callings."
In the midst of 2020 and the pandemic, I shifted my relationship with the language justice organizing that had been a huge part of my life for fifteen years. I decided I'd try to make a way into what felt like a "truer calling" of ancestral work, even though it felt scary and overwhelming, but also joyful and crucial.
So here I am. Since The Unsettlements: Dad in 2019 at Lawndale Art Center, I had an idea I wanted to work with motherhood and femininity. Over the last years of writing poems, my conception of lineage has shifted, both blood and genetic connection and into other kinds of queer and artistic lineages.
And now, I have the good news that I will be in residence this fall at Artpace in San Antonio to work on The Unsettlements: Moms with my birth mother, Claire D. Pluecker (on the right in the pic above with my kid, Elena), and with my dyke mom, Linda L. Anderson (in the pic on the left above next to yrs truly).
The work is artistic research into the lineage and life of my birth mom and also the lesbian feminist and labor organizing and life of my dyke mom. What we pass down, what we retain, what we lose, what we recover, what we destroy, what we disassemble. And my white queer, non-binary self is in there too (somehow, eek). The lines of research with both moms are happening at the same time, as I am interested in how these two women and their very different meanings and materials speak to one another, how they clash, how they conflict, and how they combine within me. In that process, I am attempting to consider the legacies of white supremacy and the wonders of queerness and femininity in the same space and time. An attempt to dismantle whiteness and embody a generationally-inherited queerness, tinged with struggles around “mental” health and accessing joy. I'm full of emotions, joyful and scared and very grateful for Artpace's support, and that seems like the right mix.
I wanted to share the good news. I also watched this video on Youtube this morning, with Jonathan Van Ness and Alok, and an audience member suggested we inhale self-worth and exhale doubt. So *inhale* *exhale* here goes a little celebration.
I'd love to hear your news as well if you feel like connecting and have the time and space for it.