Queering Surrender: Expanding, Embodying, Remembering
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Queering Surrender: Expanding, Embodying, Remembering 🫀
Selected by community vote for NAVEL’s ASSEMBLIES Fall 2020 session, “Queering Surrender: Expanding, Embodying, Remembering” was born as a practice / sanctuary / gathering for queer, trans, and non-binary BIPOC to reconnect with the agency, pleasure, possibility, and bigness of our bodies.
To surrender is to give up, to give in, to allow. Queerness is a tender, passionate refusal — of straight time, linearity, binary, categorization. How do capitalism, colonialism, and cisheteronormativity inform the ways we live in, perceive, or erase our bodies?
At its core, this collective sanctuary challenged both the facilitators and the participants to reimagine what intimacy can feel like in a digital structure and format — allowing us to feel the texture of new questions, the serene embrace of a stranger through a pixelated screen, the euphoria of being both witness to and “with-ness” to bodies most often pushed to or disregarded to the margin.
Here, we allowed the newness of deconstruction to make friends with the familiar comfort of closeness, and listened to the chorus of wonder and grief and joy that emanated from that queer alchemy.
NAVEL is a non-profit cultural organization and multipurpose “test site for kinship” that empowers artists, organizers, and creative practitioners to cooperate and build in holistic, pleasurable, horizontal, and emergent ways. ASSEMBLIES is NAVEL’s platform for experimental & collaborative research, discussion, and creation to support community-led, socially-engaged and multidisciplinary learning groups for three-month sessions.
Queer Love is Spacious
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Queer Love is Spacious 🫂
How can a queer & non-binary lens or “framework”help us to better access other parts of ourselves with a greater sense of love & imagination?
"Queer Love is Spacious” was a recurring writing, thinking, and feeling workshop on Zoom focused on the ways QTBIPOC love can be rooted in & guided by a belief in spaciousness, the ceaseless ebb & flow of our own expansion, and how queerness & transness can offer a “horizon imbued with potentiality” for us all.
Drawing from the work of writer Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Buddhist philosopher Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, T. Fleischmann’s Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through and the ordained Zen priest angel Kyodo Williams, this self-authored workshop was first hosted by The Sunday Jump, a historic Filipinx open mic and performance space in Los Angeles and then by the Asian American Justice & Innovation Lab’s People’s School for Justice.
At its most spacious, this workshop offering reached 500+ people.
Grand Country | 蕫國華
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Grand Country | 蕫國華 🪞
“Grand Country | 蕫國華” examines the usage of the Chinese pronouns for “he” and “she,” which sound exactly the same when devoid of context; the slipperiness of gender as a non-binary person of the Chinese diaspora; and my grandmother, who was born with a name “typically reserved for a boy.”
It was originally performed as part of “Asian America: The Future is Now,” a two-night sold out show presented at Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles, California during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, featuring dance, movement, meditation, poetry, spiritual tools, and a healing gastronomic experience by a collective of entirely Asian American/Pacific Islander artists.
This interactive art show wove the songs of our mothers and motherlands, sung the stories of migration that live in our bodies, and sought to inspire us as a collective to stand in our ancestral power and honor the future that lives inside each of us. “Grand Country | 蕫國華” also incorporated footage taken of my grandmother writing & describing gendered pronouns in English and Mandarin, splicing together a sense of curiosity through a sonic & visual landscape that allowed the audience to time travel through the words as portals/windows to feel a sense of closeness with both the past and the future.
This poem was later performed for Netflix for an internal Pride event featuring fellow performers Alyssa Edwards, Alok Vaid-Menon, and other LGBTQIA+ artists.
