Vibrant communities of fish
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.
But there is no intersection of river sciences with queer and trans theory. Those two items don’t intersect. You might as well say Manhattan’s Riverside Drive intersects London’s Kensington High Street. It doesn’t. They’re thousands of miles apart.
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.
You what now? How did “settler colonialism” get in there?
It’s hilarious but it’s also intensely annoying, watching a boutique gender-haver try to attach xirself to the politics of indigenous people as if boutique gender were comparable to genocide and mass displacement.
Huh, I thought it was going to be about quantities of synthetic hormones getting pissed into the rivers, and what that did to the fish.
Maybe someone is taking their metaphors a little too literally?
Whereas cis-scum don’t need rivers at all; we’re a complete waste of water.
I don’t know if trans-otters are included in this perspective or not. I would imagine they should be, but how can we be sure that this writer is not blindly trapped within cis-mammalian, anthropo-normative narratives.
I’m guessing that the writer is a part of the settler colonial class, but by donning trans/queerness, and appropriating the struggles of Native communities, Hazard is “identifying out” of whiteness, just like other white guys claiming to increase “diversity” and “inclusion” by somehow identifying out of their race and sex (while remaining white males). No, I don’t know how this works, but it passes for “valid” in some circles.
Also, who the fuck puts an umlaut in “Wolfie”? That would be something I would expect in a Sokal-type hoax submission.
I’d love to see what the input was to ChatGPT to generate that gazpacho.
Wölfle (not Wölfie) is a common enough German name. There is a manufacturing company with that name.
Wölfle and Wölfie are very hard to tell apart in this font unless you big it up to like 16 or something.
Ooops. Guilty as charged. With extenuating circumstances.
Yes, these are the circumstances that did the extenuating. I’m happy to blame tiny font.
No mention of ecology or any science. This book is rubbish.
Yeah, the ‘settler-colonialist’ thing is absolutely an attempt to staple trans issues to Native American tribal struggles. This is common–I’ve commented before about how the term ‘two-spirit’ (which is sometimes represented in the alphabet soup with ‘2S” in with the LGBTQetc) is simultaneously appropriative AND imperialist (as it was created in large part by white folks looking to homogenize dozens of often unrelated native cultural practices under a single term, then used by same to ‘universalize’ the notion of trans identities and link the modern movement, entirely a Western invention, to some sort of deeper spiritual tradition).
And of course, they can’t help themselves, the poor dears–it should be ‘settler-imperialist’ (the Westward expansion under Manifest Destiny was imperialist, not colonialist, though the two are somewhat related, like, say, communism and socialism).
Hold on, there are reasonably plausible pronunciations of Wölfle as waffle and woeful. If this isn’t a hoax it damn well should be.