Kristen Stone's "Queeragripoetics" (now with last three words!!)
by Joyelle McSweeney on Oct.31, 2011
[What follows is prose and photographs by Kristen Stone, an artist who locates her work in the genre of queeragripoetics. Visit her tumblr here; Kristen’s text and images below]
1. The heat rises in wet slaps off the crumpled pavement. The cow was dead by the side of the road.. The camera(phone) allows a digital empathy I could not feel crouching at the asphalt edge by a carcass becoming foul.
2. Moving the chicken nursery one was crushed under the house. Dangerous architecture. We laid her body, still limp, in the forest under a pile of Spanish moss.
3. Sometimes they just die. The placenta partially absorbs them, but after the mama passes the afterbirth I pick through it. These I keep because the kids like to look at them. It’s educational.
4. maureen has blood on her hands and i think about kissing her. it’s a hot beautiful september day, the sharp blue sky and shimmering green.brown of dirt and grass. when the bodies are laid out on the table and we are cutting around the asshole she will bust the intestine by accident and have shit on her hands.the bad smell of yellow-brown waste. // he looks up at us, raises his head. this is not the random discharge of the nervous system, the spastic flapping. but intentional. can a chicken have intention? he’s not dead. he does not want to, but knows he will. maureen cuts again and this time the blood rushes out in a fine red arc. jasmine’s favorite part is plucking, hanging the limp body in hot water, the animal smell the feathers release, pulling out in handfuls the small furry ones from the breast and under the wings. individually the long ones from the ends of the wings and tail.
As a child, I wanted to live Little House on the Prairie. Now, I am part of the new agrarian/young farmer movement which is committed to localizing and liberating food systems, the ethical treatment of animals, and knowing the origin story of food. Far from the clean sweep of the prairie as described by Laura Ingalls, (the false emptiness) (the political and economic forces behind the “opening of the West”), my actual rural experiences have been contingent, ethically fraught, uncertain, queer, disturbing, gross—assemblages of people and animals touching in unexpected, sometimes excessive, ways. shit and piles of blue-gray viscera; genderqueer goat behavior; the always-contested decisions about who eats what (whom), who dies.
October 31st, 2011 on 8:15 pm
I love it! You’re a real writer. Favorite: “Part of the work of creating/cultivating in postmodernity is to re-make intimacy as something that crosses geography, species, time.”
October 31st, 2011 on 11:31 pm
…breeding, eating, horror.
(last three words)(truncated!)
November 1st, 2011 on 12:34 am
I hope what I’m reading is the ‘future’ of queer writing!
November 1st, 2011 on 3:09 am
cripes this is great. i really love the juxtaposition of contemporary queer agricultural experience with laura ingalls wilder – YES.
November 1st, 2011 on 2:24 pm
So sorry, Kristen– cut and paste error– last three words restored! JM
November 1st, 2011 on 2:26 pm
Another aspect of LHOTP: The TV show. The perms. The synthetic wardrobes. The plastic-looking wigs. The pancake makeup. And then they blow up the town! Wild!
November 1st, 2011 on 2:57 pm
[…] on Nov.01, 2011, under Uncategorized [I see so many webby and glitchy potentials running between Kristen Stone's Queeragripoetics and my ideas about Bug Time that I'm posting my paper on Bug Time here. Thanks, Kristen, for your […]
November 1st, 2011 on 10:34 pm
there’s also this really quietly beautiful book about LHOTP, the wilder life; the author tries to reconcile the tv show, the books, memory and geography. it is a map of failures, all the glitches of wanting-to-feel and imaginary nostalgia:the intense longing for a narrative that ultimately falls apart. AND it’s full of the midwest (ohmyheart)
[also: thank you! i feel like such a montevidayo fan girl, and seeing my photos/words here it’s like being onstage with (betraying my youth) hanson or something]
November 3rd, 2011 on 12:24 am
Beautiful!