paisaqueerdramaturgy

You are walking with your back turned, into a sparse and open [[chaparral]] forest. [[Golden]] with [[thirst]]. You are an angel of the [[damned]], born the way a [[river->water]] cuts through the body.

"Urination, adequately eroticized in advance, can be like coming. No, not like coming. It can be coming, the feeling of an [[orgasm->sacred]] going on and on, controllable and extendable in a way that no other orgasm can be. It can be filth or a [[cleansing flood->water]]," - Joseph W. Bean, *(link: "LeatherSex: A Guide for the Curious Outsider and the Serious Player")[(goto-url: 'http://wonder-woman.info/ds/Leathersex%20-%20Joseph%20Bean.pdf')]*

"Marero" by Roy G. Guzmán <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/7fa25b357fa413b22f21f2014bd0657c/89780ab2c2863be0-6b/s1280x1920/3bb564ea0eac34fe4a8176c5d83c2e505bb196b4.png"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/7318856c23ded35ce4b1c20cccae2413/89780ab2c2863be0-45/s1280x1920/c5208e5cff9af9d6788441e17d6498d0ee49dfe0.png"> [[red]] [[blue]] [[green]]

Around you is all scrubland and hot light and walnut woodlands, fields of lilac, mountain mahogany, sage, toyon and sumac. The skin at the end of your nose is so dry that a bead of sweat trickling down from your scalp meets your nostril and [[stings]]. You wander, sweat pooling at your chest, with an indomitable [[thirst]]. You retrace your steps, let your body spill into the [[land]]. The Tongva people, the traditional caretakers of Tovaangar (Los Angeles Basin, So. Channel Islands) (link: "relate to maps as stories")[(goto-url: 'http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=4942348fa8bd427fae02f7e020e98764')] that transpose all manner of environmental factors into the substance of the map, factors including wetlands, [[ceremony->Golden]], kinship networks. A story can have many different [[centers]] depending on where you are standing. A story can be [[centerless->blue]].

It [[hurts so good->leather]] to love him. You love the blush affirmation of his blood cells rising underneath his skin. Greeting you, wanting you, small fish feeding at the surface. What you give him, he gives you back, and like this, you both make up your own language to love each other. He's rubbing your fingernails in gentle, open circles on your back and now he's brushing his teeth. He looks away from you for a moment and you've started crying, you don't know why. Something about his mouth, the light, a sound that reminded you of something you sang in the 90's, you don't know. He doesn't press you, just looks over with a warm, melted honey look in his eye. *Baby*, he calls you after you've left him, his legs spread and dark and wet in the [[center->centers]]. Like you're the most precious thing in the world. Like he's the most eager little creature for your affection.

Today I believe in the possibility of love, that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions. Frantz Fanon The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. Che Guevara Love . . . is an important source of empowerment when we struggle to confront issues of sex, race, and class. bell hooks To reoccupy Aztlán, the oppressed hallucinate — and that practice has no borders. Laura Pérez from the epigraph of "Love as a Hermeneutics of Social Change, a Decolonizing *Movida*" by Chela Sandoval in *(link: "Methodology of the Oppressed")[(goto-url: 'https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/sandoval_method_oppressed.pdf')]* (text-color: #e61919)[[red]] (text-color: #197fe6)[[blue]] (text-color: #19e619)[[green]]

"When I was a kid, I fantasized about this moment. What would it be like to give myself to someone? Like a [[warrior->centers]] laying my body on the line. Besides the warning, besides the fear. A [[ceremony->Golden]]. My skin, burning against yours. [[Burning->red]], [[burning->red]]." "Cuando era niño fantaseaba con este momento. ¿Cómo sería entregarme a alguien? Como un guerrerro que pone mi cuerpo en la línea. Además de la advertencia, además del miedo. Una ceremonia. Mi piel arde contra la tuya. Ardiendo, ardiendo." - Yosimar Reyes, "Natural"

I am writing this in my apartment in traditional, ancestral, and contemporary homelands of Dakota and Anishanaabe people, not too far from Bdoté. I most often call where I live South Minneapolis. This is where I eat, sleep, read, fuck, sob, and cast off the [[dry->chaparral]] husks of my former selves. Let's talk now about [[power]].

You pull up your shirt and he kisses your breasts, your stomach rippling against the crest of his chin. How can you be closer? How can you merge your [[waters->water]]? You know he feels all of you when his perfect eyebrows come frayed from their choreographed arch, like [[brush->chaparral]] in the dry wind. "We are sensual beings, in all forms and flavors. Even the sexual moments we share with those on the [['downlow'->thirst]], we find love and positivity there, and we acknowledge the fact that these secretive moments are [[taboo->Golden]] because of an oppressive morality that has decimated humans for decades. Sex positivity grounded in mindfulness and consent. We are wiser than this world gives us credit for. We are powerful and plentiful. We are forever." - Dorian Wood

Selections from the poem "The First Water Is the Body" by Natalie Diaz in *Postcolonial Love Poem* "This is not juxtaposition. [[Body->land]] and water are not *two unlike things* - they are more than *close together* or *side by side*. They are *same* - body, being, energy, prayer, current, motion, medicine. The body is beyond six senses. Is sensual. An ecstatic state of energy, always on the verge of praying, or entering any river of movement. Energy is a moving river moving my moving body." "A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in a bed. It can make you good. It has a head. It remembers everything." "If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, if the very shape of my throat, of my thighs is for wetness, how can I say who I am if the river is gone? What does 'Aha Makav mean if the river is emptied to the skeleton of its fish and the miniature sand dunes of its dry silten beds? If the river is a ghost, am I? Unsoothable [[thirst]] is one type of haunting."

(click: "fuck")[Your finger is wet.] Where the fuck is non-western queer leather subculture? Where the fuck is queer leather subculture that explicitly deals with [[colonialism]] and leather? (click: "research")[Your [[hands]] paint prayers into ether.] I research and I hit a wall. (click: "over")[Like the Creator divining bodies from mud.] I research over and over again and I hit a wall. Let me tell you about [[me]].

On both sides of my family, I am Brahmin - high caste Hindus who have historically oppressed and participated in physical, systemic, and epistemic violence against lower caste people. One of the largest communities in India is Chamar, leatherworking people. They are "Scheduled Caste" which also means Dalit, which also means people who have been historically disenfranchised and oppressed i.e. "untouchable". In the history of tanning (the process by which skins are treated to produce leather) - the practice was considered so "noxious" and foul-smelling a trade that it was relegated ot the outskirts of town. Ancient tanners soaked animal skins in water to soften them. Skin was soaked in [[urine->Golden]] to remove hair or it was allowed to putrify for months and dropped in a salt solution. Dung was also used, in a process called "bating" (softening) i.e. pounding dung into skin, or soaking skin a solution of animal brains. In 1840, chromium solution was proved to be useful in the tanning process. This is now regarded the most effective tanning agent. Chromium can cause serious skin irritation, and serious protective measures are rarely taken in South Asian tanneries. India is the 5th largest exporter of leather goods. Between 2015 and 2016, India exported (link: "5.92 billion in leather and leather goods")[(goto-url: 'https://undark.org/2017/02/21/leather-tanning-bangladesh-india/#:~:text=At%20a%20tannery%20near%20Vaniyambadi,at%20Indias%20Kolkata%20Leather%20Complex.')], with 14% going to the [[United States->land]].

"Colonialism is defined as 'control by one power over a dependent area or people.' In practice, colonialism is when one country violently invades and takes control of another country, claims the land as its own, and sends people — 'settlers' — to live on that land." - Jamila Osman, "Colonialism Explained" (link: "x")[(goto-url: 'https://www.teenvogue.com/story/colonialism-explained')] "Settler colonialism is a global and transnational phenomenon, and as much a thing of the past as a thing of the present. There is no such thing as neo-settler colonialism or post-settler colonialism because settler colonialism is a resilient formation that rarely ends. Not all migrants are settlers; as Patrick Wolfe has noted, settlers come to stay. They are founders of political orders who carry with them a distinct sovereign capacity. And settler colonialism is not colonialism: settlers want Indigenous people to vanish (but can make use of their labour before they are made to disappear). Sometimes settler colonial forms operate within colonial ones, sometimes they subvert them, sometimes they replace them. But even if colonialism and settler colonialism interpenetrate and overlap, they remain separate as they co-define each other. Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini, 2010.

"Consensual S/M (the collective organization of fetishism) insists on exhibiting the 'primitive' (slave, baby, woman) as a *character* in the historical time of modernity. S/M performs the "primitive irrational" as a dramatic script; a theatrical, communal performance in the heart of [[Western->colonialism]] reason. The paraphernalia of S/M (boots, whips, chains, uniforms) is the paraphernalia of state power, public punishment converted to private pleasure. S/M plays social [[power]] backward, visibly and outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy, or alienation of the body, placing these ideas at the center of Western reason. S/M thus reveals the imperial logic of individualism and refuses it as fate, even though it does not finally step outside the enchantment of its own magic circle. Hence the paradox of S/M. On one hand, S/M parades a slavish obedience to conventions of power. In its reverence to formal ritual, it is the most ceremonial and decorous of practices. S/M is high theater: 'beautifully suited to symbolism.' As theater, S/M borrows its decor, props and costumery (bonds, chains, ropes, blindfolds) and its scenes (bedrooms, kitchens, dungeons, convents, prisons, empire) from the everyday cultures of power. At the same time, with its exaggerated emphasis on costumery, script and scene, S/M reveals that social order is unnatural, scripted and invented." - Anne McClintock, *(link: "Imperial Leather")[(goto-url: 'https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/mcclintock_imperial-leather.pdf')]*

<img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/d7cc6eff5584fe4161cc348fe428871d/e67f0efac6faee10-ab/s1280x1920/c22953a334855d212eaa4aafbed0f182a3ec9016.png"> <img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/529da2e155f44528b15baa72f5bc93b5/e67f0efac6faee10-12/s1280x1920/7a985aadb60438e3bfd2c617cfd60af64dfdbe25.png"> [[o->hands]]

This is my most [[sacred]] space. (click: "where")[we anoint one another] where [[you're->land]] (click: "with")[with our devotion] always with (click: "always")[waves of piss lapping at our feet] [[me]]

<img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/12620f521d72e71f7f71152f902e9afd/e67f0efac6faee10-c0/s1280x1920/8570ad41979bbc3bfb2a8fe908473a210d52513b.png"> [[o->hands]] [[o->chaparral]]

(click: "clench")[dig] You clench (click: "purse")[fist] You unclench You purse your fingers into the shape of a bird's mouth (click: "finger")[claw] You twirl his hair around your finger. You [[anoint->sacred]] him in your [[waters->water]].

You come [[home->green]] to your people. It smells like ashes, New Wave, silk sky of [[violet->red]]. You take into your mouth more than you can swallow. You take it [[all->centers]].