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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with ALOK.

ALOK The political and the intellectual don't hit deep enough, and I'm calling and harkening for a kind of spiritual reckoning, that spiritual reckoning is beauty. I'm asking the world are you ready to find beauty in the parts of yourself that you've marked for dead? And then in doing that process, what I promise you is that the world will be so much more beautiful. I'm still depressed. I'm still lonely, I'm still anxious. I still am self hating, all of these things, but God damn, I see the beauty. 

Ayana Young ALOK is a gender non-conforming writer and performance artist. Their distinctive style and poetic challenge to the gender binary have been internationally renowned. As a mixed-media artist Alok uses poetry, prose, comedy, performance, fashion design, and portraiture to explore themes of gender, race, trauma, belonging, and the human condition. They are the author of Femme in Public and Beyond the Gender Binary.

Well, ALOK, thank you so much for sharing some time with us here. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, I have so much respect for your work and I've been really excited about this conversation for a while. So thanks for joining us. 

ALOK Thanks so much for having me. 

Ayana Young So I'd like to begin our conversation by foregrounding the importance of moving out of the paradigm of understanding trans and queer as something that is exclusive to our bodies or gender, because while it’s been necessary to re-explain definitions to community - I think at a certain point, this overemphasis on body and gender limits us from thinking about how challenging the gender binary is for everyone, and is in service to our collective wellbeing. Much of your creations are in dedication to the many possibilities and spiritual dimensions of queer identity, and I’ve certainly been pushed to think about folks who occupy non-binary spaces as those who are creating pathways to break through rigidity, so to preface our conversation I wonder if you can share a bit about how challenging the gender binary, is not just about one’s identity alone, it is an offering that recognizes the multidimensional nature of all beings? 

ALOK Absolutely. I feel like conversations where people just want to talk about gender difference, don't inspire me as much right now as talking about spiritual transformation. But moving beyond the gender binary entails in us is reimagining, outside of a Western paradigm, that has taught us that we are just the summation of our body. There are three histories I want to offer to illustrate this point. The first is in 2012, I had the opportunity to work on the ground with the trans and intersex movement in India and while I was there, I was researching the history of the state being used to deny trans people dignity, and what I started to understand is that when the British invaded India, they actually passed legislation criminalizing trans and gender-variant people for the first time and actually legally defining trans people by their absence of genitalia. That was not a framework that existed prior to that colonial judicial legislative imagination. So we actually lose so many historic ways of imagining what gender is, because of the colonial imposition of this framework of genitals equals gender. Second, I had the opportunity to spend a couple of months working with the trans movement in South Africa, and a lot of my colleagues in South Africa would tell me that traditionally, gender transition was less about physical practice and more about going to a Sangoma or traditional healer and asking if it was okay to change their gender role. And if they got approval, then people will respect their identity, and it was seen less as what you look like, and more about your role within a social community. 

The truth is that, actually, this suturing of gender to bodies comes from 18th and 19th century European science, which comes from an explicit agenda to justify sexism and racism. So you have The Great Enlightenment, you have this idea of inalienable rights come out of the French Revolution, how then do you justify mass genocide of Indigenous peoples, enslavement, denying women autonomy and the right to vote, you begin to argue that anatomically and biologically, there are natural differences, and that the social hierarchies that you're creating are actually God's plan that's evidenced through biology. We're still haunted by this tradition and lineage of imagining people to be the summation of their body parts. And when I'm saying move beyond the gender binary, what I'm actually insisting is that we are far more tremendous, expansive, celestial than could ever be contained by a body, and that actually, some of the most powerful or inspiring Earth-shattering ways to exist in the world will never be visible, not because they're not there, but rather, because we don't yet have the tools to decipher, understand, and tabulate them. 

Ayana Young Wow, ALOK, what a way to start this conversation. Thank you so much. Yeah, and as we understand the expansive dimensions of recognizing the fluidity of our person, and move into the spiritual dimensions; I think about what it says about countries and societies, like the United States, and any settler-colonial society really, that demonstrates a tremendous amount of resistance to really begin exploring this space. Can you speak to how pervasive the gender binary is in our country, as well as what it signifies about a society’s future - if they choose to remain stuck in a very stagnant understanding of gender?

ALOK I can think of no better illustration of this right now than in 2021 there are actually over 20 states that have introduced anti-trans legislation right now, there's over 30 of these, that are trying to do things like ban teachers in Iowa from speaking about trans people in the classroom, trying to do things like ban trans people from having access to comprehensive life-affirming health care, and in fact, seeking to criminalize health practitioners for providing it. Trying to do things like banning our ability to change our identity documents, banning us from restrooms, saying that they have to have evidence of our chromosomes in order to enter the restroom is what they're doing in Indiana. And I'm thinking we're facing over 500,000 people plus who have died from the Coronavirus in this country alone. We're facing massive economic recession, people struggling with houselessness, poverty, we're facing a coordinated orchestrated backlash against the emergence of Black and Indigenous people in racial justice movements. And I began to realize this is all part of a calculation, that the gender binary works as a strategy to reorganize people's legitimate anxieties, fears, into fearing and villainizing a small vulnerable minority, rather than working together to demand the conditions that challenge the largest crises of our time, like climate apocalypse. 

So what happens, as the gender binary has been created specifically as a way to people make people more concerned about what I'm wearing outside than the fact that they're not being given economic relief, what becomes the crisis is my sartorial appearance, and not racial and economic apartheid. And that's not incidental, that's the product of a centuries-long paradigm that actually is hurting all people. And so the reason that there's so much resistance to moving beyond the gender binary is because what we're actually arguing is, no one else has the right to tell you who you are, which one, people have not understood that consent is even a framework that they're worthy of, and then second, we're saying who are you? And most people have never been able to even ask that question, because the systems that be, tried to make it impossible to ask that question, and most people only know themselves out of what they've been told that they should be. So I reframe the crisis of anti-trans violence as having actually nothing to do with trans people, it has to do with non-trans people who don't know their own embodiment, their own spiritual being outside of the costumes that they've been fitted into, predetermined without their choice.

Ayana Young Yes. What an important perspective. Yeah. Well, I want to ask you a bit about the limitations of LGBT mainstream politics, and in a post titled, “My Body Belongs to Me, Not Heteronormativity'', you write; “So far mainstream lgbt politics has not posed a challenge to heteronormativity, but has instead participated in it for legitimacy. This opinion makes it so that we have to “come out” as anything other than straight, but more insidiously it maps on to our bodies and instrumentalizes all of their parts in service of heteronormativity. What I am saying is that the only way we are taught to view our bodies is insomuch as their heteronormative reproductive capacity.” And in my mind, this also really calls us to interrogate the superficial ways that heteronormativity interacts with queerness as something that is sensational and for spectacle. What would you like to see in terms of folks talking about queerness without it being a reflection of heteronormativity? 

ALOK So the idea that LGBTQ people as an identity are a minority rehashes this heteronormative project, which imagines people to be born straight and cis and then become something else. In fact, what I would like us to move towards is saying gender and sexual diversity is a natural, intrinsic, and essential part of our species, and of our ecology. And that any imagining, that sees being trans, being intersex, being non-binary is somehow less natural than being straight or cis is heteronormative. And I really want to explain because I think a lot of people don't understand what I'm saying around how heteronormativity has mapped our own relationships to ourselves, we still only understand womanhood, as it is related to reproduction and this is actually an equation that comes once again, from 18th and 19th century white European scientists, after the French Revolution, you begin to see white women in France asked for the inalienable rights that people were so rallying around, and you'd see physicians literally make arguments like the word femme, which is woman in French, is like fetus, because women's anatomical function in the world is just to give birth. And they would say, that's why women can't go to school or vote, because it will distract vital nerve energies away from their sole role of being mothers of the nation. So this equation of making womanhood into reproduction is actually part of a long-standing historical project of capitalism and colonialism. 

Now, whenever you see gender-variant people who are actually reclaiming traditionally feminine objects, and actually wearing what people associate with womanhood, people will say, “You're not really a woman because you can't reproduce.”
And I ask where does that equation come from? So actually, what we're trying to do here is to recognize that femininity and masculinity don't have to be determined by heteronormativity. They get to be determined by you, you get to articulate what masculinity means to you, which means there are as many ways to be masculine as there are masculinities. So heteronormativity actually flattens the range of what woman, man, masculine, feminine, could be, and should be. And what we're actually arguing for then, is the proliferation of possibility and what heteronormativity also does, which really frustrates me and we see this even in queer community, is offer an incorrect assumption of what reproduction is. Heteronormativity says reproduction is just conception, is just pregnancy, is just birth. But we know as cultural workers, what helps people survive is not just the reproductive act, it's cooking, it's care work, it's cleaning, it's art, it's trauma-informed mental health practitioners, it's people who you can process grief, loneliness, and heartbreak with. It's all of these things that get cut out of a single issue framework that only defines reproduction in such a simple and simplistic and myopic way. 

So actually, what I'm arguing is that there are so many ways to create life and that actually, when we just make the creation of life about conception and pregnancy, we are losing the dynamism and the artistry of what it means to be alive and to be in community with one another. So one of the things that I find in all my historical research is queers have always been involved in caretaking and in the creation of just humane ethical society, how dare you dislodge us by saying that we are somehow not about the future, or that we're going to die out because we're not caring about the future generations, whenever, in so many ways, the things that we're birthing and creating, are making that future possible. So in the same way that I think that people are critiquing how when people say that they're pro-life, they're not actually speaking about how challenging incarceration and climate change and pollution are, those things have to be consistent. If you're going to say that you're pro-life. They're taking a single issue, narrow perspective, what I'm offering is that heteronormativity actually eclipses what the joyous work and the joyous struggle of making life actually is. And it therefore disqualifies queer and trans people from not just are legitimate, but are necessary contributions to the work of life making. 

Ayana Young Absolutely, yes, and you know, more and more, I hear movements talk about gender fluidity, non-binary, and trans identity, as being really vital to ushering us through this moment of complication - which I do agree with, and that can be a really powerful way of framing the conversation; for us to think about how this moment is calling queerness as an answer; but this also raises the question of tokenization or, just reflecting on how utilitarian our approach to understanding can be, and so I’m sitting with this thin line between celebration and tokenization, and just wondering if you see potential problems here, or if ultimately any sort of way in which folks come to queerness is net positive?

ALOK I think we're in a very perilous moment right now, where the ideas and aesthetics that are templated by visibly, gender non-conforming people are being abstracted, without the due diligence of caring for our material lives. So what I notice is that people will be speaking about gender fluidity, but that has done nothing to make it safer for people like me to exist in public, and in fact, what it actually allows is people who can be assumed traditionally in the binary, to become seen as expertise, decontextualize, with those of us who are being spat on for this, and so for me the dangers of tokenization are symbolic economies reduce me to a prop and ornament, when in fact, instead of being ornamental, visibly, gender non-conforming, transfeminine, Black, Indigenous and racialized people have to be instrumental, not ornamental. And what it means then, is that it's not just about the circulation of new ideas, of new theories, of new fashions, obviously, those things are important. But I'm also saying the circulation of resources, the circulation of responsibility, instead of making it the onus on us to be triumphant, brave, resilient, how about we move the onus to be on those who perpetuate constant violence against us to actually stop? What would it look like to take seriously the ongoing crisis of anti-trans murder and violence? 

In 2021, at the time of this interview, there have already been eight reported trans murders and it's not even been two months, last year was the most deadly year in the United States ever recorded of anti-trans violence. I'm receiving this information and this grief alongside the circulation of so many of our ideas, so many of our imaginations, and it's terrifying because it speaks to how the act was never actually about comprehension. And this is why I returned to the spirit question because the way that tokenization has worked is that it has made the political ask know us, learn our pronouns, learn our knowledge. Okay? True. But that’s surface, the next ask is know yourself, and that's the work that people won't do. They'll look at us, and that's how spectacularization works, and they'll exceptionalist us, but they won't actually say “Wait this means that I must necessarily shift the way that I conceive of my own self and my own being.” And that is the spiritual work that's not being done, and the lack of that spiritual work not being done is actually creating the conditions of violence for us, because it continually makes it for us to artfully and sartorially escape the grasp of violence, rather than for the people to stop doing violence to us. And I know that the reason they do violence to us is because they've done violence themselves first. I know that the first perpetuation of gender-based violence is to the self, it is cis men who have divine femininity who seek to destroy and obliterate that in order to be read as legitimate men. It is all people killing their own fluidity such that when they see a template in us, instead of saying, “Oh, wow, this is possible”, they have to destroy it, because our existence calls into question their own performance art. So I guess we're in a very scary moment where on the one hand, I feel gratitude and excitement that more people are having this conversation, but then I feel grief and fear and existential dread, that it's not actually creating the cultures of insulation, of protection, and of care of the people who deserve it most.

Ayana Young ALOK that was chilling, and so yeah, just thinking about the projections that people create, because of self-hatred and discomfort, it's really so important for us to understand that angle and you write: “yes i know it’s difficult to shift habit & language but this is something TGNC people are doing as well! we were not magically bestowed with these knowledges & sensibilities, we are coming into them through struggle, trying to excavate over time a more kind & gentle way to recognize & affirm ourselves & one another. heed our invitation to this work & receive it as a blessing, not an inconvenience — one that allows you to journey beyond the tedium of the visual, the fatigue of the normative, and the brutality of the assumptive. we surpass all of this — we occupy more than physical space — we transcend convention & form — we birth language & ritual — we defy & in that refusal we create.” And, this is in reference to a lot of the conversations around pronouns, but it also leads me to think about the importance of a culture that is creative and imaginative, and how our capacity for creative expression is deeply intertwined with our ability to navigate language and terminology. And, in thinking about moving forward, and what world we want to create; one where no one is attached to gender, one where queerness becomes the norm, etc. I wonder if you could speak a bit about how you’d like to see folks participate in this creation? 

ALOK Yes, this is where I'm at in my life right now, is I'm kind of exhausted by critique that's separate from creation, because I think the most incredible and important and potent forms of critique actually happen with creation, and this is what it means for me to be an artist is I could just be a scholar that learned and critique, but I'd rather fashion something else, I'd rather design something else. And what I'm finding when I facilitate creative arts workshops across the world, is that most people have been made to feel as if art is something that they can't do, that art belongs to the artists, so they say I'm not good at drawing. I'm not good at singing, I'm not good at - and first of all, I'm saying, this is less about being good, it's less about being liked, it's less about being accomplished, it's actually more about you. What I believe is that creative education and creative literacy is essential for humanity and I'm deeply concerned about how the privatization of the arts has actually made people feel as if art has to be a career and not a spiritual mode of being, and so what I find is that people have never been given permission to create, and that often in these writing workshops, I'm the first person that says you are a writer, or you are a painter, you are a singer. And what if we all are singers, painters, writers, novelists. 

I also validate the idea that survival is the ultimate act of creation in a world that has reduced us to the road of fascist arithmetic, of being a quantitative statistic, not a human soul. So we still found a way to care, love and create isn't that art? And so I teach people - decipher the art that you're already doing, recognize the artistry around you, and the everyday miracles of life around you, and create from that place. And what you find is that that is some of the most generative meaning in the world, like, that's what makes me wake up in the morning is I'm thinking, how am I going to create the world that I want to see? I'm thinking, how can I practice the way that I want people to relate to me with how I relate to other people. And every crisis for me is an opportunity for compassion is an opportunity for creation. 

But what I notice is that the sickness of this kind of regime of power is a kind of cynicism that postures itself as some sort of moral or ethical authority, the voice of reason, comes into the chat and they'll dismiss those of us who speak about the power of creativity is just idealistic, as naive, as far fetched, as foolish, because insert the severity of the present. And I always just respond with the prolific and kind of prophetic words of Gloria Anzaldua who says nothing happens in the “real world” until it happens first in the images in our own head, and I think what she was trying to articulate with that is that there's this way in which like Western secular technoscience, has made us obsessed with physical form, as if things aren't spiritual and energetic before they become physical form. I'm thinking here, about imaginal cells, when caterpillars become butterflies, they have cells that essentially are called imaginal cells that are the transformative potential that catalyze that transformation. I'm thinking a lot about that potentiality in each of us, is material to me, is substantive to me, is urgent to me. So what would it look like to create a world then that challenged the ways that cynicism and nihilism have created a vise grip around anyone who has the audacity to dream and believe and instead invest in the daydreamers, invest in the people who have the audacity to question, and hope, and ambition - I think the job of a poet is many things, but among them, it's to be a resurrector of dead things like hope. And my hope is that when I can create the best form of myself, I can give permission to other people to do the same, and that feels so much more generative to me, so much more careful in both senses of the word to me than just meager criticism.

Ayana Young I really feel uplifted by your response and I'm sure others who will be listening will feel that same glimmer of hope that may have been buried under that sense that it's not possible and to rekindle possibility I think we need that so much right now. I’d like to move our conversation into the realm of mental health and spiritual crisis, and to preface where I am coming from at this moment, I’ve been thinking about the pervasiveness of this crisis because of the capacity of our emotional immune systems, both collectively and individually, and how because of rampant disconnection, so many of us are really on the brink of mental and emotional collapse - the system sets us up to have mental breakdowns, but it provides no measure of care. For the most part, people are not willing to take the time to pay attention nor do they have the capacity to say “I am going to be here, for as long as you need, I will spend time with you as we move through this.” And so, my question is what would our mental health look like if we truly address this problem through sustaining networks of care?

ALOK I think that if we were really careful with each other, and I appreciate how this conversation is making me really understand the double valence of that word, careful, full of care with one another and cautious at the same time, there would no longer be a framework of mental health. Mental health is already counterintuitive to the goals of a mental health, a wellness movement, because it imagines the mind is somehow outside of the body and outside of the spirit, and rehearses not just a Cartesian dualism of mind and body, but also the Cartesian colonial project of erasing and denying the presence of spirit. So if we were careful with one another, I think that we would be talking about wellness, we'd be talking about love, we'd be talking about community, we wouldn't just be talking about mental or physical health, that is a grammar that has been written for the purpose of genocide, not for the purpose of gratitude or regeneration. I think what it would look like as we understand sickness and illness as a natural response to structural insubordination, Western biomedicine blames people for being sick, rather than understanding that sickness makes so much sense in a world that only values you for the summation of your body and labor, and not actually your spirit. That the real sickness is actually a kind of ideology that reduces people to rote machinery, not a kind of celestial humanity that I think that we are, and have always been. 

And so I think that what we'll begin to recognize is that the stigma is actually what is killing so many people is that people have so much shame, and so much trepidation and fear and anxiety about being alive. By which I mean, being alive means that we're constantly impacted and imprinted in by the things around us, by which I mean, trauma has always been physical and material. I think what it would look like as we understand what gets called “mental health conditions”, as not just individual privatized experiences, but actually, collective experiences, that when someone that we love is depressed, that is about all of us, because it's about a world that has allowed that to be. And so then the work then doesn't become about a kind of individual model of diagnosis and a “fixing”, it becomes about a collective struggle to create a world where loneliness isn't possible, to create a collective world where isolation is impossible. 

The way that I speak about it in my work is that strangers are potential friends. And what I mean by that is that every system of power that's been erected has made me fear, fear, and feel, that the only people I can trust are somehow blood family, which is just ridiculous. And I think the potential of queerness is that it actually taught me in a physical and embodied way, “Okay, you're being followed home right now. No one is here to protect you. So ask for help.” So I had to learn how to ask for help. I had to learn how to take random people on the street as potential best friends. I had to learn to clued people in “Hey, I'm getting harassed right now, I need you.” And this is I think the beauty of Trans and  Disability Justice is that we had to break up with the mythology of Western individualism because we needed to create economies of care in order to get through the day.

And so what I found in all of that is actually strangers are my potential friends, and what I found in all of that, is that actually, the economy of care is as big as there are people in the world. What happens if we become each other's Poké centers? I love  Pokémon, so I'm really glad to throw in that metaphor, where we become the place that we can recharge. What would a world look like where if you’re hungry outside, and technology was actually created around interdependency and you’d just say “I’m hungry” and then someone who had extra food from lunch is like “Okay, come on over”, and we trusted each other, and we fed each other. What would it look like if my space was your space if there was no possessive investment in those kinds of fictional borders, it would look like the most beautiful thing in the world. And I think that's what I'm fighting for, is for people to recognize that we actually have the potential to love everyone in the world, and that everyone is lovable, and that everyone is capable of giving love. And that that's actually the natural order of the universe. It's not this kind of competition, kind of Hobbesian, conflict is nature, way of being. I actually think that we're cooperative, and we're collaborative, and we're so careful with one another. And it's these toxic ideologies that have made us forget that our organic predisposition is that when we were children, weeping, someone heeded our call, which for me, suggests that the fundamental intrinsic subject of humanity is one of profound and routinized interdependence. So what would it look like to go back to that an interdependent world I think, would be a world in which the mental, the physical and the spiritual, were no longer separated and isolated from one another. 

Ayana Young So many emotions came up for me in that last response, just wanting to cry out of a hope of that type of world and the feeling of what would it feel like if one is feeling depressed to have that communal, connected way of us all holding it together? It's, oh, yeah, I'm excited to re-listen to that and sit with it more, and in a post called “Queerness Is Why I Live”, you write; “I learned that my lonely was our lonely. I discovered an underworld that lives beneath the things we say but do not feel. They hunt us because we feel and what is more dangerous than that in a world that anesthetizes our souls into thinking they are merely bodies? We were taught to view each other as sculptures. We spend so much time in fear that we forget how to live. But every stone still has a spirit. I swear it.” And, I’m thinking about the many different forms of loneliness that we choose from and have to negotiate with; for example, do we choose to feel lonely because we would rather suppress ourselves in the name of conformity, do we choose loneliness that comes from going against the grain...and so for listeners who are navigating between this loneliness, what advice would you offer? 

ALOK I love having you read my words, they take on a new veracity, I appreciate that. Look, I'm not going to romanticize that the life that I've chosen is not arduous and painful. It is. Every day, I'm in a public space and I'm the only person who looks like me and it's devastating, to have everyone stare at you, but not see you and to never be witnessed. As if there's just a red carpet or stage every step that I take, like I only can exist in this country, on a billboard or fashion runway, not on a fucking subway train. It's painful, exhausting, and debilitating. It's made me suffer physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But alongside that pain, I have a kind of purpose that I never had in my life. What I need people to understand is that for the first half of my life, I didn't exist. Or rather, I existed and I wasn't alive. Or rather, I was so disassociated, I was a fictional character in someone else's movie. And now, even if I'm getting laughed at on the street, the joke is on them because it is me, walking down the street, not a fantasy of someone else. It is me grieving, I wasn't able to grieve when I was younger, because I didn't have any relationship with my emotion, because the only way that I survived was numbing and desensitizing myself to every feeling such that now I cry every day. And I feel every day and I wouldn't give that up for anything. 

So this is the kind of loneliness that is actually a better form of loneliness than the other one, because I can feel it. Before I didn't even know that I was lonely and now I do, because I can feel it. And so I guess what I'm arguing, it's not that this is going to be happy, that this is going to be triumphant, that this is going to be easy, but that this is going to feel and I'd rather feel than desensitize myself because I know what desensitization leads to. It leads to what I'm alluding to in this conversation about the mass genocidal imaginations of these nation-states, where people are just expendable. And I think about why is it that there's no real ceremony around grief in the United States, and then you begin to realize the United States is institutionalized violence such that grief is antithetical to American culture. In fact, repressing grief is the American condition and we are so accustomed to mass liquidation of bodies here, because that is the inception of this cultural and imperialist project. 

So we know where desensitization leads us, I think, we forget that in every violent encounter, there's also a kind of violence that has happened spiritually to the person committing the gross act of injustice, because they have been severed from their own capacity for compassion and empathy and I know that when we are desensitized, we wreck havoc on ourselves and one another, so that loneliness is genocidal, this loneliness is something more tender. And like I said, I don't want to be a false prophet here that says, like, “Come and join this vulnerable spiritual revolution, people will love you.” It's not true, they're gonna doubt you, they're gonna isolate you. But what I can say is that the way that I keep going is I find my ancestors, you know, every new year, I write a new series of New Year's resolutions. And this year, I have that same line of someone else has felt your loneliness before, find your ancestors. And what I was framing is that ancestors are not people who necessarily we’re connected to by lineage, or blood or kinship, but are people who felt the same kind of fear and hesitation and pain and anxiety and heartbreak, that there's someone who did. 

And so I read people like James Baldwin, I read people like Susan Sontag, and Audre Lorde, and I read novels, and I think there are people out there who have felt this kind of loneliness before, so I'm not lonely anymore, because someone else felt it. And I think that's why we make art, it's to make evidence of our loneliness and to find one another and to say, the thing that you felt most impossible in, I felt it too so, therefore, it can't be impossible. And that's my daily act of miracle. I try to remember that this world says that people like me don't exist, and by people like me, of course, I mean, non-binary people, but I think more extensive, I mean, people who give a shit, people who care, people who work, who grieve, people who cry, people who are earnest people who are idealistic, the world disciplines us out of our idealism calls that childhood innocence when I actually think it's the organic way. 

I remember once, I was getting dumplings with a friend, and I was having an existential crisis. It was just a Tuesday afternoon why not? And I was looking around at everyone. And I was like, “How do people process the collateral damage of being alive? All the heartbreak, the loneliness, the disrepair?” And then my friend said to me, “Do you ever think that maybe no one else can feel what you're feeling? Maybe you just feel things more intensely.” And then I knew with a type of purpose, and vigor in me, everyone has the capacity to feel this. It's just that this culture has made us desensitized from this feeling, because when we feel it, nothing could ever be the same again. And so what I'm saying is that, yes, this loneliness is here. But it's allowed me to feel a type of deep and resonant and empathetic love that will sustain me for the rest of my life in a way that anger and fear and trepidation would never have, I don't think that I will burn out. Who knows. But because I'm burning in me, there's a kind of flamboyant passion that comes from a kind of earnest commitment to the human condition that I feel like I've been able to discover, because I shed all the preconceived fantasies and articulations of what I should be, and instead embraced what I was. And it cleared space, not just for the people I was waiting for my entire life, but for a type of intimate relationship with myself that I wouldn't give up to the world.

Ayana Young That was so beautiful, and I love how this conversation has really emphasized the reality that we can't just operate on an individual level. And, yeah, I've heard you speak about leaving a legacy of healing behind, and the term legacy infers that it doesn’t end, it is unfinished work and that is the beauty of it, that we can leave behind a bit of a map or guidepost for a world in which we are less cruel to ourselves and in turn less cruel to each other, and yeah I feel like something that comes up in context to mental and spiritual wellness is the fact that a lot of public reckoning is transpiring, and you speak about disposability culture which is something that I think people have formed really polarizing opinions on because it is so much easier than working through the intricacies of the topic...you point out that it might be beneficial for us to sort of reassess our approach to this, because it can be a very oppressive mentality to continuously decide who is allowed to remain in what spaces...But then this of course begs the question of responsibility and who bears the burden. What might an authentic attempt as accountability look like?

ALOK I believe that it's possible to simultaneously hold a conviction and the redemption of everyone and everything, and the transformation of all matter and matters, while also practicing a kind of vigilant boundary making that says that is not my work to do. In my imagination, of a kind of society that I want is one in which we think about the locations that we have power in, and instead of just being fluent in the language of injury, we also claim complicity and we say this is my work to do. So what that looks like is we think, “Okay, this person who messed up, they messed up because of the kind of cultural social political ecosystems that people like me have helped create, so I share in this bruise. And it's my job to transform this person.” And I notice that it's so much easier for us to just all look away, then we get confused about how we've created a world with so much incarceration and detention and isolation but it's because we have to shift the modes of perception. And with the shifting the modes of perception actually looks like is instead of looking away and saying “That is not me, that is singularly bad, that is exceptionally awful.” What would it mean to actually say, “This is me, the evil that we see in the world is in us too. So maybe it's my responsibility to do that transformation work.” And once again, I'm not saying that that's everyone's responsibility. Of course not, but it is some of ours, in some capacities. 

I also feel like it's difficult for me to articulate what a universal paradigm around this should be because I think our experiences of injury are so distinct, but I'll speak from my own perspective. If I was to harbor a kind of disgruntlement with everyone who has transgressed me, I would be dead, because the way that my body responds to that looks like cortisol stress, chronic pain, flare up trauma, because people treat me like shit, and so actually, choosing love was less about other people, as much as it was an act of self-preservation. Because when I began to believe in love, and practice it for other people, my body regulated itself and became a pharmacy, and I no longer harbored the kind of toxicity in me, that led to a kind of depletion. So love actually was an act of self-love first. 

And so I think that what I'm also trying to gesture to with my life, and my work, is that any political project that will win has to necessarily collapse the artificial boundary between self and other, and compassion as a force does that. Through practicing self-compassion, we're able to have compassion for others, to doing shadow work, and actually doing shadow integration work, seeing the parts of ourselves that we feel shameful for, the parts of ourselves that we don't feel loved for, the parts of ourselves that we feel insecure about and loving those and not making it a conditional love. That everything that we feel shame into, we breathe into it and say, “I'm glad you're here. I am working. I'm a work in progress.” If we do that self-compassion work. I think our relationship, the disposability of others shifts, at least that's been my experience. 

So I guess it's like, I don't have answers. I have more questions. I understand how difficult and thorny all these things are. But I wish that we could talk about love again, I mean, I think that's been my recurrent sort of refrain on this, is that I'm kind of love-drunk on love. It's the only thing that makes me feel like I can keep going. I guess what I'm speaking to is that the fuel of anger or rage or righteousness becomes easily exhausted and quickly depleted. Whereas the fuel of love is the only thing that helps me keep getting up. And I think what's required of us in these times, is some kind of stamina to keep going. Because the onslaught is relentless and it's just a drone. I mean, it's like every day, a new travesty, a new tragedy, every millisecond, how do we continue. And what I found is that the only way that I can continue at least, is by love, because it's the only thing that makes life worth living. And I don't know if that is going to work for everyone, but it's working for me and so I feel like I need to speak that truth. And I feel like I need to say to the world that healing is possible, that love is possible, that transformation is possible, that imperfection is actually the perfection we've been seeking. I feel like I need to say to people that living it's a poetic praxis, which means that the thing about being a poem is that it's never finished, which means we're constantly drafting. I think I need to tell to people, no one is a finished draft, we're all drafting and revising and editing and it's that work of editing that makes life worth living. 

Why are we only pretending as if we're statues, I returned to that, because it feels like we need people to be perfect to be loved and that's an equation that comes from 19th and 20th-century eugenics, it looks like the 1930s when Norm and Norma, two statues, were created, and white women took photos next to the statues measuring their bodies to see which one of them most adequately resembled the ideal American female, we've been taught that perfection is something worth striving for, not a eugenic ideal. I guess what I'm trying to do in my life is break up with the stranglehold that eugenics has had on our imagination, where it only requires people to cultivate themselves into something that actually noticed them for what they are fat, unruly, gender, non conforming, dark skin, actually all these things that are just cut out of eugenic equation as unlovable, what does it mean to love unlovable things, and ourselves and one another, that's the kind of work I'm interested in doing.

Ayana Young Gosh, I feel you and yeah, I'm with you, with committing to love and similarly, you know, some of the stories you've been sharing about being with your friend eating dumplings, having the existential moments of like, how is anybody feeling these things and what you brought up around complicity, I just want to say, I really feel aligned with that, and definitely have struggled through the mud in my ways, and continue to come back to the Earth and come back to that wild and feral and all-encompassing love of being alive, and just all of the other imperfect, perfect creatures and beings around us that can hold us through this. And yeah, I just have so appreciated what you've been saying and I wanted to circle back to a conversation that you were touching on earlier on expression and right relationship and how being empowered to express ourselves fully, can bring us into right relationship, which for many is a really foreign space to think into, because we've grown up in a culture that pushes conformity, because it's beneficial for a very capitalistic understanding of efficiency, but it isn't great for the collective heart. And I know you've been asked this question before, where it's framed as your own self-expression in terms of bravery, but I love how you sort of turn that on its head and respond with your own question of, well how is it possible that one can practice an active denial of self day-in and day-out, and expect to have good relationships? And so, I’d like to ask you what ramifications you see in terms of squelching self-expression, and how the queer community is really pointing out that the denial of self-expression is both gravely unhealthy, and doesn’t have to be a permanent fixture of society? 

ALOK I think that there are many worlds that are possible and the world that we have been ritualized and routinized, and normalized and naturalized into is one that has taught us that the things that are the most intimate and dear to us, are the things that people will hate the most. So we have to protect them from one another. Which means that we can be in relation with one another for 20 years and never actually speak about what we feel. And that's a disassociated world for me. And that language is really important for me, as someone who has struggled and suffered from dissociation my entire life, the sense of being here, but not quite being there. It's a world that actually is illusory. And there's nothing more real to me, than the kind of pang of ugliness, of vulnerability, of breaking down, of inconsistency, of imperfection and that's what I believe, is actually the organic self, an unruliness, or, as you were saying before, kind of feral illness is where we began. And so when I see people who are so well contained, like, this is who I am, I'm just confused, because I'm like, how do you know who you are in a world that's dispossessed us of the grammar to even articulate that? I'm a mess and I love messy people and I love people who are honest about being messes, and my sort of hypothesis is that actually, everyone's playing pretend and trying to use all these jobs and identities and labels to give some sense of ontological security. But my security doesn't come from that. It comes from actually saying, I don't know, therefore, I am. Not I know therefore I am. I suspend all knowing, it comes from actually cultivating ignorance and harnessing it. I love ignorant people. Hot take, but I think the people who are most fluent in their ignorance are the smartest people, because how dare we even think that we know in a  universe that is so huge and expansive? 

I guess this is my way of saying what I was trying to get to earlier today in this interview about moving the onus away from empowerment of trans people towards actually making gender unknowable. I think that right now, there's a coordinated and understandable effort to try to explain gender, this is what it is. But I actually am breaking up with that and I'm trying to say, I don't know, I may never know, I don't know who I am. I don't really know what gender is, I don't know. But I love I don't know because that means that I can try. And trying for me is the mode of existence that I want to be in. Maybe it won't work, but at least I'm trying. Maybe I'll never, but at least I'm trying. And that's the kind of people I've met. When I started to actually prioritize my joy over other people's shame, I met people who tried. And we're all trying to do the same. It's inconsistent. It's posting a selfie on Instagram and being like, I love myself and then 20 minutes later, looking in the mirror and being like, psych it's, it's a back and forth. It's frenetic. But it's something I would never give up. I guess. It's given me purpose and dignity and spirit in a way that I didn't have before because it's actually attracted to me, magnetized, people who are trying and attempting and have mercy and delicacy with one another because we recognize how fragile it is to try in a world of house of mirrors. 

Ayana Young Yes, yes, I'm so with you and on the topic of expression, I'd like to move into the realm of fashion; and I know you do a lot of work around fashion industry capitalism and degendering fashion; and as I prepared for our conversation I thought about how in many societies today, fashion has been so far removed from the spirit and shuffled into two arenas; one which is very elitist and the other which is rapidly consumptive, but that wasn’t the origin - and I recall my conversation with Martín Prechtel, who shared how Indigenous communities throughout Guatemala adorn themselves in regalia to farm because it is dressing up for the divine. And so, this is one of the ways I come into this conversation, thinking about the divinity of our expression through adornment. To begin, can you share what you see as the very essence of fashion in terms of its poetic beauty? 

ALOK I would scream like, yes, but I'm worried about confusing my roommates in the other room, but you really hit the nail for me, which is fashion for me is about embracing my divinity and the divinity of the world. When I'm putting together an outfit I'm making an altar. I'm making an altar to myself so that when people treat me with such blatant disrespect, I'm treating myself with respect. And I'm saying, in a world that has marked me for various forms of social death, I am worth life. And that is nothing superficial. That's why I get so irritated by the kind of rogue misogyny and the dismissal of aesthetics as a legitimate terrain of political resistance. Sure, read your books, but how do you survive? You survive by finding beauty in impossible and bleak situations. You survive from self improvisation and authorship, and fashion has and continues to be a part of that for me, then I notice in a lot of my work, trying to trace gender dissenters across the centuries, that time and time again, when colonial authorities would arrest gender nonconforming people for colonial-era sodomy, or cross dressing legislations and thinking here like the Portuguese Inquisition, they would ask people, why are you wearing that? And people would often answer, this is what I wear to receive God, so much of what we've been taught femininity is, was actually ceremonial wear and so there's this way in which what I've been tracing in my research in the early 20th century, there's a dress reform movement where white women basically argued for the right to wear pants to join white men and the pursuit of empire and work and they would often say femininity is permittivity. They would say, unlike these “savage” “Natives”, we don't practice adornment. In fact, the idea was criminal adornment. Adolf Loos, the famous Viennese architect, literally writes that you can tell criminals based off of the ways that they adorn their bodies across colonial projects; tattooing, piercing, beauty, color, became markers of a kind of savagery that was incompatible with the machinery of capitalist work. 

So when I read this history, I'm like, okay, why did the British write down every artifact, that gender-variant people were wearing their earrings, how they dressed, how they walked? Could it be that these things are doing something? So now my relationship with fashion is, it's about creating a spiritual ecology with these non-human objects, and recognizing the kinds of bodies that we're creating. I'm not just adorning my body, I'm creating a new body. When I speak about how important self-expression is for me, people will do this thing like, well, there's your body, and then there's your outfit. But to me they're not separate, like I am my best, most true self, in what I'm wearing. What I'm wearing allows me to show up in the world as myself, which means that I can and will deliver an academic lecture and a gown and a seven-inch heel, practical functional, which means I can and will still identify as trans and be trans, even if I'm wearing gym shorts, and a freaking t-shirt, because it's not about what we're wearing. It's about how it makes us feel. And it's about I think that's the recurring motif for me alongside love is an alternative to the visual realm, is the realm of feeling. And the sensations are more important than the sense making. And the sensations that I get when I'm adorned in my ultimate divine form, they allow me to keep going.

For a long time, I felt a lot of shame about that because people I mean, my parents would be like, why do you care so much about what you look like? And the only relation that we have to conversations around aesthetics is that there's always an audience, but I wonder, maybe some of us are actually getting dressed for ourselves. Or maybe some of us are actually getting dressed for something that you can't see. I don't think that we have the vocabulary to describe self intimacy. The only way that we understand intimacy is about the other. But what does it actually mean to recognize that our relationship with ourselves could be and maybe should be one of the greatest romances of our lives? When I get dressed, it's like I'm dressing for a date with myself. And that helps me not just keep going, but helps me celebrate and thrive. The world might be bleak and apocalyptic, but my blue lip makes it worth it.

Ayana Young Gosh, I'm feeling so inspired to up my game. And yeah, and I think when we feel in our divinity, we also can treat others better. We can treat ourselves better. I mean, I think there's such a beautiful ripple effect. When we can just feel in our, I don't know, yeah, I just I'm really with you there. But I do want to tie this back into the gender binary and you extensively speak and write about how colonialism and gender exploit fashion to do its bidding through the gendering of clothes, So who benefits, or what thought reigns supreme, as long as we continue to understand our dress through a gendered lens?

ALOK Yeah, you know, I try to teach people that everything has a history and people think that the gendering of fashion has always been and it's not, it's a calculated project. What fashion historians will teach you is that the suit became solidified as the male garb in the Western world around 1820. And the reason that people sort of designed the suit the way that they did is because they're inspired by Greek sculptures and they wanted to actually shape the male torso to be visually distinct from the female torso with the invention of the sex binary, the phenomenon that males and females were meant to be anatomically opposite and distinct. So fashion, became a way of elaborating and proving a sex-based distinction, which was a cultural project and invention. So actually, at its inception, the gendering of fashion was an active artistic subterfuge, to naturalize what is an arbitrary distinction between bodies. There's more anatomical physiological genetic variability among the category female than there is between male and female. It's a social and cultural decision to divide the world into male and female, not a biological one.

As Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling argues, the body in fact is one of the biggest arguments against the sex binary, because testosterone is involved in ovulation. So many of the physical and physiological features that we gender are actually found among bodies. But I digress. So fashion then it's not just about the resuscitation of a kind of cultural invention of gender binarism, it's also about a marker of colonial distinction. One of the primary ways in which Indigenous people would be demonized across the world was the sartorial and aesthetic choices that white Europeans saw as markers of degeneracy or savagery. And the way that fashion was positioned, was as Adolf Loos argues in Ornament and Crime, is that “men” fought for the right to wear pants, in order to basically enter modernity. So the goal has always been about the right to wear pants, the right to have binary gender in order to be good capitalists, modern workers, so that's why the degendering of fashion is not for me just about gender, it's actually about all these larger things we've been speaking about - cultures of control, cultures and economies of race and colonization, it's actually about creativity and self authorship. Fashion for me becomes a really convenient metaphor to describe how the uniform is not just a physical look, it's a cultural mentality. How have we normalized and condition people into literally gendering arbitrary articles of fabric and color like, that shows how flimsy gender binarism actually is, is that the color pink used to be associated masculinity until after world war two is that actually lace and heels and makeup or historically worn by men in Europe first, is that actually all these kinds of things that posh themselves as natural are actually political propaganda meant to create the kinds of efficiencies you're speaking to that allow the kind of rote mechanization of these political projects. 

So I noticed though, a lot of people will join me in an intellectual declaration of degenerating fashion, but so few people will join me in the actual sartorial pleasures of doing it, which suggests to me what I was speaking to before about how this moment of tokenization allows people to feel like an intellectual commitment is the same as a kind of praxis of solidarity. If you really understood what de gendering fashion meant, you would realize that your gender is the cosmological, universal, spiritual principle that is not actually determined by what society arbitrarily dictates what kind of clothes you should be wearing, which is a way of saying, we need more men wearing skirts and dresses and makeup, because that doesn't invalidate your manhood. And we need more women not removing their body hair because that doesn't invalidate their womanhood. But yet, the labor the physical labor of gender nonconformity is outsourced to us as gender-variant people, as if we are some sort of non-consensual Noah arc trying to rescue the world from the apocalypse of the gender binary, I digress, I've got more interesting things to do with my day, than save people who would rather not save themselves. So what my hope with degender fashion is, is that there's a way to acknowledge the historic contributions of non-binary people and being on the front lines of this kind of cultural political set of conversation, while also recognizing that this is a mandate for all of us to ask, why are we dressed the ways that we are? And how can we shift a culture that genders arbitrary objects, and actually author ourselves from a place of creative vibrancy and potency, not real cultural conformity.

Ayana Young I do want to talk about this fashion topic a little bit more, and the expression of the divine through fashion lends itself for us to inquire about beauty a bit, and this question is open-ended, so please answer it in the way that feels most pertinent at this moment, but I think about how so much of our conversations swirl around the concept of beauty standards and understanding how they operate, but your writing pushes us to look at beauty in terms of its power, and danger, too. And that framing encourages us to think beyond beauty standards, that we don't need new standards, we need to approach beauty in a fundamentally different way. And I think about beauty in an ecological sense and it's simply a testament to being alive. So what does beauty mean to you today? And is that definition deeply wrapped up in notions of dignity as well?

ALOK Absolutely. I'm not trying to overthrow one set of gender norms by enforcing a new set of gender norms that says everyone must be non-binary, I'm not trying to respond to one regime of beauty norms by saying this is the new beauty standard. No, I'm trying to make a standard that there is no beauty standard, because there's as many ways to be beautiful as there are people as there are sentience, as there are objects. Beauty is honesty and the cultures of beauty, we've been indoctrinated into our cultures of fantasy and fiction, that only love us for emulation of a kind of archetype, don't love us for what is, is-ness is beauty, is being able to be like “Oh I have stubble because that is my is.”This is what is, and finding beauty in that, that's the shadow work I was speaking to. I have a poem where I say your wound is my garden, I found life here and the places you have marked for death and that's what beauty work is about for me. It's to actually recognize where have we been taught to allocate darkness and despair and hope, disrespect, and ugliness? And how do we still find some kind of redemptive vitality in that? How do we recognize that the work then is about recognizing that there's a kernel of possibility and therefore beauty in everything. Beauty is the catalyst that allows us to keep going, every system in this world told me that I should obliterate myself, edit myself out of the composition of this country, of this land, of this movement, of this world to make things more convenient or easier decipherable or efficient for other people, and yet I didn't. And what was responsible for my rebellion, it was a commitment to my beauty. 

I speak in a sort of talk I gave around degender fashion of Stephanie Yellowhair, a Native American trans woman who when being arrested by the police said “Excuse my beauty” and in that moment of a carceral encounter where they're trying to disappear her they were trying to disappear, her beauty. So what if we then reframe the projects of incarceration, the projects of systematic racism, of detention, of deportation, as projects of expunging beauty, and that's what I want us to reframe for is that we are not just fighting for civil rights for racial justice, environmental justice, we are fighting for beauty, because beauty comes from an acknowledgement of the celestial diversity of being. It's not a beautiful world if people all look the same, yikes. And that kind of recalibrative work is actually what my job is as an artist, what I keep on saying in this conversation, that the political and the intellectual don't hit deep enough and I'm I'm calling and harkening for a kind of spiritual reckoning, that spiritual reckoning is beauty. I'm asking the world, are you ready to find beauty in the parts of yourself that you've marked for dead and then in doing that process, what I promise you is that the world will be so much more beautiful, I'm still depressed, I'm still lonely, I'm still anxious, I still am self-hating all these things. But God Damn, I see the beauty. And every day, I go outside, and I see beautiful things and nature and in the world. And I'm so grateful for it. This work has allowed me to embrace the beauty in myself. It's the kind of unruly, feral beauty. It's a kind of beauty that seeps into the pores and in between your toes and leaves stains and smudges and sand on the ground. It's a beauty that recognizes that this is where we belonged all along. And now that I have my own kind of beauty, I'm never going back. 

Sure there's temptations to jump into the quicksand and disappear myself for the easy and rote approval of instant validation, but that will soon dry up and evaporate. What is eternal I think, is a relationship to a kind of beauty that shifts alongside you. My hope is that when I'm 70, and 80, and 90 and 100, I can look at my skin and still find it beautiful because it's honest to what I am at those ages, my hope is that increasingly, I become comfortable with the creases under my eyes, around my lips, because they're honest, they're markers of what it means for me to have lived. My hope is that the “discolorations” won't be seen as discoloration, they will just be seen as variations in my skin tone, which are honest, because I'm not sleeping, my hope is that we don't have to lie and pretend about the collateral weight that capitalism has on our bodies that of course, we're exhausted, and it shouldn't be my responsibility to conceal that exhaustion, I should be able to say I am exhausted. I guess it's just honest bodies and  that's always what motivated me in fact. 

I've never said this to my first collection of poems I wrote while living in Cape Town in the summer of 2012 and I called it Unapologetic Bodies because I caught on fire that summer, I suffered from intense burns and my legs and arms and I was bandaged and I couldn't really walk or dance or cook. So I wrote and what I found myself writing from that place of incredible pain is God dammit, I love this burned body. And it was such a strange revelation to be like in one imagining this would be impairment, this would be pain, this would be something I should spend my life avoiding. But in the author, it was reincarnation. It was kind of like I've speaking to a flamboyant fire within me where I emerged from those flames. And I looked at myself bandaged and unruly with all those scars. And I said, God, damn, I love these scars. And that's what beauty is, for me is to actually recognize that the indentations on our bodies are just as precise and wonderful and exquisite, as the makeup we put up to conceal them. 

Ayana Young Alok, I am so moved by all that you've spoken to, and on the other end of this technical connection at the moment, I just want to weep really a weep out of a type of openness, like a cracked openness, and a like this deep feeling of being cradled by your words. And I think when I was preparing for this interview, I had a sense of what you were talking about when you spoke to the spiritual dimension of this work, but hearing you in real-time in this conversation, that spiritual question is just hovering and circling me. I think every time you respond, I get deeper and deeper into this understanding of the spiritual dimension, and how Earth changing, humanity changing, this work really is. So I just want to thank you so much for your time. And as we come to a close, I'd love for you to either share how listeners connect with you further or if you'd like to share any final sentiments. 

ALOK Hmm. I guess one final sentiment is I'm rooting for you. I think that the way that we respond to a culture of harassment is a culture of affirmation and I just want everyone to know I don't need to know you to love you and I believe in you and your infinite transformation and I'm so grateful that you're here. Because you create a world that's worth living in for me and in that way you are my world and I'm just so grateful for your curiosity, your stubbornness, for your ignorance, and for your becoming and it makes me emotional to know that you are alive and I’m rooting for you. If people want to keep in touch I believe in TMI, too much information, as a cultural life force. So catch me on social media. My Instagram @ALOKVMENON, and thank you for your astute and thoughtful questions. It feels so rare that I'm actually in spaces where I'm challenged and creatively compelled and I really appreciate you doing your research and actually engaging with my work and its forms. I felt really seen and validated and excited that this is going to exist in the world.

Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Soda Lite, Rising Appalachia, and Lady Moon & The Eclipse. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young and Francesca Glaspell with special research assistance by Julia Jackson.