Looking for Dandelions: On Finding Care in the Wastelands of Settler Colonialism
Looking for Dandelions maps the tangled legacies of racial capitalism, Native dispossession and settler colonialism, disability and accessible medicine and networks of care, and landscapes of ecological destruction and reciprocal restoration, through stories of dandelions in eastern United States. Dandelions are one of the few plants most people in the United States can identify, whether because of their yellow weedy presence in lawns or childhood puffball wishes blown into the wind. They are also potent medicine and nourishing food—used for millennia and brought here intentionally by European colonizers. Looking for Dandelions draws on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s and Mel Chen’s interventions on animacy and Mishuana Goeman’s (re)mapping of embodied geographies, tracing histories and ideologies of herbalism and pharmaceutical industries, of lawns and weed science, of property and aesthetics of space, in order to demonstrate how settler colonial hierarchies of animacy, capital, race, gender, and ability show up in something as seemingly innocuous as a common weed. Using Alex Pauline Gumbs’ poetry, Cleo Wölfle Hazard’s trans ecologies, and Eli Clare’s trans* crip examination of cure, I reorient towards ecological kinship, exploring questions about bodies and their boundaries, societal constructions of value, what it means to be a weed, and conceptions of medicine and care. This is an offering of ecological orientation toward the life and animacy of care—asking what it might mean to consider this plant a fully animate being, a body that matters, perhaps a teacher and neighbor and friend? Looking for Dandelions weaves these stories of interdependence, care, and animacy layer by layer, with fragments from myriad sources and knowledges, while keeping Dandelions at the center. Some layers speak to hierarchies and power dynamics, some to the possibilities of resilient refusal, of interdependent attention and care, and the futures we might build in the current era of ecological and climate precarity.
American studies, Environmental studies, Disability studies, Care, Dandelion, Political ecology, Settler Colonialism, Trans ecology, Weeds
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