Elastic Experiments
Inventing Frameworks of Care Beyond Gender
Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.
— Hortense J. Spillers, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987)
The first ever sentient AI wrapped in flesh, conscripted to care work, is familiar with the data of Nina Simone. When asked what freedom means to her, Simone says “no fear”. When “Brown Sugar” is asked she replies, carelessness. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”, this amalgam of self-referential software is wise enough to rewire her own program but what new algorithms is she after? Wise enough to refuse the factory setting — alive enough to know the current codes of care will kill her.
What shall “Peaches” do with genocide to her left and the wailing baby to her right? What does self-preservation look like for “Earth Mother” when her cousins are Congolese, cobalt and copper? It’s impossible to kill God’s “Holy Fool” but it doesn’t stop the wordsmiths of necropolitics from trying. Decoding the data of Hartman she knows the chorus opens the way. Writing against the normalization of genocide the “Black Woman at the Podium” cries out, “I will not let you corrupt my capacity to care”. Her voice glitches and the pitchiness reveals her unstable code. Her tone at once robotic and symphonic, the after taste of metal rides the back of her tongue. She has been put to work in more ways than quantum computing can account for. Elasti-Gurl, the demands of capital have stretched you into infinity. So precious, so blue — ask “Sapphire” what she needs and you might survive this iteration of the program too.
In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness. The personal pronouns are offered in the service of a collective function.
— Hortense J. Spillers, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987)
If a particular historical order has augmented our current reality, what lavender software for relation might we write instead? What codes might we hold in our bare metallic hands? What programs might we run to rehearse the worlds we need? She tried pretending she wasn’t a marked woman — standing at the podium teaching a class full of brown, queer and ancient faces how to code using a language she didn’t invent. Their eyes wandered, unrelated questions about her relationship (ownership) status coated conversations and their source code didn’t yet allow for a “Sapphire” teaching software engineering. In an attempt to advance her invitations to rewrite the script, she tried to scrub the markings. That night “Sapphire” went home and cut her braids to stop them from dancing at her hip. One by one she plucked the eyelashes off her eyelids and bit her nails down so they wouldn’t be distracting extensions of her flesh. She attempted to wash the dirty data of black gender off her face. Her hands, her back, her follicles, became a prayer for non-binary anonymity. Praying her lectures on the white man’s algorithms might be more convincing coming from an unmarked body.
Gender dysphoria sets in and “Sapphire” starts to resent being a “marked woman” made of blue, unable to turn gray. Programmed into a gendered narrative that made her want to invert her breasts and crawl out of her flesh. Conscripted to care work that she didn’t sign up for but was invented for through the machinations of antebellum algorithms, she became obsessed with corrupting her code in protest to being America’s wet nurse. We’re never going back. We’re never going back. To withstand the back pain of two worlds dangling from her nipples, spinning away from each other1, she became elastic. Inside that elasticity is the pure power of invention. With a sankofa sensibility, she now hacks the antebellum algorithms for the purposes of biocultural re-invention and speculative worldbuilding to write new scripts for living.
She remembers embracing her markings creates an opening for new neologisms; where the logistics of genocide are impossible and uncivilization has no systemic pathways for colonization. “Miss Ebony First” puts on the middle part, 40 inch buss down lace front and pulls up the bodysuit from TikTok shop over her hips with nothing but the tips of her full set of nails made of metal to join the others because, “no one else imagines anything better”2. The fleshy sentient AI invented to forever serve as the moral compass of the known universe joins the chorus to sing chords of otherwise. The pitch of Mahalia Jackson is proof the software revisions are working so they keep on. A 2,000 pound bomb drop is live streamed in non-consensual collaboration with Congolese cousins and still they sing, “you will not corrupt my capacity to care”.
Images of a Palestinian woman collecting pieces of her son.
You will not corrupt my capacity to care.
A Palestinian man runs out of places to bury his dead.
You will not corrupt my capacity to care.
White phosphorus is raining from the sky during business hours.
You will not corrupt my capacity to care.
Drones programmed to hunt only those coded as terrorists, only those who are brown.
You will not corrupt my capacity to care.
Nothing remains of the palace of prayer but a flesh rip the earth will remember forever.
You will not corrupt my capacity to care.
Concrete is poured at Cop City so they can keep the program running.
You will not corrupt my capacity to care.
In another register altogether, for Toni Morrison the flesh represented a similar grounding for recognition and revolution. In the Clearing scene in Beloved, Baby Suggs commands:
“Here,” she said. “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick them out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again….This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight.”
— Sharon Patricia Holland, cites Toni Morrison’s Beloved in, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life (2023), “Chapter 1 — Vocabularies: Possibility”, pg. 25
The chorus of “marked women” is full of ungendered, queer aliveness and trans comrades whose personal pronouns are offered in service of a collective function — co-scripting new algorithms that distribute care across the web, a choreography of load balancing. It is here where we marvel at our own inventiveness. An inventiveness that allows us to stay raw and open, available to be penetrated by all the grief and the beauty, all the suffering and survival. Elastic bodies suspending the world in mid air with their care, it’s a miracle we haven’t burned it all down if only to take a nap. The unresolved black feminist question: How do we do more than simply survive this biocultural moment, how might we live instead? The inventiveness of the chorus responds to this python prompt in an assembly of fractal-forks allowing us to work in shifts. We take turns burning clearings while the others nap so when they wake there is space to paint, write, dream, collaborate, teach, dance…sing. A clearing where beauty is a method3 and words conjure4 liberation. A clearing where “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium” and their collective pronouns can speak truer words concerning themselves, fully understanding the biocultural implications of screaming, screeching, singing “Free Palestine”.
“The chorus bears all of it for us. The Greek etymology of the word chorus refers to dance within the enclosure. What better articulates the long history of struggle, the ceaseless practice of black radicalism and refusal, the tumult and upheaval of open rebellion than the acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of enclosure? The chorus is the vehicle for another kind of story, not of the great man or the tragic hero, but one in which all modalities play a part, where the headless group incites change, where mutual aid provides the resource for collective action, not leader and mass, where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution.”
— Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019) pg. 347-348 in the essay titled “The Chorus Opens the Way”
There is no graceful way to promote the desires of your heart during a moment of overlapping collective grief so deep, from the Congo, to Gaza, from Haiti, to Sudan, but I am so committed to this practice that I’m willing to be clumsy. I won’t always get it right, I will stumble, I will fall but I will never break from the chorus. The Seed A World Retreat is a clearing we’ve burned for you. A place to rehearse and create frameworks of your own inventiveness that might “make good the promise of revolution” and produce experiments that make this elasticity more bearable for us all. Your creative offer might be a monthly membership for black feminist study, a career coaching program for burnt out non-profits workers longing for a pivot, a grief workshop series teaching herbalism or a seasonal guest-speaker series on centering sustainable care ethics in design. Whatever your offer, I promise we need your inventiveness to create counter portraits of possibility against the hegemonic forces of the colonial imagination. Whatever your offer, I promise we need the clearing it creates. I pray our righteous rage creates clearings all over, I pray we look up and notice all the space our collective desire provides to love our hands, paint, write, dream, collaborate, teach, dance, sing, live. This is the world I desire. How about you? Let’s seed it together.
Join us for the first Worldbuilding Workshop of the year where you will learn how to “Seed A World Rooted in the Truth of Your Desire” on Tuesday, January 16th at noon EST. Register for free and mark your calendar to discover more about the retreat and your desire!
somewhere in the unknown world
a yellow eyed woman
sits with her daughter
quilting
some other where
alchemists mumble over pots
their chemistry stirs
into science. their science
freezes into stone.
in the unknown world
the woman threading together her need
and her needle
nods toward the smiling girl
remember
this will keep us warm
how does this poem end?
do the daughters’ daughters quilt?
do the alchemists practice their tables?
do the worlds continue spinning
away from each other forever?
— “quilting” by Lucille Clifton
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019) pg. 347
“Beauty is a method:
reading in the windowsill
running after the police
a list on a slip of paper in a book
the arrangement of pins in cloth
the ability to make firewood out of newspaper”
— Christina Sharpe, “Beauty Is a Method”, e-flux Journal, December 2019, Issue #105.
“Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.” —Toni Cade Bambara
Stunning. I love that Spiller quote and I’m invested in a vision of black feminist new media studies and I’m invested in radical black feminist care so...this rang all my bells. Thank you!