City Planning, Polyamory, Pleasure and Perfectionism
hawtDamn! I’d forgotten how fine cowboy/boi butts in wranglers are. I’d also forgotten how crazee unsustainable life in Dallas is- until I experienced the hiStormic winter invasion that blew though end of February while I was there snowbirding with my mama. Turned on by that denim round tightness in warmer weather and turned off by the endless miles of wire haughtily interrupting horse farms, scrappy Texas fields of locusts cedar oak, and bright southern skies, that storm brought me back to hard suburban truths.
After rationing water, heat, power for a week, our lives regulated by rude power grids, I’m asking “What powers us/me”? Pleasure, anger, injustice, love, relationships, the unknown, money. My answers point me back (always) to the intersections of queerness (imperfectionism), polyamory and pleasure.
Wild how returning home allows you to see things about yourself you’ve been missing/blind to/ignoring for a long, ragged while. The unusual weather in my bigD shed light on anger I’ve held for possible lifetimes. (“It’s not supposed to be as cold as Minnesota in my southern home!” *insert rage indignance rage climate change sadness here. )The stress in waiting for pipes to burst, roads to melt, power to snap off or back on was real. I acknowledge my privilege in rationing resources water, heat light for one week only. Heartbreak and disappointment translate here knowing thousands of others across the state were experiencing something far worse than we were.
I’m taking a class called Love and Rage right now- and damn Whew fuck I’m seeing all the ways I’ve buried the anger that’s lived in my body since moving to Texas in fifth grade. Lama Rod Owens invites us all to be curious about and practice tuning into our own anger which is hurt which is heartbreak which is disappointment so we can ultimately continue to work for personal and collective freedom.
Oh yes! opportunities to practice being present with anger abound. I spent two months escaping winter and living with my mother. I haven’t folded myself into Texas culture or the hyperfeminine + suburban need for “control” since high school. Mostly my mom + Dallas and I got along swimmingly while snowbirding. I established sweet, sustainable routines over the ten weeks that included shared mid and close of day meals, walks with a few friends, and miles of roller skating, running, romping solo in thin layers of cotton (my fiber of choice always).
As I stared into my own pain and patterns (truth telling, vulnerability, re-orienting pleasure to center, yes!), I remembered it’s no secret that addressing pain, fear, anger within households (especially those that don’t align with the nuclear family model or “typical” life course (moving in a linear fashion from being single, to getting/staying married, having kids, and finally empty nesters)) is difficult and often heart breaking. Also important though is to zoom out and see how the control of natural landscape alongside identity locations is the root of so much cultural, somatic and climactic pain.
It’s critical to address pain, fear, anger long rooted in urban planning. As feminist planning critic Carolyn Whitzman notes, “Planning has long been a white male profession. Questions about gender, sexuality and families are typically viewed outside the rational, technical box ascribed to planning practice. Planning from below, or a people centered ‘soft’ approach isn’t ascribed the same kind of values as designing the hard infrastructure of the city”.
There’s something world making/queer in re-imagining our cities and homes. I believe it’s about reshaping the ideas about what private and public support systems can look like. The bigger question for me is how can we re-create and re-purpose space, especially our family and urban spaces, in ways that open up a wide range of possibilities for sustaining and practicing the kinds of relationships that will support reciprocity, freedom for all and higher levels of consciousness across the course of our lives. How do our cities and families allow us to live amongst wildness while building safe spaces to get to know our anger, fear, pain and capacity to love beyond violence- from birth to death?
In my Love and Rage class, I learn over and over “everything must be loved, even that which is unlovable”. At the heart of Lama Rod’s teaching is love as acceptance. Family can be the epitome of such extreme contrast.. For me, returning to the excessive hyperfeminine suburban control i.e. white perfectionism “made me angry”. Left me asking how do I love this “unlovable-ness” that seemingly sucks pleasure out of our lives to maintain power-over? As a queer trans womxn, I grapple with hyperfeminine rules daily. When I encounter those rules in my mom’s space and city, I’m exhausted and aware that early trauma is still alive in my body. While visits are an opportunity to practice compassion, forgiveness and acceptance of learned behaviors, long term immersion is not sustainable or welcome.
Writer Leslie kern says this in Feminist City about those of us committed to re-creating life-giving relationships with place and people we love, “Prioritizing, writing about and representing queerer ways of living is an act of insurgency that starts to unmake the tightly woven, rigid cloth of heteronormativity, capitalism, reproductive labour and domesticity”, i.e the suburban hyperfeminine.
I explore living beyond this tightly woven rigidity in my next post and want to say here perfectionism and power over are not sustainable models of love. Queering how we connect with the land and one another is a practice of homecoming. Yes to new practices that allow me to love the unlovable as I get to know my anger (buzzing like the blight of big-city power lines) and admit cowboy butts may look perfect and delicious in tight wranglers but they won’t sustain me over the long haul.