noninnocence / risk
Donna Haraway uses the term noninnocence (in a number of forms) thirteen times in her book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. She emphasizes that the actions we need to take in this time of concentrated change cannot be innocent gestures, because of the "disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times" we are living in. Things are messy and there is no way to engage with it and keep your hands clean. I try to embody this need for noninnocence and its messiness by working in the ruddy land of my home while wearing bleached-white clothes, which are required to do LDS Temple work, as white is symbolic of the spiritual purity one must have to be worthy to do temple work.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, in their article Decolonization is not a metaphor, discuss a phenomenon they call "settler moves to innocence." Here they examine the many ways that settler-colonists try to align or ally themselves with oppressed persons and peoples in order to "relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege."
This project requires risk, noninnocence, and the need to get messy by staying with the unsettling nature of settler-colonization and my place in it. In a way, I have two families--the one I was born into and the one I have made since leaving home. My birth family is mostly LDS and this forms the foundation of their identity and purpose for living. Many of the racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies of the CJCLDS actively harm the family I have made since leaving home. I love my families with my whole heart. Because of this inbetween tension, this project requires a balance of risk, care, noninnocence, and sensitivity.
see also: baby and the bathwater, body, care, change, the Church, decolonization, ebb / flow, embodied / embedded, fluid, groundlessness, home, kin(d), Latter-days, origins / foundations, path, southwestern Utah, spiritual experience, stable / settled, Ut(ah/opia), "what is", white out / white supremacy
<--- --->
Donna Haraway uses the term noninnocence (in a number of forms) thirteen times in her book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. She emphasizes that the actions we need to take in this time of concentrated change cannot be innocent gestures, because of the "disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times" we are living in. Things are messy and there is no way to engage with it and keep your hands clean. I try to embody this need for noninnocence and its messiness by working in the ruddy land of my home while wearing bleached-white clothes, which are required to do LDS Temple work, as white is symbolic of the spiritual purity one must have to be worthy to do temple work.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, in their article Decolonization is not a metaphor, discuss a phenomenon they call "settler moves to innocence." Here they examine the many ways that settler-colonists try to align or ally themselves with oppressed persons and peoples in order to "relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege."
This project requires risk, noninnocence, and the need to get messy by staying with the unsettling nature of settler-colonization and my place in it. In a way, I have two families--the one I was born into and the one I have made since leaving home. My birth family is mostly LDS and this forms the foundation of their identity and purpose for living. Many of the racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies of the CJCLDS actively harm the family I have made since leaving home. I love my families with my whole heart. Because of this inbetween tension, this project requires a balance of risk, care, noninnocence, and sensitivity.
see also: baby and the bathwater, body, care, change, the Church, decolonization, ebb / flow, embodied / embedded, fluid, groundlessness, home, kin(d), Latter-days, origins / foundations, path, southwestern Utah, spiritual experience, stable / settled, Ut(ah/opia), "what is", white out / white supremacy
<--- --->
