For powerful lessons about organizing and queer community, let’s look beneath our feet.
Pride month was established in June to acknowledge a pivotal event in queer American history — the Stonewall Uprising. On June 28, 1969, a popular gay bar in New York City was targeted by a police raid, as it had been countless times before. But on this occasion, the patrons fought back. The story is common knowledge to most queer people in the U.S., but some details bear retelling. At this point in history, it was illegal to be outwardly queer, gay, homosexual, transgender, or to otherwise express yourself in ways that were “misaligned” with your sex. Psychologists and medical doctors could have someone institutionalized on the basis of their “perversions,” a person could be fired for even spurious allegations of gay activity, and police would routinely target and entrap people, especially men, who were known or presumed to be gay. This was not just local policy or small-town bigotry. In fact, it was official U.S. government policy to classify queer people as “subversives” who were a threat and a liability to the American identity and imperial project. If you were queer, they said, you were a sexual deviant, and worse — a communist.
The criminalization of queer life and expression forced the community underground. Relics of the prohibition-era infrastructure were transformed — often by the mafia — into clandestine queer spaces of dance and revelry. The Genovese family, which owned the Stonewall Inn, paid bribes to the New York City Police Department so it would pass over the bar on the monthly raids conducted by the Public Morals Squad. But in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, what started as a typical raid spontaneously transformed into a radical act of defiance. The 200 or so patrons resisted arrest, smashed glass bottles, swung their purses, slashed the tires of the police wagons, and freed as many detained comrades as they could. Though this uprising was unplanned, it was not disconnected, climatologically, from the concurrent civil rights uprisings happening all across the country. That is how subversion and uprisings work: energy flows through the collective, organizing happens underground.
Currently, queer rights are once again being undermined and dismantled across the United States. The trend of incremental progress that characterized the past 50 years now appears to be moving in reverse. In moments of heightened political conflict such as these, it’s crucial to find our teachers. Our elders and past resistance movements provide essential learning. But we should not restrict ourselves to learning exclusively from human beings.
As a mycologist (someone who studies fungi), I have found the lessons I’ve learned from fungi to be radical and life-affirming. Fungi with both male and female sexes in one body taught me about my own queer experience. Some fungi shapeshift, alternating between sexual and asexual forms, producing ephemeral mushrooms, then retreating to their mycelial form underground. From them I learned that there is a freedom in living undefined, existing outside the limits of predictability. Lichens — which are part fungi, part photosynthetic microorganisms — are best understood as living, interdependent communities, inspiring the word “symbiosis.” They teach us that our fixation on individualism is not only inaccurate biologically, it’s a dead end.
In this moment in time, I think it is important to reflect on the meaning of the word “queer.” The word was long used in a derogatory way against people existing and behaving outside of heteronormative culture, but it was reclaimed during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. “Queer” was a way to bring together separate subsets of people — gays, lesbians, trans people, and others — and harness the power of the collective against oppressive violence. Queerness, therefore, is a rallying cry, an animate force, an ethic of collective responsibility. Queerness is not a plea for permission to assimilate into systems of oppression. Queerness is a community revolt. Queerness is the understanding that all living beings are interdependent. Queerness teaches us to be like fungi.
When contending with misused state power, individualism will not save us. Nor will a reductionist usage of identity politics. What we need is community.
One of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned from fungi is about strategizing underground. Certain species of fungi form mycorrhizal networks, which are mutualistic partnerships between fungi and plants. The roots and the fungal cells connect underground sharing nutrients and protection against pathogens. Each is uniquely suited to contribute in their own way — the plants supply sugar, the fungi supply nitrogen and phosphorus. They are different kingdoms, but they need each other; together their differences become a strength. Through these microscopic linkages entire forests are sustained. These networks may span across many trees and individual fungi, forming a grid pulsing with animacy. Sunlight becomes sugar which becomes a patch of colorful mushroom bursting from the soil. The exact time and place of a fungal fruiting is not always predictable. Amazingly, for reasons and by mechanisms not fully understood, members of the same mushroom species will spontaneously fruit across an entire continent. Like an uprising, their energy is tapped into the collective.
When contending with misused state power, individualism will not save us. Nor will a reductionist usage of identity politics. What we need is community, however messy it may be. We need diverse coalitions through which we share skills and resources. We need to be queer. We need to learn from fungi.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is a mycologist, educator, and writer. She is the author of Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature.
Turning social fragmentation into action through discovering relatedness
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Kobe University lifelong learning researcher GOTO Satomi developed a new approach to intersectional learning where the individual with its different degrees of relatedness to any given issue takes the center stage.
view moreCredit: GOTO Satomi
Discovering relatedness outside of a topical issue helps diverse groups to overcome differences and develop action for social change. The Kobe University addition to educational theory offers a framework to analyze and promote intersectional learning.
To achieve social change in a fragmented modern society, individuals from diverse backgrounds need to join together and develop a common plan for action. This is important especially for education related to social change, where groups of varying involvement in a particular issue, e.g., learners and teachers, interact in a structured setting. Current educational theories fall short of offering a framework of how such cultural differences between the participating individuals can be met, overcome and used as motivation for learning.
Kobe University lifelong learning researcher GOTO Satomi says: “Based on my own personal history of repressing my opinions in school to live up to what I perceived to be the expectations of the teacher, I realized that the role of the individuals’ diverse backgrounds has been neglected in education theory. But through my involvement in various volunteer activities, I realized that social issues are always also individual issues.” Consequently, she developed a new approach to intersectional learning where the individual, with its different degrees of relatedness to any given issue, takes the center stage.
In the International Journal of Lifelong Education, Goto comprehensively outlines her theory that results in each individual exhibiting a multilayered nature of issue relatedness, assuming people to be “a bundle of relationships with conscious or latent issues.” Thus, she argues, “By providing a variety of entry points for involvement in multiple themes, not just a specific social issue, a wider range of stakeholders can be involved, which will activate the field and increase collective emergence.” Not only does this theory offer a systematic way of explaining the origin of community engagement from an individual’s point of view, it can also “capture a broader range of learner transformations, rather than just the approach to a specific issue or theme, as the axis of evaluation.”
The term she uses for the degree of relatedness, the Japanese “tojisha-sei,” is interesting in itself. The word, as well as a substantial part of the theoretical body, derives from group development activities in Japan, such as the community reconstruction efforts in the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake or the social movements surrounding the Minamata disease problem. In these cases, the multi-layered relatedness to a broad range of issues apart from the main issue allowed different parties to connect and, in the end, together promote movement around the main issue.
“The tojisha-sei concept helps to blur the boundaries between those who are directly involved in a particular issue/theme and those who are not, and to promote interaction between the two and the learning that results from this process,” Goto writes in the paper. For the future, she wants to explore whether and under what conditions such a realization of shared relatedness can be catalyzed practically, for example in school education. The goal of such a further development ultimately is, she writes, “helping learners become more autonomous and aware of their relationship to society.”
This research was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (grant 23KJ1573).
Kobe University is a national university with roots dating back to the Kobe Higher Commercial School founded in 1902. It is now one of Japan’s leading comprehensive research universities with nearly 16,000 students and nearly 1,700 faculty in 11 faculties and schools and 15 graduate schools. Combining the social and natural sciences to cultivate leaders with an interdisciplinary perspective, Kobe University creates knowledge and fosters innovation to address society’s challenges.
Journal
International Journal of Lifelong Education
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Positioning and practical significance of ‘encounter of tojisha-sei’ in lifelong learning theories and research
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