current writing

As an anthropologist, I was trained to be outside of things. This assumption, one that stretches back to the beginning of the discipline, holds that distance brings clarity, neutrality, and quasi-objectivity. To be an expert, you need to be outside—even when you’re clearly not.

While still on the tenure track, I began work on a project exploring the wild and mysterious world of contemporary somatics. Anthropology has been interested in the multiplicity of the body for many decades, yet little research has been done on somatics, which has grown in popularity since the pandemic. As I deepened into that world, I found that folks in somatics and dance had such expansive understandings of the body, often lightyears ahead of most work in anthropology on the topic. Their understanding came from a deep sense of being inside the body in community—creating and holding containers that emphasized felt-sense immediacy, deep vulnerability, and radical curiosity.

I found Continuum, a practice that brought deep nourishment to my life and queer body, and deepened in my meditation practice and community. These worlds relied less on having the right thing to say and instead centered felt-sense experience in its immediate ungraspability, its beautiful way of defying precise representation. While these worlds were an immense portal for my own growth, I felt the pressure to stay “outside” the practices to justify my work’s contributions to institutions that were desperately afraid of losing their claims to expertise.

As I brought somatics and mindfulness into the college classroom—ethnography, after all, is a radically embodied practice—I received more and more pushback: that my courses weren’t rigorous enough, didn’t assign enough reading, didn’t have laundry lists of busywork, and focused too much on process and experiential learning. Attempts to fund and publish my work were halted by a sense that I was too close to the material, the words too personal, that I was too “inside” the practices I wanted to understand.

I left—with all the grief that comes from leaving a professional path that took so much to bring to fruition. After a few years of focusing on my movement/dance art practice, I’m finding my way back to writing, seeing how much of my relationship to it was about trying to meet someone else’s expectations of rigor and value.

As the fake inside/outside binary softens, I’m working on a number of essays that blend all of the beautiful things anthropology taught me with the deep wisdom of my somatic and meditation practices. One piece explores my difficult relationship to biology as a queer and genderfluid person, and how Continuum’s perspective on biology has expanded and healed that relationship. Another explores how I rely on somatics in my choreographic practice, looking at resonance and witnessing in performance. A third explores the erotic in somatic movement and improvisational dance practice, querying the beauty/dynamism/unfathomability of body-based queer joy.

I hope to share something with you soon.