maomao: becoming ancestral mud is a solo performance that weaves in family oral histories, creation myths, folk songs, and Buddhist/Taoist rituals to rekindle ancestral spirits, queer lineage, and ecological entanglements. The piece offers a biomythographical retelling of my ancestral and diasporic migration, from rural Shaanxi to the US, mapped onto my coming-of-age story of place-making. More than twelve generations of my ancestors had resided in northern Shaanxi while I am the first generation in my family who was born and raised outside of the region. “Mao mao,” literally meaning feathers, is a nickname of mine given by my grandmother for endearment. I name the piece “maomao” to both honor grandma’s rural wisdom and articulate a grammar for femme/queerness within ancestral lineage.
I’m indebted to critical ethnic studies and queer/trans studies’ approach to fabulation as a speculative knowledge practice. Saidiya Hartman (2008) responds to the limit of colonial archives of transatlantic slavery from “critical fabulation,” a writing practice that asks what could have been, what might have happened, akin to what Lisa Lowe’s (2014) “past conditional temporality.” Queer of color writers engage with fabulation as a literary device to merge myths, biographies, fictions, and fantasies together as alternative narratives of the self, from Audre Lorde’s (1982) “biomythography” in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name to Kai Cheng Thom’s (2016) “confabulous memoir” in Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars. I depart from these generative theorizations of fabulation as a literary and historical method by articulating “ancestral fabulation” an embodied ritual practice. By mythologizing one's diasporic ancestry interwoven with femme, queer intimacies, it situates one’s lineage entangled with legacies of relational colonial modernities while simultaneously imagining otherwise. Doing this performance is a process of becoming and unbecoming, to remember and dream alternative ways of knowing and being different from the extractive systems of the present.
Saturday March 22, 2025 4:15pm - 5:30pm EDT
Room 155Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02167
