Bender

“To queer the archive is to acknowledge its incompleteness and to disrupt traditional narratives of legitimacy, success, and value.”

Paul Soulellis, Bad Archives, 2020

 The Bender, as a living artwork embedded in the lesbian women’s camp, operates at the

intersection of decolonial feminist resistance, queer theory, eco-theory, and embodied

anthropology. Its presence is more than artistic; it is an act of reclamation, intimacy, and collective

imagination. By drawing on the theoretical frameworks of thinkers like Audre Lorde, Donna

Haraway, Jack Halberstam, and Anna Tsing, this proposal positions the Bender as a decolonial,

somatic, and relational structure that actively resists patriarchal, colonial, and heteronormative

modes of art-making and spatial control. The Bender becomes a site of queer ecological praxis, a

vessel for the archive as lived experience, and a space for imagining futures of utopia and

rebellion.

 

The Bender as Decolonial Resistance

 

In anthropology and eco-theory, the enclosure of land is recognised as a colonial practice that

renders the earth as property to be controlled and exploited. Drawing from Anna Tsing’s The

Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), we can understand the Bender as a counter-practice to

this paradigm, one that reflects “livability amidst ruin” by weaving together land, labor, and

creativity in ways that refuse extraction. Unlike concrete or militarized structures, the Bender’s

materials—willow, rope, and tarpaulin—are impermanent and reciprocal, engaging in what Tsing

calls “collaborative survival.” The Bender mirrors the temporal and porous nature of the Common

itself, emphasising shared stewardship over ownership.

The Bender resists colonial architecture, which Donna Haraway critiques in Staying with the

Trouble (2016) as a “command-and-control” model that separates humans from nonhumans and

land from body. Instead, its organic, bending form is collaborative and relational. As Haraway

writes, “It matters what worlds world worlds,” and the Bender worlds a space where the land is

not a resource but a participant in the act of making, and where lesbian bodies and stories are

equally integral to its shape and meaning.

 

The Erotic as Power: Queer Desire and Somatic Praxis

 

Audre Lorde’s concept of the erotic as a deeply somatic and transformative force is central to

understanding the Bender as a queer space. In Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1984),

Lorde defines the erotic as “the assertion of the life force of women; that creative energy

empowered.” The Bender becomes an embodiment of this life force, its curved and enfolding

structure an intimate, sensual response to the land and to the women who inhabit it. Within the

Bender, queer desire flows between the archive and the body, the personal and the political.

Inside the Bender, the act of touch—of willow, tarpaulin, the ground, and each other—becomes a

practice of embodied resistance. This somatic connection, as Sara Ahmed explores in Queer

Phenomenology (2006), reorients bodies toward one another and toward spaces that queer

heteronormative alignments. The women gathered in the Bender create new orientations: toward

intimacy, solidarity, and ecological belonging. Their conversations, laughter, and shared physical

presence transform the Bender into what Ahmed calls “a queer horizon,” a site where new futures

become imaginable.

 

The Archive as a Living Commons

 

The integration of archival materials—letters, photographs, poems, and oral histories—within the

Bender reframes the archive as an embodied, lived experience. Michel Foucault’s notion of the

archive as a “system of discursivity” (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969) underscores how

archives determine what is remembered or forgotten. Traditional archives have historically erased

queer and feminist resistance, privileging patriarchal and colonial narratives. The Bender rejects

this erasure by embedding the archive within a living, breathing structure.

The Bender becomes a site of what Elizabeth Freeman, in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer

Histories (2010), calls “chrononormativity’s disruption”—a space where linear time is upended.

The archival fragments within the Bender invite participants to inhabit a “queer time,” where the

past, present, and future coexist. This temporal collapse fosters what Judith Halberstamdescribes in The Queer Art of Failure (2011) as “a refusal of mastery,” allowing for vulnerability and

imagination to emerge as radical acts.

 

Queer Ecologies: The Land as Lover

 

Ecological queer theory provides a framework for understanding the Bender’s relationship with

the land as one of mutual care and erotic connection. As Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce

Erickson argue in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010), queerness disrupts

binaries between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, body and environment. The Bender

materialises this disruption, its form reflecting a porous, relational ecology.

The land, in this context, is not passive—it is a lover, an active participant in the queer

relationships fostered within the Bender. The bending of willow, the smell of soil, and the sound of

wind moving through the structure evoke what Stacy Alaimo calls “trans-corporeality” in Bodily

Natures (2010): the recognition that human and nonhuman bodies are deeply entangled. This

erotic, somatic entanglement is a decolonial practice, rejecting the commodification of land and

bodies in favour of reciprocity and care.

 

Fire as Collective Imagination: Rebellion and Utopia

 

The conversations that flow from the Bender to the fire—and back again—are acts of communal

dreaming. As the archive becomes embodied within the Bender, it transforms into a catalyst for

collective imagination. Around the fire, stories are shared, reshaped, and expanded into visions of

utopia and rebellion. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), we can

understand these conversations as glimpses of “queerness as horizon,” a collective refusal to

accept the present as the limit of possibility.

The fire itself acts as a space of transformation. Its heat and light create a visceral, somatic

experience that ties the women together. As Anna Tsing might describe it, the fire is a site of

“friction,” where difference and connection meet, sparking new possibilities. The fire becomes

both archive and future, carrying the stories of the women of Greenham Common into acts of

rebellion against patriarchal enclosure and ecological destruction.

Conclusion: Toward a Queer Commons

The Bender artwork, as a space of somatic experience, queer relationality, and decolonial

resistance, embodies the principles of a queer commons. It disrupts colonial, patriarchal, and

heteronormative structures, offering instead a space where intimacy, care, and imagination

converge. Inhabiting the Bender becomes an act of love: for each other, for the land, and for

futures yet to come.

 

This proposal invites us to see the Bender not as a static artwork but as a living, breathing

practice—one that holds the archive, resists erasure, and sparks collective utopias. Through its

sensory, embodied presence, the Bender teaches us that art, like land and love, is most powerful

when it is shared, porous, and alive.

 

References for Further Exploration

 

1. Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1984).

2. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016).

3. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in

Capitalist Ruins (2015).

4. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006).

5. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010).

6. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (2011).

7. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

(2009).

8. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010).

9. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature,

Politics, Desire (2010).