Rimming Colonial and Gendered Relations to the Environment in Léuli Eshrāghi’s Performance Video Works
- Jasmine Sihra
- 2 minutes ago
- 24 min read
In recent years, many Queer and / or Indigenous, Black, and other racialized artists, writers, and scholars have exposed the relationship between colonialism, climate change, and environmental issues around the world. These discourses point to the need for highlighting and resisting the colonial undertones and structures embedded in climate change policy or future environmental planning. Some artists have even stepped outside of conventional ways of thinking through climate change and colonialism, bringing together seemingly disparate themes in their practices and work. Dr Léuli Eshrāghi is a Sāmoan / Persian curator, artist and scholar whose research and work explores artistic themes of sexuality, queer kinships, relationality, ancestral knowledge(s), and gender identities from a decolonial and Indigenous lens.[1] In their chapter, ‘Rimming Islands: Fa’afafine-Fa’atane Pleasure and Decoloniality’, from the 2022 book Sex Ecologies, Eshrāghi speaks of a Sāmoan Ancestor, referring to them by their pronoun i’a, to offer a gentle yet provocative way of exploring ancestry in relation to sexuality and queerness:
To me, this Ancestor holds a tender, but firm gaze, daring us to remember our ways from before the fall of colonization and domination. Rather than embodying shame, would i’a giggle as we gossip about the meagre offering on Grindr or Tinder in the village? Would i’a regale younger queers with hxstories of sex in the forest with cousins, with neighbours from a far-off village who have come for ceremony and exchange?
While Eshrāghi’s work has been considered within the context of Indigenous, queer scholarship and artistic practice, very little has been written about Eshrāghi’s thoughtful consideration of land, water, and other elements of nature as it relates to these themes. What is the significance of the forest that hold those hxstories of sex?[2] Why would Eshrāghi evoke an image of full, lush green trees that cover the bodies and experience pleasure with each other? Why does nature, or the environment more broadly, matter in their work? The answers to these questions can be found in Eshrāghi’s many performance video works, specifically Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk (2015), SOGI MAI (2016), and re(cul)naissance (2021). Through an analysis of these works, I argue that Eshrāghi’s artistic practice circumvents colonial and gendered relationships with the environment and with their human kin. My framework of analysis for these works comes primarily from Eshrāghi’s own notion of ‘rimming islands’ and ‘rimming time’. Central to Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming is a projection of Queer and Indigenous relationships. In this article, I will draw out the significance of water and time using this conceptual practice of rimming to argue that Eshrāghi’s work disrupts colonial and gendered relationships with various environments.
Rimming is a sexual act performed between lovers when one uses their tongue to pleasure another’s anus. Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming follows the work of many Queer scholars, artists, and writers who consider anal sex, the buttocks, or ‘ass-play’ as a site of conceptual engagement to make (non)sense of Queer sexuality, intimacies, representation, or community experiences.[3] Throughout, I will demonstrate the significance of Queer and/or Indigenous perspectives that have the potential to disrupt colonial discourses around the climate and the environment, especially important during our current climate crisis. Moreover, I will situate Eshrāghi’s practice within the context of their own Sāmoan diasporic experience, as well as the colonial oppression of global Indigenous gender identities. My framework of analysis purposefully leans on Eshrāghi’s own ideas because their scholarly and artistic practices all arise from these themes of pleasure, sexuality, Indigeneity, and relational thinking, and my own positionality as a non-Sāmoan, non-Indigenous scholar can limit my understanding of their work. In other words, this paper takes cues from Eshraghi’s own theoretical concepts to analyze their work, offering a new way of thinking through climate change which considers sexuality, queerness, and colonialism.
Rimming: Pleasure, desire, and relationality
Eshrāghi has written extensively on Indigenous pleasure and how capitalism, colonialism, and Christianity across the Great Ocean[4] have repressed genders, desires, and sexualities, resulting in gender-based violence against non-binary and Trans-Indigenous bodies. In pre-colonial Sāmoan culture, those who adopted other Indigenous gender identities were accepted as part of the community and sexual relations with the same sex were never shamed. In fact, there existed and continue to exist terms for those who do not experience gender as ‘women’ or ‘men’: fa’afafine (becoming woman, or the way of the woman) and fa’atane (becoming man, or the way of the man).[5] Sāmoan scholar Johanna Schmidt explains that historically Sāmoans have had a collective idea about culture, and that during pre-colonial times gender markers of any kind were established as a way to contribute labour ‘for the good of the group’.[6] Because of this relationship between gender and labour, fa’afafine were not necessarily marked by behaviour or appearance. Schmidt explains that this might be the reason why fa’afafines are relatively invisible within early colonial documentation of Sāmoan culture,[7] in addition to the fact that, as Eshrāghi points out, European missionaries did not consider fa’afafine and fa’atane human beings.[8] However, fa’afafine had a constant presence in Sāmoan cultural hxstories and were integral parts of their communities and villages. For example, fa’afafine and fa’atane had nurturing and housekeeping roles in village performances and ceremonies but their existence was threatened by colonialism.[9] Anyone who exhibited any expression or behaviour that did not conform to heteronormative relationships or the colonial gender binary was punished, killed, or experienced other forms of gender-based violence.
Eshrāghi suggests that the non-colonial action of rimming explores pleasure as emancipatory and part of both chosen kinships and actual bloodlines.[10] For Eshrāghi, pleasure is a conduit for Indigenous ‘cumlines’, the sexual and spiritual genealogies that assert desire as the foundation for kinships.[11] Eshrāghi evokes the body as part of kinship-making, writing, such that ‘our bodies are the skins, waters, airs of the nations where we come from’.[12] Eshrāghi also considers the physical aspects of sexuality and pleasure, asking how ‘antics with lovers’ can resist colonial legacies in the form of feeding, licking, eating, devouring, pouring, furrowing, and rimming.[13] They consider the last point of rimming to think about movement and intimacy and to centre pleasure as part of community-building. Within the context of water and the islands, the concept of rimming offers a way of freely flowing relationships across the Great Ocean, centring water as part of that relationality between different people. As it relates to time, rimming suggests that time moves back, forth, and around. Though water and time both flow, I analyse them in isolation to draw out the meaning of both water (as part of islands) and time (as disrupting time) within this broader notion of rimming. I argue that by isolating the rimming of time and the rimming of water, we can more fully understand the concept of rimming that manifests in different ways throughout Eshrāghi’s works.
Eshrāghi highlights Queer, Indigenous experiences to reclaim repressed gender identities and advocate for the safety of those who experience gender-based colonial violence within their communities. However, these acts of reclamation are not referential to the heteronormativity and binaries that are established by colonial powers. Rather, they rebuild communities in a way that embraces the integral roles that are possible within a community. The relationships that are established between the participants and environments in Eshrāghi’s works build kinship within and beyond communities—kinship that does not exist through the exclusion of oppressed people such as fa’afafine or fa’atane. This is reminiscent of Cree / Métis / Saulteaux scholar Jas M Morgan and Cree scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt’s conversation about Queer Indigenous ethics, where they explicitly highlight a ‘relational way of being’.[14] As Belcourt explains, differently gendered Indigenous peoples often ‘seek and/or perform alternative sites of political action and community building’, further signifying relationality as part of Queer Indigenous ethics and aesthetics.[15] They even suggest that Queer Indigenous ethics connect the past, present, and future of Indigenous communities where enactments of care and ‘relational transformation’ take precedence. In many ways, Eshrāghi’s practice works through this Queer Indigenous aesthetic considers Indigenous Queer and trans pasts and futures. In the following sections, I will separately analyse time and water to explore how Eshrāghi rims both throughout three video works: Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk, SOGI MAI, and re(cul)naissance. Through these works, I argue that by rimming water and time, Eshrāghi disrupts gendered and sexual relationships to the environment.
Rimming time: Projecting futures
Eshrāghi introduces rimming time as a way to circumvent what they call ‘Gregorian shame-time’, which was imposed upon Indigenous peoples across the Great Ocean with the arrival of colonizers.[16] Eshrāghi’s use of ‘shame’ points to how other Indigenous gendered peoples of the Great Ocean are cast within a ‘backward, whiteward trajectory of annihilation’ that sees their existence hinging on pain, death, and unbelonging.[17] Instead of aligning kinships and Indigenous pleasure to the linear process of Gregorian calendrical time, Eshrāghi suggests that rimming time allows for hxstories that move backwards and forward, where relationships are based on Indigenous pleasures.[18] Eshrāghi’s idea of Gregorian shame-time resonates with settler-scholar Mark Rifkin’s explanation of settler-time, a white, western framing of time that asserts linear temporal experiences and the ‘orderings, articulations and reckonings of time’.[19] Settler-time emphasizes settler-futurities: that is, the survival of settler societies and ideologies, often excluding Indigenous communities, Queer communities, and differently gendered peoples.
Non-linear temporal explorations can resist settler-time, especially when Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC), Two-Spirit, Queer, and Trans artists employ non-linear temporal formations that foreground their own communities’ futures.[20] I argue that rimming time embraces a non-linear temporal formation that is rooted in both pleasure and Indigenous formations of time. In Punā’oa ‘Upu Mai ‘O Atumotu / Glossaire des Archipels (2022), Eshrāghi mentions rimming to define the Sāmoan word taumamuli taking cues from Sāmoan scholar Leali’fano Albert Refiti. They state that taumamuli is the ‘realization of Indigenous time through acts of rimming or surrounding butts or the end of the world’ (fig 1). Taumamuli denotes Indigenous formations of time and implies a futuristic perspective in thinking about the end of the world. I argue that the use of futurism in Eshrāghi’s practice points to the forward-looking perspective of rimming that does not exist at the expense of Indigenous, Queer, Trans, or non-binary bodies.
The use of rimming time considers the past, present, and future of Queer, Indigenous peoples, resisting a colonial narrative that might situate them in the past or render them nonexistent, by reimagining relationships with the environment, now and into the future, as including or even underscored by pleasure. This suggestion of new relationships is timely considering the current climate crisis; it resists the feeling of isolation from the environment with intimacy and pleasure. The result is that the rimming of time can encourage us to care for the environment in times of climate crisis.
Rimming water in/of/around islands
In Eshrāghi’s performance videos, participants construct relationships with each other through different actions like touching and breathing while engaging with their environments. In addition to creating relationships between themselves, participants construct relationships with the various environments. Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming islands acknowledges their own Great Ocean context and the significance of water in the various environments presented in the performance videos. Water complements Eshrāghi’s curatorial, scholarly, and artistic practice that references ways of knowing or relating across the Great Ocean. Many scholars, such as Tongan scholar Epeli Hau’ofa and Sāmoan scholar Lana Lopesi, have explained that water, seas, and oceans is a significant part of the cultural heritage and ways of relating across different communities around the Great Ocean. These bodies of water flow freely, transcending political borders to connect communities across the Great Ocean. The Great Ocean context and holds weight in Eshrāghi’s practice as well.
Similar to white settler feminist and scholar Astrida Neimanis, I strive to think with water to understand rimming as fluid, moving freely, slipping, spreading, flowing in no particular direction, and connecting bodies to each other, including more-than-human ones.[21] In this way, thinking with water can disrupt anthropocentrism in research or conversations about the environment and climate. As Eshrāghi writes, Western knowledge systems are typically centred around human life, a result of colonial epistemologies hailing from Europe that sever relationships and ‘responsibilities to rivers, lakes, fields, mountains, and deltas’.[22] White settler Australian scholar Val Plumwood describes how European colonization has resulted in colonial relationships between humans and more-than-human, like nature and animals, where the former come to control and dominate the latter.[23] This ideology insists that land is unused, underused, and empty, which then justifies the colonial domination of nature and non-human life. Nature and animals are othered, their differences are ignored, and they are not seen as independent. This othering of nature and animals directly follows the othering of Indigenous peoples. Plumwood argues for a decolonization of relationships with nature by affirming the presence of the other’s difference ‘as an independent presence to be engaged with on their own terms’.[24]
Referencing Refiti, Eshrāghi explains that many Indigenous communities across the Great Ocean experience kinships with different beings as described in the concept of vā, the ‘relational space between all things, a spatiality that is visual, emotional, political, and in constant flux’.[25] Refiti describes vā as the ‘great tension that pushes the world outwards and gathers it inwards in its totality’.[26] Vā thus seeks to establish kinships beyond the human, existing outside of human-centric notions within colonial ways of being and living. As Refiti further outlines, oceanic perspectives include lalolagi, a holistic worldview where
nothing is unrelated, everything has a relation. Mountains, rivers, rocks, celestial movements, and people form a contiguous fabric, a network drawn in and out, thus always in tension, spreading, to māvae and regathering/reordering – tōfiga.[27]
I argue that Eshrāghi looks to Refiti’s scholarly and written work to think through Sāmoan knowledge, such that water is not only part of rimming but part of lalolagi and vā. Thinking with water in Eshrāghi’s works resists a colonial relationship to the environment as a resource. Water, here, furthers the importance of care and meaningful relationships to the environment. This confronts the climate crisis by establishing better relationships between humans and the environment, rather than one of isolation.
In the following section, I will analyse three of Eshrāghi’s performance video works. First, I analyse Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk, one of Eshrāghi’s earlier works, that shows three individuals interacting with each other and the Merri Yaluk Creek. I analyse how the participants rim time and water by interacting with each other, touching, caressing, and greeting each other, while curiously exploring the different nooks and crannies of the creek. After, I explore SOGI MAI, a performance video that shows participants greeting each other through sogi (so-ngi)—a Sāmoan practice of greeting where individuals share breath to affirm each other’s presence. The participants perform this greeting on top of a snowy, cold mountain framed by the sound of rapids, contrasting with the warmer climates in Eshrāghi’s other works. I consider how the practice of sogi establishes an intimacy with different people that resists settler-time and reinforces relationships with and through water. Finally, I explore Eshrāghi’s most recent body of work at the time of writing, re(cul)naissance. This work is an installation that includes a video-work. In re(cul)naissance, Eshrāghi explores Indigenous pleasures and non-colonial Indigenous actions with different participants through intimate actions of gentle caressing and other forms of tactile pleasure. As will be seen, re(cul)naissance offers the most obvious examples of rimming time and water compared to the other videos.
Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk
Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk is the earliest work by Eshrāghi analyzed here. In it, Eshrāghi and two other individuals, Joe Joe Orangias and Darcy Jones, explore the waters of a creek called Merri Yaluk (figs 2-4). This creek is known to be a ‘sacred source of life for the Wurundjeri people’, who are Indigenous to the area of so-called Australia known as Melbourne.[28] As Eshrāghi mentions, this creek is a place for ‘liminal, Queer’ ways of relating, and the video’s participants accordingly explore the environment and their relationships.[29] Simply put, desire underpins all the actions of these individuals. They engage in a relational practice of rimming by gently and consensually wiping and caressing each other’s bodies, marking them with liquid as they explore the creek. Eshrāghi notes that these actions can resist the ‘pressure…to assert title over Indigenous territories in the marking of space’.[30] One of the ways European colonizers established control over lands was by naming them, erasing Indigenous names and ways of knowing about places. Part of this naming is the intention of removing the hxstory of a place, in this case, the hxstory and ancestral knowledge held in a place, in order to bring about a settler-colonial futurity at the expense of Indigenous lives. Gregorian shame-time then is rimmed by the actions of the participants, who use desire to relate with the environment and with each other. Equally significant in this rimming is the non-linear flow of the video. The beginning of the video establishes a kind of greeting between Eshrāghi and one of the participants, but then another participant joins and, from there, the scenes shift from one to another completely outside of chronological order. This hints at a future that makes space for other kinds of relating beyond shame-time.
Eshrāghi notes that the creek itself is ‘a secluded space where young and old interact in liminal, Queer ways unbeknownst to heteropatriarchal society’.[31] It carries great meaning as the waterway that surrounds and holds these non-colonial actions. Eshrāghi chose the creek to highlight another way of engaging with the environment that is rooted in desire and pleasure. Hau’ofa has written that waterways and seas are part of the cultural heritage of many communities across the Great Ocean, calling places like Sāmoa existing as part of a ‘sea of islands’ instead of an island in a vast sea.[32] Furthermore, Eshrāghi has likely come across the literature and research on Queer ‘cruising spots’ that point to green spaces, like forests or parks, as safe places for sex because Queer sex and intimacies are stigmatized within heteropatriarchal society.[33] I argue that Eshrāghi enacts these liminal actions in the space with the participants in the video, to realize those actions rooted in pleasure. However, I do not believe the intention is to normalize those actions in the space. Instead, Eshrāghi and the individuals rim the waters, acting within and around the creek which comes to symbolize a flow of connections, meetings, and intimacies between each other. Indeed, the golden fluid is clearly part of the creek, as suggested in the title of the work: Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk. Eshrāghi rims the waters of the creek, not literally but as a method of relating, to highlight the creek’s waters that hold these pleasures and intimacies.
SOGI MAI
Sogi
SOGI MAI is a performance video that Eshrāghi created during their 2016 Indigenous Visual & Digital Arts Residency at The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, in Mihrpha[34] (‘Banff’), Treaty Seven Territory. Sogi (so-ngi) is a Sāmoan practice of greeting where individuals share breath to affirm each other’s presence, or ‘mana, cumulative energy’.[35] In the video, Eshrāghi and one individual gently touch their foreheads against each other and deeply inhale the air between them. Eshrāghi performs this greeting with seven participants, including one greeting Eshrāghi with a young baby perched on their back (figs 5-6).[36] The participants perform their greetings against a wintry backdrop, with tall green trees and snowy ground. What is interesting here is the sharing of breath, visible as condensation in the cold air, and the crunch of the participants’ footsteps on the snowy land as they walk to meet each other. At different points in the video, water flowing as rapids can be heard, sometimes harshly and loudly, sometimes gently and faintly. Through the residency, Eshrāghi was a guest on the Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain in Mirhnpa. This area also comprises the oral practices of the Îyârhe Nakoda (‘Stoney Nakoda’), comprised of the Bearspaw, Chiniki, and Goodstoney Nations, the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and nations part of the Blackfoot Confederacy: The Siksika, The Piikani, and The Kanai. This territory is home to the Shuswap Nations, Ktunaxa Nations, and the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3.[37] Eshrāghi’s employment of the practice of sogi is a careful and thoughtful practice to consider how to respectfully greet different people on different lands. It is significant that an Indigenous artist from relatively isolated parts of the world, The Great Ocean and so-called Australia, can engage in this deep, intimate relationality with others from different cultural backgrounds or nationalities in a faraway place. The effect of colonialism globally is often felt as isolation from other communities, even Indigenous communities who have once had relationships with each other, but which were disrupted by colonial and imperial practices of geopolitical border-making.[38] Sogi Mai can be seen as an extension of rimming, not only as a way of relating that can disrupt time and centre pleasure but establishing relationships beyond one’s own immediate, local communities.
Though it might not be readily apparent, water forms the foundation of Sogi Ma, especially considering Eshrāghi’s cultural heritage around water, and experiences and connections to islands in the Great Ocean. Looking closely at Sogi Mai, water is seen as the snow covering the mountains and the trees around the participants, but it is also heard as the crunch under their feet as they walk towards each other and the quick flow of rapids in the background. Eshrāghi chose to include the snowy scenery, the sounds of walking on the snow, and the sometimes gentle, sometimes harsh movement of the rapids. I see Eshrāghi trying to make the environment familiar to them, as the water they have learnt from and through in their life has likely been warm and flowy. However, they emphasize the snowy, cold landscape, acknowledging how water in diverse forms can hold these connections to people in different kinds of places. That being said, the practice of sogi generates some level of warmth, seen in the condensation of breath when the participants breathe in the air between them. Condensation, here, is still water, simply in the form of liquid vapour or steam, when warm air is exposed to cold air. Sogi is a traditional Sāmoan greeting and would not usually be practised in cold weather, but the warm breath hints at Eshrāghi’s lessons from water from their own Great Ocean context. Eshrāghi then, engages in rimming here in the sense of moving freely and respectfully around a new, unfamiliar place, establishing a connection that is literally fluid at times or speaks to a kind of fluidity in how to create a connection with others in a new environment.
Eshrāghi also rims time in the video, but once again it might not be readily apparent. The artist notes that sogi is undertaken as a way to consider fleeting, temporary connections, or meetings between people from various kinds of backgrounds.[39] The fragmented sounds of the rapids indicate that the video is entirely non-linear. Moreover, it is difficult to tell who Eshrāghi meets first and last, perhaps suggesting that a linear chronology of relationality between the participants does not matter. The temporality of the video resists a settler time, insisting on the relationships above all else. The intimate act of sharing breath signifies that these connections, while fleeting, are deep and meaningful. Time, then, does not necessarily matter within those relationships, resisting any sense of Gregorian shame-time. Water and time may not be clear as elements of the video, but Eshrāghi does rim both to engage in relational practice.
re(cul)naissance
In re(cul)naissance, Eshrāghi and four other participants touch, caress, and wipe water on each other, set against tall green trees, branches, and stacked stones, with the sound of a river and rain gently flowing on Obelisk nude beach on Eora Nation territory (figs 7-8).[40] Throughout the video, the participants look as if they are in a state of pleasure, and at some points, they stare back at the camera, almost to involve the viewer in their actions. Their gazes could imply defiance, as many Indigenous artists have used this as a tactic to resist a colonial gaze from anthropological photographs that have often rendered Indigenous peoples as stuck in the past, primitive, or victims.[41] But based on Eshrāghi’s practice of pleasure, it feels more appropriate to think of the gaze as an invitational one—a gaze that asks how we can all engage in a relationality with others from a place of pleasure and desire. Eshrāghi mentions that this video is meant to think through kink practices and Indigenous pleasures as part of non-colonial actions that imagine futures after Gregorian shame-time. This figures ‘softness, hardness, fluid states, openness, closedness’ as a key part of those futures.[42] Eshrāghi has discussed that the title of the work re(cul)naissance comes from the French word ‘renaissance’, meaning rebirth or stepping back, and ‘cul’, a French slang word for ‘ass’.[43] Of all works in this essay, re(cul)naissance most fully captures Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming islands and time.
The environment in re(cul)naissance is more similar to the warm ones that Eshrāghi experienced living across the Great Ocean. In fact, the performance took place in an area that experiences relatively mild temperatures year-round. The ancestors of many Indigenous First Nations are known to have lived on the island, particularly the nations who are descended from the Eora People.[44] As a contested site that has been altered by colonialism, the Indigenous, Queer, gender non-conforming, and / or non-binary participants, engage with the island through non-colonial actions, resisting the present state of the island which distorts the diverse Indigenous hxstories of the place and the people who inhabited it. These actions are framed by water in the form of rain and the river that lubricates the bodies as they caress and massage each other. While viewers might feel like voyeurs intruding in an intimate, sexual act, these actions do not only signify actual sexual intimacies. This performance video demonstrates that a relationship between individuals is meant to be fluid, soft, hard, or wet, where different people are meant to feel comfortable and good in their bodies and acknowledge those bodies through affectionate touch. Through their non-colonial actions, all the participants assert a Queer Indigenous presence and futurity based on pleasure.
Like Eshrāghi’s previously discussed works, this performance video does not follow a chronological order. However, what is more indicative of the rimming of Gregorian shame-time is the combination of cul and renaissance in the title, which suggests that Eshrāghi projects a desire for a future that actively centres the relationships based on pleasure and desire between Queer Indigenous peoples. Eshrāghi uses the word cul to evoke Queer pleasure and sex in the video. On the one hand, Eshrāghi suggests a reclamation of Queer relationships that were forcibly lost through assimilation and genocide at the onset of colonialism. On the other, the artist suggests a rebirth of those relationships that now look different because of the effects of colonialism on differently gendered Indigenous and Queer people. The title of the video suggests that Queer, Trans, and non-binary Indigenous peoples must work through their cumlines and bloodlines to move forward into the future. The term cumlines is reminiscent of Queer notions of ‘chosen family’, when Queer people seek acceptance and belongingness outside of their family, or bloodlines. However, cumlines is an Indigenous practice that circumvents the Western whiteness that is pervasive within practices of Queer chosen families.[45] Cumlines likewise disrupt the colonial practice of blood quantum:, that is, the amount of Indigenous blood that one might have in them. Generally, settler-colonial states globally used blood quantum as an attempt to assimilate Indigenous peoples into settler society.[46] But re(cul)naissance circumvents blood quantum by demonstrating the deeply intimate relationships that could arise from exploring cumlines as well as bloodlines. Cumlines is not positioned as a binary to blood quantum or bloodlines; it encompasses all of these things and, as seen in this performance-video, a way to rim both is through pleasure.
Pleasure and / in the environment
While each performance video seemingly emphasizes the relationships between Eshrāghi and the participants, my focus on time and water points to the need for understanding human relationships with the environment. The water covers or surrounds the participants’ bodies and intervenes in these relationships to remind the viewer of the spaces, places, and hxstories that have held and will continue to hold some form of greeting and exchange between people. Though colonial relationships with the environment are premised on domination, extraction, and use, they are not the only ways of relating to the environment. Indigenous scholars stress the need for reciprocal, respectful relationships with the environment through such concepts as rimming time, rimming water, vā, and lalolagi. These views assert connections with everything, including the more-than-human world, challenging the colonial ideologies that have resulted in the current climate and ecological crises.[47]
Within the context of the current climate and ecological crises, Eshrāghi’s practice is extremely important because it implicates relationships between peoples and their surrounding environments. Eshrāghi offers a tangible way of establishing those relationships, like gently wiping or massaging waters onto each other, frolicking around a creek, or breathing and taking in the air no matter how cold it might be. These actions are non-colonial, in that they do not seek to extract from the land or people. Furthermore, taumamuli or rimming considers the ‘end of the world’, suggesting an exploration into what the ‘end’ of the world could mean. I have written elsewhere that mainstream discourses around climate change always seem to delve into ideas of environmental apocalypse rooted in Judeo-Christian notions of Judgement Day, but Indigenous formations of time would not consider the end of the world in this way.[48] Eshrāghi would agree with this in re(cul)naissance, which proposes a kind of rebirth of ways of relating with others. Moreover, Eshrāghi’s work suggests pleasure as part of how we respond to climate environmental apocalypse and climate change by re-establishing respectful relationships with the environment. Their performance videos ask how we can ensure that respect and pleasure are part of ecological restoration projects, or how we can state climate disaster policies and future planning in ways that do not infringe upon Indigenous sovereignties. How can centring pleasure insist upon listening to, working with, and following the leadership of 2SQTBIPOC climate and environmental activists? And how does pleasure allow us to ensure the health and well-being of those whose lives are deeply and intimately affected by climate disasters? Pleasure and rimming might seem as though they have nothing to do with climate change, but Eshrāghi’s work shows that they have everything to do with it.
Conclusion: What’s to cum?
In this essay, I draw out themes of water and time within Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming to analyze their performance video works. As a scholar working around the arts, climate change, and the environment, I am particularly interested in the presence of the environment through water across Eshrāghi's works. I see immense potential for these videos of pleasure to offer another way of relating to the environment—a necessary pursuit considering the climate crisis. I consider the importance of Queer and Indigenous perspectives and ways of thinking or relating within the climate change discourse without overshadowing how Eshrāghi makes space for Queer, Trans, Non-binary, Two-Spirit, and Indigenous peoples. By assessing these works, we gain an understanding of the importance of spaces created by and for Two-Spirit, Queer, Trans, non-binary, and differently gendered Indigenous peoples. They ensure safety and belonging within a heteropatriarchal society that enacts violence on those who do not conform, underscored by better relationships with the environment. The relationality between the participants in all of the works suggests a desire for relationship-building and solidarity across various communities and environments. Vulnerable groups like 2SQTBIPOC will be the most disrupted by climate disasters and will make up a large percentage of climate refugees’ populations. [49] Therefore, as we continue to move into difficult climate futures, meaningful connections, relationships, and solidarities might prove to be key for the survival and well-being of all. In light of Eshrāghi’s analysis, I argue that we can only survive if we are brave enough to rim—both literally and figuratively.
Jasmine Sihra
Born and raised in Tsí tkaròn:to (‘Toronto’), Dr. Jasmine Sihra is a Punjabi researcher and curator. She completed her PhD in Art History at Concordia University in 2026. Her career and research focus on how the arts can contribute to planning for inevitable climate disasters and environmental pollution, particularly for underserved and underrepresented communities.
[1] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Rimming Islands: Fa’afafine-Fa’atane Pleasure and Decoloniality’ in Stefanie Hessler (ed), Sex Ecologies (MIT Press 2021) 108.
[2] Hxstories is a term used by queer and feminist scholars to interrogate the commonly told histories of places and people from a mostly White, male, cisgender, straight perspective, which are typically taken as fact. Hxstories creates space for different kinds of narratives, accounts, and perspectives, especially marginalized ones.
[3] See Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (University of Chicago Press 2009); Chris A Eng, ‘Apprehending the “Angry Ethnic Fag”: The Queer (Non) Sense of Shame in Justin Chin’s “Currency” and “Lick My Butt”’ (2020) 26(1) GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 105; Jennifer C Nash, ‘Black Anality’ (2014) 20(4) GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 440.
[4] Eshrāghi uses the phrase ‘the Great Ocean’ to refer to the area known as the Pacific Islands, likely to point to the cultural exchange, migration flows, and shared hxstories across these areas.
[5] Eshrāghi (n 1) 103.
[6] Johanna Schmidt, ‘Samoan fa'afafine’ in Howard Chiang (ed), The Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History (Charles Scribner’s Sons 2019) 1408.
[7] ibid 1408.
[8] Eshrāghi (n 1) 101.
[9] Léuli Eshrāghi and Lucreccia Quintanilla, ‘Trueno tropical / Faititili a motu / Tropical thunder’ (2013) 1(2) Writing From Below Journal 94.
[10] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Privilégier le plaisir autochtone / Priority to Indigenous pleasures’ in Jessyca Hutchens, Brook Andrew, Stuart Geddes, and Trent Walter (eds), NIRIN NGAAY (Biennale of Sydney 2020) 2.
[11] ibid 2.
[12] ibid 6.
[13] ibid 8.
[14] Billy-Ray Belcourt and Lindsay Nixon, ‘What Do We Mean by Queer Indigenous Ethics?’ (Canadian Art Magazine, 23 May 2018) <https://canadianart.ca/features/what-do-we-mean-by-queerindigenousethics/> accessed 1 June 2024.
[15] ibid.
[16] Eshrāghi, (n 1) 103.
[17] ibid 104.
[18] ibid 104.
[19] Mark Rifkin, ‘One: Indigenous Orientations’ in Mark Rifkin (ed), Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Duke University Press 2017) 3, 5.
[20] Jasmine Sihra, ‘She Falls for Ages and Imagines Future After Apocalypse’ (2021) 3(1) Tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture 228.
[21] Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (Bloomsbury 2017) 2.
[22] Eshrāghi (n 1) 105.
[23] Val Plumwood, ‘Decolonising Relationships with Nature’ (2002) 2(2) Pan 9.
[24] ibid 15.
[25] Albert Refiti, ‘Vā Moana swells within a global sea of islands’ in Alexandra Chang, Charlotte Huddleston, and Janine Randerson (eds), 2020 Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange Aotearoa: Ngā Tai o te Ao: the global tides (St Paul St Gallery AUT; Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU 2021) 1.
[26] ibid 6.
[27] ibid 6.
[28] ‘Walking Tours’ (Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation) <https://wurundjericulturaltours.com.au/> accessed 1 June 2024.
[29] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk (2015)’ (LÉULI ESHRĀGHI) <http://leulieshraghi.art/goldenflow> accessed 1 June 2024.
[30] ibid.
[31] Eshrāghi (n 29).
[32] Epeli Hau'ofa, ‘Our Seas of Islands’ in We are the Ocean: Selected Works (University of Hawai’i Press 2008) 31.
[33] Gavin Brown, ‘Ceramics, clothing and other bodies: affective geographies of homoerotic cruising encounters’ (2008) 9(8) Social & Cultural Geography 916.
[34] Translated from Stoney Nakoda as ‘the waterfalls’.
[35] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘SOGI MAI (2016)’ (LÉULI ESHRĀGHI) <http://leulieshraghi.art/sogi-mai>.
[36] ibid.
[37] ‘Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’ (Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity) <https://www.banffcentre.ca/> accessed 1 June 2024.
[38] Lana Lopesi, False Divides (Bridget Williams Books Limited 2018) 8.
[39] Eshrāghi (n 35).
[40] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Re(cul)naissance (2020)’ (LÉULI ESHRĀGHI) <http://leulieshraghi.art/reculnaissance>.
[41] Julie Nagam, ‘Deciphering the Digital and Binary Codes of Sovereignty/ Self-determination and Recognition/Emancipation’ (2016) 27(54) Public 78.
[42] ibid 78.
[43] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Untitled Lecture on Artistic, Curatorial, and Scholarly Practice’ (presentation in Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim’s Graduate Seminar ARTH 649 Curatorial Studies: Theory and Practice in the Department of Art History, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, October 2022).
[44] ‘Cockatoo Island’ (Cockatoo Island) <https://www.cockatooisland.gov.au/en/our-story/first-nations/> accessed 1 June 2024.
[45] Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (Duke University Press 2022) 10.
[46]Annette M Jaimes, ‘Some Kind of Indian: On Race, Eugenics, and Mixed-Bloods’ in Naomi Zack (ed), American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity (Rowman & Littlefield 1995) 138.
[47] See also eg Joanna Barker, ‘Confluence: Water as an Analytic of Indigenous Feminisms’ (2019) 43(3) American Indian Culture and Research Journal 2; Cutcha R Baldy and Melanie K Yazzie, ‘Introduction: Indigenous peoples and the politics of water’ (2018) 7(1) Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 10; Zoe Todd, ‘Fish, Kin, and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in Amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory’ (2017) 43 Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 102.
[48] Sihra (n 20) 229.
[49] Kirsten Vinyeta, Kyle Whyte, and Kathy Lynn, Climate change through an intersectional lens: gendered vulnerability and resilience in indigenous communities in the United States (United States Department of Agriculture 2015) 3.
