--- title: "Queering Earth" url: "https://queering.earth/" updated: "2026-09-09" description: "Reading the world through a queering lens — art, literature, poetry, politics, people, history — and asking what else any of it could have been. A Stimpunks Foundation and More Realms collaboration." licence: "CC-BY-SA-4.0" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" attribution_ledger: "https://github.com/Stimpunks/Queering-Earth/blob/main/ATTRIBUTIONS.md" generated_by: "tools/make-markdown.mjs from the page's own
landmark" --- # Queering.Earth Post-normal possibilities. What is normal? Who’s normal? ## What this is Queering Earth reads the world through a queering lens — art, literature, poetry, politics, people, and history — and asks what else any of it could have been. Our sibling site, [Star Stuff](https://starstuff.earth/), is built on science: bone that turns pressure into charge, atoms forged in dying stars, a universe that declines to pathologize its own variation. This place is built on the other half of the shelf — the humanities, the myths, the canon, the stories we were handed and told not to question. There are no hard facts here for everything. That is deliberate. Interpretation is the method, and the room left open is where the reading happens. ## Queering is a verb The word we are working with comes from Queer Theory, and [Nick Walker](https://neuroqueer.com/) carried it into neurodiversity. His definition is a parenthesis, and the parenthesis is the whole thing: Specimen — the verb > I originally conceived of *neuroqueer* as a verb: neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously. Nick Walker, [*Neuroqueer: An Introduction*](https://neuroqueer.com/neuroqueer-an-introduction/). Collected in [*Neuroqueer Heresies*](https://neuroqueer.com/neuroqueer-heresies/) (Autonomous Press, 2021). Walker is naming two normativities in particular. Taking the verb further out — to a painting, a canon, a century, a diagnosis, a life — is our extension, not his sentence. The credit for the verb stays with him. The line under our masthead owes him too. *Neuroqueer Heresies* is subtitled *Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities* — one hyphen from our own. Whatever route the phrase took to reach us, he published it first, and a site about queering normativity is not going to be coy about where its masthead came from. After the cover of Nick Walker’s [*Neuroqueer Heresies*](https://neuroqueer.com/neuroqueer-heresies/), which sets a human brain where a swallowtail’s body would be, and after Ezra Furman’s [*Lilac and Black*](https://genius.com/Ezra-furman-lilac-and-black-lyrics). Ours is a moth, and the Earth is where the brain was. ## To queer is to adapt Walker gives us the verb. [Pamela Demory](https://ucdavis.academia.edu/PDemory) — writing in adaptation studies, not in neurodiversity — gives us what the verb does to a text. Her argument is that two fields have been describing the same motion under different names for years, and she sets the two words on either side of a slash to say so. Specimen — the slash > To adapt is to modify, to evolve, to transform, to repeat, imitate, parody, make new. To queer something is to make it strange or odd, but also to turn or transform it. To queer, then, may be to adapt; to adapt is to queer. Pamela Demory, [*Queer/Adaptation: An Introduction*](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-05306-2_1), page 1. In [*Queer/Adaptation: A Collection of Critical Essays*](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-05306-2) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She arrives where Walker is standing, by the other road: “If we think of queer as a verb, as a doing rather than a being, then to queer something is to deconstruct it, to demonstrate the instability of all those apparently obvious oppositions” — and the three she names are male/female, homosexuality/heterosexuality, and normal/deviant. That is this site’s method described from the outside. Every sheet here is an adaptation: Woolf read through illness, Rossetti read through solo polyamory, Miranda read as somebody to be wondered *with*. Demory’s useful insistence is that this is not a lesser thing to do to a text. Adaptation and queerness both, she writes, “suffer from the stereotype of being secondary, somehow less authentic” — a copy held against an original, a life held against a norm. It is one charge made twice, and it is the charge this site declines. Drawn after the crooked tree in *Wristcutters: A Love Story* (2006, dir. Goran Dukić, from Etgar Keret’s *Kneller’s Happy Campers*), [spoken by Tom Waits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAov-G-zHlc): the straight tree spends its life telling the crooked one what it is, until the lumberjacks arrive and are told to cut all the straight trees. The crooked one is still there, “growing strong and growing strange”. **Whether the speech is Waits’ own or the screenplay’s, we have not established** — the question is open in `ATTRIBUTIONS.md` rather than settled here. ## The sentence adapts itself Five years later Demory quotes that sentence back, in a chapter on Apple TV+’s *Dickinson*. She does not quote it whole. She cuts it to what the new argument needs, marks every cut, and leaves her own name on what is left. Specimen — the same sentence, adapted > As argued elsewhere, queer and adaptation are parallel terms, both shaping the ways that we approach or reflect on given texts. In other words, ‘To adapt is to modify … To queer something is to make it strange or odd … or transform it. To queer, then, may be to adapt’ (Demory 2019). Pamela Demory, [*Queering Emily Dickinson for the Millennial Age*](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-50832-5_10). In Blythe Worthy and Paul Sheehan, eds., *Adapting Television and Literature* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Read the two together and the second one performs the first. *To evolve, to repeat, imitate, parody, make new* is gone. *But also to turn* is gone. *To adapt is to queer* — the half of the sentence that ran the other way — is gone. What survives is still hers and still true, and it is no longer the same sentence. It is “repetition, but repetition without replication”, which is Linda Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation, quoted in Demory’s own 2019 introduction three pages after the sentence she would later cut. An author may do that to her own line. The reason it reads as adaptation and not as misquotation is the ellipses: every cut is marked, and you can see exactly where the scissors went. That is the whole difference, and it is not a small one. A trimmed quotation with the attribution still attached is the characteristic failure of a site like this one — not an invented source, a tightened one. So we mark the cuts, or we do not make them, and when we get it wrong we say so in [the register](https://queering.earth/changelog). ## The type plays, and the words do not move Letters on this site lean, deviate, and refuse to sit on the line. That is not decoration. A page about normativity that sets itself in a tidy grid is arguing against itself. Specimen — one sentence, pasted up > This is a protest of the notion that there is any correct way to live. Max Alexander, [*A Playful Manifesto*](https://playradical.com/a-playful-manifesto/), Play Radical. Read at source 9 September 2026; the opening is [quoted whole on the manifesto sheet](https://queering.earth/manifesto). **One sentence, six sizes, and not a word of it altered.** The setting is ours and the words are Alexander’s, and the join between those two things is the only thing on this page that is not allowed to play. The faces are the sheet’s own two — the display face shouts, the reading face carries — so the setting follows whatever typeface you choose under **Reading** rather than overriding it. *Correct* is the exception, set in whatever face your device prints its forms in, and it is the one thing here that plain view takes away: in plain view every word is in that face. It also is not a trade. Every page here has a **plain view** — the control at the top of this one. It turns off the play, the motion, and the display faces, and leaves the words exactly as they are. One page, two ways to read it, and no second-class copy. Nothing on this site will ever be readable only in the decorated version. ## The plate Every sheet mounted so far, numbered below in the order it was accessioned. [About this drawer](https://queering.earth/the-plate) — what a sheet is, what a reading, an essay and a wall each mean, and what the numbers do and do not say. - [ Reading No. 1 The Army of the Upright Virginia Woolf, *On Being Ill*, 1930 Illness missing from the prime themes, a language that runs dry, and the army you desert by lying down. ](https://queering.earth/on-being-ill) - [ Essay No. 2 Coming to Terms Ryan Boren, 2022 Pink-tinted eyeglasses in Southern Baptist Texas, and two words that fit after a lifetime of looking. ](https://queering.earth/coming-to-terms) - [ Reading No. 3 The Die Uncast Christina Rossetti, *Promises like Pie-crust*, 1861 Twenty-four lines refusing to promise anybody anything, read as the charter for solo polyamory that nobody handed us. ](https://queering.earth/promises-like-pie-crust) - [ Reading No. 4 Wyrd, Weird, and the Invention of Normal Helen Edgar, More Realms, July 2026 A word demoted from fate to defect, three sisters at a well, and an idea of normal barely two centuries old. ](https://queering.earth/invention-of-normal) - [ Reading No. 5 Miranda: To Be Wondered With William Shakespeare, *The Tempest*, 1611 A name coined from the Latin for *wonder at*, a boy actor in 1611, and the editor who moved her hardest speech into her father’s mouth. ](https://queering.earth/the-tempest) - [ Reading No. 6 The Swell and the Dwell Emily Dickinson, *Wild nights – Wild nights!*, about 1861 Twelve lines asking for one night in harbour, with no indicative verb in them, read as co-regulation and answered in verse. ](https://queering.earth/wild-nights) - [ Reading No. 7 A Waste Garden, Flowering at Its Will Violet, pansy, green carnation, and lavender Four flowers worn where they could be seen, each read in the end by the people it was meant to slip past. ](https://queering.earth/flower-codes) - [ Wall No. 8 The Preferred Flower of Life Monotropa uniflora, Dickinson, and monotropism A plant that will not photosynthesise, the flower Dickinson kept in her herbarium, and one Greek root shared by a 1753 binomial and a theory of Autistic attention. ](https://queering.earth/monotropa-uniflora) - [ Reading No. 9 The Five Unmistakable Marks Lewis Carroll, *The Hunting of the Snark*, 1876 A definition recited for a beast nobody has seen, a word that works by being empty, and the coiner who gets dropped in transit. ](https://queering.earth/five-unmistakable-marks) - [ Reading No. 10 Other People Who Have It Octavia E. Butler and Sami Schalk, on hyperempathy A disability invented for a novel because nobody had it, and the Autistic readers who do — and what that does to the argument built on its being unreal. ](https://queering.earth/other-people-who-have-it) - [ Essay No. 11 My Gloomy Sunflowers Van Zandt, Van Gogh, Plath and Cobain, on the mad-genius myth Four artists filed under *tortured*, and three archives that each say the work was the thing going well. ](https://queering.earth/gloomy-sunflowers) - [ Essay No. 12 Every Day’s Most Quiet Need Ryan Boren, 2026 Limerence as monotropic attention, and the line where a love sonnet stops climbing and comes down. ](https://queering.earth/most-quiet-need) - [ Essay No. 13 Held, Not Fixed Helen Edgar, 2026 A shop, a herbarium sheet and a cabinet of curiosities — three places that hold what is lost without asking it to be fixed first. ](https://queering.earth/held-not-fixed) - [ Wall No. 14 Known and Felt and Seen Dolly Parton, 1946–2026, and Tressie McMillan Cottom A weed is not a kind of plant but a verdict about a place, and sixty years spent handing out the opposite verdict. ](https://queering.earth/known-and-felt-and-seen) - [ Essay No. 15 Metaphoray Helen Edgar, 2026 A botanist’s word for the walk, a writer’s word for the same walk, and the gap between what a label can hold and what the plant actually was. ](https://queering.earth/metaphoray) The border is four flowers that were once a way of saying it without saying it: *violet*, *pansy*, *green carnation*, *lavender*. Gathered as a set by Sarah Prager in [*Four Flowering Plants That Have Been Decidedly Queered*](https://daily.jstor.org/four-flowering-plants-decidedly-queered/), JSTOR Daily, 29 January 2020. What follows will be made the way [Star Stuff](https://starstuff.earth/) is made — a piece at a time, in public, with the working-out left in, by [Helen Edgar](https://morerealms.com/) and the [Stimpunks Foundation](https://stimpunks.org/). Come back and watch it fill in. ## The founding papers Why this cabinet exists, and what it is for. [About this drawer](https://queering.earth/the-founding-papers) — what each paper is for, why none of them is a sheet, and which one is signed. **[What this cabinet is for](https://queering.earth/mission)** : Thirteen aims, each one naming the page where it is already being kept — and, for each, the observation that would show we had quietly stopped. An aim you cannot fail is not an aim. **[Nothing here was inevitable](https://queering.earth/manifesto)** : The manifesto, and the argument the aims rest on: normal is an arrangement and arrangements have authors, weird is a verb, and a reading is where an arrangement gets contested. **[Two Cohabitating Modes](https://queering.earth/two-cohabitating-modes)** : Why this cabinet has a sibling built on science, by way of the fox and the hedgehog — two children’s poems, both public domain, that end in exactly the same place, and the spiky profile the typology was never written about. ## The cabinet itself Eight pages that are not specimens. They are the cabinet — how it is made, what it has recorded, how to look through the drawers, and what it knows about you. No cards and no numbers, deliberately: a card would file them with the readings, and none of these is a reading of anything. [About this drawer](https://queering.earth/the-cabinet-itself) — what each page is for, and what the build checks about it. **[How this site is made](https://queering.earth/design)** : The herbarium sheet, the palette, the type that leans, and the borrowed plates — each rule written down with the reason it exists, so it can be argued with. **[The accession register](https://queering.earth/changelog)** : Every sheet as it was mounted, every plate that came off again, and every label we corrected. Grouped by accession rather than by release, and indexed at the foot by which sheet it happened to. **[What has arrived, and when](https://queering.earth/whats-new)** : The cabinet by date rather than by drawer — every page here, newest first, with the day it arrived and how often it has been corrected since. The one list on the site that a feed reader can follow. **[Find a word in the cabinet](https://queering.earth/search)** : Every sheet, every quotation, and every correction, searched in your own browser. A quotation comes back whole with its source or not at all, and nothing you type is sent anywhere. **[The attribution ledger](https://queering.earth/ledger)** : Every quotation on the site, whose it is, where it came from, and the day somebody read the primary and confirmed the wording — including the ones we got wrong. Generated from the file a session edits, so it cannot drift from it. **[What we quote, and why we may](https://queering.earth/how-we-quote)** : The fair-use position, written down: what we take from work still in copyright, how much, why we think we may, and what to do if you hold the rights and disagree. **[What is settled, and what is open](https://queering.earth/what-is-settled)** : The reasoning behind the decisions, kept so the same question is not re-litigated in three weeks — including the designs that were refused and why. **[What this site knows about you](https://queering.earth/privacy)** : Almost nothing, and the whole of it: no analytics, no cookies, no accounts, and exactly one thing on the site that can reach anybody else — which waits until you press it. ## Coda: the lilacs Say *lilac* and something answers. For Helen it is always Eliot, instantly — the four lines that open *The Waste Land*, which file the flower on the cruel side of the season rather than the kind one. Specimen — the lilacs > April is the cruellest month, breeding\ > Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing\ > Memory and desire, stirring\ > Dull roots with spring rain. T. S. Eliot, [*The Waste Land*](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land), lines 1–4 (1922). Public domain in the United States; wording checked against [Project Gutenberg’s transcription](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1321) of the 1922 text. *Syringa vulgaris*, the common lilac, drawn from the shrubs in Ryan’s yard. *Lilac Wine* is James Shelton’s, written in 1950 for the revue *Dance Me a Song*; the readings that stayed with us are [Nina Simone’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Is_the_Wind_(Nina_Simone_album)) on *Wild Is the Wind* (1966) and [Jeff Buckley’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_(Jeff_Buckley_album)) on *Grace* (1994). One song, read three ways — which is this site’s method, sung. Helen listens to Eliot read *The Waste Land* often, in what she calls “his dull but strangely calming tone”. Here he is. [ Play the recording T.S. Eliot reads *The Waste Land* · on YouTube ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqvhMeZ2PlY) Nothing is fetched from YouTube until you press play. Press it and your browser asks `www.youtube-nocookie.com` for the player, which is a request to Google — the only third party this site can reach, and only ever because you asked. [What that means.](https://queering.earth/privacy#the-embed) Uploaded by [tim24frames](https://www.youtube.com/@tim24frames). Eliot recorded the poem more than once, and we have not established which reading this is or who holds the recording — so it is somebody else’s copy of somebody else’s tape, linked and labelled as exactly that.