--- title: "Known and Felt and Seen" url: "https://queering.earth/known-and-felt-and-seen" updated: "2026-09-14" description: "Dolly Parton, 1946–2026: a weed is not a kind of plant but a verdict about a place, and sixty years spent handing out legibility without a test — read alongside Tressie McMillan Cottom on what made the drag affordable." 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" --- 1. [Queering Earth](https://queering.earth/) 2. [The plate](https://queering.earth/the-plate) Sheet · a wall # Known and Felt and Seen A weed is not a kind of plant. It is a verdict about a place — and sixty years spent handing out the opposite verdict, read alongside the sharpest thing anybody has written about what made it affordable. **Specimen** : Dolly Rebecca Parton, 1946–2026 — and the record she left in her own words **Mounted here** : *Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business* (HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 297–298; her 1984 conversation with Andy Warhol in *Interview*; her remark to *Billboard*, 2020; her remark to *USA Today* on the response to *Travelin’ Thru*; the couplet she sang at Vanderbilt University Medical Center on 2 March 2021 **Read against** : Tressie McMillan Cottom, [*The Dolly Moment: Why We Stan A Post-Racism Queen*](https://tressie.substack.com/p/the-dolly-moment), *essaying*, 25 February 2021 — read in full, on her own site, and not summarised from a summary **The programme** : Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, founded 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee: birth to five, one book a month, no test of any kind **Sourcing** : The quotations here were traced to their primaries for [Star Stuff, *No One Had to Qualify*](https://starstuff.earth/dolly-zine), Zine No. 67, and that trail is not re-walked on this sheet. What is new here is the reading, not the evidence — and one quotation the zine did not carry, flagged below **Read** : 14 September 2026 **Read by** : Ryan Boren **The physics** : Not here. Our sibling site read the same life through a star that cannot aim its light; this one reads it through a plant that cannot appeal its name. [Star Stuff has the other half](https://starstuff.earth/dolly-zine) **Terms** : [Deficit ideology](https://stimpunks.org/glossary/deficit-ideology/) · [Belonging](https://stimpunks.org/glossary/belonging/) · [Labels](https://stimpunks.org/glossary/labels/) · [Normal](https://stimpunks.org/glossary/normal/) **Weed is not a rank.** Taxonomy has kingdoms and families and genera and species, and it has no rank anywhere in it called weed, because a weed is not a kind of plant — it is a sentence somebody has passed on a place. The plant is perfectly visible the whole time it is being one. It is simply not supposed to be there, and the verdict is written in a hand that is never the plant’s own. Dolly Parton spent sixty years handing out the opposite verdict — to children who had not applied for it, to men dying in a decade that had decided they deserved to, to a trans woman in a film her audience had not asked for — and one of the sharpest readers in American letters spent months working out why she could afford to. ## Nine hands, and the specimen is a person This sheet is a **wall** rather than a reading, and the difference is not decoration. A reading has an order and arrives somewhere. A wall has a chorus: several people standing in front of the same thing, each seeing something the others could not, every slip signed. A herbarium sheet that has been in a drawer long enough looks exactly like this — a specimen, and a stack of determination slips in different hands. **The specimen here is a person, and that is the reason for the form rather than an awkwardness in it.** Nobody gets filed under one determination. The nine hands below span forty-seven years and they do not agree, and the disagreement is not a problem the sheet is going to solve at the bottom. - > I wasn’t getting interviewed much, and Dolly of course was, and I guess I looked sort of alone. And she started saying, “Hey, everybody, come over here and talk to Lenora — she’s just a little girl getting started like the rest of us did.” Lenora Ross, on a disc jockey convention in Nashville in the autumn of 1974, quoted at [Hillbilly-Music.com](https://hillbilly-music.com/artists/story/index.php?id=17894). A Black country singer, describing the moment somebody made a room able to see her. - > I got a huge gay following and some really macho-looking women. To me, people are people. Many of my friends are gay, male and female. I don’t judge people. I don’t care what people do in their bedrooms. Dolly Parton, interviewed by Andy Warhol, *Interview*, 1984 — in print, unprompted, from a Tennessee-born singer with a conservative religious audience, at the start of the AIDS crisis. - > People are not perfect. They will sometimes take your love and give nothing back or, worse yet, use it against you. But they are still all there is. They are the greatest of God’s creations. Loving one another is our only reason for being. Dolly Parton, *Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business* (HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 297–298. She prices the disappointment first and goes ahead anyway. - > I don’t mean to sound like the inside of a Hallmark card. I do think, though, that it’s time we learned to use the word love without cringing. Dolly Parton, same book, same pages — catching herself being sincere in public and declining to apologise for it. - > Having a big gay following, I get hate mail and threats. Some people are blind or ignorant, and you can’t be that prejudiced and hateful and go through this world and still be happy. Dolly Parton to *USA Today*, on the response to *Travelin’ Thru* — the song she wrote for *Transamerica* (2005), which was nominated for an Academy Award and for which she received death threats. - > I do understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen. Of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No! Dolly Parton to *Billboard*, 2020, as Cottom quotes and reads it. Cottom’s observation is that the radical clause is the last one, not the first: it is the first time she can recall Parton describing herself as simply white, with no class modifier softening it. - > Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine,\ > I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate. Dolly Parton, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, 2 March 2021, sung in the chair before her first dose — her own re-tooling of the most-covered song in her catalogue. Quoted briefly for commentary; no further lyric is reproduced. - > Dolly is a white Southern multi-millionaire boomer who produces self-consciously white music while wearing a stylized drag of a fallen Southern belle. Tressie McMillan Cottom, *The Dolly Moment: Why We Stan A Post-Racism Queen*, *essaying*, 25 February 2021. Not a takedown, and reading it as one is the first mistake — the same essay says what Parton gave her. - > Knowing what we love does not diminish who we love, only how we choose to love them. Tressie McMillan Cottom, same essay, its closing line. It is hers, it is the hinge of this sheet, and we did not improve it. ## A weed is a sentence about a place The plant drawn at the head of this sheet is *Asclepias tuberosa*, and in most of North America it is called butterfly weed. It is not a weed. It is sold in nurseries, planted deliberately in gardens meant to feed pollinators, and it is the host plant of the insect it is named for. The word is simply left over — the residue of a verdict passed by people who wanted the ground for something else, still attached to the plant long after the verdict was quietly withdrawn. That is what the word does. **Weed is not a rank**, and no flora in the world can tell you whether a plant is one, because the answer is not in the plant. It is in the bed, and in the hand of whoever keeps it. Move the same species four feet and the answer changes. Nothing about the plant changes at all. A herbarium has a formal instrument for this, and it is the reason this site is shaped the way it is. A specimen carries **determination slips** — small labels, added over the years, each one a botanist saying *this is what this is*, signed and dated. A later hand can disagree with an earlier one, and both slips stay on the sheet. The determination is never pretended to be a property of the plant. It is always somebody’s reading, with a name on it. What a weed does not get is a slip of its own. The verdict arrives without a signature, from nobody in particular, and there is no procedure for appealing it — which is precisely what makes it useful to whoever is holding the hoe. ## Visible is not legible Tressie McMillan Cottom has a distinction that does the rest of this sheet’s work, and she draws it in a different essay from the one about Parton. **Being visible and being legible are not the same thing**, and collapsing them makes the conversation worse. You can see a lamppost. Seeing it costs you nothing and asks you for nothing. To be legible is to be a thing other people can *make sense of* — which means being a thing that is understood to be *supposed to exist*, here, in this room, in this conversation. > Legibility is not the same as visibility. We often confuse the two and our discourse is poorer for the conflation. Being legible is very relational. It happens in relationship to other people. … Being legible requires other people to have the ability to make sense of me. That means I am a thing that exists but that is also *supposed to exist*, in a given space or conversation or exchange. Tressie McMillan Cottom, *Why I Hate California*, *essaying*, 26 June 2021, read by Ryan Boren in the post itself. The ellipsis is ours and closes a gap of two sentences. Put the two words beside the plant and the whole thing resolves. **A weed is perfectly visible and entirely illegible.** Nobody is failing to see it. What it lacks is the standing to be there — the quiet agreement that a thing of this kind belongs in a bed of this kind, which is granted to the plant beside it and withheld from this one for reasons that have nothing to do with either. Readers of this cabinet know the condition from the inside. Being ill in a culture that files illness under failure, being Autistic in a room built for one kind of attention, being Disabled in a building that was drawn without you, being queer anywhere that treats a life as a claim requiring evidence — none of these is an experience of invisibility. People can see you the entire time. What is missing is the assumption that you were supposed to be there. ## The book arrives because you exist In 1995 Parton began mailing books to children in Sevier County, Tennessee. Not the poor ones, and not the promising ones. Every one, birth to five, one book a month, until school. Three decades later the programme runs in five countries and the count is past three hundred million books, and in all that time the thing that was never added is a test. No income threshold. No application beyond an address. No reading assessment, no referral, no diagnosis, no waiting list, and no annual review to confirm the child still deserves it. And the parcel does not come addressed to the parent or guardian of anybody. **It has the child’s own name on it** — a two-year-old who cannot read a word of it gets post. Read through the plant, that is not generosity. It is a *refusal to determine*. Almost everything else a child might need arrives with a slip attached: free school meals have an income threshold, special education has an eligibility determination, therapy has severity cut-offs, disability support has an assessment and then a reassessment. Each of those is defended the same way — resources are finite, so they must be targeted — and that is true, and it is not the whole sentence. **A gate does not only ration. It sorts.** Sorting requires somebody to decide who is worth it, by criteria written by people who will never be measured against them, and once that apparatus exists it is available for other uses and gets put to them. Families learn to describe a child in the language of damage because that is the language the form rewards, and then go home and live with having said it. The cost of a gate is never only the people it turns away. It is what it teaches everyone who gets through. What the Imagination Library does is remove the hand from the bed. The book does not arrive because a child qualified. It arrives because the child exists and somebody knows the address. She made a record for it, too — her first for children, with the proceeds going back into the programme. [ Play the recording Dolly Parton, *I Believe in You* · on YouTube ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXDEg_H8e78) 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) *I Believe in You* (2017), the title track of her first children’s album, whose proceeds go to the Imagination Library. Posted by [DollyPartonVEVO](https://www.youtube.com/@DollyPartonVEVO). ## Claimed, without a test The same operation shows up in a department nobody was asking her to work in. **1984**, in *Interview*, unprompted: “To me, people are people.” That is not a brave sentence by the standards of 2026. In print, from a country singer with a conservative religious audience, in the first years of the AIDS crisis, it was one then. **1989.** Sandollar Productions — hers and her manager Sandy Gallin’s — produced *Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt*, about the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It was the first Sandollar project she was not in: she put the company behind it and stayed off the screen. **2005.** She wrote and sang *Travelin’ Thru* for *Transamerica*, drawing, she said, on a transgender relative and a transgender friend. It was nominated for an Academy Award, and she received death threats for it. [ Play the recording Dolly Parton, *Travelin’ Thru* · on YouTube ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx_I-byng78) 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) *Travelin’ Thru*, written and sung for *Transamerica* (2005) and nominated for an Academy Award. Official music video, posted by [Nettwerk Music Group](https://www.youtube.com/@NettwerkMusic), who released the soundtrack. The thing to notice is what is absent from all three. **Nobody had to become respectable first.** There is no version of this in which she asks the men on that quilt to have lived differently, or asks a trans woman to be less inconvenient, before the work goes out. It is the mailing label again, in another department: the standing is granted up front rather than earned by performance, and it is not revocable for bad behaviour. And the smallest instance is the clearest, because it cost her nothing and she did it anyway. A room full of disc jockeys is interviewing the famous woman and ignoring the Black singer sitting next to her, and the famous woman says the other one’s name out loud until the room turns around. That is legibility being handed over directly, in the only way it can be: by somebody the room already reads, spending it. ## The paper died and the claim did not In April 2020 she gave a million dollars to Vanderbilt for coronavirus research. On 2 March 2021 she sat in a chair at that same hospital, put her own arm in the frame, and sang the line at the top of this sheet. [ Play the recording Dolly Parton at Vanderbilt, 2 March 2021 · on YouTube ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjbSWebA3Ko) 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) Filmed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, 2 March 2021. Posted by the [Associated Press](https://www.youtube.com/@AssociatedPress), whose copy this is — the recording is the wire service’s, not ours and not hers. The money was the smaller half. What she actually spent was the attention: she took the most-covered song in her catalogue — one most of the English-speaking world can already sing from memory — re-tooled it into a public-health instrument, and made herself the demonstration. **For the readers of this cabinet that landed somewhere very specific, and it is the point where this sheet’s own figure comes back round.** Autistic communities had by then spent more than two decades answering the claim that our existence is vaccine injury. The paper it was built on was retracted in full by *The Lancet* in 2010, and its lead author was struck off the medical register the same year. **The determination was formally withdrawn.** The claim went on circulating regardless, and is circulating now. That is the butterfly weed exactly. **A verdict does not have to be current to keep working.** *Asclepias tuberosa* is still called a weed two centuries after anybody troubled to defend the judgement, because a name outlives the hand that wrote it and nobody goes back to read the slip. And a retraction *is* a determination slip — a later hand disagreeing with an earlier one — which means it arrives under the herbarium’s honest and uncomfortable rule: **the old slip stays on the sheet.** It is not lifted off. What changes is only which one a reader decides to believe. Answering it is thankless work, too, because it is not really an argument about immunology. It is an argument that we are damage — not different, damage — and the people making it are frequently sincere and frightened, which makes the work sadder and slower rather than easier. Which is why what she did counted in a way an argument could not have. **She did not re-determine us.** She did not take our side, or name us, or correct anybody. She took the most legible thing she owned — a song everybody already loved — and spent it, on camera, making the thing itself ordinary and funny and safe to be seen doing. She was not doing it for us. She was doing it for everybody, and that is the entire point: we were included without having to ask, and without first having to explain ourselves. It is the mailing label a third time. The standing is not granted to a category once the category has made its case. It is simply never withheld in the first place. ## The drag was an argument, and the ground under it was not neutral She was also, for sixty years, running the operation on herself. The look was assembled on purpose out of exactly the material a small town uses to write somebody off, and she said so for decades without a trace of apology. The wigs, the nails, the deliberate excess: none of it was an attempt to become legible to the people who decide these things. It was a refusal to apply. She built a category she was the only member of, and then declined to leave it, and the culture eventually widened to fit rather than the other way round. **That is as queering as a career gets, and it is the point at which this sheet has to stop admiring and start reading.** Cottom’s essay is the sharpest account anybody has given of why the refusal was survivable, and it is not a takedown — reading it as one is the first mistake. She spent months on it, and she says plainly what Parton gave her: a map of female ambition built from stigma and difference rather than inheritance, offering, in her words, “a repertoire to triangulate the stigmatization of my blackness”. Then she says the other thing. The drag works, she argues, *because it is white* — blonde operating as an unmarked identity, one that reads as no particular race at all and therefore filters for whiteness without ever having to name it. Parton could be spectacularly illegible along the axes of class and gender and remain perfectly legible along the one that was doing the underwriting. The ground she was standing on was never in question, which is what made it affordable to stand on it so loudly. Cottom is sharpest on the line everybody quotes. Asked about Black Lives Matter, Parton said: “Of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!” Cottom notices that the radical clause is the second one — the first time she can recall Parton naming herself as simply white, with no class modifier softening it — and she notices what is still, carefully, left unsaid. Her phrase for the habit is “ever the artist of misperception”. **This sheet is not going to resolve that, and putting it here is not a disclaimer.** A determination slip that leaves out the inconvenient reading is not a kinder slip. It is a less true one, and the smoothing away of the awkward half is the exact operation this cabinet exists to refuse. The two readings sit on the same specimen, in different hands, both signed, which is what a wall is for. Cottom got to the formulation first and it is hers: knowing what we love does not diminish who we love, only how we choose to love them. ## A determination in a loving hand, and wrong There is one more slip, and it belongs at the end because it is the only one on the sheet that is mistaken. On page 297 of her autobiography, Parton writes: “The poet Emily Dickinson said, ‘The only thing I know about love is that love is all there is.’” Dickinson did not say that. The poem is there underneath it, and what happened to it in the carrying is worth looking at slowly. > That Love is all there is,\ > Is all we know of Love;\ > It is enough, the freight should be\ > Proportioned to the groove. Emily Dickinson, J1765 in Thomas H. Johnson’s numbering, Fr1747 in R. W. Franklin’s. Public domain. **Dickinson’s poem is about the limits of knowing.** *That love is all there is* is all we *know* of love — and the poem’s move is to say that this ignorance is enough, that the load should be sized to the groove it has to run in. The subject of the sentence is the boundary of our knowledge, not the quantity of love in the universe. What survived the journey is the warmth. What fell off is the epistemics — the whole hedge, which is also the whole poem. And the reason it fell off is the ordinary one: **the tidied version travels further.** A sentence with a qualification in it is heavier to carry, and hands that are carrying it fondly put the heavy part down. We are not correcting her to score a point, and the correction is not the interesting part. [This site publishes its own errors](https://queering.earth/how-we-quote) for exactly this reason, and [the ledger](https://queering.earth/ledger) exists because the characteristic failure here is not an invented source but a tightened one — a sentence trimmed to fit, with the attribution left attached. Every sheet in this cabinet carries a line at its foot saying how many times its own label has been corrected. So the last determination slip on this wall is a wrong one, in a loving hand, and it stays on the sheet with the correction beside it rather than being lifted off. That is what a herbarium does with a misidentification, and it turns out to be the answer to a question this sheet could not otherwise have finished: **you can love something down to the misquote.** The slip does not have to be right to stay. It only has to be signed. ## What this sheet will not tidy Left open, on purpose - **We are not claiming her.** She was not Autistic, not Disabled, not queer, and she does not need to be for any of this to hold. This sheet is about how she treated people and about what a category costs, not about recruiting somebody into ours. The reading is entirely ours and she never authorised a word of it. - **The vaccine reading is written from inside Autistic community, not on its behalf.** There is no single Autistic position on that video and this sheet does not pretend to report one. What it describes is what it meant to the people writing it and to the community they are part of, which is a smaller and more honest claim than the one a sentence like that usually makes. - **The metaphor has a literal counter-example and we are not going to hide it.** This sheet runs on the absence of a gate. When she bought two parcels in a Black neighbourhood in Nashville in 1990 and 1991, a large gate was built around the compound. The widely-repeated story that Whitney Houston’s royalties paid for it — told by her in 2021 and repeated in obituaries — cannot be true on the dates, because the purchase predates the record. **A figure of speech does not get to outrank the property records**, including ours. - **A gift is not a policy.** Three hundred million books is extraordinary, and a country where early literacy runs on one singer’s goodwill has a problem no singer can fix. Philanthropy at this scale is a symptom being read as a cure. She appears to have been unusually good at it and unusually free of the ego that normally comes with it. It still should not have been her job. - **Not bootstraps.** The rags-to-riches story is the most extractable thing about her and it is routinely used to argue that the gate is fine because somebody once climbed it. One person clearing a wall is not evidence about the wall. - **This sheet has no plate.** Every mounted image on this site is public domain, and the photographs of her are all in copyright. The drawing at the head is ours, of a plant, and it is not a portrait — deliberately, because a drawing of a person in this cabinet’s hand would be a likeness nobody signed off. - **Whether a wall was the right form is still open.** The kind is a judgement, and a person is not a specimen in the way a poem or a plant is. We think the chorus is more honest than a single reading would have been. We are not certain. She died on 25 August 2026, at eighty. She had written in 1994 that there was plenty of life and love left in her and that she planned to enjoy every blessed second, and she got thirty-two more years of it. The method she leaves is one sentence long and it is not a sentiment: **decide the category honestly and generously, then spend the whole budget on the thing itself rather than on the apparatus that decides who gets it.** That is not soft-headedness, and the arithmetic usually supports it — a test costs money to run, costs the applicant time and paperwork and dignity, and reliably turns away the people with the least capacity to fight it, who are the ones it was ostensibly built to protect. Or, in the vocabulary of the drawer this sheet is filed in: stop determining, and let the thing grow where it came up. The plant at the top of this page has been called a weed for two hundred years by people who were wrong about it, and it never once stopped being what it was while they said so. Queering Earth Sheet No. 14 Accessioned 14 Sep 2026 Provenance Mounted [14 September 2026](https://queering.earth/changelog#a-2026-09-14-known-and-felt-and-seen). Not yet corrected.