GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

Feelings and Fractals

Woolly Ecologies of Transgender Matter

Jeanne Vaccaro

Crochet Coral Reef (2005 – ) is a woolly exoskeleton of coralline geometries and

sea critters made by a collective of hands joining animal and plastic fibers in
hyperbolic shapes. The reef is a “testimony to the disappearing wonder of liv-
ing reefs” and a creative experiment of the twin sisters Margaret and Christine
Wertheim, a science writer and an art professor, respectively, and the Los Angeles
nonprofit Institute for Figuring; like the marine organism, the crochet reef is fertile
and spawns its fiber tentacles to stage public art interventions about warming sea
temperatures, carbon dioxide, ocean acidification, plastic trash, and the pacific
trash vortex.1 As a collective and aesthetic rendering of threat and survival, Cro-
chet Coral Reef is suggestive of how we negotiate environmental risk in myriad
forms of collusion, protest, and cohabitation. “We” is an idea and a problem, a
shape to ask after. I am particularly interested in the convergence between this
project’s engagement with touch, risk/survival, and handicraft, on the one hand,
and those issues in transgender theory and experience, on the other: that is, I see
promising overlaps between a fiber art project and the everyday process of becom-
ing that transgender life necessitates. In what follows I practice, as a method,
intra action, a process that Karen Barad describes as “the mutual constitution of
entangled agencies,” to think between coral erosion and transgender.2 Valuing a
diversity of fragile ecological bodies — human, animal, fiber, and aquatic — this
essay examines how patterns of harm contour vulnerable populations and the
administration of life in biosocial scenes of not only climate and biosphere but
also sex and gender. It does so by foregrounding feelings and fractals — or pat-
terns and repeats — to assemble a lexicon of transgender in coral, crochet coral,

GLQ 21:2 – 3
DOI 10.1215/10642684-2843347
© 2015 by Duke University Press

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and hyperbolic geometry, and to craft a tentacle-­like shape between transgender

and its environments: administrative, aesthetic, cellular, woolly, toxic, oceanic.
As Donna Haraway asks in her manifesto for cyborgs, “Why should our bodies
end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?”3 Oscillat-
ing between feelings and fractals, unwieldy and algorithmic modes of description,
yields a fibrous and felt science of transgender life.

Woolly Pedagogy: The Handmade

In Brain Storm Rebecca Jordan-­Young describes the “confused, confusing, and

contentious” configurations of sex, gender, and sexuality as a “three-­ply yarn”
and endeavors to untangle the “strands that are simultaneously distinct, interre-
lated, and somewhat fuzzy around the boundaries.”4 And Sophia Roosth, in her
exploration of Crochet Coral Reef and the stories we tell to inhabit and transform
evolutionary knowledge, writes: “Analogies from the fiber arts run deep in the
life sciences, as attested by the preponderance of terms such as strand, tissue,
membrane, fiber, and filament in anatomy and net or web in systems biology and
ecology.”5 I am similarly compelled by fiber, and this essay animates the labor,
process, and materials of handiwork to illuminate the biological and cultural con-
structions of sex and gender. Like a sewing circle or quilting bee, Crochet Coral
Reef and its collective labor of “figuring” operates between the optic and sensory.
Similarly, identity is made between administrative force and self-­determination,
between legal and scientific interventions and ad hoc self making. As transgender
labors for diverse and sometimes divergent aims, the shape of its analytic force
is also knotted to its flux and circulation in, for example, community organizing,
arts and culture, the administration of diagnosis and health, and the law. The felt
configuration of the “handmade,” then, orients our thinking to the labor and mate-
riality (fiber, flesh, “biocodes”) of crafting identity.6 This essay is part of a project
to place transgender theory in dialogue with craft studies, themes of figuration,
collectivity, process, and amateurism, and the ordinary shapes and sensations of
bodily transformation.7
Craft is a conceptual limit, categorically unlike the sublime; in Immanuel
Kant’s aesthetic judgment, it is mere purpose, effect.8 Maligned in Renaissance
hierarchies of liberal and mechanical arts, craft evokes the remunerative, utili-
tarian, ornamental, and manual labor and laborers —  the feminine, ethnic, and
“primitive” — however, craft is a legitimate field of inquiry and, while adjacent to
art history, is increasingly recognized as a theoretical process and method.9 Trans-
gender is something of a maligned materiality as well, what the legal theorist Dean

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Spade has called “LGB-­fake-­T studies,” in ways that are both theoretical and con-
crete; as with craft studies there are no undergraduate or graduate degrees offered
in transgender studies (although the new research cluster spearheaded by Susan
Stryker at the University of Arizona may be a sign of changing times). Crochet
Coral Reef offers an opportunity to forge a dialogue between these “minor” fields
of inquiry, as materiality negatively saturates transgender and craft studies and
thus offers a potential theory of identity in flesh and fabric. As the art historian
Julia Bryan-­Wilson reminds us with scholarship that mines contemporary craft for
insights into feminized labor, the outsourcing of labor, and geopolitical commerce,
“Craft is uniquely positioned to allow us to reconsider the politics of materiality
and exchange — their labors, pleasures, and hazards.”10
Deploying ideas of craft — too frequently dismissed as low art, skilled labor,
or “women’s work” — the handmade connects transgender to collective process and
quotidian aesthetics. As the material is marginalized by discursive forms of leg-
ibility, the performative dimensions of craft privilege the politics of the hand, that
which is worked on, and the sensory feelings and textures of crafting trans­gender
identity. The handmade, utilitarian, and purposeful materials popular in craft and
material studies is brought to bear in this essay to illuminate the everyday as a site
of value for transgender identity. By speaking of “crafting” transgender identity, I
mean to highlight the felt labor and traces of making and unmaking identity and
the performative doing of gender becoming in relation to the materiality of the
flesh. While relevant to all kinds of identity making and politics, it is an especially
relevant corrective for transgender histories (of the clinic, of diagnostic force, or
of theoretical accounts like, for example, the one made by Jay Prosser in Second
Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, which makes a strong objection to
performativity as a method for knowing transgender life, as he argues performativ-
ity cannot account for “the feeling and experience of being transexed”).11 My aim
here is to pressure the digestible forms of narrative and diagnostic representation
available to transgender people by privileging the labor of texture and touch. Fore-
grounding process, rather than achievement, is a critical bridge between transgen-
der and craft studies, as the study of how works to displace the logic of when in the
urgent, administrative clock of diagnosis and medicalization.
In connection with transbiology — “a biology that is not only born and bred,
or born and made, but made and born” (which I discuss below) — and the elastic
materials of fiber arts, this essay aims to build a dimensional record of bodily
experience.12 The handmade is a methodology — a call to value the aesthetic and
performative labor of making identity — and builds points of contact between trans-
gender and craft studies by looking at materials that make transgender identity felt

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and legible, such as wood, wool, skin, sweat, rubber, foam, cloth, and scar tissue.
In this essay I ask after the lush shapes and textures of many things: the hard,
rough edges of marine coral and soft, woolly seams of crochet coral; the slippery,
translucent film of plastic grocery bags recycled into an environmental manifesto;
and the bright and open turbulence of the hyperbolic dimension. My aim here is to
highlight the sensory and emotional dimensions of feeling in order to confront the
force of diagnosis and value the ordinary politics of crafting transgender life.
As a felt method, the intervention that the handmade offers is to reexam-
ine method as the ordering — its patterns, repeats, echoes (as waves of the sonic,
oceanic thumps, and women’s and feminist politics and studies) — of bodily knowl-
edge. In other words, hand making is a mode of knowing and doing objects and
bodies. The handmade is an operating system or guide, a fleshy science to untan-
gle ordinary shapes and feelings of embodied life and its intersections with vibrant
matter and toxicity. Given this moment of the institutionalization of queer (and
increasingly) transgender studies, we are poised to practice transgender studies in
what I am thinking of as a tentacle formation, and take up the invitation offered by
“trans — ,” a “(de)subjugated knowledge” affixed to and made plural by proximity:

“Trans” thus becomes the capillary space of connection and circulation

between the macro-­and micro-­political registers through which the lives
of bodies become enmeshed in the lives of nations, state, and capital-­
formations, while “– gender” becomes one of several sets of variable tech-
niques or temporal practices (such as race or class) through which bodies
are made to live.13

In other words, leaning on the objectness of craft orients our thinking to the spa-
tial and temporal landscape of embodiment and highlights the force of the hand
(rather than the diagnosis) in the worked on, textured, sensory, and amateur labor
of making identity in the everyday. Additionally, the lengthened dash in “trans — ,”
theorized in the introduction to a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on
the subject by editors Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore, fore-
grounds the disruption and remade connection of trans-­and -­gender, and “marks
the difference between the implied nominalism of ‘trans’ and the explicit relation-
ality of ‘trans — ,’ which remains open-­ended and resists premature foreclosure by
attachment to any single suffix.”14 The porosity of its categorization is not vacuous
or void; as Stryker and Currah ask of transgender in the inaugural issue of Trans-
gender Studies Quarterly, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-­First
Century Transgender Studies,” “Does it help make or undermine gender identities

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WOOLLY ECOLOGIES OF TRANSGENDER MATTER 277

and expressions? Is it a way of being gendered or a way of doing gender? Is it an

identification or a method?”15 In the mode of query transgender is made a promise
and provocation.
Method is a labor of dispersal, containment, and a pattern, repeat, echo.
But as Margaret Wertheim cautions, “by restricting ourselves to a Euclidean
perspective we lose the visceral sense of hyberbolic being.”16 By way of offering
a cosmic catalog of transgender as labor (cosmic like a mythic science, a mode
between sense and belief and a system of study), I focus on patterns and the pat-
terning of identity and the bodies and forms of embodiment we cannot quiet by
the work of description. What is foreclosed and what is made quiet by the orienta-
tion of our bodies and politics to description? In “I’d Rather Be a Cyborg Than
a Goddess”: Becoming-­Intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” Jasbir Puar reads
the intersectional as a method to examine the force of its pedagogy and asks how,
for feminist thinkers, activists, teachers, and students, the intersectional is, like
the university’s traffic in diversity language as capital, sometimes invoked to quiet
and absorb difference. She stages as “frictional” the false opposition of Kimberlé
Crenshaw’s intersectionality to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s assemblage
and writes, “Subject positioning on a grid is never self-­coinciding; positioning
does not precede movement but rather it is induced by it; epistemological correc-
tives cannot apprehend ontological becomings; the complexity of process is con-
tinually mistaken for a resultant product.”17 Her staging of a false opposition as
“frictional” — X is against X (and is X “a” Body and X an Identity?) — suggests
that it is not like or unlike, for or against, or a description of a thing, and so forms
a network for thinking of transgender as, for example, a body, a collection of skin
and organs, the organizing of social and sexual exchange, a politic, an aspiration,
a keyword, a “special guest,” a way of being in the world. The handmade, in this
spirit, is a frictional offering of transgender as experiment, provocation, potential.18
What can the patchwork organization of marine coral, the geometry of
hyperbolic crochet, and the transbiological teach us about transgender? The dif-
ficulty of language, and my sense of sometimes being at its limits, matter insofar
as the work to describe, look, and feel make demands on us differently. To theorize
the texture of a thing like politics or identity is always labor of reaching (perhaps
desiring), and the space between our descriptive and bodily knowledge is difficult
to navigate because the density of material and emotion conjoin to language in
uneven and imperceptible modes. It is difficult because the fabric of our align-
ment in the social is felt at registers we cannot always translate, and language is
more than a process of translation or vehicle of connection. If in words we cannot
manage the expressive work of identity — we know by our failures we cannot — we

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might look to the labor of senses and shapes — or feel for it: in our thinking, poli-
tics, writing, and art making. The fleshy, fibrous seams of Crochet Coral Reef and
the geometry of its marine ecology illustrate how new life, including the new lives
constituted by shifts in or confirmations of identity, can flourish as felt patterns.
What if we expanded our definitions of transgender to a new form of life, a constant
process of making that could be figured by or alongside something like coral or
handicraft?

Yarns, Plastic, and the Geometry of Craft

Crochet Coral Reef plays at the intersection of marine biology, feminine handi-
crafts, and mathematics. It began as a creative experiment in the Los Angeles
living room of the Wertheims; soon, the crochet reef became difficult to contain,
a dense and voluminous fabric in the house, much like the abundant and organic
excess of the hyperbolic dimension, a kind of geometry characterized as non-­
Euclidean by its excess surface and negative curvature, and like the spawning
reproductive force of marine coral itself. Looking for some extra hands to help
spawn the reef, the artists posted an open call on the website of the Institute for
Figuring (IFF) — the nonprofit organization they founded in 2003 for the mate-
rial and physical exploration of science and mathematics — seeking participants
to assist in the making of hyperbolic crochet coral reef as a public artwork. Today,
over eight thousand people have contributed to thirty satellite reefs in Germany,
Abu Dhabi, Ireland, Latvia, Baltimore, and Japan. Collectives of volunteers, often
organized around lectures and interactive workshops taught by Margaret Wert-
heim, have stitched sea slugs, kelp, anemones, and coral polyps, and produced
branches of the crochet coral reef like a kelp garden, the Branched Anemone Gar-
den, the Ladies’ Silurian Atoll, a toxic reef made of white and gray recycled plastic
trash, and a “bleached” installation made of cotton tampons. Crochet Coral Reef
stretches over three thousand square feet and has been exhibited at the Andy War-
hol Museum (Pittsburgh, 2007), the Hayward (London, 2008), the Science Gallery
(Dublin, 2010), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (Wash-
ington, DC, 2010), and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum (New York,
2010). According to the IFF, the reef is “one of the largest participatory science +
art projects in the world.”19
The Wertheims formed the IFF in 2003 as a “play tank” for public edu-
cation about the “aesthetic and poetic dimensions” of science, mathematics, and
engineering.20 Figuring — a process of calculating, shaping, patterning, and form-
ing things and ideas — is a pedagogical method and a hopeful bridge between

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Figure 1. Institute For Figuring’s Crochet Coral Reef project, 2005–ongoing, as

installed at New York University Abu Dhabi Institute, 2014. Photo © the IFF 

intellect and physicality. In its exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and artist residen-
cies, the IFF seeks to animate abstract ideas like geometry, engineering, topology,
physics, and biological life, and does so by making public and accessible exercises
of material play, things like how to cut and fold paper, crochet yarn, and tie rope
knots. At workshops and installations of the Crochet Coral Reef the techniques of
hyperbolic crochet (a way to fabricate ruffles and squiggles by increasing stitches
on a traditional crochet foundation chain) are taught alongside ideas of hyperbolic
space and activist interventions in plastic waste and the crisis of climate change.
In this process, making things with the hands intervenes in hierarchies of sensory
knowledge to value the work of sensation and touch and make a potentially dif-
ficult idea tactile and intimate. Figuring a calculation is a labor shared by our
motor, optic, and cognitive capacities. In crochet and handicraft, figuring yields a
felt dimensionality and augments our limited ability to know a thing as impossible
and imaginary as hyperbolic space. Reef makers take yarn and repurposed plastic
trash in a hopeful occupation of a different perspective, abundant, infinite, and
spiraling outward, proliferating an excess of surfaces, points of parallel, curvature,
and intersecting lines.
The Crochet Coral Reef is created in a patchwork process out of many
hands and by joining natural, manufactured, and recycled fabrics. Many mak-
ers do not identify as artists and are drawn to participate in an environmental, if

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not aesthetic, intervention. Crochet art workers convene in a collective practice

reminiscent of quilting bees and ladies’ sewing circles. 21 Bodies lean, eyes dart,
and hands touch to repair stitches, learn and exchange technique, and create and
share a feeling of community. Stitching kelp, sea slugs, and anemones out of mate-
rials like synthetic and animal fibers, plastic yarn, and repurposed trash makes
an assemblage evocative of the seascape of coral. The Crochet Coral Reef takes
the fragile ecology of marine coral as inspiration to build community in a cre-
ative and collective process of viral art making: “Just as living coral reefs replicate
by sending out spawn, so the Crochet Reef sends out spawn.”22 The IFF bridges
public art education and activism to build connections between the domestic and
ecological and inspire transformative politics. An environmental aim of the hyper-
bolic Crochet Coral Reef, directed at people who make or encounter the reef in
gallery and museum exhibitions, is to teach art makers about climate change and
encourage them to make inventories of their plastic trash and develop strategies to
lessen waste. The action of stitching is attached to a hopeful idea — the potential of
small and private alterations to plastic waste use to inspire institutional and public
dialogue.
Crochet Coral Reef, rather than being expressly transgender, is coded in
feminine and feminist ways: handicraft is characterized as “women’s work,” and
the collective labor of the artwork bridges public and private spheres in a gesture
to the consciousness-­raising ethos of the feminist slogan “the personal is political.”
Still, how might we think of the reef in connection to a transgender politic? It is
not an artwork about gender or identity politics per se, and it is not explicitly cre-
ated by transgender artists, and, insofar as the reef is created in a collective and
anonymous way, it is incidental if transgender, queer, or feminist artists contribute
crochet corals and woolly sea creatures to the reef. The maker’s identity is inessen-
tial to the capacity of crochet, craft, and coral ecologies to animate the woolly and
felt matters of transgender life. Moreover, why conjoin transgender art making and
artists? I borrow techniques and ideals of craft, but without defining craft itself as
queer or transgender, or linking transgender art making to trans artists. I do so to
create and demand dense and elastic transgender politics as open, bright, and tur-
bulent as the hyperbolic dimension and a coral seascape. But though craft shares
an outside positionality with transgender politics, their connection is more than
just an allegory. Sensory and sensual, craft is a praxis primed to illuminate queer
bodies and politics; as the textile artist L. J. Roberts argues, “Craft can gain from
the methods and tools that queer theory has deployed to reclaim and reconfigure
its own marginal position into a place of empowerment.”23 Similarly, queer and
transgender theory can gain from the methods and tools developed in craft.

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What does the handcrafting of animal fibers and synthetic, plastic yarns
teach us about how transgender identities are fabricated and figured? Fabricat-
ing an identity, like figuring an idea or crocheting a seascape, is a calculation — a
fuzzy method to track the distance or proximity between me and you; my sense of
self and how I fit into the world; a topographical misshape; a reworking, one more
try one more time; a labor to build something and belong. The collective labor to
fabricate the shapes of marine coral in woolly and plastic yarns illuminates the
patterning of transgender I describe as handmade, which, like the figuration of the
crochet coral, forges a fuzzy and felt knowledge. Stitching a fabric in crochet, knit,
or embroidery is like any mode of ordinary labor — a repetition of movement, a per-
formative gesture. Think of fingering yarn, the loop and drag of the crochet hook,
as a sensory algorithm. Suturing the so-­called natural and manufactured — the
fleshy, fibrous, and plastic — the trope of mixture offers an antidote to the surface
and depth models that foreclose transgender subjectivity as “wrong” embodiment
(as in trapped, diagnosed, released) or other systems of enclosure. As opposed
to some psychoanalytic readings, the ethnographic or sociological, the handmade
does not operate by a narrative of discovery. Instead, its movement is about cocre-
ation, about making connections and contexts. In the collective joining of hands,
Crochet Coral Reef is a reconfiguring of shapes and gestures into a diversity of
embodied forms and identities that labor as a set of material practices against the
toxic effects of climate change and the reproduction of species (and identities).

Transgender Is a Shape

“Straightness turns out to be a subtle and surprisingly plastic concept,” writes

Margaret Wertheim in the instructional manifesto for hyperbolic crochet, A Field
Guide to Hyperbolic Space: An Exploration of the Intersection of Higher Geom-
etry and Feminine Handicraft.24 She describes the discovery of hyperbolic space
by the mathematicians Janos Bolyai and Nicholay Lobatchevsky in the nineteenth
century as “disturbing” and “undeniable”; efforts to substantiate and/or negate
the parallel postulate and the reign of Euclid “struck terror into mathematicians’
hearts, offending rational sensibilities and evoking a sense of moral outrage.”25
The “aberrant formations” of hyperbolic space promise, for Wertheim, both an
optic and a sensory way to look, feel, and inhabit dimensions that exceed the grids,
rectangles, and straight networks that organize the built architecture of our lives.26
In other words, if knowledge production and sight are intimately connected, as
many have contended, then thought itself is transformed as hands look and eyes
touch. 27 The “woolly pedagogy” of Crochet Coral Reef is a sensuous encounter

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with the turbulent geometry of hyperbolic space, and the hyperbolic form of the
crochet reef “verif[ies] materially the manifest untruth of Euclid’s axiom” of the
parallel postulate, which in two dimensional geometry regulates the possibility for
a straight line to intersect another. 28 To fabricate shapes evocative of ocean life,
the Wertheims adapted a method of hyperbolic crochet, an invention of Latvian
mathematician Diana Taimina.29 In hyperbolic crochet, an exponential increase of
stitches yields dimensional permutations of the fiber, made in a fractal pattern. To
fabricate shapes like the coralline tentacles of marine life, crocheters manipulate
the rate of stiches by increasing stitches per row; the more stitches are increased
per row, the more intense the volume and the more dense and crenellated the form
and shape of the crochet fabric.
Crochet Coral Reef is made by a collective process of adaptation, using
the techniques of Taimina’s hyperbolic crochet to mutate patterns and discover
how fabric shapes into sea critters and ocean life. An experiment with the math-
ematic elasticity of hyperbolic geometry and the fiber strands of yarn let crochet-
ers, inspired and instructed by the IFF, build a network environment of feeling and
sight, and between coral, fiber (synthetic or animal), and human bodies. Taimina
is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, and her invention in 1997 of
hyperbolic crochet is significant for the field of geometric models. The elasticity,
strength, and sensory capacity of fiber offer a way to manipulate, hold, touch, pull,
and disassemble a physical model of hyperbolic space. In yarn she could illus-
trate a feeling of hyperbolic space in her classroom and remedy a disconnection
between the optic and felt knowledge of hyperbolic geometry. Taimina looked to
yarn and a synthetic fiber (ideal for stitching a stiff and durable model) to avoid
the way that cloth and paper models of hyperbolic space tear, crease, and buckle.
She began to experiment with knitting, but in order to yield an abundant excess of
surface she needed too many double-­pointed needles (which allow the yarn to slide
on and off in different directions) to increase her rate of stitching. Crochet requires
only one needle and a skein of yarn, and so is less cumbersome and unwieldy,
letting Taimina formulate a tactile and dimensional method to interact with hyper-
bolic space.
A reorganization of form and matter, the hyperbolic dimension is suggestive
of shapes that bodies make, and geometry — a study of shapes, figures in posi-
tion, lengths, distance, volume, and properties of space — gestures to new kinds
of relational identity and embodiment. The elliptical configurations of hyperbolic
geometry and its myriad surfaces and points of intersection prompt us to reex-
amine how distance and difference are measured by proximity or belonging and
on a horizontal-­vertical grid of equivalences. Like the handmade labor of mak-

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Figure 2. Institute For Figuring’s Crochet Coral Reef project, 2005–ongoing.

Hyperbolic model by Margaret Wertheim. Photo © the IFF

ing identity, the dimensional field of hyperbolic space provides another method to
measure the relation between bodies and objects differently, to resist the limited
and oppositional categories of surface and depth that locate transgender either on
or inside the body. We might foreground, for example, gender transformation as a
process of assembly and disassembly in which bodies auto-­engineer shape and
form, building and remaking connections between the soft and pliable material
forms of emotional and material life. An alignment of lines in infinite intersec-
tion, transgender is a shape and, in the conjoining of feelings beside fractals, an
alternative dimension of shapes — of negative (hyperbolic) and positive (Euclid-
ean) curvature — can coexist to proliferate an abundance of shapely possibilities

Figure 3. A mathematically
precise model of a hyperbolic
plane by Diana Taimina.
Photo © the IFF

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for transgender life. Identity is a kind of geometry, too. It approximates the desire
to apprehend the boundaries of a body, to calculate the relation of skin, sweat,
blood, and hair, to measure the distance between one shape and another, perhaps
to configure the measurements and intersections, the way “I” join (or do not) with
“you,” who “we” are to each other, and how to make contact with some other things
like bodies, objects, and ideas. Is the ambient, floating feel of desire, between bod-
ies and for politics, enough of an alternative, or can we devise some new ways to
make contact? I am interested in how we attempt to measure these distances and
movements between slippery and stuck things. The diagnostic sciences of obser-
vation and their administrative instruments of evidence collection seem to always
foreclose the openness and possibility that material experience leaves ajar. As a
meditation on straight lines and flatness, drawn onto dimensional spaces and cur-
vatures, the hyperbolic dimension invites us to examine positioning, or figuring,
and the orientation of bodies, eyes and hands, knowledge and feeling. The material
and conceptual work of reconfiguring how lines intersect — in dimensional, or at
new and unknown, points of contact — foregrounds the labor of embodiment, the
joining and disconnecting work of belonging, and the ways that bodies make and
remake identity in the biosocial landscape. In the idea of an excess of surface the
seeming problem of “transgender” as the uncontainable body is reimagined as a
provocation.
Transgender is a mode of inquiry in my writing, an organizer, a schema,
something I ask after: is transgender something we can ascertain in the tools of
description, or as a set of bodily practices? The diffractive methodology Barad
proposes is instructive for this inquiry into transgender (in/as) patterns. In physics,
diffraction describes a wave in an encounter with an obstacle — for example, how
light bends. For Barad, diffraction is an optical form meant to describe a reading
practice of how knowledge is made in and with text, and it “can serve as a useful
counterpoint to reflection,” as “both are optical phenomena, but where reflection
is about mirroring and sameness, diffraction attends to patterns of difference.”30
Ordinarily, geometry seeks a method of measurement in equivalence, a formula
familiar to studies of gender and sexuality. But in geometric studies of shape we can
also animate computations to measure the distance between things — calculations
of lines, area, angles, volume, the perimeter of a triangle, circumference of a
circle, and intersections. We can use these ways of thinking and ascertaining to
investigate the space between bodies and politics and categorical configurations
of the self and other, human and animal, and surface and depth. Relationality as
a non-­Euclidean geometric offers a different way to grasp at, feel, and imagine
a body and its shape in the world, and to grasp its formulation as, for example,

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made by the labor of the hand rather than by an administrative or diagnostic force
or foreclosure. In particular, orienting our perception to the dimensional field of
hyperbolic space is a labor of sensory alignment and reorganization.
In this provocation, mathematical concepts of excess of surface, geodesics,
void, finitude, and dimensionality animate the transgender body. There are, how-
ever, many other permutations of mathematical knowledge that could illuminate
the bodily flesh and matter of transgender. Katie King, for example, has written
beautifully about khipu, an Andean recording device of fiber cords and knots,
which let her reconsider fundamental questions such as “What counts as writing?
as counting? as connecting or disconnecting them?,” as “the word khipu comes
from the Quechua word for ‘knot’ and denotes both singular and plural.”31 King
harnesses the shapes of knots, the gathering of materials, and the multiple mean-
ings associated with a language and practice in order to investigate her theory
of transdisciplinary knowledge. Hyperbolic space, a deviation of geometry with
origins in Europe and deeply entangled with Western philosophy, may represent
a radical departure from Euclid’s axiom of the parallel postulate and foundational
mathematic knowledge, but is not the only possible path of inquiry. It is, however,
especially relevant to my study of transgender precisely because geometric narra-
tives such as interior versus exterior selves have so often delimited the movements
and possibilities for transgender experience. As diagnostic and administrative
forces condense and consolidate bodily feelings and sensations into narratives of
prior and emergent selves contained or liberated by the body, we can recall how
the demands of medicalization and strategic performances of “wrong” embodiment
(“feeling trapped in the ‘wrong’ body”) collapse transgender into legible forms of
identity and fold trans subjectivity into coherent figurations of binary gender and
sexuality.

Transbiologicals

“Coral is good to queer with,” writes Stefan Helmreich in “How Like Reef: Fig-
uring Coral, 1839 – 2010.”32 And coral is a kind of queer object and inquiry — 
difficult to taxonomize, hovering at the boundaries of plant and animal, softs and
solids, inhuman passivity and bodily action, a single thing or a plural collection,
life and death. Coral is a breathy and spineless marine invertebrate, inelastic as
human bone, fertile and spawning. These are curious contradictions, to be breathy
(lively), yet to spew not air but its own reproductive force. Coral sex and sexual-
ity (another odd word to pair with a coral) is also ambiguous: corals reproduce
sexually and asexually, spawning gametes and budding genetic material, like a

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clone, and often broadcasting to reproduce en masse once a year, during the full
moon. An object of fascination and study for Charles Darwin, corals, writes Helm-
reich, “come with durable, multiple, and porous inheritances,” and Helmreich
foregrounds the labor of figuration and composition to “discern a movement from
opacity, to visibility, to readability.”33 Fertile and generous, coral polyps secrete
calcium carbonate to form an exoskeleton, a space for diverse species of sharks,
chimaeras, bony fishes, crustaceans, sponges, mollusks, clams, sea snakes, sea-
weed, saltwater crocodiles, and turtles to thrive. A fragile organism, sensitive and
receptive to environmental stressors, coral is under enormous threat from climate
change. As erosion causes ocean temperatures to rise, sudden spikes of salinity
bring on “bleaching events,” which leave the white bone of the coral exposed in an
environmentally violent shedding of skin.
Marine coral, like sea pods, succulents, lettuce, and fungi, is an organic
hyperbolic shape. Its hyperbolic form is adaptive, as the crinkles, frills, and ruf-
fles of its shape allow coral maximal opportunities to filter feed. As a stationary
organism with access to a limited volume of nutrients, the coral uses its sting-
ing cells to gather and strain food in an interactive process between the coral
tentacles and ambient particles of fish and plankton. This porous interactivity is
a promising model for crafted and becoming modes of transgender reproduction.
In a collaborative politics of risk and vulnerability, the devaluing of human and
inanimate bodies share an economy; as Mel Chen writes, “for biopolitical gov-
ernance to remain effective, there must be porous or even co-­constituting bonds
between human individual bodies and the body of a nation, a state, and even a
racial locus like whiteness.”34 Violence threatens transgender bodies and coral
colonies alike, in registers of diverse feeling and administration as, for example,
street harassment, un-­and underemployment, toxic waters and chemical pollu-
tion. In the patchwork patterns of coral we can learn something about our fragile
ecology of identity politics, and so we do not need to inquire about the animacy
of coral — is it animate, with a capacity to act and affect objects, things, and life
forms? — to do so. Instead we can build connections between organic hyperbolic
shapes, like lettuces, kelp, and sea slugs, and the transformation of human bodies
in nonbinary and morphologically complex ways, without reproducing hierarchies
of the natural and manufactured, the animate and inanimate. Inspired by Chen’s
inquiry into the “role of metaphor in biopolitics,” I want to draw a hyperbolic line
to connect how violence is shared between transgender and coral. 35 In Animacies
Chen offers a “political grammar, what linguists call an animacy hierarchy, which
conceptually arranges human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms
of nonliving material in orders of value and priority.”36 As our fragile ecologies

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of sex, gender, and species cohabitate, an ethics of thinking between transgender

and coral demands that we read for animacy hierarchies and the uneven shape
and distribution of “subordinate cosmologies,” returning us to the provocation of
a cosmic transgender studies.37 Coral exoskeletons stretch in a collective shape. A
coral polyp is kind of dead, a “brainless jellyfish,” yet coral polyps breathe, seek
nourishment, and reproduce in a plural formation like an assemblage.38 In this
rigid sea of bone, animate and animating, a rough skeleton is soft and receptive.
Here let us imagine how diverse bodies — of land and water, plastic waste, and
human in/action — cohabitate to share and distribute violence and form a potential
politics as an ecology of trust.
Is it possible to connect plastic trash recycled as yarn to the repurpos-
ing work of a transgender body — a body of material flesh and collective politics?
Something feels sensible, if strange, in adopting the language of recycling and
repurposing to describe human, transgender experience, yet we undo and remake
gender in messy and creative negotiations of physicality and capacity, social and
financial in/access, and the space between need and desire. Porous flesh, for
example, is a way we share or stretch a politics of cohabitation; Beatriz Preciado
offers such an account of the porous in Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in
the Pharmacopornographic Era, archiving an experiment of the body and how it
makes contact and contracts with testosterone as a practice of self-­care. Preciado
writes to wrestle the flesh and its capture by the administrative coding of gender
dysphoria as disorder and to record a breathy, sensual feeling of resistance and
containment, and animates Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower,” the adminis-
tration of life, and Deleuze and Guattari’s “control society” in order to trace an
architectonics of control to the soft, gelatinous technologies of testosterone injec-
tion and digestion. “Testosterone,” writes Preciado, “is one of the rare drugs that
is spread by sweat, from skin to skin, body to body. How can such trafficking — the
microdiffusion of minute drops of sweat, the importing and exporting of vapors,
such contraband exhalations — be controlled, surveyed; how to prevent the contact
of crystalline mists, how to control the transparent demon’s sliding from another’s
skin towards mine?”39 By offering an account of feeling as seepage from within
and against the governmental and cultural apparatuses that foreclose feeling, s/he
provides a vital document of feelings and fractals for trans —  and  — gender.
Like Preciado’s account, which dislodges transgender from the singular
“event” of its diagnosis to foreground the fleshy, fibrous seams of transformation,
handmade and handcrafted identities are characterized by bodily and felt labor.
The handmade intervenes to value transgender as matter and fleshy substance, and
is a response to both feminist and queer thought experiments and to the history of

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the clinic, to the way gender “deviant” and nonconforming bodies are made objects
of scientific practice, sexological and psychiatric diagnosis. Systems of traditional
close reading sometimes govern transgender studies, organized by categories of
surface and depth — the body as a text, a surface to interpret or depth to excavate.
Yet insofar as it seeks to be an intervention of method, a call to reconsider how the
body is read as text, the handmade is not an alternative reading practice. A dif-
ferent epistemology is at work in the figuration of transgender as crafted, one that
puts to the side the textual to animate textural modes of labor, process, collectivity,
duration, and pattern. If method is a form of ordering knowledge to contain, repeat,
and echo an idea again and again, it is also a labor of dispersal. My investment
in method for transgender studies is in parsing the tasks of mimetic responsibil-
ity and process and untangling the associations of method with novelty, discov-
ery, and invention to make count the ordinary feelings of identity. The demand to
feel wrong, to perform a wrong body and a broken feeling, and not, for example,
the pain of a discrimination, forecloses the dimensionality of feeling and the fis-
sures, seams, and textures of experience, those things impossible to encapsulate
in diagnostic language. For feminist thought and politics, the transgender body is
a paradox, mobilized to evidence the immutability of sex and social construction of
gender. The demand to be liberated materially or conceptually by physicality pro-
hibits an ability to inhabit the body with meaning or strategy. Here I do not mean
to suggest that transgender people substitute strategic ways to inhabit the body for
the ways they wish to modify it, but to suggest that these two processes may be
mutually constitutive.
In an effort to remedy the problem of transgender bodies doing the work of
evidencing both the construction and the immutability of the flesh, it is produc-
tive to turn to a biology that does not correlate transformation with technologies
of intervention. A potential fleshy and felt science is found in “transbiology,” “a
biology that is not only born and bred, or born and made, but made and born.”40
In “The Cyborg Embryo: Our Path to Transbiology,” Sarah Franklin traces how
Donna Haraway’s cyborg gives birth to an embryo; she examines the work of bio-
logical transfer in assisted reproductive technologies and the embryonic stem cell,
and defines transbiology as “the literal back and forth of the labour of creating new
biological.”41 While the “trans” to which she refers is not “transgender,” the repro-
ductive labor of the cyborg embryo is in productive dialogue with more explicit
work connecting transgender to animality by scholars like Eva Hayward and Bai-
ley Kier, who investigate the slippery sex and fingery eyes of coral and endocrine-­
altered “trans” fish in the Potomac River.42 Franklin’s interest is the biological
drag, the push and pull of microscopic things in pipettes and the capture, contain-

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WOOLLY ECOLOGIES OF TRANSGENDER MATTER 289

ing, and insertion of reproductive matter. In the “trans-­work of embryo transfer,

and the translation of embryology into stem cell derivation and redirection,” trans
is meant to signify directionality: to cross, go beyond, oppose, or exchange. To
“trans” is an action, and transbiology contains the moving parts of biological mat-
ter, capital, scientific reach, and the emotionality of hope, despair, and desire in
reproductive engineering. Franklin notes the “queer lineage” of the transbiological
reproduction of species, populations, and ideas manufactured in a laboratory, how
in the diverse proliferation of life forms and narratives about life, the heterosexual
matrix of reproduction is made unstable.
Taking up the invitation of the elongated dash to stretch the category of
transgender, this essay interrogates the space between “trans” and “biology” as a
realignment of the distance and proximity between bodies and objects, forms of the-
ory and practice, natural and manufactured. If we characterize the body as “trans-
biological,” is our description limited to transgender bodies? Can bodies be trans-
biological or transgender or both? Is transbiology a kind of transgender biology? If
some bodies — of flesh, knowledge, and/or politics — are transbiological, those bod-
ies are not containable in a singular form, a body with plain borders, or as a simple
reference. Like a collective, one with participant-­driven taxonomies, transbiology
might be a prompt, a method of disturbing the oppositional formations of surface/
depth, human/animal, nature/culture, and before/after. Anchored to the material
body and its diverse conditions and mobilized as a political possibility independent
of fleshy matters, “trans” beside biology is a prefix able to attach to multiple suf-
fixes like -­national, -­feminist, -­genic, and -­animality. Franklin writes, “Like the
cyborg embryo, transbiology is a mix of control and rogue, or trickster, elements.”43
Cyborg politics sometimes stands in for forms of transgender as bodily liberation
and the post-­or inhuman, making abstract and diluted the material weight of flesh.
While a shared genealogy of biological and artificial matter marks the cyborg and
transbiological body, the transgender body (in states “natural” or otherwise) is not
an artificial one. A fleshy science like transbiology can be harnessed to counter how
quantitative knowledges made about transgender bodies by, for example, institutions
like hospitals, laboratories, or administrative bodies like departments of motor vehi-
cles and passport agencies support hierarchies of knowledge between instruments
and objects, an expert and patient, and the animate and passive.
Trans figures for me as the possibility of the re-formation of gender, mak-
ing it impossible to theorize the formation of life — human, marine, aesthetic, tex-
tured, or felt — without gesturing to an alternative experience of embodiment. The
handmade promise of the prefix trans, to which I affix a porous transgender in
the definition of transbiology, is “an encounter with technology.” If, for Franklin,

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to trans is an action, I read trans as an encounter, a suturing of trans and biology

signaling a potentiality of relational politics. As a reconfiguration of trans in con-
nection to biology, another way to read Franklin’s “encounter with technology” is
as a felt sense of the body encountering its own flesh. Variations of the handmade
and fleshy sciences like transbiology offer a way to access, in autonomously sen-
sible and choreographed forms, the body’s encounter with its material composi-
tion (blood, skin, skeleton, cellular, and imperceptible workings). Between feelings
and fractals, those unwieldy and algorithmic forms, I see a way to gain access
to the soft actions and sensations that precede, anticipate, or remake our limited
categories of biological containment, observation, evidence, and repeatability and
let be variables, contamination, and uncertainty. The handmade, transbiological
encounter records the way that bodies accumulate, become in proximity, and build
contact, independently of intervention defined as an intrusion, made by one for
another, to foreground the relational capacity of bodies to evidence, measure, and
reproduce identities difficult to quantify or control.
In “Evolutionary Yarns in Seahorse Valley” Sophia Roosth investigates the
“manifold biological theories that inform the Crochet Coral Reef makers’ descrip-
tions of their project, showing how they draw on contemporary, historic, and folk
understandings of evolution and morphogenesis in describing their work,” and sug-
gests “that in so doing, they pose evolution as akin to handicraft — something open-­
ended, lively, time consuming, perpetually becoming.”44 This study also takes the
Crochet Coral Reef as an invitation to mine the way that we — to return to and
reflect on the impossible and imaginary collective — inhabit and transform identity
practices by reproducing bodily knowledges. Forging a dialogue out of transgender,
woolly and marine coral, hyperbolic geometrics, and transbiological interventions,
this essay offers a handmade account of transgender life and something between a
provocation and a method for how transgender studies can integrate and value both
the feelings and the fractals of transgender knowledge. This essay lingers with the
possibilities of preoccupation and the knowledge production it makes possible; it
is also a hopeful thought experiment about the queer reproductive ecologies of
identity and the politics of crafting a handmade transgender materiality. While
it may be difficult to conceptualize bodies evenly accessing health and survival
on an intellectual and political terrain that does not value the animal, inhuman,
objects, and all kinds of stuff and matter, the knowledge production that preoccu-
pation makes possible is. As Margaret Wertheim offers, “Knotted in thread, bound
together across continents by tendrils of shared, evolving energy, the Crochet Coral
Reef offers us a metaphor — take it or leave it — we are all corals now.”45

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Notes

1. Margaret Wertheim, “We Are All Corals Now: A Crafty Yarn about Global Warming,”
Brooklyn Rail, April 2, 2014.
2. In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter
and Meaning, Karen Barad describes how “the notion of intra-­action constitutes a
radical reworking of the traditional notion of causality” and is “in contrast to the usual
‘interaction,’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede
their interaction” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 33.
3. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149 – 81.
4. Rebecca M. Jordan-­Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 15.
5. Sophia Roosth, “Evolutionary Yarns in Seahorse Valley: Living Tissues, Wooly Tex-
tiles, Theoretical Biologies,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23,
no. 3 (2012): 9 – 41.
6. In Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, Bea-
triz Preciado writes of sex hormones and “master hackers of gender, genuine traffick-
ers of semiotico-­technological flux, producers and tinkers of copyleft biocodes” (New
York: Feminist, 2013), 395.
7. In my book manuscript “Handmade: Everyday Feelings and Textures of Transgen-
der Life,” I examine fibrous and fleshy modes of bodily capacity and transgender art
making in soft sculpture, knitting, embroidery, dance, and performance. For a study
of transgender textiles and fabrics, see my essay, “Felt Matters,” in The Transgender
Studies Reader II (New York: Routledge, 2013), 91 – 100.
8. In Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant describes the aesthetic beauty of art as
oppositional to labor and purpose; while art is “liberal” “play,” handicraft is “remu-
nerative art” “attractive only because of its effect” (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 182 – 83.
9. An important text inaugurating the contemporary field of craft studies is Thinking
through Craft by the scholar and curator Glenn Adamson (New York: Oxford, 2007).
His book investigates the art-­craft binary and suggests craft is a “problem” and
the “conceptual limit” of art” (3, 2). Yet as the feminist art historian Elissa Auther
observes, “More than the names themselves, it is the preoccupation with naming and
distinguishing that is of interest here, for such naming is a primary component of
artistic consecration” (String Felt Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American
Art [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009], 7).
10. Julia Bryan-­Wilson, “Sewing Notions,” Artforum, February 2011.
11. Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1998), 67.

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12. Sarah Franklin, “The Cyborg Embryo: Our Path to Transbiology,” Theory, Culture,
and Society 23, nos. 7 – 8 (2006): 71.
13. Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore, “Introduction: Trans — , Trans,
or Transgender?,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, Fall – Winter 2008, 11.
14. Stryker, Currah, and Moore, “Introduction,” 14.
15. Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-­
First Century Transgender Studies,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1 – 2
(2014): 1 – 18.
16. Margaret Wertheim, A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space: An Exploration of the Inter-
section of Higher Geometry and Feminine Handicraft (Los Angeles: Institute for Fig-
uring, 2007), 30.
17. Jasbir Puar, “ ‘I’d Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess’: Becoming-­Intersectional in
Assemblage Theory,” philoSOPHIA: a journal of feminist philosophy 2, no. 1 (2012):
49 – 66.
18. In “Beyond the Special Guest — Teaching ‘Trans’ Now,” Shana Agid and Erica Rand
describe how “structures and beliefs” of the special guest “even as adapted by well-­
meaning, feminist allies in the struggle against gender oppression” and ask, “What
does it mean to teach about trans matters without exoticizing or marginalizing trans
people, bodies, identities, and issues?” (Radical Teacher 92 [Winter 2011]: 5 – 6).
19. Institute For Figuring website, theiff.org.
20. Like the chemical, agricultural, and genetic modifications to our food and water,
plastic shapes how bodies occupy physicality and the in/capacity of flesh. Parallel
to Crochet Coral Reef, Margaret and Christine Wertheim undertook an experiment to
store their domestic plastic trash between February 2007 and 2011: plastic packag-
ing, food containers, bottles of shampoo, and electronic debris like computers and
cellular telephones. In addition to tracking their waste use, the Wertheims repurposed
some of the plastic into plarn (plastic yarn) and midden monsters (dolls and sculptures
made of trash) and posted observations about oceanic trash and the great Pacific gar-
bage patch on the IFF website. A participatory installation of The Midden Project was
exhibited at the New Children’s Museum in San Diego, “like a forest filling up with
toxic fruit” (October 15, 2011, to March 30, 2013).
21. In Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 2011), the art historian Julia Bryan-­Wilson examines the Art Workers’
Coalition and the myriad permutations made possible by the conjunction of “art” and
worker.”
22. Although satellite reefs organize locally at universities, community centers, art gal-
leries, and museums, the IFF requires exhibition fees and contractual recognition
of Crochet Coral Reef and its ideas and techniques as the intellectual property of the
organization and Margaret and Christine Wertheim; this contradiction brings to mind
Julia Bryan-­Wilson’s critical observation, “The left-­progressive valence of many of the

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activist and artistic appropriations of craft is evident, but craft-­based techniques, like
any other, are ideologically ambivalent” (“Sewing Notions,” Artforum, February 2011,
74).
23. L. J. Roberts, “Put Your Thing Down, Flip It, and Reverse It: Reimaging Craft Identi-
ties Using Tactics of Queer Theory,” in Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art,
ed. Maria Elena Buszek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 243 – 59.
24. Wertheim, Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space, 30.
25. Wertheim, Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space, 9.
26. Wertheim, Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space, 10.
27. See, for example, Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Moder-
nity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); for a feminist cri-
tique of the visual as an apparatus of knowledge making, see Joan Scott, “The Evi-
dence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773 – 97.
28. The parallel postulate is an axiom of Euclid’s two-­dimensional geometry and states
that at most one line can be drawn through any point not on a given line parallel to the
given line in a plane.
29. In 1997, at Cornell.
30. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 29.
31. Katie King, “In Knots: Transdisciplinary Khipu @ UMD 2012,” transkhipu.blogspot
.com; see King’s website for illustrations and an interactive exploration of khipu.
32. Stefan Helmreich, “How Like Reef: Figuring Coral, 1839 – 2010,” in Party Writing for
Donna Haraway!, partywriting.blogspot.com, reefhelmreich.com.
33. Helmreich, “How Like Reef.”
34. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 194.
35. Chen, Animacies, 190.
36. Chen, Animacies, 13.
37. Chen, Animacies, 29.
38. Wertheim, “We Are All Corals Now.”
39. Preciado, Testo Junkie, 65.
40. Franklin, “Cyborg Embryo,” 67 – 187.
41. Franklin, “Cyborg Embryo,” 74.
42. For exceptional work in queer and trans animality, see Bailey Kier, “Interdependent
Ecological Transsex: Notes on Re/production, ‘Transgender’ Fish, and the Manage-
ment of Populations, Species, and Resources,” Women and Performance: A Journal of
Feminist Theory 20, no. 3 (2010): 299 – 318; and Eva Hayward, “Fingeryeyes: Impres-
sions of Cup Corals,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 577 – 99.
43. Franklin, “Cyborg Embryo,” 75.
44. Roosth, “Evolutionary Yarns in Seahorse Valley,” 11.
45. Margaret Wertheim, “We Are All Corals Now.”

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