PLANTCRAFT: Aaron McIntosh Forges Queer, Southern Kinship with Kudzu
Broadcast 004
The animosity that invasive species elicit is noteworthy not just in the diversity of sources from which it issues, but also in its fevered intensity. Journalists describe these species with ominous diction: they are voracious, insatiable, unstoppable, incessantly breeding.1
A Philly Pride scene, around 2:00-6:00 a.m. ET.
Finally! After coat check, after recitation of “house rules,” the lid is lifted off our anticipation as L. and I cross the threshold into a mirror world, descending into an underground basement cannibalized by darkness, hammered by heat, and accented with soft-edged diffusions of red (like heated charcoal) and orange (like late sun); we surrender our selves to an ooze of bodies—bare-chested, bedazzled, buzz-cut, collared, long-maned, mugged-down, spit-slathered, tattooed—that coalesces and shapeshifts into a nocturnal creature, one huffing and puffing and frequently fracturing into little islands of desire and of rejection; the Nocturnal Creature, terrifying and alluring, accretes as it contracts, growing bigger, growing smaller, more illegible—a mass blanketed by steady belches of smoke that make L. and I forget ourselves: me flapping my fringed leather vest, now makeshift, rhythmic timekeeper (thrwrap! thrwrap! thrwrap! 1! 2! 3!), and L. serving his signature twerks and gyrations, our hard drives corrupted.
Mischief straightens it back when I spot A., a new friend, flanked by one of their countless chic besties, and being blasted by beats summoned by a trio of alchemists transforming sound into putty, into a mere plaything; I bet on testing boundaries, inviting A.’s body to orbit mine, to become doppelgängers of each other—mirrored arms, mirrored legs, maybe mirrored appetites—to feed the long-term dare between us and L.; but the trance doesn’t last long before the music—an aquatic (“It’s like we’re dancing in a seashell!”), carnivorous, dispossessing, possessing eddy of techno, of hyperpop, of amapiano—sweeps me up and hacks me apart; I’m unzipped, as joyously “unselfed”2 as the one Doll next to me detonating her locs, TEAAARING! while being torn—and this is exactly what I came for: to be as incoherent as the friendly dancefloor whispers I try to decipher and translate while within the enclosing sonic walls.
Quick stop to the restroom, waiting line a watering hole and living room for merging friend groups, negotiating which Third to bring home, exchanging notes on So-And-So’s new Bottom, stoically drinking in the scene, tweaking a Sniffies bio, and laughing from the belly; L. and I are happy-exhausted, eventually slumping our way to the exit and emerging on the surface as sweat-slicked rats; the inside of my cap sticky, my limbs buzzy and viscous with evidence that a gathering can be a self-portrait, that a rave can be a rehearsal for Something More; showered by embryonic sun, the OG polyamorous lover, and overhearing lusty exchanges between copied-and-pasted muscle queens, we fade back into our selves, into our share of skin and bone and water, reverse-engineering our recession out to sea, lassoing our leakage into the atmosphere back into my biker bag.
L. and I’s smiles sync as I fetch and flick my lighter—our North Star guiding us back to the Delaware River, to home; we’re half-composted, drunk only off the primordial pleasure that comes with co-creating a temporary obliteration, a redressive effusiveness, a vining, boisterous spillage that threatens to be invasive and bring The World As Is to its knees in eager submission.
[K]udzu isn’t going anywhere. Rather than work to eradicate it, why not try to understand the latent possibilities it holds?3
Making chaos our co-rider.
That’s an idea I’ve been living with and thinking about how to live into since hearing a lecture given by “artist, trickster, educator, jíbare and wakeworker” brontë velez a few weeks ago.
During their talk, brontë insisted on renegotiating our imperative to work against the overlapping crises of our times by considering how these crises can be something we work with. Amid the unfurling Anthropocene (Capitalocene? Plantationocene?), the consequence of human forces disemboweling and destabilizing the planet to earn, to hoard, to dominate, how do we “stay with the trouble,” as professor Donna Haraway asks of us, and, going back to brontë, how do we practice “disaster companionship versus disaster preparedness?” Meanwhile, how do we recognize that we are the aftermath of The Trouble—made in, deeply changed by, and kin with this era of emergency? From that recognition, what new strategies for navigating This Moment, alongside other methods we’ve inherited up to this point, can come to the fore?
Why this idea resonates with me is mainly related to how it’s postured toward time. Within disaster preparedness or mitigation framework, there’s a sense of linearity in the substrate: a disaster becomes an Event, something we can anticipate and funnel resources toward to bring it to an End. However, as we continue to see the climate crisis rage on without predictability, without a discernible “stopping point,” perhaps our global community needs to orient toward being deeply present with disaster, toward adapting to and integrating disaster in our day-to-day, toward channeling emergent tools for nimbly wayfinding through disaster’s unexpected turns. An experiment in that process could be coordinating reappraisals of maligned “invasive species”—oft-considered to be as much a sign of a damaged planet as anemic glaciers—beginning with what is perhaps the most infamous invasive of all: kudzu.
Once uprooted and introduced to the United States, kudzu inhabited a rise-and-fall narrative that has become its de facto history—eclipsing its long use throughout East Asia for building, for eating, for healing. In 1876, the plant debuted in the States as a lush, beautifying ornamental; beginning in the 1930s through the 1950s, kudzu fever exploded as the botanical was seeded in the Southeastern corners of the U.S. to revitalize and anchor land fatigued by the monoculture of cotton and other profitable crops, and stripped by a spurt of infrastructure development. First a gorgeous “pet” that was enlisted to mitigate the impacts of white supremacist world-building, kudzu started to take to its new home a little too well, transitioning into a “threat” blanketing entire landscapes and structures and injuring “native” ecosystems. By the 1970s, kudzu’s villainous status began to solidify.
Despite efforts at all scales to exterminate this plant, “the vine that ate the South” continues to thrive extraordinarily well—abundant, sprawling, and likely a participant in our ecologies for generations to come—igniting questions about how to consider the plant a companion and a fellow traveler in these Anthropocenic times. At first glance, kudzu has so much to offer beyond the tangible that can support thriving amid uncertainty: lessons on subverting borders, boundaries, and binaries; rethinking purity as a moral good; turning human-devastated places into sites of flourishing. In this month’s missive, I suss out other gifts kudzu can offer us—and those we can offer in return—with guest Aaron McIntosh.
Aaron (b. 1984, Kingsport, TN) is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, sexual desire and identity politics in a range of works including quilts, sculpture, collage, drawing and writing. As a fourth-generation quilt maker whose grandparents were noted quilters in their Appalachian communities, this tradition of working with scraps is a primary platform from which he explores the patch worked nature of identity. Since 2015, McIntosh has managed Invasive Queer Kudzu, a community storytelling and archive project across the LGBTQ South.
In this conversation, Aaron and I unravel many threads, including the shared demonization of kudzu, queer and trans people, and the South; historical and current interactions between the botanical and the geopolitical; kinship with weeds; diaspora-making among and between plants and people; and so much more. I’m still in awe of how much ground Aaron was able to beautifully cover, so I know you’ll walk away with something from every single line of this missive. (This conversation took place in June 2024 and has been edited for clarity.)
Amirio: I was doing research and background for another conversation, and I came across your work, specifically your Exuberant Botanica project, and I was like, Let me add this to my Bookmarks. It opened up this whole universe of learning how you work with kudzu.
There’s a phrase that you often use about how your practice of quilting is a “platform,”4 and something about that resonated with me, mostly because a huge inspiration for my work is Jamaica Kincaid. She was a part of a conversation recently where she said something along the lines of the garden being a kind of text. I love this idea of specific entities and objects being multivalent, being polyphonic.
With kudzu, you’re helping me unpack how there’s so much richness in this one plant that I’ve marginalized and haven’t thought about too deeply, as it’s been steeped in this idea of being a weed or an invasive species. So, I’m looking forward to diving into kudzu and all the richness it brings to the fore.
I want to get started by thinking about you and your origins. You work in quilting, and your practice spans other methods and media, from making sculptures to storytelling. I love how certain themes are consistent across your work, particularly themes related to place and all these identities that you hold as a queer Southerner from Tennessee.
There’s this quote I pulled from introductory language for your qMatter Zine, and you say, touching on your origins, touching on your roots, that “[g]ardening also figures large in my story, and sadly, domination or cultivation were my formative connections to land.” Within the cultural context that you grew up in, how was the more-than-human world understood, and how was queerness understood? I’m curious to see if there are any parallels between the two: were there any congruent cultural attitudes, any congruent uses of language between those two?
Aaron: It’s such a great question. I will try to keep my thoughts contained. It’s hard for me, with kudzu being an apt metaphor for numerous aspects of my life. I’m from the northeastern part of Tennessee, which has three very different geographic and cultural regions across the state. So, I always tell people, which I do a lot here with my new rooting in Montreal, where I moved for a job opportunity, that I’m from the Appalachian region of Tennessee.
My mom and dad’s sides are very traditional, Appalachian folk. They grew all their own food. Some of my earliest memories, the ones that are crystal clear, and date back to when I was probably three years old, include being out in the garden, usually helping pick weeds or harvest vegetables like tomatoes. And helping my family get firewood. My parents and every other family member I knew had wood-burning stoves.
As I have written about before and continue to think, we were always tending traditional foodways, traditional crops, so there was cultivation in that context. And then there were questions of what would be chosen to cultivate, which was maybe specific to the biocultural region I was in, and there were questions of what was chosen to not be cultivated and, thus, become a weed and something that we had to control.
A little more than 10 years ago, I was working on art projects recreating about 10 of the most common weeds—things like dandelion, broadleaf plantain, briars (where you don’t want them because we also picked wild raspberries and blackberries, but they weren’t cultivated in the garden), and things like pigweed and quackgrass.5 From a very early age, I remember being taught, by doing rather than formal education, that these are the things that are valuable and these are the things that are not. These ideas extended, in a way, to my father being a woodworker and quite a forester, too. We were always cutting down trees, clearing land for roads or pasture. (I should note my parents aren’t invested in clear-cutting landscapes, and they very much love their wild mountains.) Nowadays, my parents are too old to keep gardens, but they have always had a lot of respect for the land while holding this sense that we were always fighting the land: always needing to protect the garden from all the critters that wanted to get in, always needing to harvest timber once every decade to keep the forest in good shape. Harvesting timber was a healthy thing to do for the forest—and also a way to satisfy my dad’s desire to always build additions to our house or add a cabin on our farm. I feel like I had a close connection to the mountains, and still do, from those early life experiences.
You offered this idea, in a Donna Haraway sense, of “the more-than-human world.” My parents are super religious, like Christian Methodists. So, I think if anybody had suggested that plants had spirits, that would’ve been a sinful approach. It’s interesting: I love my parents and have a good but complex and complicated relationship with them. I remember being a teenager and asking them to help me understand their spirituality. We were in church and Sunday School every week. We were the kind of family that went to church two days a week. So, What is spirituality? What’s your spirituality? Everything else felt kind of performative. They never could tell me, and that’s one reason why I left their religion.
But one thing that I do remember is all of the ways I felt super connected to those mountains, to the woods. We weren’t allowed to watch a lot of TV because my parents were so religious, and we weren’t allowed to have Nintendo and video games. So, our childhood was spent outside. We were either helping my parents in the garden, on the farm, building something, learning a trade, or were just released into the woods. So, I feel and notice that I am most relaxed when I’m in the woods. As I have moved through adulthood and lived in various cities across the Southeast and now Montreal, it’s always been important for me to understand, even if it’s a small city park, that I need to live near nature. I need to know where I can go for that kind of spirituality, a kind of convening with nature. I don’t have any big ideas or critical thoughts around it, but I just know that I’m a person who grew up in the woods and I need to be back in the forest to feel like a whole person. So, here in Montreal, we have Mount Royal Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. It’s a place I go when I need to de-stress, and it’s also a place that I go to learn about this ecosystem that I’m now part of, which is different from where I’m from.
Amirio: You noting your parents’ religious stances and spirituality is informative and generative. Christian doctrine is so rooted in domination, especially when it comes to the land and the more-than-human world. There’s so much around this idea of containment—that we have this innate “responsibility” to contain, to dominate, to extract. There are also these ideas of purity and pristineness related to an Edenic past that we should get back to or that should represent what’s the most morally good.
Aaron: Really complicated, right?
Amirio: Really complicated! How did that religious doctrine interface with your queerness? I’m wondering how those ideas—of containment, pristineness, what’s good and bad, right and wrong—showed up in relation to your queerness? And to the landscape you grew up in?
Aaron: As a little kid, we were so sheltered from broader popular cultural movements, and just different cultures in general. Both my parents are from really big families, six and nine kids. We went to daycare, and then we were in public schools. We weren’t completely sheltered from everything, but it’s a very real fact that I didn’t understand gayness, queerness, anything about being LGBTQ+ until the very end of high school. That’s how sheltered we were. I remember thinking that what we would now call “heteronormativity” was how the world works and how people are. I’ve asked my family, as an adult, Were there no other gay people, ever, in our family—even folks that you suspected, like an uncle that didn’t marry, or an aunt? Nothing but shrugs.
But, we’re totally everywhere, and I’m absolutely convinced that there were queer people in my family. These families are so big. I mean, I remember being a little kid and going to family reunions and there would be 400 people. I’m not shitting you—they’re really big. I have cousins that themselves have nine kids. Really big families, so of course there’s some queer people. I’m closest with my niece and nephew, and my nephew is also queer.
So, 30+ years ago, as a very young person, I wasn’t exposed to much of anything that would inform the queer person I would later become. Or was I? Interestingly, my earliest queer experiences were always happening in nature, or adjacent to it. I didn’t have language for understanding those experiences, but the first times that I kissed boys, was touching other same-sex bodies—that was happening in the woods. My first more serious relationship was with someone who identifies as a woman, and that person is now queer.
I also remember a couple of particular things that relate to queerness and nature. As a kid, at school, I didn’t fit in. Kids do this to this day, but there would be little cliques that I would try to join. I was always more interested in what the girls were doing than what the boys were doing. I went to school at a really old school; this was a very different time, early eighties, but there was no fence. And the school was kind of in a rural place, so we just played in the woods, in the fields behind the school. There was a very small playground, and no one cared if we wandered in and out. I remember being isolated from other kids that I am positive are now queer. But those are some things I often look back at. I also remember collecting acorns and building small things. I think my interest in the miniature and maybe even collecting has a little bit to do with being a little queer kid in nature and not always finding other-than-human community—just with those woods.
As an adult, I once helped my mom and her two sisters take care of my grandmother when she was passing away in 2013; we were tending to my grandmother’s final garden. She had planted this garden with my aunts. My mom and I had come up from Tennessee. We were in Virginia, the Roanoke area. My grandmother was in her final months of life, and no one had been taking care of her garden. It was overgrown with weeds, so we were out there picking them. At the time, I had been in a relationship with one of the greatest loves of my life since 2011, and my mom was like, Don’t bring your boyfriend. I don’t want any of that. But I still went, and it was awkward. I wanted to be there for my grandmother’s last moments, but it was hard. It was always this confrontation, somehow, whenever I came home. I’m out to my family, they know who I am. They’ve gotten a lot better in the 10 years since this incident, but it’s not been without a lot of heartache—mostly on my end from forcing the issue. But, my family and I were pulling weeds, and we were grieving through this process. We were out there, and I’m feeling a lot of particular emotions about how my partner can’t be there with me—but these women’s husbands are there with them. And it dawned on me: I am like one of these weeds. My queerness is so unwanted in this environment. My brother is driving up with his girlfriend, now wife, and there are no problems, no questions asked. But I’m told to not bring my partner of three years. That shit’s hard.
This idea of queer people being weeds isn’t particular to the South. Once that became something for me, it made me think about this whole thing that we do as humans: deciding what will be grown, what will be cultivated, what’s unwanted, what’s going to be eradicated. To me, the connections to queerness are crystal clear: queerness and how culture writ large grapples with it, deals with it, encourages it to flourish and has also eradicated it historically. I made those weeds that I referred to earlier as a first start to processing all these ideas. And I was making them super queer, making them out of things that are erotic objects for me and desirous objects for me. And I was interweaving, intermixing, and patchworking the weeds with queer history, queer narratives—everything from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms to things that touch on queerness in nature, the queer body in nature, vulnerable masculinities in nature. So, those are my weeds. I showed those pieces with some other works, including a taxidermied black bear; my family includes hunters on my mom’s side. That all eventually led me to kudzu.
I had made those weeds and I started thinking more and more. I did a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Kudzu was everywhere. There are several banks of kudzu that grow near the artist studios, in these former dairy barns. There were a number of funny dinner conversations that happened between people who are familiar with kudzu and grew up around it, basically the Southerners, and then people who are not from the South, either from the Northeast, the Plains states, or out West, who were like, What is this? It’s just wild. And then others were like, I know, it’s just crazy. I can’t believe they haven’t killed it or done anything with it. I certainly grew up with piles of negative thoughts about kudzu, about how bad it is, blah, blah, blah. But I also had a grandmother who made kudzu jelly, and knew community members who made baskets from the dried stems. There’s a weird tension Southerners have with this vine.
Amirio: You’re giving me so many threads to pull at! A big one is related to the South and queerness. I’m from the South, from Virginia. My extended family is from South Carolina. My husband is the most Texan Texan that probably exists. So, there’s always a lot of country fagness in our household. A conversation that constantly comes up is that the South is so fundamentally queer. For example, across our families, we have aunties who have long-term “friends” and “roommates.” Queerness is always in the room but is never fully acknowledged. Even Southern accents—I feel like yours came up a little bit—feel like embodied queerness, queerness located in the mouth.
And it’s interesting thinking about how so many of your early queer experiences happened out in nature. I think there’s a beauty in your unbounded self being in this unbounded space—but there’s also a marooning that happens when you’re in this marooned space doing these marooned acts, at the edges of Society, at the edges of Civilization. I want to pick apart these threads a little bit more.
I want to drive us to this idea of malignment because it’s interesting thinking about how queerness has been maligned in so many ways and how the South has been maligned in so many ways. And also kudzu, especially when thinking about how it has become synonymous with the idea of invasive species.
I pulled this one quote from environmental anthropologist John Favini:
[F]orms of environmental management demonize specific species-on-the-move [invasive species]—and by doing so occlude our ability to identify, let alone challenge, the structural forces that actually precipitate their movement. In short, the invasive species paradigm transforms the traumatic effects of capitalism on the web of life into the regrettable consequences of a single species’ rogue departure from its supposed place of origin.
The paradigm focuses on the individual, shifting away from considering structural failings; it makes specific organisms culprits, which evades the possibility of systemic reform or mitigation. We get stuck thinking about the punishment of individuals as being the next logical step. Kudzu has its own history with that. Queer and trans people are often made into culprits for so many societal breakdowns. And I get so tired of the South being connected to backwardness.
Thinking about all the ways kudzu, queerness, and the South have been maligned in really specific ways—but then also celebrated in complicated ways— how do you hold that tension? Where do you see parallels? What do you think is happening in the ways that the three have been maligned in specific but also congruent ways? How do you feel like your work is an intervention against that shared malignment?
Aaron: It’s so rich! We could probably have an entire conversation about just the idea of the South as a maligned place. We’re both from the South and bring a lot of different things to that. Coming from Appalachia—in the cultural imaginaries of the U.S., it’s the most backward place. Out of curiosity, are you a Barbara Kingsolver fan? Have you read her book Demon Copperhead?
Amirio: No, bring them in!
Aaron: Oh, God, it’s so good! It’s over 600 pages. I read it in five days. It’s really, really good. She chronicles what led to the opioid crisis, specifically in Appalachia. So much of what she is scaffolding off of is the novel David Copperfield; she’s trying to rewrite that story and think about it through the lens of Southern Appalachian culture.
Instead of looking at the wealth disparities created by the Industrial Revolution and David Copperfield, she’s looking in Demon Copperhead at how—and all this has been exposed to us now—Big Pharma test-drove what it would take to get millions of people addicted to opioids and then leave them in these mountain communities—where they knew accountability would take so long to wind its way through a legal system. And it did. It was perfect. The Sacklers made out with billions of dollars on the back of a lot of Appalachian death. And of course, that epidemic grew and continues to grow. It’s not just in Appalachia, but that is where it has been documented to have started.
Big Pharma was able to leverage the giant gaping holes that were left by a number of national experiments in my home region, like coal mining and company towns—an economic model that has devastated generations of people in this region health-wise, economically. The way in which carpetbagging came from the Northeast, the way in which Industry erased unionized labor in the Northeast and the effects trickled down. Finding cheaper labor in the South, and extremely cheap labor in these mountain regions. The way in which the Interstate System left out big parts of Appalachia; even getting there, you can’t easily arrive in my area by bus, train, or plane. There have been a lot of systemic ways through which that region has been maligned.
In the South, you find the culmination of a bunch of things. The way in which economies were built through chattel slavery. During Reconstruction, the nation was not rebuilt in equitable ways—just in ways that protected the white farming class and a certain kind of economic status at the expense of everyone else. Southern Appalachia has an interesting connection to those histories because it was not an area that made sense geographically for large plantations; it had always been filled with little tiny farms and people eking out sustenance living. The region was further punished from the Reconstruction era through the Depression, and a lot of people lost their land: states reclaimed land through the National Parks and Tennessee Valley Authority systems, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people in that region. Kudzu as an experiment is simply one of the many national experiments that have taken place in the South, many more of them dehumanizing. In Baltimore, we have the history of Henrietta Lacks. As a nation, as an American culture, we have the South to thank for a lot of things. The only original American food has its origins in the South and from the kind of creolization of West Africa, the Caribbean, and Indigenous people already in the South.
I have lost my accent over the years, and it’s sad to me. It’s still there, but slowly losing it is something that subconsciously happened over the years. I went to undergrad in Richmond, Virginia, which, despite being very Southern, had a number of students from New Jersey, New York, and the Northeast. And they were relentless about the way I said so many different words. So, it very much was like, I’m going to need to start masking and performing a different kind of identity if I’m ever going to cut it as an artist. And you carry that stuff with you. In general, the South is also maligned when it comes to education level; it’s seen as an uneducated place, an area and cultural region that needs a lot of saving.
The way that kudzu ended up in the South was through the USDA jumping on a white horse to “save” the South from our erosion problems—which had not really been a problem until the government decided to modernize certain interstates through places that mostly displaced Black and Indigenous people and poor white people. Kudzu came to the rescue. And then when it’s decided on a national level that it is not right, that it is doing too well, suddenly it’s maligned. You can look at the South through a similar lens. The South is now the region with the highest population density in the United States. It’s also where more queer people live than any other part of the United States—in relation to that population density. I feel like as soon as different queer movements have taken off in the South, there’s suddenly a national spotlight on the region that signals change. And then that level of visibility leads local political movements to counteract any momentum. And I think, in general, the cultural malignment that happens across the South has made queer communities in the South thrive at the same level as or, in some cases, with more intensity than other places with more “established” queer communities, like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles.
It’s important for the American cultural imagination that the South is a backward place. You need to have something backward to talk about your own upward mobility as a nation, as a culture. If you don’t have something to compare and contrast yourself with in your enlightenment journey, if every place is uplifting and changing and growing more tolerant, then who will you make fun of? What will be your cultural jokes? So, in Canada, people are like, What is it like to be from the South? And I always tell people, Well, do your idea of an American accent. And it’s always a Southern accent. That is the go-to joke in the United States. If you were going to pantomime an uneducated person, they sound like they’re a rural, Southern person. So, that general level of malignment means that the queer communities that have been doing their thing in the South are usually kind of quiet and maybe under the radar. Also because of cultural conservatism rooted in church traditions that are more pervasive across the South—which has a lot to do with education levels and the way the Church has meddled with everything from congressional voting maps to being involved in building the Jim Crow architecture.
Amirio: I feel like you’re blowing my mind a little bit right now. The way you’re talking about the South makes me even more proud to be a Southerner. It becomes really clear how the South has midwifed so much that makes this nation possible in so many different ways, among so many different communities. Thank you for tying so much together. I’m still stuck on thinking about how the fundamental mythology of America doesn’t work unless you have the South. It truly fuels so much and is an engine of the nation.
I’m thinking, again, about malignment and what it breeds. One of the things that it breeds is this idea of diaspora, especially amongst queer people. I laughed out loud when you were giving a lecture and naming RuPaul as being one of the greatest queer exports connected to the South. I never really thought of him that way. I appreciated that as a reference. And I’m in Philadelphia, so I’m a part of this queer, Southern diaspora that’s being created in many Northern areas, or just outside of the South. You’re a part of that, obviously.
I have a new tenderness, through your work, for kudzu, especially after thinking about it existing in this botanical diaspora, and how it has been able to thrive in that diaspora but also not thrive. I’m wondering, alongside other people in this queer, Southern diaspora, how has the kudzu diaspora been a blueprint for you, if at all, for community-building, surviving in places outside of your home?
Aaron: It’s shocking even to myself that I’ve never made the connection. I’ve thought about kudzu as being in its own botanic diaspora because it’s not native to the U.S.; it’s been naturalized and it seems to love the South, but it’s not from here, so to speak. It’s part of its own botanic journey, with connections to Philadelphia. I don’t know if you know that.
Amirio: Yes! It was exhibited as an ornamental here.6
Aaron: This plant didn’t get here on its own. Humans got involved. They helped bring it into a community. They helped bring it to a place and made it a part of it. Then kudzu adapted and did its own thing and found ways to thrive. I’ve always liked that, and I think it’s such a special plant. There are many other plants that do this, too, but kudzu thrives in these otherwise terrible conditions that even a lot of native flora don’t thrive in super well, such as red clay soil. It’s a thriver, despite a decades-long campaign to eradicate it. It’s still going strong!
The radical in me will always be on the side of a community that’s mostly oppressed. And by community, I’ll open that up to things in the natural world, too. Those entities that find those little cracks, those slivers, and figure out ways to keep going despite oppressive forces. That’s kudzu. How it thrives—I’m just so interested in that. I mean, even in its native Korean peninsula, it does not grow with the same voracity that it does in the South. The extreme humidity we have across most of the Southeast means that it can grow up to a foot a day. This has been documented. It has this exponential growth factor. It has exceeded the initial expectations for its growth and potential viability.
The initial idea for kudzu was abandoned. What they wanted it to do was be livestock fodder, to be a useful rotation crop. It was brought over and tested on a mass scale at around the same time as its cousin the soybean. Soybean obviously took off, did its thing, was manageable. We don’t have this relationship to the soybean as being a negative thing, right? It’s been an economic engine for agriculture in the United States for 80 years now. It’s our number-one agricultural crop outside of corn. I think about those things that kudzu does so well, and I think, Well, what are the other applications of that?
Queer communities in the South have done this thing of thriving in inhospitable environments. They’ve done it and they continue to do it. Look at all this anti-trans legislation that is being test-driven in Texas, Tennessee, Missouri; it’s almost lockstep with anti-abortion stuff, this diminishment of women’s rights, body autonomy rights, and, of course, queer and trans rights at the same time. At the same time this is happening, you have people fighting back and figuring out ways to build the next generation of women’s rights, body autonomy rights, trans rights, queer rights. And maybe it’s going to take a while because we’re in a conservative epoch globally right now. With my Invasive Queer Kudzu project,7 I wanted to think about the thriving, exponential growth of kudzu. What would it mean if we could grow queer stories, grow queer histories at the same rate as kudzu, and also flip all this negativity about the vine? To look at what kudzu does well and then apply that to what queer communities can do and, in some cases, are doing?
When I started the project in 2015, it was on the eve of when the Supreme Court would rule in favor of gay marriage in the United States. And I remember that it was all over the news that the South is what’s holding us back because progress was happening state by state. I remember watching the nightly news at that time, and it was always folks like Anderson Cooper ragging on the South and how it’s the court cases in the South that are keeping the rest of the nation from moving forward. It was almost as though there aren’t queer communities in those places who aren’t held hostage by jerry-rigged voting systems. The systems used to hold back the queer community in the South were built using the same architecture that created Jim Crow. And this persists, this continues. We see this playing out in real-time right now—the Mississippi voting map that the Supreme Court said was fine. We agree that it disfavors Black communities, but we’ll leave it in place because it’s too close to an election. These are different struggles, but I think racism in the South and the state-based architecture and national negligence that have continued to perpetuate white supremacy in the South and across the U.S. are the same kind of forces that have been allowed to flourish and hold hostage the rights of queer people and women and reproductive freedom.
Another idea at the core of the Invasive Queer Kudzu project is looking at xenophobia, or the fear of the Other. Since its beginnings, I’ve thought about it as an intersectional project. Yes, I’m queer, and I’m doing a lot of investment in queer communities. Especially during the origins of the projects, I was going to queer archives in the South and trying to shine light on the fact that we’ve always been here. Our histories are here. They’re a part of the South; they’re as much a part of the South as biscuits and gravy and country music and racism and everything else the South is known for. I wanted to bring all this to the fore of the project. And because of my interest in the overarching ways that weeds are, at their base, about a kind of xenophobia, a fear of the Unknown, I thought that kudzu could be a metaphor both for growing queer stories and thinking about the bigger picture: Why do we need to shine light on queer stories? Why do we continue to need visibility around queer communities, their struggles, and their triumphs in the South? This is all related to so many other anti-oppressive struggles in the region and also nationally.
Amirio: I’m so glad that you brought up xenophobia. It’s been fascinating reading about how the origins of the native species/invasive species binary come from English citizenship law. So, there’s always been this deep connection between the botanical and geopolitical, and there’s so much of that showing up in your work, which I appreciate.8 I’m also sitting with the idea of going to the archives. You’ve mentioned elsewhere how when you’ve done deep research and have immersed yourself in queer histories, there are so many misrepresentations, so many omissions and gaps to fill. It’s beautiful thinking about how you’re using this plant that’s been misrepresented in so many ways, that’s been vulnerable to so many omissions, to address some of those same issues when it comes to queer people, when it comes to trans people.
We’re way over time, but I want to ask one more question. Thinking about the work you’re doing now, you’re going to be a queer elder one day, a queer ancestor one day. Your work is going to leave its own trails behind. Your work already falls within this huge artistic legacy of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and other similar projects. You mentioned that you have a nephew who’s queer as well. With your work, there will be resonances moving forward. How do you hope that, especially with your work that’s more plant-forward, your projects will resonate later on? What do you hope your work’s legacy will be? And thinking about who’s coming up behind you, how do you hope that your work will help create space for practical, material changes to our reality?
Aaron: Well, the first thing I would say is I take queer eldership pretty seriously. I think this comes from being in contact with queer elders along my path and always valuing them. There’s just something in me where I have always loved being around older folks. That’s why I had such proximal relationships with my grandmothers. I always loved hearing their stories.
The Radical Faerie community was one of the first queer communities that I met and I finally felt like, Oh, this can be queer. I was like, Well, I don’t think I’m like the other gay guys that I’ve met, so I don't know if that's me. And I don’t even know if I’m exclusively invested in just dating guys like that. So, when I met the Radical Faeries, I was like, Oh, these are my people and this is what I’m interested in. At 20, I did come out as queer. I didn’t have an Oh, I think I’m gay moment. I was like, I’m queer. And when I came out to my family a year after that, I was like, I’m queer. My mom was like, I think that’s not what you’re supposed to say. I was like, No, it is what I am. And if you feel more comfortable saying “gay,” that’s okay. Do that if you need to.
But I’ve always taken those elders seriously. When I was in my twenties, my first boyfriend was 10 years older than me, and his best friends were 10 to 20 years older than him and ran around Knoxville, Tennessee. And we used to call those lovely individuals, those lovely flaming creatures, Old Guard Queens. With them, you had to learn all these things, what today feels like the RuPaul-arization of queer culture—learning how to throw shade and how to read people. Those are things that I grew up with, and they are definitely rooted in the queer, Black communities of the South. Again, another thing that has been exported that America celebrates—but also wants to pick and choose what to celebrate, without actually knowing what they’re celebrating. A certain way you may talk and present or do drag may actually be a queer Southern or queer Black Southern way of being in the world.
There are a lot of Southern eccentricities. I’m sure you know Big Freedia. I remember listening to bounce music, good God, almost 20 years ago. That makes me feel kind of old! If you were going to gay clubs, you were getting local stuff thrown in with Top 40 or whatever else was in the gay universe. If you’re in a city in the South, chances are you’re there with other Southerners who grew up in New Orleans or Atlanta or Florida or other places, and it’s all coming together. So, I’ve loved Big Freedia for years. And it was like, of course, no surprise that eventually Beyoncé is going to incorporate her in some way and then do her queer disco album.
Again, I take queer eldership super seriously. It’s a reason that I’ve stayed in education because there’s a lot about it that’s very frustrating, but I have made a decision that is related to my queerness and also related to my climate change fears—I’m not going to have kids. I know that I could adopt, and that would probably be a helpful, productive thing. But I’m also kind of an Old Guard Queen myself in that way. I like not having children. I kind of bristle against some of the more heteronormative things that have happened with modern-day queerness. And I don’t judge it: I myself am married.
I just finished my fifteenth year of teaching in universities, and this is the fourth Fiber program I’ve taught in. I teach quilting and other fiber arts. I’ve realized that all these students are my progeny, if you will. I don’t think about it in so much of a parental way, but I do think about it in the sense of, What do I want to leave for this next generation of fiber artists and quiltmakers? And, maybe, more and more for people who think about queerness in nature, and plant studies as a space for queerness. I felt like I needed to carve a space for queerness in botanic studies, in nature studies, because I never would see it. And now we’re in this beautiful moment of so much efflorescence, of a lot of queer people resonating with plant life. Plants have been doing their own super, super, super queer things for a very, very long time. They don’t do reproduction in what we would think of as a heteronormative way. I absolutely accept plants as my ancestors. Any forest that I feel at home in—I think that’s a different, whole other level of connection to the more-than-human, to plants specifically, that I feel in the body, and not necessarily in the mind.
I try to be a good elder when I can in terms of the things that I leave behind, like other Old Guard Queens and other artists, queer and not queer, that I’ve met over the years who were always instilling, Keep good records, do keep little things, keep little mementos. Someone will value that one day.
I don’t think that my path is particularly rare or even that interesting, but I’m the only artist in my family. I’m one of the only out queer people in my family—but I’m not the only quiltmaker. I’m just one of the only ones who’s made a living out of it through my artwork and exhibitions and grant writing. I’m proud to be from the region that I’m from. And I want the rest of the world to know that I’m not from an extremely backward place. I’m from this place that’s been nationally maligned, and I find it extremely beautiful—and many other people do, too. And there are reasons, mostly economic, that I have chosen not to call it home, but I for sure as hell will be retiring to the region someday. I grew up with this kind of Christian mentality—more so my family’s mentality—of leaving something better than how you found it. And I take that pretty seriously.
With the Invasive Queer Kudzu project, there are archives that I visited and built into the project; some of those archives will be receiving portions of the project over time. It’s important to me that the project isn’t just in one location but, like kudzu, is kind of seeded across the South. And I’ve not even taken the project to the Delta South very much at all. There are Delta South stories that are in the project, but I’ve never done community workshops down there, because it’s geographically pretty far from where I’ve always lived. So, I’m excited for the project to continue in ways that make sense for me and the effort. Every vine that’s ever made in a place, either at an archive or a community event, has a special ribbon. So, there are, intentionally, these trails. If I die tomorrow, someone could go to my storage unit in Richmond, Virginia, and have a way to understand these queer, kudzu leaves, that they were made in a particular community. You brought up the AIDS Quilt, and that was very formative for me; other community-based storytelling projects that happen in fibers or have happened in quilts are important for me. I do want to be a good queer elder: I want to be a good fiber elder, a good quilt elder, a good plant elder.
Aaron’s Recommended Resources
Shurtleff, William, and Akiko Aoyagi. 1985. The Book of Kudzu : A Culinary & Healing Guide. Wayne, N.J.: Avery Pub. Group.
Irwin, John Rice, and Robin Hood. 2016. A People and Their Quilts. Atglen: Schiffer Publishing.
Schiebinger, Londa L., and Claudia Swan. 2007. Colonial Botany : Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. 1st paperback edition. Philadelphia, Pa., Bristol: University of Pennsylvania Press ; University Presses Marketing [distributor].
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Fray: Art + Textile Politics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Crowdy, J. “Queer Undergrowth: Weeds and Sexuality in the Architecture of the Garden.” Architecture and Culture 5, no. 3 (01 2017): 423–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2017.1365541.
Gagliano, Monica, and Suzanne Simard. Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants. First Edition. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2018.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. First edition. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Bruce Erickson. 2010. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, by Catriona, Bruce Erickson, et al Mortimer-Sandilands, 4-13. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. New York: Random House, 2001.
Schlanger, Zoë. 2024. The Light Eaters : How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. First edition. New York, NY: Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Yasmine, and Rommy González. 2023. Let’s Become Fungal! : Mycelial Teaching and the Arts : Based on Conversations with Indigenous Wisdom Keepers, Artists, Curators, Feminists and Mycologists. Amsterdam: Valiz.
Learn More About Aaron’s Work
Artist’s website: www.aaronmcintosh.com
Current project on speculative queer botany, Hot House/Maison Chaude: https://www.instagram.com/hothouse_maisonchaude/
“Kinship Quilt,” New Suns, a publication of United States Artists: https://newsuns.net/aaron-mcintosh-kinship-quilt/
Shannon Cynowa, “Aaron McIntosh: A Quilter in the Soil,” Burnaway: https://burnaway.org/magazine/queer-kudzu/
Rachael Schwabe, “Exhibition Review: Invasive Queer Kudzu: Richmond,” Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14759756.2019.1658382
“Parallel Closets,” The Brooklyn Rail: https://brooklynrail.org/2014/04/criticspage/parallel-closets
“Invasive Species,” John Favini (emphasis mine)
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, p. 324
“Making Kuzu Out of Kudzu,” Katie Carter King (emphasis mine)
From a 2023 Boston Art Review interview: “I’m a fourth-generation quilt-maker and a contemporary artist. I think of quiltmaking—work with scraps and piecework—as a global paradigm for identity formation. I think of it as a platform, a language.”
Details on Aaron’s Weeds installation: “These plants are not just mere plants. They are weeds. Briars, pigweed, briars, [broadleaf] plantain: scourges of the home gardener. In the Weeds series, I draw a covert line of connection between these pernicious unwanted plants and my own anxious efflorescence as a queer person in a tradition-steeped culture. My copies of disregarded local plants are made personally strange by their patchwork skins of vintage fabrics and printed gay erotica. In contrast to most of my other work, the text and images are not at the forefront—they are worked into the form so closely that only fragments can be read. Similarly to previous romance novel works, these new riffs on natural forms resist decipherment, favoring subtle meaning.”
From the Nature Conservancy: “[Kudzu] was first introduced to the United States during the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 where it was touted as a great ornamental plant for its sweet-smelling blooms and sturdy vines.”
More about the Invasive Queer Kudzu project: “[Invasive Queer Kudzu], a project for Southern queers and their allies, subverts the negative characterization of invasive species and uses queer kudzu as a symbol of visibility, strength and tenacity in the face of presumed ‘unwantedness.’ Traveling across the Southern states, the project will facilitate the collection of stories of LGBTQ people through workshops at community centers and historical documents from archives. Drawing on the preeminence of quilting in Southern folkways and the work of creator Aaron McIntosh, the artist will embed these stories, photographs, and archive documents into quilted leaves and vines. Eventually forming an overwhelming and undeniable mass of Southern queerness, the kudzu will be exhibited at art centers and public events across the Southeast.”
Ellie Irons digs into this relationship between the botanical and geopolitical in “Re-Patterning with Kudzu: Reckoning in Search of Regeneration”: “[Scholar Banu] Subramaniam suggests there are connections between a distinctly American form of environmentalism—premised on manifest destiny and the containment, regulation, and conservation of a ‘pristine’ wilderness landscape—and strains of protectionism, nativism, and nationalism that have animated American culture in waves since the country’s founding. The urge to protect and conserve, even when catalyzed by well-meaning attempts to ‘save the Earth’ from the perils of a changing climate, can overlap with and feed into ideologies based in xenophobia and genetic purity, as seen in populist and fascist movements from New Zealand to England to the United States.”
this conversation got so many wheels turning in my mind…..wow wow wow. Thank you so much!