QuERC(us):
The Body Electrome
Alex A. Jones
“Matter is not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency”
— Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity
There is secret knowledge held in a seed. It carries everything it needs to know about how to become a body in a world it doesn’t yet know. A complete genome can be found in each of its cells, encoding millions of years of evolutionary conventions for building a body. But the seed-structure also holds epigenetic ‘memories’ that can inform its adaptation to present conditions. These often reflect the lived experience of the mother plant, which can pass on tools like stored RNAs, altered hormone balances, and endophytic microbes, and patterns of DNA methylation that prime gene expressions for change, all of which further tune the seed’s becoming. If the mother plant developed under stress from drought, its seeds can inherit epigenetic mars that shift how they grow in ways that may lessen their water-dependence.
Professor Timothy Morton remarked, as this year’s guest speaker for the Queer Ecologies Research Collective, that the name “QuERC” recalls Quercus, the taxonomic genus of Oak. Upon reflection, this connection amounts to far more than a nominal resemblance, although the Queer Ecologies Research Collective is less like an oak tree than it is like an acorn. It is a project more concerned with conditions of emergence than with mature forms. It organizes germinal environments where ways of becoming might be shared and modified.
In summer 2023, Nicholas di Benedetto and I proposed that QuERC was a sort of body, and that all bodies contain knowledge. The purpose of gathering, then, was to find out what this collective body knew. After three annual iterations of the research collective, it has become clear that this proposition needs a more precise theory of embodiment, particularly one that is liberated from stable form—from identity, organism, or species. What is at stake in queer ecology is not simply who or what a body is, but how bodies come to matter at all. For decades queer theory has questioned the historical conception of “Nature,” pointing to an underlying logic that sorts the world into dscrete kinds and enforces that separation. If Nature is a mother, it’s the mother of all binaries: animal and human, good and evil, male and female, self and other. And as long as this logic has held, queerness has been cast as “unnatural,” as that which doesn’t fit Nature’s conceptual grid. But reality isn’t a grid.
In the 2010 essay “Queer Ecology,” Morton wrote:
“Life forms are liquid ... Queer Ecology requires a vocabulary envisioning this liquid life. I propose that life-forms constitute a mesh, a nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment.”
Morton’s mesh draws explicitly on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who defined queerness itself in 1993 as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning.” Sedgwick’s point was that queerness had repercussions well beyond the territory of sexuality and gender identity—that the queer logic of the mesh could carry our culture past a binary calculus of meaning-making.
The Queer Ecologies Research Collective has aimed to visualize that mesh, to expand its weave, devise methods for its use, and produce the vocabulary required to talk about it. In other words, to expand queer ecology in theory and praxis. Since 2023 QuERC has experimented with embodied forms of research that resist disciplinary containment: performance-lecture, collective reading, ritual composting, research as ceremony, cabaret, and image-production. Ecological consciousness, like queer experience, cannot reside solely in abstraction. It must be lived through bodies, and therefore demands embodied modes of inquiry.
So, to refine what kind of body QuERC is, we need a framework capable of accounting for embodiment without fixing bodies in advance. Here we must turn to Karen Barad’s account of matter as something that happens, rather than something that simply is. In Barad’s theory of “intra-action,” bodies are not preexisting entities that relate to each other, but phenomena that but emerge through relation—temporary, contingent stabilizations of energy, materiality, and meaning. Agency here is something enacted through ongoing configurations of embodiment, rather than something attained or possessed.
In “Posthumanist Performativity” (2003), Barad explicitly asks us us to consider what such a view of matter makes possible, how it affect our capacities for “intervening in the world’s becoming.” The question of agency opens even deeper into queer theory. Queer ecologists have long held close Jose E. Munoz’s definition of queerness as “a mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.” Queerness, in this sense, is not an identity but an orientation toward emergent forms of life that are not yet fully legible.
A seed is thus an important figure for queer ecologists to consider. It is a time-compressed body—a whole future plant folded into a tiny packet, not in the form of a predetermined blueprint but a field of potentials that will only unfold through relation. This year, 2025, we see increased censorship of queerness as a way of desiring and being, and we fear future conditions that are less hospitable to growth. So this summer, for the third annual QuERC, Nick and I gathered the research collective around the theme of secret knowledge.
We took some inspiration from Acéphale, the secret society founded by Georges Bataille in late-1930s France as rationalist, nationalist, authoritarian logics were hardening across Europe and limiting the horizons of liberal expression. Bataille linked political refusal with a “sacred conspiracy” in an attempt to live creatively outside of the dominant epistemology of the time. Acéphale’s symbol, a headless man, rejected the supremacy of abstract ‘reason’ in favor of embodied, ecstatic forms of knowing, and its rituals sought to activate a sense of the sacred through practices of collective transformation. “Secretly or not,” Bataille wrote in 1936, “it is necessary to become otherwise, or else cease to be.” Secrecy here is framed as a condition of futurity and becoming, rather than as a withdrawal—a means of protecting emergent forms of life in the midst of hostile conditions.
Queer social histories have long depended on such tactics, from encoded speech to underground media networks. Atlas A. Reid’s zine collection, shared with QuERCIII, provided evidence for how queer knowledge is often transmitted through fragile, low-tech architectures that persist by circulating outside official channels. Secrecy in this sense is actually a technique of knowledge transmission, like a seed passing through the digestive system of a bird. Often it is not preserved through this process intact, but altered through the host’s digestion in ways integral to its germination. As in Acéphale’s headless figure, knowledge is metabolized in the gut rather than stored in the head.
GNOSIS / INITIATES / SOMA — “Knowledge begins the body.” Our mantra inverts a Western bias that casts the body as unintelligent matter, the mere host for a transcendent spirit. To say instead that “knowledge begins the body” evokes germination: a body as something grown from embodied knowing. In this framework, initiate—as a verb and noun—does not invoke occult gatekeeping, but an awakening into new relations with matter and time. Soma is “body” in ancient Greek, but in Vedic Sanskrit soma refers to a fabled drink made from the bodies of plants or fungi, an entheogenic medium through which knowledge is physically imbibed rather than symbolically represented. Linking these two etymologies reinforces the insight that knowledge is metabolized through bodies, and irreversibly changes them.
The artist Joseph Beuys turned to the oak tree as a figure for embodied knowledge and future-orientation. In 1982, he called the oak “an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time,” noting the tree’s slow growth and solid heart wood made it a kind of living sculpture to the ancient Druids. His project 7000 Oaks sought to reactivate this symbolic function, framing the ritual planting of trees as a way of participating in the planet’s creative forces, and of enacting a collective body that would extend across multiple timescales. The slowness of the oak becomes a form of gnosis, a kind of embodied faith in the future. QuERC shares desires to work with other organismic knowledges, and to stage research as ritual. As with Beuys’s turn toward Druidic symbolism, our gathering this year looked to archaic mystery traditions, particularly as epistemologies that persist across history through embodied practice.
Ritual is a way of synchronizing bodies with forces that exceed individual lifetimes, and also potentially a way of learning to perceive energetic systems at different scales. One should not mistake the oak’s slowness for a lack of power. A seed, howver small, is like a storm held within a charged cloud. Its energetic discharge is the botanical shape it eventually takes — branch, root, bloom — the unfolding of which is like a lightning strike, slowed down by many orders of magnitude. When plants shift from a pattern of leafy growth into the production of flowers and seeds in response to environmental cues, they are said to “bolt.”
But electricity is not only a metaphor for life; it is an instrumental actor. In plants and animals alike, ions are constantly moving across cell membranes, generating electrical signals. Every living cell maintains a voltage differential between its inside and its outside, which is called the “membrane potential.” Ion gradients are how cells store and manage electrochemical energy, which they use to power metabolism, growth, and communication within and between them.
The animal nervous system has refined its electrical agency through highly centralized processing centers (brain, ganglia) that enable lightning-fast action across the system. In plants, electrical signalling is generally much slower, moving in waves through the body’s tissues, working in tandem with hormones to coordinate responses to light, water, and touch. But the slowness of the plant bioelectrome should not be seen as a deficiency. It confers its own evolutionary strengths, like longevity—and so, probably, patience. Some seeds can remain viable for millennia if they are kept dry. Within that dormant seed, a multicellular plant embryo lies waiting, already charged with ionic potential, not quite electrically dead. When the membranes finally hydrate, ion pumping ramps up. Germination begins.
Spatial patterns of voltage within a germinating plant or animal embryo guide its growth patterns, working in tandem with genetic code to pulse limbs, organs, roots, and pigments into existence. In laboratories, biologists have been able to produce morphological changes in embryonic animals by manipulating these electrical signals, showing that DNA is not the deterministic Master of form. Electricity plays a part as well. Bioelectric patterning is one of the ways a body “feels” and rewrites its own conductive landscape as it grows. Queerness also dwells in spaces where potentials proliferate beyond the predictions of any code.
Barad (a perverted scientist) characterized lightning as the “energizing play of a desiring field...a charged yearning.” In “Trans/Matter/Realities,” the physicist-cum-queer theorist writes that lightning embodies “matter’s experimental nature—its propensity to test out every un/imaginable path, every im/possibility. Matter is promiscuous and inventive in its agential wanderings.” Bataille, too emphasized the connective, creative power of lightning in his erotic mythology:
The first form of solar love is a cloud raised up over the liquid element [the sea]. The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a storm, and falls back to Earth in the form of rain, while lightning staves in the layers of the atmosphere.
Lightning does not simply strike downward from the sky. In reality, a cloud sends down an ionized channel to release its overdriven electrical field, and as this charged structure reaches toward the ground, objects like trees, buildings, and stones launch ionized energy upward to meet it. These skybound streamers complete the conductive path, producing the visible light we see. This huge surge of current, which travels back toward the clouds, is called the return stroke. It’s more Jacob’s ladder than Zeus’s bolt.
QuERC is grounded in the erotics of bringing conductive bodies into contact, putting into practice Barad’s posthumanist performativity. QuERCII (2024) explored performance—via cabaret, clowning, and slide lectures—as forms of embodied research. This year, performativity persisted through intra-action, shaping our emergent syllabus through acts of tending and inhabiting shared conditions. Evie Horton’s wood-shop workshop generated ritual objects and costumes for our thematic explorations of the sacred and arcane, while Lindsey Dahms-Nolan repeatedly personified the collective’s shifting spirit, first as our human dinner table, then as our angelic mýstis parthénos. Hwiy Chang’s fire-building, sustaining warmth through the unseasonable August chill in the Catskills, likewise functioned as a performance of care.
Under the night sky, Danielle Goshay led a camera-less photogram workshop, teaching us to elementally manipulate silver-gelatin coated paper. Her process of exposing photo-emulsion to water, flame, and earth reveals the alchemical character of matter, for each one-of-a-kind photogram is not, in fact, an image—it is the metabolic trace of an intra-action between light, silver halide crystals, moisture, and other states of matter. Each photogram materializes a set of hidden energetic reactions, which the technology of photography allows us to “fix”—but only on a limited time-scale! A photograph never becomes an inert object, but remains chemically alive, continuing to react to light long after their making. (Like a dormant seed, it’s not electrically dead, only partially stabilized). Each act of viewing photos continues their exposure, presenting significant challenges for their conservation as objects. But Goshay leans into this instability, often wheat-pasting prints outdoors, facilitating another material “exposure” that will modify the work, ultimately to the point of disintegration.
Thoughts of Joseph Beuys return here, for Beuys was also an alchemist—a practitioner attuned to the transformative spirit inherent in matter. Late in life, Beuys exhibited a series of simple batteries as sculptures, showing the energetic potential latent in trays of fat, jars of saltwater, or lemons wired to lightbulbs (see Capri Battery, 1985), as mediations on the energetic potential latent in ordinary materials. Like Goshay’s emulsions, they invite us to see matter as charged, tentative, seeking conduction. The lemon-battery is a common demonstration in science classrooms, for it shows that an electrochemical cell is merely a partition where differences are bridged. The biological and electrical terms “cell” stem from the same logic, both naming a bounded architecture that makes agency possible through the chance for exchange.
Each year of QuERC, we find some unifying interests emergent in the research collective (2023, see bugs; 2024, see clowning). Noting these patterned interests is integral to expanding the theory and praxis of queer ecologies. In 2025, a topic that surfaced repeatedly was skin. In Theo Eleizer’s ritual tattooing practice, emphasis is placed not on the relative permanence of ink, but the relative ephemerality of a human body. In Suzy Slykin’s clear sculptures of medical curtains and handbags, made from a glue-based “skin,” attention is drawn to boundaries of privacy and transparency in clinical and social environments. Glue is traditionally made from the collagen of animal skin and bones, while handbags are conventionally made from leather, a material which—within fetish practices that test the limits of the sensuous self—often serves as a material and symbolic skin that both binds and liberates (soma initiates gnosis).
A skin separates an inside from an outside, but it is also always a plane of exchange between the two. Skins remind us that inside and outside are not binary categories, but states of matter in energetic flux. The original unit of biological skin is a cell membrane (the organ known as one’s skin is composed of over a trillion individual cells). Some origin-of-life researchers even suggest that “the body” began as an electrically-charged bubble in porous rock on the deep seafloor. At certain hydrothermal vents, alkaline fluids rising from the oceanic crust meet more acidic seawater, forming wet batteries across thin mineral walls. These inorganic membranes concentrate chemicals on one side, allowing only selective transfer across the charged boundary. They may have been the first metabolic systems, setting a template for charged inside-outside relations that organic molecules gradually learned to replicate.
Library scientist and artist Klara Vertes, in a lecture on queer archival methodologies for QuERCIII, proposed conceiving of an archive as a matrix of boxes. Rather than a cabinet of taxonomic “files,” the archive becomes a mesh of neighboring cells. Each box is a compartment with its own internal atmosphere, but it gains salience in relation to the boxes around it, through adjacency, cross-reference, and leakage. This archive echoes Barad’s intra-action, as well as cellular structure: discrete volumes separated by thin skins, across which signals and materials might pass. To open a box is less like consulting a fixed record than triggering a small depolarization in a tissue, creating a local disturbance that can ripple out—for knowledge changes in the act of being accessed, and what it becomes depends on the conditions of its reading. A seed is also an archival container, which is not to say merely a storehouse of fixed knowledge. It is the alchemist’s dry flask, holding concentrated fragments of both history and the future. Just add water to break the hermetic seal, beginning a cascading chain of reactions—i.e., life.
The Queer Ecologies Research Collective is, in Barad’s sense, a body insofar as it is a pattern of relation, a temporary congealing of energies, practices, desires, and materials that meet within a shared membrane. QuERC is not a fixed organism or an institution, but a body electrome, an arrangement of charged differences held in productive tension. Like a seed, it holds potentials, and its knowledge is manifested through intra-action, as currents exchanged across disciplines, senses, and bodies. What QuERC generates—its insights, performances, rituals, researches—are flickerings of relation, momentary illuminations that occur when separate charges find a conduit. Agency, in this model, is something we temporarily become. The body electrome is the shimmering of its charged field, signalling the potential to remake matter and mattering.
In terms of embodiment, QuERC must not be perceived as stable identity, but as a replicable seed protocol. It can be carried elsewhere, planted by other hands, recomposed by other gradients of attention and desire. Wherever the conditions are right—where differences can be held safely apart and gently bridged—the body electrome can be called into being. “QuERC” is an apparatus, a way of staging relation so that knowledge may spark, circulate, and transform the bodies that convene it. The next task is to let this apparatus encode itself. Like a seed, QuERC requires a capsule of resources and instructions that distils its methods and protocols without fixing them. Rather than prescribing a single, correct form, this guide would provide a scaffolding for other bodies electrome to be established in other environments. This essay is the first spark of that encoding.
QuERC