Paper Short Abstract:

On social media people are dreaming of moss, and dreaming with moss. Based on digital auto/ethnographic analysis, and emphasising relations of embodied pleasure, intimacy, and joy amidst widespread climate distress, I consider moss as a way to suspend the more violent dreams of a colonial-capitalist world, and speculate on a different sort of good life

Paper Abstract:

On social media, people are dreaming of moss: of touching it, of being consumed by it, of becoming it. In this paper I draw on autoethnographic research with Facebook’s ‘Moss Appreciation Society’, and an analysis of the #girlmoss hashtag; considering the circulation of photography, poetry, and memes, as a process of collective asynchronous dreaming. I highlight how online discourse around moss seems to centre the bodily, the sensuous, and the intimate, exploring this through the lens of the ‘eco-erotic’. I connect this with circulation of other literary texts online - including the work of Mary Oliver, Sophie Strand, and Jarod K Anderson - pointing to themes of defamiliarisation and ‘becoming otherwise’, noting their use of a speculative, imaginative mode that also deals with existential themes through the bodily, and can be read through the lens of queer ecology.

Locating this process of dreaming with moss historically, I discuss the ethico-political significance of yearning towards an ‘other' defined by softness and slowness, in a colonial-imperalist-capitalist world. I also consider the significance of online practices devoted to pleasure and joy (in visual-tactile relationships with the more-than-human) amidst climate change reporting and ecological distress. I follow Audre Lorde’s stance on the political and creative potential of the erotic, to argue that moss is offering many internet users a route for subverting, or at very least suspending, the more violent dreams (or perhaps nightmares) of late stage capitalism, through presenting a vision of the good life defined by pleasurable and embodied multispecies relations.