"They Would Plant the Rose Garden Themselves": Femme, Complicity, Solidarity, and the Rewiring of the Sensuous.

This article theorizes how femme sociality and world-making provide a counterpoint to a politics that aims for neutrality or innocence, arguing that neutrality or innocence are hallmarks of different forms of patriarchy. Instead, the authors offer embracing complicity as a concept that structures practical ethics centered in abolitionism and nondisposability. Complicity is formulated as a mode of self-understanding that guides action, evading the social hierarchies demanded by a claim to innocence, uprooting (neo)liberal attitudes that look to evade friction by doling out punishment and exclusion. The proposal to embrace complicity is followed by a proposal for solidarity based on openness. Rather than being "right" or "solving problems," a turn to the sensuous provides a form of world-making that can hold difference—without reducing life to the single organizational forms characteristic of liberalism. As a key part of this form of solidarity, the authors show how trans femmeness emphasizes possibilities for social and sensorial transformation. Practices of care and solidarity allow one to entangle with different forms of life. Instead of reforming the structures of oppression, femme practices encourage us to unlearn and uproot institutional forms that reproduce social and material oppressions, and to take agency in (re)constructing and nourishing one's own worlds—to collectively plant the rose garden of struggle for liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]