to cast a line in the san jacinto river

Abstract

This thesis addresses agency of the body, of space, and of marginalized lifeways for subsistence fishers near Houston, Texas. It does so through a feminist approach that centers processes of change, instability, and emergence as mechanisms to leverage the fisher community’s embodiment of the landscape through the design of a near-future fishing spot along the San Jacinto River.

This project is designed through hurricanes; understood not only as a moment of instability but as a moment of intensity that generates a closeness to water and a thickness of land at the site of the San Jacinto River Waste Pits. Storm surges from seasonal hurricanes play a role in activating change as debris accumulates and deepens the relationship between fisher people, their body, and the fish that they lure.

Through this feminist approach, the project builds collective memory by designing with these hurricanes, as not a force of destruction, but an event that many on the gulf coast embody in a myriad of ways. In turn, I hope this offers a counternarrative to the top-down, official, patriarchal forms of knowledge that often hold greater value than embodied knowledge of those we work with. This project embodies more than a gendered feminist perspective on access and agency, and I position it as such – it attempts to illuminate the importance of intersectionality within our profession, and whole bodily agency as it pertains to space and power.