In our present ecological crisis, artists are asked to inquire deeply into the role of representa... more In our present ecological crisis, artists are asked to inquire deeply into the role of representation in communicating the reality of ‘climate change,’ as counterposed to climate denial. However, this ignores the ambivalent history of ecological politics, and contemporary reactionary violence motivated by knowledge and acceptance of climate crisis. Coinciding with this reactionary environmental violence, there has been a deepening crisis faced by trans and queer individuals, defined by state-sponsored, state-sanctioned, and individual violence. That it arrives at a time of soaring trans visibility provides the starting point for a critical reevaluation of practices based on the politics of visibility offering remedy or relief, particular given the dominance of documentary and surveillance within the visual culture of climate change. Exploring how both nature and society are violently structured into legibility by the state—that both crises share the same roots—this thesis reflects the trans perspective onto ecological politics, in search of a way to overcome the conditions which produce both climate and anti-trans violence. I argue that state and state-sanctioned attacks on trans life points us towards an anarchic nature philosophy which reorients political and artistic action around ecological crisis as a crisis of simplification. By placing this philosophy at the center of our responses to social and ecological crises, we might reorient our responses away from austerity and legibility, towards trans feminist practices of opacity, abundance, and complexity.
In our present ecological crisis, artists are asked to inquire deeply into the role of representa... more In our present ecological crisis, artists are asked to inquire deeply into the role of representation in communicating the reality of ‘climate change,’ as counterposed to climate denial. However, this ignores the ambivalent history of ecological politics, and contemporary reactionary violence motivated by knowledge and acceptance of climate crisis. Coinciding with this reactionary environmental violence, there has been a deepening crisis faced by trans and queer individuals, defined by state-sponsored, state-sanctioned, and individual violence. That it arrives at a time of soaring trans visibility provides the starting point for a critical reevaluation of practices based on the politics of visibility offering remedy or relief, particular given the dominance of documentary and surveillance within the visual culture of climate change. Exploring how both nature and society are violently structured into legibility by the state—that both crises share the same roots—this thesis reflects the trans perspective onto ecological politics, in search of a way to overcome the conditions which produce both climate and anti-trans violence. I argue that state and state-sanctioned attacks on trans life points us towards an anarchic nature philosophy which reorients political and artistic action around ecological crisis as a crisis of simplification. By placing this philosophy at the center of our responses to social and ecological crises, we might reorient our responses away from austerity and legibility, towards trans feminist practices of opacity, abundance, and complexity.
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