Queer Ecology

This essay examines the visual and written cultures of grizzly eradication and settler violence in U.S. California. In addition to unpacking the ways that settlers transformed the California Grizzly into a gendered symbol of imperial domination, this piece analyzes the ways that public discourse about the untamed outdoors worked to frame Native nations and wild grizzlies as threats to a properly domesticated and commercially productive U.S. California.

La pensée férale is a collaboration with artist Daniel Stegmann Mangrané, a series of seven photos accompanied by seven short texts that seeks to develop a notion of "feral thought"  by using the concept of ferality - a transformation of what was once tamed into something that is no longer so, suggesting that maybe survival in the Anthropocene has something to do with becoming feral.

The project was developed for Maria Lind's Instagram account  https://www.instagram.com/52proposalsforthe20s: "For each week in 2020, curator Maria Lind invites 52 artists to inhabit this account to make weekly proposals for the 2020s."

"The tradition of Transatlantic Romantic poetry claims nature as a key figure. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early work, Nature, published in 1836, he writes that “Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf,” and “[t]he world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty” (NCE 28, 34). He even feels the idealistic erasure of his subject position in Nature when he famously writes,” I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all” (29). However, according to Mary Chapman, “Emerson experience[s] a melancholic impasse after Waldo’s death,...[and in attempt] to reconcile...the calamity” (76), he philosophically wavers. I posit that his philosophy of idealism with regard to the natural world begins to vacillate, rather than stagnate, after Waldo’s death. Some theorists, such as Gyula Somogyi, argue that Emerson’s “Threnody,” “offer[s] only a hollow repetition of poetic conventions delivering no real consolation for the trauma” (317), and I agree that Emerson never completely achieves consolation, but his poetic conventions are substantive and the genre of poetry allows him to explore options of relief that weren’t fully available in his journals or letters. In a journal entry from 1857, Emerson claims, “My philosophy holds to a few laws, [one of which is]…Flowing” (JMN 14:191), so I analyze “Threnody” as it exists in contradistinction with Nature and some of Emerson’s journals from around the time of his son’s death to show how they begin to depict nature  as frequently divided and indifferent while always ideologically fluctuating. I propose that Waldo’s death, as elegized in “Threnody,” actually inspired Emerson toward a more postmodern understanding of reality and the environment through a queer  ecopoetics  of destabilization."

In this paper, I posit a theoretical intersection that may seem counterintuitive on the surface, but through my analysis and interrogations, I hope to illuminate how each school of theory seems made to fit into the other. I will disclose my theoretical base first before I establish the history, major postulates, and cinematic purpose for each theory separately and finally move into a section of synthesis in which I intend to reveal the ways that each theory informs the other, forging a new body of work over my theoretical base. Ultimately, I will propose and validate a new, hybrid school of theory that hopefully has incredible potential in application with film. I claim a mode of analysis engaged with the queer ecosemiotics of film. What I call a queer ecosemiotic theory draws on cognitivist, cultural, and semiotic approaches to film. I work from the bases established by New Queer Cinema and ecocinema, each bursting out of the 1990s, as well as the writings of thinkers like Richard Dyer, Karl Marx, Fredric Jameson, Christian Metz, Maureen Turim, and Nicole Seymour.

Colson Whitehead’s third novel, Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), features an unnamed protagonist who’s particularly prone to toe injuries, but his day-to-day occurrences are only half the story. While the text’s overall plotline is compelling, it almost takes a back seat to the philosophy Whitehead constantly puts forth regarding signification. There are many things to be said about the omnipresent conflict (in life and in the novel) between a thing’s essence and its name or label. Whitehead’s protagonist wavers on this point and often voices differing perspectives based on his company, but his vacillation is the key. He ultimately rejects any essential self/meaning and constructed selfhoods/meanings to embrace humanity’s true multiplicities. Furthermore, he utilizes liminal positioning to validate the dialogic both/and rather than what’s ‘normally’ (n)either/(n)or. In this act of rejecting binaries to focus on expansion, Whitehead proposes a queer ecosemiotics in which the postmodern foci of uncertainty and anti-authoritarianism are re-centered as intrinsic and valid experiences for certain groups in American society.

An article published in The Quarterly Review of Biology in December 2012 ended with the sentence: “We are all lichens.” The article discusses symbiosis in organisms such as lichens as well as in humans, to argue that humans cannot be thought of as individuals by any biological criteria. In this article I follow this argument and offer a brief naturalcultural history of lichens to illustrate their argument and the work of biologist Lynn Margulis on symbiogenesis. Following this, I ask: if we have never been human – if we are all composites like lichens – then what does this mean for sexuality? I argue that lichens and other symbioses can open up a queer ecological perspective that can help counter the privileging of heteronormativity and sexual reproduction, and that this has consequences for both science and society.

This paper critically queers gentrification through an ecological analysis of the redevelopment of New York City’s High Line. Taking the abandoned-queer-ecology-turned-homonormative-park as a novel form of gay and green gentrification, I argue that the ‘success’ of the project must be critiqued in relational ecological terms. Intervening into the literature of gentrification, I begin to account for the material and symbolic aspects of ecological gentrification with the help of innovations in plant geography and queer ecology. To ground my analysis, I look to the process of ‘succession,’ focusing, in particular, on one of the most established and successful plants growing in the abandoned High Line, Ailanthus altissima or the Tree of Heaven. Drawing on empirical insights into the redevelopment strategy, this interpretive account of the High Line’s redevelopment thinks plants and queers together. Through layers of sexuality, ecology, and geography, the matter of displacement becomes central to a consideration of ethico-political possibilities for a queer ecological critique of urban space. In conclusion, I argue for an ethics and politics of responsibility to and for abandoned spaces that calls us to pay closer attention to the queer, the ecological, and their ongoing entanglement.

Issues that women traditionally organize around—environmental health, habitats,
livelihoods—have been marginalized in debates that treat climate change as a scientific problem
requiring technological and scientific solutions without substantially transforming ideologies and
economies of domination, exploitation and colonialism. Issues that GLBTQ people organize around—
bullying in the schools, hate crimes, marriage equality, fair housing and health care—aren't even noted
in climate change discussions. Feminist analyses are well positioned to address these and other
structural inequalities in climate crises, and to unmask the gendered character of first-world
overconsumption; moreover, both feminist animal studies and posthumanism bring awareness of
species as an unexamined dimension in climate change. A queer, posthumanist, ecological and feminist
approach—brought together through the intersectional lens of ecofeminism--is needed to tackle the
antifeminist threads companioning the scientific response to climate change: the linked rhetorics of
population control, erotophobia and ecophobia, anti-immigration sentiment, and increased militarism.

Table of Contents

Editorial: Queering ecopsychology
Jamie Heckert, Martin Milton, Meg Barker

Queer mad animals
Margot Young

Eco-queer movement(s): Challenging heteronormative space through (re)imagining nature and food
Joshua Sbicca

From queer spaces to queerer ecologies: Recasting Gregory Batesons Steps to an ecology of mind to further mobilise & anticipate historically marginal stakeholders in environmental planning for community development
Gordon Brent Ingram

"Marriages"
Michael Leunig

Queer ecology: A roundtable discussion
Jill E Anderson, Robert Azzarello, Gavin Brown, Katie Hogan, Gordon Brent Ingram, Michael J Morris, Joshua Stephens, Jamie Heckert

Gender queering Mother Earth
Deborah Anapol

An inclusive natural world
Kirk Mikel Shepard

The world is facing what commentators, ranging from student activist Greta Thunberg to United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, are now calling an environmental emergency or climate crisis. The debates surrounding the environment in anthropology and beyond emphasise that any global processes necessarily emerge through locally embedded complex relationships and bring to the fore the tension at the heart of the anthropological project between the diversity of human experience and the question of alterity in a common world we all inhabit. In this entry I review how all these environmental processes are gendered. Further, the specific questions surrounding a critical rethinking of the nature/ culture divide resonate with crucial problematics in discussions of gender and essentialism, that therefore make joint questions about gender and the environment highly pertinent. Finally, the entry reviews past and current developments in ecofeminism, highlighting areas that are calling for further anthropological collaboration and research.

Amikor életről beszélünk, hajlamosak vagyunk pusztán az emberi létezésre gondolni. Emellett az állati élet vagy a természet mint létező alacsonyabb státuszt foglal el. Az emberi élet felsőbbrendűsége azonban nem magától értetődő, sőt az sem, mit tekintünk e fogalom alá tartozónak. Az antik gondolkodás az életet a biosz és zoé kategóriáira osztja, úgy mint emberi és nem-emberi élet. Az értelmes és boldog élet ez alapján a bioszon belül valósítható csak meg. Ez a gondolat kibillenti a két szféra közti egyensúlyt, az emberi élet felsőbbrendűségét hirdetve. Jelen írás az új materialista filozófia felől vizsgálja az élet fogalmát, kimutatva a létezők közti kölcsönös függést és komplex viszonyokat, szemben a nyugati gondolkodás alárendelő életfogalmával. Célja, hogy a revideált életfogalmon keresztül értelmezzen olyan kortárs jelenségeket, mint a kapitalista logika, a nők helyzete vagy az ökoválság.

This paper explores how Toni Morrison presents with her 2008 novel A Mercy a literal and figurative queer ecosemiotic structure, and it eventually discusses how queerly positioned (and displaced) people might be able to forge new homes and families by choice.  Morrison’s ecosemiotics in A Mercy rework environmental signification, which both queers the norm and paves the way for progress. My queer ecosemiotic reading of this text claims that Morrison’s most productive linguistic ingenuity arises through her use of the ecosignifier “family” (across all characters’ narrations and all twelve sections), which culminates in the conjoined narrative of Willard and Scully and their hopes for the future.

Peter Strickland's film The Duke of Burgundy (2014) presents an all-female world of lepidopterists whose non-monetary economic exchanges consist of mounted butterfly specimens and whose interpersonal exchanges consist of BDSM roleplay. This essay explores how the film represents a thought experiment in reimagining lesbian-feminist history by reconciling divergent strands of feminist and lesbian politics that occupied opposing camps during the period of the film's early-1970s setting. The film's "soft" eroticism and depiction of a non-capitalist economy posits a seductive fantasy of what an all-female separatist world might have looked like, had the various clashes within second-wave feminism found a utopian middle ground over major issues like the shifting place of lesbians within the women's movement, the acceptability of sadomasochism and pornography as expressions of women's sexuality, and the ecological implications of queerness.

This review essay asks how the field of rhetorical studies can center intersectional queer and trans perspectives within conversations about space, place, mobility, and mapping. What difference does it make to center queer and trans sensibilities, bodies, and practicesas central to the production of spatialities? How has our criticism contextualized the study of space and place in ways that would inhibit centering queer positionalities, temporalities, public cultures, and intimacies? Drawing from three recent monographs that foreground an array of queer geographies across scale and region, this review essay challenges some of the taken for granted assumptions about space, place, and mobility in rhetorical studies and moves toward a relationship between queer rhetorics and environmental communication.

Elsewhere, I have proposed a new, hybrid school of theory that hopefully has incredible potential in application with film, and this essay will apply praxis to theory. I claim a mode of analysis engaged with the queer ecosemiotics of film, and this essay will rework the foundations of that mode as well as relate it to three films from class this semester: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1989), and Avatar (2009).

My ecocritical research has recently come under fire from Greta Gaard and Simon Estok. In ISLE, Gaard claims that I minimise the formative influence of ecofeminism, while in 'International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism' Estok critiques 'How Queer is Green?'. His conclusion is that: 'Queer theory bashing looks a lot like plain old ordinary queer bashing, although through protective rarefied discourse, and queer bashing looks a lot like homophobia to me.' Since I cannot publish a reply to a book chapter, I have written this response for academia.edu readers, and for Gaard, Estok and Serpil Oppermann, the editors of the ecofeminism collection.

For this revised version, I am grateful for the responses provided by Profs. Gaard and Oppermann to my original essay.

Drawing on the creativity of the nascent field of “queer ecology,” I argue for a kind of irreverent ecocriticism (Nicole Seymour) and a constructive theological posture of irreverence towards the twin metaphysical concepts of “God” and “Nature.” I do so by engaging the work of feminist philosopher of science, Karen Barad.  Barad’s writing is key for enhancing and collaborating the insights of queer theory, philosophies of science, and ecology.  Particularly, I stage an encounter between Barad’s concept of “posthumanist performativity” and the sixteenth-century reformer and monk Martin Luther’s peculiar understanding of the incarnation of Spirit.  What emerges is a queer ecotheology where Luther’s passion for incarnation, critically informed by Barad’s work, offers the potential for a queer incarnation of divinity where that divinity is caught up—even plays several roles—in the performative indeterminacy of the earth and of the cosmos. Creation becomes Divinity in drag.

This article identifies a particular subgenre of the road narrative, the transgender road narrative, analyzing the film _Transamerica_ and the novel Nevada as representative
examples. The first part draws on transgender studies scholarship, showing how these texts both depict a long history of trans (im)mobility and engage with the affective
geographies of gender transitioning, including the idea of the body as home. The second part draws on ecocriticism and environmental humanities scholarship, comparing how
Transamerica and Nevada depict landscapes and environments in relation to trans bodies. This article thus takes this subgenre as an opportunity to explore the intersection of transgender issues and environmental issues and subsequently to develop a new line of
inquiry that we might call “trans ecology.”

An exploration of queerness and transformation through the posthumanist cyborg as highlighted in the novella "This is How You Lose the Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone., the graphic novel "Saga of the Swamp Thing" by Alan Moore, Stephen R. Bissette, and more, as well as other related texts.

This chapter begins by considering whether or not MCS can be understood within the frameworks of environmental justice, which were explored earlier in this book. The rest ofthe chapter develops the theoretical positions outlined in chapter r, regarding emerging models of materiality and the possibilities for trans-corporeal conceptions of the human, by exploring MCS as it is revealed and portrayed in science, cultural theory autobiography, photography, and film. Multiple chemical sensitivity may well be the quintessential example of what I m calling trans-corporeality, as those who are chemically reactive experience their selves as coextensive with the material world-an ever-emergent world of risky knowledges, mangled practices, and disturbing, potentially deviant material agencies.

An article published in  The Quarterly Review of Biology  in December 2012 ended with the sentence: “We are all lichens.” The article discusses symbiosis in organisms such as lichens as well as in humans, to argue that humans cannot be thought of as individuals by any biological criteria. In this article I follow this argument and offer a brief naturalcultural history of lichens to illustrate their argument and the work of biologist Lynn Margulis on symbiogenesis. Following this, I ask: if we have never been human – if we are all composites like lichens – then what does this mean for sexuality? I argue that lichens and other symbioses can open up a queer ecological perspective that can help counter the privileging of heteronormativity and sexual reproduction, and that this has consequences for both science and society.

This article weaves together microsocial interactions, evolutionary theories of community and queer understandings of family, kinship and intimacy to grasp some of the complex microbiopolitics of the CandidaHomo ecology. I discuss contemporary scientific understandings of Candida albicans sociality as highly tactile and sensual, bodies constantly in touch with surfaces - chemicals, cells, tissues, prosthetics. I explore the highly contested field of evolutionary theories of social selection, including biogenetic kin selection and its biases about reproduction, intimacy and care. CandidaHomo ecologies are woven through queer kinship that is biological, but not genetic; embodied, but not essentialist. Queer communities, founded on choice and more-than-biological recognition, are considered as an alternative to dominant gene-centric kinship theories. These communities are intimate, performative and more-than-human, emerging from necessity and constantly co-created. However, homonormativity and biogenetic exclusion lurk in the closet of contemporary families of choice. I consider Luce Irigaray?s figuration of eros as a visceral and tactile reorientation of relatedness and care towards CandidaHomo kind, always already formed through impersonal intimacies and caresses. Finally, the artwork Surface Dynamics of Adhesion (2015) is discussed as a material-semiotic resolution and "technology" for making kin, as Donna Haraway might say.

Antonio Pantojas revela la historia de una geografía en San Juan hasta ahora poco explorada, la del transformismo. El término significa aquí el trabajo de hombres o mujeres que deciden cruzar las fronteras de las vestimentas relacionadas a su género para ofrecer espectáculos artísticos en lugares como barras, salones y discotecas.

El actor y transformista puertorriqueño forma parte de una generación que durante la década de los setenta articuló circuitos homoeróticos en San Juan bien definidos y con unos ejes urbanos distintivos. Nuestros principales ejes urbanos gay son el Viejo San Juan, Santurce, el Condado y Río Piedras, todos unidos por las principales vías de tránsito sanjuaneras y hogar de múltiples complejos de edificios multipisos, donde es posible mantener cierto anonimato. En la posguerra y los cincuenta todavía ese circuito era oculto, en los sesenta se comienza a formar, con la apertura de barras transformistas en el Viejo San Juan, y a finales de los noventa era ya visible y presente, con manifestaciones como la Parada de orgullo LGBTT.

La cultura gay de Puerto Rico se desarrolla paralela con la puesta en marcha del discurso de modernización del país. Esto, pesar de tener un movimiento conservador y fundamentalista organizado en su contra. El tránsito masivo de puertorriqueños desde y hacia las grandes ciudades de Estados Unidos formó una parte clave del proceso. Muchas de las personas que influenciaron a Pantojas, desde Myrta Silva, compositora y artista que tenía programas televisivos de farándula en Nueva York y San Juan, hasta el dramaturgo Pablo Cabrera, que fue profesor del Hostos Community College de CUNY, mantenían lazos estrechos con Nueva York y otras ciudades estadounidenses.

Widely considered to be one of the most important theatrical pieces accomplished by an American playwright, Tony Kushner’s 1992 work Angels in America simultaneously evokes the images of pollution associated with AIDS victims in the 1980s and brings forward the anti-toxics environmental discourse of that decade. Using Di Chiro’s theorization of “queer ecology” (2010), this paper identifes a relationship in Angels between the heteronormative stigma around queer bodies and the concurrent public anxiety around toxic environmental pollution. First, I demonstrate how Angels produces and critiques the binary which sets "natural" bodies apart from "diseased" or "toxic" bodies, as well as the binary which divides a natural environment from a polluted environment. Kushner draws attention to these binaries with a suite of rhetorical methods and symbols that evoke the “heterosexist” panic surrounding queer or “polluted" bodies during the AIDS crisis. Next, I consider how Angels embodies a queer ecology by imagining an alternative environmental order that disrupts the normative urban/pastoral binary. Finally, this paper points towards a new defnition of a queer, full-blooded ecology, and how that ecology could survive and thrive despite (or perhaps because of) its dirt, trash, and toxins that oppose heteronormative ideals.

This article insists that the environmental humanities take up transgender issues and perspectives, arguing for a "trans ecology" framework. It demonstrates why transphobia must be considered an issue of environmental injustice, and considers how trans experience informs environmental activism.

Contrary to the colonial fantasy which sees the ‘new world’ as the reproduction of a utopian garden of Eden, the Caribbean has often represented a sort of wasteland for its own inhabitants, and this not only because of the history of Colonialism and more recently Neo-colonialism, but also because of the enforcement of institutionalised practices like heteronormativity. Drawing on second wave Ecocriticism, particularly on Eco-phenomenology and on Queer Ecology, this paper intends to explore the way in which the contemporary Jamaican writer Thomas Glave articulates an alternative to the violence of heteronormativity in the Caribbean (specifically in Jamaica, where homosexuality is still illegal) by turning to the natural world linked to the Caribbean land- and seascape. Drawing on the aquatic imagery offered by the Caribbean Sea, both in ‘Whose Caribbean?’ (2005) and in ‘Jamaican, Octopus’ (2013) Glave emphasises the creative, (re)productive potential of sexual pleasure and fluidity in order to resist the discourse that does not only link queer existence and (non-reproductive sexual) practices with ‘waste’, but that also ‘justifies’ the violence perpetrated on queer bodies in Jamaica. The exploration of the ‘queer’ figure of the octopus, for example, enables Glave to advance what I term a queer eco-phenomenology through which he finds a language that, by voicing the violence of the queer experience and the ‘unspeakability’ of queer desire in the Caribbean, discloses the empowering potential for militant change.

Amideo, E., (2015), 'Thomas Glave's Queer Eco-phenomenology', Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 19:2, 53-69.

Previous invitations to queer environmental education research and practice have fallen largely silent. This paper seeks to address that silence by orientating ecopedagogy toward a phenomenology of queer experience. Inspired by the utopian promises of the " It Gets Better Project " and ecopedagogy generally, the author suggests that queer phenomenology can offer new insights into ecopeda-gogy. The hope of a queer ecopedagogy lies in its inclusion of diverse beings and its celebration of (dis)orientating experiences that might lead to more egalitarian and democratic futures. Résumé Les invitations à la recherche et à la pratique en éducation environnementale homosexuelle ont cessé en grande partie. Le présent article aborde le vide ainsi créé en orientant l'écopédagogie vers une phénoménologie de l'expérience homosexuelle. Inspiré par les promesses utopiques du projet « It Gets Better » et par l'écopédagogie en général, l'auteur affirme que la phénoménologie homosexuelle peut donner lieu à des éclaircissements sur l'écopédagogie. L'espoir de créer une écopédagogie homosexuelle repose dans sa manière d'inclure des êtres différents et d'engendrer des expériences d'orientation (voire de désorientation) pouvant mener à un avenir plus égalitaire et démocratique.