Queer Ecology

Introduction: Locating Queer Ecologies, Nicole Seymour

  • “More broadly, these readings perform what David Mazel calls poststructuralist ecocriticism: “a way of reading environmental literature and canonical landscapes . . . that attends concurrently to the discursive construction of both . . . environment and . . . subjectivity” and that analyzes environment “as a powerful site for naturalizing constructs of race, class, nationality, and gender” (American Literary Environmentalism xxi).”
  • “And I show that the environment can function as a site not just for establishing such constructs, but for challenging them.”
  • “I specify how I intervene in, and draw on, queer theory and ecocriticism— thereby suggesting that queer ecology exists not only to provide a new lens, but to make use of the gaps in and overlaps among existing lenses. I also specify what Strange Natures offers more broadly as a scholarly work: not just a reconceptualization of the human relationship to the non-human natural world, but a reassessment of how we draw critical-theoretical boundaries.
  • Jeffery Weeks “He then goes on to maintain that “lesbian and gay history has led the way in challenging the conventional view that sex is a private, unchanging, ‘natural’ phenomenon” (89, my emphasis); that “what we should use history for is to . . . try to see whether what we assume is natural is not in fact social and historical” (91, my emphasis); and that “identity is not inborn, pregiven, or ‘natural’” (94, my emphasis).” –> could connect to the changing of the OR landscape and the shifting-baseline syndrome; ARTICLE LATER GOES ON TO SAY THAT WEEKS IS PROBLEMATIC SO FIND SOMEONE ELSE WHO SAYS THIS
  • “Muñoz’s phrase, “failures of imagination,” is also particularly pertinent to this book. I argue that the texts in my archive represent remarkable achievements of imagination, achievements that have much to offer to both queer theory and ecocriticism, as well as to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (GLBTQI) politics, and environmentalism more broadly. They allow us to think beyond the stalemates and impasses described above, suggesting that there are ways to care about the natural, ways to expand the social, and ways to think about the future, that are not heteronormative”
  • “Queer theorist Michael Snediker’s concept of “queer optimism,” proffered in his recent book of the same name, is also inspirational to me here. While Snediker turns to lyric poetry to rethink heteronormative futurity, I have, of course, turned to contemporary queer novels and films that engage with the natural world. But his concept speaks directly to the understandings of time and care that my archive puts forth; as he declares, “[q]ueer optimism . . . is not promissory. It doesn’t ask that some future time make good on its own hopes. Rather, queer optimism asks that optimism, embedded in its own immanent present, might be interesting” (2). I take Snediker’s term “interesting” to mean both something that draws one’s attention (“interesting” as in “fascinating”) and something that inspires care (“interesting” as in “provoking interest or investment”). Queer optimism, then, is definitely not valuable because one can gain something by it. But it’s also not valuable “in and of itself,” because there is no such thing as value without a valuer. Rather, its value is determined by the communal and empathetic process of valuing. That is precisely the kind of ethical model that the texts in my archive offer for our encounters with the non-human.”
  • “As I have noted, “imagination” is a key term in this book, and one that has great resonance for queer ecology: since humans cannot always see the consequences of their actions on the environment immediately, nor the intricate interrelationships among all components in an ecosystem, they must be able to imagine them in order to act empathetically and ethically. Indeed, empathy is by definition a largely imaginative act, a point I stress throughout Strange Natures”
  • “Buell’s comment glosses over a glaring paradox: queer theory actually underwrites, rather than resists, the move from the natural to the constructed. That is, it seeks to show that heterosexuality, the association of male biology with masculine gender, et cetera are social constructs rather than natural phenomena.” –> SIMILAR TO HOW OUR VIEW OF THE OR LANDSCAPE IS CONSTRUCTED
  • “Similarly, while David Mazel draws on the work of Judith Butler to inform his poststructuralist ecocriticism, he ends up drawing an analogy between postructuralist feminist/queer theory and a poststructuralist ecocriticism: he proposes to “treat the wilderness landscape the way Butler treats the ‘naturally’ sexed human body” (American Literary Environmentalism xvii, my emphasis)—“‘not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to product the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter’” (American Literary Environmentalism xvii, emphasis original).” –> SHIFTING BASELINE SYNDROME
  • “Relatedly, ecocriticism has long been characterized by essentialisms of various kinds—which stand at odds with queer theory’s staunch anti-essentialism and anti-identitarianism. This has been true even when the goal has been the liberation, rather than oppression, of “special interest” groups. For one thing, as Timothy Morton observes, “[e]cofeminism . . . arose out of feminist separatism, wedded to a biological essentialism that, strategic or not, is grounded on binary difference and thus unhelpful for the kinds of difference multiplication that is queer theory’s brilliance” (274). The models for care that have emerged from ecofeminist quarters have therefore often been based in essentialist beliefs—say, that women, being sensitive creatures, are uniquely equipped to care for animals.12 In the same way, masculinist brands of ecocriticism have upheld fundamentalist beliefs about maleness.13 And it likely goes without saying at this point that nature is essentialized in much ecocriticism, posited as pristine, primal, or at least self-evident.”
  • “My texts, in response, ask a galvanizing set of questions around empathy: What if we could imagine that environmental catastrophe does matter, even, or perhaps especially, if we are not going to witness its effects? How might that imagination function as a form of queer survival? How could we develop, and strengthen, that imagination? I argue that a concept of queer time that is attuned to environmentalism’s focus on futurity—on the long- and short-term effects of policies and products; on health outcomes for humans and non-humans alike; on sustainable practices—is one place to start.” –> LOOK INTO QUEER TIME
  • “Noël Sturgeon has recently noted that popular children’s texts such as Captain Planet, The Lion King, Pocahontas, and White Fang 2 regularly feature “an association . . . between homosexuality, evil, and environmental destruction, coupled with . . . anxiety about the successful reproduction of the white, middle-class, nuclear family form[, which] is presented as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ without any critique of its complicity in the overconsumption of corporate products in an environmentally destructive system in which the toxins, waste, pollution and radiation produced are visited on the poor, the people of color, and the tribal peoples of the world” (“The Power Is Yours” 263)”
  • “In this book, I employ “queer” as most queer theorists do: to describe that which questions the naturalness, and undermines the stability, of established categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. The texts in my archive are queer in that sense, staging incoherencies among those categories and indicting heterosexist ideals of health, reproductivity, individuality, domesticity, and capital accumulation.”

TO READ: https://lauraodbeke.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/melancholy_natures_queer_ecologies_c_m_sandilands.pdf https://niche-canada.org/2020/06/02/succession-queering-the-environment-an-introduction/ https://niche-canada.org/2020/06/18/queer-environmental-futures/ https://www.cbc.ca/life/hellospring/queer-ecology-helps-us-understand-the-natural-world-out-about-1.6013181 https://www.ecopoliticspodcast.ca/episode-9-ecofeminism-and-queer-ecology-2/ https://orionmagazine.org/article/how-to-queer-ecology-once-goose-at-a-time/

Queer Time: https://daily.jstor.org/queer-time-the-alternative-to-adulting/ https://www.uwo.ca/theory/current_students/course_descriptions/Roulston%20-%20QueerTemporalities%202017.pdf https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2020/07/queer-time/ https://radiantbutch.medium.com/heterotemporality-and-queer-time-b91cce4f538e https://www.dukeupress.edu/queer-temporalities https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10826602015002002 https://www.mcgill.ca/queerequity/resources/montreal-resources https://niche-canada.org/2020/06/30/black-lives-black-birds-and-the-unfinished-work-of-queer-ecologies/ https://niche-canada.org/2020/06/23/queering-ecofeminism-towards-an-anti-far-right-environmentalism/

BIPOC ENVIRONMENTAL THEORISTS TO LOOK INTO:

  • Neel Ahuja, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree), Oliver Baez Bendorf, adrienne maree brown, Mel Y. Chen, Chelsea Mikael Frazier, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Tommy Pico (Kumeyaay), Junauda Petrus, Kim TallBear (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and the aforementioned Christian Cooper and J. Drew Lanham, SOLOMON BROWN
  • LOOK INTO INDIGENOUS THEORISTS
  • ALSO ADELE PERRY’S WATER

SIDE NOTEs

  • so many articles relegate queer to sex, and I disagree. Being queer, and queering [something] is so much more than examining the way sex and sexual politics interplay with the [thing].
  • locating queer ecologies: “Mine is not an arbitrary attempt to join together the already diverse and already interdisciplinary fields of queer theory and ecocriticism: these fields are known for focusing on the concept of nature. But they have historically done so in very different ways, ways that suggest that the “naturalness” of a category such as heterosexuality is largely unrelated to the “naturalness” of a category such as wilderness. “Natural” has actually become something of a dirty word in queer theory, as I outline below, though one that it seems unable to do without. One of Strange Natures’s major projects is challenging this conceptual disconnect. I show that contemporary queer fictions ask the question, “What counts as ‘natural’—and why?” in regard to both gender/sexuality and environment— as well as race, immigration status, health status, ability, and class—and that they do so in a way that illuminates the imbrication of those categories.” –> however… wilderness is not natural and is often constructed; also the sense of wilderness as untamed (as often evoked by ‘natural’) ignores the presence of Indigenous groups/nations from time immemorial.