Against Ecocidal Environmentalism: Anti-Capitalist, Queer, and Decolonial Critiques of Mainstream Environmentalism in Lilliam Rivera's Dealing in Dreams

Abstract

Against Ecocidal Environmentalism:Anti-Capitalist, Queer, and Decolonial Critiques of Mainstream Environmentalism in Lilliam Rivera's Dealing in Dreams Hannah Doermann (bio) By creating futuristic societies that exacerbate the social issues of our time and allowing us to understand the potential future implications of our actions, dystopian Young Adult fiction provides an important avenue for exploring climate change problems. Lilliam Rivera's 2019 YA novel Dealing in Dreams, which imagines a future in which the all-Latina girl-gang Las Mal Criadas patrols the streets of a futuristic matriarchy called Mega City, makes accessible to teen readers conversations around our planetary future. The novel has been praised for its representation of Latinx characters and culture and nuanced exploration of feminist and queer politics: by creating a futuristic world in which everyone is Latinx and contrasting two matriarchal societies whose ideas around gender and sexuality are at odds with one another, Rivera centers Latinx and queer perspectives in its futuristic world-making (Streeby). In what follows, I focus on how Rivera connects the novel's gender, queer, and racial politics to a discussion of environmentalism. I argue that Dealing in Dreams empowers young readers to understand and interrogate what I am calling ecocidal environmentalism, a form of advocacy for environmental care that ignores capitalism and colonialism as underlying causes of planetary destruction and climate change, thereby naturalizing capitalist and colonial structures and actually contributing to the destruction of the environment. Central to ecocidal environmentalism is Western anthropocentrism, which, in addition to seeing human beings as the most important element of existence, understands human life as separate from nonhuman life, maintaining a harsh distinction between human society and [End Page 137] the natural environment. This belief system allows some white and privileged environmentalists to separate environmental care from the opposition to structures of violence that harm human as well as nonhuman life, such as racism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. My use of the term ecocidal environmentalism emphasizes how this limited form of environmental care contributes to racial, classed, and gendered inequalities, exacerbating social injustice and thereby actively harming the environment. The fallacies of ecocidal environmentalism therefore demonstrate the inseparability of social and ecological violence. To explore the dangers of ecocidal environmentalism, I examine the novel's futuristic society of Mega City. While it claims to practice environmentalism, Mega City maintains gendered and classed hierarchies that perpetuate environmental abuse, thus serving as a dystopian version of today's mainstream environmentalism, which has become ecocidal in its modes of advocacy that fail to challenge capitalism and colonialism as primary drivers of ecological destruction. I then argue that Dealing in Dreams critiques anthropocentric ecocidal environmentalism by offering a vision of an alternative society that understands both human and nonhuman life as symbiotic parts of the natural world. This essay opens with a discussion of Mega City's refusal to understand extractive capitalism as the primary driver of planetary destruction and climate change. I demonstrate Mega City's hypocrisy in condemning globalization for destroying the Earth, while continuing to practice extractive capitalism, extracting labor from its poor and resources from the Earth. This hypocrisy allows Mega City to appropriate environmental discourse to justify its isolationist rhetoric, economic nationalism, and highly stratified social structure, which enable this self-declared environmental state to continue harming the environment. The novel presents Los Bohios, a community founded by members of the resistance movement, as an alternative model of anti-capitalist environmental politics that practices independence through sustainability, community care, and collaboration. I then explore how Mega City's and Los Bohios's contrasting visions of feminist futures illuminate how today's environmentalism needs to center queer and non-binary perspectives. Mega City maintains gendered hierarchies and the idea of mastery of one gender over others, paralleling the naturalization of human mastery over the Earth legitimized by anthropocentric ecocidal environmentalism. Having eradicated mastery in both gendered and human-Earth relationships, Los Bohios demonstrates the need to understand queer and non-binary critiques of the gender binary in relation to the human/nonhuman binary. My argument that Dealing in Dreams offers a vision of non-binary environmentalism builds on ecofeminism and queer ecocriticism to demonstrate that centering non-binary [End Page 138] perspectives...