Edward Carpenter’s Queer Ecology of the Everyday

Abstract

This article considers the place of the everyday in Edward Carpenter’s life and writings through the concept of queer ecology, which draws on queer theory to challenge and expand the possibilities for pleasure, experience, and relationships that occur in the interactions between human and non-human agents. The simple mode of everyday life based on a more direct relationship with the natural world, as described and advocated by Carpenter, was one that foregrounded desire and other intensities of experience, and had the capacity to transform the everyday.