It’s a Queer Thing: Early Modern French Ecocriticism

Abstract

Ecocriticism, or study of nature-culture intersections, has expanded its critical and geographic scope well beyond study of modern American and English nature writing with which it originated. Ecocritics increasingly pay attention to issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and national identity in their interrogations of cultural inflections of nature, and are also starting to consider pre-modern periods. This article builds on three of these many developments: early modern ecocriticism, a specifically French ecopensee, and queer ecology, suggesting a multidimensional, articulated approach that can help us continue to question premises of nature-culture divide.Although term can be traced back to William Rueckert in 1978, one of now-canonical departure points for those seeking to define it is Cheryl Glotfelty's study of the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically cultural artifacts of language and literature (xix).1 Since 1996, when Glotfelty's landmark edited collection appeared, ecocriticism has been contested territory. Productive contestation is, of course, a necessary part of evolution of any -ism, without which it ossifies and fades into irrelevance. Ecocriticism since 1 990s has shown itself to be a robust and adaptable critical approach, not easily dismissed as a fashionable academic moment. Perhaps true test of a field's critical potential is whether it can evolve in ways that are not merely additive, but that change some of very premises of field itself. Such has been case with ecocriticism' s responses to interventions from feminisms, critical race studies, non-Anglophone or non- Western traditions, cultural geography, etc. These have not simply added extra limbs to an unchanged critical core; rather, they have profoundly complicated and nuanced core itself. To put it differently, ecocriticism is not just about intersection between human and non-human worlds, but is also a productive and mobile site for intersectional ideologies and theories. I will here suggest that three recent interventions in ecocriticism - from early modern studies; from a French traditional of ecological thinking which, following Stephanie Posthumus, I will call eco-pensee; and from queer - can each be brought into dialogue not only bilaterally with ecocriticism but also with each other, producing a multi-directional articulation that enriches our understanding of each. More specifically, this articulation can help us to continue to theorize hybridity in natureculture relations. The notion of radical separateness of non-human nature and human culture continues to haunt some ecocritical practice and environmental activism. This ecocentric versus anthropocentric debate - characterized as nature-endorsing versus nature-skeptical by Soper (4) - is one of core impasses in environmental humanities in general, despite many attempts to think beyond binary (MacCormack and Strathern, White).2 It has led to theory wars between scholars which tend to dead-end,3 and also underpins a kind of ecopraxis which is arguably less effective than one based on a hybrid natureculture. Nature-culture, or natureculture, is certainly not new: it is central, for example, to work of Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. What I am proposing is a way to apprehend hybridity by approaching it from simultaneous approaches offered by early modern studies, ecopensee, and queer theory, all of which intervene critically to complicate notion of a nature/culture (biotic/social; ecocentered/anthropocentered) exclusivity - and which, in turn, can themselves be nuanced by an encounter with ecocritical.It bears repeating that ecocriticism is not a monolithic ideology or approach. It has on occasion been unfairly and simplistically set up as a straw man (Phillips, T. Morton).4 There is some validity to these critiques, but they tend to focus on one kind of ecocritical practice that was more norm in 1990s, which was dominated according to Patrick Murphy by an anti-theoretical, naive, realist attitude (165). …