Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination by Nicole Seymour (review)

Abstract

STRANGE NATURES: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. By Nicole Seymour. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2013.What does it mean to practice a queer ecocriticism? Such a query animates Nicole Seymour's Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination, a work as invested in lingering with the paradigms of intersectionality that such a question foregrounds as it is in developing a definitive answer to it. While Strange Natures is not the first monograph in the field of queer ecology, it is-to this reader's mind, at least-a groundbreaking book, one that carefully traces the barriers to such work (namely, queer theory's vexed relationship to nature and the two fields' ostensibly conflicting relationships to the status of futurity) in order to develop a queer ecocritical practice that engages, rather than resists, such difficulty. Indeed, Seymour's work revels in the surprising and the paradoxical; from its chosen archive to a reading practice that insists upon interrogating how conceptions of nature have been wielded to validate harm to vulnerable populations, human and non-human, Strange Natures is not necessarily what readers expect from traditional ecocriticism. And that, of course, is part of the point.Also part of the point is the book's commitment to complexity, philosophical and ethical; Seymour is not content to demonstrate how the queer and the ecological meet, but also seeks to show how a queer ecological project intersects with other political projects, including anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-classism. This is perhaps the chief accomplishment of Strange Natures ', that it refuses to think queerness and environmentalism apart from questions of social justice, insisting that a queer ecological methodology, practiced well, cannot help but attune us to questions of race, class, disability, and colonialism.After a powerful introduction outlining the difficulties of queer ecological work, Strange Natures unfolds over four chapters. The first, which puts Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues in conversation with contemporaneous works of Caribbean literature (Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night), argues for an organic transgenderism, an understanding of gender transitionality that is as natural as it is cultural, that can dwell outside the medical establishment (or before medical intervention), and that contributes to an environmentalist and anti-capitalist imaginary. Conceptually, this chapter is echoed not by what immediately follows it but instead by Seymour's final chapter, which treats Shelley Jackson's novel Half Life-a sardonic depiction of conjoined twins living in the fallout of Nuclear testing-as the occasion to imagine an ethic of care that is performed irreverently, that embraces ugly landscapes and grotesque bodies (164), and that welcomes the dissolution of self-sovereignty. These two chapters are linked both by their insistence on the role of the non-normative body in queer ecological ethics (Seymour explicitly reminds us that conjoinment is not unlike transgenderism [149]), and by questions of genre (Cliff's and Mootoo's magical realism returns implicitly as a concern in Seymour's engagement with Jackson's speculative fiction). …