Thinking the Feminist Vegetal Turn in the Shadow of Douglas-Firs: An Interview with Catriona Sandilands

Abstract

This is an interview with Catriona Sandilands, an environmental literary critic and ecocultural scholar whose work brings together questions of ecology, gender and sexuality, and multispecies biopolitics. She coined the term queer ecologies to describe and intervene in the manifold intersections running between sexuality, nature, and power in contemporary ecological conversations. The concept has made a powerful contribution to feminist and queer environmental scholarship, and to the larger environmental humanities. An intuitive gardener as well as plant scholar, she writes about plants in a unique way that pairs wonder about botanical materiality and evolutionary history with a concern about the biopolitical mechanisms that govern both vegetal and other, nonhuman and human, forms of life. Cate is a Professor of Environmental Studies at York University in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (1999) as well as over 80 essays, reviews, journal articles, and chapters in edited collections. She edited, with Bruce Erickson, the much-celebrated scholarly volume Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010); her edited collection of creative writing Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times will be published in September, 2019. Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka caught up with Cate on Galiano Island, BC, to discuss the recent vegetal turn in the humanities, feminist commitments to critical plant studies, and the lessons to be learned from paying close attention to the plants around us.