Queer Ecology Research Articles

SF's Queer Ecologies

269 BOOKS IN REVIEW BOOKS IN REVIEW SF’s Queer Ecologies. Bridgitte Barclay and Christy Tidwell, eds. Gender and Environment in Science Fiction. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019. 215 pp. $95 hc, $39.99 pbk, $38 ebk. In “The Man-Trap,” the first episode of the first season of the first STAR TREK series (1966-1969), a peculiar set of circumstances unfolds on the outpost planet M-113. Here, a mind-reading, shape-shifting, salt-sucking hominid takes the form of beautiful women in order to lure men to their demise. Once it has the victim secured, it reverts to its natural form: a shaggy beast with pale green skin and a mouth like a giant suction cup. It uses this and its long green fingers, similarly equipped with suction cups, to drain the victim of their vital salts. By the end of the episode, Captain Kirk and his crew have killed the deadly creature, but the mood on the Enterprise is one of regret. The salt-sucking vampire was the last of its kind. Captain Kirk likens its fate to that of the American buffalo, hunted to near extinction as a result of colonization and colonial excess. In the end, the general consensus is that it was not really evil, just really desperate. One might say the same thing about the tortured and contorted plot machinations that require the salt sucker to get its fix this way in the first place. After all, as we learn throughout the episode, the creature possesses many impressive talents. It can take any shape; it can sift through the memories of its intended victims in order to choose just the right human forms to lure them, and it is by all appearances an excellent conversationalist. Given that the creature is not only equipped with vocal chords but also with a stunning range in terms of making use of them, it has always struck me as odd that it never once simply entreats the crew of the Enterprise for a giant shipment of salt, a lifetime supply, and that it resorts instead to elaborate and romantically coded interactions to leech the salt from its victims. It is a talented killer, in other words, but an inefficient one, and the pleasure of the episode seems to stem not from the hope that this endling, the last of its kind, will somehow manage to endure against the odds, but from watching a duplicitous female form appear in different guises to different men in order to manipulate and sap them of their vital essence. The demise of this singular creature and the attendant narrative strategies that lead to its execution have some interesting commonalities with the superb new collection of scholarship edited by Bridgitte Barclay and Christy Tidwell, Gender and Environment in Science Fiction. In this well-researched and extremely well-presented anthology, the editors and contributors reach into the rich archive of sf history to consider how stories of environment and gender interweave. Each piece, from the carefully framed and co-authored introduction to the ten stand-alone essays to Tidwell’s thoughtful conclusion, demonstrates how sf has always, from the creature features of the 1950s to the more sophisticated formal experiments of the present day, complicated 270 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) accepted epistemologies, and hence ontologies, regarding environment, ecology, gender, sexuality, and science. The salt sucker is a useful figure for encapsulating the many different aspects that the contributors to Gender and Environment in Science Fiction highlight. As the sole inhabitant of a colonized planet, it succumbs to but also resists colonization. It is both human and animal in its natural appearance, and its gender is ambiguous. When it hunts, its form is typically that of a beautiful female human being, but when it feeds it cloaks its body over its victim in a vampiric posture of sexual dominance, suggesting rape. Yet it draws salt out through suction rather than penetration, further complicating a simple performance of masculine dominance. Additionally, when Kirk links it to the colonized landscapes of the American West, its singular identity collapses into the strange landscapes of M-113 that are filled with exotic, Edenic vistas, replete with fruits and...

Limp Whitman and the Ecopoetics of the Neutral

Against the common understanding of Walt Whitman as a virile prophet of ecstatic pleasure, this article explores the ecopoetics of “limp Whitman,” an iteration of the poet who surrenders and incapacitates the self not to amplify pleasure, nor to masochistically dissolve the ego, but rather to attenuate the demands he places on the earth and on his own body. In readings of “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” and “Song of the Rolling Earth” informed by Roland Barthes’s theory of the Neutral, I uncover how these poems mimic the blank expression of the earth, thus releasing it from the anthropocentric expectation that it yield pain, pleasure, or meaning. While the ecopoetics of the Neutral contests queer ecologies founded upon the worldmaking capacity of pleasure, it departs also from “antisocial” queer theory’s embrace of the death drive, offering instead limpness as a mundane yet essential image for ecology.

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

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.

Ruins of Empire: Decolonial Queer Ecologies in Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven

This paper examines the ways in which Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987) uses postcolonial Gothic conventions to articulate a convergence of gender, race, sexuality, capitalism, colonialism, and environment. I argue that the novel diverges from colonial values in its production of conflicting identity politics, and that these can be best understood through decolonial queer ecologies. The paper begins by situating the work of Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley and Edouard Glissant to lay a foundation for the decolonial queer ecocritical analysis that follows. Both Tinsley and Glissant stress the importance of the land to Caribbean culture and people, but Tinsley further establishes a framework for queer Caribbean studies that can help one better understand my critique of Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven. From this framework, I show how both raced and classed queer and trans characters transgress colonial boundaries through the ways that they reappropriate spaces and bodies in Jamaica’s ruinate. I further examine how the Afro-Carib people who assemble in the ruinate challenge imperialism by forming a coalition that embraces trans leadership. In order to renegotiate human agency in the ruins of empire, Cliff’s novel utilizes coalition building as a form of decolonization to explore non-hierarchical relationships between queer/non-queer characters and their relationship with the land. No Telephone to Heaven repurposes the Gothic as a means for characters to discover new, more productive relationships with one other and their environment.

Ecophobia and the Porcelain Porcine Species

What has changed in the discipline of ecocriticism since Simon C. Estok’s explosive article “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia” first appeared in print in ISLE? What has shifted in institutionalized practices of ecophobia, a catch-all term for aversion to and avoidance of the nonhuman other. In the past ten years, Estok’s use of the term has gained currency. Most recently, Routledge published a full-length study of ecophobia by Estok, entitled The Ecophobia Hypothesis. It and other studies, particularly those situated in the new or burgeoning areas of postcolonial ecocriticism, Marxist ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and queer ecology, have addressed ecophobia by theorizing about the ideological links between it and intraspecies kinds of odium and dread. In contrast with this embrace of the concept, discussion of ecophobia does not appear in several recent and distinguished anthologies of ecocriticism. What, for example, is behind the omission of the topic in Hubert Zapf's Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino’s Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Joni Adamson’s Keywords for Environmental Studies. Given the importance of the term, these scholars at best look careless in their scholarship (and one hopes it is carelessness rather than ideological issues that are behind the omission, but one suspects the latter, since it is impossible to be ignorant of the profound and paradigm-rocking importance of the term “ecophobia”). Is the omission due in part to scholars’ “shrill reaction” (Brayton 205) to the article in which theorizing about ecophobia made a debut with a bang? Did they want to stay out of the fray of the debate between theory and practice and so eschew one of the key terms of that debate, for the term itself is a call for more “critical theory” in a discipline that took shape by distancing itself from “continental philosophy and its twentieth-century academic legacy” (205). Is the omission because “ecophobia” is too confrontational, brazen, accusatory, and shaming a term? With the exception perhaps of its Latinate syllables, there is little about the “ungainly neologism” (205) that is remotely discreet, euphemistic, conciliatory, charitable, or decorous. Unabashedly and unceremoniously, with little trace of refinement, piety, or good will, the term “ecophobia” calls out what society largely conceals, underplays, and underestimates. Using more sedate language to persuade society to embrace ecocentrism and reduce anthropocentrism might be more effective than an all-out verbal assault on society’s ecophobic and anthropocentric values, practices, and institutions. Yet, precisely because the term is brutally honest and confrontational, shaming, judgmental, and accusing, using it judiciously stands to productively contribute to the effort among environmentalists to nudge and haul society out of the rut of habitual abuses of the nonhuman ecogenic other. Critically engaging with the term might not bring about the end of what it names. However, such engagement would, and already is, bringing more attention to scores of ecophobic practices. Perfectly legal today, they may be criminalized in the future because of that attention, consigned to the dung heap in the form of thick legal tomes, shunned in practice, and shelved for the record. For literary studies scholars, teaching and studying texts by examining either their ecophobic content or their rebuke of it is an obvious strategy for making “ecophobia” and its like (for example, “speciesism” and “ecocide”) household words in schools, offices, airports, gas stations, corner stores, food courts, and shopping malls. I illustrate that work here towards the end of this article, in a brief reading of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a text that screams out ecophobia in the context of pig killing. Ecophobia in the twenty-first century is vaster and more insidious and more pervasive than it was in Golding’s time, and it is as monstrous an institution as the enslavement, trafficking, and commodification of human flesh.

A queer ecology of the sea: reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

ABSTRACTThis essay goes beyond previous criticism of imperialism and gender roles in The Waves to argue for the ecological potential of the novel’s experimental aesthetics. While the novel mourns the lonely, limited lives that empire and patriarchy produce, it counters those losses by offering a mode of being and relating that takes its cue from the sea. More than merely representing the seas, The Waves thematizes and self-consciously performs its writing and reading practices to create a world of sensuous, non-hierarchical relationality. The Waves both produces and dissolves empire by naming its violence and imagining its undoing.

Decolonizing the Immigration Narrative: A Queer Ecology in Chinelo Okparanta’s “America”

Decolonizing the Immigration Narrative: A Queer Ecology in Chinelo Okparanta’s “America”

The Intertwined Relationship between Power and Patriarchy: Examples from Resource Extractive Industries

This study examines the relationships between extractive industries, power and patriarchy, raising attention to the negative social and environmental impacts these relationships have had on communities globally. Wealth accumulation, gender and environment inequality have occurred for decades or more as a result of patriarchal structures, controlled by the few in power. The multiple indirect ways these concepts have evolved to function in modern day societies further complicates attempts to resolve them and transform the social and natural world towards a more sustainable model. Partly relying on queer ecology, this paper opens space for uncovering some hidden mechanisms of asserting power and patriarchal methods of domination in resource-extractive industries and impacted populations. I hypothesize that patriarchy and gender inequality have a substantial impact on power relations and control of resources, in particular within the energy industry. Based on examples from the literature used to illustrate these processes, patriarchy-imposed gender relations are embedded in communities with large resource extraction industries and have a substantial impact on power relations, especially relative to wealth accumulation. The paper ends with a call for researchers to consider these issues more deeply and conceptually in the development of case studies and empirical analysis.

Infinite Affinities: Work from the Queer Ecology Hanky Project

Infinite Affinities: Work from the Queer Ecology Hanky Project

Forest Tales: Restorying the Ramayana

Research Article| October 01 2018 Forest Tales: Restorying the Ramayana Anuj Vaidya Anuj Vaidya Anuj Vaidya is artist, educator, curator, and scholar, who spends life in India, the United States, and other realms not traced on human maps. His work as an artist straddles the cusp of performance and film, and has grown from addressing questions around the constructed nature of gender/sexuality to the constructed nature of nature/culture, coming together in his explorations of queer ecologies. Since 2008, Anuj has been coprogrammer/codirector for the 3rd i South Asian Film Festival in San Francisco. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in performance studies at University of California, Davis. For more information on his work, please visit: http://handspuncinema.wordpress.com. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2018) 5 (3): 130–147. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.5.3.0130 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Anuj Vaidya; Forest Tales: Restorying the Ramayana. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1 October 2018; 5 (3): 130–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.5.3.0130 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressQED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Edward Carpenter’s Queer Ecology of the Everyday

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.

Epistemologías transfeministas e identidad de género en la infancia: del esencialismo al sujeto del saber

Las infancias trans se han vuelto un campo de batalla con numerosos frentes. Hay posiciones que las consideran una instancia de eugenesia y que descreen de su existencia legítima, mientras que desde posturas cercanas a la medicina o a los derechos humanos se defiende la importancia de reconocer su existencia y de trabajar en su favor. En cualquier caso, uno de los temas a debate ha sido la autoridad epistémica de los y las menores de edad a la hora de testimoniar su identidad de género. En el presente trabajo problematizamos, desde las epistemologías transfeministas y la ecología queer, algunos de los presupuestos que se han usado para invalidar la autoridad epistémica de los menores de edad, decretando así la inautenticidad de experiencias trans evanescentes. Afirmamos, además, que estas presuposiciones han llevado a un nuevo modo de esencialismo en el que las experiencias trans son consideradas legítimas sólo cuando se basan en las premisas de inmutabilidad y desarrollismo; describimos esta lógica como la imposición de una mirada cis-heterofenomenológica.

“Strange Coupling”: Vegan Ecofeminism and Queer Ecologies in Theory and in Practice

“Strange Coupling”: Vegan Ecofeminism and Queer Ecologies in Theory and in Practice

“We Are All Animals:” James Joyce, Stephen Dedalus, and the Problem of Agriculture

This article will position James Joyce’s novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922) as literary works that are concerned with ecological issues associated with agriculture; here, this concern is traced through Stephen Dedalus’s awareness of land and animals beyond and outside Dublin. Specifically, Joyce frequently depicts the colonization of Ireland as centered on the control of nonhumans in the form of agriculture, which he brings into the novels’ political foreground. I will argue further that Joyce is equally critical of the violent nationalist rhetoric and insurrections of early 1900s Ireland, as a movement, which perpetuated the agricultural control of land. Joyce illustrates the violence of this agricultural aporia through the lives of nonhumans, the world of “filthy cowyards” and cannibalistic sows. Yet, this paper will also find in Stephen’s relations with animals an effective aesthetic rebellion to this aporia, for example, his self-styling as the “Bous Stephanoumenos”, as well as his interactions with dogs and swallows as fellow Dubliners, artists, and sufferers. These examples point to a kind of queer ecology as a form of resistance to agricultural violence.

Museum, Furniture, Men: The Queer Ecology of I Am My Own Wife

Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife attempts to stage the life of a unique trans woman, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who lived through Nazi occupation and Communist-era Berlin, during which time she built and maintained a beloved collection of antiques. This article will suggest that Charlotte’s queerness might be found not only in her trans status but also in her remarkable relationship with the objects of her collection. Charlotte’s privileging of the objects in her life seems to disrupt ontological hierarchies at the same time as she disrupts gender categories. Object-oriented ontology – the radically non-anthropocentric shift made visible via Charlotte’s performance – manifests as a queer ecology in the play, one with implications for how we understand the ecological place of the human in the world.

Heteronormativity without Nature: Toward a Queer Ecology

Research Article| June 01 2017 Heteronormativity without Nature: Toward a Queer Ecology Jonathan M. Gray Jonathan M. Gray Jonathan M. Gray is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University. His areas of specialization include environmental communication with an emphasis on the use of aesthetic communication and performance in environmental advocacy. He is the current Minor Professor of Creative Communication. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2017) 4 (2): 137–142. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.4.2.0137 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan M. Gray; Heteronormativity without Nature: Toward a Queer Ecology. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1 June 2017; 4 (2): 137–142. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.4.2.0137 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressQED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Forum You do not currently have access to this content.

Relative Strangers: Contracting Kinship in the Queer Ecology Classroom

AbstractThis article argues that pedagogy may help us respond to the precarity of higher education by reclaiming the forms of provisionality, accident, and exposure endemic to collaborative learning. Putting kinship theory into contact with studies of contagion, I suggest that the classroom’s contingency, temporariness, and interpersonal exposure yield a form of queer kinship that is contracted rather than intentionally developed. This kinship, a social iteration of the unintentional, symbiotic collaborations that anthropologists have described as “emergent ecologies,” burgeons in the wake of harm and helps us respond collectively to the precarity that constitutes our (experience of the) world. Ultimately, I argue that in a moment when the changing climate of higher education inspires (and perhaps even requires) paranoia, such a pedagogical practice constitutes a significant reparative gesture, enabling us to reckon with the ways in which higher education has abandoned us without requiring us, in turn, to abandon it.

A COMPARATIVE ECO-QUEER ANALYSIS OF THE SELECTED POEMS OF ALLEN GINSBERG, THOM GUNN, AND AGHA SHAHID ALI

INTRODUCTION:Ecocriticism is the emerging branch of literary criticism. It starts in the early 1990s and is continuously flourishing due to its contemporary relevance. Basically ecocriticism talks about the connection between literature and the natural environment. It starts in USA in late 1980s with William Rueckert's article Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in appeared in 1978. Rueckert is also the first to use the term ecocriticism. Another founding figure of Ecocriticism in USA is Cheryll Glotfelty, co-editor with Harold Fromm of Ecocriticism Reader: Landmark in Literary Ecology (1996). In UK ecocriticism is known as Green Studies and the founding figure of this approach is Jonathan Bate with his landmark work Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991). Before Bate, Raymond Williams has already pointed out the importance and use of nature in literature in his work Country and the City (1973).Ecocriticism is inspired by the works of nineteenth century American writers- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. In UK it is inspired by Romantic poets of early nineteenth century. All these writers put a lot of emphasis and focus on nature, natural scenes and landscapes. This tendency differentiates them from previous literary traditions like Neo-Classical school of poetry and the Age of Reason in UK and Puritinism and Enlightenment in America.The main focus of ecocriticism is to study how natural world is dealt in the literary works. Physical environment does not only mean the natural landscapes, but all that is naturally given to us like body, sex, complexion, age etc. As (Kerridge, 2006) states, Texts are evaluated in terms of their environmentally harmful or helpful effects. (2006, p. 530). Laurence Coupe, in his work, said that green theory 'debates Nature in order to defend nature' (Coupe, 2013, p. 155). (Garrard, 2012) describes the task of ecocriticism in these lines, The challenge for ecocritics is to keep one eye on the ways in which 'nature' is always in some ways culturally constructed, and the other on the fact that nature really exists, both the object and, albeit distantly, the origin of our discourse (212, p. 10).Now in these days, ecocriticism is incorporating other theoretical areas within its range as Ecofeminism, Deconstruction Ecology, Deep Ecology, Social Ecology, Eco-Marxism, and most recent Queer Ecology. focus of each of these sub-areas, within ecocriticsm, is the study of nature in relation to the particular issues related to their previous fields. Ecofeminism explores the relationship or affinity between nature and females. Similarly Deconstruction Ecology talks about how a focus on nature can deconstruct the anthropocentric view of humanity.The long standing debate of Queer Theory - whether the homosexuality is a cultural construction or natural? - can be discussed more comprehensively and analytically through the help of ecocriticism, by stating the fact that a lot of plants, animals, sea-creatures, birds and almost all the flowers are either homosexual, bisexual, intersexual, autosexual or hermaphrodite, Plants and animals are hermaphroditic before they are bisexual and are bisexual before they are heterosexual. (Morton, 2010, p. 276). So if all these natural beings can be homosexual then why can't human being. In this way queer ecology provides a queer way of thinking environmentally and an ecological way of thinking queerly. It is not that we have to search how environment or nature is used in queer texts, but the very construction and manipulation of queerness and nature is the issue. Sandilands and Erickson describes the task of queer ecology as, Queer, then, is both noun and verb in this project: ours is an ecology that may begin in the experiences and perceptions of non-heterosexual individuals and communities, but is even more importantly one that calls into question heteronormativity itself as part of its advocacy around issues of nature and environment-and vice versa. …

Wasted Sex, Wasteful Bodies: Queer Ecology and the Future of Energy Use

Wasted Sex, Wasteful Bodies: Queer Ecology and the Future of Energy Use

Urban political ecology III

Given the ongoing importance of nature in the city, better grappling with the gendering and queering of urban political ecology offers important insights that collectively provides important political possibilities. The cross-currents of feminist political ecology, queer ecology, queer urbanism and more general contributions to feminist urban geography create critical opportunities to expand UPE’s horizons toward more egalitarian and praxis-centered prospects. These intellectual threads in conversation with the broader Marxist roots of UPE, and other second-generation variants, including what I have previously called abolition ecology, combine to at once show the ongoing promises of heterodox UPE and at the same time contribute more broadly beyond the realm of UPE.