Queer ecology
Queer ecology is an endeavor to understand nature, biology, and sexuality in the light of queer theory, rejecting the presumptions that heterosexuality and cisgender ideas constitute any objective standard. It draws from science studies, ecofeminism, environmental justice, queer epistemology, and geography. These perspectives break apart various "dualisms" that exist within human understandings of nature and culture.
Overview
Queer ecology states that people often regard nature in terms of dualistic notions like "natural and unnatural", "alive or not alive" or "human or not human", when in reality, nature exists in a continuous state. The idea of "natural" arises from human perspectives on nature, not "nature" itself.Queer ecology rejects ideas of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism that propose that humans are unique and more important than the non-human. Specifically, queer ecology challenges traditional ideas regarding which organisms, individuals, memories, species, visions, objects, etc. have value.
Queer ecology also states that heteronormative ideas saturate human understanding of "nature" and human society, and calls for the inclusion of a more radically inclusive, queered perspective in environmental movements. It rejects the associations that exist between "natural" and "heterosexual" or "heteronormative", and draws attention to how both nature and marginalized social groups have been historically exploited.
Through the lens of queer ecology, all living things are considered to be connected and interrelated. "To queer" nature is to acknowledge the complexities present in nature and to rid interpretations of nature from human assumptions and their disastrous impacts.
Queer ecologies can be associated with what Tara Tabassi, queer and feminist activist, calls "dirty resilience," or "the dismantling of structures of violence that target particular racialized and gendered bodies as disposable... is thus also the contextually specific creation of spaces and structures supporting self-determination and collective liberation, such as: land sovereignty; prison and apartheid regime abolition; new food systems; community accountability in place of policing and criminalization; non-proliferation and demilitarization; healthcare accessibility; free housing; collective decision-making; trauma transformation... ."
In the same work, Sacha Knox, speaks to the radically interdisciplinary nature of queer ecologies, drawing a thread between this and 'insurgent posthumanism,' – which "dissolves the dichotomy between humans and non-humans" and asks how to contribute to "the making of lively ecologies as a form of material transformation that instigates justice as an immediate, lived, worldly experience." - as well as to the work of Arakawa and Gins, and Simondon.
Definition
The term 'queer ecology' refers to a loose, interdisciplinary constellation of practices that aim, in different ways, to disrupt prevailing heteronormative discursive and institutional articulations of human and nature, and also to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light of queer theory. Drawing from traditions as diverse as: evolutionary biology; LGBTTIQQ2SA movements; queer geography and history; feminist science studies; ecofeminism; disability studies; and environmental justice - queer ecology highlights the complexity of contemporary biopolitics, draws important connections between the material and cultural dimensions of environmental issues, and insists on an articulatory practice in which sex and nature are understood in light of multiple trajectories of power and matter.History
The theoretical beginnings of queer ecology are commonly traced back to what are considered foundational texts of queer theory. For example, scholar Catriona Sandilands cites queer ecology's origins back to Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality. Sandilands suggests Foucault "lays the groundwork for much contemporary queer ecological scholarship" by examining the conception of sex as "a specific object of scientific knowledge, organized through, on the one hand, a 'biology of reproduction' that considered human sexual behavior in relation to the physiologies of plant and animal reproduction, and on the other, a 'medicine of sex' that conceived of human sexuality in terms of desire and identity." Foucault explains the "medicine of sex" as a way of talking about human health separate from the "medicine of the body". Early notions of queer ecology also come from the poetry of Edward Carpenter, who addressed themes of sexuality and nature in his work.Judith Butler's work regarding gender also laid an important foundation for queer ecology. Specifically, Butler explores gender as performativity in their 1990 book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Queer ecology proposes that when Butler's notion of performativity is applied to the realm of ecology, it dismantles the 'nature-culture binary. From the perspective of queer ecology, essential differences do not exist between "nature" and "culture". Rather, humans who have categorized "nature" and "culture" as distinct from one another perform these differences. From a scientific perspective, "nature" cannot be fully understood if animals or particles are considered to be distinct, stagnant entities; rather, nature exists as a "web" of interactions.
In part, queer ecology also emerged from ecofeminist work. Although queer ecology rejects traits of essentialism found in early ecofeminism, ecofeminist texts such as Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology laid the foundation for understanding intersections between women and the environment. Queer ecology develops these intersectional understandings that began in the field of ecofeminism about the ways sex and nature have historically been depicted. As a political theory that insists ecological and social problems are enmeshed, queer ecology has been compared to Murray Bookchin's concept of social ecology.
Heteronormativity and the environment
Queer ecology recognizes that people often associate heteronormativity with the idea of "natural", in contrast to, for example, homosexuality, trans, and non-binary identities, which people generally, under particular structures, associate with the "unnatural". These expectations of sexuality and nature often influence scientific studies of the non-human. The natural world often defies the heteronormative notions held by scientists, helping humans to redefine our cultural understanding of what "natural" is and therefore how we might be able to "queer" environmental spaces. For example, in 'The Feminist Plant: Changing Relations with the Water Lily,' Prudence Gibson and Monica Gagliano explain how the water lily defies heterosexist notions. They argue that because the water lily is so much more than its reputation as a "pure" or "feminine" plant, we need to reevaluate our understanding of plants and acknowledge the connections between plant biology and models for cultural practice, through a feminist lens.In A Political Ecology of 'Unnatural Offenses,' Kath Weston points out that environmentalism and queer politics rarely seem to intersect, but that "this dislocation rests on a narrow association of ecology with visible landscapes and sexuality with visible bodies bounded by skin." In The Body as Bioregion, Deborah Slicer wrote that "he environmentalists' silence about the body is all too familiar. My worry is that this silence reflects that traditional and dangerous way of thinking that the body is of no consequence, that our own corporeal nature is irrelevant to whatever environmentalists are calling "Nature"." As Nicole Seymour states, "... new models of gender and sexuality emerge not just out of shifts in areas such as politics, economics, and medicine, but out of shifts in ecological consciousness."
In the Orion Magazine article, "How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time," Alex Carr Johnson calls for a stop to the dualistic and generalizing categorization of nature and its possibilities. Two opposing interpretations are found by comparing David Quammen’s essay “The Miracle of Geese” and Bruce Bagemihl’s book, Biological Exuberance. While Quammen used evidence of monogamous and heterosexual partnerships amongst geese as an ecological mandate for such behaviors, Bagemihl observed monogamous and homosexual partnerships. These partnerships were frequent and persistent, not from a lack of potential mates of the opposite sex. Such conflicting accounts of the “natural” exemplify how interpretation, extrapolation, and communication of nature and the natural subsequently restricts and reduces the capacity to conceptualize and understand what it constitutes.
Sacha Knox refers to Camille Vidal-Naquet's Sauvage as a queer ecological film, looking at how queer acts threaten colonial, imperialist, and nationalist ambitions, challenging collaboration in the colonial narratives of race, ability, sex, and gender, through which modern formations of "nature" have been constituted.
Reimagining scientific perspectives
In disciplines of the natural sciences like evolutionary biology and ecology, queer ecology allows scholars to reimagine cultural binaries that exist between "natural and unnatural" and "living and non-living".Timothy Morton proposes that biology and ecology deconstruct notions of authenticity. Specifically, he proposes that life exists as a "mesh of interrelations" that blurs traditional scientific boundaries, like species, living and nonliving, human and nonhuman, and even between an organism and its environment. Queer ecology, according to Morton, emphasizes a perspective on life that transcends dualisms and distinctive boundaries, instead recognizing that unique relationships exist between life forms at different scales. Queer ecology nuances traditional evolutionary perspectives on sexuality, regarding heterosexuality as impractical at many scales and as a "late" evolutionary development.
Other scholars challenge the contrast that exists between "human" and "non-human" classifications, proposing that the idea of "fluidity" from queer theory should also extend to the relationship between humans and the non-human.