1 Toward a Queer Ecofeminism

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 1997

This issue of Green Theory and Praxis came about as a response to conversations regarding whether ecofeminism had adequately engaged with queer theory and also the converse, whether queer theory has engaged ecofeminism. At times these two bodies of knowledge have heavily influenced one another but the potential of combining both fields has sadly often been overlooked. This issue seeks to bridge this divide. However, after receiving a variety of submissions we realized that for this edition to achieve our goal that it had to move away from just a queering of ecofeminism. Instead we realized that it needed to address the environmental justice and animal liberation movements more sweepingly.

This course brings environmental studies and critical race theory perspectives to bear on gender and sexuality studies, taking “eco-feminism” as an identity, an object of analysis, and as a methodological approach. While “Feminism” in practice need not be (though often is) gender-specific, as a political and academic practice it often carries racialized inflections towards its objects of its inquiry as well as its activism. The term, “eco”, from the Greek “oikos,” has multiple translations: “dwelling,” “household,” “home,” “family” and “hearth,” laying the foundation for examining the roles that gender and sexuality play in changing forms of kinship, citizenship, and (environmental) politics beyond and within the concept of the human. These different meanings of the “eco” in eco-nomy and eco-logy shape scholarly analyses as well as the lived experiences for those do not feel “at home” in a white hetero-normative structure. Additionally, folktales read and listened to at a young age can inform initial ideas of “normal” gendered, sexualized, and racialized social roles. In investigating the intersections and interconnections of gender and sexuality with race, ethnicity, and class, we will consider “eco’s” various forms and how humans come to think about the concept of “home.” An overarching question for this course revolves around whether, if, or when, one should separate environmental justice from social justice – and what the possibilities and limits are to fusing naturecultures (Haraway). The readings will cover classic social science approaches, current critical theory and philosophy, as well as less-often-read scholars whose voices often fall between the lines – or at the margins of – mainstream academic discourse. This is an attempt both to decolonize the syllabus as well as show how thoughts and bodies, as well as body politics become colonized. What does it mean to decolonize bodies through words? How can language create and maintain (earth) body politics? How has the concept of “home” – the “eco” continued to structure ideas about who and what bodies may chose to, or be let, to live? How do notions of “home” and what is “normal” gain their gendered, sexualized, racialized texture? What does it mean to “be at home in one’s own body?” When it comes to people’s choices about their bodies, it is crucial to understand how certain human and nonhuman bodies and lives matter, and how others do not. The fundamental anthropological divisions of “nature” and “culture” frame how we think about what it means to be human as well as what it means “to be free to choose” what we do with our bodies. Authors include Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. We will read these authors along with Donna Haraway and the Gender Nihilists, to name a few.

Ecosexuality: When Nature Inspires the Arts of Love, 2015

"Ecosexuality" collects the writings of thirty leaders in the emerging ecosexual movement, which highlights the relationship between sex, ecology, sustainability, and activism. Jennifer's essay traces a trajectory in the evolution of academic discourse from ecofeminism to ecosexuality via queer theory. Ecofeminism evolved out of a desire to connect ecocriticism and feminist theory. The intent was to explore how feminism could focus on gender as a way to access aspects of ecology not addressed in conventional environmentalism, including woman-centered interpretations of nature and poor womens' perspectives on access to natural resources. In a similar fashion, queer theory intended to create a space of discourse about gender and sexuality beyond conventional binaries while maintaining an open space for sex-positive cultures and their interpretation of sexual and erotic expressions as beneficial to human health. Ecosexuality is a natural point of convergence for these two lines of thought, since it grows out of a love for the natural world that extends beyond binaries and beyond gender. Reed places ecosexuality within the context of these parallel movements. She affirms sexuality as a central organizing principle of planetary and human life.

Ethics and the Environment, 2011

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2012

Because of their very nature, anthologies are difficult to write about -so many claims, so many perspectives, so many references to texts still unread, so many histories and projections for the future. In this sense, they mimic what actually happens in an academic field of study, the swirling together of ideas, at least for a moment, around a central post. The difficulty in charting an academic field, like that of reviewing an anthology, is all the more intensified in a book like Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire because its aim is to connect two fields of study, queer and environmental, two fields that historically have lacked much contact. Bringing together the perceptive insights of thirteen unique writers, the editors, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, a professor of environmental studies at York University, and Bruce Erickson, an environmental historian at Nipissing University, make a solid and sustained contribution to the coalescing of two fields that has been over a decade in the making.

People, Spaces and Places in Gendered Environments: Volume 34, 2024

This chapter approaches issues of ecospirituality through Gender and the Environment analytical lenses. We propose the need to actively queer human/ Nature relations and understandings by exploring studies related to ecospirituality, Earth relations, and gender dynamics. The chapter considers ecospirituality as ritual practices, material cultures, codified ethics, and/or cosmological structures related to a category of "the sacred," which influence how various gendered and sexed bodies interact with the non-human world. Here, we propose that ecospiritual categories can shape the ways that humans conceive of their humanness and their sexed and gendered bodies. Within the context of religion/Nature interactions white evangelical masculinist subcultures in the United States are considered as an example that demonstrates the paradoxical characteristics of the gender binary and human/Nature dualisms. The chapter proceeds to offer queered ecologies as alternative narratives that can assist the larger Gender and Environment discourse in better understanding ecospiritual practices and worldviews, and how the latter can contribute to prosustainable lifeways as a viable alternative to masculinist hegemonies that are continuing to predominate the ways that many humans – especially those in the Global North – understand and relate to the natural world at great cost to life on the planet.

_Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies_

Queer ecology is a conceptual framework that interrogates the relationship between the queer and the natural, broadly construed. It combines the critical, confrontational thrust of "queer" found in queer theory with the interest in biological relationships denoted by "ecology"-though this interest is usually more cultural than scientific, as I will show. 1 One of queer ecology's foundational insights is that "the queer" and "the natural" have been opposed in public discourses. This opposition is ironic to the extent that, as scholars such as Greta Gaard have pointed out, both queers and nature-along with people of color and the poor-have historically been exploited. Queer ecology scholarship thus often traces the commonalities among those categories. Other scholars have complicated such analyses by showing that pro-environmental forces can also be homophobic-not to mention racist. Andil Gosine, for example, observes that "discourses on the ecological dangers of overpopulation and [discourses on] homosexuality … similarly function and are similarly invested in the production and maintenance of white heteronormativity." 2 Queer ecology scholarship also takes aim at normative notions of health and purity as they appear across both sexual and environmental discourses-as with, for example, homophobia-and transphobia-tinged fears that androg-yny, homosexuality, and infertility are rising in animal populations as a result of pollution. 3 Some scholars have disarticulated these discriminatory links among queerness and toxicity and contamination-often to recuperate LGBTQI2S connections to nature-whereas others have reframed those links entirely; as Shiloh Krupar remarks in her work on nuclear contamination, "we might all be queer in this ' postnuclear' age-our bodies, families, homes, domesticity." 4 In sum, then, queer ecology scholars variously undertake practices of naturalizing and denaturalizing. chapter 7

Ethics & The Environment, 2011

Drawing on a range of queer and ecological theories rather a single orthodox perspective, the thirteen essays in Queer Ecologies develop a strong argument for queering environmentalisms and greening queer theory, in three steps: challenging the heteronormativity of investigations into the 'sexuality' of nature, exploring the intersections between queer and ecological inflections of bio/politics (including spatial politics), and ultimately queering environmental affect, ethics, and desire. Clearly, notions of sexuality have shaped social constructions of nature, as seen in the familiar concepts and creation of wilderness, national and urban parks, and car camping. As the first book-length volume to establish the intersections of queer theory and environmentalisms at such depth, Queer Ecologies covers a broad range of topics-gay cruising in the parks, lesbian rural retreats, transgressive sexual behaviors among diverse species, literary and cultural narratives of queer/nature. It also establishes topics for future development, i.e., exploring the intersection of speciesism and heterosexism in queer ecologies, and developing a focus on the constitution of the non-white queer subject.

Feminismo/s, 2013

Taking into account the material feminist theories of "agency," "matter," and "body," this essay examines to what extent material feminisms and trans-corporeality can be productive models for conceptualizing feminist ecocriticism, an anti-phallogocentric ecocritical theory that analyzes the complex dynamics of material agencies across human and nonhuman bodies. By contesting gendered dualities and bodily boundaries, it opens up new ecocritical pathways to deconstruct the sexist, speciesist, and homophobic discourses of nature which served as a rhetorical strategy to associate female and queer human beings with animals/nature. Feminist ecocriticism is also a form of literary criticism that examines these issues in literary texts. Richard Powers novel Gain provides a palpable example as it highlights the permeability of bodily natures