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Chapter 7 - Queer Ecologies and Queer Environmentalisms

from Part II - Confluences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2020

Siobhan B. Somerville
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

This chapter offers an overview of the conceptual framework of queer ecology – which interrogates the relationship between the categories of “queerness” and “nature.” In the first section, Seymour traces this framework’s history and deployment by academics, artists, and activists, and also attends to its oversights. She argues that queer ecology has made foundational, though sometimes underrecognized, contributions to the larger nonhuman turn in the humanities. The second section turns to primary sources, using queer ecology and the related framework of trans ecology to read two works of contemporary US literature, Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and Oliver Baez Bendorf’s poetry collection The Spectral Wilderness (2015). Seymour shows how Abbey’s novel tries, unsuccessfully, to oppose the transformativity of nature to the transformativity of sex and gender; meanwhile, Bendorf’s poetry offers an alternative to this line of thought by drawing innovative parallels between the category of the vegetal and the transgender human body.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Further Reading

Alaimo, Stacy. “Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of ‘Queer’ Animals.” In Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, 41–62. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Butler, Cameron. “A Fruitless Endeavour: Confronting the Heteronormativity of Environmentalism.” In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, edited by MacGregor, Sherilyn, 270–86. London: Routledge, 2017.Google Scholar
Hogan, Katie. “Detecting Toxic Environments: Gay Mystery as Environmental Justice.” In New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, edited by Stein, Rachel, 249–61. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.Google Scholar

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