Queer Ecologies

Bruce Erickson, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands

Description

A lively conversation about sexuality, nature, and environment

Treating such issues as animal sex, species politics, environmental justice, lesbian space and "gay" ghettos, AIDS literatures, and queer nationalities, this lively collection asks important questions at the intersections of sexuality and environmental studies. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. As a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies / Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson

Part 1. Against Nature? Queer Sex, Queer Animality
1. Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of "Queer" Animals / Stacy Alaimo
2. Enemy of the Species / Ladelle McWhorter
3. Penguin Family Values: The Nature of Planetary Environmental Reproductive Justice / Noël Sturgeon
4. Queernaturecultures / David Bell

Part 2. Green, Pink, and Public: Queering Environmental Politics
5. Non-white Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature / Andil Gosine
6. From Jook Joints to Sisterspace: The Role of Nature in Lesbian Alternative Environments in the United States / Nancy C. Unger
7. Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco-Normativity / Giovanna Di Chiro
8. Undoing Nature: Coalition Building as Queer Environmentalism / Katie Hogan
9. Fragments, Edges, and Matrices: Retheorizing the Formation of a So-called Gay Ghetto through Queering Landscape Ecology / Gordon Brent Ingram

Part 3. Desiring Nature? Queer Attachments
10. "The Place, Promised, That Has Not Yet Been": The Nature of Dislocation and Desire in Adrienne Rich's Your Native Land/Your Life and Minnie Bruce Pratt's Crime against Nature / Rachel Stein
11. "fucking close to water": Queering the Production of the Nation / Bruce Erickson
12. Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies / Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands
13. Biophilia, Creative Involution, and the Ecological Future of Queer Desire / Dianne Chisholm

List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Moral Philosophy
• Feminist
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Gender
• Feminism
• Ethics
• LGBT

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 14 juillet 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253004741
• Langue: English

Extrait

Queer Ecologies
Q ueer Ecologies
Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire
Edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson
Indiana University Press BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
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2010 by Indiana University Press
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Queer ecologies : sex, nature, politics, desire / edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35483-9 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-22203-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Queer theory. 2. Sex. 3. Human ecology. I. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona. II. Erickson, Bruce.
HQ75.15.Q434 2010
306.76 601-dc22
2009054117
1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11 10
For Stacey
For Liz
Whence the setting apart of the unnatural as a specific dimension in the field of sexuality.
Michel Foucault, The Perverse Implantation
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction: A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies CATRIONA MORTIMER-SANDILANDS AND BRUCE ERICKSON
Part 1 Against Nature? Queer Sex, Queer Animality

1. Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of Queer Animals STACY ALAIMO
2. Enemy of the Species ladelle M C WHORTER
3. Penguin Family Values: The Nature of Planetary Environmental Reproductive Justice NO L STURGEON
4. Queernaturecultures DAVID BELL
Part 2 Green, Pink, and Public: Queering Environmental Politics

5. Non-white Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature ANDIL GOSINE
6. From Jook Joints to Sisterspace: The Role of Nature in Lesbian Alternative Environments in the United States NANCY C. UNGER
7. Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco-Normativity GIOVANNA DI CHIRO
8. Undoing Nature: Coalition Building as Queer Environmentalism KATIE HOGAN
9. Fragments, Edges, and Matrices: Retheorizing the Formation of a So-called Gay Ghetto through Queering Landscape Ecology GORDON BRENT INGRAM
Part 3 Desiring Nature? Queer Attachments

10. The Place, Promised, That Has Not Yet Been : The Nature of Dislocation and Desire in Adrienne Rich s Your Native Land/Your Life and Minnie Bruce Pratt s Crime Against Nature RACHEL STEIN
11. fucking close to water : Queering the Production of the Nation BRUCE ERICKSON
12. Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies CATRIONA MORTIMER-SANDILANDS
13. Biophilia, Creative Involution, and the Ecological Future of Queer Desire DIANNE CHISHOLM
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors are deeply grateful to all of the contributors to this volume, each of whom has risen to the challenge of queering his or her ecological position with grace and intelligence. When we came together to discuss the first drafts of our chapters in Toronto in May 2007, it was immediately clear that the whole would be greater than the sum of the parts. For the respectful and insightful dialogue that has so enriched each of our contributions, we thank you all, and especially Brent for his careful and thoughtful note-taking. We are also grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its financial support of that initial workshop, without which Queer Ecologies would not have come to be.
Thank you to Dee Mortensen at Indiana University Press for her unflagging enthusiasm for the project and her ongoing and patient commitment to its success, to Laura MacLeod for her hard work on so many of its details, and to Carol Kennedy and Nancy Lightfoot for their excellent copyediting. Thank you to Sherri, Stacey, and Hannah for living with one or the other of us throughout the process of organizing, writing, and editing the volume. And thank you to so many of our colleagues in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University for understanding that ecology is, indeed, in need of a queering such as this one.
Permission granted by the University of Arizona Press to reprint a revised version of No l Sturgeon s essay Penguin Family Values: The Nature of Planetary Environmental Reproductive Justice, as it appeared in Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural (2008), copyright 2008 by the University of Arizona Press.
Queer Ecologies
INTRODUCTION
A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies
CATRIONA MORTIMER-SANDILANDS AND BRUCE ERICKSON
Introduction: Queering Ecology on Brokeback Mountain
In a now-famous scene from Ang Lee s Academy Award winning film Brokeback Mountain, 1 characters Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist have had a bit too much whiskey to drink around the fire at their camp in the Big Horn Mountains of eastern South Dakota and Wyoming, where they are employed by Joe Aguirre in the summer of 1963 to herd and protect his sheep for the grazing season. In the middle of the scene, Ennis drunkenly insists on sleeping outside the tent by the dying fire, but in the middle of the night Jack calls him into the tent and Ennis staggers in. As a brilliant full moon surfs on top of the clouds, Jack reaches over and pulls a sleeping Ennis s arm around him; Ennis wakes and jolts himself away roughly but Jack pursues him and holds onto his jacket. A long second transpires as Jack looks into Ennis s eyes and Ennis meets his gaze, understanding. They have fast, fierce sex, and with no time for so much as a postcoital cigarette, the scene abruptly changes to the next morning, Ennis crawling out of the tent with a visible hangover, cocking his rifle, leaving the campsite without conversation. His next words to Jack are later that day. Rifle still in hand, he sits down beside him and says: That was a one-shot thing we had going on there. Jack responds: It s nobody s business but ours. Ennis insists: You know I ain t queer. Jack agrees: Me, neither. But that evening, in a warmly lit tent interior, they kiss tenderly and visibly relax into each other s bodies: they may not be queer, but a rose by any other name apparently smells as sweet.
Although a lot more happens in Brokeback Mountain that is worthy of comment, notably the contrast between the heterosexual relationships both men develop and the deeply romantic and eventually tragic high-altitude fucking, to quote Jack, in which the couple engages periodically for the next twenty years, we begin this collection of writings on queer ecologies with that scene because it displays quite dramatically three important junctures at which lgbtq (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer) and environmental politics (both defined broadly) intersect. 2 First, Jack and Ennis s shared refusal to name themselves as queer is part of an ongoing narrative strategy by which the film distances both men from the taint of urban, effeminate-what Judith Halberstam has called metronormative -articulations of gay male identity (2005, 36). Jack and Ennis are cowboys; they know about guns and horses; they eat baked beans and drink whiskey from the bottle rather than having cassoulet with cabernet sauvignon. When Ennis says that he is not queer, we understand that he means he is not that kind of queer: genteel, sensitive, feminine, gay in any sense of the word. He is an ordinary white, working-class, masculine-male ranch hand who just happens to have passionate sex and fall in love with an almost equally butch rodeo king. 3 There is nothing queer about it; indeed, their masculine identities are repeatedly confirmed in both this scene and the film as a whole, and the sex unfolds almost naturally as part of a deepening, homosocial intimacy that would be as welcome in a camp full of Boy Scouts as it would in a group of urban gay men: indeed, possibly more welcome.
Although the politics are not simple and the movie is much commented upon, 4 the point we emphasize is that the presentation of Ennis and Jack in this rural-masculine manner has the effect of naturalizing their relationship insofar as their attraction and love can be read as entirely separate and distinct from what have, throughout much of the twentieth century, been presented as unnatural or degenerate sexualities. We will return to this issue presently; what we stress here is that, for a popular audience, sympathy for and identification with Ennis and Jack s tragic romance is based on the story s effective disarticulation of same-sex love and desire from gay identity, the former of which is presented as natural-masculine, rural, virile-in opposition to the latter s spectral invocation of historical and ongoing discourses of perversion. These discourses, as we will suggest below, are an important point of conversation between queer and ecological politics because they reveal the powerful ways in which understandings of nature inform discourses of sexuality, and also the ways in which understandings of sex inform discourses of nature; they are linked, in fact, through a strongly evolutionary narrative that pits the perverse, the polluted and the degenerate against the fit, the healthy, and the natural.
The second queer ecological connection going on in Brokeback Mountain is that it is not at all accidental that our sex scene takes place on Brokeback Mountain. Although, as we discover later in the film, even this remote space is not immune to