It is in Nature we are formed and it is in Nature we will return…this is one fact we all know for sure. However, many of us spend our brief lives trying to assert our independence from our surrounding natural environment— maybe that will prevent an inevitable decay and collapse that comes with age. This is an incredibly human experience, driven by our egos and the desire to be individuals of substance and value. The structures we live in compliment this kind of thinking — capitalism’s “plague of affluenza” has given rise to hyper-individualism becoming somewhat of a norm in America and the West especially. Inside our structures, binaries and labels are enforced as a way to define oneself and others which can help us understand our identities as well as those belonging to the same or different groups. This practice as it stands alone sounds pretty great in theory, and could stand near Joanna Macy’s argument in favor of a wider sense of self by acknowledging the groups and communities we belong to as being part of our identity. However, in the present day, certain identities and groups are prioritized over others. There are certain identities that are more “normal” or “respected” than others AKA straight, cisgender, white, middle-class, men…. You get the picture.
Ecofeminism comments on the patriarchy we live in and how that affects our relationship with nature. People belonging to this movement see “the devastation of the earth and her beings by the corporate warriors, and the threat of nuclear annihilation by the military warriors, as feminist concerns. It is the same masculinist mentality which would deny us our right to our own bodies and our own sexuality, and which depends on multiple systems of dominance and power to have its way (Mies and Shiva 434). Similarly, environmental justice comments on how issues of race and class impacts human’s interactions with and ideas of nature due to unfair distribution of and access to resources. In both of these movements, oppression and discrimination are linked with a negative influence on human’s relationship with the landscape and ability to live in peace and harmony. Feminism can sometimes get a bad reputation based on the word alone because it appears to leave out men. On the contrary, feminism is equal rights for all, no matter what your gender identity and expression may be. Men benefit from feminism just as much as women because the patriarchy really only does harm — it is the reason why men are told it is dangerous to fully express their feelings. Additionally, it is responsible for performative and toxic masculinity that damages men’s psyches and is responsible for all sorts of interpersonal and sexual violence against women and the environment. The patriarchy is about power and control, not about having an authentic and caring society. Indeed, we cannot have a fully functioning and healthy society until all genders are equal, and that goes for folks who identify as non-binary and transgender as well. Embracing queer ecology is one step in working towards this goal.
The natural world is a place where attitudes of sexism and racism are perpetuated through human projection. The same can be said for attitudes of heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia. We’re obsessed with preserving some man-made constructed ideal of purity, that we so often miss what’s right in front of us. Nature is so obviously queer, and this queerness is not some deviation from the norm, cause for concern, or threat to the rest of the environment. Wherever you look in nature, there will be opportunity to perceive sex, love, creation, identity, and expression that can be understood outside of the boundaries of a traditional and monogamous heterosexual relationship. “In the course of a day an avocado’s flowers can shift gender expressions. One moment they’ll open up in a femme form (fruit producing). After closing, they will reopen later that same day in a masc form (pollen producing)” (Interlocking Roots 3). To fully see and appreciate the beauty in this natural queerness calls for a look at how we view queerness in our own species — gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, transgender, nonbinary, agender, intersex, pansexual, and all the other identities that fall under LGBTQ+. Similar to ecofeminist and environmental justice movements, celebrating queer ecology is helpful in discussing our relationship with power and identities as they relate to the natural world as well as combating some of our unhelpful anthropocentric tendencies.
As Thich Nhat Hanh states in The Sun My Heart, “all phenomena are interdependent” and “unity cannot exist without diversity” (255). Hanh speaks on the dissolving of boundaries necessary to appreciate the oneness of all beings and realms: both human and nonhuman. This is in line with what ecofeminism, environmental justice, and queer ecology like to get at. Queer
ecology critiques the impulse to assign dualistic categories such as “natural” and “unnatural” when discussing animal’s sexual behavior. Assigning queer behavior as unnatural only perpetuates the harmful association with the very word “queer” which does not need to mean peculiar or odd in a negative way. It is just one of the many ways of embodied diversity and nature can help us accept this. Humans are the ones who assume heterosexuality is the standard and many people already disagree with this. It seems ridiculous to assume the same thing for animals that we can’t even effectively communicate with. Around 500 species of animals display homosexual behavior. This queerness is valid: "queer not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live” (bell hooks). ] The divine feminine and divine masculine are merely energies, not binary identities as we may think. It is not so black and white, and nature has always known this. We are just catching up. In “Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy,” Joanna Macy comments on the fragmented world we have created for ourselves in neglecting to see ourselves as part of a beautiful, larger whole (92). This factor coupled with patriarchal and heterosexist tones, values, and ideals has encouraged an overly anthropocentric and destructive worldview. Being concerned with one’s own species is an evolutionary survival and protection mechanism, and one to be grateful for as it helps keep us alive and focused on caring for our species’ wellbeing. Even under the umbrella of anthropocentrism, certain human lives are prioritized before others. Humans have exceeded the limits of helpful anthropocentrism in our obvious disregard for non-human life and ecosystems not just because it is inherently worthy, but because the natural world is queer and mysterious. Continuing the compulsive destruction is a part of queer erasure/enforced heteronormative worldview and ongoing neglect to mention how sexuality is intertwined with power relations. Not to mention the very word “queer” has been used to mean “peculiar” and “odd” AKA “not normal.” Some people in the LGBTQ+ community choose not to use this word because of the history associated with it being used as a slur. I am choosing to use the word queer in this paper because it is how I personally identify, and I think the more this word “queer” is reclaimed, the more we look towards a progression in honoring gay and transgender people, but it is obviously up to each individual how they choose to relate to this word.
The over concern regarding reproductive rate in other animals is symbolic of our anthropocentric society. Everything is about continuing the species and remaining desirable, marriageable, and employable. Being straight and cisgender allows for this — there are many, many perks. Just because our human world subscribes to the ideological framework that posits cisgender, straight people get certain benefits and gay and trans people may experience more hardship, does not mean the more-than-human world is set up this way too. That’s just how many of us are taught to view it. In the chapter “Queering Endocrine Disruption,” author Anne Pollock discusses a celebration of the queerness that exists in animals faced with endocrine disruption resulting from toxic chemical pollution. Endocrine disruption is already thought of as queer because of same-sex pairing, low fertility rate, and intersex characteristics seen in wildlife. Animals with symptoms of endocrine disruption are labelled “sexually atypical” and reason to cause “sex panic” in the environment. What if it’s not that serious? Negative reactions to so-called “sexually atypical” behavior are symptomatic of our heteronormative culture. Pollock performs a speculative exercise which asks, what do we have to lose in expressing joy for queer animals? There is no celebration of pollution or substances required. Pollock cites a pair of gay male ibises taking a stroll down the beach after exposure to mercury poisoning: “yeah, maybe these birds are “fucked up” by their polluted environment. But I do not think that I am saying too much about my own experiences of intoxication, or assuming too much about that of the reader, to point out that it can be fun to be fucked up” (185). Animals may exhibit a certain queerness because of some of our actions, but their resulting sexual behavior is not a big faux pas or enormous harm to the environment. Our minds immediately go there because of a heteronormative framework that posits that reproducibility is the number one goal of all species and the main reason to exist in/start a family. Even if animals’ queerness comes from some outside source (like chemical pollution) that does not make their queerness any less valid and their families may be set up differently than ours. We can actually be happy for these queer animals that they are experiencing pleasure rather than pain. Queer birds are better than dead birds. This speculative exercise can be performed on any other species experiencing queer tendencies, with or without a presence of outside factors that may encourage them to pursue such behavior. We can even perform this exercise on ourselves and see all the little ways heterosexuality dominates and silences natural, queer expression.
Catriona Sandilands discusses the structure of the park as one example of our heterosexist preferences in nature. Most parks are set up in a way to enable traditional, heterosexual courtship. Other parts of parks are criminalized for behaviors such as sex work and drug use — obviously behaviors that can be pursued by anyone regardless of gender and sexual orientation, but people in the LGBTQ+ community often face harsher consequences.“Parks were born from a gendered and racialized view of nature, and were also used to impose gendered and racialized relations on nature. In turn, parks supported and extended racialized and class ideals of masculinity, and literally erased aboriginal peoples from the landscape, with fairly disastrous results for all concerned, including nature” (Sandilands 6). The disastrous results occur because there is an institutionalization of sexuality that we’re told is completely normal. This is a form of brainwashing. There was a time that people even believed that homosexuality was caused by environmental factors such as pollution, bad food, and the fast paced activity of urban living (Sandilands 13). In response, “the creation of remote recreational wild spaces and the demarcation of “healthy” green spaces inside cities, was understood partly as a therapeutic antidote to the social ravages of effeminate homosexuality” (Sandilands 13). During this time, since homosexuality was becoming increasingly associated with urban spaces, it was thought that homoerotic acts would not occur in the “pure and untainted” rural wilderness. This, of course, has never been true. As Sandilands discusses, it was not the cities itself influencing homosexuality, it was the density of population and ease of communication which made it easier for same-sex couplings and gay communities to form. Similarly, queer expression can exist in rural spaces. However, environmental critiques still inspired claims about the artificiality of queerness and relation to city spaces (14). Even camping grounds have been organized to institutionalize heterosexuality: “Particularly after the 1950s, many camping facilities were intentionally designed to resemble suburban cul-de-sacs, each campsite clearly designed for one nuclear family, and all camping occurring in designated “private” spaces away from “public” recreational activities such as swimming, hiking, and climbing” (Sandilands 15). This separation between public and private life is seen as quite normal, but it is a product of viewing certain behaviors as more “natural” than others. If we have been viewing ourselves in these ways, setting up our surrounding environments and parks to subscribe to heterosexist values, it follows that we are viewing the rest of the natural world through straight and cisgender-influenced eyes.
A queer perspective is helpful in discussing issues of ecology because it helps resist descructive heterosexism by addressing the power dynamics present in expressions of gender and sexuality that ecofeminist movements started years ago. The addition of queerness in ecology shows that we still have some major work to do regarding equal rights for people in the LGBTQ+ community. Some laws to help these communities are being passed, but that does not combat the very real ways in which our society is set up to guide people to a life controlled by heterosexuality, whether they’re happy with it or not. At the same time, we’re projecting this behavior on the natural world – inferring what animal’s sexual behavior means (which just seems like none of our business), preserving wilderness for those who uphold traditional middle-class American standards, and assuming areas where queerness more visibly exists are inherently deviant. The resistance to discuss love and sex is fundamentally rooted in dominance and patriarchy. Queerness is inherently misunderstood as we can see in the varied definitions of the word “queer.” Being inclusive of all different notions of love, sexuality, and care may assist us in getting back to a more helpful anthropocentric view that appreciates more-than-human worlds for their intricacy, diversity, personality, and passions instead of destroying or sculpting them to suit society’s desire for compulsive heterosexuality. I think the meaning of life is to be strange and beautiful, like a tree. So much of nature is discarded because it doesn’t look a certain way. When will we get over ourselves? Us humans, so smart. We still have much to learn from the queer, chemically polluted ibises strolling down the beach. Queer ecology helps us reimagine a more inclusive, liberating, and free natural world not only for ourselves, but for the rest of the beings and ecosystems on this planet. Whether or not you are queer, embracing natural queerness benefits all in the same way embracing feminism benefits all because it enables a deeper level of existing comprised of love, connection, creativity, and natural biological expression. To practice queer ecology is to unlearn the harmful patterns of heterosexuality that disrupt our relations with nature and the groups we belong to. It is a meditation on radical acceptance.
Sources
“bell hooks - Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body.” YouTube, uploaded by The New School. 7 May 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJk0hNROvzs
Hanh, Thich Nhat. “The Sun My Heart.” Environmental Ethics: divergence & convergence 3rd edition, edited by Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G Botzler, Mcgraw Hill, 1993, pp. 255- 258.
Interlocking Roots. “Perfect Flowers: A Queer Botany Zine.” 2022.
https://interlockingroots.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/interlocking-roots-perfect-flowers-zine-online-version.pdf.
Macy, Joanna, and Chris Johnstone. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in Without Going Crazy. Novato, Calif: New World Library, 2012. Print.
Mies, Maria and Shiva, Vandana. “Introduction to Ecofeminism.” Environmental Ethics: divergence & convergence 3rd edition, edited by Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G Botzler, Mcgraw Hill, 1993, pp. 429-436.
Pollock, Anne. “Queering Endocrine Disruption.” Object-Oriented Feminism, edited by Katherine Behar, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 183-195.
Sandilands, Catriona. “Unnatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology.” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture. Issue 9: Nature Loving. Edited by Lisa Uddin and Peter Hobbs. 2005. http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/issue9_sandilands.pdf.