Queer Nature
At first glance, queer nature can sound like an oxymoron: gay penguins, certainly, are everywhere,[1] but queerness, at least as it came into its modern iteration through the late 20th century LGBTQ+ rights movement and the development of queer theory from the 1970s to the 90s, has emphasized its non-naturalized relationship to gender, sexuality and other identitarian categories. That is, if queer as a term has evolved radically from its status as slur for male homosexuality in the late nineteenth century to its broad current iteration encompassing non-normative relations to gender, sexuality and beyond, nature, in relation to queer life, has often been framed as a stable, unchanging entity – and one with the potential to violently repress. Given that contemporary queer culture and theory emerged out of and in response to the accusation of its unnaturalness, a vexed relation to Nature with a capital N is unsurprising. But as the environmental humanities have done much to interrogate and complicate definitions of nature – see for instance Jason Moore’s entry on “nature” in this glossary – so too has queer critical thought evolved in its relations to and understandings of nature. What these new understandings reveal is a complexity that has always existed in queerness, in nature, and queerness as an underlying force in nature. As Timothy Morton writes, “It’s not that ecological thinking would benefit from an injection of queer theory from the outside. It’s that, fully and properly, ecology is queer theory and queer theory is ecology” (2010, 281).
Traditionally, many of the thinkers central to queer theory have in their way been hedgy, or explicitly oppositional, to modes of life and thinking constructed as “natural.” This resistance is perhaps best exemplified by Lee Edelman’s anti-social stance in his polemic No Future, which argues for queers to abandon the prioritization of the future over the present as imagined in the pervasive figure of the child and the “reproductive futurity” of family life, embracing instead the symbolic of the death drive and a cultural association with negativity and irony (2004). In a more implicit but equally significant sense, the social constructivist tendencies of much foundational queer theoretical thought have also pushed against the idea of nature. This tendency goes back to thinkers like Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick, whose historicization of sexual categories resisted the idea of sexuality as stable, innate, or “natural” (Foucault 1979; Sedgwick 1990). At the same time, Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performative positions both gender and biological sex as socially constructed, rather than natural categories (1990; 1993). And given the impossibility of extracting loaded terms such as “nature” from their social construction, the natural has “become something of a dirty word in queer theory…though one that it seems unable to do without” (Seymour 2013, 2). Or at Sam See writes, it may have been late nineteenth-century discourses in eugenics and sexology that associated “nature with normativity” (2020, 16), but scholars have sometimes leapt from Foucault’s critique of these fields to a suspicion of nature more broadly, as “sexuality studies has so ritually de-natured the sexual body that it has naturalized nature as the totemic enemy of liberal philosophical inquiry” (2020, 17).
More recently, there has been an explicit push in queer theory to separate “nature” from the often oppressive ends to which historical cultural constructions of the term have been taken, a push that owes much to environmental thought. Nicole Seymour, in Strange Natures, one of the first book-length ventures into the burgeoning field of queer ecology, laments “the undertheorization and underhistoricization of ‘nature,’ in comparison to the theorization and historization of ‘sex’” (2013, 3-4) in queer theory, and notes that “at times, ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ function in queer theory as synonyms for heteronormativity or political conservativism” (2013, 4) instead of complex terms that have been used to those instrumentalist ends. In an era of mass extinction and ecosystem collapse, where climate inaction is largely driven by capitalist interests, the queer recovery of a state “against nature” looks a lot less radical than it used to. Instead of staking itself on reclaiming right-wing fantasies of queer life as anti-social or anti-relational, Seymour suggests, queer theory might fruitfully claim a position that embraces a vision of anti-normative futurity: “if queerness is anti-social, might radical environmentalists’ targeting of society as we know it – say, through tree-sitting, tree-spiking, or destroying fast-food restaurants – not be the anti-social move de resistance?” (2013, 6). Socially disruptive environmental activism is arguably the most radically anti-normative stance anyone can take in an era where the political and economic powers-that-be are the main representatives of anti-futurity, aligned with the eternal growth and eternal present of capitalism.
Another approach in queer ecological thought is to reclaim nature and the history of natural science in all its complexity and queerness. Darwin, who has often been read reductively as disseminating a heteronormative image of nature and evolution, focused on sexual selection and reproduction, is an important node in these reconsiderations. In The Companion Species Manifesto, for instance, science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway takes her position as “a dutiful daughter of Darwin” (2003, 16) as a starting point to tell “a story of cohabitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality” (2003, 4) between humans and dogs. For Haraway, coevolution is one of Darwin’s radical claims, evidence that different species can influence one another genetically over generations, evidence also in this sense that queer family and the non-sexually reproductive bonds of “making kin” and “multispecies kinship” (2016, 3) leave biological markers. In a similar vein, Timothy Morton also focuses on Darwin’s radicalism and argues that “queer theory has a strange friend in nonessentialist biology,” (2010, 275) which shows that “queerness in its variegated forms, is installed in biological substance as such and is not simply a blip in cultural history” (2010, 273-74). Building on this idea in Queer Natures, Sam See begins to sketch out the image of Darwin as a “queer theorist of the material world who conceptualizes nature as a non-normative, infinitely heterogeneous composite of mutating laws and principles” (2020, 14), a thinker whose presentation of aesthetics and sexual selection is implicitly queer, in the sense that “[i]f aesthetic feeling is mutable, and if sexual feeling is aesthetic, then sexual feeling itself must be mutable – unable to be codified within heteronormative binaries” (2020, 17). In this sense, though Darwin frames his findings within heteronormative and often also misogynistic statements, the actual implications of his arguments go beyond the structures and assumptions of his time, and often beyond our own. As Morton writes, “Modern thinking is willfully ignorant of Darwin” (2012, 18); in spite of continuing controversies around teaching evolution in relation to religious belief, the broader threats to individual or species identity that Darwinian interdependence introduces have not truly shaken our social structures.
Scholars also remind us that ecological thought has always been a significant aspect of LGBTQ+ movements and communities, and the sidelining of this interest in popular cultural representations says more about the capitalist interests in framing queers as consumers and easily consumable than the histories of the movements themselves. Popular representations of queer culture as defined by artifice, camp, and the demonstrative embrace of the unnatural and the indirect is, as Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson write in the introduction to their volume Queer Ecologies, “a very narrow band of gayness,” though a culturally prominent one (2010, 21); these authors recap a history in which the original 1978 San Francisco pride rainbow, green was meant to signify a connection to nature, and back-to-the-land movements have an important place in historical queer communities. The modern environmentalist movement and the movements for LGBTQ+ rights grew alongside one another, and were, as the movements for women’s, civil, and disability rights, deeply imbricated from the beginning.
At the same time, environmental thought has much to learn from an attention to gender and sexuality. As the critical term “petro-masculinity” implies, climate denialism and misogyny are often linked in the authoritarian movements that dominate our current political climate (Daggett 2018). And gendered attitudes permeate not just broad political holdings and extractive tendencies, but the micro-gestures of daily lives. For instance, studies have long shown that the cultural associations between meat and masculinity are among the reasons that fewer men than women show intentions of cutting back on meat consumption, one of the necessary reforms to reach current climate targets (Velzeboer et al. 2024). Widely reported in news media, this research makes for splashy headlines that bring attention to the role of gender in environmental issues, but it also reinforces a strictly binary way of thinking of both gender and environmental concerns, offering an opening for queer thought to nuance the questions that we can ask and the solutions that we can imagine. A recent study, for instance, focused less on the differences in behaviour between biological sex than on self-reported femininity or masculinity, finding that people who self-rated as more “gender-typical” were more likely to have positive associations with meat consumption. These somewhat more nuanced questions begin to get at the complex connection between identity and modes of consumption, and suggest, for instance, that the promotion of meat alternatives needs to go beyond an effort to “masculinise” vegan and vegetarian options (Adamczyk et al. 2023).
Such nuance is particularly salient given that mainstream environmental criticism and activism have both been traditionally positioned as heteronormative (and white, and male, and middle-class). Classic works of eco-criticism make at best passing reference to sexuality studies, and until recently, the cross-appearance of terms like “ecology” in prominent gender and sexuality journals, and terms such as “queer” in environmental journals was almost non-existent (Seymour 2013, 13). Environmental activism has often relied on the image of the human child as the uncritical symbol for futurity, and on environmental devastation’s threat to white, middle-class communities and ways of life (Seymour 2013, xvii-xviii). That the purported aim of ‘protecting the children’ has often been and continues to be a rallying cry for right-wing activists seeking to curtail LGBTQ+ rights points toward some of the ways that queer and ecological thinking can challenge one another.
Gender and sexuality are likewise built into the histories of environmental action. In the US, for instance, the parks and conservation movement was orchestrated by and for white cis men (often with explicit connection to the early twentieth-century eugenics movement), with the understanding of national parks as sites of masculine recreation and hunting (Mortimer-Sandilands 2005; Schmitt and Cohen 2024). An early target for editorial outrage and conservation legislation was the shooting of migratory birds for the millinery industry, to support the nineteenth and early twentieth century fashion for exotic feathers and even stuffed birds on women’s hats (Serratore 2018). The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 eventually put an end to this fashion, and while this legislation was laudatory, significant, and spearheaded in part by women’s groups, it also highlights the ways that environmental movement has often targeted the visible, the ornamental, and the feminized, especially in relation to the other species – the wild bison, for instance – that the era failed to protect. Gravitations toward the visible and the ornamental live on, evidenced for instance by the recent media storm around the environmental impact of glitter, that sparkly substance closely associated with both feminine and queer culture. Media critique led to the creation of biodegradable brands and a laudable EU-wide ban in 2023, but also to a disproportionate amount of attention given to glitter’s representation of under 1 per cent of the world’s microplastics (Seymour 2022).
It might be precisely in ornamentality, in fun, in attention to feeling, that the environmental humanities have something to learn from queer theory and culture. That the two primary sources of microplastic pollution are not glitter, but car tires and synthetic textiles, suggests that we are drowning not in an excess of frivolity and carelessness, but in the doldrums of our everyday commutes and our sensible fleece sweaters (Seymour 2022, 8). That our responsibilities toward the next generation, and the image of the innocent child, have played such a central role in traditional environmental activism suggests that we need not more focus on stewardship, but more discussion of our present ties to natural environments of which we are a part, a way out of the finger-wagging shame and futurity with which environmentalism is often associated. One way into an affect of hope and intimacy might be through a queer utopianism such as that José Esteban Muñoz embraced in Cruising Utopia (2009), his critical call for a revivification of queer imagination beyond the pragmatic aims of presentist politics, and a love-letter to the experimental arts of the early queer liberation movement. Another might be the “bad environmentalism” that Nicole Seymour embraces in her book of the same name, a tongue-in-cheek approach to the statistical fact that the more we know about the severity of the environmental crisis – or crisis in general – the less likely we are to act. Instead of pessimism or sentimentality, Seymour surveys art and activism that embraces irreverence and humour, suggesting that glitter and its associates might be exactly what we need more of (Seymour 2018). Or we might look to Lauren Berlant’s embrace of ambivalent micro-emotions as the “inconvenience” of encounters with the world, a kind of downplayed alternative to the intimacy of entanglement that examines the desire and resistance to “fac[ing] how profoundly nonsovereign we are” (Berlant 2022, 9). These ideas suggest what queer theory does best and can offer to environmental thought: a critique of the norms of cultural systems, a resistance to simplification and binaries, and a drive to envision futurity and relation beyond reproductive generations.
References
Adamczyk, Dominika, Klaudia Modlińska, Dominika Maison, and Wojciech Pisula. 2023. “Gender, Masculinity, and the Perception of Vegetarians and Vegans: A Mixed-Methods Investigation.” Sex Roles 89: 595-609. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-023-01420-7
Berlant, Lauren. 2022. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Duke University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge.
Daggett, Cara. 2018. “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire.” Millennium Journal of International Studies 47 (1). http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0305829818775817
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press.
Gómez, José M., A. Gónzalez-Megías, and M. Verdú. 2023. “The Evolution of Same-Sex Sexual Behaviour in Mammals.” Nature Communications 14 (5719). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-41290-x
Foucault, Michel. 1979. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Allen Lane.
Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona. 2005. “Unnatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology.” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 9. https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/title9.html
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson. 2010. “Introduction: A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. Indiana University Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2010. “Queer Ecology.” PMLA 125 (2): 273-282.
Morton, Timothy. 2012. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Duke University Press.
Schmitt, Catherine, and Laura Cohen. 2024. “Untangling Roots: Reflections on Eugenics, Conservation, and US National Parks.” Parks Stewardship Forum 40(2). http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/P540263642. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sx1v9dv
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press.
See, Sam. 2020. Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies. Edited by Christopher Looby and Michael North. Fordham University Press.
Serratone, Angela. 2018. “Keeping Feathers Off Hats–and On Birds.” Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/migratory-bird-act-anniversary-keeping-feathers-off-hats-180969077/
Seymour, Nicole. 2013. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. University of Illinois Press.
Seymour, Nicole. 2018. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. University of Minnesota Press.
Seymour, Nicole. 2022. Glitter. Bloomsbury Academic.
Sturgeon, Noel. 2010. “Penguin Family Values: The Nature of Planetary Environmental Justice.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. Indiana University Press.
Velzeboer, Rob, Eric Li, Nina Gao, Paul Sharp, and John L. Oliffe. 2024. “Masculinity, Meat, and Veg*nism: A Scoping Review.” American Journal of Men’s Health 18 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/15579883241247173
Note
[1] See, for instance, Sturgeon (2010, 102-134). And a lot of other animals, of course: same-sex sexual behaviour has been reported in 1500 animal species, and has been observed in 80% of the 22 mammal species that have been the subject of long-term field studies. See for instance Gómez et al. (2023).