What is Queer Ecology?
I’m deep in the process of revising and weaving together my upcoming memoir The Body is a Doorway: Healing Beyond Hope, Healing Beyond the Human. I’m sharing an older essay that I’m expanding into a longer chapter below.
The past month has been a whirlwind of audiobook recording, book-writing, and a life-threatening allergic reaction to a yellow-jacket sting. I’ll be mostly offline and on vacation starting tomorrow until July 1st but after I return I plan on hosting my next online Storytelling Gathering for paid subscribers on Encounters with Animals. If you have a day or time of day that works better for you feel free to shout out in the comments as I decide when to schedule it.
Queer Ecology seeks to disrupt heteronormative projections onto nature. Queerness, it turns out, isn’t a rarity inside ecosystems. It is ubiquitous from flowers to insects to fungi. Queer Ecology seeks to trouble how cultural dualisms get grafted onto entangled, complex ecosystems. It “interrupts” the tired monologue of hegemonic heterosexuality and the sterile fiction that we are, in fact, differentiated from the natural world. It encourages thinking erotically outside of extractive eroticisms. It melts power dynamics and pulls the rug of linearity from underneath the “narrative” of sex. What does nature have to teach us about queerness? If we are fruitings of our ecosystems, densities of mineral and meaning erupting from the forest floor, how is our individual queerness an echo of larger tentacular sexualities?