In the novella “Water,” included in their brilliant collection Heat and Light, Yugambeh author Ellen Van Neerven tells a story about a young Aboriginal woman, Kaden, who is sent to Russell Island, off the coast of Australia near Brisbane, to help convince the plant people who live there and on adjacent islands to leave. The story, told from Kaden’s point of view, is set in a not very distant future (2028) in which the Australian government has decided to make reparations to Aboriginal people by creating Australia2. Starting with this island and others nearby, the government’s plan is to uproot the plant people and move them elsewhere so that building can begin to create a stretch of new land in which colonially displaced Aboriginal people from all over Australia can have new, sovereign territory. Kaden is a “cultural liaison officer,” and although she thinks her task is to help persuade the plant people to leave, she discovers, over the course of the story, that her real job is to deliver to them a nutritional formula that will, with the gradual addition of chlorine, not only make them more docile but also, eventually, kill them. It is, clearly, a perverse act of colonial violence designed to appear to address past colonial violences.
“Water” is a wonderful story, and I can’t recommend it enough to anyone who is interested in the politics of land, colonialism, indigeneity, identity, and resistance. However, not surprisingly for someone who writes frequently about vegetal-human relationships, I love the plant people best. These so-called sandplants, as the reader discovers, are not random vegetal presences on these islands: they are jangigir, “old people, spirits,”1 who came to their present form as plant people because of the colonial digging and dredging to create the new lands, and who are allied with their kin, the Aboriginal people who belong to these islands, to resist the whole project. As Kaden’s uncle explains just before the story’s climax, “something happened when the dugai brought the sea up. They rose with it. . . . Their knowledge goes back, big time. . . . They’ve helped us piece back our language. And they’re going to help us stop this.”2 They are, in other words, the articulate, physical embodiment of a resurgent Aboriginal land relationship. They are ancient beings whose reemergence as the land and for the restoration of millennia-old, place-based human kinships challenges and disrupts an ongoing coloniality that conveniently and instrumentally pretends that the creation of a new, blank “sovereign” space is somehow equivalent to restoring ancestral territory to its people.
Over the five-week course of her appointed task to remove them, Kaden becomes deeply attracted to one of the plant people, Larapinta. Although Kaden’s eventual decision to commit to her family’s revolt against Australia2 is complex (you should read the story), there is no question that her deepening relationship with Larapinta is part of her motivation. And here is where we get to the part that is especially relevant to this foreword: Larapinta seduces Kaden. Throughout the story, Larapinta—who is “shaped like a post, covered in prickles except for the hands,” and has “wild, frond-like hair across her face, bleached pale pink in parts”3—insinuates herself into Kaden’s work. Larapinta helps Kaden recover from a bluebottle jellyfish sting, offers to accompany Kaden on her formula deliveries, shows her how to tie the knots that are essential to their boat travel from island to island, and mediates her relationships with the other plant people. At the same time, Larapinta insinuates herself into Kaden’s sex life. She engages her in conversation about gender and sexual identity based on her studies of the encyclopedias and other reference books that are available to her (Kaden describes herself as queer and, not coincidentally, Larapinta’s gender is “not predetermined and only communicated”4 in a very planty way). She also touches Kaden casually and then, more and more insistently, flirts with her. She creates a romantic date with her, embraces her, flowers for her, and, on the night before the collective action to stop Australia2, “puts her mouth in the flat between [Kaden’s] breasts. Rubs her cheek against [her] nipple.”5 “The kiss,” thinks Kaden, “is like a crash. . . . I feel like all I can hear in my head is a speedboat travelling through water.”6
Larapinta and Kaden’s relationship is, however, neither only—or perhaps ever—about romance nor about sex as a medium of utopian interspecies or polygender desire that can somehow transcend the colonial, extractive relations of its emergence. Before Larapinta kisses her on that last night, Kaden asks, “Why don’t you run away with me?”7 The question, Kaden knows even as she asks it, is “damn near foolish”:8 any attraction between them is overdetermined by the political conditions that brought them together. Indeed, we never really know what Larapinta’s motivations are, including whether or not her careful seduction is purely instrumental (I hope not). Further, as they move onto the bed, the last thing Larapinta says to Kaden is “I’m not human. . . . You never used to let me forget it.”9 Even the erotic pleasure of their sex together—at least, we know it is pleasure from Kaden’s perspective—does not happen without strong biopolitical undercurrents involving relations of species, gender, normativity, and layered violences of both the epistemic and the physical kind.
“Water” thus shares with the essays in this special issue of Environmental Humanities several preoccupations about the relationship between sex and nature. First and most obviously, these works demonstrate that sex is enmeshed in multispecies and material relations and, further, that it always has been whether or not people have thought about it as such. As Joela Jacobs points out, for example, when a person smells a sweet flower, they are captured, often unconsciously, in the olfactory sexual chemistries of pollinator attraction. Perhaps not surprisingly, flowers also appear prominently in the symbolic representation of human love and desire as figures of, among other things, female sexualities, normative and nonnormative sexual expression, and excessive sexual appetites. As Marianna Szczygielska documents, zoo endangered species breeding programs fold animal sex and desire into repro-normative institutional temporalities. The resulting heterosexualized narrative of animal desires and futurities, despite the fact that the animals are often not willing participants in many elements of breeding practice, is part of a zoocurriculum that naturalizes heteronormative conceptions of family, sociality, and wellbeing. And as Hannah Boast argues, so-called gay frogs—more accurately, genetic males of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) who, because of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, display sexually ambiguous genitalia and behavior—have been mobilized by the US alt-right to articulate and amplify a constellation of politically charged anxieties around toxicity and threats to white cis masculinity. Where liberal satire generally only repeats this articulation, the intervention of a critical, queer tradition of antinatural play may provide a more interesting avenue for a socially and sexually progressive environmental politics.
In these works, there is an obvious dual motion at play. On the one hand, animal and plant (and other) sexes, genders, and sexualities are inevitably read, interpreted, and put into discursive motion in the context of historically, socially, culturally, and politically specific relations. On the other hand, although the epistemic weight appears to rest much more heavily in particular human hands, these same nonhuman bodies and relations generate material effects and affects on/in developing understandings of human bodies and behaviors in diverse literary, scientific, and political realms. This larger story is both more complex and more interesting, especially if we focus closely on nonhuman bodies and agencies. For Jacobs’s plants, even as changing knowledges of vegetal sex and sexuality are embedded and participate in the unfolding of specific discourses, including queer ones, it remains the case that the plants have their own desires that, like Larapinta’s, may be enigmatic but nonetheless strongly influence human behaviors. For Szczygielska’s Yangtze softshell turtles, despite their forcible surgical and cryogenic incorporation into captive breeding programs, the 2019 death of the last known (at that point) female of the species represents a kind of refusal to participate in repro-normative, anthropocenic futurities, in Jack Halberstam’s terms, a very queer sort of failure.10 And for Boast’s African clawed frogs, precisely their uncharismatic, toxic amphibian embodiments herald their promises as monsters, to borrow from Donna Haraway,11 including their slippery and potentially queer escape from the grasp of both heteronormative and homonormative forms of environmental iconicity.
A second and intersecting preoccupation of the essays in this special issue is that sex is (almost) never just about sex: colonial, national, racial, class, and other relations are also extensively tied up in sex/nature knots, and not all these knots are liberatory. Ina Linge’s investigation of German sexology and modern dance shows how ideas of nature informed both scientific and aesthetic movements in the early twentieth century, and also notes how these ideas were steeped in colonial, orientalist, and other racialized understandings. Where Hirschfield’s research and Fuller’s performances are clearly part of a rich genealogy of queer ecologies—including, crucially, antipastoral ones—it is important to consider how queerness has been, and sometimes continues to be, articulated with decidedly racist and elitist political currents. Ian Fleishman makes this point even more directly in his analysis of Rolf Hammerschmidt’s eco-pornotopian film Boytropolis (1993–96), which is linked aesthetically and narratively to a colonialist, nation-building, and even protofascist Weimar film history. As a heterotopian—or, rather, homotopian—work, Boytropolis both plays in this articulation of white-colonial nature fantasy and, campily and allegorically, perhaps also plays against it in some interesting, self-critical ways.
While sex, gender, and sexuality are situated in and shaped by historically specific relations of race, class, age, marital status, colony, nation, and species, it is also the case, as with Kaden’s complex erotic entanglement with Larapinta, that sex refracts, organizes, and gives energy to these relations in powerful ways: another dual motion. As Linge describes, where early twentieth-century sexological and aesthetic movements in Germany responded to and employed ideas of nature that were steeped in relations of class and race (including antisemitism) as well as ideologies of health and morality, they were also strongly influenced by a rich Berlin tradition of queer urban performance culture, including drag, dressing up, and other forms of dance and theater. And as Fleishman underlines, the fact that Boytropolis is a work of pornographic fantasy means that it is both entangled in larger imperialist aspirations for racial and environmental homogeneity and aesthetically organized to eroticize them. As a result, the film does not just represent but also literally stimulates forms of eco-homotopian desire, forms that are also linked to contemporary sex tourism.
A third preoccupation that runs through the essays, cutting across the other two, is that sex embodies and enacts pleasure through nature, and nature through pleasure. Some of these pleasures are nonhuman (flowers, endangered turtles); some of these pleasures are politically overdetermined (sexually ambiguous African clawed frogs); some of these pleasures are performative (serpentine and butterfly dances, pornographically homotopian boys); and many of these pleasures, like Larapinta’s seduction of Kaden, include a combination of all these elements. Astrida Neimanis’s fraught love relationship with Windermere Basin near Hamilton, Ontario, however, makes especially clear, and especially fleshy, the environmental stakes of these complex nature-pleasure relationships. Starting from the direct, material intersection between sex and waste embodied in a used condom in the Basin parking lot, Neimanis considers the many layers of desire—and its organization and suppression—that have converged on this ruined (now dubiously “healed”) landscape. These layers include myriad interspecies erotics that may or may not involve people but that swirl and bubble with chemical intimacies such as those enabled by expelled hormonal contraceptives; violent repressions of Indigenous love and kinship relations, and of Indigenous women’s bodies in particular, that undergird the colonial and industrial development of Hamilton Harbour; generations of consumer infatuation with petrochemical plastics that bind intimate experiences like menstruation with capitalist extractive logics; and complex water relations that link ancient geological, hydrological, and biological intensities with more recent temporalities of power, pleasure, pollution, and destruction. For Neimanis, ecosex in the Anthropocene may be hot, but it is also largely bad, and it is precisely this combination of desire and ruin that makes the relationship between sex and nature especially important to think with at this political and ecological moment.
In these shared preoccupations (there are more, of course), the essays in this collection both engage and challenge past scholarship on sex and nature. It has been, for example, twelve years since the publication of my coedited collection Queer Ecologies (2010, with Bruce Erickson) and nine since Nicole Seymour’s book Strange Natures (2013). The field has evolved considerably since then, influenced especially (if unfortunately not enough, yet) by trans, Black, Indigenous, crip, posthumanist, materialist, multispecies, and international perspectives that have questioned and denaturalized white, Eurocentric histories of sexual and ecological discourse; that have demanded understandings of sex and nature that take into account and challenge ongoing conditions of racism and colonialism; that have extended queerness and trans identities and practices into a larger range of relations; that have insisted on greater attention to nonnormative and nonbinary corporeal perspectives; that have revisited, rethought, and redirected older arguments about sex and nature in pastoral, camp, drag, lesbian feminist, and other 2SLGBTQ+ histories; that have conceived of sex from more foundationally inhuman starting points; and that have risen to the challenge of addressing rapidly changing environmental conditions such as climate change. This special issue is a very welcome addition to this changing scholarly tradition, and I look forward to engaging with these rich and thoughtful essays in my own work in the future.
As Juno Salazar Parreñas and Nicole Seymour underline in their afterword, “Ecological Inqueeries,” however, it is now more important than ever to focus on expanding the archives that shelter, subtend, and stimulate queer, trans, and other modes of critical sex/nature thinking and practice. Outside Eurowestern sexual schemas, for example, numerous societies, cultures, and peoples have recognized the existence multiple genders and third, fourth, and fifth (or more) sexes for centuries or millennia. At the same time, plants, animals, and other nonhuman beings embody and perform such a range of sexes, sexualities, and genders that it is impossible to assign reproductive heterosexuality anything remotely resembling pride of place. Given that so much weight in Eurowestern sexual and ecological thought has been accorded to repro-normative binaries—shoring them up, and now disrupting them—listening deeply to the forms of ecological wisdom that emerge from these rich pluriverses challenges queer and trans ecologies to consider starting from different places altogether to find inspiration, energy, and direction.
As Larapinta tells Kaden on the night before the organized resistance, “she doesn’t know how they, as jangigir, came to be in the form they are in, but they know their purpose.”12 Attending to this purpose is a good step for us all.
