All of the essays in this stimulating special issue on sex and nature contribute in some way to the broad and now fairly well-established interdisciplinary subfield known as queer ecologies, or what Catriona Sandilands has called the “constellation of practices that aim . . . to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature, and also to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics” from nonnormative perspectives—in addition to fields ranging from film studies to history.1 These essays compel us to think metacritically about our own work within this subfield, and to ask three particular questions. These questions are radical in Gayle Rubin’s sense of getting down to the roots, and are at times as material and pressing as tulip bulbs bursting as new clones from their asexually reproductive parent.2 Our three questions are these: What is queer in queer ecologies? What is ecology in queer ecologies? And are queer ecologies white?
What Is Queer in Queer Ecologies?
What we find perhaps most exciting about these essays is how they gesture toward lines of inquiry such as asexual ecologies and intersex ecologies—diversifying and deepening queer ecologists’ tendency to focus on other-oriented sexual identities and practices, as opposed to nonsexualities or questions of embodiment. While it would be easy to mock such lines of inquiry as ever more niche sub-sub-subfields of queer ecologies, these essays demonstrate how questions of environment, ecology, and “nature” are bound up with every possible formulation of sex, sexuality, gender, and embodiment, human as well as nonhuman.
Joela Jacobs’s essay most obviously touches on asexual ecologies, showing that plants are both asexual and sexual in terms of reproduction—a point that reminds us of the variations in human sexuality as well as the limits of extrapolating from the nonhuman to the human. What we mean when we call plants asexual is not what we mean when we call humans asexual. Marianna Szczygielska’s essay takes up asexuality implicitly in its description of animals who fail to copulate and reproduce in captivity; it indicates that sex drive may not be as natural or universal as we otherwise assume it to be. Perhaps more obliquely, we appreciate Astrida Neimanis’s observation that for many people, sex is not always as ecstatic an experience as it seems to be for ecosexuals like Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. Such observations help denaturalize and deromanticize not just heterosexuality but also allosexuality, or sexual attraction to others—a major goal of the growing subfield of asexuality studies. This kind of work is crucial, given that recent studies have found that asexual people report the “lowest life satisfaction scores out of all the sexual orientation groups,” and also given that asexual people gendered as women face epistemic injustice.3
When it comes to intersex ecologies, we would highlight Hannah Kate Boast’s essay on how the alt-right has co-opted environmental concerns. She observes, intriguingly, that animals described as gay, such as the supposedly gay frog, exhibit sexual morphologies more accurately described as intersex. Here, intersex embodiment is simultaneously stigmatized—treated as unnatural—and invisibilized. Further, nonhuman intersex embodiment is implicitly held up as a horrifying harbinger of potential human fate—indicating how endosex normativity slips across the human/nonhuman divide. We might parallel Boast’s work to that of Hil Malatino, who in Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience recalls their medical pathologization in terms of colonial-environmental conquest: “I wasn’t a territory to be discovered and colonized. I wasn’t the mute terrain on which some doctor-explorer got to adventure alongside his brothers-in-arms. Or was I?”4 As Nicole Seymour has argued of Jeffrey Eugenides’s 2000 novel Middlesex, environments play a major role “in the unique articulation of intersex identity and embodiment”—and yet moments like those found in Boast’s and Malatino’s work are rather rare in scholarship.5 Indeed, these moments of asexual and intersex ecologies in this special issue are admittedly few and far between. But we see them as potentially inaugurating important future work in these lines of inquiry.
What Is Ecology in Queer Ecologies?
This captivating collection of articles has us consider the following ideas: Frogs exhibit intersex morphologies following exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Sylvan Czech landscapes foster throbbing vitality as envisioned through the exoticizing lens of Austrian gay male sex tourists in the immediate fall of the Iron Curtain. Ferns asexually reproduce. Modern dancer Loïe Fuller’s interpretation of butterfly metamorphosis offers fruitful comparison to sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s figuration of the “transvestite.” Blue-green algae spores manifest settler colonial understanding of water as refuse instead of refuge. Zoos continue to focus on reproduction as the solution to species extinction. Together, these ideas compel us to contemplate the matter of ecologies in queer ecologies: What is ecology in queer ecology? What is the relationship between queer ecologies and the natural sciences? Why are outmoded sciences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, like eugenics, sexology, and Orientalism, so generative for contemporary queer thought about environments, as we find in this issue? What twenty-first-century transgressions between disciplinary boundaries might generate queer forms of life?
In their concern with representation and cultural forms, the essays in this issue seem far afield from classic definitions of ecology. Such definitions focus on the organisms that make up a given system. For example, Ernst Haeckel’s definition of ecology was a “science of economy, of the habits, of the external relations of organisms to each other.”6 Haeckel’s word choice for relations in the original German has the prefix leben-, or “life”: Lebensbeziehungen. Today, the term connotes life relationships in a legal sense insofar as one dwells in the center of one’s life relations and fills out forms with local city governments identifying one’s home address as such. But Haeckel’s ecology is ultimately more about lively relations and less about law-bound systems. So, too, are the ecologies represented in this special issue. Interpreted in this way, Haeckel’s sense of ecology is not far from queer cries, moans, croaks, and flutters.
Haeckel helps remind us how ecology remains important for queer ecology. In this issue, Astrida Neimanis conveys the sensory apparatus of one’s own body as it enacts an art of “noticing the ghosts” of settler colonial muck.7 Ian Fleishman emphasizes a sense of ecology as an object of representation and fantasy. Marianna Szczygielska’s ecology involves reading and interpreting taxonomies as they follow a trajectory from studbooks to cloned species. Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, and Magnus Hirschfeld take turns haunting queer landscapes differently inhabited by Yangtze turtles and metamorphosizing caterpillars. Recognizing these differing modes of knowledge opens up the question of who is authorized to represent ecologies. If our own bodies are sensory apparatuses, to what extent do we recognize wild variation between what we notice and feel when in a given space?8 If what we know about frogs and other members of an ecosystem is solely channeled through hetero- and cis-normative scientists, is the main strategy for queer, asexual, intersex, and trans interpretations of nature to work against the grain and salvage queer vitalities against cis- and heteronormative authors’ wishes? What would queer ecologies be if it could be enacted as a set of scientific and technical practices for environments that foster any kind of queer, asexual, intersex, and trans form of life?
Ecology is particularly useful for thinking through plural forms of life that live, eat, digest, and die together. Coevolution and sympoesis teach us that we do not live in a dog-eat-dog world characterized by fatal competition.9 Variation, which is a key conceptual category in both feminist studies and life sciences, teaches us that unique forms of life come to emerge in the most surprising of circumstances.10 Ecology as a concept contains both the systemic and complex nature of relations that form life as we know it while also recognizing the myriad number of different kinds of particular subjects that comprise a greater system.
Queerly curious forms of life often stem from messy origins, as the articles in this issue show us. Orientalism, studied by Ian Fleishman as an exotic and sexually open East relative to a virile and sanitary Western Europe, and sexology, with its possibilities of sexual liberation, covered by Ina Linge, depend on ideas of primitive cultures. Consider, for example, how arguments in German sexology hinged on differences between Naturvolk, or natural people, and Kulturvolk, or cultured people.11 Even as Hirschfeld worked against racism during the rise of fascism, his arguments depended on assumptions about primitivity. Recognizing this history opens the problem that if the subfield of queer ecologies focuses on critiquing its historical roots, it is at risk of limiting itself to critiquing and reacting to racist structures of thought.
Instead, can we think of queer ecology as a practice of living? Could we, for instance, consider the celebration of “queerinteams” and queer Zoom nightlife in the early days of COVID-19 as queer urban ecologies suffered from gentrification and the closure of queer public spaces?12 Domestic spaces, too, are their own kind of ecologies, as plant love takes stage with such social media representations as “#homosandhorticulture.”13 Meanwhile, salaried workers two years into the COVID-19 pandemic were pushed to return to in-person work and had to leave their pets at home after having spent every waking minute together during pandemic lockdowns.14 Pet and plant love generate among queer folk at the very moment in which opportunities shrink for queer prospective parents of adopted human children.15 Such horizons are capacious enough to include campy joy and bleakly cruel optimism.16
Ecologies are here, queer, asexual, intersex, and trans. You see them with so-called common birds with gynandromorphic bodies. You smell them in the release of pollen from plants that asexually reproduce themselves. You consume them when you take a sip of water that likely contains more waste than you would like. Promiscuous disregard of disciplinary boundaries and a hunger for all kinds of earthly delights gives us the means to take it all in.
Are Queer Ecologies White?
There are queer and cuir ecologies all over the world. Lo cuir is a term coined by Ecuadorian and Colombian activists and artists protesting an international queer academic event in 2014, which references queer Latinidad and stems from a joke involving the Quechua word for guinea pig, cuy.17 Think, for instance, about sand that sticks to nether regions and retains the body memory of clandestine queer parties on the beaches of Martinique.18 Consider identifications that cross gender and species in Malaysian orangutan rehabilitation centers.19 Contemplate the cuir futures of what Yarimar Bonilla calls “hopeful pessimism” when Black and cuir protestors succeeded in forcing Puerto Rico’s homophobic, misogynist, ecocidal, and incompetent governor to resign in 2019.20
These different examples hint at the multivalence of queer ecologies. And so does this issue, with its impressive chronological and aesthetic range—from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment, zoo studbooks to European dance, alt-right US memes to German pornography. Yet the body of scholarship around “sex and nature” and queer ecologies frequently centers Europe and settler colonial North America, even as its stance from the start has stood against racism, colonialism, environmental injustice, and white supremacy.21
This observation opens up a similar concern to that we raised above in respect to Orientalism, sexology, and other debunked sciences: if queer ecologies and related work on “sex and nature” continue to center horrible white cis men and women as their objects of study—such as the conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazis that Hannah Boast discusses—it risks reducing itself to a reactionary field of spectators waiting to critique an immense archive of bad examples. Further, we are prompted to ask, is the subfield of queer ecologies yet another white space of the academy, produced in historically white institutions and focused mostly on white actors and thinkers?22 What new archives can queer ecologies queerly and cuir-ly generate, instead, as so many of us contemplate in our everyday how to live, eat, transform, and find pleasure in a toxic and pandemic world drenched by hurricane floods, smoked by forest fires, and blanched by heat waves? And in our queer ecologies of the everyday, how can we avoid the pitfalls of fetishizing difference, tokenizing marginality, and whitewashing or appropriating bio/diversity?
We do not have definitive answers, just flirtations, musings, crushes, and curiosities. Juno, for instance, is curious about the long history of intimate human-dog relations among hunters in what is now known as Indonesia and Malaysia and how old relations become threatened by new pandemics like rabies.23 Queer and trans* forms are not obvious from the start but might emerge through her reading practice of what she finds. Nicole, meanwhile, is enthralled with nonbinary Chinese American artist Mary Maggic’s “Open Source Estrogen” project, which imagines a “system of DIY [do-it-yourself]/DIWO [do-it-with-others] protocols” for self-synthesizing and either self-administering or sharing this hormone—thus circumventing institutional control of female and/or trans bodies and offering a radical alternative to the hormone-pollution panic recounted in Boast’s article. Maggic acknowledges “the radical porosity of [the] human, non-human, and planetary” and the fact that “cross-contaminations are indeed how we survive together.”24 In the midst of such queer and trans ecologies, attuned at once to difference and mutuality, we might venture to declare that our pronouns are “we/our/ours.”
Conclusion
This issue on sex and nature reminds us that the environmental humanities must engage queer studies and vice versa, because everybody and every body is experiencing planetary climate breakdown and species extinction, and this calls for new kinds of relations, pleasures, and embodiments. However, what makes ecological “inqueeries,” to play off our title, distinctly queer or ecological? Is it the identity of the inquirer? Is it their domestic relations and the carbon footprint they bear? (Surely not only the single and childfree can be five-star queer ecologists!) Or is it the sensitivity to relations, embodiment, affect, and sensibilities that are specific to the corpus of queer and cuir scholarship—the recognition that environments profoundly and powerfully matter? As new queer work emerges in the context of profound planetary transformation, we ask, what and whose ecologies will move queer scholarship most and in what directions?
Acknowledgments
Juno thanks the authors and editors for their work, Lisa Bhungalia and friends for social media posts, and Nicole Seymour for her generous collaboration.
Nicole thanks Sarah Bezan and Ina Linge for inviting us to participate in this special issue, and Juno Salazar Parreñas for lively conversation and keeping her social media feed full of cute dog pics.
Notes
See @homosandhorticulture, Instagram account, https://www.instagram.com/homosandhorticulture/ (accessed May 18, 2022); the hashtag was begun by a group of queer friends who are academics and artists, and they have used it broadcast activist messages against pinkwashing and the occupation of Palestine.
Atta and van der Vlies, “Queer Worlds/Global Queer”; Chan, “Written in a Historically White Space.”
Harlan Weaver’s idea of multispecies justice is especially inspirational. See Weaver, Bad Dog; Drake, “Encounters.”
See Mary Maggic’s biography at https://maggic.ooo/About.
