Living with “Strange Strangers”
By: Nathan Allen
Tags: Climate Change, Science, LGBTQ, Philosophy, Environment

Ecologizing Queer Theory? Or, Queering Ecology?

Photo by Hendrik Cornelissen on Unsplash

Unlike many fields of study, queer ecology is young and has hardly any definitions. Descriptions of what a queer ecology might look like will be a much better guide.

Timothy Morton — author, professor, and philosopher prophet — has written on the subject. In his guest column “Queer Ecology”, he tells us that:

“Judith Butler makes a case for queer ecology, because she shows how heterosexist gender performance produces a metaphysical manifold that separates “inside” from “outside.” The inside-outside manifold is fundamental for thinking the environment as a metaphysical, closed system — Nature. This is impossible to construe without violence.” (pg. 275)

This is a historical account of nature: a thing with boundaries. Things are either natural or they are not. Nature under this distinction, is metaphysically closed.

Queer ecology as Morton will go on to construct is a sort of camp-esque, but critical study of how boundaries in biology are not real at all. What’s more is that the maintenance of such barriers often results in metaphorical, emotional, and physical violence. Queer ecology is not radical as Morton writes:

“Just read Darwin. Evolution means that life-forms are made of other life-forms. Entities are mutually determining: they exist in relation to each other and derive from each other. Nothing exists independently, and nothing comes from nothing. At the DNA level, it’s impossible to tell a “genuine” code sequence from a viral code insertion. In bacteria, for example, there exist plasmids, entities not unlike pieces of viral code. Plasmids resemble parasites in the bacterial host, but at this scale it’s impossible to tell which being is a parasite and which a host (Dawkins, Extended Phenotype 159, 200–23, 226; paging Hillis Miller . . . ).” (pg.275)

A heteronormative ecology, perhaps what we call a standard ecology, is uncritical and serves to demarcate this thing from that thing. Queer ecology tells us this is but a semantic game, not a description of reality. Organisms are being born of others, being killed by others, feeding on others, evolving into and from others, going extinct because of others. That relational bit to others is the important part. Nothing exists alone. Morton writes:

In a sense, molecular biology confronts issues of authenticity similar to those in textual studies. Just as deconstruction showed that, at a certain level at any rate, no text is totally authentic, biology shows us that there is no authentic life-form. (pg. 275).

When we write of authenticity, we mean to say that our subject is the entity by which it is best described. That means nothing. Living things surprise us all the time. Humans are just describing things with blunt senses. According to us, animals could not feel pain. We know now that is not true. Once we thought animals could not use language. This seems outdated. Everytime we move the goal post of what makes a person, some animal somewhere proves us wrong.

“..the Biosphere” as Morton writes, “is permeable and boundariless … if anything life is catastrophic, monstrous, nonholistic, and dislocated, not organic, coherent, or authoritative” (pg. 275).