queer ecology

Planted Aug 2024 Tended 2 years ago

Contents

Spencer R. Scott introduced me to queer ecology:

There is a gap in our language where the twin meanings of Queer could be separated, between sexual orientation and the spirit that seeks beyond institutional dogma. The definitions are so entangled because members of the queer community, uniquely, were born with an invisible identity that can both be buried and uncovered. Gay and trans people learn to apply the spirit of queerness at the internal, individual level—uncovering our own suppressed personal truths that are at odds with everything around it—and we call that being queer. The spirit of queerness is applying that inquisitiveness externally, challenging power structures beyond our sexual identities. Queer Ecology is applying the spirit of queerness to the kingdom of life and the nature of reality.

Scott cites bell hooks’s expansive definition of queerness:

Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live. (bell hooks)

As Scott rightly points out:

One day queer ecology will just be ecology, but in the meantime it is represents a collection of emerging truths that challenge stagnant beliefs and implicitly ask us to change our relationship to the world.

An important assumption which queer ecology challenges is that predatory individualism is natural. Emerging research provides examples from trees to bats of species cooperating and sharing resources in order to survive together, an important amendment to the “survival of the fittest” ethos that the powerful have used to justify their domination and exploitation of the rest of us.

Further Learning