Stanford Humanities Center
Queer Environmentalities
How can queer theory and ecocriticism inform each other? And why should they?
More
What can the nineteenth-century American novelist Sarah Orne Jewett tell us about inhabiting a present in which historical time appears both deranged and inescapable?
The plan [in the undercommons] is to invent the means in a common experiment launched from any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night. This ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction, as the...
Authors such as A. E. Benson, Edward Carpenter, Aleister Crowley, and Michael Field explored the place of the humanist individual in a nature-centred belief system that stands in opposition not only to scientific materialism, but also to the industrialism and consumerism of the age. In so doing, they offered an early queer formulation of what today might be recognized as a post-human eco-spirituality.
The Renaissance humanist authors who seem to be at odds with ecocriticism’s professed turn to the natural world – in this study, Michel de Montaigne – exhibit, in fact, a certain form of environmental awareness in their work. They index humanism’s shifting relationship to the environment in ways that have shaped our own ecological consciousness.
This chapter considers how the performance of ecosexuality suggests ontologies of both performance and the material world that figure performances as materializing phenomena in which material entities do not merely interact but are intra-actively produced.
Seated centre-stage yet unconcerned with the anthropocentric voyeurism, self-consciousness, and self-display of traditional stage presence, the Green Man of Mesocosm dwells in a theatre of species—all species—and nonchalantly performs a scandalous form of species companionship and ecological intimacy.
In the final paragraph of his 2002 essay “Sociability and Cruising,” Leo Bersani concludes his discussion of impersonal intimacy and promiscuous attachments with an unexpected turn to ecology: “Let’s call this [ethical model predicated on ascetic practices] an ecological ethics,” he suggests, “one...
In this essay, we suggest that this new conceptualization of Swamp Thing re-positions the creature as a thing; an obdurate entity that does not easily adhere to rigid classifications of ‘human’ or ‘plant,’ of ‘animate’ or ‘inanimate,’ of ‘original’ or ‘copy’ (even if characters within the comic text may argue otherwise).
The second album by "Perfume Genius" is an example of how radically traversing the homonormative and queer/wild political scene(s) both enlivens stale gay political tropologies and revises them to put experimental queer aesthetic tendencies in high relief.
What does desire mean for Darwin and then for Freud? How do they understand the capacity to desire across species lines? and, What ethical quandaries result?
