What is the relationship between cruising and environmentalism? How might cruising inspire an ecological ethic more deeply attuned to our impersonal intimacies with the human, nonhuman, and elemental strangers that constitute both our environment and ourselves?

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...

Why turn a chicken nugget into a toy? If all objects hold something back from us, as scholars of object-oriented ontology have argued, then who are we to say what secrets the television or the pillow may hold?