Queer Ecology-Re-articulating the Language of Oppression (a precis)

In Unnatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands draws on established disciplines of ecofeminism and environmental justice, arguing that they “open our eyes to the fact that nature organizes and is organized by complex power relations. What queer ecology adds is the fact that these power relations include sexuality.” She examines the connection between sexuality and nature, first in terms of the institutions that categorize and qualify “nature” and “sexual identity,” most notably in the pathologization of non-normative sexual desire. She then goes on to point out a relationship between sexuality and the construction of natural space, such as urban and national parks, arguing that these spaces emerge from and serve to regulate and re-inforce normative sexual desire. She ends by exploring how a “queer ecological project” might challenge these normative power relations articulated within discourses of sexuality and nature, writing “My argument is thus that we should reorient our politics and take on what I am calling a queer ecological perspective, to work toward more critical possibilities responsive to the kinds of complex relations of power that I have thus far outlined. Here, I am advocating a position not only of queering ecology, but of greening queer politics.”

The article begins by describing a metaphor that seems to be fundamentally synonymous with an understanding of queer ecology, that of Jan Zita Grover's encounter with nature, Sandilands even describes her as a source for the development of the article: “With Grover as my guide, I am arguing that there is indeed such a thing as a queer ecology.” She expresses the value of Grover's perspective: “Grover, by taking elements of queer experience to construct an alternative environmental perspective. By this label, I mean that she focuses on dimensions of her experience born in the specific history of a queer community, and uses the resulting emotional resonances and conceptual links to live in nature in a way that reflects this queer experience. Simply put: Grover sees nature through queer eyes, and what she sees is important and unique.” The passage suggests that the queer experience can be used to alter the way one understands and lives within “natural” spaces, undermining perhaps the hetero-normative power-relations of spacial construction.

What is interesting about this metaphor to me is that despite its centrality to the article and supposed embodiment of the (or a) queer perspective, the language that Grover uses seems to re-articulate the language of oppression used to pathologize and marginalize queer people and queerness. For example, Sandilands writes of her experience, "The idea that one might find natural wholeness in this hard, boreal landscape was shattered at the sight of its large, multiple clear-cuts and the thin “idiot strips” of trees along the highways that foolishly attempt to conceal the scars to the landscape caused by the softwood pulp and paper industry.” She describes the effects of industry on the woods as “scars” and “artificial” and therefore devoid of “natural wholeness.” She uses these woods as a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic, and eventually learns to love and find beauty in the scars. She writes that the woods “offered me an unanticipated challenge, a spiritual discipline: to appreciate them, I needed to learn how to see their scars, defacement, and artificiality, and then beyond those to their strengths – their historicity, the difficult beauties that underlay their deformity.” Through the filter of her queer perspective, she does not learn to see the woods as whole but to look past their “deformity” to their positive attributes. Though this metaphor preaches the rhetoric of acceptance, it seems to re-enforce a certain articulation of what is “natural” and “unnatural,” problematic in light of how that rhetoric applies to queer sexuality. Granted she is speaking of AIDS and not sexual identity, but I feel a large part of the AIDS epidemic is the marginalization of those living with HIV/AIDS and the “unnatural” acts or desires associated with it. And furthermore, in terms of how a queer perspective may revolutionize an understanding of space, Grover's conceptualization of a “whole natural forest” does not seem to stray very far from the spacial understanding of a national forest as devoid of aboriginals, even if the political implications are very different.

So Grover's “queer experience” contains its own form of normativity, but hers is only one experience of many, right? Sandilands speaks of the value of the queer perspective to re-orient ourselves toward space, but whose queer perspective is it? She acknowledges that many queer discourses re-articulate normativity and therefore need to be “greened” up, but she only offers the examples of commercialism and gay marriage, neglecting the fact that even outside these obviously normative articulations, queer experiences are normative in complex ways, in terms of gender identity and expression, in terms of race, body type, and behavior. These are not directly linked to the normative articulations that Sandliland's points to: commercialism promoting waste, etc and gay marriage mirroring the hetero-normative paradigms that construct and are constructed by “natural spaces.” Is the queer experience valuable simply because it is unique? Can a queer understanding that is valuable to the re-articulation of space be extracted from individual subjectivity, in which these queer experiences are implicated in other problematic forms of normativity that construct and are constructed by space?

-Karina Grifka