GDS: BJSZ Lab – Queer Ecology K
***NEG***
1NC - Frontlines
1NC – Policy Aff
QUEERNESS MUST BE OUR STARTING POINT FOR ADDRESSING THE TOPIC OF
THE OCEANS.
THIS IS OPPOSED TO THE STARTING POINTS OF EXPLORATION AND
DEVELOPMENT BOTH OF WHICH RELY ON A NOTION OF PROGRESS THAT
MAKES OF THE OCEANS AN OBJECT OF STUDY NORMATIVELY POSITIONED TO
RENDER THE QUEER BODY AS A FOREIGN TOOL OF IMPERIALIST VIOLENCE.
WARRANT -- for use in CX
THE DIASPORIC IMAGINARY WHICH USES THE OCEANS TO MAP HISTORICAL
CONSTELLATION OF "A PEOPLE" RUNS THE RISK OF REINSCRIBING THE LOGIC
OF IMPERIALIST AMBITIONS WHERE THE QUEER BODY IS PATHOLOGIZED IN
THE EUROCENTRIC GENEALOGY -- IT IS A SICKNESS IN THE WEST THAT IS
SIMULTANEOUSLY VIEWED AS PART OF THE CIVILIZING MISSION AGAINST THE
BLACK AND BROWN OTHER. OUR APPROACH RECOGNIZES THE DANGERS OF
IMPERIALIST HOMONATIONALISM ALONGSIDE THE VIOLENCE OF ANTIQUEER
INVISIBILITY
ENG '11 DAVID, David L. Eng is professor of English, comparative literature, and Asian
American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer
Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (2010) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity
in Asian America (2001). In addition, he is coeditor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of
Mourning (2003), with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (1998), and with Judith
Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz of a special issue of the journal Social Text, "What's Queer
about Queer Studies Now?" (2005). "Queering the Black Atlantic, Queering the Brown Atlantic"
David L. Eng (bio) GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies > Volume 17, Number 1, 2011
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v017/1
7.1.eng.html
At a recent state-of-the-field queer studies conference hosted by the University of Pennsylvania
to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gayle Rubin's groundbreaking essay "Thinking Sex," it
became clear to me that the critique of the normative, which we might describe as queer
studies' most important epistemic as well as political promise, is currently in the intellectual
custody of three dynamic fields: transgender studies, disability studies, and area studies. For this
review, I focus on area studies—more specifically, on the intersectional and interdisciplinary
encounter among area studies, diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies. M. Jacqui Alexander's
Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred and
Gayatri Gopinath's Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures are two
important books that illustrate [End Page 193] the critical stakes in bringing together queer
theory with area, diaspora, and postcolonial studies. Along with several other prominent
scholars, Alexander and Gopinath have helped forge out of this encounter the burgeoning field
of "queer diasporas." Emerging most forcefully in relation to South Asian, East Asian, and Latin
American studies, queer diasporas as a method demands immediate and sustained attention to
how diaspora has traditionally relied on a "genealogical, implicitly heteronormative reproductive
logic" (Gopinath, 10) to shore up conventional structures of family and kinship. In this manner,
diaspora has reinforced dominant sexual and gendered ideologies of the nation-state that
constitute it as the site of not only purity and origin but also exclusion, racial tension, and
political, economic, and social strife in the West, as elsewhere.¶ Yet if " 'diaspora' needs
'queerness' to rescue it from its genealogical implications," Gopinath observes, " 'queerness'
also needs 'diaspora' in order to make it more supple in relation to questions of race,
colonialism, migration, and globalization" (11). Indeed, considering queerness and diaspora
together offers, in the broadest sense, important new ways to approach some of the critical
aporias in all these fields. More specifically, it offers a rethinking of a long history of EuroAmerican modernity, sexual politics, racial formation, political economy, and migration in
relation to the advent and rise of colonialism, the subsequent dilemmas of postcoloniality and
decolonization in the Third World, and the current proliferation of U.S.-led global capitalism and
the militarization of everyday life.¶ In Alexander's estimation, a certain brand of poststructuralism has had the "effect of constructing queer theory in a way that eviscerates histories
of colonialism and racial formation, frameworks that could themselves point the way to a radical
activist scholarship in which race, sexual politics, and globalization would be understood
together rather than being positioned as theoretical or political strangers" (70). A queer
diasporic methodology maps the theoretical and political itineraries of such a critical
proposition. In short, it illustrates what is at stake when disparate bodies and sexualities
travel in the global system—across the Black Atlantic to the Caribbean in Alexander's case and
across the Brown Atlantic to various locales of the South Asian diaspora in Gopinath's study. ¶
Thus, for example, in terms of normative morality, homosexuality is conventionally
characterized as "immoral" and "lewd"—" primitive" and "uncivilized" —in the West. Yet,
paradoxically, homosexuality (and tolerance of it) becomes a marker of modernity and
civilization when applied in non-Western contexts and to non-Western cultures. Often
considered a poor imitation of more advanced Western models of social life, a recognizable
gay identity becomes, Gopinath suggests, "intelligible and indeed desirable when and where it
can be [End Page 194] incorporated into [a] developmental narrative of modernity" (142). In a
transvaluation of the same logic, when taken up by conservative postcolonial and neocolonial
native elites and administrations, homosexuality is often denounced and disavowed as a
degenerate Western import, thus rescripting and reifying heteronormativity as the prerequisite
for nation and empire, for racial purity and moral rectitude, for good citizenship and social
belonging—for social life itself.¶ On both sides of this debate, sexuality appears as a fixed
identity and property belonging to a group of authorized citizen-subjects residing in the global
North, while continuing to evolve and develop elsewhere. Heightened attention to how queer
diasporas complicate such fixed notions of ownership and belonging illustrates how sexuality
continually exceeds its conventional boundaries in a Euro-American tradition of liberal
modernity and its rights-based identity claims. Hence we witness the transformation
of sexuality, as it migrates in the global system, into many other things: a
discourse of development; a dialectic of Enlightenment; a geopolitics of the civilized and
the primitive; a tale of racial, religious, and cultural barbarism; a story of democracy and
progress; and, most recently, an index of self-determination and human rights.¶ Pedagogies of
Crossing and Impossible Desires carefully unfold the manifest contradictions and intricacies of
sexuality in the diaspora as it travels across different locales, public and private zones, and
political and cultural fissures—indeed, helping construct and define through its various
movements these locales, zones, and fissures themselves. Paying particular attention to queer
diasporas as they cross not only geopolitical but also institutional boundaries, often abruptly
and impolitely, Alexander's and Gopinath's projects disrupt and denaturalize given ways of
knowing and being "over here" as well as "over there." To borrow a concept from the
postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, they provincialize queer studies, area studies, and
diaspora studies, as well as a host of other interlocking and interconnected fields, including
postcolonial theory, transnational feminism, ethnic studies, and Marxism, to name some
immediate examples.¶ Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing consists of seven chapters, divided
into three sections. As she explains in the book's opening pages,¶ Pedagogies' central metaphor
is drawn from the enforced Atlantic Crossing of the millions of Africans that serviced from the
fifteenth century through the twentieth the consolidation of British, French, Spanish, and Dutch
empires. At the time I conceived of the book in 2000, the world had not yet witnessed the
seismic imperial shifts that characterize this moment. In one [End Page 195] sense, then,
Pedagogies functions as an archive of empire's twenty-first-century counterpart, of oppositions
to it, of the knowledges and ideologies it summons, and of the ghosts that haunt it.¶ (2)¶
Alexander's three sections cover a wide historical range—from the Spaniard Vasco Nuñez de
Balboa's colonial conquest of the New World and his feeding of forty Indian "cross-dressers" to
his dogs in 1513; to the criminalization of lesbian and gay sex by neocolonial administrations in
Trinidad and Tobago in 1986 and 1991 and in the Bahamas in 1991; to our contemporary neoimperial moment of U.S. empire, the Defense of Marriage Act, and the Patriot Act, in which
"hegemonic heterosexual masculinity wishes to assert a Pax Americana through imperial
violence undertaken within its own borders as well as in different parts of the world" (183).¶
Drawing attention to how imperialism and heterosexuality have been historically welded
together by both state and corporate interests, Alexander also examines the remarkable
contemporary shifts in global capitalism that mark "a systemic, interdependent relationship
between heterosexual capital and gay capital" reminiscent of how "black capitalism has been
called on to do a similar kind of work for white capital" (66). In the first section of Pedagogies,
"Transnational Erotics: State, Capital, and the Decolonization of Desire" (chapters 1-2),
Alexander explores this convergence in the phenomenon of gay tourism in the Bahamas and
other sites in the Caribbean, investigating how capitalism reformulates sexuality and sexual
desire to meet its ever-expanding needs. Gay tourism illustrates the flexibility of global
capitalism. Its particular significance, Alexander notes, "lies in its ability to draw together
powerful processes of sexual commodification and sexual citizenship" (27).¶ Alexander deftly
examines the contemporary production of the rights-based consumer citizen embodied in the
figure of the gay white tourist. She notes that while "citizenship based in political rights can be
forfeited, these rights do not disappear entirely. Instead, they get reconfigured and restored
under the rubric of gay consumer at this moment in late capitalism" (71). As brown bodies from
the global South move north to take up employment as domestic labor, in agricultural sectors,
and in service industries, white bodies in the global North move south in search of leisure and
pleasure. In the process, they expand networks of capital, I might note, from general tourism
into areas of sex tourism and medical tourism as well as related industries such as artificial
reproductive technologies (e.g., "womb renting"), transnational adoption, and organ trading.¶
Alexander's study of gay tourism thus provides one early and important [End Page 196]
genealogy for the current historical emergence of what I have elsewhere described as queer
liberalism. Queer liberalism marks a coming together of economic and political spheres that now
forms the basis for liberal enfranchisement and inclusion of particular U.S. (as well as other
Western) gay and lesbian citizen-subjects petitioning for rights and recognition before the law.
In this regard, Alexander's study of tourism charts the shifting legacies of colonialism and
colonial travel literature and their transformations under the shadows of global capitalism. It
underscores how "racialization and colonization are being consistently written into modernity's
different projects. . . . [and] occasioned by the uneven class relations and differentiations
produced by neo-liberal capital's dispersions" (194).¶ At the same time that Alexander considers
how the shifting routes of global capitalism work to fold once dissident U.S. gay and lesbian
citizen-subjects into its economic and political mandates, she also analyzes how these
movements invoke homophobic responses by postcolonial and neocolonial administrations.
That is, she illustrates how gay and lesbian tourists from the global North are being conscripted
by neoliberal framings of capital, welfare reform, and sexual normalization (in the form of
marriage, adoption, inheritance, etc.) as exemplary consuming citizen-subjects, even as these
neoliberal mandates travel and are transformed in the diaspora into debates about postcolonial
independence and heteronormative self-determination. In this manner, while gays and lesbians
in the metropolitan North are being unevenly incorporated into the cultural imaginary of "We
the People," citizenship in places such as the Bahamas continues to be "premised in
heterosexual terms. . . . Lesbian and gay bodies are made to bear the brunt of the charge of
undermining national sovereignty, while the neocolonial state masks its own role in forfeiting
sovereignty as it recolonizes and renarrativizes a citizenry for service in imperial tourism" (11).¶
Alexander presents us with a provocative history of the present in which sovereignty is waged in
the domain of sexuality and sexual regulation and asymmetrically on the backs of racialized
queer immigrant bodies. Hannah Arendt famously noted that citizenship is nothing less than the
"right to have rights."1 However, Alexander concludes, critical attention to the problematic of
citizenship, immigration, and alienage in queer diasporas reveals how the category of formal
citizenship is simply too fragile, too fraught, and "far too subject to state manipulation and cooptation for it to become the primary basis on which radical political mobilization is carried on"
(249).¶ If section 1 of Alexander's book presents the various movements of crossings past and
crossings present that produce authorized and dissident bodies in the global system, section 2
(chapters 2-5) of her study, "Maps of Empire, Old and [End Page 197] New," focuses on the
"pedagogies" part of the book's main title. Here, Alexander focuses on how we might "teach for
justice"—how we might effectively and ethically intervene in state power, a project
"fundamentally at odds with the project of militarization, which always already imagines an
enemy and acts accordingly to eliminate it" (92). Contesting the privileged connections among
capitalism, democracy, and freedom, Alexander explores how we might contest the state and
corporate production of citizenship normalized within the prism of heterosexuality, a
normalization whose ideological consolidation, as Louis Althusser notes, is largely the
responsibility of the school in secular societies.2 Alexander wonders, "What is democracy to
mean when its association with the perils of empire has rendered it so thoroughly corrupt that it
seems disingenuous and perilous even to deploy the term. Freedom is a similar hegemonic
term, especially when associated with the imperial freedom to abrogate the self-determination
of a people" (17). Through heightened attention to these particular pedagogical queries,
Alexander shows "how free-market democracy might stand in the way of justice [and] how
legacies of transformational struggles in the academy may not be reflected in the everyday life
of an institution" (92).¶ Alexander presents numerous examples of such pedagogic initiatives,
drawn from real-life examples of political intervention into the production of knowledge and the
contestation of state power: from her musing on the social contract and John Locke ("We can't
get to liberalism and rights without John Locke, but we can watch him as he gazes at Indians in
America." [171]) to the recounting of her own battle for retention at the New School in New
York City ("For almost a year, I had experienced that odd kind of alienation that results from
being positioned as an onlooker in the usurpation of my own identity." [153]). In the process,
she seeks to interrupt¶ inherited boundaries of geography, nation, episteme, and identity that
distort vision so that they can be replaced with frameworks and modes of being that enable an
understanding of the dialectics of history, enough to assist in navigating the terms of
learning and the fundamentally pedagogic imperative at its heart: the
imperative of making the world in which we live intelligible to ourselves
and to each other—in other words, teaching ourselves.¶ (6)
WHITE HETEROMASCULINITY IS GROUNDS WAR AND IMPERIAL DOMINATION.
TRY OR DIE FOR THE ALTERNATIVE
Winnubst 06, philosophy PhD, Penn State University
Shannon, Queering Freedom 2006. p 5-6 GoogleBooks
This is the domination and violence of our historical present, late modernity: to reduce our lives
so completely to the order of instrumental reason that we cannot conceive of any political or
philosophical problem without reducing it to that narrow conception of reason. This renders us captive
to presuppositions which assume that solutions to problems must follow the same temporal register as the posing of the problem itself— i.e.,
they must appear immediately effective and useful if we are to recognize them as solutions
at all. But what if these are only truncated, shortsighted views? What if a vital resistance to politics of domination comes through freeing
that
ourselves from these closed economies of late modernity and their clearly demarcated, controlled, mastered, and useful ends? What if a vital
resistance to politics of domination requires a temporal register other than that of immediate and clear efficacy? As Bataille tells us
sympathetically, “It is not easy to realize one’s own ends if one must, in trying to do so, carry out a movement that surpasses them” (1988–
91, 1:21). His orientation toward general economies asks us to think differently from the habituated patterns of our historical present. In his
language,
this historical present is “characterized by the fact that judgments concerning the
general situation proceed from a particular point of view” (1988– 91, 1:39). This particularity can
be outlined, described, pinned down, and its blind spots excavated: I attempt to do so in this
text. But to think generally from and about the historical present may lead us into different
questions and different orientations: it has led me to query systems of domination through the registers of
temporality and spatiality, while framing them through the identity categories (race, gender, sexuality, class, religion)
that are their most explicit historical tools. For example, how does the temporality of a persistent future orientation ground systems of
racism, sexism, and heterosexism? What
assumptions about the ontology of space allow for the biological
conception of race that groundsracism, or of sex that grounds sexism and heterosexism? Bataille warns us
that, if we do not learn to think in this counter-cultural register of general economy, we will
always be subordinated to the violent and even catastrophic expressions of the excess,
abundant energy of the planet, such as war and imperialist domination. We do have a choice in
this matter. But that choice is not one which will derive from calculating our interest, analyzing
the specific problem, or charting the solution: it will not derive from the domains of
instrumental reason and its persistent mandate of utility. It may, rather, involve recuperating senses of freedom
lost to us in late modernity, where nation-states promise freedom as the facile liberation from subservience and mastery as the domination
To think generally may lead toward sensing freedom as “a dangerous breaking
loose...a will to assume those risks without which there is no freedom” (1988– 91, 1:38). It is toward recuperating these
more general senses of freedom, which Bataille signifies as “sovereign” and I signify as “queer” in
this historical period of late modernity and phallicized whiteness, that this text moves.
of nature and culture.
FUTURIST GROUNDING MANDATES EXTERMINATION OF THE QUEER BODY
Edelman ‘4
Lee Edelman, Professor of English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, 2004, page 11-13
Charged, after all, with the task of assuring “that we being dead yet live,” the Child, as if by nature
(more precisely, as the promise of a natural transcendence of the limits of nature itself), excludes the very pathos from which
the narrator of The Children of Men recoils when comes upon the –nonreproductive “pleasures of the mind and
senses.” For the “pathetic” quality he projectively locates in nongenerative sexual enjoyment –
enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty, substitutive, pathological – exposes
the fetishistic figurations of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms of identical to those for which
enjoyment without “hope of posterity” so peremptorily dismissed” legible, that is, as nothing more than “pathetic and crumbling
defences shored up against our ruins.” How better to characterize the narrative project of Children of Men itself, which ends, as
anyone not born yesterday surely expects form the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of
birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr., reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a sentence delicately
poised between description and performance of the novel’s pro-creative ideology: “If there is a baby, there is a future, there is
If, however, there is no baby and in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall
on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning
and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and,
inevitably, life itself. Given that the author of The Children of Men, like the parents of
mankind’s children, succumbs so completely to the narcissism – all pervasive, selfcongratulatory, and strategically misrecognized – that animates pronatalism, why should we
be the least bit surprised when her narrator, facing the futureless future, laments, with what we must call as
straight face, that “sex totally divorced from procreation has to become almost meaninglessly
acrobatic”? Which is, of course, to say no more than that sexual practice will continue to
allegorize the vicissitudes of meaning so long as the specifically heterosexual alibi of
reproductive necessity obscures the drive beyond meaning driving the machinery of sexual
meaningfulness: so long, that is, as the biological fact of heterosexual procreation bestows the imprimatur of meaningproduction on heterogenital relations. For the Child, whose mere possibility is enough to spirit away the
naked truth of heterosexual sex – impregnating heterosexuality, as it were, with the future of
signification by conferring upon it the cultural burden of signifying futurity – figures our
identification with an always about-to-be-realized identity. It thus denies the constant threat to the social
redemption.”
order of meaning inherent to the structure of Symbolic desire that commits us to pursuing fulfillment by way of a meaning unable,
as meaning, either to fulfill us or, in turn, to be fulfilled because unable to close the gap in identity, the division incised by the
signifier, that “meaning,” despite itself, means.
OUR DISCUSSION OF NATURE HAS PEDAGOGICAL VALUE IN THE CONTEST
ROUND COMPETITION
Reality is constructed through a series of STORIES that make society civil– our
performance access the LOST IMPORTANCE of narratives that encourage us to
live with reality in the face of change.
Kingsnorth and Hine ‘9
Paul Kingsworth is an English writer who lives in Cumbria, England. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a
co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Dougald Hine is a British author, editor and social entrepreneur. He cofounded School of Everything and is Director at large of the Dark Mountain Project. He is a well-known radical in
Britain, UNCIVILISATION: THE DARK MOUNTAIN MANIFESTO, http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/ > ~cVs
If we are indeed teetering on the edge of a massive change in how we live, in how human society itself
is constructed, and in how we relate to the rest of the world, then we were led to this point by the
stories we have told ourselves — above all, by the story of civilisation. This story has many
variants, religious and secular, scientific, economic and mystic. But all tell of humanity’s
original transcendence of its animal beginnings, our growing mastery over a ‘nature’ to which
we no longer belong, and the glorious future of plenty and prosperity which will follow when
this mastery is complete. It is the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of
all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures. What makes this
story so dangerous is that, for the most part, we have forgotten that it is a story. It has been told so
many times by those who see themselves as rationalists, even scientists; heirs to the
Enlightenment’s legacy — a legacy which includes the denial of the role of stories in making
the world. Humans have always lived by stories, and those with skill in telling them have been
treated with respect and, often, a certain wariness. Beyond the limits of reason, reality
remains mysterious, as incapable of being approached directly as a hunter’s quarry. With stories, with art, with
symbols and layers of meaning, we stalk those elusive aspects of reality that go undreamed of
in our philosophy. The storyteller weaves the mysterious into the fabric of life, lacing it with the
comic, the tragic, the obscene, making safe paths through dangerous territory. Yet as the myth of
civilisation deepened its grip on our thinking, borrowing the guise of science and reason, we
began to deny the role of stories, to dismiss their power as something primitive, childish,
outgrown. The old tales by which generations had made sense of life’s subtleties and strangenesses were bowdlerised and
packed off to the nursery. Religion, that bag of myths and mysteries, birthplace of the theatre, was
straightened out into a framework of universal laws and moral account-keeping. The dream
visions of the Middle Ages became the nonsense stories of Victorian childhood. In the age of the
novel, stories were no longer the way to approach the deep truths of the world, so much as a
way to pass time on a train journey. It is hard, today, to imagine that the word of a poet was
once feared by a king. Yet for all this, our world is still shaped by stories. Through television, film,
novels and video games, we may be more thoroughly bombarded with narrative material than any
people that ever lived. What is peculiar, however, is the carelessness with which these stories
are channelled at us — as entertainment, a distraction from daily life, something to hold our
attention to the other side of the ad break. There is little sense that these things make up the equipment by which
we navigate reality. On the other hand, there are the serious stories told by economists, politicians,
geneticists and corporate leaders. These are not presented as stories at all, but as direct
accounts of how the world is. Choose between competing versions, then fight with those who
chose differently. The ensuing conflicts play out on early morning radio, in afternoon debates
and late night television pundit wars. And yet, for all the noise, what is striking is how much
the opposing sides agree on: all their stories are only variants of the larger story of human
centrality, of our ever-expanding control over ‘nature’, our right to perpetual economic
growth, our ability to transcend all limits. So we find ourselves, our ways of telling
unbalanced, trapped inside a runaway narrative, headed for the worst kind of encounter with
reality. In such a moment, writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to
play. Creativity remains the most uncontrollable of human forces: without it, the project of
civilisation is inconceivable, yet no part of life remains so untamed and undomesticated. Words and images can
change minds, hearts, even the course of history. Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives,
unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings. It is time to pick up the
threads and make the stories new, as they must always be made new, starting from where we
are.
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO QUEER THE 1AC
Society teaches us that the queer body is UNNATURAL, precisely because
civilization has been CONTRASTED with the purity of the natural world. The
Nature/Human split is not a legitimate political tool- it is a FALSE DUALISM.
Despite the capacity of humans to carry out UNIMAGINABLE actions, the queer
body somehow becomes LESS THAN HUMAN. Our culture sets Nature as a
BEHAVIORAL EXPECTATION, while simultaneously treating Nature with our
lowest standard of respect. This CONFUSION, this PARADOX is the QUEER.
Johnson ’11
Alex Johnson, contributing author to the Orion magazine publication, a magazine devoted to ecology and reuniting
people with the harmony of the Earth. Its aim is to make human’s more accountable for the world that they live in.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/5863/m, Issued in the May-June Issue of 2001
I ONCE THOUGHT I KNEW what nature writing was: the pretty, sublime stuff minus the parking lot. The mountain majesty and the
soaring eagle and the ancient forest without the human footprint, the humans themselves, the mess. Slowly, fortunately, that
definition has fallen flat. Where is the line between what is Nature and what is Human? Do I spend equal times in the parking lot and
the forest? Can I really say the parking lot is separate from the forest? What if I end up staying in the parking lot the whole time?
The problem is, the Nature/Human split is not a split.
It is a dualism. It is false. I propose messing it up. I propose queering Nature. As it would happen, I’m
What if it has been a long drive and I really have to pee?
queer. What I mean is this: A) I am a man attracted to men. B) Popular culture has told me that men who are attracted to men are
unnatural, and so C) if my culture is right, then I am unnatural. But D) I don’t feel unnatural at all. In fact, the love I share with
another man is one of the most comfortable, honest, real feelings I have ever felt. And so E) I can’t help but believe that Nature, and
the corresponding definition of “natural,” betray reality. From my end of the rainbow, this thing we call Nature is in need of a good
queering. STEP #1: LET GO OF ECOLOGICAL MANDATES. Not so long ago, I read David Quammen’s essay “The Miracle of the Geese.”
In the essay, Quammen says this: “wild geese, not angels, are the images of humanity’s own highest self.” By humanity, I can only
assume that he means all humans, collectively, over all of time. “They show us the apogee of our own potential,” Quammen says.
“They live by the same principles that we, too often, only espouse. They embody liberty, grace, and devotion, combining those three
contradictory virtues with a seamless elegance that leaves us shamed and inspired.” Quammen seems to be on to something. Who
could possibly be against liberty, grace, or devotion? But then he starts talking about sex. How geese are monogamous. How a male
goose will in fact do better evolutionarily if he is loyal to his mate. “They need one another there, male and female, each its chosen
mate, at all times,” he says. “The evolutionary struggle, it turns out, is somewhat more complicated than a singles’ bar.” I’m a little
concerned about the evolutionary struggle thing, but I’m still tracking. Life sure is complicated. And then he says this: “I was glad to
find an ecological mandate for permanent partnership among animals so estimable as Branta canadensis.” Boom. There it is. Geese
are wild. Geese are pure. They aren’t all mixed up with the problems of civilization and humanity. What we really need is to behave
more like geese. If you are a male, then you must find a female. You must partner with that female, provide for that female, fertilize
that female, and love that female for the rest of your life. If you are a female, well, you’ll know what to do. When I first read about
Quammen’s geese, I’d been out as bisexual for a year. It was around the second Bush election, and I was writing very serious letters
to my conservative grandparents about my sexuality and politics. Now I know why his essay, so considerate, so passionate, so
genteel, hit me in the gut. I was not natural. STEP #2: STOP GENERALIZING. My instinct is to give Quammen the benefit of the
doubt; it was the late ’80s after all. Regardless of his intentions though, Quammen’s notion that Canada geese offer humans an
ecological mandate not only reinforces a Nature-as-purity mythos (against which humans act), but at an even more basic level, his
assumptions are simply inaccurate: plenty of geese aren’t straight. In 1999, Bruce Bagemihl published Biological Exuberance, an
impressive compendium of thousands of observed nonheteronormative sexual behaviors and gender nonconformity among animals.
Besides giraffes and warthogs and hummingbirds, there’s a section on geese. Researchers have observed that up to 12 percent of
pairs were homosexual in populations of Branta canadensis. And it’s not because of a lack of potential mates of the opposite gender.
“In one case,” says Bagemihl, “a male harassed a female who was part of a long-lasting lesbian pair and separated her from her
companion, mating with her. However, the next year, she returned to her female partner and their pairbond resumed.” Red
squirrels are seasonally bisexual, mounting same-sex partners and other-sex partners with equal fervor. Male boto dolphins
penetrate each other’s genital slits as well as blow holes. Primates exhibit all sorts of queer behavior between males and males and
females and females. Observing queer
behavior in nonhumans is as easy as a trip to the nearest
primate house, or a careful observation of the street cats, or the deer nibbling on your shrubs,
or the mites on your skin. The world itself, it turns out, is so queer. Quammen assumed that geese are
straight because it was easy to do. It was easy to assume I was straight, too; I did so for the first eighteen years of my life. But
generalizing about the habits of both humans and the more-than-human living world not only denies that certain behavior already
exists, it limits the potential for that behavior to become more common, and more commonly accepted. STEP #3: HONK. I don’t
mean to insist that there is an ecological mandate for being gay. My interest in queering ecology lies in enabling humans to imagine
an infinite number of possible Natures. The living world exhibits monogamy. But it also exhibits orgies, gender transformation, and
cloning. What, then, is natural? All of it. None of it. Instead of using the more-than-human world as justification for or against certain
behavior and characteristics, let’s use the more-than-human world as a humbling indication of the capacity and diversity of all life on
Earth. So many of us humans are queer. Across all social, political, and physical boundaries, 2 to 10 percent of people take part in
Beyond the scope of sexuality, humans are capable of any number of
imaginable and unimaginable behaviors. That I do not eat bull testicles does not mean that
that behavior is any less human than my eating of baby back ribs. Why then, if I cohabitate
with another man, sharing the same bed, yes even having sex in that bed with that man, am I
somehow less human? A goose is a goose is a goose. STEP #4: ACKNOWLEDGE THE IRONY. In a review of Peter
nonheteronormative behavior.
Matthiessen’s book The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes, Richard White indicts the “relentless and blinkered earnestness” of
nature writing. White claims that because of its “reluctance to deal with paradox, irony, and history, much nature writing reinforces
the worst tendencies of environmentalism.” White points out that Matthiessen’s unflinchingly sincere narrative baldly contradicts
the circumstances: “The birds are immortal, timeless, and they transport us back into the deep evolutionary past,” writes White.
“But then Matthiessen gives us the details. He is sitting in a loud and clattering helicopter during this particular trip to the Eocene.” If
you depict cranes as pure and ancient, with no place in this modern world, then you must ignore all those species that have done
quite well in the rice paddies. Writing
about nature means accepting that it will prove you wrong. And
right. And render you generally confused. Nature is mysterious, and our part in the pageant is
shrouded in mystery as well. This means contradiction and paradox and irony. It means that
there will always be an exception. Nature has always humiliated the self-congratulatory
scientist. Let’s stop congratulating ourselves. Instead, let’s give a round of applause to the
delicious complexity. Let us call this complexity the queer, and let us use it as a verb. Let us
queer our ecology. Cranes can be ancient, but they can also be modern. Might their posterity extend past ours? We’ve
inherited a culture that takes its dualisms seriously. Nature, on the one hand, is the ideal, the pure, the holy. On the other hand, it is
evil, dangerous, and dirty. The problem? There’s no reconciliation. We accept both notions as separate but equal truths and then
Take sexuality, for instance: We have come
to believe, over our Western cultural history, that heterosexual monogamy is the norm, the
natural. People who call gays unnatural presume that Nature is pure, perfect, and predictable.
Nature intended for a man and a woman to love each other, they say. Gays act against Nature.
And yet: we rip open the Earth. We dominate the landscape, compromising the integrity of
the living world. We act as though civilization were something better, higher, more valuable
than the natural world. Our culture sets Nature as the highest bar for decorum, while
simultaneously giving Nature our lowest standard of respect. Nature is at our disposal, not
only for our physical consumption, but also for our social construction. We call geese beautiful and
organize our world around them. Status quo hurrah! Irony be damned.
elegant and faithful until they are shitting all over the lawn and terrorizing young children. Then we poison their eggs. Or shoot
them. What
I’m getting at is this: those who traditionally hold more power in society—be they
men over women, whites over any other race, wealthy over poor, straight over queer—have
made their own qualities standard, “natural,” constructing a vision of the world wherein such
qualities are the norm. And in so doing, they’ve made everyone else’s qualities perverse,
against Nature, against God. Even Nature—defined impossibly as the nonhuman—becomes unnatural when it does not fit the
desired norm: the gay geese must be affected by hormone pollution! A man who has sex with a man must identify himself by his
perversion, by his difference. If straight is the identity of I am, then gay becomes I am not. Women are not men. Native people are
not white. Nature is not human. Instead of talking about nonconformity, I want to talk about possibility and unnameably complex
reality. What queer can offer is the identity of I am also. I am also human. I am also natural. I am also alive and dynamic and full of
contradiction, paradox, irony. Queer knocks down the house of cards and throws them into the warm wind. STEP #5: DON’T FEAR
THE QUEER. If these were still in vogue, I would tell you my thesis is queer ecology. But as Zapatista leader Subcommandante
Marcos told Pierluigi Sullo from the forest of southeast Mexico (and probably from a table in a house in a village in that forest), “I
sincerely believe that you are not searching for a solution, but rather for a discussion.” He’s right. So what discussion am I looking
for? Well,
first, one that is happening at all. I’ve met many kind people (aren’t we all
sometimes?) who are so afraid of being politically incorrect that they don’t speak at all—well,
at least not about race or gender or sex (this on top of the three taboos of religion, politics,
and money). How do I know how I should refer to Indians? Or blacks? Or gays? Or bums, for
that matter? It’s just all so complicated now. Queer, then, remains a gesture of hands under
the table. A wink. In the recent past, conversationalists have at least had the weather to fall back on. But the record heat of
late with its strange winds of change have whipped away that golden ticket of banality too. So people stop talking, at least about
difference, or flux, or complication, altogether. And the floor is left to those who are the loudest and quickest, and who never had
any intention of complicating their conversation with anyone or anything that doesn’t conform to their tidy but limited worldview.
STEP #6: ENJOY THE PERFORMANCE. The
problem with unnameably complex reality is that it’s really
hard to pin down and even harder to write about. Yet anyone who gives a damn about the
ecological health of life on Earth knows that there’s no time for dillydallying. In the late nineteenth
century, a Danish scientist named Eugen Warming first used the term ecology to describe the study of interrelationships between
living things. Henry Chandler Cowles, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, brought ecology across the Atlantic with the
1899 publication of his treatise on the succession of the plant life of the Indiana Dunes. Instead of static forests and static lakes and
static prairies, Warming and Cowles recognized that these features of the physical world were in flux. As Cowles wrote in his
Queer ecology, then, is the study of dynamics across
all phenomena, all behavior, all possibility. It is the relation between past, present, and
future. Yes, we need to act. But we also must recognize that any action is also a performance,
and possibly in drag. Any writer who chooses the more-than-human world as subject must
acknowledge both the complexity and paradox contained within the subject of nature, as well
introduction, “Ecology, therefore, is a study in dynamics.”
as the contradictions wrapped up within the writer’s very self. Such a writer will write about the parking lot
and the invasive knapweed and the unseasonably warm weather and how he or she is undeniably mixed up in the complications.
The poet James Broughton calls it “the mystery of the total self.” Henry Chandler Cowles called it ecology. It is the relation within the
A queer ecology is a
liberatory ecology. It is the acknowledgment of the numberless relations between all things
alive, once alive, and alive once again. No man can categorize those relations without lying.
Categories offer us a way of organizing our world. They are tools. They are power.
Acknowledge the power. Acknowledge the lie. STEP #7: I’M DONE WITH STEPS.
human and the natural and the god and the geese and the past, present, future, body-self-other.
1NC – Anti-Blackness
THE BLACK ATLANTIC HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE QUEER ATLANTIC
In the bellies of slave ships, queer relationships were POWERFULLY and
SILENTLY forged out of common experience. Ties developed within segregated
holds allowed slaves to resist the commodification of their bodies by FEELING
AND FEELING for their shipmates. The ocean OBSCURES all origins, connecting
race, nationality, sexuality, and gender. Thinking through crosscurrents
navigates the queer black Atlantic, bringing together ENSLAVED and AFRICAN
and BRUTALITY and DESIRE. Prescribing a notion of social death upon the black
body negates the importance of EXPERIENCE and FLUDITY in constructing
identity.
Tinsley ‘8 (Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf) DB
And water,
ocean water is the first thing in the unstable confluence of race,
nationality, sexuality, and gender I want to imagine here. This wateriness is
metaphor, and history too. The brown-skinned, fluid-bodied experiences
now called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime
contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean. You
see, the black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic. What Paul Gilroy never told
us is how queer relationships were forged on merchant and pirate ships, where
Europeans and Africans slept with fellow — and I mean same-sex — sailors. And, more powerfully and
silently, how queer relationships emerged in the holds of slave ships that crossed
between West Africa and the Caribbean archipelago. I began to learn this black Atlantic when I was studying relationships
between women in Suriname and delved into the etymology of the word mati. This is the word Creole
women use for their female lovers: figuratively mi mati is “my girl,” but
literally it means mate, as in shipmate — she who survived the Middle
Passage with me. Sedimented layers of experience lodge in this small word.
During the Middle Passage, as colonial chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us,
captive African women created erotic bonds with other women in the sexsegregated holds, and captive African men created bonds with other men.
In so doing, they resisted the commodification of their bought and sold
bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships. I evoke this
history now not to claim the slave ship as the origin of the black queer Atlantic. The ocean obscures all
origins, and neither ship nor Atlantic can be a place of origin. Not of
blackness, though perhaps Africans first became negros and negers during
involuntary sea transport; not of queerness, though perhaps some Africans
were first intimate with same-sex shipmates then. Instead, in relationship
to blackness, queerness, and black queerness, the Atlantic is the site of what
the anthropologist Kale Fajardo calls “crosscurrents.” Oceans and seas are important sites for
differently situated people. Indigenous Peoples, fisherpeople, seafarers,
sailors, tourists, workers, and athletes. Oceans and seas are sites of inequality
and exploitation — resource extraction, pollution, militarization, atomic
testing, and genocide. At the same time, oceans and seas are sites of beauty
and pleasure — solitude, sensuality, desire, and resistance. Oceanic and
maritime realms are also spaces of transnational and diasporic
communities, heterogeneous trajectories of globalizations, and other racial,
gender, class, and sexual formations. Conceptualizing the complex
possibilities and power dynamics of the maritime, Fajardo posits the necessity
of thinking through transoceanic crosscurrents. These are theoretical and
ethnographic borderlands at sea, where elements or currents of historical,
conceptual, and embodied maritime experience come together to transform
racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized selves. The queer black
Atlantic I discuss here navigates these crosscurrents as it brings together
enslaved and African, brutality and desire, genocide and resistance. Here,
fluidity is not an easy metaphor for queer and racially hybrid identities but
for concrete, painful, and liberatory experience. It is the kind of queer of
color space that Roderick Ferguson calls for in Aberrations in Black, one that reflects the materiality
of black queer experience while refusing its transparency.2
The affirmative falsely evokes the Middle Passage and slave experience as the
AUTHENTIC ORIGINAL site of African diaspora identities and discourses. The
ocean WHISPERS the stories of the diasporic populations, telling of their pain
and feelings as they were transformed into enslaved people. The Subaltern can
speak from her SUBMARINE space, but we must listen CLOSELY for her voice.
Tinsley ‘8 (Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf) DB
If the black queer Atlantic brings together such long-lowing history, why is black queer studies situated as a dazzlingly new
“discovery” in academia — a hybrid, mermaidlike imagination that has yet to find its land legs? In the last five years, black
queer and queer of color critiques have navigated innovative directions in African diaspora studies as scholars like Ferguson
and E. Patrick Johnson push the discipline to map intersections between racialized and sexualized bodies.
Unfortunately, Eurocentric queer theorists and heterocentric race theorists
have engaged their discourses of resistant black queerness as a new fashion
— a glitzy, postmodern invention borrowed and adapted from EuroAmerican queer theory. In contrast, as interventions like the New-York Historical Society’s exhibit
Slavery in New York demonstrate, the Middle Passage and slave experience continue to
be evoked as authentic originary sites of African diaspora identities and
discourses.3 This stark split between the “newest” and “oldest” sites of
blackness relects larger political trends that polarize queer versus diasporic
and immigrant issues by moralizing and domesticating sexuality as an
undermining of tradition, on the one hand, while racializing and publicizing
global southern diasporas as threats to the integrity of a nation of (fictively)
European immigrants, on the other. My discussion here proposes to intervene in this polarization by
bridging imaginations of the “choice” of black queerness and the forced migration of the Middle Passage. What would
it mean for both queer and African diaspora studies to take seriously the
possibility that, as forcefully as the Atlantic and Caribbean flow together, so
too do the turbulent fluidities of blackness and queerness? What new
geography — or as Fajardo proposes, oceanography — of sexual, gendered,
transnational, and racial identities might emerge through reading for black
queer history and theory in the traumatic dislocation of the Middle
Passage?4 In what follows, I explore such queer black Atlantic oceanographies by comparing
two narrative spaces. One is a site where an imagination of this Atlantic struggles to emerge: in academic theorizing,
specifically in water metaphors of African diaspora and queer theory. The second is
a site where such imaginations emerge through struggle: in Caribbean creative writing, specifically in AnaMaurine Lara’s tale of queer migration in Erzulie’s Skirt (2006) and Dionne Brand’s relections on the Middle Passage in A Map
to the Door of No Return (2001). I turn to these literary texts as a queer, unconventional, and
imaginative archive of the black Atlantic.5 And the literary texts turn to ocean
waters themselves as an archive, an ever-present, ever-reformulating
record of the unimaginable. Lara and Brand plumb the archival ocean materially, as space that
churns with physical remnants, dis(re)membered bodies of the Middle
Passage, and they plumb it metaphorically, as opaque space to convey the drowned,
disremembered, ebbing and lowing histories of violence and healing in the
African diaspora. “Water overflows with memory,” writes M. Jacqui Alexander, delving into
the Middle Passage in Pedagogies of Crossing. “Emotional memory. Bodily memory. Sacred memory.”6 Developing a
black feminist epistemology to uncover submerged histories — particularly
those stories of Africans’ forced ocean crossings that traditional
historiography cannot validate — Alexander eloquently argues that searchers must explore
outside narrow conceptions of the “factual” to get there. Such explorations
would involve muddying divisions between documented and intuited,
material and metaphoric, past and present so that “who is remembered —
and how — is continually being transformed through a web of interpretive
systems . . . collapsing, ultimately, the demarcation of the prescriptive past,
present, and future of linear time.”7 While Alexander searches out such crossings in Afro-Atlantic
ceremony, Lara and Brand explore similarly fluid embodied-imaginary, historical-contemporary spaces through the literal and
figurative passages of their historical fictions. The subaltern can speak in submarine space, but
it is hard to hear her or his underwater voice, whispering (as Brand writes) a
thousand secrets that at once wash closer and remain opaque, resisting
closure.
THUS WE ADVOCATE A QUEERING OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
The Atlantic and the Middle passage represent concrete maritime space rather
than conceptual principles for remapping blackness- neither should be
relegated to the position of a PHANTOM METAPHOR.
Tinsley ‘8 (Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf) DB
In the past fifteen years postcolonial studies effected sea changes in
scholarly images of the global south, smashing and wearing away
essentialist conceptions of race and nationality with the insistent pounding
force of ocean waters. Rigorously theorizing identities that have always
already been in lux and rethinking black “insularity” from England and Manhattan to
Martinique and Cuba, imaginative captains of Atlantic and Caribbean studies have called
prominently on oceanic metaphors. Their conceptual geographies figure
oceans and seas as a presence that is history, a history that is present. In the
watershed The Black Atlantic, Gilroy evokes the Atlantic as the trope through
which he imagines the emergence of black modernities. A past of Atlantic
crossings underpins his engagement with contemporary multiracial Britain, where the black
in the Union Jack is no novelty introduced by recent immigrants but a continuation of centuries
of transoceanic interchanges. Calling on the ship as the first image of this
black Atlantic, Gilroy begins by stipulating that ships and oceans are not
merely abstract figures but “cultural and political units” that “refer us back
to the middle passage, to the half- remembered micro politics of the slave
trade.”8 He underscores that seminal African diaspora figures like Olaudah Equiano,
Frederick Douglass, Robert Wedder- burn, and Crispus Attucks worked with and as sailors (why omit Harriet
Jacobs, Mary Seacole, and other sailing women?), and notes that the physical mobility enabled
by the ocean was fundamental to their intellectual motility. Yet while many
of these masculine sailor-intellectuals resurface in Gilroy’s later discussions,
the history of their sea voyages does not. Both ships and the Atlantic itself —
as concrete maritime space rather than conceptual principle for remapping
blackness — drop out of his text immediately after this paragraph. Neither the Middle
Passage nor the Atlantic appear in the index, remaining phantom metaphors
rather than concrete historical presences. Gilroy’s ghost ships and dark
waters traverse five memorable pages of his introduction, then slip into nowhereness.
2NC – Backlines
Aesthetics – Anti-Blackness
Ships were the living means by which the points within that Atlantic world were
joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in
between the fixed places that they connected. . . . For all these reasons, the
ship is the first of the novel chronotypes pre supposed by my attempts to
rethink modernity versus the history of the black Atlantic. — Paul Gilroy, The
Black Atlantic
Water is the first thing in my imagination. Over the reaches of the eyes at
Guaya when I was a little girl, I knew that there was still more water. All
beginning in water, all ending in water. Turquoise, aquamarine, deep green,
deep blue, ink blue, navy, blue-black cerulean water. . . . Water is the first thing
in my memory. The sea sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the
same time. In the daytime it was indistinguishable to me from air. . . . The same
substance that carried voices or smells, music or emotion. — Dionne Brand, A
Map to the Door of No Return
I, and my lesbian sisters and gay brothers . . . are not a new fashion. . . . We
return to the sea and the shores and once upon a time, which transposes into
this time, which it always was. . . . the past simultaneously forever embedded
in the present, in the pain and inevitable horrors confronted by conscientious
unblinking memory, in the tragedies and occasional triumphs of history always
raveled by so much needless suffering, by the unbearable human misery that
we must not, for our collective sakes and the continued growth of this body we
call “humanity,” ever be denied. – Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now:
Imagination and Dissent
And larger and larger and ever larger than me, O sea: water: waves and foam. .
. . How the sea would take I and wrap I deep in it. How it would drown I, mash I
up, wash I into bits. . . . And so I does say now that I know the sea this same sea
like I does know the back of me hand, says I: these currents, these waves, these
foams. . . . Let this sea not take I, but let it talk to I. Let it sing. The sea, the sea.
Yes, water. Waves. Wetness, poundsurf, that I does love. — Thomas Glave,
Words to Our Now
Alt Solvency – Anti-Blackness
The alternative is to embrace La Mar, to embrace the queer slave relationships
formed on the oceans and to reunite the stories of black suffering back to their
source: THE OCEAN
Tinsley ‘8 (Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf) DB
La Mar is the black Atlantic in iridescent lambí (conch), embodied and queer. This
figure that eclipses moon and stars and brings women sweet water and love is the novel’s most eroticized
character — a material body who whispers in Micaela’s ear, whose waters
she enters, whose depths she longs to explore, whose sexuality is neither
overexposed nor hidden. I see her as an image of the queer black Atlantic not primarily
because she arouses the sensuality of another femi- nine character, though, nor even because her appearance to Micaela
performs a femme desire that needs no masculinist gaze (à la Benítez-Rojo) to validate its apparition. Instead La Mar’s
queerness churns silverly in her overlow, in the sea- like capacity to desire
beyond the brutality of history, nationality, enslavement, and immigration
that she models for drowned shipmates and endangered yola- mates.
Neither disembodied metaphor nor oozing wound, her fluid desire becomes
a resistant, creative praxis that, as Brand describes diasporic art, experiments with being
“celebratory, even with the horrible,” lowing together unexpected erotic
linkages even, especially, in spaces of global violence and inequity. 27 No matter
what devastation she traverses La Mar keeps desiring, and this is the queer feeling that metaphorically and
materially connects her to African diaspora immigrants past and present. La Mar as she appears here is not
only a mirror for black Atlantic queerness; she is a black Atlantic that
mirrors queerly. Her song creates figures of comparison where terms are
not equated but rather diffracted and recomposed, reflected in a broken
mirror whose fractures are part of their meaning-creation. Let me point to two examples
of “mis-mirrored” terms in this passage: languages (Spanish/English) and couples (yolabound/shipwrecked). In the second
paragraph a centered, italicized Spanish-language poem — whose distinct visual arrangement recalls the vêvés (figures drawn
on the ground in Voudoun ceremonies) that La Mar sings of — interrupts standard English prose; although the next
paragraph offers an indirect, still bilingual translation (“Amor, I long for your kisses”), this translation remains notably inexact.
Amplifying this chain of repetition with difference, the words of the poem are then revealed to be “really” spoken in the
drowned slaves’ unrepresentable “languages that escaped the trappings of
sound”: instead of speaking two languages that mirror each other, La Mar’s song contains three
intertwined yet unequatable lenguas, proliferating and connecting across difference with each translation. Similarly, the
star-eyed lovers at the bottom of the sea — those thrown overboard during
the Middle Passage without their presence being definitively liquidated — do
“twin” sea-crossing lovers Miriam and Micaela, but also do not. Miriam and Micaela remain on the waters’ surface while the
iron- clad lovers remain submerged and the love of the former helps them stay afloat while the amor of the latter comforts
them in their sinking. The present repeats the past with a difference, and the
spectacular figure of La Mar that joins them appears as the surplus — the
overflow, the temporal and cultural gap that cannot be dissolved by their
connection. La Mar whispers this in our ears, too: in queer diasporic
imagining, the gap — the material difference — always matters and must be
part of any figuration that makes meaningful connection possible. The
maritime metaphors of Gilroy and Benítez-Rojo move toward a kind of closure, the
Atlantic transmuting into a horizon of hybridity and the cunnic Caribbean healing orgasmically
in order to become the vehicles these authors desire for diasporic and regional identities. Yet such
closure is
made possible only by washing over important materialities and
multiplicities in visions of diaspora and region. La Mar’s unclosable,
untranslatable language of beauty and pain churns differently, crossing
instead in turbulent, excessive currents of diffracting meanings. As Micaela floats
literally suspended in water between Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, La Mar’s queer mirroring
provides a medium for conceiving what it means for diasporic Africans to
emerge from her waters “whole and broken”: brutalized and feeling,
connected to the past and separate from it, divided from other diasporic
migrants and linked to them. To think the black queer Atlantic, not only
must its metaphors be mate- rially informed; they must be internally
discontinuous, allowing for differences and inequalities between situated
subjects that are always already part of both diaspora and queerness. They
must creatively figure what Rinaldo Walcott imag- ines as “a rethinking of community that
might allow for different ways of coher- ing into some form of recognizable
political entity . . . [where] we must confront singularities without the
willed effort to make them cohere into oneness; we must struggle to make a
community of singularities.”28 The black Atlantic is not just any ocean, and
what is queer about its fluid amor is that it is always churning, always
different even from itself.
Queer theory gains its roots from the suffering of enslaved people on their
voyages across the ocean. Any discussion of queer theory is a discussion of
race. The queer movement is even based off of the geography of the black
Caribbean. They are No single islands, but an archipelago of island chains, all
linked together and united, just as the different bodies that encompass the
queer community are all intertwined but separate.
Tinsley ‘8 (Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf) DB
And in the last fifteen years queer
theory has harnessed the repetitive, unpredictable
energy of currents, waves, and foam to smash and wash into bits many I’s
— from the gendered self to the sexed body, from heterocentric feminist
speech to homonormative gay discourse. In this field where groundlessness
is celebrated, writers also explicitly or implicitly rely on metaphors of
fluidity, which provide an undercurrent for expanding formulations of
gender and sexual mobility. Judith Butler’s praise of the resistant power of drag’s fluid genders and
sexualities in the pivotal Gender Trouble is echoed by many a queer theoretical text: “Perpetual displacement
constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to
resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives
hegemonic culture and its critics of the right to claim naturalized or
essentialist gender identities.”29 This proliferation multiplies the genders
and sexualities explored by queer theory beyond women and men, gay and
straight. They soon include, as Eve Sedgwick puts it, “pushy femmes, radical faeries,
fantasists, drags, clones, leather folk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or
feminist men, masturbators, bull- daggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch
bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes.”30 No deviant is a
desert isle here, but part of an archipelago rushed together by a common
sea of queerness. Does this queer sea have a color, though? As the cascading, un-color-coded
sentences of Butler and Sedgwick suggest, in the early 1990s prominent queer theorists
denaturalized conventional gender and sexuality while renaturalizing global
northernness and unmarked whiteness, initially unreferenced as if they
were as neutral as fresh water. In both theorists’ early genderscapes, the
bodies and selves rendered fluid are first and foremost gendered and
sexualized, only faintly marked by other locations — only secondarily
racialized, nationalized, classed. When Butler acknowledges that codes of (presumably white) racial
purity undergird the gender norms disturbed in her initial consideration of “fluidity of identities,” she does so belatedly and
between parentheses (as part of a long list of clarifications to her discussion of drag in the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble).31
Sedgwick’s list, somewhat differently, momentarily parts the waves of queer theory’s uncommented whiteness as race fades in
subtly with the African American – associated terms bulldagger and Snap! queen. Not only is this faint
racialization limited to the black-white landscape of the contemporary
global north, keeping terms like mahu, mati, tomboy, tongzhi unlistable, but
the particularities of this possible racialization remain as unspeciied as the
color of the leather favored by “leather folk” or the jacket cut of the “ladies
in tuxedoes.” The list’s sheer heterogeneity sweeps the bulldagger’s racial
particularities into the same washing currents as the butch bottom’s sexual
particularities. These queer theorists are innovative, rigorous scholars whose
work focuses on a predominantly white global north but who do — often in
introductions — acknowledge how racialization intersects the construction
and deconstruc- tion of ossiied genders and sexualities. Shortly after her list in
Tendencies’ introduction, Sedgwick contends that “a lot of the most exciting recent work
around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be
subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity,
postcolonial national- ity criss-cross with these and other identityconstituting, identity-fracturing dis- courses.”32 This is not her work in a text that goes on to
deftly engage Jane Aus- ten and Sigmund Freud, but she does gesture toward the importance of “other” scholars taking it up.
Similarly, in the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Gender Trouble, Butler remarks that “racial
presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse on gender in ways that
need to be made explicit” and concedes that if she rewrote the book she would include a discussion of
racialized sexuality. In thinking through performativity and race, she suggests that “the
question to ask is not whether the theory of performativity is transposable
onto race, but what happens to the theory when it tries to come to grips
with race.”33 But of course there is not just one question to ask of the meeting point between Butler’s theory and race,
and those I would pose would be different still. Namely, what happens when queer theories start with explicit formulations of
racialized sexuality and sexualized race, rather than add them in after theories like performativity have already been
elaborated? How does this change in point of departure change the tidal pattern of queer theory? How might it shift the field’s
dominant metaphors, decentering performativity’s stages and unearthing other topoi? “Metaphors lose their
metaphoricity as they congeal through time into concepts,” Butler aptly remarks in this
preface. And in a rare autobiographical moment, the short text offers one image of literal liquidity that informs the metaphoric
fluidity (threatening to congeal into a concept) in this foundational text of queer theory. Just after her discussion of
performativity, Butler provides an insight into the literal starting place for Gender Trouble. Explaining how her involvement in
lesbian and gay politics on the East Coast of the United States informed her writing of this academic text, she recounts: “At the
same time that I was ensconced in the academy, I was also living a life outside those walls, and though Gender Trouble is an
academic book, it began, for me, with a crossing-over, sitting on Rehoboth Beach, wondering whether I could link the different
sides of my life.”34 Meaning “place for all,” Rehoboth is an Atlantic resort town that boasts beautiful, Caribbean – bright white
sand beaches and has become one of the Northeast’s premier gay and lesbian summer getaways. As Butler suggests, it is
situated at a crosscurrent: “Water, water everywhere. . . . Bounded on the east by the mighty Atlantic Ocean, and on the west
by Rehoboth Bay and Indian River Bay,” gushes a promotional Web site.35 This crosscurrent has a black Atlantic history, from
the eighteenth-century docking of slave ships in Delaware’s harbors to a maritime version of the underground railroad that
passed through the state’s waters in the nineteenth century. But by the late twentieth century that history had been largely
washed out of sight. Over 98 percent of the city’s population is now white and, as Alexs Pate’s West of Rehoboth depicts,
people of color remain semi-invisible, concentrated in segregated neighborhoods.36 So when Butler sits at the “crossing- over”
of Rehoboth Beach, the difference that prominently marked its shores would be that of sexuality — the beach-combing gay and
lesbian tourists who make the resort what it is, a site of play and mobility for sexual rather than racial “others.” Now, if this is
where one of queer theory’s most influential texts emerged and a site that (Butler suggests) has metaphoric valences, I want to
extend that metaphor by saying: frequently, prominent queer theorists continue to work from Rehoboth Beach. This is an
important place from which to work, certainly, a site steeped in possibilities for meaningful confluences between thinking
sexuality and thinking race. But theorists have a tendency to wait (figuratively) for
queers of color to arrive on Rehoboth’s shores in the hopes that they will join the
sexuality- centered signifying games already set up . . . in the hopes they
will take up theories of performativity and rework them through race, for
example. And they wait rather than seriously engage how some of queer
theory’s fundamental prem- ises — including its emphasis on abstract rather
than concrete crossings-over, its references to places like Rehoboth without engagement with their
geographic and cultural specificity — need to change in order to make possible deeply
productive meetings between sexuality and race. That is, they welcome the
appearance of queer of color scholarship without rigorously confronting the
exclusionary prac- tices that marginalize queer global southern experiences.
To become an expan- sively decolonizing practice, queer theory must adjust
its vision to see what has been submerged in the process of unmarking
whiteness and global northernness: the black Atlantic, New England Bay, and Indian River
of queer crossings-over, the intersecting beach topoi of slavery and
liberation, coerced work and unconventional play, unmarked whiteness and
invisible blackness, flesh exposed for vacation and for auction. Rehoboth’s layered
present and past exemplifies the need to engage specific, situated histories and the difference they make. Water is
only literally transparent, and the imagination of fluidity inspired by the Rehoboth
or the San Francisco bays may not be the same as that inspired by the
southern Atlantic or the eastern Caribbean. Nor may its metaphorics be as playful as
waves of punk bands, snap! queens, butch bottoms. . . . Just as travel does
not offer the same image of freedom to the gay undocumented immigrant
that it does to the queer cosmopolitan, conceptualizations of the fluid
change when we approach islands where the sea simultaneously carries the
violent history of the Middle Passage, a present of yolas and tourist cruises,
and a possible future of interisland connections.
La Mar embraces all. The ocean speaks many languages. Black queer theory is
not an exclusive argument. We must continue finding intersections between
black suffering and queer theory with other forms of oppression to continue
growing like an ocean.
Tinsley ‘8 (Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf) DB
The ocean does speak many languages, and I am only a novice linguist.
So I have tried to present academic writing that is fluid, that in some way explores
what it would mean to perform the oceanness that it thematizes. I have tried to
broach more whispered secrets than I could draw out and raise more questions than
can be answered, to pick apart metaphors, put them together without closure. At
this point, then, I do not want to conclude or pretend to. Instead, I want to end with
thoughts on some of the challenges that the Atlantic offers the border waters of
African diaspora, queer, and queer African diaspora studies. The longnavigated Atlantic tells us that, like Brand’s resurrection of the
marooned, queer Africana studies must explore what it means
to conceive our field historically and materially. Like Lara and Brand,
as we navigate the postmodern we must look for the fissures
that show how the anti- and ante-modern continue to conigure
black queer broken-and-wholeness. At the same time, the
meaningfully multiblued Atlantic tells us that we must continue
to navigate our field metaphorically. As Frantz Fanon contended in The
Wretched of the Earth, metaphors provide conceptual bridges
between the lived and the possible that use language queerly
to map other roads of becoming. My point is never that we should strip
theory of watery metaphors but that we should return to the materiality
of water to make its metaphors mean more complexly, shaking
off settling into frozen figures. The territory-less Atlantic also
tells us that, like the song between Micaela and la Mar, black queer studies
must speak transnationally. When black becomes only Afri- can
American, black queer theory becomes insular; as the
crosscurrents between Atlantic and Caribbean, Atlantic and
Mediterranean, Atlantic and Indian Ocean are richest in marine
life, so they will be richest in depth of theorizing.52 Most
simply, our challenge is to be like the ocean: spreading
outward, running through bays and fingers, while remaining
heavy, stinging, a force against our hands.
AT: Perm (Anti-Blackness)
Hegemonic spaces and entities attempt to destroy these voices and stories of
suffering embodied and told by the lapping waves. They do this through their
organized development and exploration of La Mar and her many mystic
beauties. These mute the crying and the moans and the screams of the slave
ships.
Tinsley ‘8 (Dept of English, African American and African Studies @ University of Minnesota
2k8
Omise’eke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14, Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.pdf) DB
Also composed at the turn of the century, Brand’s Map to the Door of No Return charts space to explore these complexities.
The thirty-year literary career of this Trinidadian-born, Toronto-resident poet, novelist, essayist, filmmaker, and activist
narrates continual migration among Atlantic and Caribbean seascapes, crossings-over that connect sites like Delaware’s
Rehoboth or Toronto’s Bathurst to Cuba’s Santiago and Trinidad’s Blanchisseuse. The chief landing points of her work
transmigrate between Grenada, then Trinidad, now Ontario. Brand’s writing in the 1980s is propelled, haunted by her vision of
the Grenadan shore stormed by U.S. troops in 1983, walking distance from the office where she worked as an information
officer for the People’s Development Agency under the New Jewel government. Her work returns again and again to waters
that absorbed the bloodshed of this invasion, combing Caribbean beaches to attempt to put many sides of her political life
together: tidal scenes of revolutionary hope, invasion, betrayal, death, eroti- cism, and possibility. These last wash in
prominently when, in 1990 — the same year that Gender Troubl e and Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet revolutionized
sexuality studies — Brand publishes No Language Is Neutral. This award-winning collection of poems is heralded by Michelle
Cliff as the first anglophone Caribbean text to explore fully love between women in a West Indian setting, the black queer
Atlantic of Trinidad’s north coast. 37 But, resistant to being caught in the nostalgia of a return to her native land, by the late
1990s Brand’s geographic and thematic focus moves yet again to the shores of Lake Ontario, where she now lives in the sea of
West Indian and other diasporics that has become Toronto. This northern migration further complicates the crossed currents
she witnesses, as the Canada cycle reflects gathering discomfort with writing from any identity — whether revolutionary,
activist, black, lesbian, or otherwise. As she explains in an interview, “The book is a map . . . [to] a new kind of identity and
existence” that challenges isolated, nationally or otherwise bounded constructions of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identity.
Its trajectory answers her post-Grenada, post-homeland question: “So now, who am I? I really want to think about that. My
objections lie with the people who hang onto what they call identities for the most awful reasons, and those are the reasons of
exclusion. I’m trying to be very careful how I say it. I don’t want to say that we don’t have a history, but what we hold onto has
to be part of a much larger terrain.”38 As it explores this terrain, her Map does not emerge as a text as immediately given to
queer reading as either Gender Trouble or No Language Is Neutral. Yet its oceanography queers many
crossings-over, and indeed Brand once generously thanked me for reading “that book that way.”39 Instead of
foregrounding fluxes of gender or sexuality this work rushes into larger bodies, larger openings. The text is a tactile,
shifting oceanography of African diaspora experience imagined at an
unremitting intersection between maritime materialities and metaphors.
This intersection is physically dominated by the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean
Sea, those waters from which blacks emerge whole and broken, and
psychically dominated by the Door of No Return, the “real, imaginary, and imagined”
portal through which Africans left the continent in slave ships’ holds. 40 Brand’s
Map through the “sea in between” is fluidly genred writing that moves between childhood memories and family stories, ships’
logs and colonial maritime chronicles, and contemporary echoes of the slave trade in the conflux of immigrants from the
Caribbean, North America, Europe, and Africa that form their own human sea in Toronto.41 Its creative project is one Brand
identifies as always underway in diaspora: to record disruptions that continue on the other side of the door
and “reclaim the black body from that domesticated, captive, open space” it
has become.42 This project is fundamentally queer, in a black Atlantic,
crosscurrents way. Rather than eroticize individual bodies, it offers what Chela
Sandoval calls a “social erotics”: a compass that traces historical linkages that
were never sup- posed to be visible, remembers connections that counteract
imperial desires for global southern disaggregation, and puts together the
fragmented experiences of those whose lives, as Butler writes, were never
supposed to “qualify as the ‘human’ and the ‘livable.’ ”43 Like the texts of Butler and
Sedgwick, Brand’s work also generates lists that crash onto her pages like waves — but join unexpected terms in
concatenations that recall the chains of slave ships more than those of sexual play. Toward the end of her Map, Brand imagines
the continued haunting of the black Atlan- tic by those literally and figuratively drowned in the Middle Passage, those she calls
the marooned of the diaspora. For these marooned she writes a ruttier: which is, she explains, “a long poem
containing navigational instructions which sailors learned by heart . . . the
routes and tides, the stars and maybe the taste and flavour of the waters,
the coolness, the saltiness; all for finding one’s way at sea.”44 Reconfiguring these
colonial maritime lists, her ruttier traces how misdirections become the way for diasporic
Africans — always painfully, always partially. She describes the marooned as
unsexed, irreducibly opaque figures who at once refuse to stay submerged and
refuse to appear in clearly recognizable bodies. Like many ghosts, their
bodies seemed waterlogged, distorted beyond naturalizable gender and
other identities: Desolation castaway, abandoned in the world. They was, is,
wandered, wanders as spirits who dead cut, banished, seclude, refuse, shut
the door, derelict, relinquished, apart. . . . And it doesn’t matter where in
the world, this spirit is no citizen, is no national, no one who is christened,
no sex, this spirit is washed of all this lading, bag and baggage , jhaji bundle,
georgie bindle, lock stock, knapsack, and barrel, and only holds its own weight
which is nothing, which is memoryless and tough with remembrances,
heavy with lightness, aching with grins.45 “This spirit . . . is no sex”; this
spirit is a singular, plural, and genderless they that “was, is,” in a
grammatical unmarking that parallels the absence of gender in Creole third-person
pronouns. This genderlessness is perhaps an ocean reflection of the negative
equality of sexes experienced in plantation labor that brutalized men and
women without discrimination — a gender queerness that calls into question facile linkages between gender trouble and liberation. But more than
this, the fluid identities of Brand’s black queer Atlantic simultaneously efface
gender and nationality, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, their maroons “no
citizen, no national, no one christened, no sex.” This is a lyric litany of
negatives whose rhythmic, sonoric, and conceptual linkages speak a crosscurrent of dissolved and reconfigured black selfhoods . . . a tide where
woman- hood, economic status, motherhood, Yorubaness, (for example) are all
disrupted from previous significations at the same time — black queer time.
This kind of ongoing, multiple black Atlantic resignification is thematized
and performed through these lists where words jostle against each other
unexpectedly, breaking open and reconfiguring meanings. The conventional
baggage of language is shuffled and shed as the spirit is washed of “bag
and baggage, jhaji bundle, geor- gie bindle, lock stock, knapsack, and barrel.” At
the end of this washing, maroons’ sexless and otherwise unmarked bodies
emerge as the legacy of geographically and historically specific waters, the
Atlantic of the Middle Passage. Their brown bodies are gender fluid not
because they choose parodic proliferations but because they have been
“washed of all this lading, bag and baggage” by a social liquidation that is
not the willful or playful fluidity of Butler’s drag queens and Sedg- wick’s butch
bottoms. I am compelled by Butler’s growing insistence, from the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble to the engaging
Undoing Gender, that gender theory should address more material concerns — issues
of survival for the trans- gendered and others whose “unintelligible” bodies
threaten their very lives.46 But Brand’s embodied images of the black queer Atlantic
remind us that such survival is not a concern that can be reduced to the
present, that black gender queers are always already surviving a past of
multiple, intersecting violences. The specificity of these waters, these
images, this literary language is at once a map to the door of no return and a map to a
black queer alternative to canonical gender theory. Yet the route of unReturn is not only one of violence; it is also one of queer erotics. Just before the
ruttier for the marooned, Brand includes another kind of ruttier titled “Arriving at Desire.” But just as Brand’s ruttier for the
marooned never goes in expected directions, the desire she charts here never becomes sexual or even interpersonal. After a
description of childhood reading experiences that introduced her to desires both political and erotic, the narrator recounts
how she came to write her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon. Like Butler on Rehoboth Beach, Brand conceived her text
at a crossing-over between land and water, between experience of the real and vision of the (im)possible. Her inspi- ration
came while contemplating maritime artifacts in a Port of Spain museum overlooking the sea, and her converging descriptions
of the museum’s inside and outside become the Map’s most erotic description: As you crest the hill, there is the
ocean, the Atlantic, and there a fresh wide breeze relieving the deep lush of heat. From atop this hill you can see
over the whole town. Huge black cannons overlook the ocean, the har- bour, and the town’s perimeter. If you look right, if your
eyes could round the point, you would see the Atlantic and the Caribbean in a wet blue embrace. If
you come here at night you will surprise lovers, naked or cloth- ing askew, groping hurriedly or dangerously languorous,
draped against the black gleaming cannons of George III.47 Before we ever come to these lovers, Brand at once gestures
toward and leaves opaque two queer desires: the Atlantic’s desire for the Caribbean it meets in
a wet blue embrace, and the narrator’s desire for the ocean she describes so erotically. This desire is
queerly gendered, since ocean, sea, and Brand — rolling and writing in opposition to the black
cannons — would all normatively be feminized. It is also queer in a black Atlantic
way, since it ascribes feeling to bodies — of water and of African females —
that, in colonizers’ and slave traders’ maps of the world, were never
supposed to feel. The queerness of this sensuality is the drive Brand describes two paragraphs
earlier: the diasporic search to “put the senses back together again,” a sensual re-membering that George III’s cannons, the
policing of sea and of diasporic bodies, cannot stop.48
What puts together Atlantic and Caribbean, viewers and lovers in this passage is another list, a string of conditionals: “If you
look . . . if your eyes could round . . . you would see. . . . If you come . . . you will surprise.” Like the ruttier’s litany of negatives,
this conjunction of if . . . would, if . . . will traces some complexities of the black queer time the Map moves through. The
embrace of Atlantic and Caribbean, of lovers in front of cannons, is not written as a
present reality that narrator or readers can see but as past and future
possibilities they could see if and when their consciousness and body move
creatively to “find one’s way at sea,” to arrive at a desire — for sentient
pasts, livable futures — to which there are no ready maps. This desire
promises to emerge at a site of oceanographic and historical uncertainty
and violence that the reader’s eyes cannot quite reach (“if your eyes could round the
point” you would see it, but can they?): the harbor where Atlantic meets Caribbean, where
ships docked after a Middle Passage that did not end. Neither Atlantic nor
Caribbean yet both, this unseen site is one where diaspora’s radical blurring
can also harbor new routes to being, routes neither shielded nor boxed in by
doors of hegemonic space, time, and identity. It is the space for rewiring
the senses that Alexander calls for, a crossroads/crosscurrents of “expansive memory
refusing to be housed in any single place, bound by the limits of time,
enclosed within the outlines of a map, encased in the physicality of the
body, or imprisoned as exhibit in a museum.”49 One of Butler’s important observations in
Gender Trouble is that all subjects put together fictionally solid subjectivities from
fluid, unstable experiences, and Brand’s Map supports this idea. Earlier in the text she observes, “There
are ways of constructing the world — that is, of putting it together each
morning, what it should look like piece by piece. . . . Before that everything
is liquid, ubiquitous and mute. We accumulate information over our lives
which bring various things into solidity, into view.”50 What proves innovative in Brand’s
black queer Atlantic liquidity is how insistently she weaves these explorations of
figurative fluidity together with poignant material engagements with the
waters that shape raced, nationalized, classed, gendered, and sexualized
selves in different moments and sites of diaspora. Understanding the
particularity of the liquids that we put together daily is the project of A Map to the Door of
No Return, a project that allows the marooned of the diaspora another kind of queer
coupling: the possibility of putting the world together and putting the
senses back together at the same time. As Wekker writes of her search for stories of
women’s sexuality in the African diaspora, finding these stories involves collecting
the curving, chipped, conch shell – like “pieces of [black women’s]
conceptions of being human” that have been dispersed in the waters of
forced transatlantic migrations and that individuals and commu- nities
rearrange in creatively transculturated ways.51 The key to making black
queer sense of such self-pieces is not turning to race-, class-, or
geographically unmarked models of sexuality and humanity — based in the European
Enlightenment philosophy that justified slavery in the first place — but tracing as carefully as possible
the particular, specific, always marked contours, the contested beachscapes
of African diaspora histories of gender and sexuality. So in the black queer
time and place of the door of no return, fluid desire is neither purely
metaphor nor purely luxury. Instead — like the blue embrace of two bodies
of water — its connections and crosscurrents look to speak through and
beyond the washed lading, the multiply effaced identities of the Middle
Passage. Finally, Brand’s ruttiers chart how the marooned come to sail as maroons, continually stealing back the space
where they live. This is my ocean, but it is speaking another language, since its accent changes around different islands —
Derek Walcott, Midsummer
AT: Perm (Queer Eco)
STARTING POINT IS KEY -- The perm is the exact type of heteronormative
silencing that we are critiquing. The invisibility of normative ideology that
sustains the 1AC. SIMPLY ADDING QUEERING BRACKETS THE QUEER BODY
THAT DOES NOT SHIFT CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS OR ACHIEVE MEANINGFUL
PEDAGOGICAL BENEFITS.
Winans 06, associate professor of English at Susquehanna University
Amy E., Pedagogy 6.1 (2006) 103-122 Queering Pedagogy in the English Classroom: Engaging
with
the Places Where Thinking Stops. AJM
What I am proposing in this essay is not simply that we should discuss sexual orientation in our
classrooms, although I believe that we should. Simply adding sexual orientation to the list of
issues that we explore in our classes is insufficient for reasons that many scholars of
multiculturalism have discussed. As Urvashi Vaid (1995), E. Shelley Reid (2004), and others have
argued, simply adding materials about "the other" does not challenge our pedagogy or
conceptual framework in meaningful ways; the additive approach of inclusivity or celebration
of difference tends to leave dominant cultural assumptions and their complex relationships to
power unexamined. Simply put, changing the content of our classes does not necessarily impact
our pedagogy. As Harriet Malinowitz (1995: 252–53) explains, "It is possible to 'include' new
discourses and yet simultaneously deny the tensions that exist around their proximity and
their competing claims for territorial definition. Naming and engaging with these tensions is
what sparks the chemical reaction that ineluctably queers the brew." It is this process of
"queer[ing] the brew" that merits further exploration in our classrooms.
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS A UNIQUE METHODOLOGY THAT RESITUATES THE CATEGORY OF THE
NATURAL -- IF WE WIN THIS IS A PREREQUISITE THEN YOU CANNOT VOTE ON THE PERM
BECAUSE THE DEBATE IS A QUESTION OF METHOD
MORTIMER-SANDILANDS
Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture at York University
2k5
Catriona (Cate)- Her work lies at the intersections of queer and feminist theory, environmental philosophy and political theory,
and cultural studies. She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minnesota, 1999), the coeditor (with Rebecca Raglon and Melody Hessing) of This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment (UBC, 2004), and is
working on a manuscript called Pastoral Traditions, Sexual Subversions: Lesbian Histories of Nature Writing; “Unatural Passions?:
Notes Toward a Queer Ecology”; INVISIBLE CULTURE, An electronic journal for visual culture, Issue 9;
https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/sandilands.html
Returning rather abruptly to main point of this essay, ecofeminism and environmental justice
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. But what does an analysis of environmental issues grounded in a queer
perspective reveal? What does it mean to think about nature as a site in which the social relations of sexuality are played out,
and vice versa? I will approach these questions in three, related ways. First, I will explore some of the historical
connections that have developed between institutions of sexuality and
institutions of nature. We can see that modern understandings of sexuality
are deeply influenced by historically specific ideas of nature, perhaps most
obviously in the classification of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and
queer bodies as, somehow, unnatural. Connected to this conceptual history
is a second line of exploration: we can see that many modern formations of
natural space – including parks and other designated nature spaces – are organized by prevalent
assumptions about sexuality, and especially a move
to institutionalize heterosexuality by linking it to particular environmental
practices. Finally, I will discuss how a queer ecological project might proceed
by challenging these problematic links between the power relations of
sexuality and nature. Queers have, in a variety of ways, challenged the
destructive pairing of heterosexuality and nature: by developing "reverse
discourses" oriented to challenging dominant understandings of our
“unnatural passions”; by borrowing ecological thinking to develop radically
transformative gay and lesbian politics; and, like Grover, by taking elements of
queer experience to construct an alternative environmental perspective.
THE NOTION OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS CONTAINED WITHIN THE CONCEPTS OF
"EXPLORATION" AND "DEVELOPMENT" -- THIS NOTION OF LINEAR AND HOMOGENOUS
TEMPORALITY DEFINES IDENTITY IN RELATIONSHIP TO NATIONALITY THAT PRECLUDES THE
FORMATION OF NON-NORMATIVE SUBJECTS
Ferguson, associate professor of American Studies at Minnesota, 2007 p. MUSE
(Roderick, “Theorizing Queer Temporalities” in GLQ 13.2-3)
Benjamin is an important landmark for me, at least in trying to answer this question. I'm
thinking especially of "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "The concept of the historical
progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a
homogeneous, empty time."3 I return to this argument to underline the importance of
connecting the question of time to the question of space, especially space as an entity that
nations and nationalisms have tried to bring into national and nationalist time. If we apply
Benjamin's arguments to the history of oppositional practices and movements—Marxism,
revolutionary nationalism, feminism—we can see it as a powerful warning about the
precariousness of radical uses of time. Hoang's remarks about a "homonormative time line," for
instance, caution us not to have faith in vanguardist conceptions of time. Recruiting previously
excluded subjects into a nationalist regimen can be a way of using time to unmake forms of
nonnationalist relationality. I think one of the encouraging aspects of this discussion, as Chris
and Carolyn are suggesting, is the refusal of canonical texts of history: history as origin narrative
and history as outside textuality, to invoke Lee's arguments. At the same time, several of us
seem to acknowledge that disidentifying with hegemonic texts of history does not mean the
absolute dismissal of historical projects. The deconstructive turn was very much about the
radical critique of the text of history in an effort to produce alternative texts. There's reason to
extend and resuscitate that aspect of deconstruction.
Queer theory must be at the forefront of thought to have solvency. This means that the
permutation destroys alt solvency. The impact to this is education. To change the classroom
education system, queer research must be first.
Hill ‘4
Robert J, University of Georgia at Athens, Activism as Practice: Some Queer Considerations from New Directions for
Adult and Considering Education, 85-94, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ace.141/pdf
Life at the contact zone of theory and activism manifests itself in numerous expressions. Some
of the ways I deploy my
privileged position to further critical queer consciousness include the following. Queering
Research. My research agenda explores processes and practices that try to push life's complex
gender constructions--what it means to be female, what it means to be male, or what it
means to be simultaneously neither or both-into the so-called normal patterns of U.S. culture. To do so is to
contest the easy dualities of gender, and to interrogate the too easy answers with respect to
the traditional binaries of male-female, men-women, gay-straight. Instead, a research-to-practice scheme
must lead to the investigation of power relations and contest the social, political, economic,
historical, and cultural contexts that define and sustain so-called normal sexuality, sexual
orientation, and gender expression or identity. This is another example of queer work as a
way to translate marginalized experiences and recognize the value of the knowledge found
there. As a result I find myself engaged in research that assists transsexuals (Hill, 2000, 2002), sex workers, and other sexual
nonconformists. Queering Teaching. Differences are reflected in the backgrounds that students
bring to learning situations (Moll, Tapia, and Whitmore, 1993). Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) have shown that
students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. Cultural
and religious differences affect students' comfort level, which in turn has an impact on
learning. Paulo Freire (Freire and Macedo, 1987, p. 127) advocates that educators should try to "live part of
their dreams within their educational space." Doing queer cultural work at the crossing point
of theory and activism as practice necessitates bringing it into the classroom. The confluence
of theory and activism becomes a part of classroom performance in order to offer students
new ways of seeing and being in the world. Activism also promotes ongoing dialogue among
faculty, administrators, and higher education policymakers. Facilitating adult learning includes exposing
students attachments to heteronormativity, homophobia, and heterosexual privilege. The
confluence of theory and activism as praxis demands that we think critically and teach
subversively.
AT: Queer theory Bad
OUR DIASPORIC APPROACH SOLVES THE ISSUES WITH CONVENTIONAL QUEER
THEORY -- IT KEEPS QUEERING THE QUEER AND ALLOWS FOR EFFECTIVE
CHALLENGE TO IMPERIALIST VIOLENCE
ENG '11 (DAVID, David L. Eng is professor of English, comparative literature, and Asian
American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer
Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (2010) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity
in Asian America (2001). In addition, he is coeditor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of
Mourning (2003), with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (1998), and with Judith
Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz of a special issue of the journal Social Text, "What's Queer
about Queer Studies Now?" (2005). "Queering the Black Atlantic, Queering the Brown Atlantic"
David L. Eng (bio) GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies > Volume 17, Number 1, 2011
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v017/1
7.1.eng.html)
In sum, Gopinath, like Alexander, boldly charts a history of the present in which
heteronormativity and contemporary nationalisms are neither a natural nor an inevitable
result of neoliberal globalization marching across the world. In both books, queer diasporas
place South Asian and Caribbean perspectives at the center of transnational feminism,
postcolonial studies, and critical race theory to consider the numerous ways by which attention
to female sexuality in the global South presents us with histories of the past and present that do
not march to the beat of enlightened liberalism's deafening drums. To the contrary, the field of
queer diasporas provides a compelling account of how a turn to queer circuits of desire might
interrupt the dominant itineraries of globalization and the current ascension of queer
liberalism as one of its regnant effects. Ultimately, it works to keep queer studies queer.
QUEER PERSPECTIVISM RESITUATES OUR RELATIONSHIP TO ECONOMIES OF
VIOLENCE IN A WAY THAT ALLOWS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF NON-IMPERIAL
IDENTITIES -- THE NOTION THAT ECOLOGY IS A PERSPECTIVALLY NEUTRAL
SUBJECT REPRESENTS A VIEW FROM NOWHERE THAT NORMS THE QUEER BODY
WITHIN A VIOLENT FRAME
MORTIMER-SANDILANDS
Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture at York University
2k5
Catriona (Cate)- Her work lies at the intersections of queer and feminist theory, environmental philosophy and political theory,
and cultural studies. She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minnesota, 1999), the coeditor (with Rebecca Raglon and Melody Hessing) of This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment (UBC, 2004), and is
working on a manuscript called Pastoral Traditions, Sexual Subversions: Lesbian Histories of Nature Writing; “Unatural Passions?:
Notes Toward a Queer Ecology”; INVISIBLE CULTURE, An electronic journal for visual culture, Issue 9;
https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/sandilands.html
Queering ecological politics
The final section of this paper turns our attention away from the ways in which sexuality and ecology have been linked as
power relations having a negative (if still productive) influence on both queers and nature, and toward the ways in which a
queer perspective offers us a unique standpoint on resisting these destructive
relations. That said, if I were to judge only from televisions shows like Will and Grace, Queer as Folk, and Queer Eye for
Gay
culture, in the mainstream – which, in all of these shows, means affluent urban white men – is
extraordinarily tied to lifestyle consumerism. As Andil Gosine writes, “gay men, the story goes,
the Straight Guy, I would hardly nominate queers as the world’s best nature stewards. Quite the opposite, in fact:
shop. Urban gay men live in chic condominium apartments, buy a lot of hair and body care products, [and] have great taste in
cars, clothes, and interior design.” 21 Although one might be tempted to celebrate in these shows the general
public’s apparently increased acceptance of queers, I think it is only a very
narrow band of queerness – that portion tied to the fetishistic exchange of
aesthetic commodities – that ends up being at all “acceptable.” Queers are
OK not because they are queer, but because they are exemplary consumers
in a society that judges all people by their ability to consume. Note that working-class
queer folk, lower-income or anti-aesthetic lesbians, and older, sicker, or even HIV+ gay men, are not the ideal subjects of Will
and Grace.
Not only is this band of North American “acceptance” of queer culture thus
very narrow, but the continuing mainstream political process by which
queers strive to be “accepted” in consumer society limits the full scope of
political possibility potential in queer communities. For example, although I would be lying if
I didn’t say that I was moved by Canada’s legalization of same-sex marriage, our pursuit, as queers, for a family form “just like
heterosexual marriage" seems, to me, to blunt the critical potential inherent in the fact that queers have developed alternative
forms of family that do not necessarily replicate all of the problems of legal, nuclear heterosexuality. To quote Tony Kushner,
“it’s entirely conceivable that we will one day live miserably in a thoroughly ravaged world in which lesbians and gay men can
marry and serve openly in the army and that’s it.” 22 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.
While it is true that the hegemonic pairing of heterosexuality and ecology
has had a generally oppressive impact on both queers and nature, the fact is
that queers have also used ideas of nature and natural spaces as sites of
resistance. Perhaps most prominently, many queer writers have pointed to
the fact that there is a long tradition, dating from the Greeks, of a positive and
conscious linkage between same-sex eroticism and rural or wilderness
environments. Broadly part of a “pastoral” literary tradition dating from Theocritus and
Virgil, and continuing through the work of such writers as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, contemporary
gay male writers emphasize that natural settings have been important sites
for the exploration of male homosexuality as a natural practice. Rural
spaces in particular have served, in a wide range of literatures, as places of
freedom for male homoerotic encounters. In addition, because of the
association of nature with ideas of innocence and authenticity, gay male
writers have been able to use pastoral literary conventions as a way of
making an argument for the authenticity of homosexuality. This “homophile
pastoralism,” as literary critic David Shuttleton emphasizes, has not only been used by such writers as
Andre Gide to make political claims for gay equality on the basis of the
naturalness of homosexuality, but has also been used to challenge the very
idea of the naturalness of heterosexuality. 23
Briefly, in his work Corydon: Four Socratic Dialogues, Gide tells a story based on Theocritus’ third century BC poem The Idylls,
in which shepherds not only engage in same-sex love but muse, together, on the mysteries of making love to girls. The young
shepherd is a typical pastoral figure; he is close to nature in his daily work, and is also largely in the company of other young
men, with whom he engages not only in the immediate pleasures of the flesh but also in the reflective dialogue associated with
the young men’s passage from a state of natural, youthful innocence to socialized manhood. What is key, here, is that same-sex
passion is associated with that natural innocence, and opposite-sex eroticism is the thing that needs to be learned in order to
enter the adult social order. What we have, here, is a “reverse discourse” that pairs nature with the homoerotic, and
artificiality with the heteroerotic; against an assumption of natural heterosexuality, Gide actually positions heterosexuality as
a normative practice into which the young shepherds must be disciplined. As Shuttleton writes, “Gide launches a
trangressively counter-intuitive argument that it is this compulsory heterosexuality which is constructed and inauthentic
since it needs to be taught and culturally maintained.” 24
Drawing on a similar tradition, gay men in modern cities have frequently made use of
urban green spaces as sites for both individual sexual contact and
community-oriented activism. Ironically, exactly in the parks that were so
frequently designed to discourage homosexual activity, gay men have found
and created a form of sexual community that, again, pairs nature and
homoeroticism in a positive way. There are at least two important elements to consider. In the first place,
what is significant about public sex in parks is that it is public, meaning that it overtly challenges heteronormative
understandings of what is “appropriate” behavior for public, natural spaces. Here, we must remember that public parks
are disciplinary spaces, in which a very narrow band of activities is sanctioned, practiced, and experienced; only certain kinds
of nature experience are officially allowed. In this context, one can consider public gay sex as a sort ofdemocratization of
natural space, in which different communities can experience the park in their own ways, and in which a wider range of
natural experiences thus comes to be possible. As one frequenter of public parks in Toronto related of a sexual encounter in
Queen’s Park (no pun intended):
I stayed there because I loved storms, love to see nature in its violence…. We enjoyed ourselves so much, and of course the rain
had swept in and we were all wet, and all those soggy clothes to put on. But it was joyous…. I love wild, spontaneous moments
like that where … it just goes crazy and it’s wild. 25
Clearly, wild sex in a public park in a thunderstorm is a far cry from the prim courtship rituals embodied in Olmsted’s formal
promenades. Whileit is important to point out that park sex is controversial in itself, it seems that gay men’s re-appropriation
of these natural spaces in fact fosters an alternative and critical awareness of urban nature. Such awareness has
galvanized queer communities to take environmental action; to give one example,
shortly after the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York, a popular cruising area in Queens, Kew Gardens, was badly destroyed by
extensive tree cutting. “Within a week … there were public actions showing conscious visibility, and the first gay liberationist
environmental group, Trees for Queens, was formed to restore the park.” 26
Turning to the lesbian community, one can see different but related patterns
of resistance to the pairing of heterosexuality and nature. Like their gay
male counterparts but with very different gender politics involved, lesbian
authors have also used pastoral literary traditions to develop a “reverse
discourse” that argues for the naturalness of women’s same-sex love
relationships. These "lesbian pastoral” literatures have a history that extends well back into the nineteenth century,
for example into the writings of such authors as Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather. In the early twentieth century, Radclyffe
Hall made overt use of pastoral conventions in The Well of Loneliness to paint a picture of her gender-invert protagonist,
Stephen Gordon, in which Stephen’s identity was very natural, and morally very positive. The problem for Stephen was not her
“nature”; it was the artificial heterosexism and social intolerance that surrounded her as she made her way into adulthood.
More recent lesbian authors have, in fact, consciously taken on the idea that
women in lesbian relationships might experience nature differently, and
possibly more positively, than is generally the case within the confines of
compulsory heterosexuality. Most obviously, lesbian feminists have
consciously connected a radical feminist politics with a radical ecological
politics. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, utopian and science fiction writers such as
Sally Miller Gearhart overtly tied the destruction of nature to patriarchal,
heterosexist social institutions. In her 1979 novel The Wanderground, she envisioned a world in which
women, freed from oppressive male influence, were able to live together in polygynous sexual relationships in a rural world
that was actively and intentionally separate from destructive, male-dominated cities. In that woman-centred world, women
were better able to find both rich erotic and social relations to one another, and rich social and erotic relations to their natural
environments, all of which were actively prevented in heterosexual, patriarchal societies. Thus, such novels actively
criticized heteronormativity, arguing not only that heterosexuality was not
natural, but that it was destructive to both women and to nature; here, we
have a narrative that reverses the idea that homosexuality is an urban
illness, and instead argues that heterosexism is the urban “ill” to which
lesbians must respond. In a healthier environment, one organized according
to homosocial and homoerotic norms, women could create a more profound
connection to each other and to nature. Whatever one might say about the
essentialism of such understandings of a “natural” woman/nature
connection, it is clear that the transgressive pairing of ecological with
lesbian feminist politics posed a significant challenge to the overarching
assumption that heterosexuality is not only natural, but also good for
nature.
Influenced by these literary currents, some women began in the 1970s to actually
develop intentional communities based on the combination of ecological and
lesbian separatist politics. Communities like the Womanshare Collective in Southern Oregon were founded
on the idea of rural nature as a privileged set of spaces in which women could find, "in the healing beauty of nature,” “a safe
space to live, to work, to help create the women’s culture [they] dreamed of.” 27 These “wimmin’s lands” had complex
ecological goals, ranging from opening rural landscapes to women by transforming heterosexual relations of property
ownership; to withdrawing the land from patriarchal-capitalist agricultural production and reproduction; to symbolically
reinscribing the land with lesbian erotic presence. While many of these communities have
disappeared, others are still there as living examples of what it looks like to
live one’s life intentionally as a lesbian ecologist. To quote one long-term resident: “Women’s
land, lesbian land … [is] land that women have purchased and are living on [as lesbians]. It is intended to serve lesbians, not
only the ones who live here, and it is intended to be lesbian land evermore…. And moving to the country stretches who a
lesbian is.” 28
QUEER FRAMES OF EXISTENCE ARE NECESSARY TO RESIST VIOLENT
HETEROSEXISM
MORTIMER-SANDILANDS canada research chair in sustainability and culture
at york university 2k5
catriona (cate)- her work lies at the intersections of queer and feminist
theory, environmental philosophy and political theory, and cultural
studies. she is the author of the good-natured feminist: ecofeminism and the quest for
democracy (minnesota, 1999), the co-editor (with rebecca raglon and melody
hessing) of this elusive land: women and the canadian environment (ubc, 2004), and is
working on a manuscript called Pastoral Traditions, Sexual Subversions: Lesbian
Histories of Nature Writing; “Unatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology”; INVISIBLE
CULTURE, An electronic journal for visual culture, Issue 9;
https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/sandilands.html
Conclusions
These stories certainly do not illustrate the full range of queer ecological politics, past or present. I have not discussed the
conversation between queer ecology and ecofeminism that Greta Gaard began in her 1994 article “Toward a Queer
Ecofeminism”; 29 I have not discussed the fact that the liberation of eroticism and physical
desire has played a strong role in many historical and contemporary
environmental movements; 30 I have not even begun to consider the ways the experiences of
transgender individuals call us to question the interrelations among
sexualities, natures, gender identities, and bodies. I may have also given the impression that
gay male ecological politics are about sex in nature, and lesbian ecologies are about the liberation of nature; pointing to both
lesbian cultures of public sex and “radical faerie” gay male communities, I assure you that this is not the case.
What I hope I have done is illustrate that, not only is heterosexism part of the web of
oppressive power relations through which human relations to nature are
organized, but also that queers have made interesting ecological moves to
challenge some of these relations. Not all of us are content to practice our sexual politics within the
narrow circles offered to us by consumerist and other mainstream agendas; some of us like to think that queers might
have an interesting and diverse set of experiences from which to develop
more critical, and more ecological, politics. Thus in closing, I return to Jan Zita Grover.
Grover’s work is far from being a lesbian separatist utopian vision, but it is, for me, a particularly inspiring
queer ecology. For her, an environmental perspective grounded in the
painful experience of a gay community allows her to see and find beauty in
a natural landscape ravaged by the visions of others, for whom its beauty is
simply a question of resource extraction. She is keenly aware of the devastations of both AIDS and
clear-cuts; indeed, her experience as a primary caregiver for PWA’s has allowed her an especially
intimate view of the resemblance between the two. But her standpoint didn’t just afford her the metaphoric
ability to see, in diseased leg and burnt-out stumpage, the same possibility of continuing life and beauty. It also taught
her about responsibility: In the gay community of San Francisco, it was often lesbians and other “chosen”
community members, not biological family, who took on the hard work of caring for the dying. Thus, Grover’s queer
ecology is both about seeing beauty in the wounds of the world and taking
responsibility to care for the world as it is. I leave her the last words: “We assume
responsibility for a place when we are able to look both backward at the
burden of its history and forward at our responsibility for those parts of its
future that lie under human control.” 31
AT: Cede the Political
ONLY OUR PRIOR INTERROGATION CAN DETERMINE WHETHER LIBERATORY
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS CAN ENACT THEIR AGENDAS -- SMOOTHING OVER
QUEER DIFFERENCES CAUSES COALITION FAILURE
Gaard ’11 (GAARD prof of English @ Univ of Wisconsin River Falls 2k11
Greta- an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker. Gaard's academic
work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the
disciplines of composition and literary criticism; “Green, Pink, Lavender: Banishing Ecophobia
Through Queer Ecologies; ETHICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT 16 (2); published (Catriona
Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ethics_and_the_environment/v016/16.2.gaard.pdf)
When progressive political movements fail to recognize the inter- sections of oppression, we
lose political power: coalitions become less stable, and activists are forced to choose their
“irst emergency” while backgrounding other ethical and political commitments. In 2010, it’s
no longer tolerable (if it ever was) to put one’s sexual identity “on hold”
in order to work on environmental issues, and it will be no great achievement if queers gain full civil rights on a planet with few liveable areas due
to climate change (where would we go for the honeymoon?). In Queer
Ecologies, thirteen radical environmental scholars make clear the material and conceptual
connections that conirm eco-queers won’t have to choose between ecology and sexuality, and
neither will anyone else: these essays deal decisive blows to ecophobia and erotophobia alike.1
Mortimer-Sandilands’ past decade of scholarship developing the in- tersections of queer ecopolitics and ecocriticism has laid the theoretical groundwork for this volume, and many of the
contributors acknowledge her work in their chapters. She and co-editor Erickson created the
deeply feminist and democratic opportunity for the contributors to meet in To- ronto to discuss
the irst drafts of their chapters, opening the editing proc- ess to a multi-directional plurality of
dialogues that ensures there is less repetition and more cross-referencing, more collective
theory-building among the chapters than readers expect from more hierarchically-edited
volumes. Each chapter develops the book’s central aim of “queering ecol- ogy” and “greening
queer politics” by demonstrating “the powerful ways in which understandings of nature inform
discourses of sexuality…[and] understandings of sex inform discourses of nature” (2–3)
The introduction offers an excellent overview of the conceptual ques- tions raised by eco-queer
perspectives, and I can easily imagine assigning this 47-page chapter in a class on gender
studies, ecocriticism, environ- mental politics, or queer theory. It establishes the need for this
inquiry by providing a historical narrative of the ways that notions of sexuality have shaped
social constructions of nature in the familiar concepts and crea- tion of wilderness, national and
urban parks, and car camping. Moreover, t’s enticing: who ever heard of the performance group
Fuck For Forests, or eco-activists like the Lesbian Rangers, and their khaki-clad force of Eager
Beavers? Of course we want to know more! Drawing on “a range of queer and ecological
theories” rather a single orthodox perspective, the volume’s introduction and essays develop
the argument for queering environmentalisms and greening queer theory in three steps:
challenging the heteronormativity of “investigations into the ‘sexuality’ of nature,” exploring
“the intersections between queer and ecological inlections of bio/politics (including spatial
politics),” and ultimately queering “environ- mental affect, ethics, and desire” (30–31).
Heterocentrism charges queer sexualities with being “against nature,” so the irst step in a queer
ecology requires reviewing the literature on non- human same-sex acts, and scrutinizing the
deinition of species boundaries. In this irst section on “queer sex, queer animality,” the
frequency with which Bruce Bagemihl (1999), Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird (2008; Hird 2004a,
2004b), Donna Haraway (2004), and Joan Roughgarden (2004) are cited proves the eco-queer
canon is already being formed. We begin with well-known feminist science studies scholar Stacy
Alaimo reviewing the wealth of documented queer animal behaviors, “making sexual diver- sity
part of a larger biodiversity” (55). Here, we learn that Norway has already hosted the irst-ever
Exhibition on Animal Homosexuality, aptly titled “Against Nature?” (2007) and displaying
multiple sexual behaviors that challenge the heterosexist interpretation of same-sex activity
between animals as anything but sex. Alaimo deftly points out the limitations of cultural
criticism that casts “animal sex into the separate sphere of na- ture,” at the same time that
“scientiic accounts of queer animal sex have rendered them too cultural, so as to render them
not sexual” (62). Like human animals, other animal species are both biological and cultural beings: if not, how shall we explain simultaneously sexual and cultural facts that “many primates
not only use, but manufacture, objects to aid with masturbation” (61)? Alaimo’s survey of
animal sex and gender provides data that will “complicate the foundations of feminist theory….
[and] also denaturalize familiar categories and assumptions in queer theory and gay cultures”
(65). Noel Sturgeon’s essay on “Penguin Family Values,” the only reprinted essay in the volume,
takes up the issue of reproductive justice by bring- ing an ecocritical lens to examining the
nature documentary The March of the Penguins (2005) and the children’s film Happy Feet
(2006): both present penguins as “popular symbols that conlate heterosexist family ideals with
the need to resist environmental threats” (118). Asking “what kind of environmental politics can
encompass the threat to both Emperor penguins and Alaskan Natives from global climate
change?”, Sturgeon criticizes Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth for the convenient omission of
Arctic indigenous peoples and the foregrounding of polar bears (along with the ilm’s antipopulation rhetoric backgrounding the problem of resource consumption—a topic taken up by
other authors in this book, notably Andil Gosine). To combat this heterocentric and ethnocentric
dis- course, Sturgeon brings forward the children’s book And Tango Makes Three (2005) about
the gay penguins in Central Park Zoo, as well as the plight of Arctic native peoples in an era of
intense oil extraction and cli- mate change. Environmentalists should not “depict
environmentalism as a heteronormative family romance,” for such “rhetoric obscures the
need to put pressure on corporations to change their labor practices—includ- ing health care,
childcare, pay equity, and global labor practices…. [issues that are] important to real family
values...as part of an environmentalist agenda” (126–27). At the conceptual level, the rhetoric
of “penguin fam- ily values” limits ideas of “what is natural” and obscures nature’s “more
agentive” practices (128). Sturgeon invokes Donna Haraway’s (2004) concept of
“naturecultures” to describe the mutually-constituted relation- ships among “nature and
culture, nature and human, human and animal, and human and machine” (128). Scrutinizing the
heteronormative deinition of species as “interbreed- ing natural populations that are
reproductively isolated from other such groups,” Ladelle McWhorter documents the ways that
“the concept of species has often brought great harm to both racial and sexual minori- ties over
the past two hundred years” and has been used to “underwrite discourses that historically have
condemned sexual variation” such as slavery and eugenics (75). Acknowledging claims that
“sexual diversity persists because it contributes to our species’ health, strength, and pros- pects
for survival,” McWhorter nonethless cautions against “resting pro- queer arguments on the
concept of species” (91). Doing so gives too much authority to science for deciding “social,
political, and moral questions,” when “science is [at best] an important tool and component in
the proc- ess...not a inal arbiter” (96). “If sexual and gender diversity are valuable in human
society,” she concludes, “they are so regardless of their value for species preservation or
evolution” (96). Here, McWhorter’s perceptive argument offers a critical foundation stone for
queer ecology’s relevance to science studies and cultural studies alike. Like Sturgeon, David
Bell’s “Queernaturecultures” employs and aug- ments Haraway’s term, using the examples of
sex-positive performance activism in defense of forests (yes, Fuck For Forests), nudist cultures,
and the whole project of reclaiming queer animals as necessary but not suf- icient strategies for
ideological transformation, since they do not chal- lenge but rather “rest on the nature/culture
divide” (142). “The project of reclaiming queer animals,” Bell explains, is “driven by a political
impera- tive to naturalize the rights of sexual minorities”—but this project “sits at odds...with
the powerful anti-essentialism of queer theory and politics” (139). Strategic essentialism has
been used to defend queer civil rights against discrimination, to challenge the logic of the
religious-based “ex- gay” movement, and to argue against “gay contagion” using the “born gay”
claim. Rather than promote the division between theory and politics in the contexts of
queer/environmentalism, Bell argues for “reconnecting to sex” in ways that “renaturaliz[e]
humanity...by reminding us of our own embodied naturalness” (137) and acknowledging the
impossibility of delinking nature from culture. His questions about public sex—“what would it
mean for our understandings of public sex to think about na- ture-as-public? What does it mean
to talk of the publicness of nature? And…what does that mean for the politics of nature and the
politics of sex?” (144)—certainly leave readers thinking. The essays in section two address
“queering environmental politics” by examining the environmental and spatial dimension of
sexual politics, and the implicit sexualization of environments. “Queer ecology involves a
necessary critique of the heteronormativity and whiteness of environ- mental politics,” the
editors explain, as well as a critique of the “metro- normative stereotype of gay life as inherently
consumerist” (34). Leading off the discussions, Andil Gosine’s essay explores how both
“reproductive sex between non-white people, and sex between men” have been seen as “toxic
to nature” (149); both “threaten colonial-imperialist and national- ist ambitions” of white
heteropatriarchy (150). Examining reports of ar- rests for gay male cruising in parks at Merced,
California; the Minnesota National Wildlife Refuge near Minneapolis; the Kokomo Reservoir
Park in Indiana, and Vancouver’s Stanley Park, Gosine exposes a rhetoric of gay sex as
pollution: the cruising areas are described as “trash-strewn pulloffs,” with “condoms by the
hundreds,” and other “unsavory litter” creating health hazards and endangering children.
Citing the Vancouver Park Board Commission’s sensible strategy of installing extra garbage
can receptacles in the area, Gosine directly challenges the belief that “public, homosexual sex
is bad for the environment” and shows the heteronorma- tive “solutions” (i.e., cutting down
bushes, building fences, paving path- ways) tend to be more environmentally destructive than
gay sex. The theme of queer environments is carried forward in Nancy Un- ger’s chapter, which
chronicles the construction of lesbian space in the United States, from the black lesbians in
Harlem to the white lesbian retreat at Cherry Grove, the back-to-the-land movement in Oregon,
the Pagoda womynspace in Florida (later reconstituted at Alapine Village in Alabama), and the
lesbian community established through regional and national women’s music festivals.
Curiously, though Unger notes the les- bian feminist political analysis that placed “vegetarian
organic foods” (182) and “healthy food” (189) as an integral part of lesbian space, she fails to
mention persistent connections between vegan/vegetarianism and lesbian feminism which
were foundational components of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, The Bloodroot
Collective, and many other les- bian-only collectives and communal living spaces (Gaard 2000).
These lesbians’ dietary choices were inspired by a widespread belief that sex- ism, heterosexism,
racism, classism, and speciesism were part of the same heteropatriarchal system that lesbian
feminists wanted to leave behind. In this volume, Unger is not alone in omitting critique of the
dominant heteromasculinity/speciesism connection, indicating this connection as an area for
further development in queer ecologies generally. The use of animal-based research in
disparaging queer sexualities is a case in point, where potential coalitions among
queer/environmental/ animal advocates could be stronger with more theoretical
development as foundation. Giovanna Di Chiro’s chapter confronts the misplaced concern
over abnormal sex differences (documented through ield stud- ies of nonhuman animals) as
producing a heterosexist and transphobic hysteria that shifts attention away from serious
health problems caused by toxics, such as breast, ovarian, and testicular cancers; immune
system breakdown; diabetes, and heart disease. Even progressive environmental scientists and
policy advocates have mobilized “socially sanctioned het- erosexism and queer-fear in order to
generate public interest and a sense of urgency to act,” Di Chiro laments (210)—supporting her
claim with ex- amples from environmental author Janisse Ray’s association between en- docrine
disruptors and transgender identity, and from atrazine-researcher Tyrone Hayes, who opens his
lecture by establishing both his outsider sta- tus (via race and class) and his normality (via
photos of his heterosexual parents and present family). As a model alternative, Di Chiro points
to the community-based organization Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, which has
created an intersectional analysis of reproductive and environmental justice through projects
examining, for example, the cos- metic industry’s use of phthalates, thereby connecting “the
environmental health, safety, and livelihood concerns of both consumers and workers” and
creating a movement of “young API [Asian Paciic Islander] women who now identify themselves
as ‘environmentalists’” (223). Katie Hogan’s chapter continues the exploration of toxics and
coali- tion-building through cultural texts such as Heather MacDonald’s 1995 Ballot Measure 9, a
documentary about the Oregon Citizens’ Alliance attempt to amend the Oregon state
constitution to discriminate against queers, and Joseph Hansen’s 1984 detective novel
Nightwork, a gay mys- tery about “toxic dumping as an aspect of toxic heterosexuality” (237).
Together, Hogan argues, these texts “show us what a queer ecocritique and queer
environmental justice looks like” (250). Completing the explo- ration of queers and space/place,
Gordon Brent Ingram pairs queer urban history with landscape ecology, examining the diverse
histories of gays and lesbians in Vancouver’s West End. Far from being a true “ghetto,” the West
End offered a large network of public spaces, secluded forest parklands, and the cleanest air and
beaches of the city. Ingram’s narra- tive illustrates how the forces of racism, classism, sexism,
and homopho- bia worked to construct the West End as a white middle-class gay male enclave,
eliminating Stanley Park’s one remaining Native village, briely nurturing white women’s suffrage
activists and (proto-lesbian) women athletes, and shifting to a population of predominantly gay
white men by the end of the 1960s. Taken together, the essays in this section explore the
sexualization of nature, challenging the myth that queer communi- ties are essentially urban
communities by exposing the repeated efforts to enforce and police the unnaturally
overdetermined heterosexualizion of both urban and rural environments. The book’s inal
section, “desiring nature,” functions as a sort of solu- tion to the problems of seeing sexuality
and nature as separate, and offers various visions for the future. Rachel Stein builds on theories
advanced in her well-known volume, New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender,
Sexuality, and Activism (2004), to examine how “the premises and effects of crime-againstnature ideology...dislocate lesbians from so- cial and natural environments” and how lesbian
poets Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt use their writing to “strategically resituate
homoerotic desire within the natural landscape” (288). In other words, “The Place, Promised,
That Has Not Yet Been” is in fact a “revolutionary environment of sexual freedom,” where
crime-against-nature ideology is subverted, and the struggles for environmental justice and
sexual justice are brought to- gether. Bruce Erickson invokes Canada’s articulation of national
identity with eco-sex (“making love in a canoe is the most Canadian act that two people can do,”
309), revealing that, analogous to the function of the cow- boy in the American West, the canoe
was originally “an indigenous cul- tural artifact made into a tool of colonization, to extract the
nation from the landscape” (312). The national identity and economy are blended and
naturalized in the appearance of the canoe on Canada’s currency. In capitalism, the construction
of identity is “inherently productive,” fueling patterns of consumption; alternatively, Erikson
suggests ways to “recon- ceptualize the pleasures of canoeing outside of the desire for identity,
out- side of the demands of nation” (312). Two essays on love—mourning, and celebration-complete the vol- ume. In “Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies,” Mortimer-Sandilands
examines the differences between grief and melancholy in the works of Jan Zita Grover’s North
Enough: AIDS and Other Clearcuts (1997), and Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature (1991). Both
authors “come to love and understand devastated landscapes,” Mortimer-Sandilands argues,
with Grover’s “melancholic refusal to ‘get over’” the loss of so many friends to AIDS as well as
“the multiple presences of loss and death in the natu- ral landscape around her” (348), and
Jarman’s “queer memorialization that both politicizes AIDS...and also establishes that memory
in a sensu- ous, sensual world of plants, shingle, wind, salt” (351). By “allowing the natural world
to be a ield of intimately mourned lives and possibilites,” Grover and Jarman draw strong
parallels between “non-heterosexual lives in the midst of homophobia, and the more-thanhuman world in the midst of environmental devastation” (355). Ending on a more celebratory
note, Dianne Chisholm offers an eco queer reading of heterosexual nature writer Ellen Meloy’s
four books, ar- guing that Meloy rewrites E.O. Wilson’s biophilia concept by recognizing “an
erotic-ethical afiliation between human and nonhuman life” and de- scribing “a vitalism in which
nonreproductive sex is a primary force of na- ture” (360). Meloy’s biophilia includes imagining
“leaping into bed’ with desert lora to satiate a craving to know their seduction of color” (364)
and thus is “pronouncedly queer”; Chisholm argues that Meloy envisions a future “where
creatures deemed unproductive by utilitarian standards are valued for their own nature, as well
as for their part in determining a healthy local ecology” (375). If this is Meloy’s stance, how does
she rec- oncile consuming the nature that she professes to love? Chisholm gives us the
paradoxical “aroused biophilia” of Meloy’s participation in a bighorn sheep relocation project,
where Meloy simultaneously consumes the ani- mals she is allegedly saving: “the taste of the
meat lingers on my tongue. Rain and river. Bedrock to soil to plant to milk to bone, muscle, and
sinew. I am eating my canyon. Eating stone” (Meloy, cited in Chisholm, 372). Chisholm’s rather
lippant question—“Does [Meloy’s] ethics of becom- ing-bighorn not challenge the most radical
platform of queer activism, no less than the ‘save-the-whale’ (and other select-species versus
compan- ion-species) campaigns of animal rights?” (376)—is neither developed nor supported,
again conirming that this intersection of speciesism and het- erosexism has yet to be explored in
queer ecologies. That exploration needs to come quickly, for queer ecology is catch- ing on.
Already in Spring 2011, the leading magazine of nature writing, Orion, has published a very
readable essay explaining the core concepts of queer ecology (Johnson 2011), at the same time
as a leading ecocritic in Britain has denounced their plausability in the scholarly journal of the
Society for Literature and Science, Conigurations (Garrard 2011). There, Greg Garrard claims
that the “queer commitment to transgression seems to outweigh concerns about conservation,”
since conservation relies on the Endangered Species Act, and thus, species do matter; but
McWhorter’s essay did not argue for the end of species, only for a healthy suspicion of the
concept’s ontological position, and for extricating arguments for sex- ual and gender diversity
from arguments for the value of species preser- vation/evolution. Or, on the topic of “toxic
discourse” Garrard insists “it seems unlikely that ecologists are merely dupes of
heteronormativity for drawing attention to feminization as a consequence of pollution,” when in
fact Di Chiro’s essay acknowledges the urgency of responding to hormone disruptors—without
having to access divisive rhetoric around heteronor- mativity. The more substantive challenges
Garrard raises—the need for “a green bailout for queer theory,” for example, or for considering
the full range of “ecopolitical consequences of the critique of species”(95)—merit more serious
responses. For example, does the ecology of ecoqueers include the self-determi- nation of other
species, or do we merely celebrate their polymorphous perversities and then eat them? Donna
Haraway’s naturecultures—and Bell’s queering thereof—seem to offer liberation for human
animals but not other animals. Where are the vegan lesbians who have been defending the
intersections of sexuality and animality since the 1970s? Where is the greening of queer theory,
which has roots not just in the Lesbian Rang- ers but also in queer critiques of gay rodeos, in the
formation of PETA’s Gay and Lesbian Animal Rights Caucus, and in the Gays and Friends for
Animals Rights presence in the San Francisco Pride Parade of the 1990s (Mills 1994)? It seems
odd in a book celebrating lesbian seagulls and other nonreproductive sexual behaviors among
animal species that there’s a si- lence about queer ecocritics eating queer birds and their eggs,
or drinking the breastmilk of other species. Now, that’s perverse—but not deliciously so. As
Annie Potts and Jovian Parry (2010) have recently argued, for some environmental and sexpositive activists, vegan sexuality challenges het- eronormative masculinity, so perhaps there’s a
connection between “what you eat and what you do in bed”(1993-94). Would today’s
vegansexuals—who, within their own sexual orienta- tions, prefer vegan sexual partners—also
be considered queer? Perhaps so, if heterosexual nature writer Ellen Meloy is offered the inal
word in Queer Ecologies for her descriptions of interspecies eroticisms. Though an ardent fan of
inclusivity, I am nonetheless concerned about how such extensions of the term “queer” may
make its meaning too ambiguous for use as a critical tool, eliding important differences between
the real mate- rial, cultural, and “lifestyle” experiences of gay men and lesbians (class and
economics among them). Is “queer” an identity, a set of behaviors, a perspective available to
people of all sexualities, or all of these simultane- ously? Are there sets of experiences or
concepts that a queer ecological per- spective would not illuminate? For example, Ingram’s
chapter describing the different material experiences of lesbians vs. gay men in Vancouver’s
West End, or Unger’s history of lesbian feminist space as motivated largely by politics, suggest
there are signiicant reasons for studying sexual-cul- tural groups separately as well as
collectively. Is queer ecology always feminist? Given the historical foundations of lesbian
feminism, ecofemi- nism, or material feminisms for many of the contributors, it is curious that
there is no speciic articulation of the feminism-queer ecology connection. Unavoidably, despite
the volume’s richness and range of discussion, a few questions remain. Among them, perhaps
one of the most important questions is how ecoqueer theory will develop once it moves beyond
this initial collective articulation from primarily Anglo-American scholars. As Andil Gosine’s essay
pointedly asks, “is the production of ‘queer ecology’ a decidedly Eu- roamerican project?” and
“is the privileging of Euroamerican stories of en- vironmentalism—even for the purpose of
critical examination—complicit with the agendas of empire, and American imperialism in
particular?” (166). Instead of separating “the queer subject from the racialized-as-non- white
subject” and effectively “disappearing the non-white queer,” as well as the diasporic subject,
Gosine suggests “a special focus on the consti- tution of the non-white queer subject...[as] a
more insightful project of queer ecology” (167). As the first book-length volume to establish the
intersections of queer theory and environmentalisms at such depth, the publication of Queer
Ecologies has decisively created a rich ield for fur- ther research. May the Lesbian Rangers be
our guides!
QUEER ECOLOGY OFFERS NEW INSIGHTS FOR A SOCIETY BUILT ON THE
EXPLOITATION OF THE NATURAL WORLD
Although ecological criticism and queer theory seem incompatible, their
intersection OVERTURNS the FANTASY OF NATURE. Our era necessitates
strategies that move beyond passive and active DESTRUCTION of the nonhuman. Queering ecology DISTORTS gender binaries that construct the world in
terms of PARANOIA and ESSENTIALISM. To separate the environment from our
own social location is to endorse INTELLECTUAL EXCLUSIONS. Repudiating dirt
and pollution from the construction of our own identity finds its corollary in
VOMITING and EXCRETING OUT “undesirable” populations. The natural world
MUST BE BROUGHT CLOSE and made INTIMATE.
Morton ‘10
Timothy Morton is the Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, he was written extensively
on metaphysics, realism, ecology, and object-oriented ontology, “Guest Column: Queer Ecology”, 2010, Journal of the
Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 125, No. 2, file:///Users/joesmith/Downloads/pmlamorton2010libre.pdf
ECOLOGICAL CRITICISM AND QUEER THEORY SEEM INCOMPATIBLE, but if they met, there
would be a fantastic explosion. How shall we accomplish this perverse, Frankensteinian meme
splice? I’ll propose some hypothetical methods and frameworks for a field that doesn’t quite exist—queer ecology. The
pathbreaking work of Catriona Sandilands, Greta Gaard, and the journal Undercurrents must be acknowledged here.) This
exercise in hubris is bound to rattle nerves and raise hackles, but please bear with me on this test light. Start
with the basics. Let’s not create this field by comparing literary-critical apples and oranges. Let’s do it the hard way, up from
foundations (or unfoundations). Let’s do it in the name of ecology itself, which demands intimacies with other beings that queer
theory also demands, in another key. Let’s do it because our
era requires it— we are losing touch with a
fantasy Nature that never really existed (I capitalize Nature to make it look less natural), while we actively
and passively destroy life-forms inhabiting and constituting the bio-sphere, in Earth’s sixth
mass extinction event. Giving up a fantasy is even harder than giving up a reality. At Christmas
2008, Pope Benedict XVI declared that if tropical forests deserve our “protection,” then “the human being” (denied as “man” and
“woman”) deserves it no less: “We need something like human ecology, meant in the right way.” His proclamation explicitly targeted
“gender” theory. To
undermine the false dichotomy of Nature and history on which papal
homophobia depends, scholarship must research the ways in which queerness, in its
variegated forms, is installed in biological substance as such and is not simply a blip in cultural
history.2 Unfortunately, a great deal of ecocriticism provides a toxic environment in which to
spawn queer ecology. Ecofeminism (the classic example is Carolyn Merchant’s he Death of Nature) arose out of
feminist separatism, wedded to a biological essentialism that, strategic or not, is grounded on
binary difference and thus unhelpful for the kinds of difference multiplication that is queer
theory’s brilliance. Much American ecocriticism is a vector for various masculinity memes,
including rugged individualism, a phallic authoritarian sublime, and an allergy to femininity in
all its forms (as sheer appearance, as the signifier, as display). Other environmentalisms (such as ecophenomenology, as
practiced by Kate Rigby, Glen Mazis, and others) are more promising for their flexible, experiential view that Nature is a process, not
a product—but I worry that they might just be upgrades. 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. Using Mary
Douglas’s Purity and Danger and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, Butler demonstrates that the inside-outside manifold
sustains gender identification and rituals of exclusion that can never be totally successful—the
body just isn’t an impermeable, closed form (Gender Trouble 133–34). Butler also holds that “nature” as such be
thoroughly revised through ecological notions of interrelatedness (Bodies 4). As I’ve argued elsewhere, ideologies of Nature are
founded on inside-outside structures that resemble the boundaries heterosexism polices (Ecology 19, 25, 40, 52–54, 63–64, 67, 78;
“Eco- logocentrism”). All life-forms, along with the environments they compose and inhabit, defy boundaries between inside and
outside at every level. When we examine the environment, it shimmers, and figures emerge in a “strange distortion.”3 When
the
environment becomes intimate—as in our age of ecological panic and scientifically
measurable risk (Beck)—it is decisively no longer an environment, since it no longer just happens
around us: that’s the difference between weather and climate. Human society used to define
itself by excluding dirt and pollution. We cannot now endorse this exclusion, nor can we
believe in the world it produces. This is literally about realizing where your waste goes.
Excluding pollution is part of performing Nature as pristine, wild, immediate, and pure. To
have subjects and objects, one must have abjects to vomit or excrete (Kristeva). By repressing the abject,
environmentalisms—I am not de- noting particular movements but suggesting affinities with, say, heterosexism or racism— claiming
to subvert or reconcile the subject- object manifold only produce a new and improved brand of Nature.
Impact Framing - AT: Extinction
“APOCALYPSE NOW” HAS BECOME “APOCALYPSE FROM NOW ON”
In 1989, at the conclusion of the Cold War, nuclear weapons no longer
DOMINATED the geopolitical climate or COMMANDED American popular
culture. NUCLEAR AMENSIA has set in, and nukes have become the vintage toys
of a bygone era. Apocalypse is no longer global, it has been LOCALIZED and its
scope limited to a so-called “OTHER.”
If the postmodern is NECESSARILY POSTNUCELAR, then the tools of power had
to be REARTICULATED. The civic utility of threats lies in their ability to DEFINE
national identity. TO BE AMERICAN, TO AFFIRM THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL
GOVERNMENT shows a commitment to defend liberty, democracy,
individualism, and private property. Without an EVIL EMPIRE to fight against,
this FOUNDATIONAL PRINCIPLE would RUPTURE. Suddenly, the fight against
AIDS emerged as a national imperative and homosexuality morphed into a
political instrument to avoid détente. The QUEER SUBJECT became a contagion
to the social body, a destructive force of both CONDEMNATION and
FASCINATION.
Apocalyptic rhetoric has not VANISHED; its deployment has simply become
more implicit and strategic. The testing of nukes became a METAPHOR for
SEXUAL INTERCOURSE and the NUCLEAR FAMILY aligned itself with notions of
normalcy and production.
Coviello 2k
Peter Coviello has been at Bowdoin College since 1998, where he specializes in nineteenth-century American
literature and queer studies, and where he has served as Chair of the departments of English, Africana Studies, and
Gay and Lesbian Studies. Since 2011 he has been a member of the editorial board at American Literature. His work
has appeared in PMLA, ELH, Raritan, American Literature, GLQ, and MLQ as well as in venues like Frieze and The
Believer. Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations, “Apocalypse From now On,” pp. 40-43,
University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition, 2000
to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say
that the world we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I began by saying,
changed—it did not go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of yesteryear,
Perhaps. But
apocalypse signified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derrida’s suitably menacing phrase)
in the postnuclear world apocalypse is an affair whose
parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypse is defined now by
the affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an "other" people whose very presence
might then be written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and
prosperity of a cherished "general population." This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontag’s incisive
observation, from 1989, that, “Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but
‘Apocalypse from Now On.’” The decisive point here in the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point
Sontag goes on, at length, to miss) is that apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast
”remainderless and a-symbolic destruction,“ then
economy of power, it is ever useful. That is, through the perpetual threat of destruction—
through the constant reproduction of the figure of apocalypse—agencies of power ensure
their authority to act on and through the bodies of a particular population. No one turns this point
more persuasively than Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addresses
himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than productive, less life threatening than, in his words, "life-
Power, he contends, “exerts a positive influence on life . . . [and] endeavors to
administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive
regulations." In his brief comments on what he calls ”the atomic situation," however, Foucault insists as well that the
productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of
violent or even lethal means. For as “managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race,"
agencies of modern power presume to act “on the behalf of the existence of everyone.”
Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and survival in this way serves to
authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive or, indeed, potentially
annihilating. "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power," Foucault writes, ”this is not because of a recent return to
administering.”
the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale
For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill its
population, but with a more comprehensive power over the patterns and functioning of its
collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic
initiative that can scarcely be done without. A number of questions present themselves: how, in a postnuclear
phenomena of population."
world, is power dispersed and seized and operated? Can we discover, in this age of disarmament, presences not so much new as
newly articulated that form equivalent threats to, say "bodies and the race," to “the existence of everyone," threats through
which a postnuclear regime might reconstitute itself with all the more efficiency? If
the nuclear has vanished so
entirely from the cultural stage, might some other apocalyptic spectacle have more or less
seamlessly replaced it, and have taken over some of the civic utility once extracted from
the threat of nuclear destruction? To anyone possessed of an at least passing familiarity
with the last decade of American public life, my referent should now be clear: nothing
exemplifies the postnuclear localization of the figure of apocalypse more visibly or more
harrowingly; than AIDS. Sometime around 1989, and with a thoroughness and a rapidity that I think we are only now
beginning to grasp, the menace of AIDS unseated nuclear warfare as the defining apocalyptic
threat to American health and security. What I want to take up in this chapter, then, are the uncanny
transactions between these two genres of apocalypse, the nuclear and the sexual, and the quietly sweeping rearrangements of
American civic life their interchange effects. It would of course startle no one to say that queer communities are a great deal
more visible now than they were fifteen years ago, and that such visibility comes, at least in part, as a rather direct result of
AIDS, which has in that brief time turned upon gay men in particular the full glare of any number of differently calibrated public
gazes. Still, it's remarkable- and, I think, necessary—to consider how deeply scored this multifaceted national investment in
homosexuality has been by the shifting political imperatives of a nuclear state on the verge of détente. I mean to suggest,
in the wake of a rapidly deflating nuclear threat, violently homophobic responses
to AIDS came to operate in America with all the decisiveness and utility of a defensive, fully
national initiative. I look in the first half of the pages that follow at the often arrestingly lurid figures of nuclear discourse,
broadly that
to show how intimately bonded the nuclear and the sexual actually were, before the advent of AIDS gave to such bonding a
ghastly quality of inevitability. In the second half, I take up the matter of “the new queer visibility" by considering the
extractions from, and inflictions upon, gay life and gay possibility that the various narrative mechanisms of popular gay
enfranchisement seem to demand. Part of my concern is thus to trace a few of the salient transformations in national polity
queer peoples became at once the targets of a uniquely virulent condemnatory
campaign, and the objects of sustained, and not always spiteful, public fascination. Figuring
whereby
out exactly how this double movement works seems to me a matter of some analytic importance, especially since this
unprecedented national interest in homosexuality manifests itself not least consequentially in the emergence of the very
discipline under whose auspices this collection of essays has been gather together: queer studies. One might say that the
undertaking of this chapter is thus a kind of genealogy: not so much a genealogy of queer studies per se as of the conditions of
American public life in which it became possible for such a critical discourse to emerge, in institutions (like the university)
otherwise not wholly amenable to gay life. The overarching point I want to make here, though, is simply that in the shift
from a nuclear to a postnuclear political dispensation what unfolds is not a diminishment,
but rather a series of calculated adjustments to the state's capacity to administer to its
citizens carefully regulated quantities of life. As a result of this readjustment, a pivotal figure in the
legitimation of power over life is snow, more than every before, the gay man.
THE VIEW OF THE CHILD AS AN IDOL OF REPRODUCTIVE FUTURISM
NECESSARILY RELIES ON THE SACRIFICE OF THE QUEER BODY
Privileging large-scale impacts over systemic violence is the kind of rationale
that legitimizes violence in the first place.
Edelman ‘4
Lee Edelman, Professor of English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, 2004, page 28-31
Bernard Law, the former cardinal of Boston, mistaking (or maybe understanding too well) the degree of authority
bestowed on him by the signifier of his patronymic, denounced in 1996 proposed legislation giving health
care benefits to same-sex partners of municipal employees. He did so by proclaiming, in a
noteworthy instance of piety in the sky, that bestowing such access to health care would profoundly
diminish the marital bond. “Society,” he opined, “has a special interest in the protection,
care and upbringing of children. Because marriage remains the principal, and the best,
framework for the nurture, education and socialization of children, the state has a special
interest in marriage.” With this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly committed to the figure of the Child that it will
justify refusing health care benefits to the adults that some children become, Law lent his voice to the mortifying
mantra of a communal jouissance that depends on the fetishization of the Child at the
expense of whatever such fetishization must inescapably queer. Some seven years later, after Law had
resigned for his failure to protect Catholic children from sexual assault by pedophile priests, Pope John Paul II returned to this
theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, “based on individual egoism”
rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he
observed, “Such a ‘caricature’ has no future and
cannot give future to any society.” Queers must respond to the violent force of such
constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives, not only by insisting on
our equal right to the social order’s coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and
the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand here anyway in each and every
expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in
whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor,
innocent kid on the Net; fuck laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole
network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. We might like to believe that
with patience, with work, with generous contributions to lobbying groups or generous participation in activist group so
generous doses of legal savvy and electoral sophistication, the future will hold a place for us – a place at the political table that
won’t have to come at the cost of the places we seek in the bed or the bar or the baths. But there
are no queers in
that future as there can be no future for queer, chosen as they are to bear the bad tidings
that there can be no future at all: that the future, as Annie’s hymn to the hope of “Tomorrow” understands, is
“always / A day / Away.” Like the lover son Keat’s Grecian urn, forever “near the goal” of a union they’ll never in fact achieve,
we’re held in thrall by a future continually deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue
the dream of a day when today are one. That future is nothing but kid stuff, reborn each
day to screen out the grave that gapes from within the lifeless letter, luring us into,
ensnaring us in, reality's gossamer web. Those queered by the social order that projects its
death drive onto them are no doubt positioned to recognize the structuring fantasy that so
defines them. But they're positioned as well to recognize the irreducibility of that fantasy and the cost of construing it as
contingent to the logic of social organization as such. Acceding to this figural identification with the undoing of
identity, which is also to say with the disarticulation of social and Symbolic form, might well be described, in John Brenkman's
words, as "politically
self-destructive. But politics (as the social elaboration of reality) and the self (as mere
what queerness, again as figure, necessarily
destroys — necessarily insofar as this " s e l f " is the agent of reproductive futurism and
prosthesis maintaining the future for the figural Child), are
this "politics" the means of its promulgation as the order of social reality. But perhaps, as Lacan's
engagement with Antigone in Seminar 7 suggests, political self-destruction inheres in the only act that
counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life. If
the fate of the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of futurity, if the jouissance, the corrosive enjoyment,
intrinsic to queer (non)identity annihilates the fetishistic jouissance that works to
consolidate identity by allowing reality to coagulate around its ritual reproduction, then
the only oppositional status to which our queerness could ever lead would depend on our
taking seriously the place of the death drive we're called on to figure and insisting, against
the cult of the Child and the political order it enforces, that we, as Guy Hocquenghem
made clear, are "not the signifier of what might become a new form of 'social
organisation,' " that we do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since all
of these fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future. We
choose, instead, not to choose the Child, as disciplinary image of the Imaginary past or as
site of a projective identification with an always impossible future. The queerness we propose, in
Hocquenghem's words, "is unaware of the passing of generations as stages on the road to better living. It knows nothing
about 'sacrifice now for the sake of future generations' . . . [it] knows that civilisation alone is mortal."
Even more: it delights in that mortality as the negation of everything that would define itself, moralistically, as pro-life. It is
we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the signifier, pronouncing at last
the words for which we're condemned should we speak them or not: that are the
advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity's emblem must die; that the future is mere
repetition and just as lethal as the past. Our queerness has nothing to offer a Symbolic that
lives by denying that nothingness except an insistence on the haunting excess that this
nothingness entails, an insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of
futurity, shattering narrative temporality with irony's always explosive force. And so what
is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist
intransitively—to insist that the future stop here.
Binary Extension
Sexuality is an undefined in Nature- society and civilization have placed these
categories for the purpose of procreation.
Mortimer-Sandilands ‘5
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, is Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture at York University. Her work lies
at the intersections of queer and feminist theory, environmental philosophy and political theory, and cultural studies.
She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minnesota, 1999), the
co-editor (with Rebecca Raglon and Melody Hessing) of This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment
(UBC, 2004), and is working on a manuscript called Pastoral Traditions, Sexual Subversions: Lesbian Histories of
Nature Writing. http://www.invisibleculture.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/issue9_sandilands.pdf,
Originally delivered as a speech on 2/19/04. Excerpt from pages 7 to 9
Histories of sexuality and ecology: un/ naturalizing the queer: Perhaps
the most important starting-point for this
analysis is the fact that the categories through which we currently understand sexuality and
sexual identity are not “natural.” By this, I mean that the categories gay, lesbian, bisexual,
transgender, and queer are not given “in nature.” Although, as biologist Bruce Bagemihl has
demonstrated, homoerotic activity flourishes, and always has, in a wide range of animal
species, the way in which we predominantly understand sexuality at the turn of the twentyfirst century is a historical artifact located in very specific ideas and institutions. 11 In
particular, the idea of sexuality as a part of one’s identity, and a part of one’s identity that
might be grounded in some fact of biology, is a very recent development indeed . As Michel
Foucault has pointed out, “homosexual ” as a distinct category of persons is a unique
product of Victorian society ; prior to the nineteenth century, there was a wide range of forms
of sexual activity, but these sexual acts were – among men, at least – understood as
potentially occurring anywhere, and between anyone. 12 Thus, for example, the British Navy
had a rule by which buggery was perfectly legitimate provided the sailors had been at sea for
at least six months ; sodomy, here, was not something that happened because a sailor “was
gay,” but was simply a particular – if still not quite respectable – sexual activity. The fact that we
now commonly understand sexuality as question of natural identity has a great deal to do with the confluence of biomedical
thinking and social regulation that developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century. At the same time as biological science
was creating an understanding of categories of species based on their possession of certain traits, medical science was developing a
categorization of sexual traits with the agenda of explaining sexual behavior as part of the biological life of the human species. The
rise of evolutionary thought defined a biological narrative that had a large influence on
medical research on sexuality; particularly important were ideas of sexual selection and
reproductive fitness, in which the species survival was understood to be dependent on the
strongest and best reproducers getting together. In this narrative, heterosexuality came to be
understood, for the first time in history, as a distinct category of sexual practice, the
naturalness of which was solidified by its opposition to so-called deviant sexual identities that
did not fit into an evolutionary narrative. For Darwin, only heterosexual courtship and mating
could be “natural” because it was reproduction that allowed the species to continue; despite
overwhelming evidence to suggest that homoeroticism is everywhere in nature, evolutionary
thought thus came to define it as aberrant.
Uncivilized Writing
Our advocacy brings topical discussions closer to nature in order to re-align
ourselves with our ecological, sexual, and gendered origins. This debate will be
uncivilized, and the blurred lines of the civil will be washed away in oceans of
change.
Kingsnorth and Hine ‘9
Paul Kingsworth is an English writer who lives in Cumbria, England. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a
co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Dougald Hine is a British author, editor and social entrepreneur. He cofounded School of Everything and is Director at large of the Dark Mountain Project. He is a well-known radical in
Britain, UNCIVILISATION: THE DARK MOUNTAIN MANIFESTO, http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/ > ~cVs
We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that
our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live
with it. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to
a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’. We believe that the roots of these
crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our
civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our
separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have
forgotten they are myths. We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere
entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality. Humans are not the point and
purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble.
By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world. We will celebrate writing and art
which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too
long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels. We will not lose ourselves in the
elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under
our fingernails. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the
hope beyond hope , the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.
This speech is an act of Uncivilized writing, which seeks to deconstruct and
analyze the position of humanity in relation to ecology in reference to civil
society. Uncivilized writing.
Kingsnorth and Hine ‘9
Paul Kingsworth is an English writer who lives in Cumbria, England. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a
co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Dougald Hine is a British author, editor and social entrepreneur. He cofounded School of Everything and is Director at large of the Dark Mountain Project. He is a well-known radical in
Britain, UNCIVILISATION: THE DARK MOUNTAIN MANIFESTO, http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/ > ~cVs
Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left to politicians,
economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or
campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In
between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted
their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What
new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an exhibition equal
to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord? If the answers to these questions have been
scarce up to now, it is perhaps both because the depth of collective denial is so great, and
because the challenge is so very daunting. We are daunted by it, ourselves. But we believe it needs to
be risen to. We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a
steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic
response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind. This response we call Uncivilised art,
and we are interested in one branch of it in particular: Uncivilised writing. Uncivilised writing
is writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly
evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient
thought, control, compassion or intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth
of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project. Apes whose project has
been to tame, to control, to subdue or to destroy — to civilise the forests, the deserts, the wild lands and the seas, to
impose bonds on the minds of their own in order that they might feel nothing when they
exploit or destroy their fellow creatures. Against the civilising project, which has become the
progenitor of ecocide, Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective—we remain human
and, even now, are not quite ashamed — but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather
than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession. It offers an unblinking look at the forces
among which we find ourselves.
ID PTX Good
Identity politics are key to solve oppression--critics ignore the reality
Von Blum '13
Paul Von Blum is a senior lecturer in African American studies and communication studies at UCLA, "In Defense of
Identity Politics," 2001, http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/in-defense-of-identity-politics
Conservative and liberal critics
have taken strong issue with identity politics, especially in the past few
decades. Many of these critics downplay the ongoing violence of racism, sexism, homophobia,
transphobia, and ableism that continue to provoke identity-based organizing in the present day. I would
like to offer some reflections on why identity politics movements strengthen rather than weaken the Left
and why we all need to support identity-based organizing if we are to address the ongoing, dismal
realities of racial exclusion and overt and institutional discrimination against historically oppressed
populations.
Critics of ID politics criticize in part because of their unfamiliarity with the
subject matter and should be discredited as such
Duberman '1
Martin Duberman has a Harvard PhD in history, and is also the Amherst College Doctor of Humane Letters and
professor emeritus of history at Herbert Lehman College and CUNY, "In Defense of Identity Politics," 2001,
http://inthesetimes.com/issue/25/16/duberman2516.html
The critics
of identity politics give no sign that they have actually read, let alone absorbed, the
work of queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jeffrey Weeks, Michael Warner, Wayne Koestenbaum or Judith Butler-to name only a few of the more prominent. A large body of work now exists that, taken together, presents a
startling set of postulates about such matters of universal importance as the historicity and fluidity of
sexual desire, the performative nature of gender, and the complex multiplicity of attractions, fantasies, impulses
and narratives that lie within us all.
AT: Nature not Queer
THE NOTION THAT SEXUALITY HAS DEFINABLE BORDERS AND SEQUENCES IS
PART AND PARCEL OF A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ORIENTATION THAT
AUTHORIZES VIOLENCE. OUR interrogation of sexual orientation allows us to
diverge from the line in society that forces us to be “straight”. A queer
phenomenology allows us to interrogate heteronormativity.
Ahmed '8 (Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed, GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12, Number 4, 2006, pp. 543-574 (Article), Vlad)
What then does it mean to be oriented sexually? We might suggest first that such orientations
take time. We can paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir by starting with the following point: “One is
not born, but becomes straight.”24 What does it mean to posit straightness as about
becoming rather than being? That such a question is askable reminds us that we should not
approach the question of orientation simply as a spatial question. We might note here that dwelling
refers not only to the process of coming to reside, or what Heidegger calls “making room,” 25
but also to time: to dwell on something is to linger, or even to delay or postpone . If orientation is a
matter of how we reside or how we clear space that is familiar, then orientations also take
time. Orientations allow us to take up space insofar as they take time. Even when orientations
seem to be about which way we are facing in the present, they also point us toward the
future. The hope of changing directions is always that we do not know where some paths may
take us: risking departure from the straight and narrow, makes new futures possible, which
might involve going astray, getting lost, or even becoming queer. The temporality of
orientation reminds us that orientations are effects of what we tend toward, where the
“toward” marks a space and time that is almost, but not quite, available in the present. In the
case of sexual orientation, it is not then simply that we have it. To become straight means not
only that we have to turn toward the objects given to us by heterosexual culture but also that
we must turn away from objects that take us off this line. The queer subject within straight
culture hence deviates and is made socially present as a deviant. What is present to us in the
present is not casual: as I have suggested, we do not just acquire our orientations because we
find things here or there. Rather, certain objects are available to us because of lines that we
have already taken: our life courses follow a certain sequence, which is also a matter of
following a direction or of being directed in a certain way (birth, childhood, adolescence,
marriage, reproduction, death), as Judith Halberstam has shown us in her reflections on the
“temporality” of the family and the expenditure of family time.26 The concept of orientations
allows us to expose how life gets directed through the very requirement that we follow what
is already given to us. For a life to count as a good life, it must return the debt of its life by
taking on the direction promised as a social good, which means imagining one’s futurity in
terms of reaching certain points along a life course. Such points accumulate, creating the
impression of a straight line. To follow such a line might be a way to become straight, by not deviating
at any point. The relationship between following a line and the conditions for the emergence of lines is
often ambiguous. Which one comes first? I have always been struck by the phrase “a path well
trodden.” A path is made by repeatedly passing over ground. We can see the path as a trace of past
journeys, made out of footprints, traces of feet that tread and in treading create a line on the
ground. When people stop treading, the path may disappear. When we see the line of the ground
before us, we tend to walk on it, as a path clears the way. So we walk on the path as it is before us, but
it is only before us as an effect of being walked upon. A paradox of the footprint emerges. Lines are
both created by being followed and are followed by being created. The lines that direct us, as
lines of thought as well as lines of motion, are in this way performative: they depend on the
repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as
an effect of this repetition. To say that lines are performative is to say that we find our way, we
know which direction we face, only as an effect of work, which is often hidden from view. So in
following the directions, I arrive, as if by magic. Directions are then about the magic of arrival. In a way,
the work of arrival is forgotten in the very feeling that the arrival is magic. The work involves following
directions; we arrive when we have followed them properly: bad readings just will not get us there.
Following lines also involves forms of social investment. Such investments promise return (if we follow
this line, then this or that will follow), which might sustain the very will to keep going. Through such
investments in the promise of return, subjects reproduce the lines that they follow. Considering the
politics of the straight line helps us rethink the relationship between inheritance (the lines that
are given as our point of arrival into familial and social space) and reproduction (the demand that we
return the gift of the line by extending that line). It is not automatic that we reproduce what we inherit
or that we always convert our inheritance into possessions. We must pay attention to the pressure to
make such conversions. We can recall here the different meanings of the word pressure: the
social pressure to follow a certain course, to live a certain kind of life, and even to reproduce
that life, can feel like a physical press on the surface of the body, which creates its own
impressions for sure. We are pressed into lines, just as lines are the accumulation of such moments of
pressure, or what we can call “stress points.”
Queer ecology creates a sexual politics that more clearly includes
considerations of the natural world and its biosocial constitution, erasing the
human/nature binary.
White 10 (“What's the Matter?” Melissa Autumn White, Melissa Autumn White is a transdisciplinary
queer and feminist scholar. Her research interests include viruses, affect, embodiment, subjectivity,
knowledge, territoriality, sovereignty and power, Vlad)
To begin, again, with matter, this review turns to two recent collections that take up the question of
matter in distinctive philosophical and political ways: Diana Coole's and Samantha Frost's New
Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010) and Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson's Queer
Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010). Together, these volumes [End Page 339] materialize richly
populated and verdant worlds in which to rethink and reconsider the matter of materiality, a matter of
theoretical concern that is, as Coole and Frost see it, "everywhere we look" (2). " Everywhere we
look," they write, "we are witnessing scattered but insistent demands for more materialist
modes of analysis and for new ways of thinking about matter and processes of
materialization" (2). The question that both of these volumes leave us with—or ought to leave is
with—is, Why? Why now? In other words, what are the material conditions that make the turn to the
"new materialisms" not only possible, but also felt as urgent, indeed, necessary? Marx, mma: "all that
is solid melts into air," and it makes us, understandably, anxious. Longing for a return to what matters
as even the geography closest in—the body loses its solidity, experienced as a system of parts (kidneys,
wombs for hire, limbs that don't belong), an assemblage of cells, an ecology of microbes, parasites and
viruses, a fleshy knot of capacities and debilities, as our intimate and physical lives become increasingly
saturated "by digital, wireless, and virtual technologies" (5).2 Sorceries of capitalism: "all that is holy is
profaned." Both New Materialisms and Queer Ecologies are, in the truest sense, timely volumes; both
collections illuminate and reflect contemporary compulsions in critical theory while making important
contributions to transdisciplinary feminist and queer posthumanist inquiry, a minor arc of theory that
nevertheless has an extensive history in feminist studies of science, technology, and epistemology, as
Sara Ahmed (2008) has argued elsewhere.3 There is, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost suggest, "an
apparent paradox in thinking about matter: as soon as we do so, we seem to distance
ourselves from it, and within the space that opens up, a host of immaterial things seem to
emerge: language, consciousness, subjectivity, agency, mind, soul; also imagination, emotion,
values, meaning, and so on" (1-2). Yet, after Butler's theorizations of the radical inseparability of
embodiment, psychic life, and discourse (1990, 1993, 1997), and in the face of autonomist theorizations
of the information economy (e.g., Marazzi 1994; Hardt and Negri 2004; Clough 2007; Berardi 2009),
what can it possibly mean to render language, affect, subjectivity, imagination, mind, and, indeed
"soul" as "immaterial things"? Having opened thus, it seems important to clarify that the "new
materialisms" are not to be confused with historical materialism, though both volumes do
situate their inquiries as emerging from scientific and philosophical cleavages not unlike the
ones that opened the ground for the emergence of evolutionary and sexological thought in
Darwin and Krafft-Ebing [End Page 340] (Sandilands and Erickson, Queer Ecologies, 7), as well as "the
great materialist philosophies of the nineteenth century, notably those of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"
(Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 5). Queer Ecologies and New Materialisms delve, in distinct ways,
into the complex economies and ecologies of matter, materiality, concepts, and objects to foster
methodologies of inquiry that can begin to do justice to the complex interdependencies between the
human (and) the animal, nature (and) culture, agency (and) information, sex (and) desire, politics (and)
ethics, embodiment (and) technology. Drawing on "queer" as both a noun and a verb, Queer Ecologies
brings together essays that explore the genealogical and phenomenological entanglements of sex
and nature to develop "a sexual politics that more clearly includes considerations of the
natural world and its biosocial constitution, and an environmental politics that demonstrates
an understanding of the ways in which sexual relations organize and influence both the
material world of nature and our perceptions, experiences, and constitutions of that world "
(5). Deploying "queer ecology" as a strategy of critique and deconstruction, this volume as a
whole creates spaces for erotic poetics and politics of naturecultures to press up against what
various included authors identify as imperatives of heteronormative reprocentricity
(Sandilands and Erickson), econormativity (Chiro), speciest logics (McWhorter), biophilia (Chisholm),
and melancholia (Sandilands). Sandilands and Erickson's excellent introduction crafts a genealogy of
queer ecology that simultaneously gestures toward its phenomenology by way of a surprisingly
provocative reading of Brokeback Mountain, as well as a reading of texts that have opened up space for
a queer ecology, including Greta Gaard's 1997 article, "Toward a Queer Ecofeminism"; Scott Herring's
recent work on rural queer sexualities; and, of course, Eli Clare's moving memoir, Exile and Pride (1999),
which poetically opens up a world in which corporeal, class, sexual, and environmental politics are
deeply enmeshed in the very act of writing. Following this strong introduction, the collection unfolds in
three parts. In the first, Against Nature? Queer Sex, Queer Animality, four essays resituate queer desire
in and through the more-than-human world. Stacy Alaimo offers an "epistemology of the zoological
closet" (56) in her reading of "queer" animals; Ladelle McWhorter explores the dangers that inhere
in a reliance on deeply racialized discourses of "diversity" and "species" in making queer
claims to social inclusion; Noël Sturgeon advances an eco-queer reading of The March of the
Penguins (2005); and David Bell reflects [End Page 341] on Fuck for Forests (FFF), a not-for-profit
organization currently based in Berlin that produces ecoporn to raise money for environmental justice
projects. In part 2, Green, Pink, and Public: Queering Environmental Politics, Andil Gosine, Nancy G.
Unger, Giovanna Di Chiro, Katie Hogan, and Gordon Brent Ingram collectively investigate the
intersections of sex, race-racism, nature, kinship, class, and landscapes with the aim of opening spaces
for more radically transformative ecopolitics. Rebecca Stein continues this work against the notion of
queer sex as a "crime against nature" in her ecopoetic readings of Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt
in the third and final part of the book, Desiring Nature? Queer Attachments, in which Bruce Erickson
provides a queer reading of sex ecology and nation building in his deconstruction of a mark of
Canadian-ness: the ability to make love in a canoe. Meanwhile, Catriona Sandilands offers an evocative
consideration of melancholia as "a psychic state of being that holds the possibility for memory's
transformation into an ethical and political environmental reflection" (354). Diane Chisholm closes the
collection with a gesture toward our more-than-human futures through a reading of Ellen Meloy's
writings on "bio-erotic-diversity" (359), which, Chisholm contends, engenders something like a queer
devotion to biophilia that works against Lee Edelman's ironically reprocentric No Future (2004).
Gathering a strong list of contributors, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost open New Materialisms:
Ontology, Agency, and Politics with an extensive introduction that argues that particle physics,
biotechnology, theoretical physics, and chaos complexity theory have had profound effects on the ways
in which we understand ontology, such that our "sense of the patterns or characteristics of matter's
movements" have been transformed (13). At the same time, these epistemologies have undermined
"the idea of stable and predictable material substance, hastening a realization that our natural
environment is far more complex, unstable, fragile, and interactive" than many ontoepistemologies
have allowed (13). The essays collected here, in three parts, offer nuanced responses to this shifting
ground for thinking matter and for producing theory that matters.
AT: Not Intersectional
Queer Ecologist movements are influenced by scholarship rooted in an
intersectional approach
Gaard ’11 (Greta Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary
filmmaker. Gaard's academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is
widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of composition and literary criticism. Her
theoretical work extending ecofeminist thought into queer theory, vegetarianism, and
animal liberation has been influential within women's studies. A cofounder of the
Minnesota Green Party, Gaard documented the transition of the U.S. Green movement into
the Green Party of the United States in her book, Ecological Politics. She is currently a
professor of English at University of Wisconsin-River Falls and a community faculty member
in Women's Studies at Metropolitan State University, Twin Cities; Ethics & the Environment,
Volume 16, Number 2, Fall 2011; Published by Indiana University Press; “Green, Pink and
Lavender: Banishing Ecophobia through Queer Ecologies”; pg. 119-120) GFD
The essays in section two address “queering environmental politics” by examining the
environmental and spatial dimension of sexual politics, and the implicit sexualization of
environments. “Queer ecology involves a necessary critique of the heteronormativity and
whiteness of environ- mental politics,” the editors explain, as well as a critique of the
“metro- normative stereotype of gay life as inherently consumerist” (34). Leading off the
discussions, Andil Gosine’s essay explores how both “reproductive sex between non-white
people, and sex between men” have been seen as “toxic to nature” (149); both “threaten
colonial-imperialist and national- ist ambitions” of white heteropatriarchy (150).
Examining reports of ar- rests for gay male cruising in parks at Merced, California; the
Minnesota National Wildlife Refuge near Minneapolis; the Kokomo Reservoir Park in
Indiana, and Vancouver’s Stanley Park, Gosine exposes a rhetoric of gay sex as pollution: the
cruising areas are described as “trash-strewn pulloffs,” with “condoms by the hundreds,”
and other “unsavory litter” creating health hazards and endangering children. Citing the
Vancouver Park Board Commission’s sensible strategy of installing extra garbage can
receptacles in the area, Gosine directly challenges the belief that “public, homosexual sex is
bad for the environment” and shows the heteronorma- tive “solutions” (i.e., cutting down
bushes, building fences, paving path- ways) tend to be more environmentally destructive
than gay sex.¶ The theme of queer environments is carried forward in Nancy Un- ger’s
chapter, which chronicles the construction of lesbian space in the United States, from the
black lesbians in Harlem to the white lesbian retreat at Cherry Grove, the back-to-the-land
movement in Oregon, the Pagoda womynspace in Florida (later reconstituted at Alapine
Village in Alabama), and the lesbian community established through regional and national
women’s music festivals. Curiously, though Unger notes the les- bian feminist political
analysis that placed “vegetarian organic foods” (182) and “healthy food” (189) as an
integral part of lesbian space, she fails to mention persistent connections between
vegan/vegetarianism and lesbian feminism which were foundational components of the
Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, The Bloodroot Collective, and many other les- bian-only
collectives and communal living spaces (Gaard 2000). These lesbians’ dietary choices were
inspired by a widespread belief that sex- ism, heterosexism, racism, classism, and
speciesism were part of the same heteropatriarchal system that lesbian feminists wanted
to leave behind. In this volume, Unger is not alone in omitting critique of the dominant
heteromasculinity/speciesism connection, indicating this connection as an area for further
development in queer ecologies generally.
AT: Sexual “deviances” Don’t Exist in “Nature”
THERE ARE LOTS OF QUEER ANIMALS – Yale doe
FEREYDOONI '12 Arash, undergrad science contributor Yale Science, the oldest undergrad
science magazine "Do Animals Exhibit Homosexuality?" 3/14
http://www.yalescientific.org/2012/03/do-animals-exhibit-homosexuality/
Recent research has found that homosexual behavior in animals may be much more common
than previously thought. Although Darwin’s theory of natural selection predicts an evolutionary
disadvantage for animals that fail to pass along their traits through reproduction with the
opposite sex, the validity of this part of his theory has been questioned with the discoveries of
homosexual behavior in more than 10% of prevailing species throughout the world.
Currently, homosexual behavior has been documented in over 450 different animal species
worldwide. For instance, observations indicate that Humboldt, King, Gentoo, and Adélie
penguins of the same sex engage in “mating rituals like entwining their necks and vocalizing to
one another.” In addition, male giraffes have also been observed engaging in homosexual
behavior by rubbing their necks against each others’ bodies while ignoring the females. Yet
another example is lizards of the genus Teiidae, which can copulate with both male and female
mates.
Biologists Nathan W. Bailey and Marlene Zuk from the University of California, Riverside have
investigated the evolutionary consequences and implications of same-sex behavior, and their
findings demonstrate benefits to what seems to be an evolutionary paradox. For example, their
studies of the Laysan albatross show that female-female pairing can increase fitness by taking
advantage of the excess of females and shortage of males in the population and provide
superior care for offspring. Moreover, same-sex pairing in many species actually alleviates the
likelihood of divorce and curtails the pressure on the opposite sex by allowing members to
exhibit more flexibility to form partnerships, which in turn strengthens social bonds and
reduces competition. Thus, not only do animals exhibit homosexuality, but the existence of
this behavior is quite prevalent and may also confer certain evolutionary advantages.
AT: Framework
THE ROLE OF THE BALLOT IS TO UNDERMINE VIOLENT EPISTEMIC
FRAMEWORKS. ONLY QUEERING THE OCEAN ALLOWS US TO INVESTIGATE THE
WAY THAT IMPERIAL ONTOLOGIES VIOLENTLY CONSTITUTE SPACE IN THE
NAME OF FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY.
ENG '11 (DAVID, David L. Eng is professor of English, comparative literature, and Asian
American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer
Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (2010) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity
in Asian America (2001). In addition, he is coeditor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of
Mourning (2003), with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (1998), and with Judith
Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz of a special issue of the journal Social Text, "What's Queer
about Queer Studies Now?" (2005). "Queering the Black Atlantic, Queering the Brown Atlantic"
David L. Eng (bio) GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies > Volume 17, Number 1, 2011
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v017/1
7.1.eng.html)
Ultimately, teaching for justice would seek to undermine epistemic frameworks and practices
that are simply unable to explain those itineraries of violence that gain their political force
through "names such as democracy and civilization" (3). [End Page 198] ¶ In section 3 of
Pedagogies, "Dangerous Memory: Secular Acts, Sacred Possession" (chapters 6-7), Alexander
continues this pedagogic initiative by showing us how the personal is political and how the
spiritual is political as well. She illustrates how one might go about constructing oppositional
knowledges and practices by reconsidering the conventional relations between the secular and
the sacred that would decidedly split the latter from the former in modernity's self-narration of
development. Here, she refuses to yield the space of the spiritual to religious fundamentalists,
whose vision of sinners in the hands of an angry God sets the conceptual limits to the functions
of the spiritual in social debate today. At the same time, she resists the notion that "no selfrespecting postmodernist would want to align herself (at least in public) with a category such as
the spiritual, which appears so fixed, so unchanging, so redolent of tradition" (15). Working
against these traditions of sanctioned knowledge and practice, Alexander observes that while
"humans made the Crossing, traveling only in one direction through Ocean given the name
Atlantic[,] Grief traveled as well" (289).¶ Alexander draws on this history of grief—exemplifying
the recent affective turn in queer studies—through her experiences with Santeria and Vodou.
Such experiences lead her to commune with a slave woman named Kitsimba, who made her
own Atlantic Crossing in the eighteenth-century, as well as with other sisters of color, ancestrally
recalled in This Bridge Called My Back.3 "In the realm of the secular," Alexander remarks, "the
material is conceived of as tangible while the spiritual is either nonexistent or invisible. In the
realm of the Sacred, however, the invisible constitutes its presence by a provocation of sorts, by
provoking our attention" (307). We may choose to ignore the Sacred. However, attuned to its
effects, and to its affective valences, the spiritual promises to lead us elsewhere, yielding forms
of knowledge and practice that evade the instrumental radar of empiricism and scientific
rationality, the cornerstones of Enlightenment thinking.¶ Understanding that ghosts and spirits
do not depend on our collective acknowledgment to validate their existences provides a new
way to approach Bruno Latour's insistence that "we have never been modern"—or, at least,
quite as modern as we would like to believe. Even more, it allows those left out of modernity's
instrumental reason to make better sense of a social world that outsources them as collateral
damage. Alexander summarizes,¶ I wish to examine how spiritual practitioners employ
metaphysical systems to provide the moorings for their meanings and understanding of self—in
short, how they constitute or remember experience as Sacred and how that experience shapes
their subjectivity. Experience is a category of great [End Page 199] epistemic import to
feminism. But we have understood it primarily as secularized, as if it were absent Spirit and thus
antithetical, albeit indirectly, to the Sacred.¶ (295)
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS A PREREQUISITE TO ACADEMIC DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THE
OCEANS. ONLY BY DRAWING ATTENTION TO THE WAY IN WHICH SOVEREIGNTY
IS VIOLENTLY NATURALIZED CAN WE HOPE TO BRING TO LIGHT EFFECTIVE
PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE. THIS IS MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE WITH A FOCUS ON
DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE.
ENG '11 (DAVID, David L. Eng is professor of English, comparative literature, and Asian
American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer
Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (2010) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity
in Asian America (2001). In addition, he is coeditor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of
Mourning (2003), with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (1998), and with Judith
Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz of a special issue of the journal Social Text, "What's Queer
about Queer Studies Now?" (2005). "Queering the Black Atlantic, Queering the Brown Atlantic"
David L. Eng (bio) GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies > Volume 17, Number 1, 2011
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v017/1
7.1.eng.html)
By queering the Black Atlantic in these provocative ways, Alexander offers bold ways to
reimagine and rethink the intersectional and interdisciplinary relationships among queer
studies, area studies, diaspora studies, postcoloniality, transnational feminism, ethnic studies,
Marxism, and globalization. Indeed, such a queering of the Black Atlantic is long overdue.
Alexander's specific attention to the postcolonial Caribbean highlights issues of sovereignty,
citizenship, immigration, and social belonging, placing Afro-diaspora and African American
studies in more immediate conversation with Asian/Asian American studies as well as
Latin/Latin American studies, whose long-time engagements with these categories have helped
fuel the critique of hetero-and homonormativity, kinship, and elective affiliation in the field of
queer diasporas. Alexander's methodology draws sustained attention to different and uneven
histories of slavery, coerced migration, and indentureship that construct these legal and social
formalizations. Furthermore, her focus on the queer Caribbean supplements the more
cosmopolitan emphases of Afro-diaspora in the Black Atlantic (which connect, for example, the
metropolitan capitals of New York, London, and Paris). As Alexander notes:
There is a great deal of urgency for us to map . . . some crucial analytic shifts that will prompt
postcolonial studies to engage more strategically with the "here and there," to position
immigration, for instance, as an important site for the local reconfiguration of subalternity and
the local reconfiguration of race. . . . As certain strands of queer studies move to take up more
centrally questions of political economy and racial formation, and of transnational feminism and
immigrant labor, the analytic vise in the discipline will be sharpened between those who hold
on to a representational democratic focus within U.S. borders and those who espouse an
antipathy toward the links between political economy and sexuality.
NORMAL IS THE TYRANNY OF OUR CONDITION -- REJECT THEIR ATTEMTP TO
NORM DEBATE
The transformative potential of intersectionality should not be ignored in
academic spaces. Queer theory’s sphere of influence has been extended
through political tracts to tackle COUNTLESS systemic boundariesencompassing race, class, sex, gender and sexuality. All instances domination
stitch together various forms of oppression, weaving a matrix of oppression
articulated in the TOTALITY of NORMALCY. This is the state, this is capitalism,
this is police brutality, and this is heteronormativity.
Loadenthal ‘12
Michael Loadenthal is an adjunct lecturer in the program on justice and peace at Georgetown University, Loadenthal
holds a BA in "International Studies: International Peace & Conflict Resolution," and a BA in "Women and Gender
Studies" from American University, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume 10, Issue 3,
http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Volume-10-Issue-3-2012.pdf
The anonymously authored political
tracts under analysis serve to redefine and extend Queer theory’s
sphere of influence to tackle additional systemic binaries beyond those situated in race, class,
sex, gender, sexuality, ability, age, etc.. The examination of the intersectionality of oppressions
is well situated in the academic literature through the work of such authors as Patricia Hill
Collins, who coined the term “matrix of domination” (2000: 227-28) to refer to the overlapping taxonomies in which “domination
is organized.” Collins (2000) states, “all contexts of domination incorporate some combination of
intersecting oppressions…the concept of a matrix of domination encapsulates the universality
of intersecting oppressions as organized through diverse local realities” (228). The concept of
interrelated systems of oppression occurs throughout the (non-BB! specific) insurrectionist Queer
literature generally. In once such foundational essay, such an intersectional location is termed the “Totality,” and is defined
as: As queers we understand Normalcy. Normal, is the tyranny of our condition; reproduced in
all of our relationships. Normalcy is violently reiterated in every minute of every day. We
understand this Normalcy as the Totality. The Totality being the interconnection and
overlapping of all oppression and misery. The Totality is the state. It is capitalism. It is
civilization and empire. The totality is fence-post crucifixion. It is rape and murder at the
hands of police. It is ‘Str8 Acting’ and ‘No Fatties or Femmes.’ (Towards, 2008: II)
Representations must precede policy discussion
Crawford ‘2 (Neta Crawford ,PhD MA MIT, BA Brown, Prof. of poli sci at boston univ.
Argument and Change in World Politics, 2002 p. 19-21)
Coherent arguments are unlikely to take place unless and until actors, at least on some
level, agree on what they are arguing about. The at least temporary resolution of metaarguments- regarding the nature of the good (the content of prescriptive norms); what is
out there, the way we know the world, how we decide between competing beliefs (ontology
and epistemology); and the nature of the situation at hand( the proper frame or
representation)- must occur before specific arguments that could lead to
decision and action may take place. Meta-arguments over epistemology and ontology,
relatively rare, occur in instances where there is a fundamental clash between belief systems
and not simply a debate within a belief system. Such arguments over the nature of the world
and how we come to know it are particularly rare in politics though they are more
frequent in religion and science. Meta-arguments over the “good” are contests over what it is
good and right to do, and even how we know the good and the right. They are about the nature
of the good, specifically, defining the qualities of “good” so that we know good when we see it
and do it. Ethical arguments are about how to do good in a particular situation. More
common are meta-arguments over representations or frames- about how we out to
understand a particular situation. Sometimes actors agree on how they see a situation. More
often there are different possible interpretations. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Roger karapin
suggest, “Argument and debate occur when people try to gain acceptance for their
interpretation of the world”. For example, “is the war defensive or aggressive?”. Defining
and controlling representations and images, or the frame, affects whether one thinks
there is an issue at stake and whether a particular argument applies to the case. An
actor fighting a defensive war is within international law; an aggressor may legitimately be
subject to sanctions. Framing and reframing involve mimesis or putting forward representations
of what is going on. In mimetic meta-arguments, actors who are struggling to characterize or
frame the situation accomplish their ends by drawing vivid pictures of the “reality”
through exaggeration, analogy, or differentiation. Representations of a situation do
not re-produce accurately so much as they creatively re-present situations in a
way that makes sense. “mimesis is a metaphoric or ‘iconic argumentation of the real.’
Imitating not the effectivity of events but their logical structure and meaning.” Certain
features are emphasized and others de-emphasized or completely ignored as their
situation is recharacterized or reframed. Representation thus becomes a “constraint
on reasoning in that it limits understanding to a specific organization of
conceptual knowledge.” The dominant representation delimits which arguments will
be considered legitimate, framing how actors see possibities. As Roxanne Doty argues, “the
possibility of practices presupposes the ability of an agent to imagine certain courses of
action. Certain background meanings, kinds of social actors and relationships, must already be
in place.” If, as Donald Sylvan and Stuart Thorson argue, “politics involves the selective
privileging of representations, “it may not matter whether one representation or
another is true or not. Emphasizing whether frames articulate accurate or
inaccurate perceptions misses the rhetorical import of representation- how
frames affect what is seen or not seen, and subsequent choices. Meta-arguments over
representation are thus crucial elements of political argument because an
actor’s arguments about what to do will be more persuasive if their characterization or
framing of the situation holds sway. But, as Rodger Payne suggests, “No frame is an
omnipotent persuasive tool that can be decisively wielded by norm entrepreneurs without
serious political wrangling.” Hence framing is a meta-argument.
Link Wall
AT: Link of Omission
Omission is a link-it shapes perceptions and writer motives- means the perm
doesn’t solve the consquences of your 1AC’s omission
Jackson, 08-Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University (Richard, “State terror,terrorism research and knowledge politics”,
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/1949/1/BISA-Paper-2008-Jackson-FINAL.pdf SW)
It is crucial to recognise that discourses
are significant not just for what they say but also for what they
do not say; the silences in a discourse can be as important, or even more important at times, than what isstated.
This is because silence can function ideologically in any number of ways. For example, silence can be a deliberate means of
distraction or misdirection from uncomfortable subjects or contrasting viewpoints, the
suppression or de- legitimisation of alternative forms of knowledge or values, the tacit
endorsement of particular kinds of practices, setting the boundaries of legitimate knowledge,
or as a kind of disciplining process directed against certain actors – among others. In other words, the
silences within a text often function as an exercise in power; revealing and interrogating those
silences therefore, is an important part of first and second order critique.
FAILURE TO GROUND EMBODIED GENDER/SEXUALITY IN POLICY RESEARCH
METHODS GUARANTEES ERROR REPLICATION AND REINFORCES THE POWER OF
THE POWERFUL
Marshall 97 (Catherine, professor at the University of North Carolina, Feminist Critical Policy
Analysis: A perspective from post-secondary education, pg. ix-x,)
Policy researchers and analysts have gained and retained legitimacy
by focusing on the problems and methods identified by powerful
people. Those with a different focus are silenced, declared irrelevant,
postponed, coopted, put on the back burner, assigned responsibilities with
no training, budget, personnel or time, or otherwise ignored. Policies, -authoritative agreements among powerful people about how things
should be – have been made without a feminist critical glance. These
two volumes focus on those areas of silence, on the policy issues at the fringe and on
the kinds of policy analysis methods, findings and recommendations that will disrupt but
will also open possibilities. The two volumes identify theories and tools for dismantling
and replacing the politics, theories and modes of policy analysis that built ‘the master’s
house’. The individual chapters illustrate how and why to expand policy
questions and policy analysis methods to incorporate critical and
feminist lenses, demonstrating the promise of politics, analysis and
policymaking that thoughtfully and thoroughly works to uncover any
source of oppression, domination or marginalization and to create
policies to meet the lived realities, needs, aspirations and values of women and girls and
others kept on the margin. The volumes name and develop a new field: Feminist critical
Policy Analysis. The promise of this field lies in its incorporation of perspective that
‘write against the grain’: the feminist, critical stance, with policy analysis
that includes methods for focusing on the cultural values bases of
policies; deconstruction of policy documents; analysis of a policy
intention and its potential effects, such as affirmative Action and Title
IX; studies of the micropolitical, for example, the dynamics of a school board task force
for sexual harassment, a tenure system’s effect on women academics, or the role of
girls’ access to computers in the implementation of computer policies; and analyses of
policies, programs and political stances that do focus on neglected needs in schooling.
Policymakers and analysts need to pause in order to recognize how
issues of gender, the needs of particular groups like the urban poor,
women and non-dominant nationalities are left out of education
policy analyses. In order to connect effectively, women need to take a hard
look at the structures and arenas of policy. By presenting literatures,
methods and examples, these books name the field: feminist critical
policy analysis leap at the challenge.
Generic Exploration Affs
The affirmative places the ocean as an object to be explored and perceived. It
ignores the mystical and beautiful unknown that queer nature is, destroying its
queer existence. This also continues the heteronormative, masculine
expansionist ideals of exploring the feminine, mysterious ocean. This places
heteronormative, human existence above nature, perpetuating the
Human/Nature binary, allowing the natural/unnatural binary that oppresses
the queer body to continue.
Mortimer-Sandilands ‘5 (Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture at York
University ¶ Catriona (Cate)- Her work lies at the intersections of queer and feminist theory,
environmental philosophy and political theory, and cultural studies. She is the author of The
Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minnesota, 1999), the coeditor (with Rebecca Raglon and Melody Hessing) of This Elusive Land: Women and the
Canadian Environment (UBC, 2004), and is working on a manuscript called Pastoral Traditions,
Sexual Subversions: Lesbian Histories of Nature Writing; “Unatural Passions?: Notes Toward a
Queer Ecology”; INVISIBLE CULTURE, An electronic journal for visual culture, Issue 9;
https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/sandilands.html¶ Histories of sexuality
and ecology: un/naturalizing the queer)
Perhaps the most important starting-point for this analysis is the fact that the
categories through which
we currently understand sexuality and sexual identity are not “natural.” By
this, I mean that the categories gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer are
not given “in nature.” Although, as biologist Bruce Bagemihl has demonstrated, homoerotic
activity flourishes, and always has, in a wide range of animal species, the
way in which we predominantly understand sexuality at the turn of the
twenty-first century is a historical artifact located in very specific ideas and
institutions. 11 In particular, the idea of sexuality as a part of one’s identity,
and a part of one’s identity that might be grounded in some fact of biology,
is a very recent development indeed. As Michel Foucault has pointed out, “homosexual” as a distinct
category of persons is a unique product of Victorian society; prior to the nineteenth century, there was a wide range of forms
of sexual activity, but these sexual acts were – among men, at least – understood as potentially occurring anywhere, and
between anyone. 12 Thus, for example, the British Navy had a rule by which buggery was perfectly legitimate provided the
sailors had been at sea for at least six months; sodomy, here, was not something that happened because a sailor “was gay,” but
was simply a particular – if still not quite respectable – sexual activity.
The fact that we now commonly understand sexuality as question of natural identity has a great deal to do with the confluence
of bio-medical thinking and social regulation that developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century. At the same time
as biological science was creating an understanding of categories of species based on their possession of certain traits, medical
science was developing a categorization of sexual traits with the agenda of explaining sexual behavior as part of the biological
life of the human species. The rise of evolutionary thought defined a biological narrative that had a large influence on medical
research on sexuality; particularly important were ideas of sexual selection and reproductive fitness, in which the species
survival was understood to be dependent on the strongest and best reproducers getting together. In this narrative,
heterosexuality came to be understood, for the first time in history, as a distinct
category of sexual practice, the naturalness of which was solidified by its
opposition to so-called deviant sexual identities that did not fit into an
evolutionary narrative. For Darwin, only heterosexual courtship and mating could
be “natural” because it was reproduction that allowed the species to
continue; despite overwhelming evidence to suggest that homoeroticism is
everywhere in nature, evolutionary thought thus came to define it as
aberrant.
In medicine, homosexuality was classified as an illness (as opposed to a sin), as a
pathology that focused on the sexualized individual rather than the sexual
act. As Foucault notes, modern medicine moved us from the regulation of sexual acts to the organization and “treatment” of
sexual identities; where once there may have been women who had sex with women (although the Victorians did not ever
really acknowledge it), now there were formal bearers of sexual categories –“gender
inverts,” “tribades,” and “lesbians” – whose sexual activities with other women
could be linked to some basic biological fault. In short, in the late nineteenth century,
sexuality became naturalized; an individual’s sexual desires were recoded
as expressions of an inherent sexual condition, and that condition was
understood in strongly biological terms. But there is an interesting paradox
here: Homosexuality was simultaneously naturalized andconsidered
“unnatural,” something deviant from a primary, normative heterosexuality.
There are many important things to say about this process. In the first
place, it is not just that ideas of nature were instrumental in the social
regulation of sexuality, but that heterosexuality came to be the defining
sexual paradigm for ideas of evolution and ecology. Heterosexual reproduction was the only
form of sexual activity leading directly to the continuation of a species from one generation to the next; thus, logically, other
sexual activities must be either aberrant or, at best, indirectly part of the heterosexual reproductive process. Preening rituals
between male cock-of-the-rocks were read only as competition for female attention, and not as homoerotic activity between
two males. Even now, some evolutionary psychologists tie themselves into knots trying to explain the eventual reproductive
significance of the prolific same-gender sexual activity that regularly occurs among female bonobos. 13
The science of ecology was strongly influenced by this evolutionary
narrative. The logic goes like this: If the ability of a species to survive in its
environment is tied to its reproductive fitness, then “healthy” environments
are those in which such heterosexual activity flourishes. Clearly, this
reasoning is not entirely sound, guided more by heterosexist assumptions
than by a complex understanding of the diverse social relations of sexuality
occurring in various animal species. But it has had unfortunate
consequences. In one case, well-meaning ecologists, convinced of the
evolutionary pathology of same-gender eroticism, argued that the
widespread presence of apparently lesbian activity among seagulls in a
particular location must be evidence of some major environmental
catastrophe. 14 Of course, it wasn’t: The world is full of lesbian gulls. This kind of “repro-centric”
environmental position remains dominant; indeed, it has also been used to
argue that the contemporary prevalence of transgender individuals (human
and other) must have behind it some contaminating event or process.
However much one might want to be able to pinpoint animal indicators of
pollution or other environmental change, the assumption that
heterosexuality is the only natural sexual form is clearly not an appropriate
benchmark for ecological research. Yet even in environmental arguments
about the destruction caused by human population growth, the paradigm of
“natural” heterosexuality overrides the obvious fact that there are plenty of
non-reproductive sexual options out there.
In the first place, then, we have a situation in which sexuality was biologized into naturalized normative categories, and in
which developing evolutionary and ecological thinking was influenced by a strongly heterosexist paradigm. In the second
place, it wasn’t just evolution that came to be coded heterosexually during this period. While the late nineteenth century saw
the rise of both modern understandings of sexuality and evolutionary ideas of species health, including human health, it also
saw the beginnings of modern environmentalism, and in particular, the politics of wilderness preservation and urban
greening.
By trying to take nature and wrangle it into a human organization is actually an
expansion of these systems. This is not a link of omission. This is a link of direct
action. THE RENDERING OF THE UNNATURAL AS AN INVISIBLE CATEGORY
WITHIN THE DISCOURSE OF THE 1AC STRUCTURES OUR RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN NORMATIVE IDENTITY CATEGORIES AND QUEERNESS.
Huduk and Giammattei 10 [Jacqueline Hudak, M.Ed., Ph.D., and Shawn V. Giammattei,
Ph.D. Doing Family: Decentering Heteronormativity in “Marriage” and “Family” Therapy, AFTA
Monograph Series, Winter 2010 http://www.afta.org/files/2010_Monograph.pdf#page=51,]
Heteronormativity sustains the dominant norm of heterosexuality by rendering marginal any
relational structure that falls outside of this “norm.” Further, heteronormativity renders the
diversity of human sexuality and identities invisible. This invisibility is marked by the fact that
there is limited language to describe sexual minority experience and identities within
dominant discourses. This creates a category of “other” in our culture, which is rendered
invalid or pathological. What little language there is often creates false binary systems that
are inaccurate representations of the actual lived experiences of many individuals. Given this
lack of language, we often are left with the antiquated and imprecise categories of lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT).
Human EXPLORATION with the ocean represent an erotic venture into the
unknown, supporting an androcentric and gendered perspective of nature
Milstein and Dickerson 12
(Tema, professor of communications at University of New Mexico, and Elizabeth, gulf-based journalist. “Gynocentric Greenwashing:
The Discursive Gendering of Nature” in Communication, Culture, and Critique vol 4 iss 5 pp. 510-532, December,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1753-9137.2012.01144.x/full , retrieved 2014/07/08, ~cVs / GFD)
We offer two ethnographic case studies to provide related, but varied, contexts to explore gendered productions of nature.
Milstein has spent several summers as a participant observer studying communication in the
world's highest concentration of whale watch tourism, located in transnational Canadian and American Pacific
waters. Endangered orcas are the main focus, but other whales,2 including humpbacks and grays,
encounter tourism as well. Milstein observes a variety of communicators, including tourists
and whale insiders (such as tour operators, tour naturalists, marine monitors, scientists, whale
advocates, volunteers, and island locals), both on the water in tour or monitor boats and on
land at public shores. Milstein also records extensive written texts, including tourism
marketing materials and educational signage and exhibits. Dickinson has spent five months as a participant
observer studying communication in North Carolina's Educational State Forest (NCESF) system—six forest sites designed to teach
forestry management practices, conservation, and environmental topics to K-12 schoolchildren. The communicators Dickinson
observes include students, teachers, parents, and chaperones bussed into the forests for fieldtrips. Dickinson also works alongside
and interviews forest service personnel and documents texts, such as forest service literature, teaching materials, and curricula.
Dickinson also documents the materiality of the forests, including trees, trails, outdoor classrooms, exhibits, and “talking-tree” and
“talking-rock” trails, where visitors press a button near a tree or rock and hear a human voice recording speak as the tree or rock.
Within each site, communication
focuses on nature representation. Staff communicators, such as
whale tour naturalists and state forest rangers, represent nature to visitors often via “edutainment”
discourses, in which information and education are melded with, and at times subordinated
to, entertainment, a process some staff communicators accept and some lament. Visitors
negotiate these representations and offer some of their own. Differences between the case sites are also
important to our analysis. Transnational tourism focused on endangered whales provides ecocultural
constructions of nature within an oceanic sphere with wild animals. For terrestrial humans,
oceans often represent a loss of human control and a venture into the wild unknown. Out of
their element, humans often encounter wild whales as magnificent and ephemeral, serving no
utilitarian purpose for humans, but instead more intrinsically valued as a way to know nature.
In contrast, the extensively managed timber state forests are known manufactured entities on solid ground. Through forest
conservation management monoculture practices, human control is extreme, and visitors are taught to value trees largely as human
resources. Despite
extant literature's long-problematizing of a predominantly gynocentric
cultural framing of nature, in our case studies, we each separately note an androcentric–
gynocentric dialectic, in which the gynocentric is favorably forefronted, but the androcentric is
decidedly privileged. This overarching dialectic is most strikingly illustrated by tensions within
individual versus communal and frontal versus embodied orientations. To highlight what we argue is an
overarching quality of these gendered ecocultural tensions, we present our interpretations from the two sites in conversation with
one another, referring to ourselves in these sections in the first person with Milstein as researcher in the ocean site and Dickinson in
the forest site.
Marine Bio-reserves
The Affirmative’s positing itself as master over nature with its establishment of
cordoned off space within the ocean is a manifestation of the Human over
nature binary that Johnson outlines in the 1NC. This means that the affirmative
continues the oppressive structures of heteronormative oppression and
actually increases these systems. This is not a link of omission. This is a link of
direct action.
Biodiversity / “Hot Spots”
The 1AC embodies the exact type of environmental politics that have instigated
the biodiversity crisis in the status quo. By seeking to manage the environment,
that which is not in our control, crises such as the impact scenario depicted in
the 1AC have been pushed closer and closer to reality. Specifically, pointing to
“brinks” in the crisis represents another level of managing the biosphere in a
way that makes it only a convenience for humanity. This turns their case and
proves a terminal solvency deficit. Any risk of this link means that you vote neg.
Mortimer-Sandilands ‘5 (Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture at York
University ¶ Catriona (Cate)- Her work lies at the intersections of queer and feminist theory,
environmental philosophy and political theory, and cultural studies. She is the author of The
Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minnesota, 1999), the coeditor (with Rebecca Raglon and Melody Hessing) of This Elusive Land: Women and the
Canadian Environment (UBC, 2004), and is working on a manuscript called Pastoral Traditions,
Sexual Subversions: Lesbian Histories of Nature Writing; “Unatural Passions?: Notes Toward a
Queer Ecology”; INVISIBLE CULTURE, An electronic journal for visual culture, Issue 9;
https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/sandilands.html¶ Histories of sexuality
and ecology: un/naturalizing the queer)
Queer environments: the sexual politics of natural spaces
Here, I would like to turn our attention away from ecology as a science and toward environmentalism as a politics of natural
space, in which sexuality has also had interesting influences. Indeed, the sexual values enacted in
struggles over space have had at least as strong an influence on
environmentalism as those enmeshed in the science of ecology. Although there are
many stories I could tell, what I would like to talk about, briefly, is the fact I mentioned in my discussion of national parks at
the beginning of the paper. To reiterate: In its early incarnation, North American environmentalism emerged as a response to
the rise of industrial cities. As I have argued, wilderness and rural spaces came to be valued as
sites to be preserved “away” from the corrupting influences of urban
industrial modernity. In addition, the cultivation of “natural” spaces inside cities, including urban parks such as
Central Park in New York, was conceived as a way to bring health and morality to the city’s inhabitants. Nature was,
here, a space of intensive moral regulation; given the increasing association
of sexuality with ideas of nature, sex became a key element in the
organization of nature as a regulatory space.
The early parks movement was, as I mentioned, born partly from a desire to
facilitate recreational practices that would restore threatened masculine
virtues. Of course, this desire was also planted in the assumption that cities were sites of the particular moral
“degeneracy” associated with homosexuality. In part as a result of the idea that homosexuality was a sort of illness, medical
thinkers of the late nineteenth century came to believe that the environmental conditions of large urban centers actually
cultivated homosexuality. There were various explanations offered for this supposed urban moral degeneration: the idea that
the work men did in cities no longer brought them into close and honorable contact with nature; the racist belief that
homosexuality was associated with “immigrant” populations; and the growing idea that homosexuality might have
environmental causes. To quote Boag, “pollution, tainted foods, and even the fast-paced nature of urban life,” in the minds of
some Victorian physicians, “induced” homosexuality. 15 In response, the creation of remote
recreational wild spaces and the demarcation of “healthy” green spaces
inside cities, was understood partly as a therapeutic antidote to the social
ravages of effeminate homosexuality.
The joint construction of sex and nature is quite complex ; although I will not get into it
here, it is also strongly tied to modern ideas of nationalism in both the United
States and Canada. There are, however, two sets of ideas I would like to pull out. First, there is the
assumption that homosexuality is a product of the urban, and that rural and
wilderness spaces are thus somehow “free” from the “taint” of homoerotic
activity. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. At the end of the nineteenth
century and well into the twentieth, the western wilderness was a space heavily dominated by communities of men. These
men – prospectors, cowboys, ranchers, foresters -- like British sailors at sea for more than six months, frequently engaged in
homosexual activity. Indeed, if sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s research was correct, there was in the nineteenth century
actually more same-sex activity in the remote wilderness than there was in the cities.
As I suggested earlier, such men were not understood as “homosexuals.” To quote Kinsey, “these are men who have faced the
rigors of nature in the wild…. Such a background breeds the attitude that sex is sex, irrespective of the nature of the partner
with whom the relation is had.” 16 It was not until homosexuality became coded as an inherent and biologicallybased identity that it came to be understood as an illness and located in the “artificiality” of cities. Certainly, cities made it
easier for interested men to find anonymous homoerotic contacts. Also, port cities such as New York and San Francisco
eventually became very important places for homosexual men to carve out spaces for their fledgling sexual communities. But it
was the growing visibility of these communities, and the increasing association of homosexuality with artificiality, that tied the
homosexual to the urban, not some actually greater homoerotic presence. Simply put, it was not until the
homosexual became urban that he became “unnatural”; emerging
environmental critiques of the artificiality of cities were thus instrumental in
shaping ideas about the artificiality of queers.
The linkage of homosexuality and cities, here, was clearly a product of
ideology, but that ideology has had an enormous material impact on both
queers and natural spaces. The pervasive assumption that queer
communities are essentially urban has had the effect of erasing the ongoing
presence of rural gay men and lesbians whose lives might not look much like Christopher Street.
This erasure has contributed to the flight of rural queers from their homes
to find “true” community in cities, to the ghettoization of queer culture, and
to the widespread assumption that country spaces are inherently hostile to
queer folk. Although one must not ever forget Brandon Teena and Mathew Shepard, it is abundantly clear that urban
spaces are often far more dangerous for us than rural ones. In addition, these spatial processes
have also affected the spaces of nature. On the one end of the spectrum, we
see the physical concentration of gay men and lesbians in particular urban
neighborhoods; their distinct and diverse patterns of
community organize urban nature in particular ways. Less well known,
however, is the fact that heterosexism in rural landscapes has physically
shaped what rural nature looks like.
Recreational and rural natures are materials marked with heterosexism. In the
former category, such spaces as national parks clearly bear the developmental imprints of specific gendered and sexualized
ideas of nature. For one small example, think about public campgrounds. Particularly after the 1950s, many camping facilities
were intentionally designed to resemble suburban cul-de-sacs, each campsite clearly designed for one nuclear family, and all
camping occurring in designated “private” spaces away from “public” recreational activities such as swimming, hiking, and
climbing. Trees were cut down in a pattern that screened campsites from one another, but not from the roadway or path, so
that the rangers or wardens could still see in and make sure nothing illegal (such as sodomy) was taking place.
For a second and earlier example, consider the settlement of much of the state of Oregon. In the mid-nineteenth century, the
Donation Land Act (DLA) encouraged a heterosexual pattern of colonization because of the way land was allotted to settlers.
“A white male who was twenty-one or older … received a 160-acre parcel and an additional 160 acres for his wife." 17 Women
were not eligible for allotments as single people, and it was clearly in the advantage of men to have the two parcels, so “very
young girls suddenly became marriageable and were soon wives.” 18 Because of the comparatively large size of these
allotments and the popularity of the program, not only did the DLA encourage heterosexual marriage along with the
settlement of the west, but it imposed a monolithic culture of single heterosexual family-sized lots on the land, with significant
effects on the economic and environmental history of the region from nuclear family farming patterns, the inhibition of town
development, and even increased forestation.
As a result of the association of degenerate queers with cities, and rural and
wilderness landscapes with wholesome, heterosexual family life, there
developed in the nineteenth century the idea that nature is a primary place in which to
develop moral and physical fitness. With the hetero-masculine deployment
of wilderness at the turn of the century – which, incidentally, also saw the rise of organizations like the Boy Scouts –
we can see the antecedents of how nature was deployed during the Great Depression and
into World War II as a site for the cultivation of a rigidly disciplinary hetero-male
ideal.In the United States, for example, organizations such as the Civilian Conservation Corps provided unemployed young
men with physically and morally healthy work in the wilderness. At apparent risk of degeneracy in cities, such men were
located in camps far from urban centers and, between 1933 and 1942, strenuously “installed 89,000 miles of telephone line,
built 126,000 miles of roads and trails, constructed millions of erosion control dams, planted 1.3 billion trees, erected 3,470
water towers, and spent over 6 million hours fighting forest fires.” 19 All of these developments are markers of a national
desire for a particular kind of man as much as they are about the infrastructural needs of particular landscapes.
Science/Ecotourism
Non-Queer Perspectives on nature entrench hetro/androcentrism
Milstein and Dickerson 12
(Tema, professor of communications at University of New Mexico, and Elizabeth, gulf-based journalist. “Gynocentric Greenwashing:
The Discursive Gendering of Nature” in Communication, Culture, and Critique vol 4 iss 5 pp. 510-532, December,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1753-9137.2012.01144.x/full , retrieved 2014/07/08, ~cVs )
In the androcentric–gynocentric dialectic, culturally
constructed prototypical masculine and feminine
orientations to nature can appear to coexist. For example, Littlefield (2010) complicates broad-sweeping
ecofeminist claims that deer hunting is a unilaterally violent form of domination of nature and women. Instead, Littlefield points to
multiple masculinities, where male hunters can incorporate feminine values (e.g., compassion, communal friendship development,
and nature appreciation) into the largely masculine hobby. However, as
we argue in this paper, even though
gynocentric values may be favorably expressed, androcentrism ultimately may be privileged.
Similarly, the emerging field of queer ecology studies questions human-constructed gendered
nature dualisms (Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson, 2010). As such, queer ecology explores and resists
heteronormative framings of nature and retheorizes humanature relations, mostly by
“challenging heteroecologies from the perspective of non-normative sexual gender positions”
(p. 22). In what follows, we join ecofeminist and queer ecology studies questioning to illustrate,
and in the end to attempt to alternatively conceptualize, the androcentric–gynocentric
ecocultural dialectic. To do so, we first examine the two tensions that we argue are key
androcentric–gynocentric dialectic elements, frontal versus embodied and individual versus
communal orientations to nature.
Social Progress
The acceptance of progress locks political movements into passivity, preventing
meaningful change. A Queer methodology is key to inject disruption into these
movements to build coalitions strong enough to fight anti-queerness in all its
forms
Copenhaver ’14 (Robert Copenhaver identified as a Queer person of faith, graduate
of Idaho State University, whose interests include queer theory, politics, and theology.
He will be starting a masters in theological studies at The Lutheran School of Theology
at Chicago next fall; “Queer Rage”; published 2/19/14;
http://coperoge.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/queer-rage/) GFD
I hate straight people who can’t listen to queer anger without saying “hey, all straight
people aren’t like that. I’m straight too, you know,” as if their egos don’t get enough
stroking or protection in this arrogant, heterosexist world. Why must we take care of
them, in the midst of our just anger brought on by their f—ed up society?! Why add the
reassurance of “Of course, I don’t mean you. You don’t act that way.” Let them figure out
for themselves whether they deserve to be included in our anger.¶ But of course that
would mean listening to our anger, which they almost never do. They deflect it, by
saying “I’m not like that” or “now look who’s generalizing” or “You’ll catch more flies
with honey … ” or “If you focus on the negative you just give out more power” or “you’re
not the only one in the world who’s suffering.” They say “Don’t yell at me, I’m on your
side” or “I think you’re overreacting” or “Boy, you’re bitter.”¶ ¶ - The Queer Nation
Manifesto ¶ ¶ Last weeks post involved a quote from The Queer Nation referring to the
way in which straight people have taught us that good queers don’t get angry. A good
queer is one that accepts the “progress” that others have made for us. According to
straight people, and some queers who have accepted the straight position, we should be
thankful for things like same-sex marriage and the repeal of DADT. However, the
acceptance of progress is a form of passivity that forgets the importance of queers
of the past who fought for our recognition while maintaining the uniqueness of
queer identities. We forget about the politics of groups like ACT UP and the
protests of Stonewall. These histories are ignored in favor of assimilationist
strategies that we are taught are good because of straightness. ¶ ¶ Rather, we need
to use our anger at straightness as the starting point for our politics. We need to
stop accepting liberal progress narratives that keep us passive and have forced us
to conform to what a “good citizen” should look like. Benjamin Shepard writes, ¶
Thus, play intermingled with a full range of emotions—from despair to pathos, from
pleasure to terror. Charles King, a veteran of ACT UP New York’s Housing Committee,
which evolved into Housing Works, of which he is now president, explained that these
combined feelings of joy and anger fueled the group’s work: I actually think it’s a
combination of the two. . . . The AIDS movement in the 1980s was fueled by this
amazing combination of taking grief and anger and turning it into this powerful
energy for action. But in the course of that, developing this comradely love. Yes, the
anger was the fuel. It’s what brought us together and taking that anger and not just
sitting with it. . . not just letting grief turn into despair. Bringing it into some sort of
action was very cathartic, but also what was cathartic in the process was all the
loving that was taking place. ¶ ¶ Anger can be transformative. Anger is a strategy
that allows us to develop creative strategies for resistance against
heteronormative institutions and practices. I am tired, and we should all be tired of
both straight people along others in our own community telling us that we should be
happy about all of the progress that has been made. FUCK THAT PROGRESS. Our
passivity and acceptance of it makes us forget about the queer bashing that so
many in our community face everyday. Anti-queerness is still just as prevalent as
ever, but under the guise of tolerance we have covered up the physical and
psychological violence that so many queers face everyday. There are homeless
queer youth everywhere. There are queer people being assaulted in our streets.
There are parents telling their children they are going to get AIDS and die, that
they are perverts and should die, and are sending them to therapy to “make them
straight.” Governments – state and local are complacent and strategically prevent us
from having access to housing, jobs, and other material resources. Instead of being
fucking happy about same-sex marriage, we should be fucking mad. We should be
angry that we pretend that it’s getting better. IT IS NOT! Stop pretending. Be
angry. Utilize our rage to confront the ways in which anti-queerness continue to
perpetuate violence against queer bodies everywhere.
Pacific Ocean
European imperialism in the Pacific brought the suppression of native
queerness of all types - the aff is no different, multiple historical examples
prove.
Elleray 6
(Michelle, assistant professor of English at the University of Guleph, quotes Jeremy Bentham, English Philosopher, internally cites
Lee Wallace, author, in Sexual Encounters (2003), “Queer Pacific” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol 12.1, pp. 147149, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v012/12.1elleray.html , retrieved 2014/07/08, ~cVs)
Jeremy Bentham noted that "in the newly discovered islands of the Pacific Ocean, the
prevalence of the improlific appetite, after having been concealed by the prudent delicacy of
polished historians, has been revealed by the untutored and querulous zeal of pious
missionaries."1 Bentham locates for us the historical linkage of homosexual acts with the
South Pacific, a connection since subsumed by tourist investments in the Pacific as the site of
heterosexual fantasy but now excavated anew in Lee Wallace's cogent work, Sexual
Encounters. Returning us to the Pacific's role in European negotiations of male same-sex
desire, Wallace argues that encounters with Pacific formations of male sexuality opened up an
awareness of new sexual possibilities for metropolitan masculinity. Sexual Encounters is predicated on
the assumption that change in the imperial context is not unidirectional—something that the metropole does to far-flung, palmstudded islands—but that metropolitan culture was itself modified by contact and exchange with the societies encountered on the
voyages of discovery. Thus Wallace's
focus on the European male body "troublingly inscribed with the
erotic consequences of contact" generates "a significant rethinking of the European
masculinity that in most versions of encounter, remains untransformed, the neutral measure
against which all change is reckoned" (38). Wallace critiques the theoretical heterosexualization
of imperialism that positions Europe in terms of masculine dominance and the Pacific (or
other imperialized regions) in terms of an enforced feminine submission. In its place she calls
our attention to moments of cultural encounter modulated through male same-sex desire,
demonstrating that "male homosexuality, such as we have come to understand it . . . was
constituted in no small part through the European collision with Polynesian culture" (8). Sexual
Encounters provides a significant contribution to the study of homosexuality in its historical
specificity and regional resonances, exposing through deft analyses homosexuality's
implication in imperialism. Wallace anchors her work to historical figures with whom an academic audience would be
familiar: Captain James Cook, British icon of sexual continence and martyrdom in the Pacific; Captain William Bligh of Mutiny on the
Bounty infamy; Herman Melville, the textual beachcomber of the Marquesas; the missionary William Yate (familiar, at least, to a
New Zealand academic audience), who was dismissed from the Church Missionary Society for sexual misdemeanors involving local
Ma¯ori youths; and Paul Gauguin, self-styled refugee from Parisian civilization whose paintings of Ma'ohi and Marquesans are
readily available on everything from greeting cards to coffee cups. Given the recent critical work that has made Cook into his own
academic subfield, the first two chapters in which he figures will no doubt interest many. Wallace points out that the
scientific
impetus of his voyages privileged the rationalizing and categorizing of Polynesian sexuality as
part of the ethnographic project, shifting the terms of sexual discourse from the denunciation
of moral vice to a cultural relativism engaged with the social dynamics of gender variance.
Following the lauded explorers, the scandalous beachcomber emerges in Russian accounts of the Marquesas and Melville's Typee.
Newly minted on Pacific shores, the beachcomber embodies European integration into Pacific Island communities and "reflect[s]
back to a mortified European gaze a newly defined capacity for bodily perversion" (86), a perversion read symptomatically through
an intense investment in his tattooed flesh. I greatly appreciated Wallace's twist on the standard settler narrative in her Yate
chapter, in which she locates the settler nation's foundations not in Mum, Dad, and the colonial family but in the expulsion of the
sexual sinner as a means of consolidating "the Christian collectivity in the new land," an act that "made of its members proto–New
Zealanders" (104). Continuing
the focus on ambivalence deployed in the Yate chapter, Wallace's
analysis of Gauguin's Manao tupapau reads the intricate movements between "homosexual
possibility" and "heterosexual outcome" through the formal properties of the painting (110);
she argues that "Polynesian gender dissonance . . . manifests sexual possibilities barred
European representation" (115). The "reciprocal evolution of European and Pacific sexual
practices engaged in the colonial context" that was tracked in earlier chapters resurfaces in
Wallace's final chapter, a critique of Caroline Harker's 1995 television documentary, Queens of Samoa (108). Harker's
film narrates the story of fa'afafine, that is, Samoans who are bodily male but raised to
conform to female gender expectations. While disavowing the colonizing dynamics inherent in
imposing European labels such as "homosexual," "transvestite," and "transsexual" on
Polynesian forms of sexuality and gender performance, Wallace foregrounds the implications
of assuming the incommensurability of the European and Polynesian terms, pointing out that
they contribute to the failure of some members of the Pacific Island community to see
themselves as implicated in concerns of the queer community, for example, the movement of
HIV/AIDS within the Pacific. Here the prescience of Wallace's work vis-à-vis developments subsequent to the book's
publication emerges. The careful analysis and historicization of the intersecting dynamics of
sexuality and colonialism that Wallace advocates are necessary for situating and negotiating
recent denunciations of homosexuality by public individuals such as Archbishop Whakahuihui
Vercoe of the New Zealand Anglican Church and Pastor Brian Tamaki of Destiny Church, which
appear to separate the interests of the Ma¯ori (among others) from those of homosexuals. The
assumption that the identity categories "Ma¯ori" and "gay" are mutually exclusive has already
been countered in the fiction of the author and academic Witi Ihimaera, while the fact that
Vercoe and Tamaki speak from within their churches would strike a chord with another author
and academic, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. In a move that resonates with the opening chapters
of Sexual Encounters, Te Awekotuku argues that what the Europeans, and more specifically
the missionaries, brought to the Pacific's shores was not homosexuality (same-sex desire as a
putatively Western practice) but homophobia.
AT: Link of Omission
Omission is a link-it shapes perceptions and writer motives- means the perm
doesn’t solve the consquences of your 1AC’s omission
Jackson, 08-Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University (Richard, “State terror,terrorism research and knowledge politics”,
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/1949/1/BISA-Paper-2008-Jackson-FINAL.pdf SW)
It is crucial to recognise that discourses
are significant not just for what they say but also for what they
do not say; the silences in a discourse can be as important, or even more important at times, than what isstated.
This is because silence can function ideologically in any number of ways. For example, silence can be a deliberate means of
distraction or misdirection from uncomfortable subjects or contrasting viewpoints, the
suppression or de- legitimisation of alternative forms of knowledge or values, the tacit
endorsement of particular kinds of practices, setting the boundaries of legitimate knowledge,
or as a kind of disciplining process directed against certain actors – among others. In other words, the
silences within a text often function as an exercise in power; revealing and interrogating those
silences therefore, is an important part of first and second order critique.
FAILURE TO GROUND EMBODIED GENDER/SEXUALITY IN POLICY RESEARCH
METHODS GUARANTEES ERROR REPLICATION AND REINFORCES THE POWER OF
THE POWERFUL
Marshall 97 (Catherine, professor at the University of North Carolina, Feminist Critical Policy
Analysis: A perspective from post-secondary education, pg. ix-x,)
Policy researchers and analysts have gained and retained legitimacy
by focusing on the problems and methods identified by powerful
people. Those with a different focus are silenced, declared irrelevant,
postponed, coopted, put on the back burner, assigned responsibilities with
no training, budget, personnel or time, or otherwise ignored. Policies, -authoritative agreements among powerful people about how things
should be – have been made without a feminist critical glance. These
two volumes focus on those areas of silence, on the policy issues at the fringe and on
the kinds of policy analysis methods, findings and recommendations that will disrupt but
will also open possibilities. The two volumes identify theories and tools for dismantling
and replacing the politics, theories and modes of policy analysis that built ‘the master’s
house’. The individual chapters illustrate how and why to expand policy
questions and policy analysis methods to incorporate critical and
feminist lenses, demonstrating the promise of politics, analysis and
policymaking that thoughtfully and thoroughly works to uncover any
source of oppression, domination or marginalization and to create
policies to meet the lived realities, needs, aspirations and values of women and girls and
others kept on the margin. The volumes name and develop a new field: Feminist critical
Policy Analysis. The promise of this field lies in its incorporation of perspective that
‘write against the grain’: the feminist, critical stance, with policy analysis
that includes methods for focusing on the cultural values bases of
policies; deconstruction of policy documents; analysis of a policy
intention and its potential effects, such as affirmative Action and Title
IX; studies of the micropolitical, for example, the dynamics of a school board task force
for sexual harassment, a tenure system’s effect on women academics, or the role of
girls’ access to computers in the implementation of computer policies; and analyses of
policies, programs and political stances that do focus on neglected needs in schooling.
Policymakers and analysts need to pause in order to recognize how
issues of gender, the needs of particular groups like the urban poor,
women and non-dominant nationalities are left out of education
policy analyses. In order to connect effectively, women need to take a hard
look at the structures and arenas of policy. By presenting literatures,
methods and examples, these books name the field: feminist critical
policy analysis leap at the challenge.
Impacts
Heteronormativity (Violence)
Heteronormativity is violent
Yep ’13 (Gust, “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies', Journal of Homosexuality, 45: 2, 11 — 59)
In this passage, Simmons vividly
describes the devastating pervasiveness of hatred and violence in
her daily life based on being seen, perceived, labeled, and treated as an “Other.” This process of
othering creates individuals, groups, and communities that are deemed to be less important,
less worthwhile, less consequential, less authorized, and less human based on historically
situated markers of social formation such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and
nationality. Othering and marginalization are results of an “invisible center” (Ferguson, 1990, p. 3). The
authority, position, and power of such a center are attained through normalization in an ongoing circular movement.
Normalization is the process of constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a takenfor-granted and all-encompassing standard used to measure goodness, desirability, morality,
rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant cultural values. As such, normalization becomes one
of the primary instruments of power in modern society (Foucault, 1978/1990). Normalization is a symbolically, discursively,
psychically, psychologically, and materially violent form of social regulation and control, or as Warner (1993) more simply puts it,
normalization is “the site of violence” (p. xxvi). Perhaps one of the most powerful forms of normalization in Western social systems
is heteronormativity. Through
heteronormative discourses, abject and abominable bodies, souls,
persons, and life forms are created, examined, and disciplined through current regimes of
knowledge and power (Foucault, 1978/1990). Heteronormativity, as the invisible center and the presumed bedrock of
society, is the quintessential force creating, sustaining, and perpetuating the erasure,
marginalization, disempowerment, and oppression of sexual others. Heteronormativity is
ubiquitous in all spheres of social life yet remains largely invisible and elusive. According to Berlant and
Warner (in Warner, 2002), heteronormativity refers to: the institutions, structures of understanding,
and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent–that is, organized
as a sexuality–but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes
contradictory) forms: unmarked as the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an
ideal or moral accomplishment. It
consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine
than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations–often unconscious, immanent to
practice or to institutions. (p. 309, my emphasis) Heteronormativity makes heterosexuality hegemonic
through the process of normalization. Although it is experienced consciously or unconsciously and with different
degrees of pain and suffering, this process of normalization is a site of violence in the lives of women, men, and transgenders–across
the spectrum of sexualities–in modern Western societies. Not
unlike the experiences of children who must learn
to survive in an emotionally and physically abusive environment where violence is the recipe for
daily existence (Miller, 1990, 1991, 1998, 2001), individuals living in the heteronormative regime need to
learn to conform, ignore, and banish their suffering to survive. The process of coping by
repressing the pain and identifying with the perpetrator is, in my view, a powerful mechanism
for heteronormativity to perpetuate itself in current forms of social organization. Drawing from the
work of feminists and womanists, critical scholars, and mental health researchers, I identify and examine the injurious and violent
nature of heteronormativity in this section. For purposes of discussion, I focus on the violence of heteronormativity enacted upon:
(a) women inside the heteronormative borders, (b) men inside the heteronormative borders, (c) lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgendered, and queer people, and (d) individuals living at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Institutional violence as well
Yep ’13 (Gust, “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies', Journal of Homosexuality, 45: 2, 11 — 59)
These are systematic and socially accepted injuries inflicted upon individuals outside of the heteronormative mandate.
Institutional violence is widespread for LGBTQ individuals and communities. Undergirding all
social institutions is heteronormative ideology (Berlant & Warner, 1998; Richardson, 1996). Hegemonic
heterosexuality permeates the family (VanEvery, 1996a, b), domestic and intimate life (Croghan, 1993;
Holland, Ramazanoglu, & Thomson, 1996; VanEvery, 1996b), education (Kumashiro, 2002; Pinar, 1998; Talburt & Steinberg,
2000), social policy (Carabine, 1996; Eskridge, 2002; Kaplan, 1997), the mass media and popular culture (Fejes & Petrich, 1993;
Gross, 2001; Gross & Woods, 1999; Ingraham, 1999), among others. In short, heteronormative
thinking is deeply
ingrained, and strategically invisible, in our social institutions. The process of normalization of
heterosexuality in our social system actively and methodically subordinates, disempowers,
denies, and rejects individuals who do not conform to the heterosexual mandate by
criminalizing them, denying them protection against discrimination, refusing them basic rights
and recognition, or all of the above (Kaplan, 1997; Rubin, 1984/1993). More simply stated, the regulatory power of
heteronormativity denies LGBTQ individuals and couples their citizenship. There are numerous
“positive rights” (Stein, 1999, p. 286) that heterosexual individuals take for granted but LGBTQ persons are categorically denied.
They include being able to marry a person of the same sex, gain custody of their children,
become foster and adoptive parents, visit one’s same-sex partner in the hospital, being able to obtain bereavement
leave when one’s partner passes away, being able to file joint income tax returns with one’s partner, among many others. Although
the issue of same-sex marriage is highly contested on ideological grounds within LGBTQ communities in the U.S. (Yep, Lovaas, & Elia,
2003), LGBTQ couples are deprived of the numerous rights and privileges accorded to heterosexually married dyads (Kaplan, 1997;
Stein, 1999). In sum, heteronormativity
is a site of unrelenting, harsh, unforgiving, and continuous
violence for LGBTQ individuals. Such violence is everywhere: in the individual psyche and in
collective consciousness, in the individual perceptions and experiences and in the social system
and institutions.
Heteronormativity is a form of everyday violence
Yep ’13 (Gust, “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies', Journal of Homosexuality, 45: 2, 11 — 59)
These are injuries inflicted on others. Fuelled
by heteronormativity, externalized homophobia is
commonplace. It can be directed to any person who is perceived or assumed to be a sexual
other and can be manifested in multiple ways: harassment, avoidance, verbal abuse, differential treatment and
discriminatory behavior, and physical violence. The use of name-calling toward individuals who are perceived to be outside the
boundaries of heteronormativity (e.g., lesbian, gay, or transgender) is common in everyday interaction. In
U.S. middle and
high schools, for example, verbal harassment is a pervasive problem: One-third of eleventh grade students who
responded to a 1999 CBS poll said that they knew of incidents of harassment of gay and lesbian students. Twenty-eight percent
admitted to making antigay remarks themselves. The
average high school student in Des Moines, Iowa, public
schools hears an antigay comment every seven minutes, according to data gathered by
students in a year-long study; teachers intervened only 3 percent of the time. (Human Rights Watch,
2001, p. 31) When administrators and fellow students overlook and disregard these situations, they provide a clear message that it is
permissible to hate those who are perceived to be sexual others; thus, the cycle of homophobia gets perpetuated in society. In
addition, verbal
harassment, if allowed to persist, can lead to an overall hostile environment and
other forms of violence, including physical violence and sexual assault. Hate crimes are the most extreme
expression of externalized homophobia. Antigay violence is increasing (Berrill, 1992; Fone, 2000) and victims are still being blamed
for bringing it on to themselves (Herek & Berrill, 1992). Homophobic murder
is, as Donna Minkowitz (2000) put it, “still
open season on gays” (p. 293). Reports on gay bashing appear regularly in the media and Every
such incident carries a message to the victim and the entire community of which he or she is
part. Each anti-gay attack is, in effect, a punishment for stepping outside culturally accepted
norms [of heteronormativity] and a warning to all gay and lesbian people to stay in “their place,” the
invisibility and self-hatred of the closet. (Herek & Berrill, 1992, p. 3) Externalized homophobia, whether
in the form of verbal or physical assault, is a potent, and at times deadly, mode of enforcement
of the heteronormative order.
Heteronormativity is also soul murder
Yep prof comm @ san fransisco state 2k3 (Gust, “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies', Journal of
Homosexuality, 45: 2, 11 — 59
These are the internal injuries that individuals inflict upon themselves. Very
early in life children learn from
interpersonal contacts and mediated messages that deviations from the heteronormative
standard, such as homosexuality, are anxiety-ridden, guilt-producing, fear-inducing, shame-invoking,
hate-deserving, psychologically blemishing, and physically threatening. Internalized homophobia, in the form of
self-hatred and self-destructive thoughts and behavioral patterns, becomes firmly implanted in
the lives and psyches of individuals in heteronormative society. Exemplifying the feelings and experiences of
many people who do not fit in the heteronormative mandate, Kevin Jennings (1994) tells us his personal story: I
was born in 1963. . . . [I] realized in grade school that I was gay. I felt absolutely alone. I had no one
to talk to, didn’t know any openly gay people, and saw few representations of gays in the media of the 1970s. I imagined gay
people were a tiny, tiny minority, who had been and would always be despised for their
“perversion.” Not once in high school did I ever learn a single thing about homosexuality or gay people. I couldn’t imagine
a happy life as a gay man. So I withdrew from my peers and used alcohol and drugs to try to dull the pain of my isolation.
Eventually, at age seventeen I tried to kill myself, like one out of every three gay teens. I saw
nothing in my past, my present, or (it seemed) my future suggesting that things would ever get any better. (pp. 13-14)
Heteronormativity is so powerful that its regulation and enforcement are carried out by the
individuals themselves through socially endorsed and culturally accepted forms of soul murder.
Soul murder is a term that I borrow from the child abuse and neglect literature to highlight the torment of heteronormativity (Yep,
2002). Shengold (1999) defines soul murder as the “apparently willful abuse and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient
intensity and frequency to be traumatic . . . [so that] the children’s subsequent emotional development has been profoundly and
predominantly negatively affected” (p. 1). Further explaining this concept, Shengold (1989) writes, “soul murder
is neither a
diagnosis nor a condition. It is a dramatic term for circumstances that eventuate in crime–the
deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise the separate identity of another person” (p. 2, my
emphasis). Isn’t the incessant policing and enforcement, either deliberately or unconsciously, by
self and others, of the heteronormative mandate a widespread form of soul murder?
***AFF***
2AC
Perm do Both
1. Perm do both. The USFG can advocate for a queer approach to
_________. The alternative is not mutually exclusive with the aff.
2. The Status quo solves for queer suffering. The government is already
improving the situation of queers all around the country. The
permutation speeds up this process faster than the negative, meaning
we access their solvency better.
Lederman ’14 (Josh Lederman is a White House reporter for Associated Press (AP), where he
covers electoral politics, Vice President Joe Biden, and domestic and foreign policy issues. This
article was published on 6/20/2014 and accessed on 7/7/14. “Obama Expands Government
Benefits For Gay Couples.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/20/gay-couplesbenefits_n_5516561.html. AE)
WASHINGTON (AP) — A year after the Supreme Court struck down a law barring federal
recognition of gay marriages, the Obama administration granted an array of new benefits
Friday to same-sex couples , including those who live in states where gay marriage is against
the law. The new measures range from Social Security and veterans benefits to work leave for
caring for sick spouses. They are part of President Barack Obama's efforts to expand whatever
protections he can offer to gays and lesbians even though more than half of the states don't
recognize gay marriage. That effort has been confounded by laws that say some benefits should
be conferred only to couples whose marriages are recognized by the states where they live,
rather than the states where they were married. Aiming to circumvent that issue, the Veterans
Affairs Department will start letting gay people who tell the government they are married to a
veteran to be buried alongside them in a national cemetery, drawing on the VA's authority to
waive the usual marriage requirement. In a similar move, the Social Security Administration
will start processing some survivor and death benefits for those in same-sex relationships who
live in states that don't recognize gay marriage. Nineteen states plus the District of Columbia
currently recognize gay marriage, although court challenges to gay marriage bans are pending in
many states. For Tim Fagen of Fort Collins, Colorado, the implications could be profound. A
retired electrical engineer, Fagen receives higher Social Security payments than his 79-year
partner, Ken Hoole. The two will celebrate their 47th anniversary in August but until now would
have been prevented from accessing each other's benefits. "If I was to die, it would be really
significant for Ken," Fagen said in an interview. "Not only is it financially beneficial, but
psychologically it's beneficial. It's nice to know that your relationship is recognized."
Meanwhile, the Labor Department said it would start drafting rules making clear that the
Family and Medical Leave Act applies to same-sex couples, ensuring that gay and lesbian
workers can take unpaid leave to care for a sick spouse. Attorney General Eric Holder, in a
memo to Obama, said the Justice Department has completed its government-wide push to
carry out the high court's 2013 ruling in United States v. Windsor that struck down part of the
Defense of Marriage Act, enabling the federal government to start granting benefits to
married same-sex couples. Holder said the impact of that court decision "cannot be
overstated." At the same time, Holder urged Congress to adopt legislation that Democratic
lawmakers have proposed that let the VA and Social Security extend benefits to married
couples living in non-gay marriage states. Obama was lending his support to those efforts in
Congress, the White House said. "The fact that they're endorsing our legislation will give it a
boost," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who wrote the bill altering the state-of-residence
requirement for VA benefits. But opponents of gay marriage argued that the Obama
administration is misinterpreting the court's decision by using state of residence as the standard
for determining which marriages Washington will recognize. "This clearly goes beyond the
executive branch's authority," said Peter Sprigg of Family Research Council. "The federal
government should not put the thumb on the scale in terms of how states define marriage."
The administrative steps mark the latest attempt by Obama to promote social acceptance for
gays and lesbians and to ensure they and their relationships enjoy equal treatment under the
law. In addition to successfully pushing to repeal the ban on gays serving openly in the
military, the Obama administration stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act years
before the Supreme Court took it up. And last week, Obama took another step demanded by
gay rights advocates when he announced he will sign an executive order banning federal
contractors from discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation or gender
identity.
Alt Bad
“Queer” Bad
By labeling their movement as “queer,” they have sought to codify that which
should remain fluid – this is so un-queer of you, links and turns solvency
Browne 6
(Katherine, faculty member of the University of Brighton, researches LGBTQ+ issues. “Challenging Queer Geographies” in
Antipode vol. 38 iss. 5 pp. 885-893, November 2006, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.14678330.2006.00483.x/full , retrieved 2014/07/08, ~cVs)
In seeking queer geographies that offer radical contestations and transgressions of “normality”, I do not want to fix these
contestations and transgressions to only searching for spaces between and beyond dualisms. Instead , I
see queer
contestations and transgressions as always potentially fleeting, recuperated and fluid
because of the “unbounded chaos and uncertainty” of queer (Elder 1999:88). This fluidity
produces tensions in naming, categorising and politicising. One of the challenges in
writing about queer is that in naming activism, actions or writings as such, there is a risk
of solidifying, homogenising and “de-queering” them through the act of naming (and even
this is simplistic in considering the subtleties of categorising, naming and defining where
“belonging” to “queer” implies criteria and policing of such belongings or where singular
acts of becoming are not necessarily linked to normative discursive frameworks). Queer in
this sense may now be attributed to actions, writings and activism that deconstruct dichotomies between homosexuality and
heterosexuality or man and women. However, these
specific performances and artefacts may not
remain “queer” as they could become orthodoxies and recuperated within “normal” (with
other acts and artefacts having the potential to be “de-normalised” and “re-queered” in
specific places, contests and times). Activities and writings that are defined as queer in
our current geographical context thus have the potential not to be so queer, and as
recuperation occurs the “queerness” of these events, actions and manifestations can slip
away. Because “queer” writings may not remain so queer, queer can remain ever elusively
transgressive not just by defying being named, but by doing what queer does—operating
beyond powers and controls that enforce normativity. As particular operations of power seek to
normalise, categorise and fix the proper relations of objects, this makes “it” difficult to define, categorise and most
importantly control.
The use of the term “queer” represents a homogenizing of identity which risks
the reestablishment of a masculine identity and the erasure of its political
usefulness
Annamarie Jagose, 1996, PhD in English from the Victoria University of Wellington, “Queer Theory: The Appeal Of “Queer
Theory” Has Outstripped Anyone’s Sense Of What Exactly It Means”, Pgs. 1-3
Once the term 'queer' was, at best, slang for homosexual, at worst, a term of homophobic
abuse. In recent years 'queer' has come to be used differently, sometimes as an umbrella term for a
coalition of culturally marginal sexual self-identifications and at other times to describe a
nascent theoretical model which has developed out of more traditional lesbian and gay
studies. The rapid development and consolidation of lesbian and gay studies in universities in the 1990s is paralleled by an
increasing deployment of the term 'queer'. As queer is unaligned with any specific identity category, it has
the potential to be annexed profitably to any number of discussions. In the history of disciplinary
formations, lesbian and gay studies is itself a relatively recent construction, and queer theory can be seen as its latest institutional
transformation. Broadly speaking, queer
describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatise
incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual
desire. Resisting that model of stability--which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect--queer
focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire. Institutionally, queer
has been associated most
prominently with lesbian and gay subjects, but its analytic framework also includes such
topics as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery.
Whether as transvestite performance or academic deconstruction, queer locates and exploits the incoherencies in those three terms
which stabilise heterosexuality. Demonstrating
the impossibility of any 'natural' sexuality, it calls into
question even such apparently unproblematic terms as 'man' and 'woman'. The recent intervention of
this confrontational word 'queer' in altogether politer academic discourses suggests that traditional models have been ruptured. Yet
its appearance also marks a continuity. Queer theory's debunking of stable sexes, genders and sexualities develops out of a
specifically lesbian and gay reworking of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable
positions. Queer
is not always seen, however, as an acceptable elaboration of or shorthand for
'lesbian and gay'. Although many theorists welcome queer as 'another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual'
(de Lauretis, 1991:iv), others question its efficacy. 1 The most commonly voiced anxieties are provoked by
such issues as whether a generic masculinity may be reinstalled at the heart of the ostensibly
gender-neutral queer; whether queer's transcendent disregard for dominant systems of
gender fails to consider the material conditions of the west in the late twentieth century;
whether queer simply replicates, with a kind of historical amnesia, the stances and demands of an
earlier gay liberation; and whether, because its constituency is almost unlimited, queer
includes identificatory categories whose politics are less progressive than those of the lesbian
and gay populations with which they are aligned. Whatever ambivalences structure queer, there is no doubt that
its recent redeployment is making a substantial impact on lesbian and gay studies. Yet, almost as soon as queer
established market dominance as a diacritical term, and certainly before consolidating itself in
any easy vernacular sense, some theorists are already suggesting that its moment had passed
and that 'queer politics may, by now, have outlived its political usefulness'. 2 Does queer become
defunct the moment it is an intelligible and widely disseminated term? Teresa de Lauretis, the theorist often credited with
inaugurating the phrase 'queer theory', abandoned it barely three years later, on the grounds that it had been taken over by those
mainstream forces and institutions it was coined to resist. Explaining her choice of terminology in The Practice of Love: Lesbian
Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994), de Lauretis writes: "As for 'queer theory', my insistent specification lesbian may well be taken
as a taking of distance from what, since I proposed it as a working hypothesis for lesbian and gay studies in this very journal
(differences , 3.2), has very quickly become a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry'. 3 Distancing herself from her
earlier advocacy of queer, de Lauretis now represents it as devoid of the political or critical acumen she once thought it promised.
Conflating “queer” as a part of identity allows infinite pluralism within the term
– it is this pluralism that cannot resolve the inevitable contradictions and
violence within identity politics
Annamarie Jagose, 1996, PhD in English from the Victoria University of Wellington, “Queer Theory: The Appeal Of “Queer
Theory” Has Outstripped Anyone’s Sense Of What Exactly It Means”, Pgs. 3-5
In the sense that Butler outlines the queer project--that is, to the extent that she argues there
can't be one--queer may
be thought of as activating an identity politics so attuned to the constraining effects of naming, of
delineating a foundational category which precedes and underwrites political intervention, that
it may better be understood as promoting a non-identity--or even anti-identity--politics. If a potentially
infinite coalition of sexual identities, practices, discourses and sites might be identified as
queer, what it betokens is not so much liberal pluralism as a negotiation of the very concept
of identity itself. For queer is, in part, a response to perceived limitations in the liberationist and identity-conscious politics of
the gay and lesbian feminist movements. The rhetoric of both has been structured predominantly around
self-recognition, community and shared identity; inevitably, if inadvertently, both movements
have also resulted in exclusions, delegitimation, and a false sense of universality. The
discursive proliferation of queer has been enabled in part by the knowledge that identities are
fictitious--that is, produced by and productive of material effects but nevertheless arbitrary, contingent and ideologically
motivated. Unlike those identity categories labelled lesbian or gay, queer has developed out of
the theorising of often unexamined constraints in traditional identity politics. Consequently,
queer has been produced largely outside the registers of recognition, truthfulness and selfidentity. Queer, then, is an identity category that has no interest in consolidating or even stabilising itself. It maintains its critique
of identity-focused movements by understanding that even the formation of its own coalitional and negotiated constituencies may
well result in exclusionary and reifying effects far in excess of those intended. Acknowledging
the inevitable violence
of identity politics and having no stake in its own hegemony, queer is less an identity than a
critique of identity. But it is in no position to imagine itself outside that circuit of problems
energised by identity politics. Instead of defending itself against those criticisms that its operations inevitably attract,
queer allows such criticisms to shape its--for now unimaginable--future directions. 'The term', writes Butler, 'will be revised,
dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by
which it is mobilized'. The
mobilisation of queer--no less than the critique of it--foregrounds the
conditions of political representation: its intentions and effects, its resistance to and recovery
by the existing networks of power. For Halperin, as for Butler, queer is a way of pointing ahead
without knowing for certain what to point at. "'Queer" ... does not designate a class of already
objectified pathologies or perversions', writes Halperin 6 ; "rather, it describes a horizon of
possibility whose precise extent and heterogenous scope cannot in principle be delimited in
advance". Queer is always an identity under construction, a site of permanent becoming:
"utopic in its negativity, queer theory curves endlessly toward a realization that its realization
remains impossible" 7 . The extent to which different theorists have emphasised the unknown potential of queer suggests
that its most enabling characteristic may well be its potential for looking forward without anticipating the future. Instead of
theorising queer in terms of its opposition to identity politics, it is more accurate to represent it as ceaselessly interrogating both the
preconditions of identity and its effects. Queer
is not outside the magnetic field of identity. Like some
postmodern architecture, it turns identity inside out, and displays its supports exoskeletally . If
the dialogue between queer and more traditional identity formations is sometimes fraught--which it is--that is not because they
have nothing in common. Rather, lesbian
and gay faith in the authenticity or even political efficacy of
identity categories and the queer suspension of all such classifications energise each other,
offering in the 1990s--and who can say beyond?--the ambivalent reassurance of an unimaginable future.
This is game over for the negative. By using “queer” as a facet of their identity,
they destroy any possibility of solvency. They make the dichotomy of hetero vs.
queer even more binaristic by lumping together all non-heteros into one group.
They create their own monsters and are fighting themselves. Vote affirmative
for the only team that advocates any real social change and progress. Also,
don’t let them say that because their authors identify as that it makes it okay.
The fact of the matter is that they have created binaries within this very round.
Vote them down for oppressing themselves.
Anti-Science/Biophobia Turn
The Neg’s scholarship is Biophobic—Queer Ecology is logically fallacious.
Normative, scientific epistemology solves the impacts of the K
Garrard ’10 (Greg Garrard is the FCCS Sustainability Professor at the University of British
Columbia, a National Teaching Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy, and a
founding member and former Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the
Environment (UK & Ireland). He is the author of Ecocriticism (Routledge 2004, 2011 2nd
edn) as well as numerous essays on eco-pedagogy, animal studies and environmental
criticism. His interests include environmental criticism and theory; critical animal studies;
environmental education; literature and science (especially biology); and contemporary
British literature; Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press; Configurations, Volume
18, Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010; “How Queer is Green?”; pgs. 73-76) GFD
Ecofeminism has sought to unravel the interarticulation of gender op- pression with the
domination of nature, while queer theory has pursued a cultural project of subversion of
sexual heteronormativity. Queer ecology brings together and extends both discourses, at
once drawing upon contemporary biology and subjecting its taxonomies to skepti- cal
critique. This essay argues that queer theory needs ecocriticism to rescue it from its
biophobic assumptions, but it is not yet clear what ecocriticism stands to gain from queer
theory. Moreover, it is argued that queer ecology risks the appearance of partial,
opportunistic, and conspicuously biased engagement with biology.¶ Four Exhibits in the
Growing Museum of Queer Ecology¶ Exhibit A: The Bluegill Sunfish¶ The reproductive
habits of this very widespread North American freshwater fish are such, claims biologist
Joan Roughgarden, as to “challenge the foundations of gender and sexuality.”1 Contrary to
popular assumptions that other animals conform to the dimorphism of the human species,
the sunfish has two sexes (morphs possessing two distinct gamete sizes), but four
spawning genders: large males with the orange breast that gave the species its common
name; me- dium males slightly smaller than but visually similar to females;small, lightcolored males with no markings; and females, marked with vertical bars. Large males spawn
by aggressively defending ter- ritories, or “leks,” while large numbers of small males hover
at the boundaries awaiting an opportunity to zoom in and fertilize eggs laid in a lek (male
strategists memorably called “sneaky fuckers” by John Maynard Smith, a name
Roughgarden rather archly contests). The medium males, on the other hand, court the large
males, and, if accepted, fertilize the females together with them. The mere exis- tence of
these varied types of sunfish might be considered subversive enough, but Roughgarden
knows that the dominant explanations in biology involve “deceit” of the large males by the
medium ones, and counters with the argument that they are, in fact, cooperating to gain
joint access to reproductive opportunity.¶ Exhibit B: Rocky Mountain Sheep¶ Another
example from Roughgarden: the charismatic, curly horned rams of the species, images of
which adorn the bonnets of big macho cars and the logos of American football teams, form
gay groups that practice “homosexual courting and copulation.”2 The most “dominant,”
masculine rams are the most enthusiastic par- ticipants, while rams that refuse anal sex and
prefer to live with the ewes are called “effeminate.” Some domestic rams tested for homo-
sexuality not only preferred to mount other males, but would not mount females at all. Of
course, it is not asserted that what is good enough for rams should be good enough to
confront homophobia in humans—a signal instance of the naturalistic fallacy—but only
that reactionary attempts to invoke the “order of nature” against homo- sexuality (as in,
notoriously, the pope’s claim that anti-essentialist gender theory was a bigger threat to
nature that climate change)3 are wholly without biological warrant.¶ Exhibit C: Human
Endogenous Retrovirus 3 (or HERV-R)¶ Making up around 1 percent of our genome,
endogenous ret- roviruses are thought to be “fossil viruses” whose genetic ma- terial has
become embedded in the germ line. While some are suspected of causing autoimmune
diseases and cancer, the fact that they have been present in our ancestral genome for at
least three million years suggests that they may have beneficial effects as well. As Timothy
Morton notes in “Queer Ecology,” the alien DNA of ERV-3 may assist in reducing the
mother’s immune reac- tions to the embryo, and he concludes that “life is catastrophic,
monstrous, non-holistic, dislocated, not organic, coherent and authoritative.”4 Richard
Dawkins, who would probably gag at the thought of cooptation into what he would
understand as “postmod- ern theory,” seems to agree that the notion of a bounded,
coherent identity prescribed by our own DNA is belied by microbiology, say- ing that “there
is no important distinction between our ‘own’ genes and parasitic or symbiotic insertion
sequences. Whether they con- flict or cooperate will depend not on their historical origins
but on the circumstances from which they stand to gain now.”5 We are, it seems,
strangers to ourselves even at the genetic level.¶ Exhibit D: Lesbian Park Rangers¶ Reflecting,
and in some respects representing, these discover- ies of the queerness of nature, Lorri
Millan and Shawna Dempsey formed the Canadian “Lesbian National Parks and Services”
(LNPS) in 1997.6 Dressed in authentic-looking outfits with embroidered badges, handing
out leaflets in Banff near the national park, and guiding “tours” that combine queer
natural history with counter- hegemonic sexual and gender commentary, these
performance art- ists could be considered part of the artistic wing of queer ecology. The
LNPS makes a striking appearance near the conclusion of Ca- triona Sandilands’s discussion
of the sexist and heteronormative structuring of historical narratives of Canada’s national
parks, which provides detailed evidence of the ways in which Canadian national identity
came to be invested in spaces that were constructed, ahis- torically, as the wild home
ranges of solitary male wardens. Con- testing that ideology is a case of both retrieving the
more complex history of the parks, and paying tribute to the ways in which the LNPS queers
the parks and their wardens: “They raise the possibil- ity of a homosexual presence in
official national-park culture; they make same-sex desire . . . a reality in the iconic space of
the mas- culine wilderness-nation; and they call into question the assump- tion of women’s
heterosexuality and, along with it, their hetero- sexualizing role as bearers of the domestic
nation.”7 Queer ecology disrupts heteronormative natures and proposes an alliance
between biological science and the cultural theory that, throughout the “sci- ence wars”
and beyond, had been assumed to be antithetical to it.
Queer Ecology is dogmatic—the Neg’s methodology is based in
misrepresentations of their opposition
Garrard ’10 (Greg Garrard is the FCCS Sustainability Professor at the University of British
Columbia, a National Teaching Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy, and a
founding member and former Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the
Environment (UK & Ireland). He is the author of Ecocriticism (Routledge 2004, 2011 2nd
edn) as well as numerous essays on eco-pedagogy, animal studies and environmental
criticism. His interests include environmental criticism and theory; critical animal studies;
environmental education; literature and science (especially biology); and contemporary
British literature; Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press; Configurations, Volume
18, Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010; “How Queer is Green?”; pgs. 76-79) GFD
Jorge Luis Borges’s brilliant conflation of represented and real, ref- erential and reflexive,
animate, inanimate, and ananimate animals inspired Michel Foucault to interrogate the
discursive construction of “the order of things,” and it stands conveniently as the ur-text of
the taxonomic anti-realism that runs through queer ecology. At the most general level,
“queer” itself represents and encapsulates a kind of intellectual Maoism, a perpetual
revolution of categories and types. As Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird assert in Queering the
Non/Human: “The unremitting emphasis in queer theoretical work on fluidity, überinclusivity, indeterminacy, indefinability, unknowability, the preposterous, impossibility,
unthinkability, unintelligibility, mean- inglessness and that which is unrepresentable is an
attempt to undo normative entanglements and fashion alternative imaginaries.”
Rhetorically, queer theory unceasingly (and rather tediously) negates “stable categories”
and enthuses over subversive or amorphous ex- ceptions to—or, as they are always seen,
transgressions of—allegedly fixed distinctions.¶ It is perhaps unsurprising that a pioneer of
queer ecocriticism, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, declares “an almost phobic dislike of
taxonomy,”10 which she applies to attempts to categorize her as an ecofeminist, but
which seem to be shared much more generally within this insurgency-within-an-insurgency.
It is not as if ecocrit- ics at any stage of the enterprise have been unaware that nature is a
problematic social construct (in some way, in some sense, to some degree), nor have they
been blind to the inter-articulation of this construct with gender, racial, and (to a lesser
degree) sexual dis- criminations. Queer theory, though, introduces a radical new level of
skepticism toward “nature” and its presumed taxonomies.¶ Greta Gaard’s “Toward a
Queer Ecofeminism” is an early contri- bution to what is now orthodox ecocritical theory,
that “liberating women requires liberating nature, the erotic, and queers.”11 Unlike the
new wave of queer ecology with its scientific reference-points, Gaard draws mainly upon
historical evidence to buttress what is re- ally a structuralist argument linking oppressively
hierarchical dual- isms such as male/female, culture/nature, reason/emotion, hetero/
homosexual, and others, which she hopes to confront by “embrac- ing the erotic in all its
diversity and building coalitions for creating a democratic ecological culture based on our
shared liberation.”12 It is a laudable ambition, certainly, but not necessarily well founded
the- oretically or empirically. For one thing, while the ecofeminist analy- sis of the
persistent (and usually demeaning) association of women and nature is, with some biased
selection of sources, defensible,13 it is clear that queers have consistently been
condemned as “against nature” in Western homophobic culture. Gaard admits as much,
but then suggests that “nature is devalued just as queers are devalued,”14 which is not the
case: queers allegedly violate the “natural order” according to which, often in other
contexts, humans are meant to dominate nature, this time in the everyday sense of the
nonhuman environment and its denizens. Gaard’s argument depends, then, on an
equivocation between two of Kate Soper’s three meanings of na- ture: sexual oppression
relies upon a vicious theological and ideo- logical inflection of the “realist” sense of the
word, while the nature that is subjected to modernizing and colonial conquest is the “lay” or
“surface” sense.15 Empirically, it seems unlikely that one would find any correlation
between metrics of sexual liberation in a soci- ety (taking, say, levels of homophobic
persecution or, conversely, gay marriage and civil rights) and those of environmental
impact, like carbon emissions (think Canada and Australia). So although the conceptual
isomorphism discussed by Gaard and others is popu- lar, intriguing, and perhaps politically
motivating, queer ecologists need more evidence that “an ideology in which the erotic,
queer sexualities, women, persons of color, and nature are all conceptu- ally linked”16
translates into real socio-ecological relationships.¶ Ecofeminists like Gaard have long been
skeptical of nature in that ideological sense of “natural order”; the innovation of queer
ecology is to draw upon scientific evidence to queer nature in the ordinary, lay sense. It is
a complex movement: subverting the ideological fic- tion of a heteronormative natural
order, queer ecologists deploy ex- amples from the (queer) natural world, which are then
read back into a transformed natural order reread as always already queer. The initiative
enjoys an atmosphere of bracing radicalism: whereas eco- critics always sought to
highlight the ambivalence of nature, as well as its historicity, Morton’s Ecology without
Nature damns ecocriticism tout court as “too enmeshed with the ideology that churns out
ste- reotypical ideas of nature to be of any use.”17 The leftist alternative is “ecocritique,”
which, like queer theory, “thoroughly examines how nature is set up as a transcendental,
unified, independent category. Ecocritique does not think that it is paradoxical to say, in the
name of ecology itself: ‘down with nature!’”18 However, while it is clear that queer needs
green, to avoid the ethical dead-end of repetitive aporetic gestures, its reflex of reflexivity, it
is not obvious that green needs—or indeed stands to benefit from—queer. Furthermore,
while the queer critique of organicism is salutary on properly ecological grounds, and the
dismantling of spurious sexual hierarchy desirable on moral grounds, queer ecology’s
opportunistic appropriation of biology frequently misrepresents both science and the
philosophi- cal assumptions that guide it.
Trans* Erasure
You don’t go far enough. Despite its entrenchment in the academy and in
society, queer theory has not realized its potential to restructure
understandings of gender or to achieve progress for the trans community
Stryker 4
(Susan, trans activist and trans woman, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies 10.2 pp. 212-215 http://ejournals.ebsco.com/Direct.asp?AccessToken=6VMVKL98MGOO1WAW7330AWINZKO89FK9X&Show=Object&msid=604025715 ~cVs)
If queer theory was born of the union of sexuality studies and feminism, transgender studies
can be considered queer theory's evil twin: it has the same parentage but willfully disrupts the
privileged family narratives that favor sexual identity labels (like gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
heterosexual) over the gender categories (like man and woman) that enable desire to take
shape and find its aim. In the first volume of GLQ I published my first academic article, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein
above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage," an autobiographically inflected performance piece drawn from my
experiences of coming out as a transsexual.1 The article addressed four distinct theoretical moments. The first was Judith Butler's
then recent, now paradigmatic linkage of gender with the notion of trouble. Gender's
absence renders sexuality
largely incoherent, yet gender refuses to be the stable foundation on which a system of
sexuality can be theorized.2 A critical reappraisal of transsexuality, I felt, promised a timely
and significant contribution to the analysis of the intersection of gender and sexuality. The
second moment was the appearance of Sandy Stone's "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," which pointedly
criticized Janice G. Raymond's paranoiac Transsexual Empire and called on transsexual people to articulate new narratives of self
that better expressed the authenticity of transgender experience.3 I considered my article on transgender rage an explicit answer to
that call. The third moment was Leslie Feinberg's little pamphlet, Transgender Liberation. Feinberg took a preexisting term,
transgender, and invested it with new meaning, enabling it to become the name for Stone's theorized posttranssexualism.4 Feinberg
linked the drive to inhabit this newly envisioned space to a broader struggle for social justice. I saw myself as a fellow traveler.
Finally, I perceived a tremendous utility, both political and theoretical, in the new concept of
an antiessentialist, postidentitarian, strategically fluid "queerness." It was through
participation in Queer Nation—particularly its San Francisco-based spin-off, Transgender
Nation—that I sharpened my theoretical teeth on the practice of transsexuality. When I came
out as transsexual in 1992, I was acutely conscious, both experientially and intellectually, that
transsexuals were considered abject creatures in most feminist and gay or lesbian contexts,
yet I considered myself both feminist and lesbian. I saw GLQ as the leading vehicle for advancing the new queer
theory, and I saw in queer theory a potential for attacking the antitranssexual moralism so unthinkingly embedded in most
progressive analyses of gender and sexuality without resorting to a reactionary, homophobic, and misogynistic counteroffensive. I
sought instead to dissolve and recast the ground that identity genders in the process of staking its tent. By
denaturalizing
and thus deprivileging nontransgender practices of embodiment and identification, and by
simultaneously enacting a new narrative of the wedding of self and flesh, I intended to create
new territories, both analytic and material, for a critically refigured transsexual practice.
Embracing and identifying with the figure of Frankenstein's monster, claiming the transformative power of a return from abjection,
felt like the right way to go.
Looking back a decade later, I see that in having chosen to speak as a
famous literary monster, I not only found a potent voice through which to offer an early
formulation of transgender theory but also situated myself (again, like Frankenstein's monster) in a
drama of familial abandonment, a fantasy of revenge against those who had cast me out, and
a yearning for personal redemption. I wanted to help define "queer" as a family to which
transsexuals belonged. The queer vision that animated my life, and the lives of so many others
in the brief historical moment of the early 1990s, held out the dazzling prospect of a
compensatory, utopian reconfiguration of community. It seemed an anti-oedipal, ecstatic leap
into a postmodern space of possibility in which the foundational containers of desire could be
ruptured to release a raw erotic power that could be harnessed to a radical social agenda.
That vision still takes my breath away. A decade later, with another Bush in the White House and another war
in the Persian Gulf, it is painfully apparent that the queer revolution of the early 1990s yielded, at
best, only fragile and tenuous forms of liberal progress in certain sectors and did not radically
transform society—and as in the broader world, so too in the academy. Queer theory has
become an entrenched, though generally] progressive, presence in higher education, but it has not
realized the (admittedly utopian) potential I (perhaps naively) sensed there for a radical restructuring of
our understanding of gender, particularly of minoritized and marginalized manifestations of
gender, such as transsexuality. While queer studies remains the most hospitable place to undertake transgender work,
all too often queer remains a code word for "gay" or "lesbian," and all too often transgender
phenomena are misapprehended through a lens that privileges sexual orientation and sexual
identity as the primary means of differing from heteronormativity.
Queer Theory = Racist
Queer Theory does not sufficiently recognize the intersections of race and
class—little focus on materiality and the perspectives of PoC
Johnson ’10 (E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies
and African American Studies at Northwestern University. A scholar, artist, and activist,
Johnson has performed nationally and internationally and has published widely in the area
of race, gender, sexuality and performance; “’Quare’ studies, or (almost) everything I know
about queer studies I learned from my grandmother”; Text and Performance Quarterly;
Volume 21, Issue 1; Publisher: Routledge; Published online: 05 Nov 2010; pages 4-5) GFD
At a moment when queer studies has gained momentum in the academy and forged a
space as a legitimate disciplinary subject, much of the scholarship produced in its name
elides issues of race and class. While the epigraphs that open this essay suggest that the
label ‘‘queer’’ sometimes speaks across (homo)sexualities, they also suggest that the term
is not necessarily embraced by gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people of
color. Indeed, the statements of Mack-Nataf, Blackman, and Cohen reflect a general
suspicion that the label often displaces and rarely addresses their concerns.4¶ Some queer
theorists have argued that their use of ‘‘queer’’ is more than just a reappropriation of an
offensive term. Cherry Smith, for example, maintains that the term entails a ‘‘radical
questioning of social and cultural norms, notions of gender, reproductive sexuality and the
family’’ (280). Others underscore the playfulness and inclusivity of the term, arguing that it
opens up rather than fixes identities. According to Eve Sedgwick, ‘‘What it takes—all it
takes—to make the description ‘queer’ a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first
person’’ (9). Indeed, Sedgwick suggests, it may refer to¶ pushy femmes, radical faeries,
fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedos, feminist women or feminist men,
masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals,
aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or [. . .] people
able to relish, learn from, or identify with such. (8)¶ For Sedgwick, then, it would appear that
‘‘queer’’ is a catchall term not bound to any particular identity, a notion that moves us away
from binaries such as homosexual/ heterosexual and gay/lesbian. Micheal Warner offers an
even more politicized and polemical view:¶ The preference for ‘‘queer’’ represents, among
other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of
toleration or simple political interest- representation in favor of a more thorough resistance
to regimes of the normal. For academics, being interested in Queer theory is a way to mess
up the desexualized spaces of the academy, exude some rut, reimagine the public from and
for which academic intellectuals write, dress, and perform. (xxvi)¶ The foregoing theorists
identify ‘‘queer’’ as a site of indeterminate possibility, a site¶ where sexual practice does not
necessarily determine one’s status as queer. Indeed, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner
argue that queer is ‘‘more a matter of aspiration than it is the expression of an identity or a
history’’ (344). Accordingly, straight- identified critic Calvin Thomas appropriates Judith
Butler’s notion of ‘‘critical queerness’’ to suggest that ‘‘just as there is more than one way to
be ‘critical’, there may be more than one (or two or three) to be ‘queer’ ’’ (83).¶ Some critics
have applied Butler’s theory of gender to identity formation more generally. Butler calls into
question the notion of the ‘‘self’’ as distinct from discursive cultural fields. That is, like
gender, there is no independent or pure ‘‘self’’ or agent that stands outside socially and
culturally mediated discursive systems. Any move toward identification, then, is, in her
view, to be hoodwinked into believing that identities are discourse free and capable of
existing outside the systems those identity formations seek to critique. Even when identity
is contextualized and qualified, Butler still insists that theories of identity ‘‘invariably close
with an embarrassed ‘etc’.’’ (Gender 143). Butler’s emphasis on gender and sex as
‘‘performa- tive’’ would seem to undergird a progressive, forward-facing theory of sexuality.
In fact, some theorists have made the theoretical leap from the gender performative to the
racial performative, thereby demonstrating the potential of her theory for understanding
the ontology of race.5¶ But to riff off of the now popular phrase ‘‘gender trouble,’’ there is
some race trouble here with queer theory. More particularly, in its ‘‘race for theory’’
(Christian), queer theory has often failed to address the material realities of gays and
lesbians of color. As black British activist Helen (Charles) asks, ‘‘What happens to the
definition of ‘queer’ when you’re washing up or having a wank? When you’re aware of
misplace- ment or displacement in your colour, gender, identity? Do they get subsumed [. .
.] into a homogeneous category, where class and other things that make up a cultural
identity are ignored?’’ (101–102). What, for example, are the ethical and material
implications of queer theory if its project is to dismantle all notions of identity and
agency? The deconstructive turn in queer theory highlights the ways in which ideology
functions to oppress and to proscribe ways of knowing, but what is the utility of queer
theory on the front lines, in the trenches, on the street, or anyplace where the racialized
and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed—indeed, where the body is the site of
trauma?6¶ Beyond queer theory’s failure to focus on materiality, it also has failed to
acknowledge consistently and critically the intellectual, aesthetic, and political
contributions of nonwhite and non-middle-class gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and
transgendered people in the struggle against homophobia and oppression. More- over,
even when white queer theorists acknowledge these contributions, rarely do they selfconsciously and overtly reflect on the ways in which their whiteness informs their critical
queer position, and this is occurring at a time when naming one’s positionality has
become almost standard protocol in other areas of scholar- ship. Although there are
exceptions, most often white queer theorists fail to acknowledge and address racial
privilege.7
The White Epistemology intrinsic to much of Queer Theory makes the AFF
methodology inaccessible to some Queer PoC and props up White Supremacy
through the deconstruction of community and fervent rejection of opposition
Johnson ’10 (E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies
and African American Studies at Northwestern University. A scholar, artist, and activist,
Johnson has performed nationally and internationally and has published widely in the area
of race, gender, sexuality and performance; “’Quare’ studies, or (almost) everything I know
about queer studies I learned from my grandmother”; Text and Performance Quarterly;
Volume 21, Issue 1; Publisher: Routledge; Published online: 05 Nov 2010; pages 5-6) GFD
Because transgendered people, lesbians, gays, and bisexuals of color often ground their
theorizing in a politics of identity, they frequently fall prey to accusations of
‘‘essentialism’’ or ‘‘anti-intellectualism.’’ Galvanizing around identity, however, is not
always an unintentional ‘‘essentialist’’ move. Many times, it is an intentional¶ strategic
choice.8 Cathy Cohen, for example, suggests that ‘‘queer theorizing which calls for the
elimination of fixed categories seems to ignore the ways in which some traditional social
identities and communal ties can, in fact, be important to one’s survival’’ (‘‘Punks’’ 450).
The ‘‘communal ties’’ to which Cohen refers are those which exist in communities of color
across boundaries of sexuality. For example, my grandmother, who is homophobic,
nonetheless must be included in the struggle against oppression in spite of her bigotry.
While her homophobia must be critiqued, her feminist and race struggles over the course of
her life have enabled me and others in my family to enact strategies of resistance against a
number of oppressions, including homophobia. Some queer activists groups, however,
have argued fer- vently for the disavowal of any alliance with heterosexuals, a disavowal
that those of us who belong to communities of color cannot necessarily afford to make.9
There- fore, while offering a progressive and sometimes transgressive politics of sexuality,
the seams of queer theory become exposed when that theory is applied to identities around
which sexuality may pivot, such as race and class.¶ As a counter to this myopia and in an
attempt to close the gap between theory and practice, self and Other, Audre Lorde
proclaims:¶ Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and
temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not
mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do
not exist. [. . .] I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge
inside herself and touch the terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See
whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our
choices. (112–13, emphasis in original)¶ For Lorde, a theory that dissolves the communal
identity—in all of its difference— around which the marginalized can politically organize is
not a progressive one. Nor is it one that gays, bisexuals, transgendered people, and
lesbians of color can afford to adopt, for to do so would be to foreclose possibilities of
change.