"Bad Environmentalism" Queer Ecology, Pleasure Activism and the Politics of Feeling Good

Content

This seminar engages with key ideas that have recently been subsumed under the umbrella term 'Queer Ecology' as part of the young field of the Environmental Humanities. Reading various texts from various places (cinema, poetry, biography, short fiction and novels from Australia, Canada, the Caribbean/U.S., India, Nigeria, and U.S./Mexico), we will reflect on cross-cultural understandings of queerness, nature, and the planetary/cosmic, as well as on new articulations of environmental activism. We will interrogate notions of purity, evolution, and species competition, and engage with the "Uses of the Erotic" (Audre Lorde, 1978) in various genres. Key questions will be: What is 'queerness' and how does it relate to (trans)cultural ecology? How do 'queer' perspectives enrich and support current scientific insights about evolution, biodiversity and ecosystems? And how can ecocritical theory and the creative imagination teach us the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Tsing et al. 2019)?