QUEERING ECOCULTURAL STUDIES

Abstract

This paper begins with Slack and Whitt's (‘Ethics and cultural studies’ in Cultural Studies, eds L. Grossberg et al., Routledge, New York, 1992) crucial imperative to cultural studies: that we need to (re)develop its normative commitment, and that ecological relations are the site from which to do so. Although their argument eventually relies on a problematic understanding of nature as an integrative totality ‘beyond’ culture, this paper maintains that it is nevertheless important to follow their lead and consider ecological relations in their articulation with, and implication in, other relations of power in late capitalism. ‘Queer’ ecocultural studies, given its considerable skepticism with ‘normative’ natures as well as its emphasis on sex/nature articulations, would have us focus precisely on challenging the intersections of power, beginning with heteronormativity, and ecological relations. For an example of queer ecocultural studies, the paper then reads Jane Rule's novel The Young in One Another's Arms (Pandora Press, London, 1977), a sophisticated example of ‘queer nature writing’ with its focus on the intertwined becomings of a queer family and a wounded landscape. Following from Rule's narrative, the paper argues that a critical practice of queer ecocultural studies demands that we read ‘for’ nature, for the implication of culture in ecosystemic relations, and that we also insist on understanding these more-than-human implications as part of, and not beyond, complex articulations of power.

Keywords:

• environment
• queer theory
• ecoculture
• bio-politics
• lesbian and gay studies

Notes

1. Slack and Whitt (1992) outline an ecosystemic understanding that assumes neither an evolutionary teleology in which the meaning of the individual organism is determined by its reproductive/adaptive success, nor a functional contingency in which the meaning of a given organism is cast in relation to the overall integrity of the ecosystem. Much of cultural studies’ allergy to ecology is, I think, triggered by the related spectres of biological determinism and functionalism, and the fact that Slack and Whitt have opened up the question of organismic-cultural meaning to a more complex array of possibilities is a very important contribution.

2. Even in the early 1990s, many thinkers were concerned with the collision between ‘the linguistic turn’ of social theory – perhaps especially cultural studies? – and questions of ‘nature’ in environmental thought and politics. Although the ‘nature wars’ of the late 1990s – in which environmental historian William Cronon was lambasted by for his argument that wilderness is a historically and socially constructed set of social relationships to nature, not ‘nature’ itself (1995) – were not terribly productive, several authors took the thorny problem of materiality seriously. In particular, the works of writers in the field of feminist science studies, for example as recently collected in Alaimo and Hekman (2007), have led the way in this conversation in their insistence on the ‘artifactuality’ (Haraway's term) of the biotic (to whit: all nature is constructed, but that doesn't mean that humans are the only ones doing the constructing). What cultural studies adds, I think, is a more careful understanding of what ‘construction’ is all about.

3. In this idea of ‘making nature appreciable,’ I am indebted to Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (1973).

4. Noting again Ross’ justifiable suspicion of ‘using’ nature to authorize the social, I relate Bagemihl's biological evidence more as a challenge to the assumed heterosexuality of ‘normal’ nature than as proof of the ‘naturalness’ of any form of sexuality. In fact, as Simon LeVay documents, animal research has a long and sordid history of ‘proving’ the naturalness/bestiality of homosexuality (1996, p. 195). Bagemihl's use of animal behavior to ‘naturalize’ homosexuality says as much about ideas of nature-as-authority as it does about the desirability of any particular kind of sexual activity.

5. Rule is perhaps best known for the 1985 film Desert Hearts, an adaptation of her 1964 novel Desert of the Heart.

6. The Young in One Another's Arms (1977) was one of the books detained by Canada Customs as obscene, an ironic counterpoint to Jay's criticism of Rule's work as too mainstream.

7. Rule and Sonthoff moved from Vancouver to Galiano Island in the 1970s, living there full-time by 1976. Galiano Island is one of the Southern Gulf Islands of British Columbia, in the Strait of Georgia between the mainland and Vancouver Island. During the 1970s, Galiano was home to an interesting mixture of farmers, retirees, and hippies; following Vancouver and Victoria, it has become progressively gentrified in the intervening years. On the centrality of the themes of home and community to Rule's mid- to late-career writing, see Schuster (1999).

8. In fact, Galiano was the site of a quite considerable Japanese fishing community, and there remain visible remnants of these lives in the form of several charcoal pits. Their lands were, like that of all Japanese-Canadians living on the West Coast, expropriated during World War II. This violence was not, of course, the only one to shape Galiano's history; the Coast Salish People, whose physical presence is also still part of the visible landscape of the island—for example, in a large midden at Montague Harbour – were decimated by disease.

9. It is precisely in the long-term transformation of these communities from an utopian to a ‘queer ecological’ orientation that they have found the possibility of flourishing (although, good lesbian feminists still, they don't much care for the term ‘queer’) (Sandilands 2000).

10. Wreck Beach is not physically part of the West End, but certainly – as Fire Island is to Manhattan – it is part of the spatial sensibility of the West End gay male community.