“Melancholic? Naturally!”: Impulses for Cultural Transformation from Queer-Ecological Worldmaking, Activism, and Art in a Western Context

Abstract

Although ecological grief is a common psychic response to socioecological losses, there are no shared spaces to engage with it in Western cultures—a symptom of the problematic way they conceive Nature as external and subordinate to humans. Seeking subversive impulses for paradigmatic transformation, this research centers queer-identifying eco-activists and -artists, and their practices of queer-ecological worldmaking. Arts-based research and interviews reveal the potential of melancholic grieving to create an understanding of interdependencies with the more-than-human world, as well as communities for healing. Impulses toward a joint liberation entail the extension of empathy and agency to the more-than-human world.

Keywords:

• Arts-based research
• ecofeminism
• ecological grief
• eco-poetry
• joint liberation
• nature melancholy
• queer ecology
• sustainability

Notes

1 According to Stuart Hall (1992), the West is a discursive construct instrumentalized in binary opposition to the East to legitimize the former’s dominance and the latter’s colonization by implying European uniqueness and non-European inferiority. While I acknowledge the problematic history of the term, I still find it the best “catch-all” term for the paradigms, cultures, and the geographic areas they prevail in. I thus use it temporarily and critically.

2 Nature, here and throughout the paper, is capitalized purposefully, to underline its constructedness (Morton, 2010). While the first part of the paper provides an understanding of how Nature is understood in Western dominant culture, within the dualisms of the Master identity, following sections will not offer an alternative definition, instead using it in the tradition of Queer Theory: as a useful yet problematic category resisting essentialist definition (Alaimo, 2016; Morton, 2010).

3 A queer re-thinking of the term women, to also include trans*, inter*, and non-binary identities.

4 A catch-all term for a plurality of people self-identifying as queer, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.