Lavender ' s Green ? Some Thoughts on Queer ( g ) ing fnvironmental Politics

At the Stein Valley festival in the Summer of 1989, Anne Cameron, who was presumed to be an authority on such things, was asked "what is the place of gay men and lesbians in the environmental movement?" She answered: "everywhere." Much applause. Next question.


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It is not enough to point to "one-in-ten" environmentalists, as if the mere presence of gay bodies at blockades of logging roads were a significant form of inclusion or conversation.It is not enough simply to add "heterosexism" to the long list of dominations that shape our relations to nature, to pretend that we can just "add queers and stir" in our formulations of what "oppression" and "exploitation" mean .It is not enough to wear buttons with pink triangles beside the ones that say "Save the Whales" and "Stop Acid Rain ."It is not enough, even, to imagine that the tree you are hugging is the same sex as you.
Or perhaps that's a starr.Maybe it's even flirting with you.

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This earth is my sister; J Love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how Loved I am. 3 6.
You would think that ecofeminism would be a reasonable place to find some sort of critical examination of the relations between (a t least) lesbian and environmental politics.Bur I am constantly amazed by the profound heterosexuality of its metaphors, the ways in which reproduction , in its narrowes t sense, is often located as the "apex" of women 's connection to nature.Why do women not embrace "sister earth " as a lover?Has the sexualization of nature been so completely, so unwiLlingly penetrative-" raping" the wildas to render celibate our affections?
Or is it that the inclusion of "queer" wo uld force us to call into question the ways in which "women ," as a category, has been invoked in a rather monolithic way, both in ecofeminism itself and in the "worldview" that it purportedly challenges?Discourses of "difference," meaning heterosexual difference, live on in many ecofemini.~J . . .sFfF:b\.~.sions of "who women are," and also in many understandings of "narure" itself.Therein lies a challenge.
Despite the considerable evidence that many species engage in same-gender sex (however you may want to understand\he validity of using "evidence" from other species to reflect upon human behaviour), "homosexuality" has been socially positioned as "unnatural." Indeed, when same-gender sex is observed in other species, "the paradigm ofheterosexism ... selectively overrides the use of nature as a model of alternate gender and sexual relationships."' Yet " nature" is still invoked as a tool of condemnation.At the same rime, "homosexuali ty" has been socially positioned as "uncivilized."As Gary Kinsman notes, discourses aro und "degeneracy" have been used in medical and psychiatric practice to define "homosex uals, like criminals, as throwbacks to earlier stages of civi lization ." 6A mutant Darwin continues to haunt us.
"Queers" have thus been positioned as boundary-creatures: neither fully "natural" nor full y "civilized.''?Surely here the inclusion of" queer" into environmental politics would have us interrogate the discursive relations by which such a posi rion is possible?Given the tendency in (some) environmental political theory to describe "oppression" in terms of the operations of hierarchical dualism (nature/culture, man/woman) , it would seem that the inclusion of "queer" would also have us interrogate the adequacy of"dualism" as a description of power, and the political forms that result from such an analysis. 8
Perhaps we are asking the wrong question.The inclusion of"queer" into environmental politics must involve not so much a noun as an adjective and verb.Rather than enumerate some series of points where lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgenderists can carve out some sort of unique "position" in relation to environmental issues, perhaps the point is to "queer" nature itself, to create "queer" environments.
To queer nature is to question its normative use, to interrogate relations ofknowledge and power by which certain "truths" about ourselves have been allowed to pass, unnoticed, without question.It is a process by which all relations to nature become de-naturalized, by which we question the ways in which we are located in nature, by which we question the uses to which "nature" has been put.To queer nature is to "put out of order" our understandings, so our "eccentricities" can be produced more forcefully.
Queer environments are rhus those in which the boundaries berween "nature" and "culture" are shown to be arbitrary, dialectical, m utually-cons titutive.These are places where "unnatural" and "uncivilized" combine to produce questionable, shady, suspect, characters who are nor comfortable inhabiting existing bifurcations.

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The cock-of-the-rock, a native of So uth America, has a permanently erected crest that practically conceals its small beak.This strange bird's chief claim to fame lies in its extraordinary ritual dancing ceremonies.During these performances, one male at a time cavorts and postures on a rock or outcrop whilst the other males and the females watch near by. 9

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Read the cock-of-the-rock as a drag queen both to call into question the "naturalness" of any particular sexuality or gender, and to force us to consider the situatedness of all interpretive practices around "nature." Position drag "in" nature both to suggest that "nature" may be partially performative, and to challenge the boundaries between "truth" and "artifice."Speak of nature and artifice as non-mutually-exclusive to suggest that the truth may be stranger than we could ever imagine.

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The earth has innumerable modes of being that are not human modes.Our direct intuitions tell us that the earth is infinitely strange, even where gentle and beautiful. 10 have met strange and it is us."

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A politics that would have us celebrate "strangeness" would place queer at the centre, rather than on the margins, of the discursive universe.It is not that we encounter "the stranger" only when we visit "wi lderness," but that s/he/it inhabits even the most everyday of our actions.To treat the world as "strange" is to open up the possibility of wonder, to speak also with the impenetrable spaces between the words in our language.
Such a project lies at the core of refiguring both human relations to nonhuman nature, and human relations to each other.It involves both a certain humbl eness, and, in William Connolly's words, a certain generosity."Not a generosity growing out of the unchallengeable privilege of a superior social position and moral ontology, but one emerging from enhanced appreciation of dissonances within our own identities." 12Not a rigid boundary between Self/knowledge, and Other/fear, but movement in the wo rld through a multitude of queer environments.

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I would have loved to live in a world of women and men gaily in collusion with green leaves, stalks, building mineral cities, transparent domes, little huts of woven grass each with its own patterna conspiracy to coexist with the Crab Nebula, the exploding universe, the Mind-"

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Gaily in collusion.Such a process would seem to mark the subversive conversation between queer and environmental politics, a conversation that demands of each change, accommodation, displacement.T he "nature" of environmentalism, here, would seem to depend on such an articulation.
Strange bedfellows, perhaps, queers and environmentalists, but stranger, hopefully, the results.