Celebrating Pride Month and Queer Ecological Theory
In (belated) celebration of pride month, we wanted to highlight the many intersections between ecology and LGBTQIA2+ experiences, and how implementing a queer ecology lens can help dismantle colonist, white supremacist, heteronormative assumptions about human nature and the more-than-human world.
But first, to introduce myself – Hi! My name is Julia (she/they pronouns), and I am one of the two Rogue Farm Corps Apprentices at Good Rain Farm this season. I am white and identify as queer. I’ve been fascinated by plants since as long as I can remember, spending most of my childhood wandering through the woods where I grew up on the lands of the Wampanoag, Massachusett, and Nipmuc tribes (colonially known as Massachusetts) and trying to identify every plant species I could find.
One species that holds a special place in my heart – in part because my sisters used to call me this plants’ name when I was little – is jewelweed. Jewelweed has bright orange flowers with green seed pods that burst open dramatically when you touch them. The plant often grows near poison ivy, and its stem, when cracked open, produces an aloe-like salve that soothes poison ivy rashes and other skin irritations. The healing powers of this plant seemed like pure magic to me as a kid, and still do.
I was excited to see that jewelweed is growing wild at Good Rain Farm and decided to do more research, which led me to learn that jewelweed has a few more tricks up its sleeve. While its orange flowers require cross-pollination, the plant can also reproduce through its smaller, cleistogamous flowers, which never open and are self-fertilizing. This means that jewelweed can still propagate in environments where pollinators are scarce.
Cleistogamous are under the broader umbrella of “perfect” flowers, which are both pollen producing and pollen receiving (in other words, multi-gender). 90% of all flowering plants have perfect flowers, and 75% of all plants are multi-gender. Other plants, such as ash trees, shift their gender expression throughout their lives, while some flowers, like those of the avocado plant, can shift their gender expressions every day. Throughout the plant world, queerness (including asexual, agender, intersex, multi-sex, gender queer, trans, non-binary, and other expressions of gender and sexuality) is overwhelmingly the norm.
Queer ecological theory highlights that queerness is all around us, and celebrates the wide diversity of gender expressions and sexualities as a positive, beneficial, intrinsic element of the natural world. As is unfortunately a common experience for many queer kids, I often received the narrative growing up that to be queer is to be “unnatural.” It has been liberating to learn that not only is queerness abundantly present in the behavior, anatomy, and genealogy of all life on earth, but queerness is also a lens through which to reconnect with core truths about the natural world as a place full of interdependence, mutualism, expansiveness, fluidity, and relationship.
These concepts of queer ecological theory are rooted in knowledge from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities, both historically and in the present-day, and are in defiance of the colonial, white supremacist concepts rooted in domination, control, and binary thinking.
Contrary to many western perceptions of evolution, the natural world is not solely driven by competition and individuals’ ability to reproduce, i.e. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest.” To zoom in on plants again for a moment – it’s important to recognize that the very root of western plant taxonomy is based in white supremacism and hetero-normativity. Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish biologist who formalised the binomial nomenclature system still used today, imbued the system with heterosexual terminology. According to a description of “Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism” by Banu Subramaniam, "botany's foundational theories and practices were shaped and fortified in the aid of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions … [in which] colonizers obliterated plant time's deep history to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants like ‘foreign humans.’”
Queer ecological theory is not just about remembering that the natural world is replete with examples of queerness and mutualism, but also about recognizing, eroding, and being accountable to the legacy of colonizer theories as they have warped understandings of the non-human world and ourselves. “Queer botany/Queer ecology is about decolonizing our understanding of the natural world. It is about seeing plants, land and animals not in opposition to humans, or as something we need to control but rather interconnected and interdependent with nature and the natural world… It is also about uplifting Indigenous knowledge and understanding.” – Mo Browne, at the 2018 Interlocking Roots Network Gathering in Detroit, MI.
Radical, feminist, and queer ecological theories based in BIPOC and queer & trans lineage imagine ways to abolish all systems of oppression. In Romy Opperman’s article “We Need Histories of Radical Black Ecology Now,” she writes that “the renewal of interest and experiments in extra state-based forms of community survival, care, and autonomy is enriched by an engagement with these texts that situate such forms in terms of a longer history of Black diasporic spirituality, ecological ethics, resilience and resistance.”
At a time when colonizing forces continue to commit multiple genocides around the world, transphobic and homophobic legislation is on the rise, and marginalized communities in the so-called US face and resist increased deportation and other atrocities, it is critical we put theory into practice, follow frontline leadership, and work together towards collective liberation for the human and more-than-human world. Queer ecological theory is just one lens of many, but I think it can play a role in breaking down colonist concepts of domination, individualism, and control, while giving us tools for building collective care, connection, and liberation.
- Julia
Juleweed is growing wild at Good Rain Farm!
ORGANIZATIONS TO FOLLOW
Queer Nature
https://www.queernature.org/ - “Nature-intimacy, naturalist studies, place-based skills for LGBTQIA+, Two-Spirit, & non-binary people and allies.”
“Queer nature is really centering kinship with the more than human world and… inter-species solidarity and co-conspiring with the natural world for co-liberation” - Pınar Sinopoulos-lloyd
https://www.queernature.org/resource-list-further-reading – more resources linked from Queer Nature
Queering Herbalism
https://queerherbalism.blogspot.com/ - “Brown. Queer. Herbalism.”
Queer Farmers Network
Queer Farmer Network - “The QFN was conceived to build community among queer farmers and to reflect on and interrupt racist, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal legacies in Agriculture. We strive to create a stronger web of support for and address the isolation of queer farmers in both rural and urban spaces across the so-called USA.”
FURTHER READING
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s books Braiding Sweetgrass & Gathering Moss and essay “Why Nature Needs a New Pronoun”
Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism by Banu Subramaniam
Perfect Flowers: A Queer Botany Zine from Interlocking Roots
"Now is the Time for Black Queer Feminist Ecology,” by Zsea Bowmani
“We Need Histories of Radical Black Ecology Now,” by Romy Opperman
Why Ecology Needs a Queer Lens
Naturally Queer by Myra J. Hird
Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson
"What if we were able to truly conceive of a flower as a multi-sex being? And then, what about the field in which the flower lives? What about the ecosystem in which the field operates: the oak tree that sits at the edge of the field, the earthworm moving through the topsoil, the symbiotic mycelial-root relationships, the water, wind, and sunlight that sustain life there? What about the whole earth, a living, breathing, multi-sex organism capable of reproduction beyond the human species’ wildest dreams? Does conceiving of the world in this way change how we move through it?" – Eli Brown, https://www.anothermother.co/, Another Mother: A Database of All Trans Organisms on Earth
