by Hester Baer
Dominant ecological discourses have often positioned environmental stewardship as an ethical practice that is predicated on reproductive futurity, chaste restraint, and the common good, evident in concepts like ‘the seventh generation’; ‘leave no trace’; and ‘one earth, one future.’ Understanding environmentalism as devoted to preserving the earth for subsequent generations, and implicitly suggesting that doing so entails self-sacrifice and the renunciation of pleasure in the service of a deferred higher purpose, such discourses assume a heteropatriarchal social order and its attendant institutions and temporalities as the key referents for ecological thought. Queer ecology disrupts these received models of conservation, sustainability, and future orientation, reimagining environmentalism as a practice that is invested, in queer ecocritic Sarah Ensor’s words, “not in conserving or sustaining present ways of life but rather in rupturing or annihilating norms” (Ensor 2017, 150). Drawing on and contributing to queer theory’s widespread reshaping of modes of inquiry in the humanities, queer ecology calls into question what is understood as ‘natural,’ including ideas, practices, bodies, landscapes, and temporalities, and in so doing opens up new ways of conceptualizing the interrelationship of organisms and their environments.
In recasting environmentalism as a mode of enabling queer life, queer ecology is especially committed to radically rethinking nature as an epistemological category and, concomitantly, to dismantling the nature/culture divide. Queer approaches have contributed significantly to theorizing nature and culture as relational rather than polar or universalizing categories, in ways that have proved broadly influential for environmental thought. Signaling the imbrication of nature and culture, Donna Haraway’s coinage “naturecultures” underpins her broader queer-feminist project of rethinking received understandings of nature—including the boundaries between humans and technology, species relations, and kinship networks—as a catalyst for social change. As Haraway writes in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, “[b]eings do not preexist their relatings. […] Biological and cultural determinism are both instances of misplaced concreteness—i.e. the mistake of, first, taking provisional and local category abstractions like ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ for the world and, second, mistaking potent consequences to be preexisting foundations. There are no pre-constituted subjects and objects, and no single sources, unitary actors, or final ends” (Haraway 2003, 6). Haraway’s expansive exploration of “the queer family of companion species” (ibid., 11) demonstrates how interspecies “relatings” are not only ontologically constitutive of human beings and animals but also how each of these groups ultimately forms an inextricable part of the other, in both affective and material terms.
With Haraway, queer ecology draws on queer theorizations of non-sovereign relationality to investigate our material entanglements and interdependencies, thereby reconceptualizing biopolitical understandings of life itself. Timothy Morton describes the intimate and entangled queer relationality of life-forms as “a mesh, a nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment” (Morton 2010, 275-76). Insofar as the mesh “defies our imaginative capacities and transcends iconography” (ibid., 276), it contributes to the queer ecological project of simultaneously de-naturalizing nature and re-envisioning it as encompassing and sustaining gender and sexual diversity.
Inspired by non-normative sexualities, genders, and modes of embodiment, queer ecology ruptures the hegemonic assumption that heteronormativity is the natural order of things and that nature is inevitably heteronormative. Queer ecocritics and historians of science including Stacy Alaimo, Myra Hird, and Joan Roughgarden have examined trans*, intersex, and nonbinary gender and homo- and bisexuality in animals and plants to forge new accounts of nature as itself queer. By demonstrating the complexity of animal and plant behaviors, their studies generatively problematize human exceptionalism and contribute to rethinking conventional understandings of species distinction. The emerging study of transanimalities argues that the human/nonhuman distinction is inextricable with conceptions of gender and sexual difference, since to be human has entailed the assignation of a gender designation and, conversely, to become trans* or to fall outside of normative binary gender categories may render one less-than-human.
Queer theory’s critique of straight time—including teleological narratives of progress, linear timelines that define life in goal-oriented terms, and the concomitant expectation of reproductive futurism—has likewise informed queer ecology’s examination of the temporalities that underpin environmental thought. Queer ecocritics have delineated diverse models for framing environmental ethics, aesthetics, and practices in ways that complicate or reject heteronormative time. Nicole Seymour proposes a form of empathy predicated on the queer theoretical concept of self-shattering, contending that a non-sovereign relational paradigm of environmentalism “is ethically attuned to the present and future safety and health of the biosphere as it encompasses the human, non-human, and everything in-between,” an ethical attunement that is lacking in the risk-oriented heteronormative regimes of global capitalism (Seymour 2013, 184). Catriona Sandilands offers a queer ecological reading of fire’s capacity for creative destruction, distinguishing between heterosexual reproductivity’s ideal of sameness and a queer generativity that might allow new forms of life to emerge. Sarah Ensor finds an alternative to the future-orientation of environmentalism and ecocriticism in queer practices of care that respond to a terminal present: “Queer lasting names a form of ongoingness—and a practice of togetherness—predicated upon vulnerability and impermanence” (Ensor 2017, 4). These models rethink ecology from a queer perspective conditioned by the standpoint of living without ‘a future,’ due to historical forms of oppression and exclusion, including vulnerability to transhomophobic violence and the specific experience of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
In and beyond studies of temporality, queer ecology contributes to rethinking the structure and ethics of care—both care for the environment and care work as a central aporia of capitalist heteropatriarchy—finding potential in non-normative relational paradigms and non-directed and transient practices of intimacy. Insofar as environmentalism presumes the heterosexual couple and heteropatriarchal social organization as its key frames of reference, it is predicated on the assumption of socialization into regimes of dimorphic gender and compulsory heterosexuality that enforce the reproduction of heteronormative institutions, preventing a substantive engagement with different models of just resource distribution and social responsibility. Rooted in ecofeminism’s attention to gendered and raced divisions of labor, scholarship on the political ecology of care has been an especially prominent facet of queer ecological thought in the German context. Christine Bauhardt’s concept of Ressourcenpolitik (resource politics) encompasses access to, use of, and engagement with resources, broadly defined to include not only traditionally-understood ‘natural’ resources but also the “ReProductive” labor—a term that de-naturalizes the gendered division of labor predicated on heterosexual reproduction—necessary for their socioeconomic use. Integrating attention to gender and sexuality into a critical reframing of resource management, resource politics exposes the structures of power and domination that follow from the heterosexual matrix and considers provisions for caregiving and resource-sharing beyond the nuclear family.
The critical perspectives offered by queer ecology have infused not only scholarly approaches in the environmental humanities but also, increasingly, art and culture more broadly. The Institute for Queer Ecology pursues interdisciplinary collaborations with artists around the world, including German Green Party co-founder Joseph Beuys, that engage relational strategies of climate adaptation. The figurative language and narrative style of Kim de l’Horizon’s award-winning Blutbuch (2022) draw on queer ecological discourse, as do recent films including Nicolette Krebitz’s Wild (2016) and Christian Petzold’s Roter Himmel (2023). Fighting back against the intertwined domination of nature and minoritized groups, queer ecology calls attention to the sexual politics of nature as integral to the broader environmental struggle against heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and climate collapse.
Reference Works
- Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. “Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of ‘Queer’ Animals.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. Indiana University Press.
- Bauhardt, Christine. 2011. “Gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse von der Materialität aus denken. Feministische Ökonomi, Queer Ecologies und das Konzept Ressourcenpolitik.” Gender 3: 89-103.
- Bauhardt, Christine. 2019. “Ökofeminismus und Queer Ecologies: feministische Analyse gesellschaftlicher Naturverhältnisse.” In Handbuch Interdisziplinäre Geschlechterforschung, edited by Beate Kortendiek, Birgit Riegraf, and Katja Sabisch. Springer.
- Ensor, Sarah. 2017. “Queer Fallout: Samuel R. Delany and the Ecology of Cruising.” Environmental Humanities 9 (1): 149-66.
- Ensor, Sarah. 2025. Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World. New York University Press.
- Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press.
- Hird, Myra. 2008. “Animal Trans.” Queering the Non/Human, edited by Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird. Ashgate.
- Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. 2010. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Indiana University Press.
- Morton, Timothy. 2010. “Guest Column: Queer Ecology.” PMLA 125 (2): 273-82.
- Roughgarden, Joan. 2004. Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. University of California Press.
- Seymour, Nicole. 2013. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. University of Illinois Press.