Queer Ecology Critique - GDI 2014

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QUEERNESS MUST BE OUR STARTING POINT FOR
ADDRESSING THE TOPIC OF THE OCEANS.
THIS IS OPPOSED TO THE STARTING POINTS OF
EXPLORATION AND DEVELOPMENT BOTH OF WHICH RELY
ON A NOTION OF PROGRESS THAT MAKES OF THE OCEANS
AN OBJECT OF STUDY NORMATIVELY POSITIONED TO
RENDER THE QUEER BODY AS A FOREIGN TOOL OF
IMPERIALIST VIOLENCE.
WARRANT -- for use in CX
THE DIASPORIC IMAGINARY WHICH USES THE OCEANS TO
MAP HISTORICAL CONSTELLATION OF "A PEOPLE" RUNS
THE RISK OF REINSCRIBING THE LOGIC OF IMPERIALIST
AMBITIONS WHERE THE QUEER BODY IS PATHOLOGIZED IN
THE EUROCENTRIC GENEALOGY -- IT IS A SICKNESS IN THE
WEST THAT IS SIMULTANEOUSLY VIEWED AS PART OF THE
CIVILIZING MISSION AGAINST THE BLACK AND BROWN
OTHER. OUR APPROACH RECOGNIZES THE DANGERS OF
IMPERIALIST HOMONATIONALISM ALONGSIDE THE
VIOLENCE OF ANTIQUEER INVISIBILITY
ENG '11 DAVID, David L. Eng is professor of English, comparative literature,
and Asian American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of
The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy
(2010) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (2001).
In addition, he is coeditor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of
Mourning (2003), with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (1998),
and with Judith Halberstam and Jos Esteban Muoz of a special issue of the
journal Social Text, "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" (2005).
"Queering the Black Atlantic, Queering the Brown Atlantic" David L. Eng (bio)
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies > Volume 17, Number 1, 2011
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_s
tudies/v017/17.1.eng.html
At a recent state-of-the-field queer studies conference hosted by the
University of Pennsylvania to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gayle
Rubin's groundbreaking essay "Thinking Sex," it became clear to me that the
critique of the normative, which we might describe as queer studies' most
important epistemic as well as political promise, is currently in the intellectual
custody of three dynamic fields: transgender studies, disability studies, and
area studies. For this review, I focus on area studiesmore specifically, on
the intersectional and interdisciplinary encounter among area studies,
diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies. M. Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies
of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the

Sacred and Gayatri Gopinath's Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and
South Asian Public Cultures are two important books that illustrate [End
Page 193] the critical stakes in bringing together queer theory with area,
diaspora, and postcolonial studies. Along with several other prominent
scholars, Alexander and Gopinath have helped forge out of this encounter the
burgeoning field of "queer diasporas." Emerging most forcefully in relation to
South Asian, East Asian, and Latin American studies, queer diasporas as a
method demands immediate and sustained attention to how diaspora has
traditionally relied on a "genealogical, implicitly heteronormative reproductive
logic" (Gopinath, 10) to shore up conventional structures of family and
kinship. In this manner, diaspora has reinforced dominant sexual and
gendered ideologies of the nation-state that constitute it as the site
of not only purity and origin but also exclusion, racial tension, and
political, economic, and social strife in the West, as elsewhere. Yet if
" 'diaspora' needs 'queerness' to rescue it from its genealogical implications,"
Gopinath observes, " 'queerness' also needs 'diaspora' in order to make it
more supple in relation to questions of race, colonialism, migration, and
globalization" (11). Indeed, considering queerness and diaspora together
offers, in the broadest sense, important new ways to approach some of the
critical aporias in all these fields. More specifically, it offers a rethinking of a
long history of Euro-American modernity, sexual politics, racial formation,
political economy, and migration in relation to the advent and rise of
colonialism, the subsequent dilemmas of postcoloniality and decolonization in
the Third World, and the current proliferation of U.S.-led global capitalism and
the militarization of everyday life. In Alexander's estimation, a certain brand
of post-structuralism has had the "effect of constructing queer theory in a
way that eviscerates histories of colonialism and racial formation, frameworks
that could themselves point the way to a radical activist scholarship in which
race, sexual politics, and globalization would be understood together rather
than being positioned as theoretical or political strangers" (70). A queer
diasporic methodology maps the theoretical and political itineraries
of such a critical proposition. In short, it illustrates what is at stake
when disparate bodies and sexualities travel in the global system
across the Black Atlantic to the Caribbean in Alexander's case and
across the Brown Atlantic to various locales of the South Asian
diaspora in Gopinath's study. Thus, for example, in terms of normative
morality, homosexuality is conventionally characterized as "immoral"
and "lewd"" primitive" and "uncivilized" in the West. Yet,
paradoxically, homosexuality (and tolerance of it) becomes a marker
of modernity and civilization when applied in non-Western contexts
and to non-Western cultures. Often considered a poor imitation of
more advanced Western models of social life, a recognizable gay
identity becomes, Gopinath suggests, "intelligible and indeed
desirable when and where it can be [End Page 194] incorporated into
[a] developmental narrative of modernity" (142). In a transvaluation of
the same logic, when taken up by conservative postcolonial and neocolonial
native elites and administrations, homosexuality is often denounced and
disavowed as a degenerate Western import, thus rescripting and reifying
heteronormativity as the prerequisite for nation and empire, for racial purity
and moral rectitude, for good citizenship and social belongingfor social life
itself. On both sides of this debate, sexuality appears as a fixed identity and
property belonging to a group of authorized citizen-subjects residing in the
global North, while continuing to evolve and develop elsewhere. Heightened
attention to how queer diasporas complicate such fixed notions of ownership
and belonging illustrates how sexuality continually exceeds its conventional
boundaries in a Euro-American tradition of liberal modernity and its rightsbased identity claims. Hence we witness the transformation
of sexuality, as it migrates in the global system, into

many other things: a discourse of development; a
dialectic of Enlightenment; a geopolitics of the civilized and the primitive; a
tale of racial, religious, and cultural barbarism; a story of democracy and
progress; and, most recently, an index of self-determination and human
rights. Pedagogies of Crossing and Impossible Desires carefully unfold the
manifest contradictions and intricacies of sexuality in the diaspora as it
travels across different locales, public and private zones, and political and
cultural fissuresindeed, helping construct and define through its various
movements these locales, zones, and fissures themselves. Paying particular
attention to queer diasporas as they cross not only geopolitical but also
institutional boundaries, often abruptly and impolitely, Alexander's and
Gopinath's projects disrupt and denaturalize given ways of knowing and
being "over here" as well as "over there." To borrow a concept from the
postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, they provincialize queer studies,
area studies, and diaspora studies, as well as a host of other interlocking and
interconnected fields, including postcolonial theory, transnational feminism,
ethnic studies, and Marxism, to name some immediate examples.
Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing consists of seven chapters, divided into
three sections. As she explains in the book's opening pages, Pedagogies'
central metaphor is drawn from the enforced Atlantic Crossing of the millions
of Africans that serviced from the fifteenth century through the twentieth the
consolidation of British, French, Spanish, and Dutch empires. At the time I
conceived of the book in 2000, the world had not yet witnessed the seismic
imperial shifts that characterize this moment. In one [End Page 195] sense,
then, Pedagogies functions as an archive of empire's twenty-first-century
counterpart, of oppositions to it, of the knowledges and ideologies it
summons, and of the ghosts that haunt it. (2) Alexander's three sections
cover a wide historical rangefrom the Spaniard Vasco Nuez de Balboa's
colonial conquest of the New World and his feeding of forty Indian "crossdressers" to his dogs in 1513; to the criminalization of lesbian and gay sex by
neocolonial administrations in Trinidad and Tobago in 1986 and 1991 and in
the Bahamas in 1991; to our contemporary neo-imperial moment of U.S.
empire, the Defense of Marriage Act, and the Patriot Act, in which "hegemonic
heterosexual masculinity wishes to assert a Pax Americana through imperial
violence undertaken within its own borders as well as in different parts of the
world" (183). Drawing attention to how imperialism and heterosexuality have
been historically welded together by both state and corporate interests,
Alexander also examines the remarkable contemporary shifts in global
capitalism that mark "a systemic, interdependent relationship between
heterosexual capital and gay capital" reminiscent of how "black capitalism
has been called on to do a similar kind of work for white capital" (66). In the
first section of Pedagogies, "Transnational Erotics: State, Capital, and the
Decolonization of Desire" (chapters 1-2), Alexander explores this convergence
in the phenomenon of gay tourism in the Bahamas and other sites in the
Caribbean, investigating how capitalism reformulates sexuality and sexual
desire to meet its ever-expanding needs. Gay tourism illustrates the flexibility
of global capitalism. Its particular significance, Alexander notes, "lies in its
ability to draw together powerful processes of sexual commodification and
sexual citizenship" (27). Alexander deftly examines the contemporary
production of the rights-based consumer citizen embodied in the figure of the
gay white tourist. She notes that while "citizenship based in political rights
can be forfeited, these rights do not disappear entirely. Instead, they get
reconfigured and restored under the rubric of gay consumer at this moment
in late capitalism" (71). As brown bodies from the global South move north to
take up employment as domestic labor, in agricultural sectors, and in service
industries, white bodies in the global North move south in search of leisure
and pleasure. In the process, they expand networks of capital, I might note,
from general tourism into areas of sex tourism and medical tourism as well as
related industries such as artificial reproductive technologies (e.g., "womb
renting"), transnational adoption, and organ trading. Alexander's study of
gay tourism thus provides one early and important [End Page 196]
genealogy for the current historical emergence of what I have elsewhere
described as queer liberalism. Queer liberalism marks a coming together of
economic and political spheres that now forms the basis for liberal
enfranchisement and inclusion of particular U.S. (as well as other Western)
gay and lesbian citizen-subjects petitioning for rights and recognition before
the law. In this regard, Alexander's study of tourism charts the shifting
legacies of colonialism and colonial travel literature and their transformations
under the shadows of global capitalism. It underscores how "racialization and
colonization are being consistently written into modernity's different
projects. . . . [and] occasioned by the uneven class relations and
differentiations produced by neo-liberal capital's dispersions" (194). At the
same time that Alexander considers how the shifting routes of global
capitalism work to fold once dissident U.S. gay and lesbian citizen-subjects
into its economic and political mandates, she also analyzes how these
movements invoke homophobic responses by postcolonial and neocolonial
administrations. That is, she illustrates how gay and lesbian tourists from the
global North are being conscripted by neoliberal framings of capital, welfare
reform, and sexual normalization (in the form of marriage, adoption,
inheritance, etc.) as exemplary consuming citizen-subjects, even as these
neoliberal mandates travel and are transformed in the diaspora into debates
about postcolonial independence and heteronormative self-determination. In
this manner, while gays and lesbians in the metropolitan North are being
unevenly incorporated into the cultural imaginary of "We the People,"
citizenship in places such as the Bahamas continues to be "premised in
heterosexual terms. . . . Lesbian and gay bodies are made to bear the brunt
of the charge of undermining national sovereignty, while the neocolonial
state masks its own role in forfeiting sovereignty as it recolonizes and
renarrativizes a citizenry for service in imperial tourism" (11). Alexander
presents us with a provocative history of the present in which sovereignty is
waged in the domain of sexuality and sexual regulation and asymmetrically

on the backs of racialized queer immigrant bodies. Hannah Arendt famously
noted that citizenship is nothing less than the "right to have rights." 1
However, Alexander concludes, critical attention to the problematic of
citizenship, immigration, and alienage in queer diasporas reveals how the
category of formal citizenship is simply too fragile, too fraught, and "far too
subject to state manipulation and co-optation for it to become the primary
basis on which radical political mobilization is carried on" (249). If section 1
of Alexander's book presents the various movements of crossings past and
crossings present that produce authorized and dissident bodies in the global
system, section 2 (chapters 2-5) of her study, "Maps of Empire, Old and [End
Page 197] New," focuses on the "pedagogies" part of the book's main title.
Here, Alexander focuses on how we might "teach for justice"how we might
effectively and ethically intervene in state power, a project "fundamentally at
odds with the project of militarization, which always already imagines an
enemy and acts accordingly to eliminate it" (92). Contesting the privileged
connections among capitalism, democracy, and freedom, Alexander explores
how we might contest the state and corporate production of citizenship
normalized within the prism of heterosexuality, a normalization whose
ideological consolidation, as Louis Althusser notes, is largely the responsibility
of the school in secular societies. 2 Alexander wonders, "What is democracy to
mean when its association with the perils of empire has rendered it so
thoroughly corrupt that it seems disingenuous and perilous even to deploy
the term. Freedom is a similar hegemonic term, especially when associated
with the imperial freedom to abrogate the self-determination of a people"
(17). Through heightened attention to these particular pedagogical queries,
Alexander shows "how free-market democracy might stand in the way of
justice [and] how legacies of transformational struggles in the academy may
not be reflected in the everyday life of an institution" (92). Alexander
presents numerous examples of such pedagogic initiatives, drawn from reallife examples of political intervention into the production of knowledge and
the contestation of state power: from her musing on the social contract and
John Locke ("We can't get to liberalism and rights without John Locke, but we
can watch him as he gazes at Indians in America." [171]) to the recounting of
her own battle for retention at the New School in New York City ("For almost a
year, I had experienced that odd kind of alienation that results from being
positioned as an onlooker in the usurpation of my own identity." [153]). In the
process, she seeks to interrupt inherited boundaries of geography, nation,
episteme, and identity that distort vision so that they can be replaced with
frameworks and modes of being that enable an understanding of the
dialectics of history, enough to assist in navigating the terms
of learning and the fundamentally pedagogic

imperative at its heart: the imperative of making the
world in which we live intelligible to ourselves and to
each otherin other words, teaching ourselves. (6)
WHITE HETEROMASCULINITY IS GROUNDS WAR AND

IMPERIAL DOMINATION. TRY OR DIE FOR THE ALTERNATIVE
Winnubst 06, philosophy PhD, Penn State University
Shannon, Queering Freedom 2006. p 5-6 GoogleBooks
This is the domination and violence of our historical present, late modernity:
to reduce our lives so completely to the order of instrumental reason that we
cannot conceive of any political or philosophical problem without reducing it
to that narrow conception of reason . This renders us captive to presuppositions which assume
that solutions to problems must follow the same temporal register as the posing of the problem itself i.e.,
they must appear immediately effective and useful if we are to recognize

them as solutions at all. But what if these are only truncated, shortsighted views? What if a vital
that
resistance to politics of domination comes through freeing ourselves from these closed economies of late
modernity and their clearly demarcated, controlled, mastered, and useful ends? What if a vital resistance to
politics of domination requires a temporal register other than that of immediate and clear efficacy? As Bataille
tells us sympathetically, It is not easy to realize ones own ends if one must, in trying to do so, carry out a
movement that surpasses them (1988 91, 1:21). His orientation toward general economies asks us to think
differently from the habituated patterns of our historical present. In his language ,
this historical present

is characterized by the fact that judgments concerning the general situation
proceed from a particular point of view (1988 91, 1:39). This particularity
can be outlined, described, pinned down, and its blind spots excavated: I
attempt to do so in this text. But to think generally from and about the
historical present may lead us into different questions and different
orientations: it has led me to query systems of domination through the registers of
temporality and spatiality, while framing them through the identity categories (race,
gender, sexuality, class, religion) that are their most explicit historical tools. For example, how does the
What
assumptions about the ontology of space allow for the biological conception
of race that groundsracism, or of sex that grounds sexism and heterosexism? Bataille
warns us that, if we do not learn to think in this counter-cultural register of
general economy, we will always be subordinated to the violent and even
catastrophic expressions of the excess, abundant energy of the planet, such
as war and imperialist domination. We do have a choice in this matter. But
that choice is not one which will derive from calculating our interest,
analyzing the specific problem, or charting the solution: it will not derive from
the domains of instrumental reason and its persistent mandate of utility. It may,
temporality of a persistent future orientation ground systems of racism, sexism, and heterosexism?
rather, involve recuperating senses of freedom lost to us in late modernity, where nation-states promise freedom
To think
generally may lead toward sensing freedom as a dangerous breaking
loose...a will to assume those risks without which there is no freedom (1988 91, 1:38). It is toward
recuperating these more general senses of freedom , which Bataille signifies as
sovereign and I signify as queer in this historical period of late modernity
and phallicized whiteness , that this text moves.
as the facile liberation from subservience and mastery as the domination of nature and culture.
FUTURIST GROUNDING MANDATES EXTERMINATION OF

THE QUEER BODY
Edelman 4
Lee Edelman, Professor of English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive, 2004, page 11-13
Charged, after all, with the task of assuring that we being dead yet
live, the Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural transcendence of the
limits of nature itself), excludes the very pathos from which the narrator of The Children of Men
recoils when comes upon the nonreproductive
pleasures of the mind and

senses. For the pathetic quality he projectively locates in nongenerative
sexual enjoyment enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as
empty, substitutive, pathological exposes the fetishistic figurations
of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms of identical to those for which
enjoyment without hope of posterity so peremptorily dismissed legible, that is, as nothing more than
pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins. How better to characterize the narrative
project of Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born yesterday surely expects form the start,
with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr.,
reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a sentence delicately poised between
description and performance of the novels pro-creative ideology: If there is a baby, there is a future,
If, however, there is no baby and in consequence, no

future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic
enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and
therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization,
collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself. Given that the author of
The Children of Men, like the parents of mankinds children,
succumbs so completely to the narcissism all pervasive, selfcongratulatory, and strategically misrecognized that animates
pronatalism, why should we be the least bit surprised when her
narrator, facing the futureless future, laments, with what we must call as straight face, that
sex totally divorced from procreation has to become almost
meaninglessly acrobatic? Which is, of course, to say no more than that
sexual practice will continue to allegorize the vicissitudes of
meaning so long as the specifically heterosexual alibi of
reproductive necessity obscures the drive beyond meaning driving
the machinery of sexual meaningfulness: so long, that is, as the biological fact of
heterosexual procreation bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production on heterogenital relations. For
the Child, whose mere possibility is enough to spirit away the naked
truth of heterosexual sex impregnating heterosexuality, as it were,
with the future of signification by conferring upon it the cultural
burden of signifying futurity figures our identification with an
always about-to-be-realized identity. It thus denies the constant threat to the social
there is redemption.
order of meaning inherent to the structure of Symbolic desire that commits us to pursuing fulfillment by
way of a meaning unable, as meaning, either to fulfill us or, in turn, to be fulfilled because unable to close
the gap in identity, the division incised by the signifier, that meaning, despite itself, means.
OUR DISCUSSION OF NATURE HAS PEDAGOGICAL VALUE IN

THE CONTEST ROUND COMPETITION
Reality is constructed through a series of STORIES that
make society civil our performance access the LOST
IMPORTANCE of narratives that encourage us to live with
reality in the face of change.
Kingsnorth and Hine 9
Paul Kingsworth is an English writer who lives in Cumbria, England. He is a former deputyeditor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Dougald Hine is a British
author, editor and social entrepreneur. He co-founded School of Everything and is Director at
large of the Dark Mountain Project. He is a well-known radical in Britain, UNCIVILISATION: THE
DARK MOUNTAIN MANIFESTO, http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/ > ~cVs
If we are indeed teetering on the edge of a massive change in how

we live, in how human society itself is constructed, and in how we relate to the rest
of the world, then we were led to this point by the stories we have
told ourselves above all, by the story of civilisation. This story has
many variants, religious and secular, scientific, economic and mystic.
But all tell of humanitys original transcendence of its animal
beginnings, our growing mastery over a nature to which we no
longer belong, and the glorious future of plenty and prosperity
which will follow when this mastery is complete. It is the story of
human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys,
unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures. What
makes this story so dangerous is that, for the most part, we have forgotten
that it is a story. It has been told so many times by those who see
themselves as rationalists, even scientists; heirs to the
Enlightenments legacy a legacy which includes the denial of the
role of stories in making the world. Humans have always lived by
stories, and those with skill in telling them have been treated with
respect and, often, a certain wariness. Beyond the limits of reason,
reality remains mysterious, as incapable of being approached directly as a hunters quarry.
With stories, with art, with symbols and layers of meaning, we stalk
those elusive aspects of reality that go undreamed of in our
philosophy. The storyteller weaves the mysterious into the fabric of
life, lacing it with the comic, the tragic, the obscene, making safe paths through
dangerous territory. Yet as the myth of civilisation deepened its grip
on our thinking, borrowing the guise of science and reason, we
began to deny the role of stories, to dismiss their power as
something primitive, childish, outgrown. The old tales by which generations had
made sense of lifes subtleties and strangenesses were bowdlerised and packed off to the nursery.
Religion, that bag of myths and mysteries, birthplace of the theatre,

was straightened out into a framework of universal laws and moral
account-keeping. The dream visions of the Middle Ages became the
nonsense stories of Victorian childhood. In the age of the novel, stories were
no longer the way to approach the deep truths of the world, so much
as a way to pass time on a train journey. It is hard, today, to imagine
that the word of a poet was once feared by a king. Yet for all this,
our world is still shaped by stories. Through television, film, novels and video games,
we may be more thoroughly bombarded with narrative material than
any people that ever lived. What is peculiar, however, is the
carelessness with which these stories are channelled at us as
entertainment, a distraction from daily life, something to hold our
attention to the other side of the ad break. There is little sense that these things
make up the equipment by which we navigate reality. On the other hand, there are the
serious stories told by economists, politicians, geneticists and
corporate leaders. These are not presented as stories at all, but as
direct accounts of how the world is. Choose between competing
versions, then fight with those who chose diferently. The ensuing
conflicts play out on early morning radio, in afternoon debates and
late night television pundit wars. And yet, for all the noise, what is
striking is how much the opposing sides agree on: all their stories
are only variants of the larger story of human centrality, of our everexpanding control over nature, our right to perpetual economic
growth, our ability to transcend all limits. So we find ourselves, our
ways of telling unbalanced, trapped inside a runaway narrative,
headed for the worst kind of encounter with reality. In such a moment,
writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role
to play. Creativity remains the most uncontrollable of human forces:
without it, the project of civilisation is inconceivable , yet no part of life
remains so untamed and undomesticated. Words and images can change minds,
hearts, even the course of history. Their makers shape the stories people carry through
their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings.
It is time to pick up the threads and make the stories new, as they
must always be made new, starting from where we are.
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO QUEER THE 1AC

Society teaches us that the queer body is UNNATURAL,
precisely because civilization has been CONTRASTED with
the purity of the natural world. The Nature/Human split is
not a legitimate political tool- it is a FALSE DUALISM.
Despite the capacity of humans to carry out
UNIMAGINABLE actions, the queer body somehow
becomes LESS THAN HUMAN. Our culture sets Nature as a
BEHAVIORAL EXPECTATION, while simultaneously treating
Nature with our lowest standard of respect. This
CONFUSION, this PARADOX is the QUEER.
Johnson 11
Alex Johnson, contributing author to the Orion magazine publication, a magazine devoted to
ecology and reuniting people with the harmony of the Earth. Its aim is to make humans more
accountable for the world that they live in.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/5863/m, Issued in the May-June Issue of 2001
I ONCE THOUGHT I KNEW what nature writing was: the pretty, sublime stuff minus the parking lot. The
mountain majesty and the soaring eagle and the ancient forest without the human footprint, the humans
themselves, the mess. Slowly, fortunately, that definition has fallen flat. Where is the line between what is
Nature and what is Human? Do I spend equal times in the parking lot and the forest? Can I really say the
parking lot is separate from the forest? What if I end up staying in the parking lot the whole time? What if it
The problem is, the Nature/Human

split is not a split. It is a dualism. It is false. I propose messing it up.
I propose queering Nature. As it would happen, Im queer. What I mean is this: A) I am a
has been a long drive and I really have to pee?
man attracted to men. B) Popular culture has told me that men who are attracted to men are unnatural,
and so C) if my culture is right, then I am unnatural. But D) I dont feel unnatural at all. In fact, the love I
share with another man is one of the most comfortable, honest, real feelings I have ever felt. And so E) I
cant help but believe that Nature, and the corresponding definition of natural, betray reality. From my
end of the rainbow, this thing we call Nature is in need of a good queering. STEP #1: LET GO OF
ECOLOGICAL MANDATES. Not so long ago, I read David Quammens essay The Miracle of the Geese. In
the essay, Quammen says this: wild geese, not angels, are the images of humanitys own highest self. By
humanity, I can only assume that he means all humans, collectively, over all of time. They show us the
apogee of our own potential, Quammen says. They live by the same principles that we, too often, only
espouse. They embody liberty, grace, and devotion, combining those three contradictory virtues with a
seamless elegance that leaves us shamed and inspired. Quammen seems to be on to something. Who
could possibly be against liberty, grace, or devotion? But then he starts talking about sex. How geese are
monogamous. How a male goose will in fact do better evolutionarily if he is loyal to his mate. They need
one another there, male and female, each its chosen mate, at all times, he says. The evolutionary
struggle, it turns out, is somewhat more complicated than a singles bar. Im a little concerned about the
evolutionary struggle thing, but Im still tracking. Life sure is complicated. And then he says this: I was
glad to find an ecological mandate for permanent partnership among animals so estimable as Branta
canadensis. Boom. There it is. Geese are wild. Geese are pure. They arent all mixed up with the problems
of civilization and humanity. What we really need is to behave more like geese. If you are a male, then you
must find a female. You must partner with that female, provide for that female, fertilize that female, and
love that female for the rest of your life. If you are a female, well, youll know what to do. When I first read
about Quammens geese, Id been out as bisexual for a year. It was around the second Bush election, and I
was writing very serious letters to my conservative grandparents about my sexuality and politics. Now I
know why his essay, so considerate, so passionate, so genteel, hit me in the gut .
I was not
natural. STEP #2: STOP GENERALIZING. My instinct is to give Quammen the benefit of the doubt; it was
the late 80s after all. Regardless of his intentions though, Quammens notion that Canada geese offer
humans an ecological mandate not only reinforces a Nature-as-purity mythos (against which humans act),
but at an even more basic level, his assumptions are simply inaccurate: plenty of geese arent straight. In
1999, Bruce Bagemihl published Biological Exuberance, an impressive compendium of thousands of
observed nonheteronormative sexual behaviors and gender nonconformity among animals. Besides
giraffes and warthogs and hummingbirds, theres a section on geese. Researchers have observed that up
to 12 percent of pairs were homosexual in populations of Branta canadensis. And its not because of a lack
of potential mates of the opposite gender. In one case, says Bagemihl, a male harassed a female who
was part of a long-lasting lesbian pair and separated her from her companion, mating with her. However,
the next year, she returned to her female partner and their pairbond resumed. Red squirrels are
seasonally bisexual, mounting same-sex partners and other-sex partners with equal fervor. Male boto
dolphins penetrate each others genital slits as well as blow holes. Primates exhibit all sorts of queer
Observing queer behavior in

nonhumans is as easy as a trip to the nearest primate house, or a
careful observation of the street cats, or the deer nibbling on your
shrubs, or the mites on your skin. The world itself, it turns out, is so
queer. Quammen assumed that geese are straight because it was easy to do. It was easy to assume I
behavior between males and males and females and females.
was straight, too; I did so for the first eighteen years of my life. But generalizing about the habits of both
humans and the more-than-human living world not only denies that certain behavior already exists, it
limits the potential for that behavior to become more common, and more commonly accepted. STEP #3:
HONK. I dont mean to insist that there is an ecological mandate for being gay. My interest in queering
ecology lies in enabling humans to imagine an infinite number of possible Natures. The living world
exhibits monogamy. But it also exhibits orgies, gender transformation, and cloning. What, then, is natural?
All of it. None of it. Instead of using the more-than-human world as justification for or against certain
behavior and characteristics, lets use the more-than-human world as a humbling indication of the capacity
and diversity of all life on Earth. So many of us humans are queer. Across all social, political, and physical
Beyond the
scope of sexuality, humans are capable of any number of imaginable
and unimaginable behaviors. That I do not eat bull testicles does not
mean that that behavior is any less human than my eating of baby
back ribs. Why then, if I cohabitate with another man, sharing the
same bed, yes even having sex in that bed with that man, am I
somehow less human? A goose is a goose is a goose. STEP #4:
boundaries, 2 to 10 percent of people take part in nonheteronormative behavior.
ACKNOWLEDGE THE IRONY. In a review of Peter Matthiessens book The Birds of Heaven: Travels with
Cranes, Richard White indicts the relentless and blinkered earnestness of nature writing. White claims
that because of its reluctance to deal with paradox, irony, and history, much nature writing reinforces the
worst tendencies of environmentalism. White points out that Matthiessens unflinchingly sincere narrative
baldly contradicts the circumstances: The birds are immortal, timeless, and they transport us back into
the deep evolutionary past, writes White. But then Matthiessen gives us the details. He is sitting in a loud
and clattering helicopter during this particular trip to the Eocene. If you depict cranes as pure and
ancient, with no place in this modern world, then you must ignore all those species that have done quite
Writing about nature means accepting that it will

prove you wrong. And right. And render you generally confused.
Nature is mysterious, and our part in the pageant is shrouded in
mystery as well. This means contradiction and paradox and irony. It
means that there will always be an exception. Nature has always
humiliated the self-congratulatory scientist. Lets stop
congratulating ourselves. Instead, lets give a round of applause to
the delicious complexity. Let us call this complexity the queer, and
let us use it as a verb. Let us queer our ecology. Cranes can be ancient, but they
well in the rice paddies.
can also be modern. Might their posterity extend past ours? Weve inherited a culture that takes its
dualisms seriously. Nature, on the one hand, is the ideal, the pure, the holy. On the other hand, it is evil,
dangerous, and dirty. The problem? Theres no reconciliation. We accept both notions as separate but
Take
sexuality, for instance: We have come to believe, over our Western
cultural history, that heterosexual monogamy is the norm, the
equal truths and then organize our world around them. Status quo hurrah! Irony be damned.
natural. People who call gays unnatural presume that Nature is pure,
perfect, and predictable. Nature intended for a man and a woman to
love each other, they say. Gays act against Nature. And yet: we rip
open the Earth. We dominate the landscape, compromising the
integrity of the living world. We act as though civilization were
something better, higher, more valuable than the natural world . Our
culture sets Nature as the highest bar for decorum, while
simultaneously giving Nature our lowest standard of respect. Nature
is at our disposal, not only for our physical consumption, but also for
our social construction. We call geese beautiful and elegant and faithful until they are shitting
all over the lawn and terrorizing young children. Then we poison their eggs. Or shoot them. What Im
getting at is this: those who traditionally hold more power in society
be they men over women, whites over any other race, wealthy over
poor, straight over queerhave made their own qualities standard,
natural, constructing a vision of the world wherein such qualities
are the norm. And in so doing, theyve made everyone elses
qualities perverse, against Nature, against God. Even Naturedefined impossibly as the
nonhumanbecomes unnatural when it does not fit the desired norm: the gay geese must be affected by
hormone pollution! A man who has sex with a man must identify himself by his perversion, by his
difference. If straight is the identity of I am, then gay becomes I am not. Women are not men. Native
people are not white. Nature is not human. Instead of talking about nonconformity, I want to talk about
possibility and unnameably complex reality. What queer can offer is the identity of I am also. I am also
human. I am also natural. I am also alive and dynamic and full of contradiction, paradox, irony. Queer
knocks down the house of cards and throws them into the warm wind. STEP #5: DONT FEAR THE QUEER. If
these were still in vogue, I would tell you my thesis is queer ecology. But as Zapatista leader
Subcommandante Marcos told Pierluigi Sullo from the forest of southeast Mexico (and probably from a
table in a house in a village in that forest), I sincerely believe that you are not searching for a solution, but
Well, first, one that is

happening at all. Ive met many kind people (arent we all
sometimes?) who are so afraid of being politically incorrect that they
dont speak at allwell, at least not about race or gender or sex
(this on top of the three taboos of religion, politics, and money).
How do I know how I should refer to Indians? Or blacks? Or gays? Or
bums, for that matter? Its just all so complicated now. Queer, then,
remains a gesture of hands under the table. A wink. In the recent past,
rather for a discussion. Hes right. So what discussion am I looking for?
conversationalists have at least had the weather to fall back on. But the record heat of late with its strange
winds of change have whipped away that golden ticket of banality too. So people stop talking, at least
about difference, or flux, or complication, altogether. And the floor is left to those who are the loudest and
quickest, and who never had any intention of complicating their conversation with anyone or anything that
The
problem with unnameably complex reality is that its really hard to
pin down and even harder to write about. Yet anyone who gives a
damn about the ecological health of life on Earth knows that theres
no time for dillydallying. In the late nineteenth century, a Danish scientist named Eugen
doesnt conform to their tidy but limited worldview. STEP #6: ENJOY THE PERFORMANCE.
Warming first used the term ecology to describe the study of interrelationships between living things.
Henry Chandler Cowles, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, brought ecology across the
Atlantic with the 1899 publication of his treatise on the succession of the plant life of the Indiana Dunes.
Instead of static forests and static lakes and static prairies, Warming and Cowles recognized that these
features of the physical world were in flux. As Cowles wrote in his introduction, Ecology, therefore, is a
Queer ecology, then, is the study of dynamics across all

phenomena, all behavior, all possibility. It is the relation between
past, present, and future. Yes, we need to act. But we also must
recognize that any action is also a performance, and possibly in
drag. Any writer who chooses the more-than-human world as subject
must acknowledge both the complexity and paradox contained
study in dynamics.
within the subject of nature, as well as the contradictions wrapped

up within the writers very self. Such a writer will write about the parking lot and the
invasive knapweed and the unseasonably warm weather and how he or she is undeniably mixed up in the
complications. The poet James Broughton calls it the mystery of the total self. Henry Chandler Cowles
called it ecology. It is the relation within the human and the natural and the god and the geese and the
A queer ecology is a liberatory ecology. It is

the acknowledgment of the numberless relations between all things
alive, once alive, and alive once again. No man can categorize those
relations without lying. Categories ofer us a way of organizing our
world. They are tools. They are power. Acknowledge the power.
Acknowledge the lie. STEP #7: IM DONE WITH STEPS.
past, present, future, body-self-other.
1NC Anti-Blackness
THE BLACK ATLANTIC HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE QUEER
ATLANTIC
In the bellies of slave ships, queer relationships were
POWERFULLY and SILENTLY forged out of common
experience. Ties developed within segregated holds
allowed slaves to resist the commodification of their
bodies by FEELING AND FEELING for their shipmates. The
ocean OBSCURES all origins, connecting race, nationality,
sexuality, and gender. Thinking through crosscurrents
navigates the queer black Atlantic, bringing together
ENSLAVED and AFRICAN and BRUTALITY and DESIRE.
Prescribing a notion of social death upon the black body
negates the importance of EXPERIENCE and FLUDITY in
constructing identity.
Tinsley 8 (Dept of English, African American and African Studies @
University of Minnesota 2k8

Omiseeke Natasha-; BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings
of the Middle Passage; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 14,
Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.23.tinsley.pdf) DB
water, ocean water is the first thing in the unstable confluence of race,
nationality, sexuality, and gender I want to imagine here. This wateriness is
metaphor, and history too. The brown-skinned, fluid-bodied experiences
now called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime
contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean.
You see, the black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic. What Paul Gilroy
never told us is how queer relationships were forged on merchant and pirate
ships, where Europeans and Africans slept with fellow and I mean same-sex sailors. And, more
powerfully and silently, how queer relationships emerged in the holds of slave
ships that crossed between West Africa and the Caribbean archipelago. I began to learn this black
And
Atlantic when I was studying relationships between women in Suriname and delved into the etymology of
the word mati. This is the word Creole women use for their female lovers:
figuratively mi mati is my girl, but literally it means mate, as in shipmate

she who survived the Middle Passage with me. Sedimented layers of
experience lodge in this small word. During the Middle Passage, as colonial
chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us, captive African women created
erotic bonds with other women in the sex-segregated holds, and captive
African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted the
commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for
their co-occupants on these ships. I evoke this history now not to claim the slave ship as the
origin of the black queer Atlantic. The ocean obscures all origins, and neither ship nor
Atlantic can be a place of origin. Not of blackness, though perhaps Africans
first became negros and negers during involuntary sea transport; not of
queerness, though perhaps some Africans were first intimate with same-sex
shipmates then. Instead, in relationship to blackness, queerness, and black

queerness, the Atlantic is the site of what the anthropologist Kale Fajardo calls
crosscurrents. Oceans and seas are important sites for differently situated
people. Indigenous Peoples, fisherpeople, seafarers, sailors, tourists,
workers, and athletes. Oceans and seas are sites of inequality and exploitation
resource extraction, pollution, militarization, atomic testing, and
genocide. At the same time, oceans and seas are sites of beauty and pleasure
solitude, sensuality, desire, and resistance. Oceanic and maritime realms
are also spaces of transnational and diasporic communities, heterogeneous
trajectories of globalizations, and other racial, gender, class, and sexual
formations. Conceptualizing the complex possibilities and power dynamics
of the maritime, Fajardo posits the necessity of thinking through transoceanic
crosscurrents. These are theoretical and ethnographic borderlands at sea,
where elements or currents of historical, conceptual, and embodied
maritime experience come together to transform racialized, gendered,
classed, and sexualized selves. The queer black Atlantic I discuss here navigates
these crosscurrents as it brings together enslaved and African, brutality and
desire, genocide and resistance. Here, fluidity is not an easy metaphor for
queer and racially hybrid identities but for concrete, painful, and liberatory
experience. It is the kind of queer of color space that Roderick Ferguson calls for in
Aberrations in Black, one that reflects the materiality of black queer experience
while refusing its transparency.2
The affirmative falsely evokes the Middle Passage and

slave experience as the AUTHENTIC ORIGINAL site of
African diaspora identities and discourses. The ocean
WHISPERS the stories of the diasporic populations, telling
of their pain and feelings as they were transformed into
enslaved people. The Subaltern can speak from her
SUBMARINE space, but we must listen CLOSELY for her
voice.
Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
If the black queer Atlantic brings together such long-lowing history, why is black queer studies situated
as a dazzlingly new discovery in academia a hybrid, mermaidlike imagination that has yet to find its
land legs? In the last five years, black queer and queer of color critiques have navigated innovative
directions in African diaspora studies as scholars like Ferguson and E. Patrick Johnson push the discipline to
map intersections between racialized and sexualized bodies. Unfortunately, Eurocentric queer
theorists and heterocentric race theorists have engaged their discourses of

resistant black queerness as a new fashion a glitzy, postmodern invention
borrowed and adapted from Euro-American queer theory. In contrast, as
interventions like the New-York Historical Societys exhibit Slavery in New York demonstrate, the Middle
Passage and slave experience continue to be evoked as authentic originary
sites of African diaspora identities and discourses.3 This stark split between
the newest and oldest sites of blackness relects larger political trends
that polarize queer versus diasporic and immigrant issues by moralizing and
domesticating sexuality as an undermining of tradition, on the one hand,
while racializing and publicizing global southern diasporas as threats to the
integrity of a nation of (fictively) European immigrants, on the other. My discussion
here proposes to intervene in this polarization by bridging imaginations of the choice of black queerness
and the forced migration of the Middle Passage. What would it mean for both queer and
African diaspora studies to take seriously the possibility that, as forcefully

as the Atlantic and Caribbean flow together, so too do the turbulent
fluidities of blackness and queerness? What new geography or as Fajardo
proposes, oceanography of sexual, gendered, transnational, and racial
identities might emerge through reading for black queer history and theory
in the traumatic dislocation of the Middle Passage?4 In what follows, I explore such
queer black Atlantic oceanographies by comparing two narrative spaces. One is a site where
an imagination of this Atlantic struggles to emerge: in academic theorizing, specifically in water
metaphors of African diaspora and queer theory. The second is a site where such
imaginations emerge through struggle: in Caribbean creative writing, specifically in Ana- Maurine
Laras tale of queer migration in Erzulies Skirt (2006) and Dionne Brands relections on the Middle Passage
in A Map to the Door of No Return (2001). I turn to these literary texts as a queer,
unconventional, and imaginative archive of the black Atlantic.5 And the literary
texts turn to ocean waters themselves as an archive, an ever-present, everreformulating record of the unimaginable. Lara and Brand plumb the archival ocean
materially, as space that churns with physical remnants, dis(re)membered
bodies of the Middle Passage, and they plumb it metaphorically, as opaque space to
convey the drowned, disremembered, ebbing and lowing histories of
violence and healing in the African diaspora. Water overflows with
memory, writes M. Jacqui Alexander, delving into the Middle Passage in Pedagogies of Crossing.
Emotional memory. Bodily memory. Sacred memory.6 Developing a black feminist
epistemology to uncover submerged histories particularly those stories of
Africans forced ocean crossings that traditional historiography cannot
validate Alexander eloquently argues that searchers must explore outside narrow
conceptions of the factual to get there. Such explorations would involve
muddying divisions between documented and intuited, material and
metaphoric, past and present so that who is remembered and how is
continually being transformed through a web of interpretive systems . . .
collapsing, ultimately, the demarcation of the prescriptive past, present, and
future of linear time.7 While Alexander searches out such crossings in Afro-Atlantic ceremony,
Lara and Brand explore similarly fluid embodied-imaginary, historical-contemporary spaces through the
literal and figurative passages of their historical fictions. The subaltern can speak in
submarine space, but it is hard to hear her or his underwater voice,

whispering (as Brand writes) a thousand secrets that at once wash closer and
remain opaque, resisting closure.
THUS WE ADVOCATE A QUEERING OF THE MIDDLE

PASSAGE
The Atlantic and the Middle passage represent concrete
maritime space rather than conceptual principles for
remapping blackness- neither should be relegated to the
position of a PHANTOM METAPHOR.
Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
In the past fifteen years postcolonial studies effected sea changes in

scholarly images of the global south, smashing and wearing away
essentialist conceptions of race and nationality with the insistent pounding
force of ocean waters. Rigorously theorizing identities that have always
already been in lux and rethinking black insularity from England and Manhattan to
Martinique and Cuba, imaginative captains of Atlantic and Caribbean studies have
called prominently on oceanic metaphors. Their conceptual geographies
figure oceans and seas as a presence that is history, a history that is
present. In the watershed The Black Atlantic, Gilroy evokes the Atlantic as the
trope through which he imagines the emergence of black modernities. A
past of Atlantic crossings underpins his engagement with contemporary multiracial
Britain, where the black in the Union Jack is no novelty introduced by recent immigrants but a
continuation of centuries of transoceanic interchanges. Calling on the ship
as the first image of this black Atlantic, Gilroy begins by stipulating that
ships and oceans are not merely abstract figures but cultural and political
units that refer us back to the middle passage, to the half- remembered
micro politics of the slave trade.8 He underscores that seminal African
diaspora figures like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Robert Wedder- burn, and Crispus
Attucks worked with and as sailors (why omit Harriet Jacobs, Mary Seacole, and other sailing
women?), and notes that the physical mobility enabled by the ocean was
fundamental to their intellectual motility. Yet while many of these masculine
sailor-intellectuals resurface in Gilroys later discussions, the history of their
sea voyages does not. Both ships and the Atlantic itself as concrete
maritime space rather than conceptual principle for remapping blackness
drop out of his text immediately after this paragraph. Neither the Middle Passage
nor the Atlantic appear in the index, remaining phantom metaphors rather
than concrete historical presences. Gilroys ghost ships and dark waters
traverse five memorable pages of his introduction, then slip into nowhereness.
2NC Backlines
Aesthetics Anti-Blackness
Ships were the living means by which the points within
that Atlantic world were joined. They were mobile
elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between
the fixed places that they connected. . . . For all these
reasons, the ship is the first of the novel chronotypes pre
supposed by my attempts to rethink modernity versus the
history of the black Atlantic. Paul Gilroy, The Black
Atlantic
Water is the first thing in my imagination. Over the
reaches of the eyes at Guaya when I was a little girl, I
knew that there was still more water. All beginning in
water, all ending in water. Turquoise, aquamarine, deep
green, deep blue, ink blue, navy, blue-black cerulean
water. . . . Water is the first thing in my memory. The sea
sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the
same time. In the daytime it was indistinguishable to me
from air. . . . The same substance that carried voices or
smells, music or emotion. Dionne Brand, A Map to the
Door of No Return
I, and my lesbian sisters and gay brothers . . . are not a
new fashion. . . . We return to the sea and the shores and
once upon a time, which transposes into this time, which
it always was. . . . the past simultaneously forever
embedded in the present, in the pain and inevitable
horrors confronted by conscientious unblinking memory,
in the tragedies and occasional triumphs of history always
raveled by so much needless sufering, by the unbearable
human misery that we must not, for our collective sakes
and the continued growth of this body we call
humanity, ever be denied. Thomas Glave, Words to
Our Now: Imagination and Dissent
And larger and larger and ever larger than me, O sea:
water: waves and foam. . . . How the sea would take I and
wrap I deep in it. How it would drown I, mash I up, wash I
into bits. . . . And so I does say now that I know the sea
this same sea like I does know the back of me hand, says
I: these currents, these waves, these foams. . . . Let this
sea not take I, but let it talk to I. Let it sing. The sea, the
sea. Yes, water. Waves. Wetness, poundsurf, that I does
love. Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now
Alt Solvency Anti-Blackness

The alternative is to embrace La Mar, to embrace the
queer slave relationships formed on the oceans and to
reunite the stories of black sufering back to their source:
THE OCEAN

Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
La Mar is the black Atlantic in iridescent lamb (conch), embodied and queer.
This figure that eclipses moon and stars and brings women sweet water and love is the novels most
eroticized character a material body who whispers in Micaelas ear,
whose waters she enters, whose depths she longs to explore, whose
sexuality is neither overexposed nor hidden. I see her as an image of the queer
black Atlantic not primarily because she arouses the sensuality of another feminine character,
though, nor even because her appearance to Micaela performs a femme desire that needs no masculinist
gaze ( la Bentez-Rojo) to validate its apparition. Instead La Mars queerness churns silverly
in her overlow, in the sea- like capacity to desire beyond the brutality of
history, nationality, enslavement, and immigration that she models for
drowned shipmates and endangered yola- mates. Neither disembodied
metaphor nor oozing wound, her fluid desire becomes a resistant, creative
praxis that, as Brand describes diasporic art, experiments with being celebratory,
even with the horrible, lowing together unexpected erotic linkages even,
especially, in spaces of global violence and inequity. 27 No matter what devastation
she traverses La Mar keeps desiring, and this is the queer feeling that metaphorically and
materially connects her to African diaspora immigrants past and present. La Mar as she appears
here is not only a mirror for black Atlantic queerness; she is a black Atlantic
that mirrors queerly. Her song creates figures of comparison where terms
are not equated but rather diffracted and recomposed, reflected in a broken
mirror whose fractures are part of their meaning-creation. Let me point to two
examples of mis-mirrored terms in this passage: languages (Spanish/English) and couples

(yolabound/shipwrecked). In the second paragraph a centered, italicized Spanish-language poem whose
distinct visual arrangement recalls the vvs (figures drawn on the ground in Voudoun ceremonies) that
La Mar sings of interrupts standard English prose; although the next paragraph offers an indirect,
still bilingual translation (Amor, I long for your kisses), this translation remains notably inexact.
Amplifying this chain of repetition with difference, the words of the poem are then revealed to be really
spoken in the drowned slaves unrepresentable languages that escaped the
trappings of sound: instead of speaking two languages that mirror each other, La Mars song
contains three intertwined yet unequatable lenguas, proliferating and connecting across difference with
each translation. Similarly, the star-eyed lovers at the bottom of the sea those
thrown overboard during the Middle Passage without their presence being
definitively liquidated do twin sea-crossing lovers Miriam and Micaela, but also do not. Miriam
and Micaela remain on the waters surface while the iron- clad lovers remain submerged and the love of
the former helps them stay afloat while the amor of the latter comforts them in their sinking. The
present repeats the past with a difference, and the spectacular figure of La
Mar that joins them appears as the surplus the overflow, the temporal
and cultural gap that cannot be dissolved by their connection. La Mar
whispers this in our ears, too: in queer diasporic imagining, the gap the
material difference always matters and must be part of any figuration
that makes meaningful connection possible. The maritime metaphors of
Gilroy and Bentez-Rojo move toward a kind of closure, the Atlantic transmuting
into a horizon of hybridity and the cunnic Caribbean healing orgasmically in order to become the
vehicles these authors desire for diasporic and regional identities. Yet such closure is made
possible only by washing over important materialities and multiplicities in
visions of diaspora and region. La Mars unclosable, untranslatable language
of beauty and pain churns differently, crossing instead in turbulent,
excessive currents of diffracting meanings. As Micaela floats literally suspended in water
between Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, La Mars queer mirroring provides a
medium for conceiving what it means for diasporic Africans to emerge from
her waters whole and broken: brutalized and feeling, connected to the
past and separate from it, divided from other diasporic migrants and linked
to them. To think the black queer Atlantic, not only must its metaphors be
materially informed; they must be internally discontinuous, allowing for
differences and inequalities between situated subjects that are always
already part of both diaspora and queerness. They must creatively figure
what Rinaldo Walcott imagines as a rethinking of community that might allow for
different ways of coher- ing into some form of recognizable political
entity . . . [where] we must confront singularities without the willed effort
to make them cohere into oneness; we must struggle to make a community
of singularities.28 The black Atlantic is not just any ocean, and what is
queer about its fluid amor is that it is always churning, always different
even from itself.
Queer theory gains its roots from the sufering of

enslaved people on their voyages across the ocean. Any
discussion of queer theory is a discussion of race. The
queer movement is even based of of the geography of
the black Caribbean. They are No single islands, but an
archipelago of island chains, all linked together and
united, just as the diferent bodies that encompass the
queer community are all intertwined but separate.

Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
queer theory has harnessed the repetitive,
unpredictable energy of currents, waves, and foam to smash and wash into
bits many Is from the gendered self to the sexed body, from
heterocentric feminist speech to homonormative gay discourse. In this field
where groundlessness is celebrated, writers also explicitly or implicitly rely
on metaphors of fluidity, which provide an undercurrent for expanding
formulations of gender and sexual mobility. Judith Butlers praise of the resistant power
And in the last fifteen years
of drags fluid genders and sexualities in the pivotal Gender Trouble is echoed by many a queer theoretical
text: Perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests
an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation

deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the right to claim naturalized
or essentialist gender identities.29 This proliferation multiplies the genders
and sexualities explored by queer theory beyond women and men, gay and
straight. They soon include, as Eve Sedgwick puts it, pushy femmes, radical
faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leather folk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist
women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens,
butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes. 30 No deviant
is a desert isle here, but part of an archipelago rushed together by a
common sea of queerness. Does this queer sea have a color, though? As the cascading,
un-color-coded sentences of Butler and Sedgwick suggest, in the early 1990s prominent
queer theorists denaturalized conventional gender and sexuality while
renaturalizing global northernness and unmarked whiteness, initially
unreferenced as if they were as neutral as fresh water. In both theorists
early genderscapes, the bodies and selves rendered fluid are first and
foremost gendered and sexualized, only faintly marked by other locations
only secondarily racialized, nationalized, classed. When Butler acknowledges that
codes of (presumably white) racial purity undergird the gender norms disturbed in her initial consideration
of fluidity of identities, she does so belatedly and between parentheses (as part of a long list of
clarifications to her discussion of drag in the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble).31 Sedgwicks list, somewhat
differently, momentarily parts the waves of queer theorys uncommented whiteness as race fades in subtly
with the African American associated terms bulldagger and Snap! queen. Not only is this faint
racialization limited to the black-white landscape of the contemporary

global north, keeping terms like mahu, mati, tomboy, tongzhi unlistable, but
the particularities of this possible racialization remain as unspeciied as the
color of the leather favored by leather folk or the jacket cut of the ladies
in tuxedoes. The lists sheer heterogeneity sweeps the bulldaggers racial
particularities into the same washing currents as the butch bottoms sexual
particularities. These queer theorists are innovative, rigorous scholars whose
work focuses on a predominantly white global north but who do often in
introductions acknowledge how racialization intersects the construction
and deconstruction of ossiied genders and sexualities. Shortly after her list in
Tendencies introduction, Sedgwick contends that a lot of the most exciting recent work
around queer spins the term outward along dimensions that cant be
subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity,
postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identityconstituting, identity-fracturing discourses.32 This is not her work in a text that goes
on to deftly engage Jane Aus- ten and Sigmund Freud, but she does gesture toward the importance of
other scholars taking it up. Similarly, in the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Gender Trouble,
Butler remarks that racial presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse on
gender in ways that need to be made explicit and concedes that if she rewrote the book
she would include a discussion of racialized sexuality. In thinking through performativity
and race, she suggests that the question to ask is not whether the theory of
performativity is transposable onto race, but what happens to the theory
when it tries to come to grips with race.33 But of course there is not just one question to
ask of the meeting point between Butlers theory and race, and those I would pose would be different still.
Namely, what happens when queer theories start with explicit formulations of racialized sexuality and
sexualized race, rather than add them in after theories like performativity have already been elaborated?
How does this change in point of departure change the tidal pattern of queer theory? How might it shift the
fields dominant metaphors, decentering performativitys stages and unearthing other topoi?
Metaphors lose their metaphoricity as they congeal through time into

concepts, Butler aptly remarks in this preface. And in a rare autobiographical moment, the short text
offers one image of literal liquidity that informs the metaphoric fluidity (threatening to congeal into a
concept) in this foundational text of queer theory. Just after her discussion of performativity, Butler
provides an insight into the literal starting place for Gender Trouble. Explaining how her involvement in
lesbian and gay politics on the East Coast of the United States informed her writing of this academic text,
she recounts: At the same time that I was ensconced in the academy, I was also living a life outside those
walls, and though Gender Trouble is an academic book, it began, for me, with a crossing-over, sitting on
Rehoboth Beach, wondering whether I could link the different sides of my life.34 Meaning place for all,
Rehoboth is an Atlantic resort town that boasts beautiful, Caribbean bright white sand beaches and has
become one of the Northeasts premier gay and lesbian summer getaways. As Butler suggests, it is
situated at a crosscurrent: Water, water everywhere. . . . Bounded on the east by the mighty Atlantic
Ocean, and on the west by Rehoboth Bay and Indian River Bay, gushes a promotional Web site.35 This
crosscurrent has a black Atlantic history, from the eighteenth-century docking of slave ships in Delawares
harbors to a maritime version of the underground railroad that passed through the states waters in the
nineteenth century. But by the late twentieth century that history had been largely washed out of sight.
Over 98 percent of the citys population is now white and, as Alexs Pates West of Rehoboth depicts, people
of color remain semi-invisible, concentrated in segregated neighborhoods.36 So when Butler sits at the
crossing- over of Rehoboth Beach, the difference that prominently marked its shores would be that of
sexuality the beach-combing gay and lesbian tourists who make the resort what it is, a site of play and
mobility for sexual rather than racial others. Now, if this is where one of queer theorys most influential
texts emerged and a site that (Butler suggests) has metaphoric valences, I want to extend that metaphor
by saying: frequently, prominent queer theorists continue to work from Rehoboth Beach. This is an
important place from which to work, certainly, a site steeped in possibilities for meaningful confluences
between thinking sexuality and thinking race. But theorists have a tendency to wait
(figuratively) for queers of color to arrive on Rehoboths shores in the hopes that
they will join the sexuality- centered signifying games already set up . . . in
the hopes they will take up theories of performativity and rework them
through race, for example. And they wait rather than seriously engage how
some of queer theorys fundamental premises including its emphasis on
abstract rather than concrete crossings-over, its references to places like Rehoboth
without engagement with their geographic and cultural specificity need to change in order to
make possible deeply productive meetings between sexuality and race. That
is, they welcome the appearance of queer of color scholarship without
rigorously confronting the exclusionary practices that marginalize queer
global southern experiences. To become an expan- sively decolonizing
practice, queer theory must adjust its vision to see what has been
submerged in the process of unmarking whiteness and global northernness:
the black Atlantic, New England Bay, and Indian River of queer crossings-over, the
intersecting beach topoi of slavery and liberation, coerced work and
unconventional play, unmarked whiteness and invisible blackness, flesh
exposed for vacation and for auction. Rehoboths layered present and past exemplifies the
need to engage specific, situated histories and the difference they make. Water is only literally
transparent, and the imagination of fluidity inspired by the Rehoboth or the San
Francisco bays may not be the same as that inspired by the southern
Atlantic or the eastern Caribbean. Nor may its metaphorics be as playful as waves
of punk bands, snap! queens, butch bottoms. . . . Just as travel does not
offer the same image of freedom to the gay undocumented immigrant that it
does to the queer cosmopolitan, conceptualizations of the fluid change
when we approach islands where the sea simultaneously carries the violent
history of the Middle Passage, a present of yolas and tourist cruises, and a
possible future of interisland connections.
La Mar embraces all. The ocean speaks many languages.

Black queer theory is not an exclusive argument. We must
continue finding intersections between black sufering
and queer theory with other forms of oppression to
continue growing like an ocean.
Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;

The ocean does speak many languages, and I am only a novice

linguist. So I have tried to present academic writing that is fluid, that in
some way explores what it would mean to perform the oceanness that
it thematizes. I have tried to broach more whispered secrets than I
could draw out and raise more questions than can be answered, to pick
apart metaphors, put them together without closure. At this point,
then, I do not want to conclude or pretend to. Instead, I want to end
with thoughts on some of the challenges that the Atlantic offers the
border waters of African diaspora, queer, and queer African diaspora
studies. The long-navigated Atlantic tells us that, like Brands
resurrection of the marooned, queer Africana studies must
explore what it means to conceive our field historically and
materially. Like Lara and Brand, as we navigate the postmodern
we must look for the fissures that show how the anti- and antemodern continue to conigure black queer broken-andwholeness. At the same time, the meaningfully multiblued
Atlantic tells us that we must continue to navigate our field
metaphorically. As Frantz Fanon contended in The Wretched of the
Earth, metaphors provide conceptual bridges between the lived
and the possible that use language queerly to map other roads
of becoming. My point is never that we should strip theory of watery
metaphors but that we should return to the materiality of water
to make its metaphors mean more complexly, shaking off
settling into frozen figures. The territory-less Atlantic also tells
us that, like the song between Micaela and la Mar, black queer
studies must speak transnationally. When black becomes only
Afri- can American, black queer theory becomes insular; as the
crosscurrents between Atlantic and Caribbean, Atlantic and
Mediterranean, Atlantic and Indian Ocean are richest in marine
life, so they will be richest in depth of theorizing.52 Most
simply, our challenge is to be like the ocean: spreading
outward, running through bays and fingers, while remaining
heavy, stinging, a force against our hands.
AT: Perm (Anti-Blackness)

Hegemonic spaces and entities attempt to destroy these
voices and stories of sufering embodied and told by the
lapping waves. They do this through their organized
development and exploration of La Mar and her many
mystic beauties. These mute the crying and the moans
and the screams of the slave ships.

Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;
Also composed at the turn of the century, Brands Map to the Door of No Return charts space to explore
these complexities. The thirty-year literary career of this Trinidadian-born, Toronto-resident poet, novelist,
essayist, filmmaker, and activist narrates continual migration among Atlantic and Caribbean seascapes,
crossings-over that connect sites like Delawares Rehoboth or Torontos Bathurst to Cubas Santiago and
Trinidads Blanchisseuse. The chief landing points of her work transmigrate between Grenada, then
Trinidad, now Ontario. Brands writing in the 1980s is propelled, haunted by her vision of the Grenadan
shore stormed by U.S. troops in 1983, walking distance from the office where she worked as an information
officer for the Peoples Development Agency under the New Jewel government. Her work returns again and
again to waters that absorbed the bloodshed of this invasion, combing Caribbean beaches to attempt to
put many sides of her political life together: tidal scenes of revolutionary hope, invasion, betrayal, death,
eroticism, and possibility. These last wash in prominently when, in 1990 the same year that Gender
Troubl e and Sedgwicks Epistemology of the Closet revolutionized sexuality studies Brand publishes No
Language Is Neutral. This award-winning collection of poems is heralded by Michelle Cliff as the first
anglophone Caribbean text to explore fully love between women in a West Indian setting, the black queer
Atlantic of Trinidads north coast. 37 But, resistant to being caught in the nostalgia of a return to her native
land, by the late 1990s Brands geographic and thematic focus moves yet again to the shores of Lake
Ontario, where she now lives in the sea of West Indian and other diasporics that has become Toronto. This
northern migration further complicates the crossed currents she witnesses, as the Canada cycle reflects
gathering discomfort with writing from any identity whether revolutionary, activist, black, lesbian, or
otherwise. As she explains in an interview, The book is a map . . . [to] a new kind of identity and
existence that challenges isolated, nationally or otherwise bounded constructions of racial, ethnic,
gender, and sexual identity. Its trajectory answers her post-Grenada, post-homeland question: So now,
who am I? I really want to think about that. My objections lie with the people who hang onto what they call
identities for the most awful reasons, and those are the reasons of exclusion. Im trying to be very careful
how I say it. I dont want to say that we dont have a history, but what we hold onto has to be part of a
much larger terrain.38 As it explores this terrain, her Map does not emerge as a text as immediately given
to queer reading as either Gender Trouble or No Language Is Neutral. Yet its oceanography queers
many crossings-over, and indeed Brand once generously thanked me for reading that book that
way.39 Instead of foregrounding fluxes of gender or sexuality this work rushes into larger bodies, larger
openings. The text is a tactile, shifting oceanography of African diaspora experience
imagined at an unremitting intersection between maritime materialities and

metaphors. This intersection is physically dominated by the Atlantic Ocean
and the Caribbean Sea, those waters from which blacks emerge whole and broken,
and psychically dominated by the Door of No Return, the real, imaginary, and
imagined portal through which Africans left the continent in slave ships
holds.40 Brands Map through the sea in between is fluidly genred writing that moves between
childhood memories and family stories, ships logs and colonial maritime chronicles, and contemporary
echoes of the slave trade in the conflux of immigrants from the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and
Africa that form their own human sea in Toronto.41 Its creative project is one Brand identifies as always
underway in diaspora: to record disruptions that continue on the other side of the door and
reclaim the black body from that domesticated, captive, open space it has
become.42 This project is fundamentally queer, in a black Atlantic, crosscurrents
way. Rather than eroticize individual bodies, it offers what Chela Sandoval calls a
social erotics: a compass that traces historical linkages that were never
supposed to be visible, remembers connections that counteract imperial
desires for global southern disaggregation, and puts together the
fragmented experiences of those whose lives, as Butler writes, were never
supposed to qualify as the human and the livable. 43 Like the texts of Butler and
Sedgwick, Brands work also generates lists that crash onto her pages like waves but join unexpected
terms in concatenations that recall the chains of slave ships more than those of sexual play. Toward the
end of her Map, Brand imagines the continued haunting of the black Atlan- tic by those literally and
figuratively drowned in the Middle Passage, those she calls the marooned of the diaspora. For these
marooned she writes a ruttier: which is, she explains, a long poem containing
navigational instructions which sailors learned by heart . . . the routes and

tides, the stars and maybe the taste and flavour of the waters, the coolness,
the saltiness; all for finding ones way at sea.44 Reconfiguring these colonial maritime
lists, her ruttier traces how misdirections become the way for diasporic Africans
always painfully, always partially. She describes the marooned as unsexed,
irreducibly opaque figures who at once refuse to stay submerged and refuse to
appear in clearly recognizable bodies. Like many ghosts, their bodies
seemed waterlogged, distorted beyond naturalizable gender and other
identities: Desolation castaway, abandoned in the world. They was, is,
wandered, wanders as spirits who dead cut, banished, seclude, refuse, shut
the door, derelict, relinquished, apart. . . . And it doesnt matter where in
the world, this spirit is no citizen, is no national, no one who is christened,
no sex, this spirit is washed of all this lading, bag and baggage , jhaji bundle,
georgie bindle, lock stock, knapsack, and barrel, and only holds its own weight
which is nothing, which is memoryless and tough with remembrances,
heavy with lightness, aching with grins.45 This spirit . . . is no sex; this
spirit is a singular, plural, and genderless they that was, is, in a
grammatical unmarking that parallels the absence of gender in Creole third-person
pronouns. This genderlessness is perhaps an ocean reflection of the negative
equality of sexes experienced in plantation labor that brutalized men and
women without discrimination a gender queerness that calls into question facile linkages between gender trouble and liberation. But more than
this, the fluid identities of Brands black queer Atlantic simultaneously efface
gender and nationality, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, their maroons no
citizen, no national, no one christened, no sex. This is a lyric litany of
negatives whose rhythmic, sonoric, and conceptual linkages speak a crosscurrent of dissolved and reconfigured black selfhoods . . . a tide where
woman- hood, economic status, motherhood, Yorubaness, (for example) are all
disrupted from previous significations at the same time black queer time.
This kind of ongoing, multiple black Atlantic resignification is thematized
and performed through these lists where words jostle against each other
unexpectedly, breaking open and reconfiguring meanings. The conventional
baggage of language is shuffled and shed as the spirit is washed of bag
and baggage, jhaji bundle, georgie bindle, lock stock, knapsack, and barrel. At
the end of this washing, maroons sexless and otherwise unmarked bodies
emerge as the legacy of geographically and historically specific waters, the
Atlantic of the Middle Passage. Their brown bodies are gender fluid not
because they choose parodic proliferations but because they have been
washed of all this lading, bag and baggage by a social liquidation that is
not the willful or playful fluidity of Butlers drag queens and Sedg- wicks butch
bottoms. I am compelled by Butlers growing insistence, from the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble to
the engaging Undoing Gender, that gender theory should address more material
concerns issues of survival for the transgendered and others whose
unintelligible bodies threaten their very lives.46 But Brands embodied images of
the black queer Atlantic remind us that such survival is not a concern that
can be reduced to the present, that black gender queers are always already
surviving a past of multiple, intersecting violences. The specificity of these
waters, these images, this literary language is at once a map to the door of no return
and a map to a black queer alternative to canonical gender theory. Yet the
route of un-Return is not only one of violence; it is also one of queer erotics.
Just before the ruttier for the marooned, Brand includes another kind of ruttier titled Arriving at Desire.
But just as Brands ruttier for the marooned never goes in expected directions, the desire she charts here
never becomes sexual or even interpersonal. After a description of childhood reading experiences that
introduced her to desires both political and erotic, the narrator recounts how she came to write her novel
At the Full and Change of the Moon. Like Butler on Rehoboth Beach, Brand conceived her text at a
crossing-over between land and water, between experience of the real and vision of the (im)possible. Her
inspi- ration came while contemplating maritime artifacts in a Port of Spain museum overlooking the sea,
and her converging descriptions of the museums inside and outside become the Maps most erotic
description: As you crest the hill, there is the ocean, the Atlantic, and there a fresh wide
breeze relieving the deep lush of heat. From atop this hill you can see over the whole town. Huge black
cannons overlook the ocean, the har- bour, and the towns perimeter. If you look right, if your eyes could
round the point, you would see the Atlantic and the Caribbean in a wet blue embrace. If
you come here at night you will surprise lovers, naked or cloth- ing askew, groping hurriedly or dangerously
languorous, draped against the black gleaming cannons of George III.47 Before we ever come to these
lovers, Brand at once gestures toward and leaves opaque two queer desires: the Atlantics desire
for the Caribbean it meets in a wet blue embrace, and the narrators desire for the ocean
she describes so erotically. This desire is queerly gendered, since ocean, sea, and
Brand rolling and writing in opposition to the black cannons would all normatively be
feminized. It is also queer in a black Atlantic way, since it ascribes feeling to
bodies of water and of African females that, in colonizers and slave
traders maps of the world, were never supposed to feel. The queerness of
this sensuality is the drive Brand describes two paragraphs earlier: the diasporic search to put the
senses back together again, a sensual re-membering that George IIIs cannons, the policing of sea
and of diasporic bodies, cannot stop.48
What puts together Atlantic and Caribbean, viewers and lovers in this passage is another list, a string of
conditionals: If you look . . . if your eyes could round . . . you would see. . . . If you come . . . you will
surprise. Like the ruttiers litany of negatives, this conjunction of if . . . would, if . . . will traces some
complexities of the black queer time the Map moves through. The embrace of Atlantic and
Caribbean, of lovers in front of cannons, is not written as a present reality that narrator
or readers can see but as past and future possibilities they could see if and
when their consciousness and body move creatively to find ones way at
sea, to arrive at a desire for sentient pasts, livable futures to which
there are no ready maps. This desire promises to emerge at a site of
oceanographic and historical uncertainty and violence that the readers eyes
cannot quite reach (if your eyes could round the point you would see it, but can they?): the
harbor where Atlantic meets Caribbean, where ships docked after a Middle
Passage that did not end. Neither Atlantic nor Caribbean yet both, this
unseen site is one where diasporas radical blurring can also harbor new
routes to being, routes neither shielded nor boxed in by doors of hegemonic
space, time, and identity. It is the space for rewiring the senses that Alexander
calls for, a crossroads/crosscurrents of expansive memory refusing to be
housed in any single place, bound by the limits of time, enclosed within the
outlines of a map, encased in the physicality of the body, or imprisoned as
exhibit in a museum.49 One of Butlers important observations in Gender Trouble is that all
subjects put together fictionally solid subjectivities from fluid, unstable
experiences, and Brands Map supports this idea. Earlier in the text she observes, There are
ways of constructing the world that is, of putting it together each
morning, what it should look like piece by piece. . . . Before that everything
is liquid, ubiquitous and mute. We accumulate information over our lives
which bring various things into solidity, into view.50 What proves innovative in
Brands black queer Atlantic liquidity is how insistently she weaves these explorations
of figurative fluidity together with poignant material engagements with the
waters that shape raced, nationalized, classed, gendered, and sexualized
selves in different moments and sites of diaspora. Understanding the
particularity of the liquids that we put together daily is the project of A Map to the
Door of No Return, a project that allows the marooned of the diaspora another kind of
queer coupling: the possibility of putting the world together and putting the
senses back together at the same time. As Wekker writes of her search for stories of
womens sexuality in the African diaspora, finding these stories involves collecting
the curving, chipped, conch shell like pieces of [black womens]
conceptions of being human that have been dispersed in the waters of
forced transatlantic migrations and that individuals and communities
rearrange in creatively transculturated ways. 51 The key to making black
queer sense of such self-pieces is not turning to race-, class-, or
geographically unmarked models of sexuality and humanity based in the
European Enlightenment philosophy that justified slavery in the first place but tracing as
carefully as possible the particular, specific, always marked contours, the
contested beachscapes of African diaspora histories of gender and sexuality.
So in the black queer time and place of the door of no return, fluid desire is
neither purely metaphor nor purely luxury. Instead like the blue embrace
of two bodies of water its connections and crosscurrents look to speak
through and beyond the washed lading, the multiply effaced identities of the
Middle Passage. Finally, Brands ruttiers chart how the marooned come to sail as maroons,
continually stealing back the space where they live. This is my ocean, but it is speaking another language,
since its accent changes around different islands Derek Walcott, Midsummer
AT: Perm (Queer Eco)

STARTING POINT IS KEY -- The perm is the exact type of
heteronormative silencing that we are critiquing. The
invisibility of normative ideology that sustains the 1AC.
SIMPLY ADDING QUEERING BRACKETS THE QUEER BODY
THAT DOES NOT SHIFT CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS OR
ACHIEVE MEANINGFUL PEDAGOGICAL BENEFITS.
Winans 06, associate professor of English at Susquehanna University
Amy E., Pedagogy 6.1 (2006) 103-122 Queering Pedagogy in the English
Classroom: Engaging with
the Places Where Thinking Stops. AJM
What I am proposing in this essay is not simply that we should discuss sexual
orientation in our classrooms, although I believe that we should. Simply
adding sexual orientation to the list of issues that we explore in our classes is
insufficient for reasons that many scholars of multiculturalism have
discussed. As Urvashi Vaid (1995), E. Shelley Reid (2004), and others have
argued, simply adding materials about "the other" does not challenge
our pedagogy or conceptual framework in meaningful ways; the
additive approach of inclusivity or celebration of diference tends to
leave dominant cultural assumptions and their complex relationships
to power unexamined. Simply put, changing the content of our classes
does not necessarily impact our pedagogy. As Harriet Malinowitz (1995: 252
53) explains, "It is possible to 'include' new discourses and yet
simultaneously deny the tensions that exist around their proximity
and their competing claims for territorial definition. Naming and
engaging with these tensions is what sparks the chemical reaction
that ineluctably queers the brew." It is this process of "queer[ing]
the brew" that merits further exploration in our classrooms.
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS A UNIQUE METHODOLOGY THAT RESITUATES
THE CATEGORY OF THE NATURAL -- IF WE WIN THIS IS A
PREREQUISITE THEN YOU CANNOT VOTE ON THE PERM BECAUSE THE
DEBATE IS A QUESTION OF METHOD
MORTIMER-SANDILANDS
University
Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture at York
2k5
Catriona (Cate)-
Her work lies at the intersections of queer and feminist theory, environmental philosophy and political theory,
and cultural studies. She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minnesota, 1999), the coeditor (with Rebecca Raglon and Melody Hessing) of This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment (UBC, 2004), and is
working on a manuscript called Pastoral Traditions, Sexual Subversions: Lesbian Histories of Nature Writing; Unatural Passions?:
Notes Toward a Queer Ecology; INVISIBLE CULTURE, An electronic journal for visual culture, Issue 9;
https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/sandilands.html
Returning rather abruptly to main point of this essay, ecofeminism and environmental
justice open our eyes to the fact that nature organizes and is organized by
complex power relations. What queer ecology adds is the fact that these
power relations include sexuality. But what does an analysis of environmental issues
grounded in a queer perspective reveal? What does it mean to think about nature as a site in which the
social relations of sexuality are played out, and vice versa? I will approach these questions in three, related
ways. First, I will explore some of the historical connections that have developed
between institutions of sexuality and institutions of nature. We can see that

modern understandings of sexuality are deeply influenced by historically
specific ideas of nature, perhaps most obviously in the classification of gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer bodies as, somehow, unnatural.
Connected to this conceptual history is a second line of exploration: we can
see that many modern formations of natural space including parks and other
designated nature spaces are organized by prevalent assumptions about sexuality,
and especially a move to institutionalize heterosexuality by linking it to
particular environmental practices. Finally, I will discuss how a queer ecological
project might proceed by challenging these problematic links between the
power relations of sexuality and nature. Queers have, in a variety of ways,
challenged the destructive pairing of heterosexuality and nature: by
developing "reverse discourses" oriented to challenging dominant
understandings of our unnatural passions; by borrowing ecological
thinking to develop radically transformative gay and lesbian politics; and , like
Grover, by taking elements of queer experience to construct an alternative
environmental perspective.
THE NOTION OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS CONTAINED WITHIN THE

CONCEPTS OF "EXPLORATION" AND "DEVELOPMENT" -- THIS NOTION
OF LINEAR AND HOMOGENOUS TEMPORALITY DEFINES IDENTITY IN
RELATIONSHIP TO NATIONALITY THAT PRECLUDES THE FORMATION
OF NON-NORMATIVE SUBJECTS
Ferguson, associate professor of American Studies at Minnesota, 2007 p.
MUSE
(Roderick, Theorizing Queer Temporalities in GLQ 13.2-3)
Benjamin is an important landmark for me, at least in trying to answer this
question. I'm thinking especially of "Theses on the Philosophy of History":
"The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be
sundered from the concept of its progression through a
homogeneous, empty time."3 I return to this argument to underline the
importance of connecting the question of time to the question of
space, especially space as an entity that nations and nationalisms
have tried to bring into national and nationalist time. If we apply
Benjamin's arguments to the history of oppositional practices and
movementsMarxism, revolutionary nationalism, feminismwe can see it as
a powerful warning about the precariousness of radical uses of time. Hoang's
remarks about a "homonormative time line," for instance, caution us not to
have faith in vanguardist conceptions of time. Recruiting previously
excluded subjects into a nationalist regimen can be a way of using
time to unmake forms of nonnationalist relationality. I think one of the
encouraging aspects of this discussion, as Chris and Carolyn are suggesting,
is the refusal of canonical texts of history: history as origin narrative and
history as outside textuality, to invoke Lee's arguments. At the same time,
several of us seem to acknowledge that disidentifying with hegemonic texts
of history does not mean the absolute dismissal of historical projects. The
deconstructive turn was very much about the radical critique of the
text of history in an effort to produce alternative texts. There's reason to
extend and resuscitate that aspect of deconstruction.
Queer theory must be at the forefront of thought to have solvency.
This means that the permutation destroys alt solvency. The impact
to this is education. To change the classroom education system,
queer research must be first.
Hill 4
Robert J, University of Georgia at Athens, Activism as Practice: Some Queer Considerations

from New Directions for Adult and Considering Education, 85-94,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ace.141/pdf
Some of
the ways I deploy my privileged position to further critical queer
consciousness include the following. Queering Research. My research
agenda explores processes and practices that try to push life's
complex gender constructions--what it means to be female, what it
means to be male, or what it means to be simultaneously neither or
both-into the so-called normal patterns of U.S. culture. To do so is to contest the easy
dualities of gender, and to interrogate the too easy answers with
respect to the traditional binaries of male-female, men-women, gay-straight.
Instead, a research-to-practice scheme must lead to the
investigation of power relations and contest the social, political,
economic, historical, and cultural contexts that define and sustain
so-called normal sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender
expression or identity. This is another example of queer work as a
way to translate marginalized experiences and recognize the value
of the knowledge found there. As a result I find myself engaged in research that assists
transsexuals (Hill, 2000, 2002), sex workers, and other sexual nonconformists. Queering
Teaching. Diferences are reflected in the backgrounds that students
bring to learning situations (Moll, Tapia, and Whitmore, 1993). Bransford, Brown, and
Cocking (1999) have shown that students come to the classroom with
preconceptions about how the world works. Cultural and religious
diferences afect students' comfort level, which in turn has an
impact on learning. Paulo Freire (Freire and Macedo, 1987, p. 127) advocates that
educators should try to "live part of their dreams within their
educational space." Doing queer cultural work at the crossing point
of theory and activism as practice necessitates bringing it into the
classroom. The confluence of theory and activism becomes a part of
classroom performance in order to ofer students new ways of
Life at the contact zone of theory and activism manifests itself in numerous expressions.
seeing and being in the world. Activism also promotes ongoing

dialogue among faculty, administrators, and higher education policymakers. Facilitating
adult learning includes exposing students attachments to
heteronormativity, homophobia, and heterosexual privilege. The
confluence of theory and activism as praxis demands that we think
critically and teach subversively.
AT: Queer theory Bad

OUR DIASPORIC APPROACH SOLVES THE ISSUES WITH
CONVENTIONAL QUEER THEORY -- IT KEEPS QUEERING THE
QUEER AND ALLOWS FOR EFFECTIVE CHALLENGE TO
IMPERIALIST VIOLENCE
ENG '11 (DAVID, David L. Eng is professor of English, comparative
literature, and Asian American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is

author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of
Intimacy (2010) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian
America (2001). In addition, he is coeditor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The
Politics of Mourning (2003), with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian
America (1998), and with Judith Halberstam and Jos Esteban Muoz of a
special issue of the journal Social Text, "What's Queer about Queer Studies
Now?" (2005). "Queering the Black Atlantic, Queering the Brown Atlantic"
David L. Eng (bio) GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies > Volume 17,
Number 1, 2011
tudies/v017/17.1.eng.html)
In sum, Gopinath, like Alexander, boldly charts a history of the
present in which heteronormativity and contemporary nationalisms
are neither a natural nor an inevitable result of neoliberal
globalization marching across the world. In both books, queer diasporas
place South Asian and Caribbean perspectives at the center of transnational
feminism, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory to consider the
numerous ways by which attention to female sexuality in the global South
presents us with histories of the past and present that do not march to the
beat of enlightened liberalism's deafening drums. To the contrary, the
field of queer diasporas provides a compelling account of how a turn
to queer circuits of desire might interrupt the dominant itineraries
of globalization and the current ascension of queer liberalism as one
of its regnant efects. Ultimately, it works to keep queer studies
queer.
QUEER PERSPECTIVISM RESITUATES OUR RELATIONSHIP

TO ECONOMIES OF VIOLENCE IN A WAY THAT ALLOWS FOR
THE DEVELOPMENT OF NON-IMPERIAL IDENTITIES -- THE
NOTION THAT ECOLOGY IS A PERSPECTIVALLY NEUTRAL
SUBJECT REPRESENTS A VIEW FROM NOWHERE THAT
NORMS THE QUEER BODY WITHIN A VIOLENT FRAME
MORTIMER-SANDILANDS
University
Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture at York
2k5
Catriona (Cate)-
Her work lies at the intersections of queer and feminist theory, environmental philosophy and political theory,
and cultural studies. She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minnesota, 1999), the co-
editor (with Rebecca Raglon and Melody Hessing) of This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment (UBC, 2004), and is
working on a manuscript called Pastoral Traditions, Sexual Subversions: Lesbian Histories of Nature Writing; Unatural Passions?:
Notes Toward a Queer Ecology; INVISIBLE CULTURE, An electronic journal for visual culture, Issue 9;
Queering ecological politics
The final section of this paper turns our attention away from the ways in which sexuality and ecology have
been linked as power relations having a negative (if still productive) influence on both queers and nature,
and toward the ways in which a queer perspective offers us a unique standpoint
on resisting these destructive relations. That said, if I were to judge only from televisions
shows like Will and Grace, Queer as Folk, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, I would hardly nominate
queers as the worlds best nature stewards. Quite the opposite, in fact: Gay culture, in the
mainstream which, in all of these shows, means affluent urban white men is extraordinarily
tied to lifestyle consumerism. As Andil Gosine writes, gay men, the story goes, shop. Urban
gay men live in chic condominium apartments, buy a lot of hair and body care products, [and] have great
taste in cars, clothes, and interior design. 21 Although one might be tempted to celebrate in these shows
the general publics apparently increased acceptance of queers, I think it is
only a very narrow band of queerness that portion tied to the fetishistic
exchange of aesthetic commodities that ends up being at all acceptable.
Queers are OK not because they are queer, but because they are exemplary
consumers in a society that judges all people by their ability to consume.
Note that working-class queer folk, lower-income or anti-aesthetic lesbians, and older, sicker, or even HIV+
gay men, are not the ideal subjects of Will and Grace.
Not only is this band of North American acceptance of queer culture thus
very narrow, but the continuing mainstream political process by which
queers strive to be accepted in consumer society limits the full scope of
political possibility potential in queer communities. For example, although I would be
lying if I didnt say that I was moved by Canadas legalization of same-sex marriage, our pursuit, as queers,
for a family form just like heterosexual marriage" seems, to me, to blunt the critical potential inherent in
the fact that queers have developed alternative forms of family that do not necessarily replicate all of the
problems of legal, nuclear heterosexuality. To quote Tony Kushner, its entirely conceivable that we will
one day live miserably in a thoroughly ravaged world in which lesbians and gay men can marry and serve
openly in the army and thats it. 22 My argument is thus that we should reorient our politics
and take on what I am calling a queer ecological perspective, to work toward

more critical possibilities responsive to the kinds of complex relations of
power that I have thus far outlined. Here, I am advocating a position not only of queering
ecology, but of greening queer politics.
While it is true that the hegemonic pairing of heterosexuality and ecology
has had a generally oppressive impact on both queers and nature, the fact is
that queers have also used ideas of nature and natural spaces as sites of
resistance. Perhaps most prominently, many queer writers have pointed to
the fact that there is a long tradition, dating from the Greeks, of a positive and
conscious linkage between same-sex eroticism and rural or wilderness
environments. Broadly part of a pastoral literary tradition dating from Theocritus
and Virgil, and continuing through the work of such writers as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau,
contemporary gay male writers emphasize that natural settings have been
important sites for the exploration of male homosexuality as a natural
practice. Rural spaces in particular have served, in a wide range of
literatures, as places of freedom for male homoerotic encounters. In
addition, because of the association of nature with ideas of innocence and
authenticity, gay male writers have been able to use pastoral literary
conventions as a way of making an argument for the authenticity of
homosexuality. This homophile pastoralism, as literary critic David Shuttleton
emphasizes, has not only been used by such writers as Andre Gide to make political
claims for gay equality on the basis of the naturalness of homosexuality, but
has also been used to challenge the very idea of the naturalness
of heterosexuality. 23
Briefly, in his work Corydon: Four Socratic Dialogues, Gide tells a story based on Theocritus third century
BC poem The Idylls, in which shepherds not only engage in same-sex love but muse, together, on the
mysteries of making love to girls. The young shepherd is a typical pastoral figure; he is close to nature in
his daily work, and is also largely in the company of other young men, with whom he engages not only in
the immediate pleasures of the flesh but also in the reflective dialogue associated with the young mens
passage from a state of natural, youthful innocence to socialized manhood. What is key, here, is that
same-sex passion is associated with that natural innocence, and opposite-sex eroticism is the thing that
needs to be learned in order to enter the adult social order. What we have, here, is a reverse discourse
that pairs nature with the homoerotic, and artificiality with the heteroerotic; against an assumption of
natural heterosexuality, Gide actually positions heterosexuality as a normative practice into which the
young shepherds must be disciplined. As Shuttleton writes, Gide launches a trangressively counterintuitive argument that it is this compulsory heterosexuality which is constructed and inauthentic since it
needs to be taught and culturally maintained. 24
Drawing on a similar tradition, gay men in modern cities have frequently made use of
urban green spaces as sites for both individual sexual contact and
community-oriented activism. Ironically, exactly in the parks that were so
frequently designed to discourage homosexual activity, gay men have found
and created a form of sexual community that, again, pairs nature and
homoeroticism in a positive way. There are at least two important elements to consider. In
the first place, what is significant about public sex in parks is that it is public, meaning that it overtly
challenges heteronormative understandings of what is appropriate behavior for public, natural spaces.
Here, we must remember that public parks are disciplinary spaces, in which a very narrow band of
activities is sanctioned, practiced, and experienced; only certain kinds of nature experience are officially
allowed. In this context, one can consider public gay sex as a sort ofdemocratization of natural space, in
which different communities can experience the park in their own ways, and in which a wider range of
natural experiences thus comes to be possible. As one frequenter of public parks in Toronto related of a
sexual encounter in Queens Park (no pun intended):
I stayed there because I loved storms, love to see nature in its violence. We enjoyed ourselves so much,
and of course the rain had swept in and we were all wet, and all those soggy clothes to put on. But it was
joyous. I love wild, spontaneous moments like that where it just goes crazy and its wild. 25
Clearly, wild sex in a public park in a thunderstorm is a far cry from the prim courtship rituals embodied in
Olmsteds formal promenades. Whileit is important to point out that park sex is controversial in itself, it
seems that gay mens re-appropriation of these natural spaces in fact fosters an alternative and critical
awareness of urban nature. Such awareness has galvanized queer communities to
take environmental action; to give one example, shortly after the 1969 Stonewall riots in New
York, a popular cruising area in Queens, Kew Gardens, was badly destroyed by extensive tree cutting.
Within a week there were public actions showing conscious visibility, and the first gay liberationist
environmental group, Trees for Queens, was formed to restore the park. 26
Turning to the lesbian community, one can see different but related patterns
of resistance to the pairing of heterosexuality and nature. Like their gay
male counterparts but with very different gender politics involved, lesbian
authors have also used pastoral literary traditions to develop a reverse
discourse that argues for the naturalness of womens same-sex love
relationships. These "lesbian pastoral literatures have a history that extends well back into the
nineteenth century, for example into the writings of such authors as Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather. In
the early twentieth century, Radclyffe Hall made overt use of pastoral conventions in The Well of
Loneliness to paint a picture of her gender-invert protagonist, Stephen Gordon, in which Stephens identity
was very natural, and morally very positive. The problem for Stephen was not her nature; it was the
artificial heterosexism and social intolerance that surrounded her as she made her way into adulthood.
More recent lesbian authors have, in fact, consciously taken on the idea that
women in lesbian relationships might experience nature differently, and
possibly more positively, than is generally the case within the confines of
compulsory heterosexuality. Most obviously, lesbian feminists have
consciously connected a radical feminist politics with a radical ecological
politics. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, utopian and science fiction writers
such as Sally Miller Gearhart overtly tied the destruction of nature to patriarchal,
heterosexist social institutions. In her 1979 novel The Wanderground, she envisioned a world
in which women, freed from oppressive male influence, were able to live together in polygynous sexual
relationships in a rural world that was actively and intentionally separate from destructive, maledominated cities. In that woman-centred world, women were better able to find both rich erotic and social
relations to one another, and rich social and erotic relations to their natural environments, all of which
were actively prevented in heterosexual, patriarchal societies. Thus, such novels actively
criticized heteronormativity, arguing not only that heterosexuality was not

natural, but that it was destructive to both women and to nature; here, we
have a narrative that reverses the idea that homosexuality is an urban
illness, and instead argues that heterosexism is the urban ill to which
lesbians must respond. In a healthier environment, one organized according
to homosocial and homoerotic norms, women could create a more profound
connection to each other and to nature. Whatever one might say about the
essentialism of such understandings of a natural woman/nature
connection, it is clear that the transgressive pairing of ecological with
lesbian feminist politics posed a significant challenge to the overarching
assumption that heterosexuality is not only natural, but also good for
nature.
Influenced by these literary currents, some women began in the 1970s to
actually develop intentional communities based on the combination of
ecological and lesbian separatist politics. Communities like the Womanshare Collective in
Southern Oregon were founded on the idea of rural nature as a privileged set of spaces in which women
could find, "in the healing beauty of nature, a safe space to live, to work, to help create the womens
culture [they] dreamed of. 27 These wimmins lands had complex ecological goals, ranging from
opening rural landscapes to women by transforming heterosexual relations of property ownership; to
withdrawing the land from patriarchal-capitalist agricultural production and reproduction; to symbolically
reinscribing the land with lesbian erotic presence. While many of these communities have
disappeared, others are still there as living examples of what it looks like to
live ones life intentionally as a lesbian ecologist. To quote one long-term resident:
Womens land, lesbian land [is] land that women have purchased and are living on [as lesbians]. It is
intended to serve lesbians, not only the ones who live here, and it is intended to be lesbian land
evermore. And moving to the country stretches who a lesbian is. 28
QUEER FRAMES OF EXISTENCE ARE NECESSARY TO RESIST VIOLENT

HETEROSEXISM
MORTIMER-SANDILANDS canada research chair in sustainability and culture
at york university 2k5
catriona (cate)- her work lies at the intersections of queer and feminist
theory, environmental philosophy and political theory, and cultural
studies. she is the author of the good-natured feminist: ecofeminism and the
quest for democracy (minnesota, 1999), the co-editor (with rebecca raglon
and melody hessing) of this elusive land: women and the canadian
environment (ubc, 2004), and is working on a manuscript called Pastoral
Traditions, Sexual Subversions: Lesbian Histories of Nature Writing; Unatural
Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology; INVISIBLE CULTURE, An electronic
journal for visual culture, Issue 9;
Conclusions
These stories certainly do not illustrate the full range of queer ecological politics, past or present. I have
not discussed the conversation between queer ecology and ecofeminism that Greta Gaard began in her
1994 article Toward a Queer Ecofeminism; 29 I have not discussed the fact that the liberation of
eroticism and physical desire has played a strong role in many historical and
contemporary environmental movements; 30 I have not even begun to consider the ways
the experiences of transgender individuals call us to question the
interrelations among sexualities, natures, gender identities, and bodies. I may
have also given the impression that gay male ecological politics are about sex in nature, and lesbian
ecologies are about the liberation of nature; pointing to both lesbian cultures of public sex and radical
faerie gay male communities, I assure you that this is not the case.
not only is heterosexism part of the web of

oppressive power relations through which human relations to nature are
organized, but also that queers have made interesting ecological moves to
challenge some of these relations. Not all of us are content to practice our sexual politics
What I hope I have done is illustrate that,
within the narrow circles offered to us by consumerist and other mainstream agendas; some of us like to
think that queers might have an interesting and diverse set of experiences from
which to develop more critical, and more ecological, politics. Thus in closing, I
return to Jan Zita Grover. Grovers work is far from being a lesbian separatist utopian vision, but it is,
for me, a particularly inspiring queer ecology. For her, an environmental
perspective grounded in the painful experience of a gay community allows
her to see and find beauty in a natural landscape ravaged by the visions of
others, for whom its beauty is simply a question of resource extraction. She is
keenly aware of the devastations of both AIDS and clear-cuts; indeed, her experience as a primary
caregiver for PWAs has allowed her an especially intimate view of the resemblance
between the two. But her standpoint didnt just afford her the metaphoric ability to see, in diseased
leg and burnt-out stumpage, the same possibility of continuing life and beauty. It also taught her
about responsibility: In the gay community of San Francisco, it was often lesbians and other
chosen community members, not biological family, who took on the hard work of caring for the dying.
Thus, Grovers queer ecology is both about seeing beauty in the wounds of
the world and taking responsibility to care for the world as it is. I leave her the
last words: We assume responsibility for a place when we are able to look
both backward at the burden of its history and forward at our responsibility
for those parts of its future that lie under human control. 31
AT: Cede the Political

ONLY OUR PRIOR INTERROGATION CAN DETERMINE
WHETHER LIBERATORY POLITICAL MOVEMENTS CAN
ENACT THEIR AGENDAS -- SMOOTHING OVER QUEER
DIFFERENCES CAUSES COALITION FAILURE
Gaard 11 (GAARD prof of English @ Univ of Wisconsin River Falls 2k11
Greta- an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker.

Gaard's academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is
widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of composition and literary
criticism; Green, Pink, Lavender: Banishing Ecophobia Through Queer
Ecologies; ETHICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT 16 (2); published (Catriona
Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature,
Politics, Desire. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ethics_and_the_environment/v016/16.2.gaard.pd
f)
When progressive political movements fail to recognize the intersections of oppression, we lose political power: coalitions become
less stable, and activists are forced to choose their irst emergency
while backgrounding other ethical and political commitments. In
2010, its no longer tolerable (if it ever was) to put
ones sexual identity on hold in order to work on

environmental issues, and it will be no great achievement if queers gain full civil rights on a planet with
few liveable areas due to climate change (where
would we go for the honeymoon?). In Queer Ecologies, thirteen
radical environmental scholars make clear the material and conceptual
connections that conirm eco-queers wont have to choose between ecology
and sexuality, and neither will anyone else: these essays deal decisive blows
to ecophobia and erotophobia alike.1 Mortimer-Sandilands past decade of
scholarship developing the intersections of queer eco-politics and
ecocriticism has laid the theoretical groundwork for this volume, and many of
the contributors acknowledge her work in their chapters. She and co-editor
Erickson created the deeply feminist and democratic opportunity for the
contributors to meet in To- ronto to discuss the irst drafts of their chapters,
opening the editing process to a multi-directional plurality of dialogues that
ensures there is less repetition and more cross-referencing, more collective
theory-building among the chapters than readers expect from more
hierarchically-edited volumes. Each chapter develops the books central aim
of queering ecology and greening queer politics by demonstrating the
powerful ways in which understandings of nature inform discourses of
sexuality[and] understandings of sex inform discourses of nature (23)
The introduction offers an excellent overview of the conceptual questions
raised by eco-queer perspectives, and I can easily imagine assigning this 47page chapter in a class on gender studies, ecocriticism, environmental
politics, or queer theory. It establishes the need for this inquiry by providing a
historical narrative of the ways that notions of sexuality have shaped social
constructions of nature in the familiar concepts and creation of wilderness,
national and urban parks, and car camping. Moreover, ts enticing: who ever
heard of the performance group Fuck For Forests, or eco-activists like the
Lesbian Rangers, and their khaki-clad force of Eager Beavers? Of course we
want to know more! Drawing on a range of queer and ecological theories
rather a single orthodox perspective, the volumes introduction and essays
develop the argument for queering environmentalisms and greening queer
theory in three steps: challenging the heteronormativity of investigations
into the sexuality of nature, exploring the intersections between queer
and ecological inlections of bio/politics (including spatial politics), and
ultimately queering environmental affect, ethics, and desire (3031).
Heterocentrism charges queer sexualities with being against nature, so the
irst step in a queer ecology requires reviewing the literature on nonhuman
same-sex acts, and scrutinizing the deinition of species boundaries. In this
irst section on queer sex, queer animality, the frequency with which Bruce
Bagemihl (1999), Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird (2008; Hird 2004a, 2004b),
Donna Haraway (2004), and Joan Roughgarden (2004) are cited proves the
eco-queer canon is already being formed. We begin with well-known feminist
science studies scholar Stacy Alaimo reviewing the wealth of documented
queer animal behaviors, making sexual diversity part of a larger
biodiversity (55). Here, we learn that Norway has already hosted the irstever Exhibition on Animal Homosexuality, aptly titled Against Nature?
(2007) and displaying multiple sexual behaviors that challenge the
heterosexist interpretation of same-sex activity between animals as anything
but sex. Alaimo deftly points out the limitations of cultural criticism that casts
animal sex into the separate sphere of nature, at the same time that
scientiic accounts of queer animal sex have rendered them too cultural, so
as to render them not sexual (62). Like human animals, other animal species
are both biological and cultural beings: if not, how shall we explain
simultaneously sexual and cultural facts that many primates not only use,
but manufacture, objects to aid with masturbation (61)? Alaimos survey of
animal sex and gender provides data that will complicate the foundations of
feminist theory. [and] also denaturalize familiar categories and
assumptions in queer theory and gay cultures (65). Noel Sturgeons essay
on Penguin Family Values, the only reprinted essay in the volume, takes up
the issue of reproductive justice by bringing an ecocritical lens to examining
the nature documentary The March of the Penguins (2005) and the childrens
film Happy Feet (2006): both present penguins as popular symbols that
conlate heterosexist family ideals with the need to resist environmental
threats (118). Asking what kind of environmental politics can encompass
the threat to both Emperor penguins and Alaskan Natives from global climate
change?, Sturgeon criticizes Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth for the
convenient omission of Arctic indigenous peoples and the foregrounding of
polar bears (along with the ilms anti-population rhetoric backgrounding the
problem of resource consumptiona topic taken up by other authors in this
book, notably Andil Gosine). To combat this heterocentric and ethnocentric
discourse, Sturgeon brings forward the childrens book And Tango Makes
Three (2005) about the gay penguins in Central Park Zoo, as well as the
plight of Arctic native peoples in an era of intense oil extraction and climate
change. Environmentalists should not depict environmentalism as a
heteronormative family romance, for such rhetoric obscures the
need to put pressure on corporations to change their labor practices
including health care, childcare, pay equity, and global labor
practices. [issues that are] important to real family values...as part
of an environmentalist agenda (12627). At the conceptual level, the
rhetoric of penguin family values limits ideas of what is natural and
obscures natures more agentive practices (128). Sturgeon invokes Donna
Haraways (2004) concept of naturecultures to describe the mutuallyconstituted relationships among nature and culture, nature and human,
human and animal, and human and machine (128). Scrutinizing the
heteronormative deinition of species as interbreed- ing natural populations
that are reproductively isolated from other such groups, Ladelle McWhorter
documents the ways that the concept of species has often brought great
harm to both racial and sexual minori- ties over the past two hundred years
and has been used to underwrite discourses that historically have
condemned sexual variation such as slavery and eugenics (75).
Acknowledging claims that sexual diversity persists because it contributes to
our species health, strength, and pros- pects for survival, McWhorter
nonethless cautions against resting pro- queer arguments on the concept of
species (91). Doing so gives too much authority to science for deciding
social, political, and moral questions, when science is [at best] an
important tool and component in the process...not a inal arbiter (96). If
sexual and gender diversity are valuable in human society, she concludes,
they are so regardless of their value for species preservation or evolution
(96). Here, McWhorters perceptive argument offers a critical foundation
stone for queer ecologys relevance to science studies and cultural studies
alike. Like Sturgeon, David Bells Queernaturecultures employs and augments Haraways term, using the examples of sex-positive performance
activism in defense of forests (yes, Fuck For Forests), nudist cultures, and the
whole project of reclaiming queer animals as necessary but not suf- icient
strategies for ideological transformation, since they do not challenge but
rather rest on the nature/culture divide (142). The project of reclaiming
queer animals, Bell explains, is driven by a political imperative to
naturalize the rights of sexual minoritiesbut this project sits at
odds...with the powerful anti-essentialism of queer theory and
politics (139). Strategic essentialism has been used to defend queer civil
rights against discrimination, to challenge the logic of the religious-based
ex- gay movement, and to argue against gay contagion using the born
gay claim. Rather than promote the division between theory and
politics in the contexts of queer/environmentalism, Bell argues for
reconnecting to sex in ways that renaturaliz[e] humanity...by
reminding us of our own embodied naturalness (137) and
acknowledging the impossibility of delinking nature from culture. His
questions about public sexwhat would it mean for our understandings of
public sex to think about nature-as-public? What does it mean to talk of the
publicness of nature? Andwhat does that mean for the politics of nature and
the politics of sex? (144)certainly leave readers thinking. The essays in
section two address queering environmental politics by examining the
environmental and spatial dimension of sexual politics, and the implicit

sexualization of environments. Queer ecology involves a necessary critique
of the heteronormativity and whiteness of environmental politics, the
editors explain, as well as a critique of the metro- normative stereotype of
gay life as inherently consumerist (34). Leading off the discussions, Andil
Gosines essay explores how both reproductive sex between non-white
people, and sex between men have been seen as toxic to nature (149);
both threaten colonial-imperialist and nationalist ambitions of white
heteropatriarchy (150). Examining reports of ar- rests for gay male
cruising in parks at Merced, California; the Minnesota National
Wildlife Refuge near Minneapolis; the Kokomo Reservoir Park in
Indiana, and Vancouvers Stanley Park, Gosine exposes a rhetoric of
gay sex as pollution: the cruising areas are described as trashstrewn pullofs, with condoms by the hundreds, and other
unsavory litter creating health hazards and endangering children.
Citing the Vancouver Park Board Commissions sensible strategy of
installing extra garbage can receptacles in the area, Gosine directly
challenges the belief that public, homosexual sex is bad for the
environment and shows the heteronormative solutions (i.e.,
cutting down bushes, building fences, paving pathways) tend to be
more environmentally destructive than gay sex. The theme of queer
environments is carried forward in Nancy Un- gers chapter, which chronicles
the construction of lesbian space in the United States, from the black lesbians
in Harlem to the white lesbian retreat at Cherry Grove, the back-to-the-land
movement in Oregon, the Pagoda womynspace in Florida (later reconstituted
at Alapine Village in Alabama), and the lesbian community established
through regional and national womens music festivals. Curiously, though
Unger notes the lesbian feminist political analysis that placed vegetarian
organic foods (182) and healthy food (189) as an integral part of lesbian
space, she fails to mention persistent connections between
vegan/vegetarianism and lesbian feminism which were foundational
components of the Michigan Womyns Music Festival, The Bloodroot
Collective, and many other lesbian-only collectives and communal living
spaces (Gaard 2000). These lesbians dietary choices were inspired by a
widespread belief that sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism, and
speciesism were part of the same heteropatriarchal system that lesbian
feminists wanted to leave behind. In this volume, Unger is not alone in
omitting critique of the dominant heteromasculinity/speciesism connection,
indicating this connection as an area for further development in queer
ecologies generally. The use of animal-based research in disparaging
queer sexualities is a case in point, where potential coalitions among
queer/environmental/ animal advocates could be stronger with more
theoretical development as foundation. Giovanna Di Chiros chapter
confronts the misplaced concern over abnormal sex diferences
(documented through ield studies of nonhuman animals) as
producing a heterosexist and transphobic hysteria that shifts
attention away from serious health problems caused by toxics, such
as breast, ovarian, and testicular cancers; immune system breakdown;
diabetes, and heart disease. Even progressive environmental scientists and
policy advocates have mobilized socially sanctioned heterosexism and
queer-fear in order to generate public interest and a sense of urgency to act,

Di Chiro laments (210)supporting her claim with examples from
environmental author Janisse Rays association between en- docrine
disruptors and transgender identity, and from atrazine-researcher Tyrone
Hayes, who opens his lecture by establishing both his outsider status (via
race and class) and his normality (via photos of his heterosexual parents and
present family). As a model alternative, Di Chiro points to the communitybased organization Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, which has
created an intersectional analysis of reproductive and environmental justice
through projects examining, for example, the cos- metic industrys use of
phthalates, thereby connecting the environmental health, safety, and
livelihood concerns of both consumers and workers and creating a
movement of young API [Asian Paciic Islander] women who now identify
themselves as environmentalists (223). Katie Hogans chapter continues
the exploration of toxics and coalition-building through cultural texts such as
Heather MacDonalds 1995 Ballot Measure 9, a documentary about the
Oregon Citizens Alliance attempt to amend the Oregon state constitution to
discriminate against queers, and Joseph Hansens 1984 detective novel
Nightwork, a gay mystery about toxic dumping as an aspect of toxic
heterosexuality (237). Together, Hogan argues, these texts show us what a
queer ecocritique and queer environmental justice looks like (250).
Completing the exploration of queers and space/place, Gordon Brent Ingram
pairs queer urban history with landscape ecology, examining the diverse
histories of gays and lesbians in Vancouvers West End. Far from being a true
ghetto, the West End offered a large network of public spaces, secluded
forest parklands, and the cleanest air and beaches of the city. Ingrams narrative illustrates how the forces of racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia
worked to construct the West End as a white middle-class gay male enclave,
eliminating Stanley Parks one remaining Native village, briely nurturing white
womens suffrage activists and (proto-lesbian) women athletes, and shifting
to a population of predominantly gay white men by the end of the 1960s.
Taken together, the essays in this section explore the sexualization of nature,
challenging the myth that queer communities are essentially urban
communities by exposing the repeated efforts to enforce and police the
unnaturally overdetermined heterosexualizion of both urban and rural
environments. The books inal section, desiring nature, functions as a sort
of solution to the problems of seeing sexuality and nature as separate, and
offers various visions for the future. Rachel Stein builds on theories advanced
in her well-known volume, New Perspectives on Environmental Justice:
Gender, Sexuality, and Activism (2004), to examine how the premises and
effects of crime-against-nature ideology...dislocate lesbians from social and
natural environments and how lesbian poets Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce
Pratt use their writing to strategically resituate homoerotic desire within the
natural landscape (288). In other words, The Place, Promised, That Has Not
Yet Been is in fact a revolutionary environment of sexual freedom, where
crime-against-nature ideology is subverted, and the struggles for
environmental justice and sexual justice are brought together. Bruce
Erickson invokes Canadas articulation of national identity with eco-sex
(making love in a canoe is the most Canadian act that two people can do,
309), revealing that, analogous to the function of the cow- boy in the
American West, the canoe was originally an indigenous cultural artifact
made into a tool of colonization, to extract the nation from the landscape
(312). The national identity and economy are blended and naturalized in the
appearance of the canoe on Canadas currency. In capitalism, the
construction of identity is inherently productive, fueling patterns of
consumption; alternatively, Erikson suggests ways to recon- ceptualize the
pleasures of canoeing outside of the desire for identity, outside of the
demands of nation (312). Two essays on lovemourning, and celebration-complete the volume. In Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies, MortimerSandilands examines the differences between grief and melancholy in the
works of Jan Zita Grovers North Enough: AIDS and Other Clearcuts (1997),
and Derek Jarmans Modern Nature (1991). Both authors come to love and
understand devastated landscapes, Mortimer-Sandilands argues, with
Grovers melancholic refusal to get over the loss of so many friends to
AIDS as well as the multiple presences of loss and death in the natural
landscape around her (348), and Jarmans queer memorialization that both
politicizes AIDS...and also establishes that memory in a sensu- ous, sensual
world of plants, shingle, wind, salt (351). By allowing the natural world to
be a ield of intimately mourned lives and possibilites, Grover and Jarman
draw strong parallels between non-heterosexual lives in the midst of
homophobia, and the more-than-human world in the midst of environmental
devastation (355). Ending on a more celebratory note, Dianne Chisholm
offers an eco queer reading of heterosexual nature writer Ellen Meloys four
books, arguing that Meloy rewrites E.O. Wilsons biophilia concept by
recognizing an erotic-ethical afiliation between human and nonhuman life
and describing a vitalism in which nonreproductive sex is a primary force of
nature (360). Meloys biophilia includes imagining leaping into bed with
desert lora to satiate a craving to know their seduction of color (364) and
thus is pronouncedly queer; Chisholm argues that Meloy envisions a future
where creatures deemed unproductive by utilitarian standards are valued for
their own nature, as well as for their part in determining a healthy local
ecology (375). If this is Meloys stance, how does she reconcile consuming
the nature that she professes to love? Chisholm gives us the paradoxical
aroused biophilia of Meloys participation in a bighorn sheep relocation
project, where Meloy simultaneously consumes the animals she is allegedly
saving: the taste of the meat lingers on my tongue. Rain and river. Bedrock
to soil to plant to milk to bone, muscle, and sinew. I am eating my canyon.
Eating stone (Meloy, cited in Chisholm, 372). Chisholms rather lippant
questionDoes [Meloys] ethics of becoming-bighorn not challenge the
most radical platform of queer activism, no less than the save-the-whale
(and other select-species versus companion-species) campaigns of animal
rights? (376)is neither developed nor supported, again conirming that this
intersection of speciesism and heterosexism has yet to be explored in queer
ecologies. That exploration needs to come quickly, for queer ecology is catching on. Already in Spring 2011, the leading magazine of nature writing, Orion,
has published a very readable essay explaining the core concepts of queer
ecology (Johnson 2011), at the same time as a leading ecocritic in Britain has
denounced their plausability in the scholarly journal of the Society for
Literature and Science, Conigurations (Garrard 2011). There, Greg Garrard
claims that the queer commitment to transgression seems to outweigh
concerns about conservation, since conservation relies on the Endangered

Species Act, and thus, species do matter; but McWhorters essay did not
argue for the end of species, only for a healthy suspicion of the concepts
ontological position, and for extricating arguments for sexual and gender
diversity from arguments for the value of species preservation/evolution. Or,
on the topic of toxic discourse Garrard insists it seems unlikely that
ecologists are merely dupes of heteronormativity for drawing attention to
feminization as a consequence of pollution, when in fact Di Chiros essay
acknowledges the urgency of responding to hormone disruptorswithout
having to access divisive rhetoric around heteronormativity. The more
substantive challenges Garrard raisesthe need for a green bailout for
queer theory, for example, or for considering the full range of ecopolitical
consequences of the critique of species(95)merit more serious responses.
For example, does the ecology of ecoqueers include the self-determination
of other species, or do we merely celebrate their polymorphous perversities
and then eat them? Donna Haraways natureculturesand Bells queering
thereofseem to offer liberation for human animals but not other animals.
Where are the vegan lesbians who have been defending the intersections of
sexuality and animality since the 1970s? Where is the greening of queer
theory, which has roots not just in the Lesbian Rang- ers but also in queer
critiques of gay rodeos, in the formation of PETAs Gay and Lesbian Animal
Rights Caucus, and in the Gays and Friends for Animals Rights presence in
the San Francisco Pride Parade of the 1990s (Mills 1994)? It seems odd in a
book celebrating lesbian seagulls and other nonreproductive sexual behaviors
among animal species that theres a silence about queer ecocritics eating
queer birds and their eggs, or drinking the breastmilk of other species. Now,
thats perversebut not deliciously so. As Annie Potts and Jovian Parry (2010)
have recently argued, for some environmental and sex-positive activists,
vegan sexuality challenges heteronormative masculinity, so perhaps theres
a connection between what you eat and what you do in bed(1993-94).
Would todays vegansexualswho, within their own sexual orientations,
prefer vegan sexual partnersalso be considered queer? Perhaps so, if
heterosexual nature writer Ellen Meloy is offered the inal word in Queer
Ecologies for her descriptions of interspecies eroticisms. Though an ardent
fan of inclusivity, I am nonetheless concerned about how such extensions of
the term queer may make its meaning too ambiguous for use as a critical
tool, eliding important differences between the real material, cultural, and
lifestyle experiences of gay men and lesbians (class and economics among
them). Is queer an identity, a set of behaviors, a perspective available to
people of all sexualities, or all of these simultaneously? Are there sets of
experiences or concepts that a queer ecological perspective would not
illuminate? For example, Ingrams chapter describing the different material
experiences of lesbians vs. gay men in Vancouvers West End, or Ungers
history of lesbian feminist space as motivated largely by politics, suggest
there are signiicant reasons for studying sexual-cultural groups separately
as well as collectively. Is queer ecology always feminist? Given the historical
foundations of lesbian feminism, ecofeminism, or material feminisms for
many of the contributors, it is curious that there is no speciic articulation of
the feminism-queer ecology connection. Unavoidably, despite the volumes
richness and range of discussion, a few questions remain. Among them,
perhaps one of the most important questions is how ecoqueer theory will
develop once it moves beyond this initial collective articulation from primarily
Anglo-American scholars. As Andil Gosines essay pointedly asks, is the
production of queer ecology a decidedly Eu- roamerican project? and is
the privileging of Euroamerican stories of en- vironmentalismeven for the
purpose of critical examinationcomplicit with the agendas of empire, and
American imperialism in particular? (166). Instead of separating the queer
subject from the racialized-as-non- white subject and effectively
disappearing the non-white queer, as well as the diasporic subject, Gosine
suggests a special focus on the constitution of the non-white queer
subject...[as] a more insightful project of queer ecology (167). As the first
book-length volume to establish the intersections of queer theory and
environmentalisms at such depth, the publication of Queer Ecologies has
decisively created a rich ield for further research. May the Lesbian
Rangers be our guides!
QUEER ECOLOGY OFFERS NEW INSIGHTS FOR A SOCIETY

BUILT ON THE EXPLOITATION OF THE NATURAL WORLD
Although ecological criticism and queer theory seem
incompatible, their intersection OVERTURNS the FANTASY
OF NATURE. Our era necessitates strategies that move
beyond passive and active DESTRUCTION of the nonhuman. Queering ecology DISTORTS gender binaries that
construct the world in terms of PARANOIA and
ESSENTIALISM. To separate the environment from our own
social location is to endorse INTELLECTUAL EXCLUSIONS.
Repudiating dirt and pollution from the construction of
our own identity finds its corollary in VOMITING and
EXCRETING OUT undesirable populations. The natural
world MUST BE BROUGHT CLOSE and made INTIMATE.
Morton 10
Timothy Morton is the Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, he
was written extensively on metaphysics, realism, ecology, and object-oriented ontology,
Guest Column: Queer Ecology, 2010, Journal of the Modern Language Association of America,
Vol. 125, No. 2, file:///Users/joesmith/Downloads/pmlamorton2010-libre.pdf
ECOLOGICAL CRITICISM AND QUEER THEORY SEEM INCOMPATIBLE,

but if they met, there would be a fantastic explosion . How shall we
accomplish this perverse, Frankensteinian meme splice? Ill propose some
hypothetical methods and frameworks for a field that doesnt quite existqueer ecology. The pathbreaking
work of Catriona Sandilands, Greta Gaard, and the journal Undercurrents must be acknowledged here.)
This exercise in hubris is bound to rattle nerves and raise hackles , but
please bear with me on this test light. Start with the basics. Lets not create this field by comparing
literary-critical apples and oranges. Lets do it the hard way, up from foundations (or unfoundations). Lets
do it in the name of ecology itself, which demands intimacies with other beings that queer theory also
our era requires it we are losing touch

with a fantasy Nature that never really existed (I capitalize Nature to make it
look less natural), while we actively and passively destroy life-forms
inhabiting and constituting the bio-sphere, in Earths sixth mass
demands, in another key. Lets do it because
extinction event. Giving up a fantasy is even harder than giving up a

reality. At Christmas 2008, Pope Benedict XVI declared that if tropical forests deserve our protection,
then the human being (denied as man and woman) deserves it no less: We need something like
To
undermine the false dichotomy of Nature and history on which papal
homophobia depends, scholarship must research the ways in which
queerness, in its variegated forms, is installed in biological
substance as such and is not simply a blip in cultural history.2
Unfortunately, a great deal of ecocriticism provides a toxic
environment in which to spawn queer ecology. Ecofeminism (the classic
example is Carolyn Merchants he Death of Nature) arose out of feminist separatism,
wedded to a biological essentialism that, strategic or not, is
grounded on binary diference and thus unhelpful for the kinds of
diference multiplication that is queer theorys brilliance. Much
American ecocriticism is a vector for various masculinity memes,
including rugged individualism, a phallic authoritarian sublime, and
an allergy to femininity in all its forms (as sheer appearance, as the signifier, as
human ecology, meant in the right way. His proclamation explicitly targeted gender theory.
display). Other environmentalisms (such as ecophenomenology, as practiced by Kate Rigby, Glen Mazis,
and others) are more promising for their flexible, experiential view that Nature is a process, not a product
but I worry that they might just be upgrades. Judith Butler makes a case for queer ecology, because she
heterosexist gender performance produces a metaphysical

manifold that separates inside from outside. The inside-outside
manifold is fundamental for thinking the environment as a
metaphysical, closed systemNature. This is impossible to construe
without violence. Using Mary Douglass Purity and Danger and Julia Kristevas Powers of Horror,
Butler demonstrates that the inside-outside manifold sustains gender
identification and rituals of exclusion that can never be totally
successfulthe body just isnt an impermeable, closed form (Gender
shows how
Trouble 13334). Butler also holds that nature as such be thoroughly revised through ecological notions
of interrelatedness (Bodies 4). As Ive argued elsewhere, ideologies of Nature are founded on insideoutside structures that resemble the boundaries heterosexism polices (Ecology 19, 25, 40, 5254, 6364,
67, 78; Eco- logocentrism). All life-forms, along with the environments they compose and inhabit, defy
boundaries between inside and outside at every level. When we examine the environment, it shimmers,
When the environment becomes

intimateas in our age of ecological panic and scientifically
measurable risk (Beck)it is decisively no longer an environment, since
it no longer just happens around us: thats the diference between
weather and climate. Human society used to define itself by
excluding dirt and pollution. We cannot now endorse this exclusion,
nor can we believe in the world it produces. This is literally about
realizing where your waste goes. Excluding pollution is part of
performing Nature as pristine, wild, immediate, and pure. To have
subjects and objects, one must have abjects to vomit or excrete
and figures emerge in a strange distortion.3
(Kristeva). By repressing the abject, environmentalismsI am not de- noting particular movements but
suggesting affinities with, say, heterosexism or racism claiming to subvert or reconcile the subjectobject manifold only produce a new and improved brand of Nature.
Impact Framing - AT: Extinction

APOCALYPSE NOW HAS BECOME APOCALYPSE FROM
NOW ON
In 1989, at the conclusion of the Cold War, nuclear
weapons no longer DOMINATED the geopolitical climate or
COMMANDED American popular culture. NUCLEAR
AMENSIA has set in, and nukes have become the vintage
toys of a bygone era. Apocalypse is no longer global, it
has been LOCALIZED and its scope limited to a so-called
OTHER.
If the postmodern is NECESSARILY POSTNUCELAR, then
the tools of power had to be REARTICULATED. The civic
utility of threats lies in their ability to DEFINE national
identity. TO BE AMERICAN, TO AFFIRM THE UNITED STATES
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT shows a commitment to defend
liberty, democracy, individualism, and private property.
Without an EVIL EMPIRE to fight against, this
FOUNDATIONAL PRINCIPLE would RUPTURE. Suddenly, the
fight against AIDS emerged as a national imperative and
homosexuality morphed into a political instrument to
avoid dtente. The QUEER SUBJECT became a contagion to
the social body, a destructive force of both
CONDEMNATION and FASCINATION.
Apocalyptic rhetoric has not VANISHED; its deployment
has simply become more implicit and strategic. The
testing of nukes became a METAPHOR for SEXUAL
INTERCOURSE and the NUCLEAR FAMILY aligned itself with
notions of normalcy and production.
Coviello 2k
Peter Coviello has been at Bowdoin College since 1998, where he specializes in nineteenthcentury American literature and queer studies, and where he has served as Chair of the
departments of English, Africana Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies. Since 2011 he has
been a member of the editorial board at American Literature. His work has appeared in PMLA,
ELH, Raritan, American Literature, GLQ, and MLQ as well as in venues like Frieze and The
Believer. Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations, Apocalypse From
now On, pp. 40-43, University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition, 2000
to claim that American culture is at present decisively

postnuclear is not to say that the world we inhabit is in any way
post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I began by saying, changedit
did not go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of
Perhaps. But
yesteryear, apocalypse signified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques
in the
postnuclear world apocalypse is an afair whose parameters are
definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypse is defined
now by the affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an
"other" people whose very presence might then be written as a
kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and
prosperity of a cherished "general population." This fact seems to me to
stand behind Susan Sontags incisive observation, from 1989, that, Apocalypse is now a
long-running serial: not Apocalypse Now but Apocalypse from
Now On. The decisive point here in the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point
Sontag goes on, at length, to miss) is that apocalypse is ever present because, as
an element in a vast economy of power, it is ever useful. That is,
through the perpetual threat of destructionthrough the constant
reproduction of the figure of apocalypseagencies of power
ensure their authority to act on and through the bodies of a
particular population. No one turns this point more persuasively than Michel Foucault, who
Derridas suitably menacing phrase) remainderless and a-symbolic destruction, then
in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addresses himself to the problem of a
power that is less repressive than productive, less life threatening than, in his words, "life-
Power, he contends, exerts a positive influence on life . . .

[and] endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it,
subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations ." In
his brief comments on what he calls the atomic situation," however, Foucault insists as well that the
productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for a
uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For as
managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race," agencies
of modern power presume to act on the behalf of the existence of
everyone. Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and
survival in this way serves to authorize any expression of force, no
matter how invasive or, indeed, potentially annihilating . "If genocide is
administering.
indeed the dream of modern power," Foucault writes, this is not because of a recent return to the
ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the
For a state that would arm itself

not with the power to kill its population, but with a more
comprehensive power over the patterns and functioning of its
collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or
otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done
without. A number of questions present themselves: how, in a postnuclear world, is power
race, and the large-scale phenomena of population."
dispersed and seized and operated? Can we discover, in this age of disarmament, presences not so
much new as newly articulated that form equivalent threats to, say "bodies and the race," to the
existence of everyone," threats through which a postnuclear regime might reconstitute itself with all
If the nuclear has vanished so entirely from the

cultural stage, might some other apocalyptic spectacle have more
or less seamlessly replaced it, and have taken over some of the
civic utility once extracted from the threat of nuclear destruction?
To anyone possessed of an at least passing familiarity with the
last decade of American public life, my referent should now be
clear: nothing exemplifies the postnuclear localization of the
figure of apocalypse more visibly or more harrowingly; than AIDS.
the more efficiency?
Sometime around 1989, and with a thoroughness and a rapidity that I think we are only now beginning
the menace of AIDS unseated nuclear warfare as the

defining apocalyptic threat to American health and security. What I
to grasp,
want to take up in this chapter, then, are the uncanny transactions between these two genres of
apocalypse, the nuclear and the sexual, and the quietly sweeping rearrangements of American civic life
their interchange effects. It would of course startle no one to say that queer communities are a great
deal more visible now than they were fifteen years ago, and that such visibility comes, at least in part,
as a rather direct result of AIDS, which has in that brief time turned upon gay men in particular the full
glare of any number of differently calibrated public gazes. Still, it's remarkable- and, I think, necessary
to consider how deeply scored this multifaceted national investment in homosexuality has been by
the shifting political imperatives of a nuclear state on the verge of dtente. I mean to suggest, broadly
in the wake of a rapidly deflating nuclear threat, violently

homophobic responses to AIDS came to operate in America with
all the decisiveness and utility of a defensive, fully national
initiative. I look in the first half of the pages that follow at the often arrestingly lurid figures of
that
nuclear discourse, to show how intimately bonded the nuclear and the sexual actually were, before the
advent of AIDS gave to such bonding a ghastly quality of inevitability. In the second half, I take up the
matter of the new queer visibility" by considering the extractions from, and inflictions upon, gay life
and gay possibility that the various narrative mechanisms of popular gay enfranchisement seem to
demand. Part of my concern is thus to trace a few of the salient transformations in national polity
queer peoples became at once the targets of a uniquely

virulent condemnatory campaign, and the objects of sustained,
and not always spiteful, public fascination. Figuring out exactly how this double
whereby
movement works seems to me a matter of some analytic importance, especially since this
unprecedented national interest in homosexuality manifests itself not least consequentially in the
emergence of the very discipline under whose auspices this collection of essays has been gather
together: queer studies. One might say that the undertaking of this chapter is thus a kind of genealogy:
not so much a genealogy of queer studies per se as of the conditions of American public life in which it
became possible for such a critical discourse to emerge, in institutions (like the university) otherwise
not wholly amenable to gay life. The overarching point I want to make here, though, is simply that in
shift from a nuclear to a postnuclear political dispensation what

unfolds is not a diminishment, but rather a series of calculated
adjustments to the state's capacity to administer to its citizens
carefully regulated quantities of life. As a result of this readjustment, a pivotal
the
figure in the legitimation of power over life is snow, more than every before, the gay man.
THE VIEW OF THE CHILD AS AN IDOL OF REPRODUCTIVE

FUTURISM NECESSARILY RELIES ON THE SACRIFICE OF THE
QUEER BODY
Privileging large-scale impacts over systemic violence is
the kind of rationale that legitimizes violence in the first
place.
Edelman 4
Lee Edelman, Professor of English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive, 2004, page 28-31
Bernard Law, the former cardinal of Boston, mistaking (or maybe understanding too well) the
degree of authority bestowed on him by the signifier of his patronymic, denounced in 1996
proposed legislation giving health care benefits to same-sex
partners of municipal employees. He did so by proclaiming , in a
noteworthy instance of piety in the sky, that bestowing such access to health
care would profoundly diminish the marital bond. Society, he
opined, has a special interest in the protection, care and
upbringing of children. Because marriage remains the principal,
and the best, framework for the nurture, education and
socialization of children, the state has a special interest in
marriage. With this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly committed to the figure of the Child
that it will justify refusing health care benefits to the adults that some children become, Law lent
his voice to the mortifying mantra of a communal jouissance that
depends on the fetishization of the Child at the expense of
whatever such fetishization must inescapably queer. Some seven years

later, after Law had resigned for his failure to protect Catholic children from sexual assault by pedophile
priests, Pope John Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as
parodic versions of authentic families, based on individual egoism rather than genuine love. Justifying
he observed, Such a caricature has no future and

cannot give future to any society. Queers must respond to the
violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal
that condemnation,
right to the social orders prerogatives, not only by insisting on our equal right to the social orders
by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the

the Symbolic order for which they stand here anyway in each
and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality : Fuck the
social order and the Child in whose name were collectively
terrorized; fuck annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid
on the Net; fuck laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the
whole network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as
its prop. We might like to believe that with patience, with work, with generous contributions to
coherence and integrity, but also
whole of
lobbying groups or generous participation in activist group so generous doses of legal savvy and
electoral sophistication, the future will hold a place for us a place at the political table that wont have
there are no
queers in that future as there can be no future for queer, chosen
as they are to bear the bad tidings that there can be no future at
all: that the future, as Annies hymn to the hope of Tomorrow understands, is always / A day /
to come at the cost of the places we seek in the bed or the bar or the baths. But
Away. Like the lover son Keats Grecian urn, forever near the goal of a union theyll never in fact
were held in thrall by a future continually deferred by time

itself, constrained to pursue the dream of a day when today are
one. That future is nothing but kid stuf, reborn each day to screen
out the grave that gapes from within the lifeless letter , luring us
into, ensnaring us in, reality's gossamer web. Those queered by
the social order that projects its death drive onto them are no
doubt positioned to recognize the structuring fantasy that so
defines them. But they're positioned as well to recognize the irreducibility of that fantasy and
the cost of construing it as contingent to the logic of social organization as such. Acceding to
this figural identification with the undoing of identity, which is also to say with the
achieve,
disarticulation of social and Symbolic form, might well be described, in John Brenkman's words, as
"politically
self-destructive. But politics (as the social elaboration of reality) and

the self (as mere prosthesis maintaining the future for the figural Child), are what
queerness, again as figure, necessarily destroys necessarily
insofar as this " s e l f " is the agent of reproductive futurism and
this "politics" the means of its promulgation as the order of social
reality. But perhaps, as Lacan's engagement with Antigone in Seminar 7 suggests, political
self-destruction inheres in the only act that counts as one: the act
of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life.
If the fate of the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of futurity, if the jouissance,
the corrosive enjoyment, intrinsic to queer (non)identity annihilates the
fetishistic jouissance that works to consolidate identity by
allowing reality to coagulate around its ritual reproduction, then
the only oppositional status to which our queerness could ever
lead would depend on our taking seriously the place of the death
drive we're called on to figure and insisting, against the cult of the
Child and the political order it enforces, that we, as Guy
Hocquenghem made clear, are "not the signifier of what might
become a new form of 'social organisation,' " that we do not
intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since all of these
fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of
the future. We choose, instead, not to choose the Child, as
disciplinary image of the Imaginary past or as site of a projective
identification with an always impossible future. The queerness we propose, in
Hocquenghem's words, "is unaware of the passing of generations as stages on the road to better living.
It knows nothing about 'sacrifice now for the sake of future

generations' . . . [it] knows that civilisation alone is mortal." Even more: it delights in that
mortality as the negation of everything that would define itself, moralistically, as pro-life. It is we
who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the signifier,
pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned should
we speak them or not: that are the advocates of abortion; that the
Child as futurity's emblem must die; that the future is mere
repetition and just as lethal as the past. Our queerness has
nothing to ofer a Symbolic that lives by denying that nothingness
except an insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness
entails, an insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy
screen of futurity, shattering narrative temporality with irony's
always explosive force. And so what is queerest about us,
queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to
insist intransitivelyto insist that the future stop here.
Binary Extension
Sexuality is an undefined in Nature- society and
civilization have placed these categories for the purpose
of procreation.
Mortimer-Sandilands 5
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, is Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture at York

University. Her work lies at the intersections of queer and feminist theory, environmental
philosophy and political theory, and cultural studies. She is the author of The Good-Natured
Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minnesota, 1999), the co-editor (with
Rebecca Raglon and Melody Hessing) of This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian
Environment (UBC, 2004), and is working on a manuscript called Pastoral Traditions, Sexual
Subversions: Lesbian Histories of Nature Writing.
http://www.invisibleculture.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/issue9_sandilands.pdf,
Originally delivered as a speech on 2/19/04. Excerpt from pages 7 to 9
Perhaps the most important

starting-point for this analysis is the fact that the categories
through which we currently understand sexuality and sexual
Histories of sexuality and ecology: un/ naturalizing the queer:
identity are not natural. By this, I mean that the categories gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer are not given in nature.
Although, as biologist Bruce Bagemihl has demonstrated,
homoerotic activity flourishes, and always has, in a wide range of
animal species, the way in which we predominantly understand
sexuality at the turn of the twenty-first century is a historical
artifact located in very specific ideas and institutions. 11 In
particular, the idea of sexuality as a part of ones identity, and a
part of ones identity that might be grounded in some fact of
biology, is a very recent development indeed . As Michel Foucault has
pointed out, homosexual as a distinct category of persons is a
unique product of Victorian society ; prior to the nineteenth century,
there was a wide range of forms of sexual activity, but these sexual
acts were among men, at least understood as potentially
occurring anywhere, and between anyone. 12 Thus, for example, the
British Navy had a rule by which buggery was perfectly legitimate
provided the sailors had been at sea for at least six months ;
sodomy, here, was not something that happened because a sailor
was gay, but was simply a particular if still not quite respectable
sexual activity. The fact that we now commonly understand sexuality as question of natural
identity has a great deal to do with the confluence of biomedical thinking and social regulation that
developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century. At the same time as biological science was
creating an understanding of categories of species based on their possession of certain traits, medical
science was developing a categorization of sexual traits with the agenda of explaining sexual behavior as
The rise of evolutionary thought

defined a biological narrative that had a large influence on medical
research on sexuality; particularly important were ideas of sexual
selection and reproductive fitness, in which the species survival was
understood to be dependent on the strongest and best reproducers
part of the biological life of the human species.
getting together. In this narrative, heterosexuality came to be

understood, for the first time in history, as a distinct category of
sexual practice, the naturalness of which was solidified by its
opposition to so-called deviant sexual identities that did not fit into
an evolutionary narrative. For Darwin, only heterosexual courtship
and mating could be natural because it was reproduction that
allowed the species to continue; despite overwhelming evidence to
suggest that homoeroticism is everywhere in nature, evolutionary
thought thus came to define it as aberrant.
Uncivilized Writing
Our advocacy brings topical discussions closer to nature
in order to re-align ourselves with our ecological, sexual,
and gendered origins. This debate will be uncivilized, and
the blurred lines of the civil will be washed away in
oceans of change.
We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All

around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing
into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it. We reject the
faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be
reduced to a set of problems in need of technological or political
solutions. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves.
We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation:
the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of
our separation from nature. These myths are more dangerous for
the fact that we have forgotten they are myths. We will reassert the
role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through
stories that we weave reality. Humans are not the point and
purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step
outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the
non-human world. We will celebrate writing and art which is
grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been
dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan
citadels. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or
ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our
fingernails. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together,
we will find the hope beyond hope , the paths which lead to the
unknown world ahead of us.
This speech is an act of Uncivilized writing, which seeks to

deconstruct and analyze the position of humanity in
relation to ecology in reference to civil society. Uncivilized
writing.
Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be

left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number
crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners.
Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been
muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is
there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are
the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of
writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an
exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord? If the answers
to these questions have been scarce up to now, it is perhaps both
because the depth of collective denial is so great, and because the
challenge is so very daunting. We are daunted by it, ourselves. But we believe it
needs to be risen to. We believe that art must look over the edge,
face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the
challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic
response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind. This
response we call Uncivilised art, and we are interested in one branch
of it in particular: Uncivilised writing. Uncivilised writing is writing
which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we
are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which
we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or
intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of
their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project.
Apes whose project has been to tame, to control, to subdue or to destroy to civilise
the forests, the deserts, the wild lands and the seas, to impose bonds on the minds of
their own in order that they might feel nothing when they exploit or
destroy their fellow creatures. Against the civilising project, which
has become the progenitor of ecocide, Uncivilised writing ofers not
a non-human perspectivewe remain human and, even now, are not quite ashamed but
a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as
the first palanquin in a glorious procession. It ofers an unblinking
look at the forces among which we find ourselves.
ID PTX Good
Identity politics are key to solve oppression--critics ignore
the reality
Von Blum '13
Paul Von Blum is a senior lecturer in African American studies and communication studies at
UCLA, "In Defense of Identity Politics," 2001, http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/in-defense-ofidentity-politics
critics have taken strong issue with identity politics,

especially in the past few decades. Many of these critics downplay the
ongoing violence of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and
ableism that continue to provoke identity-based organizing in the present day. I
would like to offer some reflections on why identity politics movements strengthen
Conservative and liberal
rather than weaken the Left and why we all need to support identitybased organizing if we are to address the ongoing, dismal realities of racial exclusion
and overt and institutional discrimination against historically oppressed
populations.
Critics of ID politics criticize in part because of their

unfamiliarity with the subject matter and should be
discredited as such
Duberman '1
Martin Duberman has a Harvard PhD in history, and is also the Amherst College Doctor of
Humane Letters and professor emeritus of history at Herbert Lehman College and CUNY, "In
Defense of Identity Politics," 2001, http://inthesetimes.com/issue/25/16/duberman2516.html
critics of identity politics give no sign that they have actually

read, let alone absorbed, the work of queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky
The
Sedgwick, Jeffrey Weeks, Michael Warner, Wayne Koestenbaum or Judith Butler--to name only a few of the
A large body of work now exists that, taken together, presents a

startling set of postulates about such matters of
universal importance as the historicity and fluidity of sexual desire, the
performative nature of gender, and the complex multiplicity of attractions, fantasies,
more prominent.
impulses and narratives that lie within us all.
AT: Nature not Queer

THE NOTION THAT SEXUALITY HAS DEFINABLE BORDERS
AND SEQUENCES IS PART AND PARCEL OF A
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ORIENTATION THAT AUTHORIZES
VIOLENCE. OUR interrogation of sexual orientation allows
us to diverge from the line in society that forces us to be
straight. A queer phenomenology allows us to
interrogate heteronormativity.
Ahmed '8 (Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed,
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12, Number 4, 2006, pp.
543-574 (Article), Vlad)
What then does it mean to be oriented sexually? We might suggest
first that such orientations take time. We can paraphrase Simone de
Beauvoir by starting with the following point: One is not born, but
becomes straight.24 What does it mean to posit straightness as
about becoming rather than being? That such a question is askable
reminds us that we should not approach the question of orientation simply
as a spatial question. We might note here that dwelling refers not only
to the process of coming to reside, or what Heidegger calls making

room,25 but also to time: to dwell on something is to linger, or even to
delay or postpone. If orientation is a matter of how we reside or how
we clear space that is familiar, then orientations also take time .
Orientations allow us to take up space insofar as they take time.
Even when orientations seem to be about which way we are facing in
the present, they also point us toward the future. The hope of
changing directions is always that we do not know where some
paths may take us: risking departure from the straight and narrow,
makes new futures possible, which might involve going astray,
getting lost, or even becoming queer. The temporality of orientation
reminds us that orientations are efects of what we tend toward,
where the toward marks a space and time that is almost, but not
quite, available in the present. In the case of sexual orientation, it is
not then simply that we have it. To become straight means not only
that we have to turn toward the objects given to us by heterosexual
culture but also that we must turn away from objects that take us of
this line. The queer subject within straight culture hence deviates
and is made socially present as a deviant. What is present to us in
the present is not casual: as I have suggested, we do not just
acquire our orientations because we find things here or there.
Rather, certain objects are available to us because of lines that we
have already taken: our life courses follow a certain sequence, which
is also a matter of following a direction or of being directed in a
certain way (birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, reproduction,
death), as Judith Halberstam has shown us in her reflections on the
temporality of the family and the expenditure of family time.26 The
concept of orientations allows us to expose how life gets directed
through the very requirement that we follow what is already given
to us. For a life to count as a good life, it must return the debt of its
life by taking on the direction promised as a social good, which
means imagining ones futurity in terms of reaching certain points
along a life course. Such points accumulate, creating the impression of a
straight line. To follow such a line might be a way to become straight, by
not deviating at any point. The relationship between following a line and
the conditions for the emergence of lines is often ambiguous. Which one
comes first? I have always been struck by the phrase a path well trodden.
A path is made by repeatedly passing over ground. We can see the path
as a trace of past journeys, made out of footprints, traces of feet

that tread and in treading create a line on the ground. When people
stop treading, the path may disappear. When we see the line of the
ground before us, we tend to walk on it, as a path clears the way. So we
walk on the path as it is before us, but it is only before us as an efect of
being walked upon. A paradox of the footprint emerges. Lines are both
created by being followed and are followed by being created. The

lines that direct us, as lines of thought as well as lines of motion, are
in this way performative: they depend on the repetition of norms
and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also
created as an efect of this repetition. To say that lines are performative
is to say that we find our way, we know which direction we face, only as an
efect of work, which is often hidden from view. So in following the
directions, I arrive, as if by magic. Directions are then about the magic of
arrival. In a way, the work of arrival is forgotten in the very feeling that the
arrival is magic. The work involves following directions; we arrive when we
have followed them properly: bad readings just will not get us there.
Following lines also involves forms of social investment. Such investments
promise return (if we follow this line, then this or that will follow), which
might sustain the very will to keep going. Through such investments in the
promise of return, subjects reproduce the lines that they follow.
Considering the politics of the straight line helps us rethink the

relationship between inheritance (the lines that are given as our point
of arrival into familial and social space) and reproduction (the demand
that we return the gift of the line by extending that line). It is not
automatic that we reproduce what we inherit or that we always convert our
inheritance into possessions. We must pay attention to the pressure to
make such conversions. We can recall here the diferent meanings of
the word pressure: the social pressure to follow a certain course, to

live a certain kind of life, and even to reproduce that life, can feel
like a physical press on the surface of the body, which creates its
own impressions for sure. We are pressed into lines, just as lines are the
accumulation of such moments of pressure, or what we can call stress
points.
Queer ecology creates a sexual politics that more clearly

includes considerations of the natural world and its
biosocial constitution, erasing the human/nature binary.
White 10 (What's the Matter? Melissa Autumn White, Melissa Autumn
White is a transdisciplinary queer and feminist scholar. Her research
interests include viruses, afect, embodiment, subjectivity, knowledge,
territoriality, sovereignty and power, Vlad)
To begin, again, with matter, this review turns to two recent collections that
take up the question of matter in distinctive philosophical and political
ways: Diana Coole's and Samantha Frost's New Materialisms: Ontology,
Agency, and Politics (2010) and Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson's
Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010). Together, these
volumes [End Page 339] materialize richly populated and verdant worlds in
which to rethink and reconsider the matter of materiality, a matter of
theoretical concern that is, as Coole and Frost see it, "everywhere we look"
(2). "Everywhere we look," they write, "we are witnessing scattered
but insistent demands for more materialist modes of analysis and for
new ways of thinking about matter and processes of materialization "
(2). The question that both of these volumes leave us withor ought to
leave is withis, Why? Why now? In other words, what are the material
conditions that make the turn to the "new materialisms" not only possible,
but also felt as urgent, indeed, necessary? Marx, mma: "all that is solid
melts into air," and it makes us, understandably, anxious. Longing for a
return to what matters as even the geography closest inthe body loses its
solidity, experienced as a system of parts (kidneys, wombs for hire, limbs
that don't belong), an assemblage of cells, an ecology of microbes,
parasites and viruses, a fleshy knot of capacities and debilities, as our
intimate and physical lives become increasingly saturated "by digital,
wireless, and virtual technologies" (5).2 Sorceries of capitalism: "all that is
holy is profaned." Both New Materialisms and Queer Ecologies are, in the
truest sense, timely volumes; both collections illuminate and reflect
contemporary compulsions in critical theory while making important
contributions to transdisciplinary feminist and queer posthumanist inquiry,
a minor arc of theory that nevertheless has an extensive history in feminist
studies of science, technology, and epistemology, as Sara Ahmed (2008)
has argued elsewhere.3 There is, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost suggest,
"an apparent paradox in thinking about matter: as soon as we do so,
we seem to distance ourselves from it, and within the space that
opens up, a host of immaterial things seem to emerge: language,
consciousness, subjectivity, agency, mind, soul; also imagination,
emotion, values, meaning, and so on" (1-2). Yet, after Butler's
theorizations of the radical inseparability of embodiment, psychic life, and
discourse (1990, 1993, 1997), and in the face of autonomist theorizations of
the information economy (e.g., Marazzi 1994; Hardt and Negri 2004; Clough
2007; Berardi 2009), what can it possibly mean to render language, afect,
subjectivity, imagination, mind, and, indeed "soul" as "immaterial things"?
Having opened thus, it seems important to clarify that the "new

materialisms" are not to be confused with historical materialism,
though both volumes do situate their inquiries as emerging from
scientific and philosophical cleavages not unlike the ones that
opened the ground for the emergence of evolutionary and
sexological thought in Darwin and Kraft-Ebing [End Page 340]
(Sandilands and Erickson, Queer Ecologies, 7), as well as "the great
materialist philosophies of the nineteenth century, notably those of Marx,
Nietzsche, and Freud" (Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 5). Queer
Ecologies and New Materialisms delve, in distinct ways, into the complex
economies and ecologies of matter, materiality, concepts, and objects to
foster methodologies of inquiry that can begin to do justice to the complex
interdependencies between the human (and) the animal, nature (and)
culture, agency (and) information, sex (and) desire, politics (and) ethics,
embodiment (and) technology. Drawing on "queer" as both a noun and a
verb, Queer Ecologies brings together essays that explore the

genealogical and phenomenological entanglements of sex and nature to
develop "a sexual politics that more clearly includes considerations

of the natural world and its biosocial constitution, and an
environmental politics that demonstrates an understanding of the
ways in which sexual relations organize and influence both the
material world of nature and our perceptions, experiences, and
constitutions of that world " (5). Deploying "queer ecology" as a
strategy of critique and deconstruction, this volume as a whole
creates spaces for erotic poetics and politics of naturecultures to
press up against what various included authors identify as
imperatives of heteronormative reprocentricity (Sandilands and
Erickson), econormativity (Chiro), speciest logics (McWhorter), biophilia
(Chisholm), and melancholia (Sandilands). Sandilands and Erickson's
excellent introduction crafts a genealogy of queer ecology that
simultaneously gestures toward its phenomenology by way of a surprisingly
provocative reading of Brokeback Mountain, as well as a reading of texts
that have opened up space for a queer ecology, including Greta Gaard's
1997 article, "Toward a Queer Ecofeminism"; Scott Herring's recent work on
rural queer sexualities; and, of course, Eli Clare's moving memoir, Exile and
Pride (1999), which poetically opens up a world in which corporeal, class,
sexual, and environmental politics are deeply enmeshed in the very act of
writing. Following this strong introduction, the collection unfolds in three
parts. In the first, Against Nature? Queer Sex, Queer Animality, four essays
resituate queer desire in and through the more-than-human world. Stacy
Alaimo ofers an "epistemology of the zoological closet" (56) in her reading
of "queer" animals; Ladelle McWhorter explores the dangers that
inhere in a reliance on deeply racialized discourses of "diversity" and

"species" in making queer claims to social inclusion; Nol Sturgeon
advances an eco-queer reading of The March of the Penguins (2005); and
David Bell reflects [End Page 341] on Fuck for Forests (FFF), a not-for-profit
organization currently based in Berlin that produces ecoporn to raise
money for environmental justice projects. In part 2, Green, Pink, and Public:
Queering Environmental Politics, Andil Gosine, Nancy G. Unger, Giovanna Di
Chiro, Katie Hogan, and Gordon Brent Ingram collectively investigate the
intersections of sex, race-racism, nature, kinship, class, and landscapes
with the aim of opening spaces for more radically transformative
ecopolitics. Rebecca Stein continues this work against the notion of queer
sex as a "crime against nature" in her ecopoetic readings of Adrienne Rich
and Minnie Bruce Pratt in the third and final part of the book, Desiring
Nature? Queer Attachments, in which Bruce Erickson provides a queer
reading of sex ecology and nation building in his deconstruction of a mark
of Canadian-ness: the ability to make love in a canoe. Meanwhile, Catriona
Sandilands ofers an evocative consideration of melancholia as "a psychic
state of being that holds the possibility for memory's transformation into
an ethical and political environmental reflection" (354). Diane Chisholm
closes the collection with a gesture toward our more-than-human futures
through a reading of Ellen Meloy's writings on "bio-erotic-diversity" (359),
which, Chisholm contends, engenders something like a queer devotion to
biophilia that works against Lee Edelman's ironically reprocentric No Future
(2004). Gathering a strong list of contributors, Diana Coole and Samantha
Frost open New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics with an
extensive introduction that argues that particle physics, biotechnology,
theoretical physics, and chaos complexity theory have had profound efects
on the ways in which we understand ontology, such that our "sense of the
patterns or characteristics of matter's movements" have been transformed
(13). At the same time, these epistemologies have undermined "the idea of
stable and predictable material substance, hastening a realization that our
natural environment is far more complex, unstable, fragile, and interactive"
than many ontoepistemologies have allowed (13). The essays collected
here, in three parts, ofer nuanced responses to this shifting ground for
thinking matter and for producing theory that matters.
AT: Not Intersectional

Queer Ecologist movements are influenced by scholarship
rooted in an intersectional approach
Gaard 11 (Greta Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and
documentary filmmaker. Gaard's academic work in the realms of
ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the
disciplines of composition and literary criticism. Her theoretical work
extending ecofeminist thought into queer theory, vegetarianism, and
animal liberation has been influential within women's studies. A cofounder
of the Minnesota Green Party, Gaard documented the transition of the U.S.
Green movement into the Green Party of the United States in her book,
Ecological Politics. She is currently a professor of English at University of
Wisconsin-River Falls and a community faculty member in Women's
Studies at Metropolitan State University, Twin Cities; Ethics & the
Environment, Volume 16, Number 2, Fall 2011; Published by Indiana
University Press; Green, Pink and Lavender: Banishing Ecophobia through
Queer Ecologies; pg. 119-120) GFD
The essays in section two address queering environmental politics by
examining the environmental and spatial dimension of sexual politics, and
the implicit sexualization of environments. Queer ecology involves a
necessary critique of the heteronormativity and whiteness of
environmental politics, the editors explain, as well as a critique of
the metro- normative stereotype of gay life as inherently
consumerist (34). Leading off the discussions, Andil Gosines essay
explores how both reproductive sex between non-white people,
and sex between men have been seen as toxic to nature (149); both
threaten colonial-imperialist and nationalist ambitions of
white heteropatriarchy (150). Examining reports of ar- rests for gay
male cruising in parks at Merced, California; the Minnesota National
Wildlife Refuge near Minneapolis; the Kokomo Reservoir Park in Indiana,
and Vancouvers Stanley Park, Gosine exposes a rhetoric of gay sex as
pollution: the cruising areas are described as trash-strewn pulloffs, with
condoms by the hundreds, and other unsavory litter creating health
hazards and endangering children. Citing the Vancouver Park Board
Commissions sensible strategy of installing extra garbage can
receptacles in the area, Gosine directly challenges the belief that public,
homosexual sex is bad for the environment and shows the heteronormative solutions (i.e., cutting down bushes, building fences, paving pathways) tend to be more environmentally destructive than gay sex. The
theme of queer environments is carried forward in Nancy Un- gers
chapter, which chronicles the construction of lesbian space in the United
States, from the black lesbians in Harlem to the white lesbian retreat at
Cherry Grove, the back-to-the-land movement in Oregon, the Pagoda
womynspace in Florida (later reconstituted at Alapine Village in Alabama),
and the lesbian community established through regional and national
womens music festivals. Curiously, though Unger notes the lesbian
feminist political analysis that placed vegetarian organic foods
(182) and healthy food (189) as an integral part of lesbian space,
she fails to mention persistent connections between vegan/vegetarianism
and lesbian feminism which were foundational components of the
Michigan Womyns Music Festival, The Bloodroot Collective, and many
other lesbian-only collectives and communal living spaces (Gaard 2000).
These lesbians dietary choices were inspired by a widespread belief
that sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism, and speciesism
were part of the same heteropatriarchal system that lesbian
feminists wanted to leave behind. In this volume, Unger is not alone
in omitting critique of the dominant heteromasculinity/speciesism
connection, indicating this connection as an area for further development
in queer ecologies generally.
AT: Sexual deviances Dont Exist in Nature

THERE ARE LOTS OF QUEER ANIMALS Yale doe
FEREYDOONI '12 Arash, undergrad science contributor Yale Science, the

oldest undergrad science magazine "Do Animals Exhibit Homosexuality?"
3/14 http://www.yalescientific.org/2012/03/do-animals-exhibit-homosexuality/
Recent research has found that homosexual behavior in animals may
be much more common than previously thought. Although Darwins
theory of natural selection predicts an evolutionary disadvantage for animals
that fail to pass along their traits through reproduction with the opposite sex,
the validity of this part of his theory has been questioned with the discoveries
of homosexual behavior in more than 10% of prevailing species throughout
the world.
Currently, homosexual behavior has been documented in over 450
diferent animal species worldwide. For instance, observations indicate
that Humboldt, King, Gentoo, and Adlie penguins of the same sex engage in
mating rituals like entwining their necks and vocalizing to one another. In
addition, male giraffes have also been observed engaging in homosexual
behavior by rubbing their necks against each others bodies while ignoring
the females. Yet another example is lizards of the genus Teiidae, which can
copulate with both male and female mates.
Biologists Nathan W. Bailey and Marlene Zuk from the University of California,
Riverside have investigated the evolutionary consequences and implications
of same-sex behavior, and their findings demonstrate benefits to what seems
to be an evolutionary paradox. For example, their studies of the Laysan
albatross show that female-female pairing can increase fitness by
taking advantage of the excess of females and shortage of males in
the population and provide superior care for ofspring. Moreover,
same-sex pairing in many species actually alleviates the likelihood of
divorce and curtails the pressure on the opposite sex by allowing
members to exhibit more flexibility to form partnerships, which in
turn strengthens social bonds and reduces competition. Thus, not
only do animals exhibit homosexuality, but the existence of this
behavior is quite prevalent and may also confer certain evolutionary
advantages.
AT: Framework
THE ROLE OF THE BALLOT IS TO UNDERMINE VIOLENT
EPISTEMIC FRAMEWORKS. ONLY QUEERING THE OCEAN
ALLOWS US TO INVESTIGATE THE WAY THAT IMPERIAL
ONTOLOGIES VIOLENTLY CONSTITUTE SPACE IN THE NAME
OF FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY.
Number 1, 2011
Ultimately, teaching for justice would seek to undermine epistemic
frameworks and practices that are simply unable to explain those
itineraries of violence that gain their political force through "names
such as democracy and civilization" (3). [End Page 198] In section 3 of
Pedagogies, "Dangerous Memory: Secular Acts, Sacred Possession" (chapters
6-7), Alexander continues this pedagogic initiative by showing us how the
personal is political and how the spiritual is political as well. She illustrates
how one might go about constructing oppositional knowledges and practices
by reconsidering the conventional relations between the secular and the
sacred that would decidedly split the latter from the former in modernity's
self-narration of development. Here, she refuses to yield the space of the
spiritual to religious fundamentalists, whose vision of sinners in the hands of
an angry God sets the conceptual limits to the functions of the spiritual in
social debate today. At the same time, she resists the notion that "no selfrespecting postmodernist would want to align herself (at least in public) with
a category such as the spiritual, which appears so fixed, so unchanging, so
redolent of tradition" (15). Working against these traditions of sanctioned
knowledge and practice, Alexander observes that while "humans made the
Crossing, traveling only in one direction through Ocean given the name
Atlantic[,] Grief traveled as well" (289). Alexander draws on this history of
griefexemplifying the recent affective turn in queer studiesthrough her
experiences with Santeria and Vodou. Such experiences lead her to commune
with a slave woman named Kitsimba, who made her own Atlantic Crossing in
the eighteenth-century, as well as with other sisters of color, ancestrally
recalled in This Bridge Called My Back.3 "In the realm of the secular,"
Alexander remarks, "the material is conceived of as tangible while the
spiritual is either nonexistent or invisible. In the realm of the Sacred,
however, the invisible constitutes its presence by a provocation of sorts, by

provoking our attention" (307). We may choose to ignore the Sacred.
However, attuned to its effects, and to its affective valences, the spiritual
promises to lead us elsewhere, yielding forms of knowledge and practice that
evade the instrumental radar of empiricism and scientific rationality, the
cornerstones of Enlightenment thinking. Understanding that ghosts and
spirits do not depend on our collective acknowledgment to validate their
existences provides a new way to approach Bruno Latour's insistence that
"we have never been modern"or, at least, quite as modern as we would like
to believe. Even more, it allows those left out of modernity's instrumental
reason to make better sense of a social world that outsources them as
collateral damage. Alexander summarizes, I wish to examine how spiritual
practitioners employ metaphysical systems to provide the moorings for their
meanings and understanding of selfin short, how they constitute or
remember experience as Sacred and how that experience shapes their
subjectivity. Experience is a category of great [End Page 199] epistemic
import to feminism. But we have understood it primarily as secularized, as if
it were absent Spirit and thus antithetical, albeit indirectly, to the Sacred.
(295)
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS A PREREQUISITE TO ACADEMIC

DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THE OCEANS. ONLY BY DRAWING
ATTENTION TO THE WAY IN WHICH SOVEREIGNTY IS
VIOLENTLY NATURALIZED CAN WE HOPE TO BRING TO
LIGHT EFFECTIVE PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE. THIS IS
MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE WITH A FOCUS ON DEMOCRATIC
GOVERNANCE.

Number 1, 2011
By queering the Black Atlantic in these provocative ways, Alexander offers
bold ways to reimagine and rethink the intersectional and interdisciplinary
relationships among queer studies, area studies, diaspora studies,
postcoloniality, transnational feminism, ethnic studies, Marxism, and
globalization. Indeed, such a queering of the Black Atlantic is long
overdue. Alexander's specific attention to the postcolonial Caribbean
highlights issues of sovereignty, citizenship, immigration, and social
belonging, placing Afro-diaspora and African American studies in more
immediate conversation with Asian/Asian American studies as well as

Latin/Latin American studies, whose long-time engagements with these
categories have helped fuel the critique of hetero-and homonormativity,
kinship, and elective affiliation in the field of queer diasporas. Alexander's
methodology draws sustained attention to different and uneven histories of
slavery, coerced migration, and indentureship that construct these legal and
social formalizations. Furthermore, her focus on the queer Caribbean
supplements the more cosmopolitan emphases of Afro-diaspora in the Black
Atlantic (which connect, for example, the metropolitan capitals of New York,
London, and Paris). As Alexander notes:
There is a great deal of urgency for us to map . . . some crucial analytic shifts
that will prompt postcolonial studies to engage more strategically with the
"here and there," to position immigration, for instance, as an important site
for the local reconfiguration of subalternity and the local reconfiguration of
race. . . . As certain strands of queer studies move to take up more centrally
questions of political economy and racial formation, and of transnational
feminism and immigrant labor, the analytic vise in the discipline will be
sharpened between those who hold on to a representational
democratic focus within U.S. borders and those who espouse an
antipathy toward the links between political economy and sexuality.
NORMAL IS THE TYRANNY OF OUR CONDITION -- REJECT

THEIR ATTEMTP TO NORM DEBATE
The transformative potential of intersectionality should
not be ignored in academic spaces. Queer theorys sphere
of influence has been extended through political tracts to
tackle COUNTLESS systemic boundaries- encompassing
race, class, sex, gender and sexuality. All instances
domination stitch together various forms of oppression,
weaving a matrix of oppression articulated in the
TOTALITY of NORMALCY. This is the state, this is
capitalism, this is police brutality, and this is
heteronormativity.
Loadenthal 12
Michael Loadenthal is an adjunct lecturer in the program on justice and peace at Georgetown
University, Loadenthal holds a BA in "International Studies: International Peace & Conflict
Resolution," and a BA in "Women and Gender Studies" from American University, Journal for
Critical Animal Studies, Volume 10, Issue 3, http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wpcontent/uploads/2012/10/Volume-10-Issue-3-2012.pdf
political tracts under analysis serve to redefine and

extend Queer theorys sphere of influence to tackle additional
systemic binaries beyond those situated in race, class, sex, gender,
sexuality, ability, age, etc.. The examination of the intersectionality of
oppressions is well situated in the academic literat ure through the
work of such authors as Patricia Hill Collins, who coined the term matrix of
The anonymously authored
domination (2000: 227-28) to refer to the overlapping taxonomies in which domination is organized.
Collins (2000) states, all
contexts of domination incorporate some

combination of intersecting oppressionsthe concept of a matrix of
domination encapsulates the universality of intersecting oppressions

as organized through diverse local realities (228). The concept of
interrelated systems of oppression occurs throughout the (non-BB!
specific) insurrectionist Queer literature generally. In once such foundational essay,
such an intersectional location is termed the Totality, and is defined as: As queers we
understand Normalcy. Normal, is the tyranny of our condition;
reproduced in all of our relationships. Normalcy is violently
reiterated in every minute of every day. We understand this
Normalcy as the Totality. The Totality being the interconnection and
overlapping of all oppression and misery. The Totality is the state. It
is capitalism. It is civilization and empire. The totality is fence-post
crucifixion. It is rape and murder at the hands of police. It is Str8
Acting and No Fatties or Femmes. (Towards, 2008: II)
Representations must precede policy discussion

Crawford 2 (Neta Crawford ,PhD MA MIT, BA Brown, Prof. of poli sci at
boston univ. Argument and Change in World Politics, 2002 p. 19-21)
Coherent arguments are unlikely to take place unless and until actors, at least on
some level, agree on what they are arguing about. The at least temporary
resolution of meta-arguments- regarding the nature of the good (the content of
prescriptive norms); what is out there, the way we know the world, how we decide
between competing beliefs (ontology and epistemology); and the nature of the
situation at hand( the proper frame or representation)- must occur before specific
arguments that could lead to decision and action may take place. Metaarguments over epistemology and ontology, relatively rare, occur in instances
where there is a fundamental clash between belief systems and not simply a
debate within a belief system. Such arguments over the nature of the world and
how we come to know it are particularly rare in politics though they are more
frequent in religion and science. Meta-arguments over the good are
contests over what it is good and right to do, and even how we know the
good and the right. They are about the nature of the good, specifically,
defining the qualities of good so that we know good when we see it and do
it. Ethical arguments are about how to do good in a particular situation. More
common are meta-arguments over representations or frames- about how we out to
understand a particular situation. Sometimes actors agree on how they see a
situation. More often there are different possible interpretations. Thomas
Homer-Dixon and Roger karapin suggest, Argument and debate occur when
people try to gain acceptance for their interpretation of the world. For example, is
the war defensive or aggressive?. Defining and controlling representations and
images, or the frame, affects whether one thinks there is an issue at stake and
whether a particular argument applies to the case. An actor fighting a
defensive war is within international law; an aggressor may legitimately be
subject to sanctions. Framing and reframing involve mimesis or putting
forward representations of what is going on. In mimetic meta-arguments,
actors who are struggling to characterize or frame the situation accomplish their
ends by drawing vivid pictures of the reality through exaggeration, analogy, or
differentiation. Representations of a situation do not re-produce accurately so much
as they creatively re-present situations in a way that makes sense. mimesis is a
metaphoric or iconic argumentation of the real. Imitating not the effectivity of
events but their logical structure and meaning. Certain features are emphasized and
others de-emphasized or completely ignored as their situation is recharacterized
or reframed. Representation thus becomes a constraint on reasoning in that it
limits understanding to a specific organization of conceptual knowledge.
The dominant representation delimits which arguments will be considered legitimate,
framing how actors see possibities. As Roxanne Doty argues, the possibility of
practices presupposes the ability of an agent to imagine certain courses of action.
Certain background meanings, kinds of social actors and relationships, must
already be in place. If, as Donald Sylvan and Stuart Thorson argue, politics
involves the selective privileging of representations, it may not matter whether one
representation or another is true or not. Emphasizing whether frames
articulate accurate or inaccurate perceptions misses the rhetorical import of
representation- how frames affect what is seen or not seen, and subsequent choices.
Meta-arguments over representation are thus crucial elements of political
argument because an actors arguments about what to do will be more persuasive if
their characterization or framing of the situation holds sway. But, as Rodger Payne
suggests, No frame is an omnipotent persuasive tool that can be decisively
wielded by norm entrepreneurs without serious political wrangling. Hence
framing is a meta-argument.
Link Wall
AT: Link of Omission

Omission is a link-it shapes perceptions and writer
motives- means the perm doesnt solve the consquences
of your 1ACs omission
Jackson, 08-Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University (Richard, State terror,terrorism
research and knowledge politics, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/1949/1/BISA-Paper-2008-JacksonFINAL.pdf SW)
discourses are significant not just for what they say

but also for what they do not say; the silences in a discourse can be
as important, or even more important at times, than what isstated. This is because silence can function
ideologically in any number of ways. For example, silence can be a deliberate means of
distraction or misdirection from uncomfortable subjects or
contrasting viewpoints, the suppression or de- legitimisation of
alternative forms of knowledge or values, the tacit endorsement of
particular kinds of practices, setting the boundaries of legitimate
knowledge, or as a kind of disciplining process directed against
certain actors among others. In other words, the silences within a text often
function as an exercise in power; revealing and interrogating those
silences therefore, is an important part of first and second order critique.
It is crucial to recognise that
FAILURE TO GROUND EMBODIED GENDER/SEXUALITY IN

POLICY RESEARCH METHODS GUARANTEES ERROR
REPLICATION AND REINFORCES THE POWER OF THE
POWERFUL
Marshall 97 (Catherine, professor at the University of North Carolina,
Feminist Critical Policy Analysis: A perspective from post-secondary
education, pg. ix-x,)
Policy researchers and analysts have gained and retained legitimacy

by focusing on the problems and methods identified by powerful
people. Those with a different focus are silenced, declared irrelevant,
postponed, coopted, put on the back burner, assigned responsibilities
with no training, budget, personnel or time, or otherwise ignored.
Policies, -- authoritative agreements among powerful people about
how things should be have been made without a feminist critical
glance. These two volumes focus on those areas of silence, on the
policy issues at the fringe and on the kinds of policy analysis methods,
findings and recommendations that will disrupt but will also open
possibilities. The two volumes identify theories and tools for
dismantling and replacing the politics, theories and modes of policy
analysis that built the masters house. The individual chapters
illustrate how and why to expand policy questions and policy analysis
methods to incorporate critical and feminist lenses, demonstrating
the promise of politics, analysis and policymaking that thoughtfully
and thoroughly works to uncover any source of oppression,
domination or marginalization and to create policies to meet the lived

realities, needs, aspirations and values of women and girls and others
kept on the margin. The volumes name and develop a new field:
Feminist critical Policy Analysis. The promise of this field lies in its
incorporation of perspective that write against the grain: the feminist,
critical stance, with policy analysis that includes methods for focusing
on the cultural values bases of policies; deconstruction of policy
documents; analysis of a policy intention and its potential effects,
such as affirmative Action and Title IX; studies of the micropolitical,
for example, the dynamics of a school board task force for sexual
harassment, a tenure systems effect on women academics, or the role
of girls access to computers in the implementation of computer
policies; and analyses of policies, programs and political stances that
do focus on neglected needs in schooling. Policymakers and analysts
need to pause in order to recognize how issues of gender, the needs of
particular groups like the urban poor, women and non-dominant
nationalities are left out of education policy analyses. In order to
connect effectively, women need to take a hard look at the structures
and arenas of policy. By presenting literatures, methods and
examples, these books name the field: feminist critical policy analysis
leap at the challenge.
Generic Exploration Afs

The affirmative places the ocean as an object to be
explored and perceived. It ignores the mystical and
beautiful unknown that queer nature is, destroying its
queer existence. This also continues the heteronormative,
masculine expansionist ideals of exploring the feminine,
mysterious ocean. This places heteronormative, human
existence above nature, perpetuating the Human/Nature
binary, allowing the natural/unnatural binary that
oppresses the queer body to continue.
Mortimer-Sandilands 5 (Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and
Culture at York University Catriona (Cate)- Her work lies at the intersections
of queer and feminist theory, environmental philosophy and political theory,
and cultural studies. She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist:
Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minnesota, 1999), the co-editor
(with Rebecca Raglon and Melody Hessing) of This Elusive Land: Women and
the Canadian Environment (UBC, 2004), and is working on a manuscript
called Pastoral Traditions, Sexual Subversions: Lesbian Histories of Nature
Writing; Unatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology; INVISIBLE
CULTURE, An electronic journal for visual culture, Issue 9;
Histories of sexuality and ecology: un/naturalizing the queer)
the categories through

which we currently understand sexuality and sexual identity are not
natural. By this, I mean that the categories gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender,
and queer are not given in nature. Although, as biologist Bruce Bagemihl has
demonstrated, homoerotic activity flourishes, and always has, in a wide range of
animal species, the way in which we predominantly understand sexuality at
the turn of the twenty-first century is a historical artifact located in very
specific ideas and institutions. 11 In particular, the idea of sexuality as a part
of ones identity, and a part of ones identity that might be grounded in
some fact of biology, is a very recent development indeed. As Michel Foucault has
Perhaps the most important starting-point for this analysis is the fact that
pointed out, homosexual as a distinct category of persons is a unique product of Victorian society; prior
to the nineteenth century, there was a wide range of forms of sexual activity, but these sexual acts were
among men, at least understood as potentially occurring anywhere, and between anyone. 12 Thus, for
example, the British Navy had a rule by which buggery was perfectly legitimate provided the sailors had
been at sea for at least six months; sodomy, here, was not something that happened because a sailor was
gay, but was simply a particular if still not quite respectable sexual activity.
The fact that we now commonly understand sexuality as question of natural identity has a great deal to do
with the confluence of bio-medical thinking and social regulation that developed during the latter half of
the nineteenth century. At the same time as biological science was creating an understanding of categories
of species based on their possession of certain traits, medical science was developing a categorization
of sexual traits with the agenda of explaining sexual behavior as part of the biological life of the human
species. The rise of evolutionary thought defined a biological narrative that had a large influence on
medical research on sexuality; particularly important were ideas of sexual selection and reproductive
fitness, in which the species survival was understood to be dependent on the strongest and best
reproducers getting together. In this narrative, heterosexuality came to be understood, for
as a distinct category of sexual practice, the naturalness of

which was solidified by its opposition to so-called deviant sexual identities
that did not fit into an evolutionary narrative. For Darwin, only heterosexual
courtship and mating could be natural because it was reproduction that
the first time in history,
allowed the species to continue; despite overwhelming evidence to suggest

that homoeroticism is everywhere in nature, evolutionary thought thus
came to define it as aberrant.
In medicine, homosexuality was classified as an illness (as opposed to a sin), as a
pathology that focused on the sexualized individual rather than the sexual
act. As Foucault notes, modern medicine moved us from the regulation of sexual acts to the organization
and treatment of sexual identities; where once there may have been women who had sex with women
(although the Victorians did not ever really acknowledge it), now there were formal bearers
of sexual categories gender inverts, tribades, and lesbians whose

sexual activities with other women could be linked to some basic biological fault.
In short, in the late nineteenth century, sexuality became naturalized; an individuals
sexual desires were recoded as expressions of an inherent sexual condition,
and that condition was understood in strongly biological terms. But there is
an interesting paradox here: Homosexuality was simultaneously
naturalized andconsidered unnatural, something deviant from a primary,
normative heterosexuality.
There are many important things to say about this process. In the first
place, it is not just that ideas of nature were instrumental in the social
regulation of sexuality, but that heterosexuality came to be the defining
sexual paradigm for ideas of evolution and ecology. Heterosexual reproduction was
the only form of sexual activity leading directly to the continuation of a species from one generation to the
next; thus, logically, other sexual activities must be either aberrant or, at best, indirectly part of the
heterosexual reproductive process. Preening rituals between male cock-of-the-rocks were read only as
competition for female attention, and not as homoerotic activity between two males. Even now, some
evolutionary psychologists tie themselves into knots trying to explain the eventual reproductive
significance of the prolific same-gender sexual activity that regularly occurs among female bonobos. 13
The science of ecology was strongly influenced by this evolutionary

narrative. The logic goes like this: If the ability of a species to survive in its
environment is tied to its reproductive fitness, then healthy environments
are those in which such heterosexual activity flourishes. Clearly, this
reasoning is not entirely sound, guided more by heterosexist assumptions
than by a complex understanding of the diverse social relations of sexuality
occurring in various animal species. But it has had unfortunate
consequences. In one case, well-meaning ecologists, convinced of the
evolutionary pathology of same-gender eroticism, argued that the
widespread presence of apparently lesbian activity among seagulls in a
particular location must be evidence of some major environmental
catastrophe. 14 Of course, it wasnt: The world is full of lesbian gulls. This kind of reprocentric environmental position remains dominant; indeed, it has also been
used to argue that the contemporary prevalence of transgender individuals
(human and other) must have behind it some contaminating event or
process. However much one might want to be able to pinpoint animal
indicators of pollution or other environmental change, the assumption that
heterosexuality is the only natural sexual form is clearly not an appropriate
benchmark for ecological research. Yet even in environmental arguments
about the destruction caused by human population growth, the paradigm of
natural heterosexuality overrides the obvious fact that there are plenty of
non-reproductive sexual options out there.
In the first place, then, we have a situation in which sexuality was biologized into naturalized normative
categories, and in which developing evolutionary and ecological thinking was influenced by a strongly
heterosexist paradigm. In the second place, it wasnt just evolution that came to be coded heterosexually
during this period. While the late nineteenth century saw the rise of both modern understandings of
sexuality and evolutionary ideas of species health, including human health, it also saw the beginnings of
modern environmentalism, and in particular, the politics of wilderness preservation and urban greening.
By trying to take nature and wrangle it into a human

organization is actually an expansion of these systems.
This is not a link of omission. This is a link of direct action.
THE RENDERING OF THE UNNATURAL AS AN INVISIBLE
CATEGORY WITHIN THE DISCOURSE OF THE 1AC
STRUCTURES OUR RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NORMATIVE
IDENTITY CATEGORIES AND QUEERNESS.
Huduk and Giammattei 10 [Jacqueline Hudak, M.Ed., Ph.D., and
Shawn V. Giammattei, Ph.D. Doing Family: Decentering Heteronormativity in
Marriage and Family Therapy, AFTA Monograph Series, Winter 2010
http://www.afta.org/files/2010_Monograph.pdf#page=51,]
Heteronormativity sustains the dominant norm of heterosexuality by

rendering marginal any relational structure that falls outside of this
norm. Further, heteronormativity renders the diversity of human
sexuality and identities invisible. This invisibility is marked by the
fact that there is limited language to describe sexual minority
experience and identities within dominant discourses. This creates a
category of other in our culture, which is rendered invalid or
pathological. What little language there is often creates false binary
systems that are inaccurate representations of the actual lived
experiences of many individuals. Given this lack of language, we
often are left with the antiquated and imprecise categories of
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT).
Human EXPLORATION with the ocean represent an erotic

venture into the unknown, supporting an androcentric
and gendered perspective of nature
Milstein and Dickerson 12
(Tema, professor of communications at University of New Mexico, and Elizabeth, gulf-based journalist.
Gynocentric Greenwashing: The Discursive Gendering of Nature in Communication, Culture, and Critique
vol 4 iss 5 pp. 510-532, December, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.17539137.2012.01144.x/full , retrieved 2014/07/08, ~cVs / GFD)
We offer two ethnographic case studies to provide related, but varied, contexts to explore gendered
Milstein has spent several summers as a participant

observer studying communication in the world's highest
concentration of whale watch tourism, located in transnational Canadian and
American Pacific waters. Endangered orcas are the main focus, but other
whales,2 including humpbacks and grays, encounter tourism as well. Milstein
observes a variety of communicators, including tourists and whale
insiders (such as tour operators, tour naturalists, marine monitors,
scientists, whale advocates, volunteers, and island locals), both on
the water in tour or monitor boats and on land at public shores.
Milstein also records extensive written texts, including tourism
marketing materials and educational signage and exhibits. Dickinson has
productions of nature.
spent five months as a participant observer studying communication in North Carolina's Educational State
Forest (NCESF) systemsix forest sites designed to teach forestry management practices, conservation,
and environmental topics to K-12 schoolchildren. The communicators Dickinson observes include students,
teachers, parents, and chaperones bussed into the forests for fieldtrips. Dickinson also works alongside
and interviews forest service personnel and documents texts, such as forest service literature, teaching
materials, and curricula. Dickinson also documents the materiality of the forests, including trees, trails,
outdoor classrooms, exhibits, and talking-tree and talking-rock trails, where visitors press a button
near a tree or rock and hear a human voice recording speak as the tree or rock. Within each site,
communication focuses on nature representation. Staf

communicators, such as whale tour naturalists and state forest rangers,
represent nature to visitors often via edutainment discourses, in
which information and education are melded with, and at times
subordinated to, entertainment, a process some staf
communicators accept and some lament. Visitors negotiate these
representations and ofer some of their own. Differences between the case sites
are also important to our analysis. Transnational tourism focused on endangered
whales provides ecocultural constructions of nature within an
oceanic sphere with wild animals. For terrestrial humans, oceans
often represent a loss of human control and a venture into the wild
unknown. Out of their element, humans often encounter wild whales
as magnificent and ephemeral, serving no utilitarian purpose for
humans, but instead more intrinsically valued as a way to know
nature. In contrast, the extensively managed timber state forests are known manufactured entities on
solid ground. Through forest conservation management monoculture practices, human control is extreme,
Despite extant literature's

long-problematizing of a predominantly gynocentric cultural framing
of nature, in our case studies, we each separately note an
androcentricgynocentric dialectic, in which the gynocentric is
favorably forefronted, but the androcentric is decidedly privileged.
This overarching dialectic is most strikingly illustrated by tensions
within individual versus communal and frontal versus embodied
orientations. To highlight what we argue is an overarching quality of these gendered ecocultural
and visitors are taught to value trees largely as human resources.
tensions, we present our interpretations from the two sites in conversation with one another, referring to
ourselves in these sections in the first person with Milstein as researcher in the ocean site and Dickinson in
the forest site.
Marine Bio-reserves
The Affirmatives positing itself as master over nature
with its establishment of cordoned of space within the
ocean is a manifestation of the Human over nature binary
that Johnson outlines in the 1NC. This means that the
affirmative continues the oppressive structures of
heteronormative oppression and actually increases these
systems. This is not a link of omission. This is a link of
direct action.
Biodiversity / Hot Spots

The 1AC embodies the exact type of environmental
politics that have instigated the biodiversity crisis in the
status quo. By seeking to manage the environment, that
which is not in our control, crises such as the impact
scenario depicted in the 1AC have been pushed closer and
closer to reality. Specifically, pointing to brinks in the
crisis represents another level of managing the biosphere
in a way that makes it only a convenience for humanity.
This turns their case and proves a terminal solvency
deficit. Any risk of this link means that you vote neg.
Mortimer-Sandilands 5 (Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and
Culture at York University Catriona (Cate)- Her work lies at the intersections
of queer and feminist theory, environmental philosophy and political theory,
and cultural studies. She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist:
Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minnesota, 1999), the co-editor
(with Rebecca Raglon and Melody Hessing) of This Elusive Land: Women and
the Canadian Environment (UBC, 2004), and is working on a manuscript
called Pastoral Traditions, Sexual Subversions: Lesbian Histories of Nature
Writing; Unatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology; INVISIBLE
CULTURE, An electronic journal for visual culture, Issue 9;
Histories of sexuality and ecology: un/naturalizing the queer)
Queer environments: the sexual politics of natural spaces
Here, I would like to turn our attention away from ecology as a science and toward environmentalism as a
politics of natural space, in which sexuality has also had interesting influences. Indeed, the sexual
values enacted in struggles over space have had at least as strong an

influence on environmentalism as those enmeshed in the science of ecology.
Although there are many stories I could tell, what I would like to talk about, briefly, is the fact I mentioned
in my discussion of national parks at the beginning of the paper. To reiterate: In its early incarnation, North
American environmentalism emerged as a response to the rise of industrial cities. As I have argued,
wilderness and rural spaces came to be valued as sites to be preserved

away from the corrupting influences of urban industrial modernity. In
addition, the cultivation of natural spaces inside cities, including urban parks such as Central Park in New
York, was conceived as a way to bring health and morality to the citys inhabitants. Nature was,
here, a space of intensive moral regulation; given the increasing association

of sexuality with ideas of nature, sex became a key element in the
organization of nature as a regulatory space.
The early parks movement was, as I mentioned, born partly from a desire to
facilitate recreational practices that would restore threatened masculine
virtues. Of course, this desire was also planted in the assumption that cities were sites of the particular
moral degeneracy associated with homosexuality. In part as a result of the idea that homosexuality was
a sort of illness, medical thinkers of the late nineteenth century came to believe that the environmental
conditions of large urban centers actually cultivated homosexuality. There were various explanations
offered for this supposed urban moral degeneration: the idea that the work men did in cities no longer
brought them into close and honorable contact with nature; the racist belief that homosexuality was
associated with immigrant populations; and the growing idea that homosexuality might have
environmental causes. To quote Boag, pollution, tainted foods, and even the fast-paced nature of urban
life, in the minds of some Victorian physicians, induced homosexuality. 15 In response, the creation
of remote recreational wild spaces and the demarcation of healthy green

spaces inside cities, was understood partly as a therapeutic antidote to the
social ravages of effeminate homosexuality.
The joint construction of sex and nature is quite complex ; although I will not get into
it here, it is also strongly tied to modern ideas of nationalism in both the United
States and Canada. There are, however, two sets of ideas I would like to pull out. First, there is the
assumption that homosexuality is a product of the urban, and that rural and
wilderness spaces are thus somehow free from the taint of homoerotic
activity. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. At the end of the
nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the western wilderness was a space heavily dominated by
communities of men. These men prospectors, cowboys, ranchers, foresters -- like British sailors at sea for
more than six months, frequently engaged in homosexual activity. Indeed, if sexologist Alfred Kinseys
research was correct, there was in the nineteenth century actually more same-sex activity in the remote
wilderness than there was in the cities.
As I suggested earlier, such men were not understood as homosexuals. To quote Kinsey, these are men
who have faced the rigors of nature in the wild. Such a background breeds the attitude that sex is sex,
irrespective of the nature of the partner with whom the relation is had. 16 It was not until homosexuality
became coded as an inherent and biologically-based identity that it came to be understood as an illness
and located in the artificiality of cities. Certainly, cities made it easier for interested men to find
anonymous homoerotic contacts. Also, port cities such as New York and San Francisco eventually became
very important places for homosexual men to carve out spaces for their fledgling sexual communities. But
it was the growing visibility of these communities, and the increasing association of homosexuality with
artificiality, that tied the homosexual to the urban, not some actually greater homoerotic presence. Simply
put, it was not until the homosexual became urban that he became
unnatural; emerging environmental critiques of the artificiality of cities

were thus instrumental in shaping ideas about the artificiality of queers.
The linkage of homosexuality and cities, here, was clearly a product of
ideology, but that ideology has had an enormous material impact on both
queers and natural spaces. The pervasive assumption that queer
communities are essentially urban has had the effect of erasing the ongoing
presence of rural gay men and lesbians whose lives might not look much like Christopher
Street. This erasure has contributed to the flight of rural queers from their
homes to find true community in cities, to the ghettoization of queer
culture, and to the widespread assumption that country spaces are
inherently hostile to queer folk. Although one must not ever forget Brandon Teena and
Mathew Shepard, it is abundantly clear that urban spaces are often far more dangerous for us than rural
ones. In addition, these spatial processes have also affected the spaces
of nature. On the one end of the spectrum, we see the physical

concentration of gay men and lesbians in particular urban neighborhoods;
their distinct and diverse patterns of community organize urban nature in
particular ways. Less well known, however, is the fact that heterosexism in
rural landscapes has physically shaped what rural nature looks like.
Recreational and rural natures are materials marked with heterosexism. In
the former category, such spaces as national parks clearly bear the developmental imprints of specific
gendered and sexualized ideas of nature. For one small example, think about public campgrounds.
Particularly after the 1950s, many camping facilities were intentionally designed to resemble suburban culde-sacs, each campsite clearly designed for one nuclear family, and all camping occurring in designated
private spaces away from public recreational activities such as swimming, hiking, and climbing. Trees
were cut down in a pattern that screened campsites from one another, but not from the roadway or path,
so that the rangers or wardens could still see in and make sure nothing illegal (such as sodomy) was taking
place.
For a second and earlier example, consider the settlement of much of the state of Oregon. In the midnineteenth century, the Donation Land Act (DLA) encouraged a heterosexual pattern of colonization
because of the way land was allotted to settlers. A white male who was twenty-one or older received a
160-acre parcel and an additional 160 acres for his wife." 17 Women were not eligible for allotments as
single people, and it was clearly in the advantage of men to have the two parcels, so very young girls
suddenly became marriageable and were soon wives. 18 Because of the comparatively large size of these
allotments and the popularity of the program, not only did the DLA encourage heterosexual marriage along
with the settlement of the west, but it imposed a monolithic culture of single heterosexual family-sized lots
on the land, with significant effects on the economic and environmental history of the region from nuclear
family farming patterns, the inhibition of town development, and even increased forestation.
As a result of the association of degenerate queers with cities, and rural and
wilderness landscapes with wholesome, heterosexual family life, there
developed in the nineteenth century the idea that nature is a primary place in
which to develop moral and physical fitness. With the hetero-masculine
deployment of wilderness at the turn of the century which, incidentally, also saw the rise of
organizations like the Boy Scouts we can see the antecedents of how nature was
deployed during the Great Depression and into World War II as a site for the cultivation of a
rigidly disciplinary hetero-male ideal.In the United States, for example, organizations such
as the Civilian Conservation Corps provided unemployed young men with physically and morally healthy
work in the wilderness. At apparent risk of degeneracy in cities, such men were located in camps far from
urban centers and, between 1933 and 1942, strenuously installed 89,000 miles of telephone line, built
126,000 miles of roads and trails, constructed millions of erosion control dams, planted 1.3 billion trees,
erected 3,470 water towers, and spent over 6 million hours fighting forest fires. 19 All of these
developments are markers of a national desire for a particular kind of man as much as they are about the
infrastructural needs of particular landscapes.
Science/Ecotourism
Non-Queer Perspectives on nature entrench
hetro/androcentrism
Milstein and Dickerson 12
(Tema, professor of communications at University of New Mexico, and Elizabeth, gulf-based journalist.
Gynocentric Greenwashing: The Discursive Gendering of Nature in Communication, Culture, and Critique
vol 4 iss 5 pp. 510-532, December, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.17539137.2012.01144.x/full , retrieved 2014/07/08, ~cVs )
culturally constructed prototypical

masculine and feminine orientations to nature can appear to coexist.
In the androcentricgynocentric dialectic,
For example, Littlefield (2010) complicates broad-sweeping ecofeminist claims that deer hunting is a
unilaterally violent form of domination of nature and women. Instead, Littlefield points to multiple
masculinities, where male hunters can incorporate feminine values (e.g., compassion, communal
However, as
we argue in this paper, even though gynocentric values may be
favorably expressed, androcentrism ultimately may be privileged.
Similarly, the emerging field of queer ecology studies questions
human-constructed gendered nature dualisms (Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson,
2010). As such, queer ecology explores and resists heteronormative
framings of nature and retheorizes humanature relations, mostly by
challenging heteroecologies from the perspective of non-normative
sexual gender positions (p. 22). In what follows, we join ecofeminist
and queer ecology studies questioning to illustrate, and in the end
to attempt to alternatively conceptualize, the androcentric
gynocentric ecocultural dialectic. To do so, we first examine the two
tensions that we argue are key androcentricgynocentric dialectic
elements, frontal versus embodied and individual versus communal
orientations to nature.
friendship development, and nature appreciation) into the largely masculine hobby.
Social Progress
The acceptance of progress locks political movements into
passivity, preventing meaningful change. A Queer
methodology is key to inject disruption into these
movements to build coalitions strong enough to fight antiqueerness in all its forms
Copenhaver 14 (Robert Copenhaver identified as a Queer person of
faith, graduate of Idaho State University, whose interests include queer
theory, politics, and theology. He will be starting a masters in theological
studies at The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago next fall; Queer
Rage; published 2/19/14;
http://coperoge.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/queer-rage/) GFD
I hate straight people who cant listen to queer anger without saying hey,
all straight people arent like that. Im straight too, you know, as if their
egos dont get enough stroking or protection in this arrogant, heterosexist
world. Why must we take care of them, in the midst of our just anger
brought on by their fed up society?! Why add the reassurance of Of
course, I dont mean you. You dont act that way. Let them figure out for
themselves whether they deserve to be included in our anger. But of
course that would mean listening to our anger, which they almost never
do. They deflect it, by saying Im not like that or now look whos
generalizing or Youll catch more flies with honey or If you focus on
the negative you just give out more power or youre not the only one in
the world whos suffering. They say Dont yell at me, Im on your side
or I think youre overreacting or Boy, youre bitter. - The Queer
Nation Manifesto Last weeks post involved a quote from The Queer
Nation referring to the way in which straight people have taught us that
good queers dont get angry. A good queer is one that accepts the
progress that others have made for us. According to straight
people, and some queers who have accepted the straight position, we
should be thankful for things like same-sex marriage and the repeal of
DADT. However, the acceptance of progress is a form of passivity
that forgets the importance of queers of the past who fought for
our recognition while maintaining the uniqueness of queer
identities. We forget about the politics of groups like ACT UP and
the protests of Stonewall. These histories are ignored in favor of
assimilationist strategies that we are taught are good because of
straightness. Rather, we need to use our anger at straightness
as the starting point for our politics. We need to stop accepting
liberal progress narratives that keep us passive and have forced
us to conform to what a good citizen should look like. Benjamin
Shepard writes, Thus, play intermingled with a full range of emotions
from despair to pathos, from pleasure to terror. Charles King, a veteran of
ACT UP New Yorks Housing Committee, which evolved into Housing
Works, of which he is now president, explained that these combined
feelings of joy and anger fueled the groups work: I actually think its a
combination of the two. . . . The AIDS movement in the 1980s was fueled
by this amazing combination of taking grief and anger and
turning it into this powerful energy for action. But in the course of
that, developing this comradely love. Yes, the anger was the fuel. Its
what brought us together and taking that anger and not just sitting
with it. . . not just letting grief turn into despair. Bringing it into
some sort of action was very cathartic, but also what was
cathartic in the process was all the loving that was taking place.
Anger can be transformative. Anger is a strategy that allows us
to develop creative strategies for resistance against
heteronormative institutions and practices. I am tired, and we
should all be tired of both straight people along others in our own
community telling us that we should be happy about all of the progress
that has been made. FUCK THAT PROGRESS. Our passivity and
acceptance of it makes us forget about the queer bashing that so
many in our community face everyday. Anti-queerness is still just
as prevalent as ever, but under the guise of tolerance we have
covered up the physical and psychological violence that so many
queers face everyday. There are homeless queer youth
everywhere. There are queer people being assaulted in our
streets. There are parents telling their children they are going to
get AIDS and die, that they are perverts and should die, and are
sending them to therapy to make them straight. Governments
state and local are complacent and strategically prevent us from
having access to housing, jobs, and other material resources.
Instead of being fucking happy about same-sex marriage, we should be
fucking mad. We should be angry that we pretend that its getting
better. IT IS NOT! Stop pretending. Be angry. Utilize our rage to
confront the ways in which anti-queerness continue to perpetuate
violence against queer bodies everywhere.
Pacific Ocean
European imperialism in the Pacific brought the
suppression of native queerness of all types - the af is no
diferent, multiple historical examples prove.
Elleray 6
(Michelle, assistant professor of English at the University of Guleph, quotes Jeremy Bentham,
English Philosopher, internally cites Lee Wallace, author, in Sexual Encounters (2003), Queer
Pacific in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol 12.1, pp. 147-149,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v012/12.1elleray.html , retrieved
2014/07/08, ~cVs)
Jeremy Bentham noted that "in the newly discovered islands of the
Pacific Ocean, the prevalence of the improlific appetite , after having
been concealed by the prudent delicacy of polished historians, has
been revealed by the untutored and querulous zeal of pious
missionaries."1 Bentham locates for us the historical linkage of
homosexual acts with the South Pacific, a connection since
subsumed by tourist investments in the Pacific as the site of
heterosexual fantasy but now excavated anew in Lee Wallace's
cogent work, Sexual Encounters. Returning us to the Pacific's role in
European negotiations of male same-sex desire, Wallace argues that
encounters with Pacific formations of male sexuality opened up an
awareness of new sexual possibilities for metropolitan masculinity.
Sexual Encounters is predicated on the assumption that change in the imperial context is not unidirectional
something that the metropole does to far-flung, palm-studded islandsbut that metropolitan culture was
itself modified by contact and exchange with the societies encountered on the voyages of discovery. Thus
Wallace's focus on the European male body "troublingly inscribed

with the erotic consequences of contact" generates "a significant
rethinking of the European masculinity that in most versions of
encounter, remains untransformed, the neutral measure against
which all change is reckoned" (38). Wallace critiques the theoretical
heterosexualization of imperialism that positions Europe in terms of
masculine dominance and the Pacific (or other imperialized regions)
in terms of an enforced feminine submission. In its place she calls
our attention to moments of cultural encounter modulated through
male same-sex desire, demonstrating that "male homosexuality,
such as we have come to understand it . . . was constituted in no
small part through the European collision with Polynesian culture" (8).
Sexual Encounters provides a significant contribution to the study of
homosexuality in its historical specificity and regional resonances,
exposing through deft analyses homosexuality's implication in
imperialism. Wallace anchors her work to historical figures with whom an academic audience would
be familiar: Captain James Cook, British icon of sexual continence and martyrdom in the Pacific; Captain
William Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty infamy; Herman Melville, the textual beachcomber of the Marquesas;
the missionary William Yate (familiar, at least, to a New Zealand academic audience), who was dismissed
from the Church Missionary Society for sexual misdemeanors involving local Maori youths; and Paul
Gauguin, self-styled refugee from Parisian civilization whose paintings of Ma'ohi and Marquesans are
readily available on everything from greeting cards to coffee cups. Given the recent critical work that has
made Cook into his own academic subfield, the first two chapters in which he figures will no doubt interest
the scientific impetus of his voyages privileged

the rationalizing and categorizing of Polynesian sexuality as part of
the ethnographic project, shifting the terms of sexual discourse from
many. Wallace points out that
the denunciation of moral vice to a cultural relativism engaged with

the social dynamics of gender variance. Following the lauded explorers, the
scandalous beachcomber emerges in Russian accounts of the Marquesas and Melville's Typee. Newly
minted on Pacific shores, the beachcomber embodies European integration into Pacific Island communities
and "reflect[s] back to a mortified European gaze a newly defined capacity for bodily perversion" (86), a
perversion read symptomatically through an intense investment in his tattooed flesh. I greatly appreciated
Wallace's twist on the standard settler narrative in her Yate chapter, in which she locates the settler
nation's foundations not in Mum, Dad, and the colonial family but in the expulsion of the sexual sinner as a
means of consolidating "the Christian collectivity in the new land," an act that "made of its members
Continuing the focus on ambivalence deployed in

the Yate chapter, Wallace's analysis of Gauguin's Manao
tupapau reads the intricate movements between "homosexual
possibility" and "heterosexual outcome" through the formal
properties of the painting (110); she argues that "Polynesian gender
dissonance . . . manifests sexual possibilities barred European
representation" (115). The "reciprocal evolution of European and
Pacific sexual practices engaged in the colonial context" that was
tracked in earlier chapters resurfaces in Wallace's final chapter, a
critique of Caroline Harker's 1995 television documentary, Queens of Samoa (108). Harker's film
narrates the story of fa'afafine, that is, Samoans who are bodily
male but raised to conform to female gender expectations. While
disavowing the colonizing dynamics inherent in imposing European
labels such as "homosexual," "transvestite," and "transsexual" on
Polynesian forms of sexuality and gender performance, Wallace
foregrounds the implications of assuming the incommensurability of
the European and Polynesian terms, pointing out that they
contribute to the failure of some members of the Pacific Island
community to see themselves as implicated in concerns of the queer
community, for example, the movement of HIV/AIDS within the
Pacific. Here the prescience of Wallace's work vis--vis developments subsequent to the book's
publication emerges. The careful analysis and historicization of the
intersecting dynamics of sexuality and colonialism that Wallace
advocates are necessary for situating and negotiating recent
denunciations of homosexuality by public individuals such as
Archbishop Whakahuihui Vercoe of the New Zealand Anglican Church
and Pastor Brian Tamaki of Destiny Church, which appear to
separate the interests of the Maori (among others) from those of
homosexuals. The assumption that the identity categories "Maori"
and "gay" are mutually exclusive has already been countered in the
fiction of the author and academic Witi Ihimaera, while the fact that
Vercoe and Tamaki speak from within their churches would strike a
chord with another author and academic, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. In
protoNew Zealanders" (104).
a move that resonates with the opening chapters of Sexual

Encounters, Te Awekotuku argues that what the Europeans, and
more specifically the missionaries, brought to the Pacific's shores
was not homosexuality (same-sex desire as a putatively Western
practice) but homophobia.
AT: Link of Omission

Omission is a link-it shapes perceptions and writer
motives- means the perm doesnt solve the consquences
of your 1ACs omission
Jackson, 08-Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University (Richard, State terror,terrorism
research and knowledge politics, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/1949/1/BISA-Paper-2008-JacksonFINAL.pdf SW)
discourses are significant not just for what they say

but also for what they do not say; the silences in a discourse can be
as important, or even more important at times, than what isstated. This is because silence can function
ideologically in any number of ways. For example, silence can be a deliberate means of
distraction or misdirection from uncomfortable subjects or
contrasting viewpoints, the suppression or de- legitimisation of
alternative forms of knowledge or values, the tacit endorsement of
particular kinds of practices, setting the boundaries of legitimate
knowledge, or as a kind of disciplining process directed against
certain actors among others. In other words, the silences within a text often
function as an exercise in power; revealing and interrogating those
silences therefore, is an important part of first and second order critique.
It is crucial to recognise that
FAILURE TO GROUND EMBODIED GENDER/SEXUALITY IN

POLICY RESEARCH METHODS GUARANTEES ERROR
REPLICATION AND REINFORCES THE POWER OF THE
POWERFUL
Marshall 97 (Catherine, professor at the University of North Carolina,
Feminist Critical Policy Analysis: A perspective from post-secondary
education, pg. ix-x,)
Policy researchers and analysts have gained and retained legitimacy

by focusing on the problems and methods identified by powerful
people. Those with a different focus are silenced, declared irrelevant,
postponed, coopted, put on the back burner, assigned responsibilities
with no training, budget, personnel or time, or otherwise ignored.
Policies, -- authoritative agreements among powerful people about
how things should be have been made without a feminist critical
glance. These two volumes focus on those areas of silence, on the
policy issues at the fringe and on the kinds of policy analysis methods,
findings and recommendations that will disrupt but will also open
possibilities. The two volumes identify theories and tools for
dismantling and replacing the politics, theories and modes of policy
analysis that built the masters house. The individual chapters
illustrate how and why to expand policy questions and policy analysis
methods to incorporate critical and feminist lenses, demonstrating
the promise of politics, analysis and policymaking that thoughtfully
and thoroughly works to uncover any source of oppression,
domination or marginalization and to create policies to meet the lived

realities, needs, aspirations and values of women and girls and others
kept on the margin. The volumes name and develop a new field:
Feminist critical Policy Analysis. The promise of this field lies in its
incorporation of perspective that write against the grain: the feminist,
critical stance, with policy analysis that includes methods for focusing
on the cultural values bases of policies; deconstruction of policy
documents; analysis of a policy intention and its potential effects,
such as affirmative Action and Title IX; studies of the micropolitical,
for example, the dynamics of a school board task force for sexual
harassment, a tenure systems effect on women academics, or the role
of girls access to computers in the implementation of computer
policies; and analyses of policies, programs and political stances that
do focus on neglected needs in schooling. Policymakers and analysts
need to pause in order to recognize how issues of gender, the needs of
particular groups like the urban poor, women and non-dominant
nationalities are left out of education policy analyses. In order to
connect effectively, women need to take a hard look at the structures
and arenas of policy. By presenting literatures, methods and
examples, these books name the field: feminist critical policy analysis
leap at the challenge.
Impacts
Heteronormativity (Violence)
Heteronormativity is violent
Yep 13 (Gust, The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies', Journal of
Homosexuality, 45: 2, 11 59)
Simmons vividly describes the devastating pervasiveness of

hatred and violence in her daily life based on being seen, perceived, labeled,
and treated as an Other. This process of othering creates individuals,
groups, and communities that are deemed to be less important, less
worthwhile, less consequential, less authorized, and less human based on
historically situated markers of social formation such as race, class, gender,
sexuality, ability, and nationality. Othering and marginalization are results of
an invisible center (Ferguson, 1990, p. 3). The authority, position, and power of such a center are
attained through normalization in an ongoing circular movement. Normalization is the process
of constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a taken-for-granted
and all-encompassing standard used to measure goodness, desirability,
morality, rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant cultural values.
In this passage,
As such, normalization becomes one of the primary instruments of power in modern society (Foucault,
1978/1990). Normalization is a symbolically, discursively, psychically, psychologically, and materially
violent form of social regulation and control, or as Warner (1993) more simply puts it, normalization is the
site of violence (p. xxvi). Perhaps one of the most powerful forms of normalization in Western social
Through heteronormative discourses, abject and

abominable bodies, souls, persons, and life forms are created, examined, and
disciplined through current regimes of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1978/1990).
Heteronormativity, as the invisible center and the presumed bedrock of society, is the
quintessential force creating, sustaining, and perpetuating the erasure,
marginalization, disempowerment, and oppression of sexual others .
Heteronormativity is ubiquitous in all spheres of social life yet remains largely
invisible and elusive. According to Berlant and Warner (in Warner, 2002), heteronormativity
refers to: the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical
orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherentthat is,
organized as a sexualitybut also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its
systems is heteronormativity.
privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked as the basic idiom of the personal
It
consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of
a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestation soften unconscious,
immanent to practice or to institutions. (p. 309, my emphasis) Heteronormativity makes
heterosexuality hegemonic through the process of normalizatio n. Although it is
and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment.
experienced consciously or unconsciously and with different degrees of pain and suffering, this process of
normalization is a site of violence in the lives of women, men, and transgendersacross the spectrum of
Not unlike the experiences of children who must

learn to survive in an emotionally and physically abusive environment where
violence is the recipe for daily existence (Miller, 1990, 1991, 1998, 2001), individuals
living in the heteronormative regime need to learn to conform, ignore, and
banish their suffering to survive. The process of coping by repressing the pain
and identifying with the perpetrator is, in my view, a powerful mechanism for
heteronormativity to perpetuate itself in current forms of social organization .
sexualitiesin modern Western societies.
Drawing from the work of feminists and womanists, critical scholars, and mental health researchers, I
identify and examine the injurious and violent nature of heteronormativity in this section. For purposes of
discussion, I focus on the violence of heteronormativity enacted upon: (a) women inside the
heteronormative borders, (b) men inside the heteronormative borders, (c) lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgendered, and queer people, and (d) individuals living at the intersections of race, class, gender, and
sexuality.
Institutional violence as well

These are systematic and socially accepted injuries inflicted upon individuals outside of the
Institutional violence is widespread for LGBTQ individuals

and communities. Undergirding all social institutions is heteronormative
ideology (Berlant & Warner, 1998; Richardson, 1996). Hegemonic heterosexuality
permeates the family (VanEvery, 1996a, b), domestic and intimate life (Croghan, 1993;
Holland, Ramazanoglu, & Thomson, 1996; VanEvery, 1996b), education (Kumashiro, 2002; Pinar, 1998;
heteronormative mandate.
Talburt & Steinberg, 2000), social policy (Carabine, 1996; Eskridge, 2002; Kaplan, 1997), the mass media
and popular culture (Fejes & Petrich, 1993; Gross, 2001; Gross & Woods, 1999; Ingraham, 1999), among
heteronormative thinking is deeply ingrained, and strategically

invisible, in our social institutions. The process of normalization of
heterosexuality in our social system actively and methodically subordinates,
disempowers, denies, and rejects individuals who do not conform to the
heterosexual mandate by criminalizing them, denying them protection
against discrimination, refusing them basic rights and recognitio n, or all of the
above (Kaplan, 1997; Rubin, 1984/1993). More simply stated, the regulatory power of
heteronormativity denies LGBTQ individuals and couples their
citizenship. There are numerous positive rights (Stein, 1999, p. 286) that heterosexual individuals
take for granted but LGBTQ persons are categorically denied. They include being able to marry
a person of the same sex, gain custody of their children, become foster and
adoptive parents, visit ones same-sex partner in the hospital, being able to obtain bereavement
others. In short,
leave when ones partner passes away, being able to file joint income tax returns with ones partner,
among many others. Although the issue of same-sex marriage is highly contested on ideological grounds
within LGBTQ communities in the U.S. (Yep, Lovaas, & Elia, 2003), LGBTQ couples are deprived of the
numerous rights and privileges accorded to heterosexually married dyads (Kaplan, 1997; Stein, 1999). In
heteronormativity is a site of unrelenting, harsh, unforgiving, and

continuous violence for LGBTQ individuals. Such violence is everywhere: in
the individual psyche and in collective consciousness, in the individual
perceptions and experiences and in the social system and institutions.
sum,
Heteronormativity is a form of everyday violence

Fuelled by heteronormativity, externalized

homophobia is commonplace. It can be directed to any person who is
perceived or assumed to be a sexual other and can be manifested in multiple
These are injuries inflicted on others.
ways: harassment, avoidance, verbal abuse, differential treatment and discriminatory behavior, and
physical violence. The use of name-calling toward individuals who are perceived to be outside the
In
U.S. middle and high schools, for example, verbal harassment is a pervasive
problem: One-third of eleventh grade students who responded to a 1999 CBS poll said that they knew
boundaries of heteronormativity (e.g., lesbian, gay, or transgender) is common in everyday interaction.
of incidents of harassment of gay and lesbian students. Twenty-eight percent admitted to making antigay
The average high school student in Des Moines, Iowa,

public schools hears an antigay comment every seven minutes,
according to data gathered by students in a year-long study; teachers
intervened only 3 percent of the time. (Human Rights Watch, 2001, p. 31) When
remarks themselves.
administrators and fellow students overlook and disregard these situations, they provide a clear message
that it is permissible to hate those who are perceived to be sexual others; thus, the cycle of homophobia
verbal harassment, if allowed to persist, can

lead to an overall hostile environment and other forms of violence, including
physical violence and sexual assault. Hate crimes are the most extreme expression of
gets perpetuated in society. In addition,
externalized homophobia. Antigay violence is increasing (Berrill, 1992; Fone, 2000) and victims are still
Homophobic murder is, as

open season on gays (p. 293). Reports on gay
bashing appear regularly in the media and Every such incident carries a
message to the victim and the entire community of which he or she is part.
Each anti-gay attack is, in effect, a punishment for stepping outside culturally
accepted norms [of heteronormativity] and a warning to all gay and lesbian people
to stay in their place, the invisibility and self-hatred of the closet . (Herek &
Berrill, 1992, p. 3) Externalized homophobia, whether in the form of verbal or
physical assault, is a potent, and at times deadly, mode of enforcement of
the heteronormative order.
being blamed for bringing it on to themselves (Herek & Berrill, 1992).
Donna Minkowitz (2000) put it, still
Heteronormativity is also soul murder

Yep
prof comm @ san fransisco state 2k3 (Gust, The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication
Studies', Journal of Homosexuality, 45: 2, 11 59
Very early in life children

learn from interpersonal contacts and mediated messages that deviations
from the heteronormative standard, such as homosexuality, are anxiety-ridden,
guilt-producing, fear-inducing, shame-invoking, hate- deserving, psychologically
blemishing, and physically threatening. Internalized homophobia, in the form of selfhatred and self-destructive thoughts and behavioral patterns, becomes firmly
implanted in the lives and psyches of individuals in heteronormative society .
These are the internal injuries that individuals inflict upon themselves.
Exemplifying the feelings and experiences of many people who do not fit in the heteronormative mandate,
Kevin Jennings (1994) tells us his personal story: I was born in 1963. . . . [I]
realized in grade school that I was gay. I felt absolutely alone . I had no one to talk
to, didnt know any openly gay people, and saw few representations of gays in the media of the 1970s. I
imagined gay people were a tiny, tiny minority, who had been and would
always be despised for their perversion. Not once in high school did I ever learn a single
thing about homosexuality or gay people. I couldnt imagine a happy life as a gay man.
So I withdrew from my peers and used alcohol and drugs to try to dull the pain of my isolation.
Eventually, at age seventeen I tried to kill myself, like one out of every
three gay teens. I saw nothing in my past, my present, or (it seemed) my future suggesting that
things would ever get any better. (pp. 13-14) Heteronormativity is so powerful that its
regulation and enforcement are carried out by the individuals themselves
through socially endorsed and culturally accepted forms of soul murder.
Soul murder is a term that I borrow from the child abuse and neglect literature to highlight the torment of
heteronormativity (Yep, 2002). Shengold (1999) defines soul murder as the apparently willful abuse and
neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and frequency to be traumatic . . . [so that] the
childrens subsequent emotional development has been profoundly and predominantly negatively
affected (p. 1). Further explaining this concept, Shengold (1989) writes, soul
murder is neither a
diagnosis nor a condition. It is a dramatic term for circumstances that
eventuate in crimethe deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise the
separate identity of another person (p. 2, my emphasis). Isnt the incessant
policing and enforcement, either deliberately or unconsciously, by self and
others, of the heteronormative mandate a widespread form of soul murder?
***AFF***
2AC
Perm do Both
1. Perm do both. The USFG can advocate for a queer
approach to _________. The alternative is not mutually
exclusive with the af.
2. The Status quo solves for queer sufering. The
government is already improving the situation of
queers all around the country. The permutation
speeds up this process faster than the negative,
meaning we access their solvency better.
Lederman 14 (Josh Lederman is a White House reporter for Associated
Press (AP), where he covers electoral politics, Vice President Joe Biden, and
domestic and foreign policy issues. This article was published on 6/20/2014
and accessed on 7/7/14. Obama Expands Government Benefits For Gay
Couples. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/20/gay-couplesbenefits_n_5516561.html. AE)
WASHINGTON (AP) A year after the Supreme Court struck down a
law barring federal recognition of gay marriages, the Obama
administration granted an array of new benefits Friday to same-sex

couples , including those who live in states where gay marriage is
against the law. The new measures range from Social Security and
veterans benefits to work leave for caring for sick spouses. They are
part of President Barack Obama's eforts to expand whatever
protections he can ofer to gays and lesbians even though more than
half of the states don't recognize gay marriage. That effort has been
confounded by laws that say some benefits should be conferred only to
couples whose marriages are recognized by the states where they live, rather
than the states where they were married. Aiming to circumvent that
issue, the Veterans Afairs Department will start letting gay people
who tell the government they are married to a veteran to be buried
alongside them in a national cemetery, drawing on the VA's authority
to waive the usual marriage requirement. In a similar move, the
Social Security Administration will start processing some survivor
and death benefits for those in same-sex relationships who live in
states that don't recognize gay marriage. Nineteen states plus the
District of Columbia currently recognize gay marriage, although court
challenges to gay marriage bans are pending in many states. For Tim Fagen
of Fort Collins, Colorado, the implications could be profound. A retired
electrical engineer, Fagen receives higher Social Security payments than his
79-year partner, Ken Hoole. The two will celebrate their 47th anniversary in
August but until now would have been prevented from accessing each other's
benefits. "If I was to die, it would be really significant for Ken," Fagen
said in an interview. "Not only is it financially beneficial, but
psychologically it's beneficial. It's nice to know that your relationship
is recognized." Meanwhile, the Labor Department said it would start
drafting rules making clear that the Family and Medical Leave Act
applies to same-sex couples, ensuring that gay and lesbian workers

can take unpaid leave to care for a sick spouse . Attorney General
Eric Holder, in a memo to Obama, said the Justice Department has
completed its government-wide push to carry out the high court's
2013 ruling in United States v. Windsor that struck down part of the
Defense of Marriage Act, enabling the federal government to start
granting benefits to married same-sex couples. Holder said the
impact of that court decision "cannot be overstated." At the same
time, Holder urged Congress to adopt legislation that Democratic
lawmakers have proposed that let the VA and Social Security extend
benefits to married couples living in non-gay marriage states .
Obama was lending his support to those eforts in Congress, the
White House said. "The fact that they're endorsing our legislation
will give it a boost," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who wrote the
bill altering the state-of-residence requirement for VA benefits. But
opponents of gay marriage argued that the Obama administration is
misinterpreting the court's decision by using state of residence as the
standard for determining which marriages Washington will recognize. "This
clearly goes beyond the executive branch's authority," said Peter Sprigg of
Family Research Council. "The federal government should not put the thumb
on the scale in terms of how states define marriage." The administrative
steps mark the latest attempt by Obama to promote social
acceptance for gays and lesbians and to ensure they and their
relationships enjoy equal treatment under the law. In addition to
successfully pushing to repeal the ban on gays serving openly in the
military, the Obama administration stopped defending the Defense
of Marriage Act years before the Supreme Court took it up. And last
week, Obama took another step demanded by gay rights advocates
when he announced he will sign an executive order banning federal
contractors from discriminating against employees based on sexual
orientation or gender identity.
Alt Bad
Queer Bad
By labeling their movement as queer, they have sought
to codify that which should remain fluid this is so unqueer of you, links and turns solvency
Browne 6
(Katherine, faculty member of the University of Brighton, researches LGBTQ+ issues. Challenging
Queer Geographies in Antipode vol. 38 iss. 5 pp. 885-893, November 2006,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2006.00483.x/full , retrieved 2014/07/08,
~cVs)
In seeking queer geographies that offer radical contestations and transgressions of normality, I do
not want to fix these contestations and transgressions to only searching for spaces between and
beyond dualisms. Instead, I see queer contestations and transgressions as
always potentially fleeting, recuperated and fluid because of the

unbounded chaos and uncertainty of queer (Elder 1999:88). This
fluidity produces tensions in naming, categorising and
politicising. One of the challenges in writing about queer is that
in naming activism, actions or writings as such, there is a risk of
solidifying, homogenising and de-queering them through the
act of naming (and even this is simplistic in considering the
subtleties of categorising, naming and defining where
belonging to queer implies criteria and policing of such
belongings or where singular acts of becoming are not
necessarily linked to normative discursive frameworks). Queer in this
sense may now be attributed to actions, writings and activism that deconstruct dichotomies
between homosexuality and heterosexuality or man and women. However, these specific
performances and artefacts may not remain queer as they

could become orthodoxies and recuperated within normal (with
other acts and artefacts having the potential to be denormalised and re-queered in specific places, contests and
times). Activities and writings that are defined as queer in our
current geographical context thus have the potential not to be so
queer, and as recuperation occurs the queerness of these
events, actions and manifestations can slip away. Because
queer writings may not remain so queer, queer can remain ever
elusively transgressive not just by defying being named, but by
doing what queer doesoperating beyond powers and controls
that enforce normativity. As particular operations of power seek to normalise,
categorise and fix the proper relations of objects, this makes it difficult to define, categorise and
most importantly control.
The use of the term queer represents a homogenizing

of identity which risks the reestablishment of a masculine
identity and the erasure of its political usefulness
Annamarie Jagose, 1996, PhD in English from the Victoria University of Wellington, Queer
Theory: The Appeal Of Queer Theory Has Outstripped Anyones Sense Of What Exactly It Means, Pgs. 13
Once the term 'queer' was, at best, slang for homosexual, at worst, a
term of homophobic abuse. In recent years 'queer' has come to be used
as an umbrella term for a coalition of culturally

marginal sexual self-identifications and at other times to describe a
nascent theoretical model which has developed out of more
traditional lesbian and gay studies. The rapid development and consolidation of lesbian
differently, sometimes
and gay studies in universities in the 1990s is paralleled by an increasing deployment of the term 'queer'.
As queer is unaligned with any specific identity category, it has the

potential to be annexed profitably to any number of discussions . In the
history of disciplinary formations, lesbian and gay studies is itself a relatively recent construction, and
queer
describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatise
incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal
sex, gender and sexual desire. Resisting that model of stability--which claims
queer theory can be seen as its latest institutional transformation. Broadly speaking,
heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect--queer focuses on mismatches between
queer has been associated most

prominently with lesbian and gay subjects, but its analytic
framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing,
hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery .
sex, gender and desire. Institutionally,
Whether as transvestite performance or academic deconstruction, queer locates and exploits the
Demonstrating the
impossibility of any 'natural' sexuality, it calls into question even
such apparently unproblematic terms as 'man' and 'woman' . The recent
incoherencies in those three terms which stabilise heterosexuality.
intervention of this confrontational word 'queer' in altogether politer academic discourses suggests that
traditional models have been ruptured. Yet its appearance also marks a continuity. Queer theory's
debunking of stable sexes, genders and sexualities develops out of a specifically lesbian and gay reworking
Queer
is not always seen, however, as an acceptable elaboration of or
shorthand for 'lesbian and gay'. Although many theorists welcome queer as 'another
of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions.
discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual' (de Lauretis, 1991:iv), others question its efficacy. 1
The most commonly voiced anxieties are provoked by such issues as

whether a generic masculinity may be reinstalled at the heart of the
ostensibly gender-neutral queer; whether queer's transcendent
disregard for dominant systems of gender fails to consider the
material conditions of the west in the late twentieth century;
whether queer simply replicates, with a kind of historical amnesia, the stances
and demands of an earlier gay liberation; and whether, because its
constituency is almost unlimited, queer includes identificatory
categories whose politics are less progressive than those of the
lesbian and gay populations with which they are aligned . Whatever
ambivalences structure queer, there is no doubt that its recent redeployment is making a substantial
as soon as queer established market

dominance as a diacritical term, and certainly before consolidating
itself in any easy vernacular sense, some theorists are already
suggesting that its moment had passed and that 'queer politics may,
by now, have outlived its political usefulness' . 2 Does queer become defunct the
impact on lesbian and gay studies. Yet, almost
moment it is an intelligible and widely disseminated term? Teresa de Lauretis, the theorist often credited
with inaugurating the phrase 'queer theory', abandoned it barely three years later, on the grounds that it
had been taken over by those mainstream forces and institutions it was coined to resist. Explaining her
choice of terminology in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994), de Lauretis
writes: "As for 'queer theory', my insistent specification lesbian may well be taken as a taking of distance
from what, since I proposed it as a working hypothesis for lesbian and gay studies in this very journal
(differences , 3.2), has very quickly become a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry'. 3
Distancing herself from her earlier advocacy of queer, de Lauretis now represents it as devoid of the
political or critical acumen she once thought it promised.
Conflating queer as a part of identity allows infinite

pluralism within the term it is this pluralism that cannot
resolve the inevitable contradictions and violence within
identity politics
Annamarie Jagose, 1996, PhD in English from the Victoria University of Wellington, Queer
Theory: The Appeal Of Queer Theory Has Outstripped Anyones Sense Of What Exactly It Means, Pgs. 35
there can't
be one--queer may be thought of as activating an identity politics so
attuned to the constraining effects of naming, of delineating a foundational category
which precedes and underwrites political intervention, that it may
better be understood as promoting a non-identity--or even anti-identity-politics. If a potentially infinite coalition of sexual identities, practices,
discourses and sites might be identified as queer, what it betokens is
not so much liberal pluralism as a negotiation of the very concept of
identity itself. For queer is, in part, a response to perceived limitations in the liberationist and
identity-conscious politics of the gay and lesbian feminist movements. The rhetoric of both has
been structured predominantly around self-recognition, community
and shared identity; inevitably, if inadvertently , both movements have
also resulted in exclusions, delegitimation, and a false sense of
universality. The discursive proliferation of queer has been enabled
in part by the knowledge that identities are fictitious--that is, produced by
In the sense that Butler outlines the queer project--that is, to the extent that she argues
and productive of material effects but nevertheless arbitrary, contingent and ideologically motivated.
Unlike those identity categories labelled lesbian or gay, queer has

developed out of the theorising of often unexamined constraints in
traditional identity politics. Consequently, queer has been produced
largely outside the registers of recognition, truthfulness and selfidentity. Queer, then, is an identity category that has no interest in consolidating or even stabilising
itself. It maintains its critique of identity-focused movements by understanding that even the formation of
its own coalitional and negotiated constituencies may well result in exclusionary and reifying effects far in
Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity

politics and having no stake in its own hegemony, queer is less an
identity than a critique of identity. But it is in no position to imagine
itself outside that circuit of problems energised by identity politics .
excess of those intended.
Instead of defending itself against those criticisms that its operations inevitably attract, queer allows such
criticisms to shape its--for now unimaginable--future directions. 'The term', writes Butler, 'will be revised,
dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely
The mobilisation of queer--no less

than the critique of it--foregrounds the conditions of political
representation: its intentions and efects, its resistance to and
recovery by the existing networks of power. For Halperin, as for Butler, queer
is a way of pointing ahead without knowing for certain what to point
at. "'Queer" ... does not designate a class of already objectified
pathologies or perversions', writes Halperin 6 ; "rather, it describes a
horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogenous scope
cannot in principle be delimited in advance ". Queer is always an
identity under construction, a site of permanent becoming: "utopic
in its negativity, queer theory curves endlessly toward a realization
that its realization remains impossible" 7 . The extent to which different theorists
because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized'.
have emphasised the unknown potential of queer suggests that its most enabling characteristic may well
be its potential for looking forward without anticipating the future. Instead of theorising queer in terms of
its opposition to identity politics, it is more accurate to represent it as ceaselessly interrogating both the
Queer is not outside the magnetic field of

identity. Like some postmodern architecture, it turns identity inside
out, and displays its supports exoskeletally. If the dialogue between queer and
preconditions of identity and its effects.
more traditional identity formations is sometimes fraught--which it is--that is not because they have
lesbian and gay faith in the authenticity or even

political efficacy of identity categories and the queer suspension of
all such classifications energise each other, ofering in the 1990s--and who can
say beyond?--the ambivalent reassurance of an unimaginable future.
nothing in common. Rather,
This is game over for the negative. By using queer as a

facet of their identity, they destroy any possibility of
solvency. They make the dichotomy of hetero vs. queer
even more binaristic by lumping together all non-heteros
into one group. They create their own monsters and are
fighting themselves. Vote affirmative for the only team
that advocates any real social change and progress. Also,
dont let them say that because their authors identify as
that it makes it okay. The fact of the matter is that they
have created binaries within this very round. Vote them
down for oppressing themselves.
Anti-Science/Biophobia Turn
The Negs scholarship is BiophobicQueer Ecology is
logically fallacious. Normative, scientific epistemology
solves the impacts of the K
Garrard 10 (Greg Garrard is the FCCS Sustainability Professor at the
University of British Columbia, a National Teaching Fellow of the British

Higher Education Academy, and a founding member and former Chair of
the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK &
Ireland). He is the author of Ecocriticism (Routledge 2004, 2011 2nd edn)
as well as numerous essays on eco-pedagogy, animal studies and
environmental criticism. His interests include environmental criticism and
theory; critical animal studies; environmental education; literature and
science (especially biology); and contemporary British literature;
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press; Configurations, Volume
18, Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010; How Queer is Green?; pgs. 73-76) GFD
Ecofeminism has sought to unravel the interarticulation of gender
oppression with the domination of nature, while queer theory
has pursued a cultural project of subversion of sexual
heteronormativity. Queer ecology brings together and extends
both discourses, at once drawing upon contemporary biology and
subjecting its taxonomies to skeptical critique. This essay argues
that queer theory needs ecocriticism to rescue it from its
biophobic assumptions, but it is not yet clear what ecocriticism stands
to gain from queer theory. Moreover, it is argued that queer ecology
risks the appearance of partial, opportunistic, and conspicuously
biased engagement with biology. Four Exhibits in the Growing
Museum of Queer Ecology Exhibit A: The Bluegill Sunfish The
reproductive habits of this very widespread North American
freshwater fish are such, claims biologist Joan Roughgarden, as to
challenge the foundations of gender and sexuality.1 Contrary to
popular assumptions that other animals conform to the dimorphism of the
human species, the sunfish has two sexes (morphs possessing two
distinct gamete sizes), but four spawning genders: large males with
the orange breast that gave the species its common name; medium
males slightly smaller than but visually similar to females;small, lightcolored males with no markings; and females, marked with vertical bars.
Large males spawn by aggressively defending territories, or leks, while
large numbers of small males hover at the boundaries awaiting an
opportunity to zoom in and fertilize eggs laid in a lek (male strategists
memorably called sneaky fuckers by John Maynard Smith, a name
Roughgarden rather archly contests). The medium males, on the other
hand, court the large males, and, if accepted, fertilize the females
together with them. The mere existence of these varied types of
sunfish might be considered subversive enough, but Roughgarden
knows that the dominant explanations in biology involve deceit of the

large males by the medium ones, and counters with the argument that
they are, in fact, cooperating to gain joint access to reproductive
opportunity. Exhibit B: Rocky Mountain Sheep Another example from
Roughgarden: the charismatic, curly horned rams of the species, images
of which adorn the bonnets of big macho cars and the logos of American
football teams, form gay groups that practice homosexual
courting and copulation.2 The most dominant, masculine rams are
the most enthusiastic par- ticipants, while rams that refuse anal sex and
prefer to live with the ewes are called effeminate. Some domestic
rams tested for homosexuality not only preferred to mount
other males, but would not mount females at all. Of course, it is
not asserted that what is good enough for rams should be good
enough to confront homophobia in humansa signal instance of
the naturalistic fallacybut only that reactionary attempts to
invoke the order of nature against homosexuality (as in,
notoriously, the popes claim that anti-essentialist gender theory was a
bigger threat to nature that climate change)3 are wholly without
biological warrant. Exhibit C: Human Endogenous Retrovirus 3 (or
HERV-R) Making up around 1 percent of our genome, endogenous
ret- roviruses are thought to be fossil viruses whose genetic
material has become embedded in the germ line. While some are
suspected of causing autoimmune diseases and cancer, the fact that they
have been present in our ancestral genome for at least three million years
suggests that they may have beneficial effects as well. As Timothy
Morton notes in Queer Ecology, the alien DNA of ERV-3 may assist
in reducing the mothers immune reac- tions to the embryo, and he
concludes that life is catastrophic, monstrous, non-holistic,
dislocated, not organic, coherent and authoritative.4 Richard
Dawkins, who would probably gag at the thought of cooptation into what
he would understand as postmodern theory, seems to agree that the
notion of a bounded, coherent identity prescribed by our own DNA is
belied by microbiology, saying that there is no important distinction
between our own genes and parasitic or symbiotic insertion
sequences. Whether they conflict or cooperate will depend not
on their historical origins but on the circumstances from which
they stand to gain now.5 We are, it seems, strangers to ourselves
even at the genetic level. Exhibit D: Lesbian Park Rangers Reflecting,
and in some respects representing, these discoveries of the queerness of
nature, Lorri Millan and Shawna Dempsey formed the Canadian Lesbian
National Parks and Services (LNPS) in 1997.6 Dressed in
authentic-looking outfits with embroidered badges, handing out
leaflets in Banf near the national park, and guiding tours that
combine queer natural history with counter- hegemonic sexual
and gender commentary, these performance artists could be
considered part of the artistic wing of queer ecology. The LNPS
makes a striking appearance near the conclusion of Ca- triona
Sandilandss discussion of the sexist and heteronormative structuring of
historical narratives of Canadas national parks, which provides detailed

evidence of the ways in which Canadian national identity came to be
invested in spaces that were constructed, ahis- torically, as the wild home
ranges of solitary male wardens. Con- testing that ideology is a case of
both retrieving the more complex history of the parks, and paying tribute
to the ways in which the LNPS queers the parks and their wardens: They
raise the possibility of a homosexual presence in official national-park
culture; they make same-sex desire . . . a reality in the iconic space of the
masculine wilderness-nation; and they call into question the assumption of womens heterosexuality and, along with it, their heterosexualizing role as bearers of the domestic nation.7 Queer ecology
disrupts heteronormative natures and proposes an alliance
between biological science and the cultural theory that,
throughout the science wars and beyond, had been assumed
to be antithetical to it.
Queer Ecology is dogmaticthe Negs methodology is

based in misrepresentations of their opposition
Garrard 10 (Greg Garrard is the FCCS Sustainability Professor at the
University of British Columbia, a National Teaching Fellow of the British

Higher Education Academy, and a founding member and former Chair of
the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK &
Ireland). He is the author of Ecocriticism (Routledge 2004, 2011 2nd edn)
as well as numerous essays on eco-pedagogy, animal studies and
environmental criticism. His interests include environmental criticism and
theory; critical animal studies; environmental education; literature and
science (especially biology); and contemporary British literature;
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press; Configurations, Volume
18, Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010; How Queer is Green?; pgs. 76-79) GFD
Jorge Luis Borgess brilliant conflation of represented and real, ref- erential
and reflexive, animate, inanimate, and ananimate animals inspired Michel
Foucault to interrogate the discursive construction of the order of
things, and it stands conveniently as the ur-text of the taxonomic antirealism that runs through queer ecology. At the most general level,
queer itself represents and encapsulates a kind of intellectual
Maoism, a perpetual revolution of categories and types. As Noreen
Giffney and Myra Hird assert in Queering the Non/Human: The
unremitting emphasis in queer theoretical work on fluidity, uberinclusivity, indeterminacy, indefinability, unknowability, the preposterous,
impossibility, unthinkability, unintelligibility, mean- inglessness and that
which is unrepresentable is an attempt to undo normative entanglements
and fashion alternative imaginaries. Rhetorically, queer theory
unceasingly (and rather tediously) negates stable categories and
enthuses over subversive or amorphous exceptions toor, as
they are always seen, transgressions ofallegedly fixed distinctions.
It is perhaps unsurprising that a pioneer of queer ecocriticism,
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, declares an almost phobic dislike

of taxonomy,10 which she applies to attempts to categorize her
as an ecofeminist, but which seem to be shared much more generally
within this insurgency-within-an-insurgency. It is not as if ecocritics
at any stage of the enterprise have been unaware that nature is a
problematic social construct (in some way, in some sense, to some
degree), nor have they been blind to the inter-articulation of this construct
with gender, racial, and (to a lesser degree) sexual dis- criminations.
Queer theory, though, introduces a radical new level of
skepticism toward nature and its presumed taxonomies. Greta
Gaards Toward a Queer Ecofeminism is an early contribution
to what is now orthodox ecocritical theory, that liberating women
requires liberating nature, the erotic, and queers.11 Unlike the new
wave of queer ecology with its scientific reference-points, Gaard
draws mainly upon historical evidence to buttress what is really
a structuralist argument linking oppressively hierarchical dualisms such as male/female, culture/nature, reason/emotion, hetero/
homosexual, and others, which she hopes to confront by embracing the
erotic in all its diversity and building coalitions for creating a democratic
ecological culture based on our shared liberation.12 It is a laudable
ambition, certainly, but not necessarily well founded the- oretically or
empirically. For one thing, while the ecofeminist analysis of the
persistent (and usually demeaning) association of women and
nature is, with some biased selection of sources, defensible,13 it
is clear that queers have consistently been condemned as
against nature in Western homophobic culture. Gaard admits as
much, but then suggests that nature is devalued just as queers are
devalued,14 which is not the case: queers allegedly violate the natural
order according to which, often in other contexts, humans are meant to
dominate nature, this time in the everyday sense of the nonhuman
environment and its denizens. Gaards argument depends, then, on an
equivocation between two of Kate Sopers three meanings of nature:
sexual oppression relies upon a vicious theological and ideological
inflection of the realist sense of the word, while the nature that is
subjected to modernizing and colonial conquest is the lay or surface
sense.15 Empirically, it seems unlikely that one would find any
correlation between metrics of sexual liberation in a society
(taking, say, levels of homophobic persecution or, conversely, gay
marriage and civil rights) and those of environmental impact, like
carbon emissions (think Canada and Australia). So although the
conceptual isomorphism discussed by Gaard and others is popular,
intriguing, and perhaps politically motivating, queer ecologists need
more evidence that an ideology in which the erotic, queer
sexualities, women, persons of color, and nature are all conceptually linked16 translates into real socio-ecological relationships.
Ecofeminists like Gaard have long been skeptical of nature in that
ideological sense of natural order; the innovation of queer
ecology is to draw upon scientific evidence to queer nature in the
ordinary, lay sense. It is a complex movement: subverting the

ideological fiction of a heteronormative natural order, queer
ecologists deploy examples from the (queer) natural world, which are
then read back into a transformed natural order reread as always already
queer. The initiative enjoys an atmosphere of bracing radicalism:
whereas ecocritics always sought to highlight the ambivalence
of nature, as well as its historicity, Mortons Ecology without
Nature damns ecocriticism tout court as too enmeshed with the
ideology that churns out ste- reotypical ideas of nature to be of
any use.17 The leftist alternative is ecocritique, which, like queer
theory, thoroughly examines how nature is set up as a transcendental,
unified, independent category. Ecocritique does not think that it is
paradoxical to say, in the name of ecology itself: down with nature!18
However, while it is clear that queer needs green, to avoid the ethical
dead-end of repetitive aporetic gestures, its reflex of reflexivity, it is not
obvious that green needsor indeed stands to benefit fromqueer.
Furthermore, while the queer critique of organicism is salutary on
properly ecological grounds, and the dismantling of spurious
sexual hierarchy desirable on moral grounds, queer ecologys
opportunistic appropriation of biology frequently misrepresents
both science and the philosophical assumptions that guide it.
Trans* Erasure
You dont go far enough. Despite its entrenchment in the
academy and in society, queer theory has not realized its
potential to restructure understandings of gender or to
achieve progress for the trans community
Stryker 4
(Susan, trans activist and trans woman, Transgender Studies: Queer Theorys Evil Twin in GLQ: A Journal
of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.2 pp. 212-215 http://ejournals.ebsco.com/Direct.asp?
AccessToken=6VMVKL98-MGOO1WAW7330AWINZKO89FK9X&Show=Object&msid=604025715 ~cVs)
If queer theory was born of the union of sexuality studies and

feminism, transgender studies can be considered queer theory's evil
twin: it has the same parentage but willfully disrupts the privileged
family narratives that favor sexual identity labels (like gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and heterosexual) over the gender categories (like man
and woman) that enable desire to take shape and find its aim. In the first
volume of GLQ I published my first academic article, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of
Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage," an autobiographically inflected performance piece drawn from
my experiences of coming out as a transsexual.1 The article addressed four distinct theoretical moments.
The first was Judith Butler's then recent, now paradigmatic linkage of gender with the notion of trouble.
Gender's absence renders sexuality largely incoherent, yet gender

refuses to be the stable foundation on which a system of sexuality
can be theorized.2 A critical reappraisal of transsexuality, I felt,
promised a timely and significant contribution to the analysis of the
intersection of gender and sexuality. The second moment was the appearance of
Sandy Stone's "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," which pointedly criticized Janice G.
Raymond's paranoiac Transsexual Empire and called on transsexual people to articulate new narratives of
self that better expressed the authenticity of transgender experience.3 I considered my article on
transgender rage an explicit answer to that call. The third moment was Leslie Feinberg's little pamphlet,
Transgender Liberation. Feinberg took a preexisting term, transgender, and invested it with new meaning,
enabling it to become the name for Stone's theorized posttranssexualism.4 Feinberg linked the drive to
inhabit this newly envisioned space to a broader struggle for social justice. I saw myself as a fellow
Finally, I perceived a tremendous utility, both political and

theoretical, in the new concept of an antiessentialist,
postidentitarian, strategically fluid "queerness." It was through
participation in Queer Nationparticularly its San Francisco-based
spin-of, Transgender Nationthat I sharpened my theoretical teeth
on the practice of transsexuality. When I came out as transsexual in
1992, I was acutely conscious, both experientially and intellectually,
that transsexuals were considered abject creatures in most feminist
and gay or lesbian contexts, yet I considered myself both feminist
and lesbian. I saw GLQ as the leading vehicle for advancing the new queer theory, and I saw in
traveler.
queer theory a potential for attacking the antitranssexual moralism so unthinkingly embedded in most
progressive analyses of gender and sexuality without resorting to a reactionary, homophobic, and
misogynistic counteroffensive. I sought instead to dissolve and recast the ground that identity genders in
By denaturalizing and thus deprivileging

nontransgender practices of embodiment and identification, and by
simultaneously enacting a new narrative of the wedding of self and
flesh, I intended to create new territories, both analytic and
material, for a critically refigured transsexual practice. Embracing and
the process of staking its tent.
identifying with the figure of Frankenstein's monster, claiming the transformative power of a return from
abjection, felt like the right way to go.
Looking back a decade later, I see that in

having chosen to speak as a famous literary monster, I not only
found a potent voice through which to ofer an early formulation of

transgender theory but also situated myself (again, like Frankenstein's monster)
in a drama of familial abandonment, a fantasy of revenge against
those who had cast me out, and a yearning for personal redemption .
I wanted to help define "queer" as a family to which transsexuals
belonged. The queer vision that animated my life , and the lives of so
many others in the brief historical moment of the early 1990s , held
out the dazzling prospect of a compensatory, utopian
reconfiguration of community. It seemed an anti-oedipal, ecstatic
leap into a postmodern space of possibility in which the foundational
containers of desire could be ruptured to release a raw erotic power
that could be harnessed to a radical social agenda. That vision still
takes my breath away. A decade later, with another Bush in the White House and
another war in the Persian Gulf, it is painfully apparent that the queer
revolution of the early 1990s yielded, at best, only fragile and
tenuous forms of liberal progress in certain sectors and did not
radically transform societyand as in the broader world, so too in
the academy. Queer theory has become an entrenched, though generally]
progressive, presence in higher education, but it has not realized the
(admittedly utopian) potential I (perhaps naively) sensed there for a radical
restructuring of our understanding of gender, particularly of
minoritized and marginalized manifestations of gender, such as
transsexuality. While queer studies remains the most hospitable place to undertake transgender
work, all too often queer remains a code word for "gay" or "lesbian,"
and all too often transgender phenomena are misapprehended
through a lens that privileges sexual orientation and sexual identity
as the primary means of difering from heteronormativity.
Queer Theory = Racist

Queer Theory does not sufficiently recognize the
intersections of race and classlittle focus on materiality
and the perspectives of PoC
Johnson 10 (E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of
Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern

University. A scholar, artist, and activist, Johnson has performed nationally
and internationally and has published widely in the area of race, gender,
sexuality and performance; Quare studies, or (almost) everything I
know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother; Text and
Performance Quarterly; Volume 21, Issue 1; Publisher: Routledge;
Published online: 05 Nov 2010; pages 4-5) GFD
At a moment when queer studies has gained momentum in the
academy and forged a space as a legitimate disciplinary subject,
much of the scholarship produced in its name elides issues of
race and class. While the epigraphs that open this essay suggest that
the label queer sometimes speaks across (homo)sexualities, they
also suggest that the term is not necessarily embraced by gays,
bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people of color. Indeed, the
statements of Mack-Nataf, Blackman, and Cohen reflect a general
suspicion that the label often displaces and rarely addresses their
concerns.4 Some queer theorists have argued that their use of queer is
more than just a reappropriation of an offensive term. Cherry Smith, for
example, maintains that the term entails a radical questioning of social
and cultural norms, notions of gender, reproductive sexuality and the
family (280). Others underscore the playfulness and inclusivity of the
term, arguing that it opens up rather than fixes identities. According to
Eve Sedgwick, What it takesall it takesto make the description
queer a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person (9).
Indeed, Sedgwick suggests, it may refer to pushy femmes, radical faeries,
fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedos, feminist women or
feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch
bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified
men or lesbians who sleep with men, or [. . .] people able to relish, learn
from, or identify with such. (8) For Sedgwick, then, it would appear that
queer is a catchall term not bound to any particular identity, a notion
that moves us away from binaries such as homosexual/ heterosexual and
gay/lesbian. Micheal Warner offers an even more politicized and polemical
view: The preference for queer represents, among other things,
an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic
of toleration or simple political interest- representation in favor of a more
thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. For academics, being
interested in Queer theory is a way to mess up the desexualized spaces of
the academy, exude some rut, reimagine the public from and for which
academic intellectuals write, dress, and perform. (xxvi) The foregoing

theorists identify queer as a site of indeterminate possibility, a site
where sexual practice does not necessarily determine ones status as
queer. Indeed, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue that queer is
more a matter of aspiration than it is the expression of an identity or a
history (344). Accordingly, straight- identified critic Calvin Thomas
appropriates Judith Butlers notion of critical queerness to suggest that
just as there is more than one way to be critical, there may be more
than one (or two or three) to be queer (83). Some critics have applied
Butlers theory of gender to identity formation more generally. Butler calls
into question the notion of the self as distinct from discursive cultural
fields. That is, like gender, there is no independent or pure self or agent
that stands outside socially and culturally mediated discursive systems.
Any move toward identification, then, is, in her view, to be hoodwinked
into believing that identities are discourse free and capable of existing
outside the systems those identity formations seek to critique. Even when
identity is contextualized and qualified, Butler still insists that theories of
identity invariably close with an embarrassed etc. (Gender 143).
Butlers emphasis on gender and sex as performative would seem to
undergird a progressive, forward-facing theory of sexuality. In fact, some
theorists have made the theoretical leap from the gender performative to
the racial performative, thereby demonstrating the potential of her theory
for understanding the ontology of race.5 But to riff off of the now popular
phrase gender trouble, there is some race trouble here with queer
theory. More particularly, in its race for theory (Christian), queer
theory has often failed to address the material realities of gays
and lesbians of color. As black British activist Helen (Charles) asks,
What happens to the definition of queer when youre washing up
or having a wank? When youre aware of misplace- ment or displacement
in your colour, gender, identity? Do they get subsumed [. . .] into a
homogeneous category, where class and other things that make
up a cultural identity are ignored? (101102). What, for example,
are the ethical and material implications of queer theory if its
project is to dismantle all notions of identity and agency? The
deconstructive turn in queer theory highlights the ways in which
ideology functions to oppress and to proscribe ways of knowing,
but what is the utility of queer theory on the front lines, in the trenches,
on the street, or anyplace where the racialized and sexualized body is
beaten, starved, fired, cursedindeed, where the body is the site of
trauma?6 Beyond queer theorys failure to focus on materiality, it
also has failed to acknowledge consistently and critically the
intellectual, aesthetic, and political contributions of nonwhite and
non-middle-class gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people
in the struggle against homophobia and oppression. More- over,
even when white queer theorists acknowledge these
contributions, rarely do they self-consciously and overtly reflect
on the ways in which their whiteness informs their critical queer
position, and this is occurring at a time when naming ones
positionality has become almost standard protocol in other areas

of scholarship. Although there are exceptions, most often white
queer theorists fail to acknowledge and address racial privilege.7
The White Epistemology intrinsic to much of Queer Theory

makes the AFF methodology inaccessible to some Queer
PoC and props up White Supremacy through the
deconstruction of community and fervent rejection of
opposition
Johnson 10 (E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of
Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern
University. A scholar, artist, and activist, Johnson has performed nationally
and internationally and has published widely in the area of race, gender,
sexuality and performance; Quare studies, or (almost) everything I
know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother; Text and
Performance Quarterly; Volume 21, Issue 1; Publisher: Routledge;
Published online: 05 Nov 2010; pages 5-6) GFD
Because transgendered people, lesbians, gays, and bisexuals of color
often ground their theorizing in a politics of identity, they
frequently fall prey to accusations of essentialism or antiintellectualism. Galvanizing around identity, however, is not
always an unintentional essentialist move. Many times, it is an
intentional strategic choice.8 Cathy Cohen, for example, suggests
that queer theorizing which calls for the elimination of fixed
categories seems to ignore the ways in which some traditional
social identities and communal ties can, in fact, be important to
ones survival (Punks 450). The communal ties to which
Cohen refers are those which exist in communities of color across
boundaries of sexuality. For example, my grandmother, who is
homophobic, nonetheless must be included in the struggle against
oppression in spite of her bigotry. While her homophobia must be
critiqued, her feminist and race struggles over the course of her life have
enabled me and others in my family to enact strategies of resistance
against a number of oppressions, including homophobia. Some queer
activists groups, however, have argued fer- vently for the
disavowal of any alliance with heterosexuals, a disavowal that
those of us who belong to communities of color cannot
necessarily aford to make.9 There- fore, while offering a progressive
and sometimes transgressive politics of sexuality, the seams of queer
theory become exposed when that theory is applied to identities around
which sexuality may pivot, such as race and class. As a counter to this
myopia and in an attempt to close the gap between theory and
practice, self and Other, Audre Lorde proclaims: Without
community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and
temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.
But community must not mean a shedding of our diferences, nor
the pathetic pretense that these diferences do not exist. [. . .] I

urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of
knowledge inside herself and touch the terror and loathing of any
diference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the
personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.
(11213, emphasis in original) For Lorde, a theory that dissolves the
communal identityin all of its diference around which the
marginalized can politically organize is not a progressive one. Nor
is it one that gays, bisexuals, transgendered people, and lesbians of
color can aford to adopt, for to do so would be to foreclose
possibilities of change.

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GDS: BJSZ Lab Queer

of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the

of sexuality, as it migrates in the global system, into

waged in the domain of sexuality and sexual regulation and asymmetrically

of learning and the fundamentally pedagogic

WHITE HETEROMASCULINITY IS GROUNDS WAR AND

they must appear immediately effective and useful if we are to recognize

this historical present

FUTURIST GROUNDING MANDATES EXTERMINATION OF

recoils when comes upon the nonreproductive

pleasures of the mind and

If, however, there is no baby and in consequence, no

OUR DISCUSSION OF NATURE HAS PEDAGOGICAL VALUE IN

If we are indeed teetering on the edge of a massive change in how

Religion, that bag of myths and mysteries, birthplace of the theatre,

OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO QUEER THE 1AC

The problem is, the Nature/Human

Observing queer behavior in

Writing about nature means accepting that it will

Well, first, one that is

Queer ecology, then, is the study of dynamics across all

within the subject of nature, as well as the contradictions wrapped

A queer ecology is a liberatory ecology. It is

University of Minnesota 2k8

figuratively mi mati is my girl, but literally it means mate, as in shipmate

shipmates then. Instead, in relationship to blackness, queerness, and black

The affirmative falsely evokes the Middle Passage and

theorists and heterocentric race theorists have engaged their discourses of

African diaspora studies to take seriously the possibility that, as forcefully

submarine space, but it is hard to hear her or his underwater voice,

THUS WE ADVOCATE A QUEERING OF THE MIDDLE

In the past fifteen years postcolonial studies effected sea changes in

Alt Solvency Anti-Blackness

University of Minnesota 2k8

examples of mis-mirrored terms in this passage: languages (Spanish/English) and couples

Queer theory gains its roots from the sufering of

University of Minnesota 2k8

an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation

racialization limited to the black-white landscape of the contemporary

Metaphors lose their metaphoricity as they congeal through time into

La Mar embraces all. The ocean speaks many languages.

Number 2-3, pp. 191-215;

The ocean does speak many languages, and I am only a novice

AT: Perm (Anti-Blackness)

University of Minnesota 2k8

imagined at an unremitting intersection between maritime materialities and

navigational instructions which sailors learned by heart . . . the routes and

AT: Perm (Queer Eco)

Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture at York

between institutions of sexuality and institutions of nature. We can see that

THE NOTION OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS CONTAINED WITHIN THE

Robert J, University of Georgia at Athens, Activism as Practice: Some Queer Considerations

seeing and being in the world. Activism also promotes ongoing

AT: Queer theory Bad

literature, and Asian American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is

QUEER PERSPECTIVISM RESITUATES OUR RELATIONSHIP

Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture at York

and take on what I am calling a queer ecological perspective, to work toward

criticized heteronormativity, arguing not only that heterosexuality was not

QUEER FRAMES OF EXISTENCE ARE NECESSARY TO RESIST VIOLENT

not only is heterosexism part of the web of

AT: Cede the Political

Greta- an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker.

ones sexual identity on hold in order to work on