108 Part I: Queer Ecologies, Complex Genealogies Queer ecology is a conceptual framework that interrogates the relationship between the queer and the natural, broadly construed. It combines the critical, confrontational thrust of “queer” found in queer theory with the interest in biological relationships denoted by “ecology” – though this interest is usually more cultural than scientific, as I will show. 1 One of queer ecology’s foundational insights is that “the queer” and “the natural” have been opposed in public discourses. This opposition is ironic to the extent that, as scholars such as Greta Gaard have pointed out, both queers and nature – along with people of color and the poor – have historically been exploited. Queer ecology scholarship thus often traces the commonalities among those categories. Other scholars have complicated such analyses by showing that pro-environmental forces can also be homophobic – not to mention racist. Andil Gosine, for example, observes that “discourses on the ecological dangers of over- population and [discourses on] homosexuality … similarly function and are similarly invested in the production and maintenance of white heteronormativity.” 2 Queer ecology scholarship also takes aim at normative notions of health and purity as they appear across both sexual and environmental discourses – as with, for example, homophobia- and transphobia-tinged fears that androg- yny, homosexuality, and infertility are rising in animal populations as a result of pollution. 3 Some scholars have disarticulated these discriminatory links among queerness and toxicity and contamination – often to recuperate LGBTQI2S connections to nature – whereas others have reframed those links entirely; as Shiloh Krupar remarks in her work on nuclear contamination, “we might all be queer in this ‘postnuclear’ age—our bodies, families, homes, domesticity.” 4 In sum, then, queer ecology scholars variously undertake prac- tices of naturalizing and denaturalizing. chapter 7 Queer Ecologies and Queer Environmentalisms Nicole Seymour terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108699396.009 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Anderson University Library, on 08 Sep 2020 at 20:17:39, subject to the Cambridge Core