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Queer Ecologies: Connecting Sustainability Studies and Gender Studies

I came to the Valley and Ridge Workshop hoping to better understand the ways in which gender studies and queer studies connected to bigger questions of sustainability.  I quickly realized that questions of environmental justice are deeply interwoven with questions about the systems of oppression that frame my courses on gender and sexuality.   Discourses of nature have long been used to enforce heteronormativity and so I decided to focus my work on a unit I’ve called Queer Ecologies that is included in my 200-level English/WGSS course entitled, Writing, Identity, and Queer Studies.  The unit explores and engages with the intersection of queer theory and questions of sustainability by encouraging students to think about and articulate the ways in which imbalances of power and systemic oppression intersect with questions of sustainability. 

The new unit adds readings that highlight the connection between queer studies and sustainability studies including literary texts by authors Eli Clare and Shani Mootoo; both authors engage how place, and the environmental questions of that place, influence identity formation.  For example, Clare describes growing up in a white working-class logging community, and how that identity and alliances were complicated by his education in sustainability, the destruction of environments, and a new understanding of Indigenous ways of caring for land and animals.  Mootoo similarly explores a fictional island under colonial rule whose flora and fauna, as well as its people, are suffering from the violent rules requiring conformity to normative culture.  Alongside the literature, students read excerpts from Keywords for Environmental Studies (including entries on ecofeminism, humanities, and queer ecology) and work on short reflection papers that use this secondary source as a lens to help close read our primary, literary texts.  As a way of underscoring place-based learning, I also added a short, personal reflection assignment to the course.  In it, I ask students to sit in a location on Dickinson’s campus and note how the space engages with norms of gender and sexuality. 

Finally, the workshop catalyzed my thinking about my other courses—especially those related to 19th-century literature and culture.  I have begun to brainstorm ways that I can integrate conversations about sustainability studies into these classes, focusing on the impact of the Industrial Revolution and how concerns about environment and sustainability in Victorian literature still resonate today.  It seems vital to return to this time to think about the origins of this discourse, as the Industrial Revolution is both the beginning of the most harmful human-caused planetary changes as well as the beginning of this conversation about sustainability.