Strange Natures

Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination

Nicole Seymour

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780252079160, 9780252037627
• eBook ISBN: 9780252094873
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

In Strange Natures, Nicole Seymour investigates the ways in which contemporary queer fictions offer insight on environmental issues through their performance of a specifically queer understanding of nature, the nonhuman, and environmental degradation. By drawing upon queer theory and ecocriticism, Seymour examines how contemporary queer fictions extend their critique of "natural" categories of gender and sexuality to the nonhuman natural world, thus constructing a queer environmentalism. Seymour's thoughtful analyses of works such as Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, Todd Haynes's Safe, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain illustrate how homophobia, classism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia inform dominant views of the environment and help to justify its exploitation. Calling for a queer environmental ethics, she delineates the discourses that have worked to prevent such an ethics and argues for a concept of queerness that is attuned to environmentalism's urgent futurity, and an environmentalism that is attuned to queer sensibilities.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Locating Queer Ecologies
• 2. Post-Transsexual Pastoral: Environmental Ethics in the Contemporary Transgender Novel
• 3. “It's Just not Turning up”: AIDS, Cinematic Vision, and Environmental Justice in Todd Haynes's Safe
• 4. “Ranch Stiffs” and “Beach Cowboys” in the Shrinking Public Sphere: Sexual Domestication in Brokeback Mountain and Surf Party
• 5. Attack of the Queer Atomic Mutants: The Ironic Environmentalism of Shelley Jackson's Half Life
• Conclusion: The Futures of Queer Ecology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author