Mulberiddlesex

Through a careful tracing of the botanical presence of mulberry trees in Middlesex, Sandilands argues for a reading practice that takes plants seriously. Thinking with plants interrupts the tendency to consider literary plants primarily as motifs, metaphors or agents of crude naturalization. Sandilands insists on involving plants in reading Middlesex in order to take the novel in less anthropocentric directions: even as Cal enlists mulberries to signal inevitability, their own stories overflow the novel’s deterministic views of race, species, territory, and gender identity

Combustion

Match, wood, flame. Pyrocultures, settler colonial pyrophobia. Internal combustion. Wildfire. Petrocapitalist immolation. This short photo essay reflects on fire as simultaneously a sensuous phenomenon of everyday life and an entity that, because of both its presence and its absence in particular formations, makes worlds. To be aware, both corporeally and politically, of our involvement in pyric practices and regimes allows us to begin to imagine what it might mean to understand and change our relations to fire as part of a larger project of energetic transformation: bodily, socially, politically

Introduction: Sex and the (Motor) City: Ecologies of Middlesex

This special cluster consists of twelve short essays, originally presented in two linked roundtables at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference in Detroit in June 2017, examining Jeffrey Eugenides\u27 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex. Through the novel, these papers explore the historical, intersectional, and ecological understandings of Detroit, exposing an exceptional—indeed, epic—range of social ecologies, concerned with everything from intersex and multispecies bio/geopolitics to transnational economies, to the aesthetics of architecture and decay. Focused on a very particular novel, written about a very particular city and experience of it, these papers bring to light and develop an ecocritical trajectory that collects voices and perspectives not always already familiar to the environmental humanities, and also deepens or extends already ongoing discussions within the field. The cluster thus assembles people and perspectives from multiple institutions, countries, educations, and standpoints within the environmental humanities, in an attempt to both complicate and explore the desire for resilience in, as highlighted in the ASLE conference theme, a “rusted” economy

Lavender's Green? Some Thoughts on Queer(y)ing Environmental Politics

At the Stein Valley festival in the Summer of 1989, Anne Cameron, who was presumed to be an authority on such things, was asked "what is the place of gay men and lesbians in the environmental movement?" She answered: "everywhere." Much applause. Next question

Combustion

Match, wood, flame. Pyrocultures, settler colonial pyrophobia. Internal combustion. Wildfire. Petrocapitalist immolation. This short photo essay reflects on fire as simultaneously a sensuous phenomenon of everyday life and an entity that, because of both its presence and its absence in particular formations, makes worlds. To be aware, both corporeally and politically, of our involvement in pyric practices and regimes allows us to begin to imagine what it might mean to understand and change our relations to fire as part of a larger project of energetic transformation: bodily, socially, politically

Whose there is there there? Queer Directions and Ecocritical Orientations

Key words: queer ecocriticism, environmental justice, ecophobia, performativity, normative heterosexuality This essay outlines the necessary role of queer ecocriticism as one of unsettling normative thinking about environmental issues and defamiliarizing some ecocritical practices. In particular, a queer ecocritic can propose a rethinking of what our reinhabitation of the world should be like. Other questions as the implications of the intersection between sex and nature or the rethinking of nature itself as queerly performative in the fact that species become themselves over and over again through a process of evolutionary “satisficing” according to the demands of their environment should also be addresssed. Likewise, queer ecocriticism can question the role of the senses and corporeal relations in experiencing place.  Palabras clave: ecocritica queer, justicia medioambiental, ecofobia, performatividad, heterosexualidad normativa Este ensayo esboza el papel necesario de la ecocrítica queer para cuestionar el  pensamiento normativo sobre temas medioambientales y como defamiliarización de algunas prácticas ecocríticas. En particular, un/a ecocrítico/a queer puede proponer un nuevo planteamiento de cómo debería ser nuestra re-habitación del mundo. Otras cuestiones son las implicaciones de los cruces entre sexo y naturaleza o el volver a pensar en la naturaleza como “performativa” desde una perspectiva queer en el sentido de que las especies se convierten en sí mismas una y otra vez a través de un proceso evolucionario de satisfacer en grado suficiente según las demandas de su entorno. De la misma manera, la ecocrítica queer puede cuestionar el papel de los sentidos y de las relaciones corporales al experimentar el lugar