This is a portion of a roundtable discussion on queer ecologies held on 11 September 2014. The roundtable is also available as a podcast and was produced in collaboration with CoHearence, an initiative of graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies suppored by NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and Environment)

Brochu-Ingram, Gordon Brent

Hobbs, Peter

Sandilands, Catriona

English

UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)

60   UnderCurrents 19  |  2015norm, there’s going to be this drive or a kind of queer survival or a larger kind of queer space, on the one hand, and I think, we’ve alluded to it, I’m think-ing of that book [Cruising Utopia] by the now sadly deceased José Esteban Muñoz. [All the works we discussed are] struggling with notions of the queer imagination as . . . somehow relat-ed to our research and our scholarship and our lives. And it’s not easy—we’ve got these two poles—for many of us it is quite painful to try to figure out how to respond to both of those imperatives in our lives and in our scholarship.Catriona Sandilands: I think that one of the things that I have struggled with in the midst of some of the more recent scholarship that has called itself queer ecology, for example, Tim Morton’s editorial in the Pacific Modern Life As-sociation (PMLA) journal, which a lot of people quote, and he’s arguing that queer, that queerness is sort of a funda-mental principle of the universe and we all kind of share it. And, in this, he ends up equating queerness with relational-ity. He has since changed his mind, in his more recent work on hyperobjects, he has become less interested in rela-tions and more interested in objects, but, that’s OK. And he gets quoted a lot. . . . A more sophisticated version of this is Karen Barad’s work on queer perfor-mativity. In which she’s also arguing that queer is somehow a basic principle of life. So, on both of those accounts, there is no limit to queer ecology, be-cause ecology is always already queer. I start wondering, “Well, if everything is queer, than nothing is queer.” Because we lose, I think we lose the specificity, we lose the politics, we lose the sense that—Peter is shaking his head, we’ve disagreed on this publicly before . . . Darren Patrick: Let’s get it on tape this time. [Laughter] Let’s commit it to the global archive.Catriona Sandilands: I don’t think it fundamentally depoliticizes, because it is actually calling into question, it is actually calling to attention certain ver-sions of, certain processes of life that are otherwise not considered publicly, so I think it is actually quite important. I think Barad’s article is actually quite important.Is there some way in which we need to have different ways of talking about queerness in different ontolog-ical registers? So, within the biological realm, within the political realm, the social realm, within the affectional or other realms. There seem to be differ-ent versions of what queer means. So, I think queer [ecology] is potentially limitless, but what I would actually like to see us do is speak more specifi-cally about some of the particular con-junctions, some of the more particular UnderCurrents: As we engage in this extended discussion tonight, what about an in-version of the first question: When do we reach a limit after which the work we’re doing is not queer ecological work anymore? It’s a sort of goofy contingent question to pose, but it was something that came up in our editorial process this year.Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram: Well, I have a visceral response. Darren Patrick: Oh, good, we need your viscerality!Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram: That is, that we are living in a time of environmental crisis which affects everybody, including queer identified people, [which] often has huge implications for sexual practices. And, I have to say that what’s going to drive the notion of queer ecology in the long term is this very queer dynamic between surviv-al quests—quests for survival—whether its protection from violence or recognition of marriage rights or recognition of the right to live outside of any kind of accepted GORDON BRENT BROCHU-INGRAM, PETER HOBBS & CATRIONA SANDILANDSQueer Ecologies Roundtable DiscussionPart 4: Queer Ecologies at the Limits2015  |  UnderCurrents 19   61articulations that appear between and among these realms. So, that’s kind of a non-answer to your question. .  .  . It’s potentially everything, but I don’t think that it should be everything. I think it should be a bunch of very particular things.Peter Hobbs: I totally understand that point that you would lose specificity and you would lose specificity by opening up the notion of queer to include star-fish and lead. And the idea that “if ev-erything’s queer, then nothing is queer.” I understand that. And, this is sort of a minor difference, if it is a difference, be-cause, I think we . . . are pretty much the same person. [Laughter]Darren Patrick: But let’s zoom in on the difference a little bit. All the disclaimers being on the table, let’s talk about that difference, even if it is a minor differ-ence.Peter Hobbs: Well I knew this was go-ing to come up. So I was thinking about this axiom: If everything is queer then nothing is queer. And how it sort of is an axiom. Catriona Sandilands: As long as it’s not a cliché.Peter Hobbs: [Laughter] Yeah, and of course, if “everything is queer then nothing is queer;” I don’t quite follow that. If everything is queer, then every-thing is queer. Catriona Sandilands: Both things can be true at the same time.Peter Hobbs: But, regardless of that—Catriona Sandilands: Maybe the axiom is: “If everything is queer, then nothing is queer in the way that I want it to be queer.” [Laughter]Peter Hobbs: Yeah, I guess the specific-ity [is] a specificity for certain stories that haven’t been worked over enough that I think that you would be hesitant to lose. .  .  . A similar criticism is made of the posthuman: that we can’t talk about the posthuman because we’d lose out on the stories of all those wonderful and horrible stories of being human... So, I totally understand that, but I think that’s maybe the difference between; maybe we haven’t talked about the dif-ference between a cultural studies ap-proach to queer ecologies and looking at discourse [analysis] approach. . . .When materialism has been in-troduced to queer ecologies and has taken on a role, we’re looking to think with and through animals and microbes and plants. That is definitely part of the queer ecology; that’s one of the most ex-citing parts that queer ecology is think-ing with and through the animal or the non-human. And you could say the ex-act same thing: If everything is going to tell us a story then, of course, we’re go-ing to lose certain stories.But I do want to point out that there is this shift away from a cultural stud-ies to more material studies, a notion of performativity, and this call to think with and through non-human. I think [that is] important to queer ecologies.Catriona Sandilands: I think that we need both things. And the work that most compels me is the work that actu-ally manages to do both things well. Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram: Well .  .  . I haven’t read Mel Chen’s work, I know of some of [their] earlier work; I’m still stuck on this idea that queer ecologies—through this recognition of a reprocentric and heteronormative bi-ases of 300 years of modern science—has a huge implication for how we view the world. And I thought .  .  . the back and forth with Peter and Cate is very important, but, for me, it’s still funda-mental that queer ecologies is part of a greater critique of—and a very profound critique of—much of what we know as biology and ecology. We’ve just begun to understand what that means for how we view the world and how we identify what’s important and what’s vulnera-ble, what we can count on and what is more ephemeral. So, I like the way this conversation is going, but, again, it goes back to a kind of critique of science; co-lonial science and neo-colonial science, heternormative science, patriarchal sci-ence, all the things that we have just be-gun to challenge. Because, what I hear with the back and forth between Cate and Peter is .  .  . a lot of philosophical kinds of nuance that I haven’t been able to explore . . . and I’ll for sure look at Mel Chen’s reading.For bibliographic notes and a podcast of the complete roundtable discussion, please visit www.yorku.ca/currents or download the podcast from CoHearence on iTunes.Queer Ecologies Roundtable Part 4  |  Brochu-Ingram, Hobbs & Sandilands“A VERY SEXY WOODSMAN.” Photo by William Notman via McCord Museum.

Part 4: Queer Ecologies at the Limits

https://currents.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/currents/article/download/40259/36058

Part 4: Queer Ecologies at the Limits

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UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)