System-Breaking Questions from a Queer Ecologist

| By Jasmine Qureshi |

“Queerness”. A word climbing hesitantly and bravely onto the global stage. 

Odd.

Strange.

Does not correspond to established ideas.

These are words and phrases that come up should we search, “queerness” or “queer”, on the internet.

Q: “What does ‘queer’ mean to you?”

Often, at the start of the workshops and seminars, I will ask the above question. The answers vary hugely, from “different”, “space”, or “gay”, to “sexuality”, or even, “colourful”. The truth is that they are all correct. This is a recently invented word that swims in generality and only provides the benefits and freedom that it does through that vagueness.

“Queer Ecology” is often mistaken as a subject, but to me it’s an interaction and a process. When you grow up as I did – surrounded and hobbled by limitations and assumptions of your identity, none via your consent – you wish for… freedom. I find great joy in queerness as it offers the chance of ‘not corresponding’. It offers alternative ways of existing. A pathway out. As a result, the journey of “queering” is one that I have been on my entire life, even if I didn’t know it. The combining of this with my love for ecology and nature has been a more recent addition.

To “queer” something, from my perspective, is to break it. It’s to take it apart, to see how it works, to find the links and interactions between the parts, and then to break those parts down even further. This process is ever-changing and will reveal new questions for us to follow. One that I regularly grapple with is:

Q: How do we remember the things we are breaking?  

Though we are ‘questioning’ and seeking out alternatives, we mustn’t forget what we’re moving away from. When we apply this to the systems we exist in today, we see that we shouldn’t erase the parts that no longer serve us. This act of erasing and forgetting, after all, was a tactic of the colonisers who set foot on land that wasn’t theirs and rejected the ways of the indigenous peoples who were intertwined with the land and wildlife – instead of recognising them as a source of wisdom.

Control, occupation and exploitation of lands, peoples, minds and bodies, are the fundamentals of colonialism. This is known as “anthropocentrism”, where human behaviour is centred in all our scientific discoveries involving the natural world. But human behaviour is flawed and full of social constructs. In modern Western societies, for example, eurocentric standards of excellence, patriarchal standards of hierarchy, and cis heteronormative standards of existence dominate. As a result, this ‘human vs nature’ dichotomy continues and is projected onto studies relating to our planet.

These biases and binaries were questioned and fought against by many indigenous communities but prevailed nonetheless. I see our role now as continuing the fight and preserving the perspectives of those who have been historically undermined. As does Cate Sandilands, a professor of environmental studies who, in 1994, coined the term “queer ecology” to capture and conceptualise this process of continual questioning, pulling away and moving towards.

Q: What are we pulling away from?

In my poetry, creative writing, and in all liberative structures, I find I’m constantly questioning and pulling away from the normalised understandings of ecology that in the West are taught to us as fact. These ‘facts’ are assumptions made by certain people who have had the privilege of access to resources and platforms, meaning it is their voices who are constantly being heard. What I’m beginning to understand is that in the rainbow-washing capitalist world that we live in, these privileges can also exist within our queer communities.

As a result, we may find our understanding of “queer ecology” being limited by a mainstream idea of queerness. For example, evidence of “queer” nature is often depicted through the lens of the ‘gay love’ that can exist in penguins, colourful male birds, or transgender clownfish. These are all valid, and I myself have often referred to these in the past, but what I’m now realising is that these examples only further the anthropocentric structures we humans develop and place on other animals – questioning what is considered ‘normal’ in the first place.

I now feel that our queer nature is so much more free. Some examples of this freedom can be found in the ways that “gender development” is not reliant on sex chromosomes in clownfish. Likewise in studies on Neutrogla - an insect found in caves in Brazil - where the individuals are “anatomically reversed” and the male has a vagina and the female has a penis. The queer ecology that I am increasingly practising does not see these observations as shocking or odd but as a freeing opportunity to continue questioning our entire assumptions around sex, gender and reproduction.

Q: What are we moving towards?

Everything I have in myself I have used to question this world we live in. And this has lent itself to my current understanding of queer theory and ecology. This journey has led me to “Indigenous Futurism”: a movement that couples the experiences and teachings of indigenous communities and expresses them through art and literature. It then uses past, present and future analogies to create alternative ideas and systems. I believe that a Queer Ecology fused with Indigenous Futurism can nurture a global majority-led movement who will forward a future where freedom is actualised.

Our liberation is dependent upon our becoming aware of the current constraints, breaking them, and understanding new ways of growing. This process is non-absolute and ever-evolving and the future we can build from welding these ideologies together is, for me, at the core of queer ecology. Nature is gloriously unimpressed with the societal structures imposed upon it. From this, we can learn how to grow closer to nature, so our relationship with it can be one of mutual thriving as opposed to one of extraction and erasure.

Though the term may indeed fall out of usefulness one day – especially when we feel trapped in systems that harm us – queer ecology currently stands as a process of dissidence. It’s a liberative process that allows us to move towards an understanding of ecology that reflects the magic and alchemy of true scientific and sociological thought. Towards an understanding of ecology that allows us as global majority queer folk to seek our roots and create bonds with the earth and her organisms. Towards an understanding of ecology that we can imagine within and to build new systems and new realities from.