Ecofeminism has sought to unravel the interarticulation of gender oppression with the domination of nature, while queer theory has pursued a cultural project of subversion of sexual heteronormativity. Queer ecology brings together and extends both discourses, at once drawing upon contemporary biology and subjecting its taxonomies to skeptical critique. This essay argues that queer theory needs ecocriticism to rescue it from its biophobic assumptions, but it is not yet clear what ecocriticism stands to gain from queer theory. Moreover, it is argued that queer ecology risks the appearance of partial, opportunistic and conspicuously biased engagement with biology.
Exhibit A: The Bluegill Sunfish. The reproductive habits of this very widespread North American freshwater fish are such, claims biologist Joan Roughgarden, as to ‘challenge the foundations of gender and sexualit.’(2009: 78). Contrary to widespread popular assumptions that other animals conform to the dimorphism of the human species, the sunfish has two sexes (morphs possessing two distinct gamete sizes) but four spawning genders: large males with the orange breast that gave the species its common name; medium males slightly smaller than but visually similar to females; small, light-colored males with no markings; and females, marked with vertical bars. Large males spawn by aggressively defending territories, or ‘leks’, while large numbers of small males hover at the boundaries awaiting an opportunity to zoom in and fertilize eggs laid in a lek (male strategists memorably called ‘sneaky fuckers’ by John Maynard Smith, a name Roughgarden rather archly contests). The medium males, on the other hand, court the large males, and, if accepted, fertilize the females together with them. The mere existence of these varied types of sunfish might be considered subversive enough, but Roughgarden knows that the dominant explanations in
biology involve ‘deceit’ of the large males by the medium ones, and counters with the argument that they are in fact cooperating to gain joint access to reproductive opportunity.
Exhibit B: Rocky Mountain Sheep. Another one from Roughgarden: the charismatic, curly-horned rams of the species, images of which adorn the bonnets of big macho cars and the logos of American football teams, form gay groups that practice ‘homosexual courting and copulation’ (2009: 138). The most ‘dominant’, masculine rams are the most enthusiastic participants, while rams that refuse anal sex and prefer to live with the ewes are called ‘effeminate’. Some domestic rams tested for homosexuality not only preferred to mount other males, but would not mount females at all. Of course, it is not asserted that what is good enough for rams should be good enough to confront homophobia in humans—a signal instance of the naturalistic fallacy—only that reactionary attempts to invoke the ‘order of nature’ against homosexuality (as in, notoriously, the Pope's claim that anti-essentialist gender theory was a bigger threat to nature that climate change) are wholly without biological warrant (BBC News 2010).
Exhibit C: Human Endogenous Retrovirus 3 (or HERV-R). Making up around 1% of our genome, endogenous retroviruses are thought to be ‘fossil viruses’ whose genetic material has become embedded in the germ line. While some are suspected of causing autoimmune diseases and cancer, the fact that they have been present in our ancestral genome for at least 3 million years suggests that they may have beneficial effects as well. As Timothy Morton notes in ‘Queer Ecology’, the alien DNA of ERV-3 may assist in reducing the mother's immune reactions to the embryo, and concludes: ‘life is catastrophic, monstrous, non-holistic, dislocated, not organic, coherent and authoritative’ (2010: 275). Richard Dawkins, who would probably gag at the thought of co-optation into what he would understand as ‘postmodern theory’, seems to agree that the notion of a bounded, coherent identity prescribed by our own DNA is belied by microbiology, saying that ‘there is no important distinction between our ‘own’ genes and parasitic or symbiotic insertion sequences. Whether they conflict or cooperate will depend not on their historical origins but on the circumstances from which they stand to gain now' (1999: 226). We are, it seems, strangers to ourselves even at the genetic level.
Exhibit D: Lesbian Park Rangers. Reflecting, and in some respects representing, these discoveries of the queerness of nature, Lorri Millan and Shawna Dempsey formed the ‘Lesbian National Parks and Services’ (LNPS) in 1997 (Millan & Dempsey 2010). Dressed in authentic-looking outfits with embroidered badges, handing out leaflets in Banff near the national park, and guiding ‘tours’ that combine queer natural history with counter-hegemonic sexual and gender commentary, these performance artists could be considered part of the artistic wing of queer ecology. The LNPS rocks up near the conclusion of Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands's discussion of the sexist and heteronormative structuring of historical narratives of Canada's national parks, which provides detailed evidence of the ways in which Canadian national identity came to be invested in spaces that were constructed, ahistorically, as the wild home ranges of solitary male Wardens. Contesting that ideology is a case of both retrieving the more complex history of the parks, and paying tribute to the ways in which the LNPS queers the parks and their wardens:
They raise the possibility of a homosexual presence in official national-park culture; they make same-sex desire… a reality in the iconic space of the masculine wilderness-nation; and they call into question the assumption of women's heterosexuality and, along with it, their heterosexualizing role as bearers of the domestic nation. (Sandilands 2005: 158)
Queer ecology disrupts heteronormative natures, and proposes an alliance between biological science and the cultural theory that, throughout the ‘science wars’ and beyond, had been assumed to be antithetical to it.
How to categories all these disparate phenomena? What better than the original anti-taxonomy itself, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which divides up entities as follows:
those that belong to the Emperor,
embalmed ones,
those that are trained,
suckling pigs,
mermaids,
fabulous ones,
stray dogs,
those included in the present classification,
those that tremble as if they were mad,
innumerable ones,
those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
others,
those that have just broken a flower vase,
those that from a long way off look like flies. (Borges : 108)
Jorge Luis Borges' brilliant conflation of represented and real, referential and reflexive, animate, inanimate and ananimate animals inspired Michel Foucault to interrogate the discursive construction of ‘the order of things’, and stands conveniently as the ur-text of the taxonomic anti-realism that runs through queer ecology. At the most general level, ‘queer’ itself represents and encapsulates a kind of intellectual Maoism, a perpetual revolution of categories and types. As Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird assert in Queering the Non/Human:
The unremitting emphasis in queer theoretical work on fluidity, über-inclusivity, indeterminacy, indefinability, unknowability, the preposterous, impossibility, unthinkability, unintelligibility, meaninglessness and that which is unrepresentable is an attempt to undo normative entanglements and fashion alternative imaginaries. (Giffney & Hird 2008:4)
Rhetorically, queer theory unceasingly (and rather tediously) negates ‘stable categories’ and enthuses over subversive or amorphous exceptions to—or, as they are always seen, transgressions of-allegedly fixed distinctions.
It is perhaps unsurprising that a pioneer of queer ecocriticism, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, declares ‘an almost phobic dislike of taxonomy’ (2008: 58) which she applies to attempts to categorise her as an ecofeminist but which seem to be shared much more generally within this insurgency-within-an-insurgency. It is not as if ecocritics at any stage of the enterprise have been unaware that nature is a problematic social construct (in some way, in some sense, to some degree), nor have they been blind to the inter-articulation of this construct with gender, racial and (to a lesser degree) sexual discriminations. Queer theory,
though, introduces a radical new level of skepticism towards ‘nature’ and its presumed taxonomies.
Greta Gaard's ‘Toward a Queer Ecofeminism’ is an early contribution to what is now orthodox ecocritical theory: that ‘liberating women requires liberating nature, the erotic, and queers’ (1997:122). Unlike the new wave of queer ecology with its scientific reference-points, Gaard draws mainly upon historical evidence to buttress what is really a structuralist argument linking oppressively-hierarchical dualisms such as male / female, culture / nature, reason / emotion, hetero / homosexual and others, which she hopes to confront by ‘embracing the erotic in all its diversity and building coalitions for creating a democratic ecological culture based on our shared liberation’ (1997: 132). It is a laudable ambition, certainly, but not necessarily well founded theoretically or empirically. For one thing, while the persistent (and usually demeaning) association of women and nature is, with some biased selection of sources, defensible1, it is clear that queers have consistently been condemned as ‘against nature’ in Western homophobic culture. Gaard admits as much, but then suggests that ‘nature is devalued just as queers are devalued’ (1997: 120 my emphasis), which is not the case: queers allegedly violate the ‘natural order’ according to which, often in other contexts, humans are meant to dominate nature in the everyday sense of the nonhuman environment and its denizens. Gaard's argument depends, then, on an equivocation between two of Kate Soper's three meanings of ‘nature’: sexual oppression relies upon a vicious theological and ideological inflection of the ‘realist’ sense of the word, while the nature that is subjected to modernizing and colonial conquest is the ‘lay’ or ‘surface’ sense (Soper 1995: ). Empirically, it seems unlikely that one would find any correlation between metrics of sexual liberation in a society (taking, say, levels of homophobic persecution or, conversely, gay marriage and civil rights) and those of environmental impact, like carbon emissions (think: Canada and Australia). So although the conceptual isomorphism discussed by Gaard and others is popular, intriguing and perhaps politically motivating, queer ecologists need more evidence that ‘an ideology in which the erotic, queer sexualities, women, persons of color, and nature are all conceptually linked’ translates into real socio-ecological relationships (Gaard : ).
Ecofeminists like Gaard have long been skeptical of nature in that
ideological sense of ‘natural order’; the innovation of queer ecology is to draw upon scientific evidence to queer nature in the ordinary, ‘lay’ sense. It is a complex movement: subverting the ideological fiction of a heteronormative natural order, queer ecologists deploy examples from the (queer) natural world, which are then read back into a transformed natural order reread as always already queer. The initiative enjoys an atmosphere of bracing radicalism: whereas ecocritics always sought to highlight the ambivalence of Nature, as well as its historicity, Timothy Morton's Ecology without Nature damns ecocriticism tout court as ‘too enmeshed with the ideology that churns out stereotypical ideas of nature to be of any use’ (Morton 2007: 13). The ‘leftist’ alternative is ‘ecocritique’, which, like queer theory, ‘thoroughly examines how nature is set up as a transcendental, unified, independent category. Ecocritique does not think that it is paradoxical to say, in the name of ecology itself: “down with nature!’” (Morton 2007: 13). However, while it is clear that queer needs green, to avoid the ethical dead-end of repetitive aporetic gestures, its reflex of reflexivity, it is not obvious that green needs—or indeed stands to benefit from—queer. Furthermore, while the queer critique of organicism is salutary on properly ecological grounds, and the dismantling of spurious sexual hierarchy desirable on moral grounds, queer ecology's opportunistic appropriation of biology frequently misrepresents both science and the philosophical assumptions that guide it.
Judith Butler's performativity theory demonstrates just how badly queer needs green. Even in the later, ‘chiasmic’ form articulated in Bodies That Matter, gender performativity is one of the most biologically illiterate—indeed biophobic—theories ever to embarrass the humanities. Leaving aside the question of whether the sentence (ambiguity noted) ‘It's a girl!’ can sensibly be considered an illocutionary act (there is no one authorized to say it, no ritual or procedure establishing its proper from improper instances),2 the notion that bodies are discursively organized by the reiteration of sexist and heteronormative utterances depends on a Freudian assumption of the lability of desire that is, from the point of view of either evolutionary or developmental biology, frankly silly. The appeal of ‘performativity’ requires perpetual equivocation between a true (but rather shallow) claim about gender—it is performed in something like the way a theatrical role is—and a profound,
and profoundly false, claim about sex—it is engendered by language; so much depends upon the meanings of the Foucauldian passverb: ‘produce’. So, Butler protests that, ‘to claim that sexual differences are indissociable from discursive demarcations is not the same as claiming that discourse causes sexual difference,’ although it seems impossible to conclude anything else from reading Gender Trouble (Butler 1993: 1). But then, sex-as-discourse has ‘the power to produce—demarcate, circulate, differentiate—the bodies it controls’ (1993: 1 my emphasis). Note the slide from the uncontroversial ‘demarcate’ to the deliberately ambiguous ‘differentiate’. So although she graciously concedes that ‘there are, minimally, sexually differentiated parts, activities, capacities, hormonal and chromosomal differences’ she goes on to assert that ‘there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body’ (: ). It is clear that, for instance, the chromosomal differences are incapable of contributing to such ‘formation’. Here is a sample of the verbs Butler uses for what she calls the performative ‘materialization’ of the body: in addition to ‘produce’, ‘demarcate’, ‘circulate’, ‘differentiate’, we have ‘forming’, ‘crafting’, ‘bearing’, ‘signifying’, ‘framing’ and ‘regulating’. In the near-total absence of examples or evidence, Butler leaves it strategically unclear whether she means merely that cultural gender is allegedly biologically-mandated sex difference even as the illusion is maintained that gender is simply an effect of biological difference (an uncontroversial feminist claim), or that the body is somehow (formed, crafted, produced, in some senses of the word) by the reiteration of sexed language.
That we are entitled to take it in the second sense is confirmed by ‘The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,’ which draws on Freud's consideration of pain as a narcissistic ‘libidinal investment’ to argue that bodily morphology generally is psychically—which means, ultimately, psycho-socially—produced. Freud's delightful description of the infant as ‘polymorphously perverse,’ and susceptible to any prevailing sexual ordering, is the ultimate source for the argument in Gender Trouble that our very sense of what the body is requires problematisation:
Is there a ‘physical’ body prior to the perceptually perceived body? An impossible question to answer! Not only is the gathering of attributes
under the category of sex suspect, but so is the very discrimination of ‘features’ themselves. That penis, vagina, breasts, and so forth, are named sexual parts is both a restriction of the erogenous body to those parts and a fragmentation of the body as a whole. (Butler 1990: 155-6)
This is nonsense, of course: the penis and vagina (though not breasts) are the basic elements of dimorphic anatomy3 in all our mammalian ancestors and close relatives, but no biologist would therefore limit erogeneity to those body parts. What about lips and fingers, at least? Butler's evasive use of the passive voice here is revealing: not that she condemns the discursive ‘sexing’ of the body for specified reasons with counter-examples supplied, only that it ‘is… suspect’. Perhaps the conspicuous absurdity of Butler's arguments lies behind the rhetoric of vague qualification in Bodies That Matter? Thus: ‘The materiality of the body is not to be taken for granted, for in some sense it is acquired, constituted, through the development of morphology’ (Butler 1993: 69 my emphasis), which is to say, by the forced investment of libidinal energy—Freud's mysterious psychic moonjuice—in body parts selected not by evolution and development, but by cultures. And later: ‘The notion of the bodily ego in Freud and that of projective idealization of the body in Lacan suggest that the very contours of the body, the delimitations of anatomy, are in part the consequence of an externalized identification’ (Butler 1993: 90 my emphasis). To what extent exactly? And with what evidence?4 Could I see through my nose if we all kept calling it my ‘eye’?5 The absurd Freudian myth of the wandering libido apart, it is true that bodies are materially reshaped by discursive practices such as tattooing, bodybuilding and dieting, but the impact of such practices can never be meaningfully specified without reference to the genetic, developmental, endocrinal, neurological and other capacities, limits and propensities of specifically human bodies.
Without ecology, then, queer theory remains a form of cultural creationism. Prescriptively isolated from our evolutionary antecedents, the perpetual re-emergence of sexual dimorphism in every generation must seem little short of miraculous—or rather, given how inherently oppressive it is supposed to be, diabolical. The marvelous or hideous cultural process by which each of us has been physically interpellated to gain sexual satisfaction through our penis or clitoris really is as likely as
a tornado in a junkyard putting together a Boeing 747, given that any part of our anatomy might have been discursively eroticized6. (A lost tribe that comes through stimulation of its elbows no doubt awaits discovery.) If Butler were right, the broad cross-cultural uniformity in the interpellation of sexual anatomy, when aspects of human behavior that are more obviously enculturated are so incredibly diverse, requires some spectacular evidence, which seems to have arrived in the nick of time—from biology. If the species boundary proves as susceptible to deconstruction as every other conceptual differentiation, if the myth of heterosexual dimorphism in nature can be exploded, and if ‘performativity’ can be distended still further to take in nonhuman identities, queer theory can be saved from the fate proudly anticipated by Lee Edelman's attack on parenting and the oppressive notion of ‘reproductive futurity’: No Future (of which more later).
Exciting though it is that highly intelligent humanists are beginning to engage with contemporary science, it must be said that cultural critics have not been well prepared by four decades of theoretical argument to interpret biological results fairly, carefully and accurately. There are already in the ‘new materialism’ (Alaimo & Hekman 2008)7 and queer ecology signs of the priority of argument over evidence, and the habit of discounting or simply ignoring alternative hypotheses, that have characterized the biophobic strands of theoretical enquiry heretofore, and deepened the lamentable abyss between the two cultures (Sokal & Bricmont 2003)8. So whereas Joan Roughgarden's Evolution's Rainbow (which is exceptionally tendentious by scientific standards) gives some sound evidence for her attack on Darwinian sexual selection, and admits the force of its central argument, Judith Halberstam's critique of the popular (and powerfully heteronormative) film March of the Penguins has this to say about the representation of non-reproductive birds:
[They] are not merely extras in the drama of hetero-reproduction: in fact, the homo or non-repro queer penguins are totally necessary to the temporary reproductive unit! They provide warmth in the huddle, probably extra food, and they do not leave for warmer climes but they accept a part in the penguin collective in order to enable reproduction
Page 53and to survive. Survival, indeed, in this penguin world, has little to do with fitness and everything to do with collective will…. The long march of the penguins then is neither proof of heterosexuality in nature, the reproductive imperative nor evidence of intelligent design. It is, in fact, a resolutely animal narrative about cooperation, affiliation and the anachronism of the homo-hetero divide. (Halberstam 2008: 270)
It would not, in fact, run counter to ordinary Darwinian reasoning for penguins to cooperate, although one would expect it to occur either if they were closely genetically related or a highly social species with sanctions for non-cooperators9. But such reasoning would have to provide evidence for selfless ‘providing’ of warmth and ‘acceptance’ of a non-reproductive role. No biologist would see penguin survival as evidence of intelligent design, anyway, nor—conversely—would they be able to make any sense at all of the claim that heterosexuality in nature or the reproductive imperative stood in any need of ‘proof’ whatsoever. There seem to be, as exhibit B suggests, numerous examples of homosexuality in animals—though gay sheep are not uncontroversial among biologists—but penguins do not seem to exhibit it, nor does Halberstam bother to provide a citation to back up her remarkable equation of ‘non-reproductive’ and ‘homo’ penguins.
One of the defining characteristics of crude deconstructionism, as Richard Rorty long ago observed, is its habit of setting up a ‘patsy’ who believes in something simplistic (identity of word and meaning, or whatever) so that the cunning critic can expose the restless tensions and proliferating contradictions in his assumptions. So it is with queer ecocriticism: popular belief in an ideal, natural sexual dichotomy, rather than the far more complex view of actual biologists, is subverted by the truth of sexual and gender diversity. As Myra Hird points out, in ‘Animal Trans’:
… in so far as most plants are intersex, most fungi have multiple sexes, many species transsex, and bacteria completely defy notions of sexual difference,… the majority of living organisms on this planet would make little sense of the human
Page 54classification of two sexes… . (Hird 2008: 237)
No doubt the incomprehension of fungi, which can have thousands of sexes, and humans, who have approximately two, would be mutual. The operative question for queer ecology, though, is rather: what sort of species are we? Hird admits that ‘It might be argued that sexual dimorphism is a characteristic of higher life forms and that sex diversity is reserved for lower organisms’ but responds that ‘this hierarchical taxonomy invokes the worst kind of anthropomorphism’ (Hird 2008: 238), Get rid of the tendentiously teleological term ‘higher’ and replace it with the neutral phrase ‘more differentiated’, though, and her objection collapses. Sexual reproduction seems to make more highly differentiated organisms possible, and results, too, in some degree of dimorphism. In fact, as Jared Diamond shows, using a graphic-yet-coy illustration of the relationship of dimorphic body size to that of primate sex organs in The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, humans are midway in terms of sexual differentiation between highly dimorphic gorillas and massively bisexual bonobos, among whom male and female are difficult to distinguish by secondary characteristics (Diamond 1992:60). (Human males may be reassured to know that, given our average body mass relative to women, we have medium-sized testicles but surprisingly large penises.) Gorillas, moreover, seem to maintain dimorphic anatomy and ‘sexist’ social order without the aid of oppressive discourse.
The vexed boundary of humans and other animals is too large a topic for this paper, but it is in any case strictly a subset of the more general question of the identity of species. With characteristic genius, Borges' Emporium perfectly evokes the nominalist position in a very long-standing argument. Indeed, as Donna Haraway observes, ‘Debates about whether species are earthly organic entities or taxonomic conveniences are co-extensive with the discourse we call “biology”’ (Haraway 2008: xxiii), a question about which ‘Darwin himself’ (as he is always called, with apt deference to his originary authority) was at least ambivalent. Morton claims simply that ‘evolution theory is antiessentialist in that it abolishes rigid boundaries between and within species’ (Morton 2010: 275), While it is unclear what sort of ‘rigid boundaries’ were ever proposed within species (unless perhaps sexual ones—in
which case, see above), those between species are undoubtedly far more problematic for Darwinism than, for example, mono- or polygenetic creationism. Nevertheless, Darwin's discussion of ‘polymorphic genera’ distinguishes between those—Ruba and Rosa among plants, Brachiopods among molluscs—and species with ‘fixed and definite’ or ‘good and true’ species (Darwin 1996: 40); some species are morphologically diverse (brambles are decidedly queer and promiscuous), others are more stable. Haraway, reminding us of the ‘lateral gene exchange’ of bacteria, claims that:
[N]o species is ever One; to be a species is to be constitutively a crowd, in symbiogenetic naturecultures, with no stopping point. Living piles turtles on turtles, all the way down. Species is about the dance joining kin and kind. The dance is full of syncopation and oddly jointed moves, as well as sinuous curves—snake curves that tell their own tales. (Haraway 2008: xxiii)
The metaphor of species as a ‘dance’ emphasizes fluidity rather than constancy, change rather than continuity, which is, again, an important part of the truth of Darwinism; for instance, ‘ring-species’ are ones in which (contrary to the assertions of creationists that evolution is plagued by ‘missing links’) intermediate forms of closely-related species live in geographically-contiguous regions of continuous variation, as is the case with the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull. These are distinct species in the UK, but as, Richard Dawkins observes:
…[T]hey are linked by a continuous chain of interbreeding colleagues all the way round the world. The only thing that is special about ring species like these gulls is that the intermediates are still alive. All pairs of related species are potentially ring species10. (Dawkins 2004: 25)
Similarly, we are linked in a continuous chain—temporal rather than conspicuously geographical—with Homo habilis and Australopithecus afarensis. Living does indeed ‘pile turtles on turtles, all the way down’. However, the problem Dawkins identifies is the ethical consequence of
our ‘discontinuous minds” ability to think speciation, not the functionality of the idea of species itself.
The most sustained and innervating example of queer ecology to date is Timothy Morton's The Ecological Thought, his much more readable follow-up to Ecology without Nature11. Its conceptual reference points are Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Dawkins, which makes for a weird combination of irritating nebulousness on ethical issues and startling insights where biology meets ecocritical theory. Leaving aside the former, Morton's queer ecological project is summarized early on: ‘You want anti-essentialism and antibiologism? Just read Darwin’ (Morton 2010: 12). Not only need theory not fear the encounter with biology, in Morton's estimation Darwinism (read suitably, of course) is the queerest theory of them all. Where ecocritical theory once tended to advert more or less vaguely to an interdependent ‘web of life’ that subsumes all individuals, for which it claims warrant from scientific ecology, Morton substitutes the ‘mesh’, which is more intimate, more subversive of common perceptions, than the web:
Most words I considered to describe interdependence were compromised by references to the Internet—like ‘network.’ Either that, or they were too compromised by vitalism, the belief in a living substance. ‘Web’ is a little bit too vitalist and a little bit Internet-ish for my taste, so it loses on both counts…. ‘Mesh’ can mean the holes in the network and threading between them. It suggests both hardness and delicacy…. The ecological thought stirs because the mesh appears in our social, psychic, and scientific domains. Since everything is interconnected, there is no definite background and therefore no definite foreground. (Morton 2010: 28)
Morton has nailed both my resistance to webbiness and the urgent need for a more scientifically sophisticated concept to replace it. The genius of the mesh is that it accommodates such staggering things as the Hox genes common to all metazoans (i.e. multicelled animals), by which body plans are organized in embryonic development, or exhibit C, the endogenous retrovirus, or the graphs that look like plants, but
ate produced by reiterated algorithms: ‘Material organization turns out to be sets of formal relationships, not squishy stuff’ (Morton 2010: 68). Morton observes, rightly, that ‘At the basis of ‘life’ there is DNA, and it has no specific flavor. There is no chimp-flavored, no human-flavored DNA; we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimps and 35 percent with daffodils' (66). Since ‘All food is Frankenfood,’ objections to genetic modification have to be political, not metaphysical (86)12. Moreover, Morton points out that ‘Darwin's world is about coexistence but not about harmony’ (66), a lesson of incalculable significance for ecocriticism. The mesh therefore is less than the web—things are less thing-like, less different from each other and from artificial life forms, than we supposed—but more uncanny, unavoidable and uncomfortable.
Given the philosophical rush it periodically jacks you into, it is all the more disappointing that Morton is so cavalier (and even inaccurate) with biology: we are not ‘genetically descended’ from ‘every single life form’ (Morton 2010: 29), although we are cousins with them all; we do not ‘drive around using crushed dinosaur parts’(29)—oil comes from fossil algae. While it is true that some biologists claim ‘hands, tools, laughter, and dancing… have been discovered in nonhuman beings’ (13), surely such claims deserve not only a mass of citations but some careful qualification? Morton too often skims over a complex argument with airy glibness: ‘Contrary to what some humanists think, it is not big news to Darwinism that ‘species’ don't really exist' (62). As we shall see, not only is that not true, but it would be big—and bad—news if it were.
In Eva Hayward's transsexual/transpecies ‘Lessons from a Starfish’, the shift from defensible claim to vacuous rhetoric is seemingly licensed by classic deconstruction of a classically crude Saussurean structuralism:
Species exist in taxonomic differences (Homo sapiens sapiens are not the same as Octopus vulgaris), but species are also always already constitutive of the each other through the spaces and places we cohabit—this of course includes language and other semiotic registers. Indeed, species are relationships between species—relationality is world-hood.
Page 58Matter is not immutable,… it is discursive, allowing sex and species to practice trans-materialisation. The meat and meaning for humans and starfish have no structuring lack, no primordial division, but are sensuously intertwined. (Hayward 2008: 254)
The admission of taxonomic difference is subverted by the claim that species exist only in relationality (which in turn is ‘world-hood’, whatever that is—Hayward does not explain), an argument isomorphic with Saussure's decision to consider language synchronically (Morton 2010: 39)13. Yet if one considers a species (or a language) diachronically, it is, of course, lineage that matters—the inheritance of genes or memes—and for sexually reproducing species that lineage is unavoidably heterosexual14. It is true that evolution rules out theological distinctions between species, that humans and sea stars (‘starfish’) are made of roughly the same stuff, and that bacteria do not conform to classic species concepts, but evolutionary biology more generally is far from the sort of excitingly sloshy ‘liquid life’ that Morton, Hayward and Haraway enthuse about. Philosophers of biology, whose discipline is seemingly unknown to queer ecologists, grapple constantly with its relatively deficient ‘nomicity’ (lawfulness), as in these reflections on ecology by Gregory Cooper: ‘the nomicity of ecological generalizations comes in degrees and with domain restrictions—one acknowledging that while there might not be anything in ecology to match the nomicity of physics and chemistry, it does not follow that everything in ecology is equally contingent’ (Cooper : ). Too freely subverting the of natural law with contingency, queer ecologists miss the intermediate position, which is widely (perhaps universally) applicable in biology: Not an exciting slogan, admittedly, but much closer to the truth.
What queer ecocriticism is really doing is building bridges over to biology via philosophy, an inherently exciting and worthwhile enterprise that should be seen as part of E.O. Wilson's project of ‘consilience’ (Wilson 1998). However, there is already something called ‘philosophy of biology’, and it is not reliant on Foucault and Butler's cowboy constructionism, which sets out to demolish partitions it fails to recognize as structural. Much has been written on the species question,
nominalist and realist, that attempts to account for conservation and lineage as well as fluidity in evolution (none of it cited in any discussion I can see by queer ecocritics), but what queer critiques tend to emphasize is the inadequacy—familiar to biologists and philosophers of biology—of phenetic (or merely typological) species concepts15. How, as Darwin asks, is one to make sense of the embarrassingly large observed variation in Rosa morphology, for instance, and that is to say nothing of exhibit A, the three distinct types of sunfish? But modern biologists also define species phylogenetically (in terms of their lineage) and in terms of ecological, physiological and behavioral isolation (varieties of biological species concept).
While no extant species concept seems likely to prevail unchallenged, the relative pre-eminence of the phylogenetic approach is reflected in the way that the field in question is more often known today as ‘systematics’ than ‘taxonomy’. Some theories, such as Niles Eldredge and Steven Jay Gould's punctuated equilibrium, even treat species themselves as units of selection, with population-level characteristics that are ‘visible’ to evolutionary pressures (Jay Gould 2007: 242-248). As Jody Hey suggests, perhaps the ‘species problem’ itself is more a consequence of the varied and contradictory work biologists require of the concept than a strictly biological question: ‘The species problem is caused by two conflicting motivations; the drive to devise and deploy categories, and the more modern wish to recognize and understand evolutionary groups’ (Hey 2001: 329). Even the queer theorists' favorite biologist Joan Roughgarden is a strict adaptationist, despite her heterodox challenge to sexual selection theory, and would agree with the conclusion of Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths's critical survey of the question that ‘the division of organisms into species is an objective feature of the living world’ (Sterelny & Griffiths 1999: 182). As they point out, while individual differences within species—and within lineages—may be small and accumulated over long periods of time (turtles piled on turtles, as Haraway has it), populations can change very quickly due to a disease outbreak, dramatic topographic change or a new predator. Since biological and ecological species concepts assess the isolation of populations, the problem of gradualism in individual differences is irrelevant: populations demonstrably have properties that could not be ascribed to individuals, such as (ironically in this context)
riability and sexual reproduction (Sterelny & Griffiths 1999: 201-210) So the breathless enthusiasm amongst queer theorists for specially selected instances of maximum fluidity is at wild variance both with the routine assumptions of biologists and the closely interrogated concepts delineated by philosophers of biology.
The problem is, simply, that while first-wave ecocritics were apt to find corroboration of their organicist assumptions in Clementsian or equilibrium ecology, queer ecocritics are conversely too keen to identify instances of biological subversion of categories as typical, rather than the structure and stability16 studied quite generally by ecologists and evolutionary biologists. In attempt to ward off organicism and cutprice holism, I have advocated a moratorium on the use of ‘symbiosis’ in ecocriticism (Garrard 2009); I am now tempted to suggest some neologisms that would underline the indissociability of competition and cooperation, conservation and subversion in biology: ‘coopetitive’ and ‘conversive’ anyone? They are ugly words, but might prove serviceable.
The most serious problem is that queer ecology is conspicuously threatening to conservation politics. In the US, the species is, rightly, the taxonomic level protected by the Endangered Species Act, which is why there have been both complex scientific and legal arguments in particular cases and vituperative criticism of the Act from the American right. As Sterelny and Griffiths observe, ‘species have a very important role in biology as ‘score-keeping devices,’ as indices of the effects of evolutionary and ecological processes’ (Sterelny & Griffiths 1999: 183). The notion of biodiversity would lose all its considerable rhetorical force, as would the very meaning of an anthropogenic ‘extinction event’, were the queer subversion of the species concept to gain currency, while the figure of interspecies geniality Morton proposes, the amorphous Levinasian ethical construct ‘the strange stranger,’ would probably not stand up to cross-examination by oil and logging company lawyers.
Where clear conflicts occur, the queer commitment to transgression seems to outweigh concerns about conservation, as for example in the case of intersex animals thought to be affected by estrogenic pollution. Roughgarden states that:
Although a recent report on intersexes among cetaceans raises the spectre of pollution causing genital deformity, the early reports on intersexes predate dangerous levels of pollution. Perhaps cetaceans are on their evolutionary way to the state that hermaphrodite fish have already attained. (Roughgarden 2009: 41)
Since the St Lawrence beluga report dates from 1994, however, her laudable determination to depathologize intersexuality wherever possible seems to have led to complacency in this instance. Perhaps inspired by Roughgarden's attack on their ‘repro-centric’ assumptions, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands similarly chastises ecologists, accusing them of ‘insidiously’ assuming:
[T]he absolute naturalness of bodily dimorphism, even in species that harbor a wide range of characteristics within members of the same sex. If male organisms are starting to become ‘feminized,’ it must be a very bad thing for nature (some environmentalists have been heard arguing that the greater visibility of the human transgender community must be the result of pollution too). (Sandilands 2004: 27)
Having critiqued the obsessive ‘disciplinary’ maintenance of ‘bodily security’ and purity of liberal environmentalism (Sandilands 2004: 19), and the bodies conversely ‘objected’ as ‘leaky and excrescent’ (27), Mortimer-Sandilands clearly wants the reader to reject ecologists' stigmatization of intersexed or ‘feminized’ bodes, even though endocrine disruption actually is ‘a very bad thing’ whomever it happens to17. Certainly ecologists will need evidence that intersexed animals are appearing in larger numbers than before, but estrogenic pollution has also been shown to disrupt endocrine function in laboratory tests as well as field studies, so it seems unlikely that ecologists are merely dupes of heteronormativity for drawing attention to feminization as a consequence of pollution.
If queer ecocriticism is seriously hobbled by its origins in deconstructive and performativity theory, its potential political destinations currently hover somewhere between murky and seriously worrying. Extending
Butler's preoccupation with drag into the ecopolitical sphere, Mortimer-Sandilands proposes a sort of green version, arguing for ‘an exaggerated performance of a normalized environmental body, a parodic repetition of the increasingly intrusive codes of eco-managerialism’ (Sandilands 2004: 32), although I suspect only the privileged class that presently benefits from those ‘intrusive codes’ will find it funny. More broadly, she advocates shifting ‘away from proliferating rituals of fortification and toward a more thoroughly critical ecological politics’ (32)18, and espouses radical democratic decentralization of both environmental knowledge production and decision-making, raising the questions of NIMBYism and the role of scientific expertise in this process.
More difficult to locate is Morton's ‘dark ecology’, which on one level seems to advert to a sort of Gothic performativity politics: overcoming both self and nature (in the name of ecology), we are enjoined to ‘love the disgusting, inert, and meaningless…. We identify with the monstrous thing. We ourselves are ‘tackily’ made of bits and pieces of stuff. The most ethical act is to love the other precisely in their artificiality, rather than seeking to prove their naturalness and authenticity' (Morton 2007: 195). At the same time, Morton's enthusiasm for Slavoj Žižek's ecological turn allies him with one of the few neo-Stalinist intellectuals in the world. Žižek seems pleased that the ecological crisis is—at last!—one that capitalism cannot confront and resolve, and so it provides an opening for the retrieval of the ‘egalitarian terror’ for which Robespierre, Stalin and Mao Zedong are so widely admired:
… [T]he forthcoming ecological crisis seems to offer a unique chance of accepting a reinvented version of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The argument is thus that, while these phenomena [Robespierre, Stalinism, the Cultural Revolution, etc.] were, each in its own way, a historical failure and monstrosity…, this is not the whole truth: there was in each a redemptive moment which gets lost in the liberal-democratic rejection-and it is crucial to isolate this moment…. Better a disaster of fidelity to the Event than a non-being of indifference to the Event. To paraphrase Beckett's memorable phrase,… after one fails, one can go on and fail better, while indifference drowns us deeper and
Page 63deeper in the morass of imbecilic Being. (Žižek 2008: 7)
Unfortunately Žižek seems unaware of the recent examples of capitalist liberal democracies acting to resolve environmental problems. For example, he claims that:
The first thing that strikes the eye apropos this [ecological] fear is the way it remains conditioned by ideological trends. Two decades ago, everyone, especially in Europe, was talking about Waldsterben, the dying of the forests; the topic was present on the covers of all popular weeklies-now it has almost disappeared. (Žižek 2008: 439)
International agreements to limit sulfur dioxide emissions, economic incentives and technological developments, not some ‘ideological trend’ are the reasons why Waldsterben is old news (likewise CFC pollution)—although this is not to suggest that climate change can be addressed so competently. Žižek's sheer ecological ignorance is reflected in his hilarious claim that “Nature' on Earth is already so ‘adapted’ to human interventions, human ‘pollution’ is already so completely included in the shaky and fragile balance of ‘natural’ reproduction on Earth, that its cessation would cause a catastrophic imbalance' (Žižek 2008: 442)19. Of course, it is true that some species and habitats have adapted to our activities, pollution included; some are even symbiotic with us; but as a generalization it is stupid, and Žižek sees no necessity to provide any evidence for it.
One thing one can say for Žižek: while the obligatory rhetoric of radicalism in some theory-inflected criticism is worse than stale, his is frighteningly persuasive. I think he really means it. As he asks in conclusion, adapting Robespierre's chilling speech to the Convention, is it not time for egalitarian justice, terror, voluntarism, trust in the people—the latter demonstrated by widespread use of informers? ‘Does, then, the ecological challenge not offer a unique chance to reinvent the “eternal Idea” of egalitarian terror?’ (Žižek 2008: 461) That would be dark ecology indeed, beside which Morton's genial and eclectic advocacy of ambient electronic music, Edward Thomas's poetry, Dan Flavin's fluorescent sculptures and infinite openness to the
‘strange stranger’ seems reassuringly pallid.
No Future, Lee Edelman's possibly unwitting extensio ad absurdum of queer theory, by contrast, is a thoroughgoing rejection of the idea of the future itself. If the reader can survive its periodic blizzards of repetitive verbiage, the swirling minutiae of archaic Lacanian terminology, its ingenious readings of A Christmas Carol, Silas Marner and a couple of Alfred Hitchcock films provide intriguing illumination of Edelman's central contention: that queers should accept the position allocated them by their most vitriolic enemies as figures of and for the ‘death drive’, and reject the very idea of futurity embodied in the Child. The rhetorical constitution of environmental politics around fears for ‘our children's world’, though not mentioned by Edelman, would certainly be covered by his claim that ‘we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child’ (Edelman 2004: 11). Having been defined as anti-procreative, life-denying and vacuously sexual, No Future urges queers to live up to their billing, ‘saying… Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; … fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop’ (Edelman 2004: 29). Fuck too, then, the children's voices on the climate change consciousness-raiser Age of Stupid, intended to prod our consciences with proleptic anxiety. But never let that resistance ossify into anything like a political program—even an anarchic one—because that would betray the radical negativity of the queer, or ‘sinthomosexual’ (don't ask).
We have come a long way from the concerns and texts and objectives of the founders of ecocriticism. Edelman and Žižek, Latter-Day Lacanians both, can fortunately be left to their arcane differences, as it seems likely that Gaard and Mortimer-Sandilands's relative inclusivity is much closer to the political centre of gravity of queer ecology. The price of a green bailout for queer theory from its biophobic spiral towards oblivion, however, should be a demand for enhanced theoretical coherence and respect for evidence. Is gay liberation genuinely interdependent with environmentalism? What is the real relationship between the culture/nature and the hetero/homosexual dyads: metaphoric, analogical, homological or causal? How can the patchy queer data of biology, and the vibrant culture of queer subversion, coexist or interact
with the unavoidably sexual lineage of, at least, mammals and the theoretical and empirical resilience of Darwinian sexual selection theory? What are the ecopolitical consequences of the critique of species? Really, how queer is green? Some aspects of these questions have already been addressed by analytical philosophers of biology who are unaffected by the devil's bargain that purchased immortal intellectual bravura for continental philosophy in return for the soul of truth; their more modest habits of mind and intimate knowledge of biology are worthy of imitation. Others, I submit, queer theory should have asked itself already.
Morton is wrong to assert that ‘fully and properly, ecology is queer theory and queer theory is ecology’ (Morton 2010: 281), because biology is not as queer as he hopes, and queer theory is too deeply compromised by its ancestral biophobia. That rejection of identity is actually, as queer theorists themselves might say, a ‘space of possibility’, between the conversive and coopetitive ‘it just depends’ of ecology and evolutionary biology, and the ambivalent reifications and anthropomorphisms we call (and will continue to call) ‘nature’. What biologists see always depends on how long they spend looking, and at what geographical and temporal scales. There is nothing relativistic or anti-materialist about this; as Steven Rose puts it, ‘Our world may be—is, I would claim—an ontological unity, but to understand it we need the epistemological diversity that… different levels of explanation afford’ (Rose 2005: 95). Our responsibility is to keep looking over ecologists' shoulders, get accustomed to operating in that space, use the best philosophy of biology (and even queer theory) to calibrate our critical faculties, then work to reform, as ecocritics always have, the cultural construction of nature by their lights.
In fact, in some contexts, it is common to think of men as ‘closer to nature’ and women as representatives of civilisation—as in cowboy movies, for instance. In popular sexual discourse, too, male libido is imagined as ‘natural’ while female sexuality is considered context-dependent, and so on. It might be convenient to describe these as ‘ideological contradictions’, but it is more likely that our
conceptions of human nature are merely chaotic and opportunistic.
I am aware that Jacques Derrida's ‘Signature Event Context’, and his subsequent debate with John Searle, is widely supposed to have licensed us to disregard J. L. Austin's parameters for the performative. What Derrida actually did was to observe that the necessarily reiterative character of illocutionary utterances tended to threaten the stability of the conceptual parameters used to define and constrain them—especially Austin's distinction between serious and non-serious uses of language. Yet, still, properly conducted marriages are binding and stage marriages are not. While it is true that intersexed infants used to be ‘reassigned’ sexually, at great psychological cost, midwives are not empowered to sentence newborn babies to genders.
There is an important distinction between popular—and erroneous—notions of sexual dichotomy (‘the opposite sex’, Mars vs. Venus) and the biological concept of dimorphism, which is applied to typical physiologies distinguished by sex. Intersexed individuals represent a challenge to the first construct, but not the second.
I amused myself by gathering together as many pieces of ‘evidence’ as I could from Gender Trouble. They are: a report regarding a single 19th century ‘hermaphrodite’ (or intersexual person); an anecdote about Greta Garbo; reports of how some transsexuals say they feel (no citation); and Monique Wittig's testimony on behalf of lesbians. If I missed anything, I'd be pleased to be informed about it.
To be fair to Butler, she seems to have acknowledged the cultural creationism of her earlier book; she concedes: ‘I think perhaps in Gender Trouble I overemphasise the priority of culture over nature…. [It] did not take account of a nature that might be, as it were, beyond the nature/culture divide, one that is not immediately harnessed for the aims of certain kinds of cultural legitimation practices.’ But she is unable to relinquish discredited Freudian sexual theory:’… if the properties and capacities of a body part are truly contingent, acquiring recognition of libidinal investiture, then ‘the phallus’ is a term for the of investiture—for the action of delineating, identifying and eroticising.' (Kirby : )
The astronomer Fred Hoyle, though no creationist, outlined in The Intelligent Universe what he saw as the statistical objections to Darwinian evolution, which he vividly characterised as the sudden emergence of complex organisation (a jet aircraft) out of the chaos of chance (a whirlwind in a junkyard) in one go. The analogy is an absurd misrepresentation of Darwinism, but, if one added someone standing nearby insisting that ‘It's a Boeing 747‘, it would be a fine characterisation of Butlerism.
Perhaps the most interesting collection of ‘new materialism’, which brings together many of its proponents, is Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Material Feminisms.
Encounters between literary theorists and other scientific disciplines such as maths and physics have not been encouraging. (Sokal & Bricmont 2003).
A powerful evolutionary case for altruism beyond kin selection and reciprocal altruism (the varieties accepted by all Darwinists) and in favour of multi-level selection theory (in which individuals, groups and species may be units of selection, not only genes) is put by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior.
Wikipedia provides a useful illustration of the gull example: .
For an extensive review of Ecology without Nature, see Garrard, G. (2010) ‘Ecocriticism,’ The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 17 pp.9-13.
Morton is here opposed to Bill McKibben, who argues in The End of Nature that ‘creating new forms of life… changes the world [and] puts us forever in the deity business.’ It does not, of course, it only puts us in the evolution business, but we have always been in that. (1992: 153)
Morton too says that ‘all beings are related to each other negatively and differentially, in an open system without centre or edge’, The Ecological Thought—but this is untrue: I am related positively to my blood relations in that I share genes with them—and of course all organisms are my ‘blood relations’.
According to the theory of ‘kin selection’, a non-reproductive organism
can improve its own genetic fitness by helping to achieve improved reproductive success for its non-lineal relatives. Since human homosexuality is somewhat heritable, kin selection has been proposed to help explain the persistence of the genetic factors that may contribute to it—the ‘gay uncle’ theory. Roughgarden proposes a broader socialising effect of homosexuality, but with similar effects. Glenn Wilson and Qazi Rahman present evidence that homosexuality is probably inherited polygenetically (i.e. not by a single ‘gay gene’ but multiple genes), but also that the effects of maternal hormones on early neural development could play an important role in human male homosexuality: Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation. If true, there could be important genetic influences in the mother rather than—or in addition to—her gay child.
Linnaeus originally classified species phenetically, using patterns of observable similarity. The problem is that there seems to be no objective criterion on which to base judgements of similarity. For the same reason, a ‘Saussurean’ account of species as relationships of difference will not do—which traits are you measuring? As Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths point out, there is, in principle, no limit to the number of ways in which any two organisms can be similar—or different (Sterelny & Griffiths 1999: 196).
The crocodilian order, for instance, includes species virtually unchanged over 84 million years.
The logic of this argument might be that one should avoid exposing and campaigning against pollution that causes birth defects because it perpetuates the stigmatization of disability.
Although my response to this article has been mainly critical, it is worth noting that it includes some wonderful analytico-lyrical reflections on skin as ‘the integral body and its abject at the same time’ (Sandilands 2004:.33).
And in any case, what could he mean by ‘the balance of “natural” reproduction’?
Editor's Note: Gregory Garrard's paper ‘How Queer is Green’ is the draft version of a paper that appeared in a definitive, reviewed and corrected form in Configurations. See: (). It is reprinted here by kind permission of the author.