Strange natures : futurity, empathy, and the queer ecological imagination / Nicole Seymour.

Seymour, Nicole.
Urbana : University of Illinois Press, ©2013.
Added to CLICnet on 11/20/2014


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Notes:

  • Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-210) and index.
  • Introduction : locating queer ecologies — Post-transsexual pastoral : environmental ethics in the contemporary transgender novel — It’s just not turning up : AIDS, cinematic vision, and environmental justice in Todd Haynes’s Safe — Ranch stiffs and beach cowboys in the shrinking public sphere : sexual domestication in Brokeback mountain and Surf party — Attack of the queer atomic mutants : the ironic environmentalism of Shelley Jackson’s Half life — Conclusion : the futures of queer ecology.
  • 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.
  • Strange Natures reveals a tradition of queer environmentalism in contemporary literature and film from the Americas. In the process, it challenges the historical disconnect between queer theory and ecocriticism–a disconnect that, as Nicole Seymour shows, emerges from those disciplines’ divergent attitudes toward nature. 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. –Publisher’s description.

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Requested by Redmond, D

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