I was sitting at my son’s baseball game last night catching up on some reading when I picked up the latest issue of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association (March 2010). The first essay was by Timothy Morton: “Queer Ecology.” Prof. Morton calls for a merger of Queer Theory and Ecological Criticism, two staples in literary studies. The essay is fairly wide-ranging, but I thought I would provide two provocative bits for a reaction from our readers:
“Ecological critique has argued that speciesism underlies sexism and racism ([Carey] Wolfe [Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991])—why not homophobia too? How do we think about life-forms and their diverse sexualities and pleasures? Any attempt at queer ecology must imagine ways of doing justice to life-forms while respecting the lessons of evolutionary biology—that the boundary between life and non-life is thick and full of paradoxical entities” (276).
“Queer ecology will worry away at the human-nonhuman boundary, too. How can we ever distinguish properly between humans and nonhumans? Doesn’t the fact that identity is in the eye of the beholder put serious constraints on such distinctions? It’s not just that rabbits are rabbits in name only; it’s that whether or not we have words for them, rabbits are deconstrictive all the way down—signifying and display happen at every level. Nothing is self-identical. We are embodied yet without essence. Organicism is holistic and substantialist, visualizing carbon-based life-forms (organic in another sense) as the essence of livingness. Queer ecology must go wider, embracing silicon as well as carbon, for instance. . . . Queer ecology would go to the end and show how beings exist precisely because they are nothing but relationality, deep down—for the love of matter” (277).
As Mike Myers used to say via his Linda Richman character on SNL, “Now, talk amongst yourselves!”
May 22nd, 2010 | 6:12 pm | #1
What a beautiful expression of Unitarian thought.
May 22nd, 2010 | 6:38 pm | #2
“Queer ecology must go wider, embracing silicon as well as carbon, for instance. . . .”
Why stop at silicon? Is not the making of any and every distinction a manifestation of some discriminatory -ism? If so, we must then take care to distinguish ourselves from those who make distinctions to avoid falling into the next -ism, right? Proponents of queer ecology can easily declare victory, because the judgement that their project has failed would have to be based on distinguishing between success and failure, which is of course discriminatory. They can’t lose.
It all makes sense in a perverse sort of way. It was Chesterton who once said that the madman is not the one who has lost his reason but the one who has lost everything except his reason.
May 23rd, 2010 | 7:50 am | #3
“Queer ecology will worry away at the human-nonhuman boundary, too. How can we ever distinguish properly between humans and nonhumans? Doesn’t the fact that identity is in the eye of the beholder put serious constraints on such distinctions?”
Interspecies marriage, anyone?
But of course, acceptance of gay marriage will never lead to such a thing, we have been assured.
May 23rd, 2010 | 7:54 am | #4
Can’t wait to discuss these exciting new ideas with my friends at work!
May 23rd, 2010 | 11:53 am | #5
Can you hear the sound of the world’s smallest fiddle playing for the poor souls who are worried that Queer Theory and Ecological Criticism have not been sufficiently integrated?
May 23rd, 2010 | 6:16 pm | #6
[...] Fant dug up this little gem from the latest Proceedings of the Modern Language Association by Timothy Morton: It’s not just that rabbits are rabbits in name only; it’s that whether or [...]
May 24th, 2010 | 7:31 am | #7
[...] Fant dug up this little gem from Timothy Morton in the latest Proceedings of the Modern Language Association: It’s not just [...]
May 24th, 2010 | 11:04 am | #8
In substantive part, at least, this is an attempt in continuity with modern tendencies to elevate diversity by making all differences equivalently valid.
Unfortunately, intentions to respect diversity and difference notwithstanding, such an approach ultimately destroys diversity by making everything equivalently meaningful and therefore meaningless.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact