Queer and Trans Ecologies as Care Practice of Indispensability

ABSTRACT

This essay calls for an agenda of queer and trans environmentalisms within environmental communication. I detail how queer and trans ecologies operate as frameworks for ecological care, drawing from unexpected sites of queer and trans environmentalisms. Queer and trans environmentalisms encompass the environmental dimensions of LGBTQ political movements and imaginaries, which include robust commitments to housing justice, sustainability, and caring for precarious kin. Together, queer and trans environmentalisms promise to expand attention to the nexus of gender, sexuality, disability, and race in Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) scholarship and practice, while mapping environmental tributaries of queer and trans life. Queer and trans social worlds provide the frameworks and practices for reimagining indispensability and networks of vital care beyond the enclosure of Anglo American bourgeoise reprosexual kinship. Although primarily addressing twentieth-century examples of queer environmental justice, queer and trans ecologies also highlight the complex interplay of settler colonialism, race, and debility. In all, queer and trans social worlds provide critical guides for navigating climate crisis and transforming hierarchies of care.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer and trans ecologies
• care
• kinship
• disability
• land
• energy

Queer and trans practices of kinship have always encompassed ecological relationships everywhere between rural and urban, whether we as environmental communication scholars acknowledge them or not. Encompassing a commitment to interdependence as a modality of care, these cultures of kinship offer antidotes to abandonment in the struggle to build places of survival. Sometimes the juxtapositions are just this stark: in a culture in which the form of the family encloses and privatizes how we imagine relationality and practices of sustaining life, queer and trans people transform social and familial expulsion into the seeds of mutuality and survival. Our historical struggles are guidebooks for adapting to hostile climates, carving out possibilities for care infrastructures committed to meeting basic needs and honoring our complexities, and in time building our own worlds. Perhaps it’s not surprising then, that attention to care, care work, and care webs have taken on increasing urgency in both historical and contemporary queer and trans scholarship (Aizura, 2017; Malatino, 2020; Manalansan, 2008; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). As Hil Malatino writes,

This work – like all care work – is about fostering survival; it is maintenance work that must be done so that trans folks can get about the work of living. But the mere necessity of this work also points to the fact that the most fundamental networks of care that enable us to persist in our existence are often threadbare or, sometimes, nearly nonexistent. (Malatino, 2020, pp. 41–42)

For environmental communication scholars, the explicit environmental dimensions of queer and trans care work are at best marginalized in this journal, and at worst, imagined as simply irrelevant to the aims and mission of this field. What do our students experience when they try to find lifelines in these conversations and discover the absence of queer and trans people in the midst? When as a doctoral student I first encountered “queer ecology” through Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson’s Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, I found those lifelines, and in turn, the possibilities of deep understanding. I found a way to name the environmental conditions that had shaped my own life as a white settler, trans masculine, disabled person trying to comprehend flows of ecological violence as a cultural inheritance, and the later movements across time, space, and technology that continue to shape my own transitioning ecocultural identities (Cram, 2022). Sadly, at the time of this writing, the glaring absence in this journal remains, and my hope in turning to queer and trans ecologies as a practice of care is to invite others who may feel siloed and sidelined to find a place here. We take care of each other, even if others refuse or find little value in how we find ways to live.

The stakes of engaging these connections couldn’t be clearer in the face of multiple and compacting crises. First, queer and feminist geographers have taken great pains to document how the built environment concretizes social and cultural inequities, maintained through policing and property regimes to criminalize mobile and surplus populations. In the U.S., the nexus of policing and real estate development entrenched racial and class divisions within gay and lesbian communities, rewarding a “creative class” willing and able to contribute to the large-scale gentrification of major U.S. cities (Hanhardt, 2013). Decades of neoliberal transformations to education, housing, and healthcare also produce vulnerabilities, all exacerbated by climate disaster, poverty, higher levels of incarceration, chronic illness, and housing insecurity (Goldsmith & Bell, 2022). The overlapping and unique vulnerabilities for LGBTQs in the Global South and frontline island communities also intersect with deep legacies of imperial, military and colonial powers, and contemporary resistance to political authoritarianism, conversion-driven Christian missionaries, and hierarchies of value rooted in dehumanizing doctrine – the split between “human” and “animal” (Queers in Palestine, n.d.). Second, the mainstreaming and rising intensity of eco-fascist ideologies and movements intersect with increasing calls to eradicate trans people broadly from public life, by using the power of the state to deprive people of necessary medical care and welfare broadly in the name of so-called nature (Bassi & LaFleur, 2022; Butler, n.d.; Cram, 2022, pp. 198–199). Together, these forces are constituting emerging precarities as primarily trans people in the U.S. are forced to grapple with their access to mobility and support in determining if they can flee conditions increasingly hostile to their survival.

Mapping the environmental conditions of queer and trans care, and how land, waters, and non-human kin energize and care for us, is an urgent and necessary intervention situated within a paradigm of Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) (Pellow, 2017). The lived dimensions of queer and trans environmentalisms are largely taken for granted by scholars in queer studies, environmental communication, and critical environmental justice studies alike. In the remainder of this essay, then, I outline queer and trans ecologies as a framework for imagining care practice, grounded in unexpected examples of queer and trans environmentalisms. Although I focus primarily on “queer and trans ecologies,” these are deeply interwoven with dynamics of debility, disability, race, and coloniality, as I argue more in depth in Violent Inheritance. Then, I turn to extend my original writing on regeneration as a queer ecological practice grounded in relations of land and energy.

Queer and trans ecologies and practice

As a scholarly discourse, queer ecology formally emerged in 1994 to destabilize the supposedly unremarkable connections between “queer” and “nature,” given their long-standing opposition within Euro-American knowledge cultures that declared queerness a “crime against nature.” In this context, queer critiques of “nature” focus on its embedded meanings or practices constituted by colonial regimes. These might include critiques of taxonomic structures that organize nature/culture binaries within environmental discourse; logics of purity and pollution; or the hierarchization of human/non-human species into regimes of value extraction and racialization (Gaard, 1997; Mortimer-Sandilands, 2010; Seymour, 2018). These early iterations of queer ecology also imagined what queer infused environmental politics might enable coalitional politics or “unconventional” sites of organizing, care, and resistance. Together, these critiques offer a stark contrast to dominant hegemonies that silo culture and nature broadly, specifically the environmental politics of sexuality. In other words, the mentality that queerness is separate from environmental imagination is itself a consequence of white supremacist ideologies of what constitutes “sex” and the matter of social reproduction in the wake of “race suicide” (Gill-Peterson, 2018; Schuller, 2018).¹

While connected to the many tributaries that form queer and feminist orientations, trans ecologies mobilize trans studies’ preoccupation with the boundary crossings that matter. As a field of inquiry dedicated to how gender and its intersections of race and nation have delimited the markings of “the human,” trans studies examine the interplay of organic and inorganic, or somatechnicities. For some, trans ecologies might encompass play on ecocultural identities, such as when Eva Hayward imagines “trans-becomings” when “places come to matter in the changing of one’s sex”; or, affective trans-species interconnections with the starfish’s regenerative powers (Hayward, 2008, 2010). For micha cárdenas, trans ecologies promise the decentering of the human and the hope of “crossing lines between bodies, species, and environments [that] call on viewers to intervene in the violence being done to other species, for the survival of all the species who depend on these ecosystems, our own and others” (micha cárdenas, 2022). Finally, Cleo Wölfle Hazard deploys the method “underflows” to show queer and trans affinities with river justice in the wake of heteronormative and white supremacist histories of river management. Underflows also document us in water: “our ways of being together along shorelines and in the water involve, often and crucially, river and waterfront spaces … Trans future-thinking and our experiences of transformation can help grapple with an unpredictable climate future-becoming present” (Hazard, 2022). Trans waterways connect all oceans, rivers, and streams, and nourish physical, mental, and emotional vitalities.

Yet, queer and trans ecologies also have a broader cultural history in North America, underappreciated by readers outside of that history (Cram, 2019).² As students of the environmental movement, we know that the 1970s was a pivotal decade for mobilizing on a wide array of matters: chemical warfare in Vietnam, anti-nuclear activism, resistance to polluters, and much more. At the same time, publications such as Country Woman and Radical Faerie Digest constituted print networks to connect rural lesbians and gay men. Both highlight the intersections of ecological consciousness and rural queer life, broadly imagined, and they do so in ways that do and do not line up with the eco-spirituality assumptions of the period. In the former, writers organized their philosophies about liberated sexualities, feminist rage, and patriarchal violence while also spinning advice on goat farming and sustainability. In the latter, self-proclaimed country faggots exchange letters to soothe isolation and imagine new lovers, while also penning guides to herbalism and the therapeutics of psychedelic mushrooms.

The later decades of the 1980s and 1990s produced emerging ecocultural identities at the crossroads of ecological and embodied experience. Ecocultural identity refers to “a framework for understanding all identities [and] ways sociocultural dimensions of selfhoods are always inseparable from ecological dimensions” (Milstein & Castro-Sotomayor, 2022). Part of queer ecology’s intellectual tributaries include women of color and Black feminisms of the 1980s, including writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde. The former’s writings on the borderlands encompass the interplay of colonialism, sexuality, mestiza consciousness expressed through flow of ocean water and wind over and through technologies of confinement, pain, and stoppage. In addition to providing a deeply ecocultural perspective on Chicana identities, Anzaldúa’s work inspired cultural workers like Laura Aguilar, a photographer well known for her self-portraiture of her large body juxtaposed to boulders scattered in desert landscapes. Lorde’s work also engages deep ecological resonance. In her critical rewriting of Lorde’s legacy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs names her a “Black feminist speculative nature poet,” deeply engaged in debates about nuclear energy in addition to the consequences of extractive fossil fuel regimes and disasters impacting her Caribbean homeland (Gumbs, 2022). Each of these are examples of ecological elements shaping one’s feminist, womanist, and political commitments beyond the analytic frameworks of Anglo-American eco-feminisms of the same era (Singer, 2020).

Queer and trans community organizing also encompass critical lessons for housing justice, perhaps a surprise for readers who center bodies as the extent of crisis. Take for instance the 1970s New York City-based collective, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), created by two iconic trans women of color: Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. As mothers to city street youth, Johnson and Rivera formed STAR to care for unhoused queer and trans youth, inviting them from the streets into the shelter of STAR House in the East Village (DiCesare & Cram, 2023; Gill-Peterson, 2018). In later decades, the crisis of housing once again mobilized queer and trans political communities in the face of a raging AIDS epidemic. In New York, organizers within the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) confronted the cruelty of federal, state, and city organizations, whose callous neglect frustrated the capacity to care for people with AIDS (PWAs). In both, they enact a vision of housing justice, connecting queer precarities to environmental justice: where we live is where we respite against the cruelty of a disposable-centric world.

Housing was a crucial link in imagining care for the most precarious and newly disabled, especially given structural limits to the number of units reserved for those with AIDS, the defunding of community clinics, and the exponential rise of the number of people newly houseless in the face of an apocalypse. Against this backdrop, one of ACT UP’s committees founded Housing Works to expand access to shelter while centering the specific care needs of PWAs. These needs included harm reduction strategies around safe needle exchange, ensuring housing that would center privacy, dignity, and connection to communities over isolation, in addition to safety against environmental triggers for vulnerable immune systems. In retrospect, Housing Works exemplifies queer organized environmental justice, responsive to the deep connections between disability and disposability (Cram et al., 2022). These are but two of the myriad ways that queer and trans people have built indispensability – a praxis of interdependence – as resistance to “organized abandonment,” what geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore identifies as structural processes of exposure to premature death and the disparate distribution of vulnerability (Gilmore, 2022). To do so, they built the infrastructures of care so necessary to survival in hostile climates and designs committed to disposability, or the regimes of value that have long governed what lives are worthy of care: of being held, of being whole.

Grounded in feminist geography and social reproduction scholarship, “infrastructures of care,” often evoke the ordinary and mundane aspects of emotional, physical, and embodied labor necessary to the work of living (Hall, 2020). However, much of this work situates “home” within the privatized heteronormative and bourgeoise imaginations of life and racialized gendered labor. For queer, trans, and crip folks, “home” is rarely a unified space – it often evokes isolation, violence, exhaustion, or removal. This dissonance partly emerges from the design of the privatized and land locked unit of “family” within settler colonialism, in which “home” historically operates as a mechanism of enclosure, property, and racial capitalist reproduction (Cram, 2022, xiv). For these reasons and more referenced at the start of this essay, trans and queer care labor also entails a much more expansive mapping, betwixt and between formal and informal spaces and the interstices of bodies and homeplaces.

This form of care prioritizes care work as work, or the physical and emotional energies vital to holding each other for another day, another sunrise. As work, queer, trans, crip care often takes on invisible practices and surpasses the fetishization of care as “attention.” Here, I am thinking of how disability communities and queer and trans social worlds value practices that maintain the integrity and wellbeing of one’s personhood through mundane tasks of dependency: showers, medication reminders, checking in phone calls or notes, or hot meals. None of these tasks are necessarily guaranteed in disabling contexts. This work, often performed by lovers and/or friends resist the delimited terms of who “deserves” care in capitalist culture. But even so, building the infrastructure necessary for people to survive neglect requires commitment to fostering conditions in which that work does not become extractive, or a power arrangement that facilitates depletion and dominance.

To forward a more robust scholarly engagement with queer and trans environmentalisms, environmental communication scholars can build on the framework of CEJ, preliminarily outlined by environmental justice scholar David N. Pellow. While doing so surpasses the scope of this essay, I flag tentative possibilities for further discussion. First, within the context of queer and trans lives, frames of the environment as “where we live, work, play, pray, and eat,” are deeply structured by the intersection of white supremacy, capitalism, and heteronormativity. As presented here, queer and trans ecologies extend and build on CEJ’s commitments to mapping the intersection of social categories, their constitutive hierarchies and environmental privilege and/or marginalization, which encompass the conditions of who has access to conditions of life sustaining care. Consequentially, how “environment” intersects with queer and trans lives cannot be known in advance and often preclude strict delineations of private and public, urban and rural, organic and inorganic. Second, queer and trans ecologies are muti-scalar and even complicate how environmental critics engage with the concept of scale (Cram, 2019). Scale in a queer and trans sensibility must remain attentive to the stoppages and flows tethering bodies, borders, and regimes of power. Finally, queer and trans care fundamentally challenge regimes of disposability, and turn toward community-generated social infrastructures in which queer, trans, and disabled bodies are indispensable to broader webs of life. While this section details some of the ways queer and trans care work intersect with environmental dimensions, I close by returning to my own thinking about kinship and regeneration as modes of grounding care practice within and across queer and trans lives and the more than human world.

Care/Kinship/Regeneration

Queer and trans ecologies serve a vital role in environmental history. Beyond unmooring the coherence of a human subject as the epicenter of historical narrative, they also locate social traces of intimacy, entanglement, and eros that function as pedagogies and practices of regeneration. In Violent Inheritance, I make a case for imagining the politics of sexuality through a longer history of extractivism, or the ideologies that demarcate people, lands, and bodies as sacrificial to exhaustion. Energy and sexual modernity intersect in matter: in conditions of settler colonial racial capitalism, energy means the transformation of matter into value. Consequentially, these renewed histories of extraction highlight how biopolitical hierarchies of life governed land projects in the U.S., though I focus particularly on the making of the North American West. By asking what different publics might do with this inheritance of environmental dispossession and privilege, I questioned how legacies of extraction collide with political projects committed to the principles of regeneration. Inheritance may encompass everything from ecological affect, histories of land use, or cultures of preservation. Regeneration, on the other hand, grows the seeds of refusal to worlds built on domination and depletion. Between these dialectical pairs, competing claims to kinship negotiate their ongoing friction.

By kinship, I mean forms of making life that exceed and transcend domains of the bourgeoise family form or even the integrity of the so-called human. This is an explicitly queer, crip, and trans orientation to kinship because it decenters the monopoly of reprosexual kinship on relationality. Definitions matter because we should be unwilling to accept simple declarations of kinship or “making kin” as antidotes to legacies of anti-Blackness and colonialism as formidable drivers in the climate crisis. These structures, too, depended on forms of kinship. Sometimes kinship is violent, nonconsensual, and leaves people for dead. Some forms of kinship enclose the very means of survival and qualify who is deserving. By necessity, queer and trans people are experts in constituting the webs of mutual care so vital to our very survival in a world in which we are cast as unfit and surplus, and by extension disciplined and disposable.

May it be so: anti-colonial and anti-capitalist regeneration is an embodied political imagination. As I define it, “regenerative intimacies” are “practices of tending to nature connection as responsive to the violence of settler colonialism” (Cram, 2022, p. 188). As I elaborate in Violent Inheritance’s discussion of the Pacific Northwest-based Queer Nature, regenerative intimacies encompass trans-species listening, tracking, and the eroticism of eating place. What’s critical in these practices is the constant foregrounding of settler colonialism as a vehicle of violence, even within domains of the intimate. As one of Queer Nature’s facilitators, So conveyed, “Belonging isn’t a metaphor. Belonging isn’t about staking a claim to a place either – it is about respecting a place, entering with a question, and listening. Belonging can, actually, be unsettling.” Regeneration lends toward forms of kinship that privilege care practices of reciprocity, wholeness, and interdependence. Across all of these, eroticism – the sensuous opening of the body to the world – entangles us in the queer life ways of the planet, our most expansive home. Against all the crises of the present, we can let this place hold us, but what are we willing to return – to disinherit – and to reciprocate?

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Constance Gordon, and Tiara R. Na’puti for their feedback during the drafting of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This is a critique that stems from queer of color criticism specifically, and trans of color critique. Sex is not a “natural” category or an alternate to “gender.” Instead, it is a construct that emerges in the context of settler colonialism, race science and eugenics in the trans-Atlantic world.

2 Often, I hear “queerness” is hostile to environmental aims, and the reasons I’ve heard (in reviews, at conferences, at the seminar table, in small talk) are multiple: a disconnect between what is often delimited to a “legal” or “cultural” identity; to well-rehearsed tensions between culture and materiality; to over-commitments to single issue politics; to a crude engagement with earlier writings on anti-social politics and futurity. In communication studies, these connections often go eclipsed because of the queer—and more explicitly trans—impoverishment of the field, to use a phrase of Charles E. Morris III. How is it that queer theory continues to evolve in substance and intellectual commitments and yet the center of understanding for most in the field remains with debates from the early years of its emergence? Throughout my work, I have written extensively about the implicit environmental orientation of queer and trans knowledge cultures, especially Cram (2019).