A Queer Lesbian Feminist Ecopoetics

Abstract

The author elaborates the intersection of environmental theory and queer theory through a reading of the figure of the lesbian, which scholars, like Robyn Wiegman, Valerie Traub, and Lynne Huffer, have recently used to argue for a more nuanced reconsideration of gender in contemporary queer theory and queer studies. The author argues that the burgeoning field of queer ecopoetics can offer a productive response to recent calls to forge feminism alongside queer theory. The author takes the poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913–80) as a case study for a queer, lesbian, feminist ecopoetic praxis. Through a reading of three poems, the author demonstrates that, for Rukeyser, questioning human ontological boundaries is inextricable from her exploration of queer human desire, and especially inextricable from her vision of queer futurity. Furthermore, this essay shows how queer ecopoetics offers a common ground for the beyond-human, kinship-building impulses of environmental thought and for queer theory's congruent impulses of erotic and world-building relationality (as best illustrated in José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia). The author contends that what most cogently binds ecopoetics to queer theory is a deep commitment to anti-anthropogenic ethical praxis, which parallels the ethics described by Lee Edelman as a radical challenge to the social itself.