Queer Ecology: Shared Horizons after Disturbance

Abstract

ABSTRACT While queer theory and the environmental humanities might seem unlikely bedfellows, this piece argues that both fields are defined by acts of denaturalisation and worldmaking which are not merely intellectual gestures, but lively political practices. It appropriates the genre of the manifesto – its capacity to generate rupture and imagine the world otherwise – and calls for the emergence of coalitions to complicate identitarian forms of belonging. Its call for imaginative geographies puts pressure on the notion of a national framework that so often conditions Italian studies scholarship. Lastly, it argues against concepts of purity and orthodoxy that often guide leftist politics, invoking a politics based on impurity to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. These intertwined practices are explored through an example of one particular queer ecology: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1995 “Untitled” (Vultures) installation of photographs, and its relation to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem ‘Lavoro tutto il giorno’.