Week 8: The ecological crisis and the challenge to life

Question 1

(Seymour) What is Queer ecology?

Answer 1

ecology’ refers to a conceptual framework that considers how sexual and environmental issues intersect in multiple realms (culture, science, etc.)  this framework casts a particular eye on how human norms, such as heterosexuality, influence our appraisal of the natural world, and vice versa

Question 2

(Seymour) What do the natural and the queer have in common?

Answer 2

 Both sets of entities have been subjected to biopolitical control and surveillance
 Both have been objects of scientific scrutiny
 Both have historically been oppressed or exploited
 Both have been positioned on the low end of sociocultural hierarchies
 Both are understood to exceed standards of human civility and decency
 Both have been feared, pathologized, fetishized, and commodified

Question 3

(Seymour) What is ecosexuality?

Answer 3

ecosexuality’ with the mantra, “the Earth is our lover [not our mother]”  so-called ecosexuals recognize that eroticism, pleasure, and desire often inhere in relations between humans and nonhumans

Question 4

(Van den Hengel) What is ecosexuality?

Answer 4

Ecosexuality: an emerging transnational grassroots movement where sexual and environmental concerns converge around a desire for more mutual and more sustainable relationships between human and more-than-human lifeworlds (Sprinkle and Stephens are pioneers)

Question 5

(Van den Hengel) What is ecosex?

Answer 5

• Ecosex refers both to the strategy of using sex and sexuality to raise awareness about global environmental concerns and to the act of partnering with the Earth and treating the Earth with the respect and care of an intimate partner

Question 6

(chakrabarty) what is a biological agent?

Answer 6

o Humans are biological agents, both collectively and as individuals and they have always been so  there was no point in human history when humans weren’t biological agents

Question 7

(chakrabarty) what is geological agency?

Answer 7

o We can become geological agents only historically and collectively  when we have reached numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact on the planet itself  to call ourselves geological agents is to attribute to use a force on the same scale as that released at other times when there has been a mass extinction of species  we seem to be currently going through that kind of period
 Human have become geological agents very recently in human history  Industrial Revolution