Queer Feminist Climate Justice GAARD PDF
Queer Feminist Climate Justice GAARD PDF
Queer Feminist Climate Justice GAARD PDF
Dancing to salsa and merengue at Pulse nightclub on Latinx night in June 2016, the queer
and trans* community of Orlando, Florida was unprepared for the gunman who arrived at 2:00
a.m. with an assault rifle and a pistol, killing 49 people and wounding 53 more. The violence
continued from 2:00 to 5:00 a.m., with the 29-year-old shooter claiming his actions honored the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). While mainstream media heralded this as the
deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, even grieving activists were quick to cite the Battle at
Wounded Knee in 1890, where U.S. cavalry massacred 300 Lakota Sioux—mostly unarmed
women and children—and to recall the racially-motivated shooting just a year earlier at the
oldest Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine members of Bible Study group
(half of whom were seniors) were murdered by a 21-year-old white man who claimed he wanted
to start a “race war.”
In the days that followed, the intersections of race, sexuality, and environment were
eloquently articulated in e-mails from environmental and climate activists. Michael Brune of the
Sierra Club expressed sorrow and solidarity, affirming that “standing boldly against homophobia,
transphobia, racism, Islamophobia and sexism is the only way we can tear down the systems of
oppression and exclusion that have divided our country for far too long.” The internationally-
known climate justice organization, 350.Org sent out a collectively-authored message of grief
and hope, affirming “our fights are connected,” and “as LGBTQ+ climate activists, we need to
bring our whole selves to this work.” Disclosing that “many of us who are shoulder to shoulder
with you in the streets are LGBTQ+,” eleven queer and trans* activists of color from 350.Org
provided the climate justice movement with its first nationally-publicized coming-out statement.
Against Nature?
Work connecting the feminist, environmental justice, and climate justice movements had
been ongoing for decades prior to the tragedy at Pulse nightclub. Ecofeminist writings in the
1990s had initially addressed the colonialist links between homophobia and ecophobia, western
culture’s fear of nature and all those socially-constructed as “closer to nature,” whether by
gender, race, or species. Europeans who colonized the Americas rationalized their exploits on
the excuse that the indigenous people were heathens who needed to be Christianized. The
natives wore few clothes, enjoyed sexual freedoms that included a diversity of genders and
positions, and did not cultivate the land in ways the Europeans could recognize. The African slave
trade was used to reinforce the associations of people of color with nature and specifically with
animals, for along with animals and land, Africans became “property” that could be owned in a
white patriarchal economic system. And while white women were also transferred from father
to husband, the systematic rape of indigenous, mestiza and black women and girls was integral
to the colonial domination of all “naturalized” others. As ecofeminists argued, colonialism
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provides a clear example of the intersections and devaluations of all those associated with
nature, whether by indigeneity, race, sexuality, gender, or species.
So, why have arguments against homosexuality have always involved appeals to nature?
Queer theorists who explore the natural/unnatural dichotomy find that “natural” is invariably
associated with “procreation,” an equation all too familiar to feminists, as this claim has been
used to manipulate women into compulsory childbearing and women’s heterogender role.
Refusing childbearing through alternate sexualities or birth control (including abortion), women
are described as “unnatural,” and queer sexuality is seen as “against nature.” Such arguments
imply that nature is valued, yet Western culture has constructed nature as a force to be
dominated if culture is to prevail. These contradictory claims reveal that the “nature” queers are
urged to comply with is simply the dominant paradigm of heterosexuality.
In fact, the ample evidence of same-sex sexual behaviors in other species confirms that
such behaviors transcend the procreative. Popular science books such as Bruce Bagemihl’s
Biological Exuberance and Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow document a vast range of
same-sex acts, same-sex childrearing pairs, intersex animals, and multiple “genders.” Female
homosexual behavior has been found in chickens, turkeys, chameleons, and cows, while male
homosexual behavior has been observed in fruit flies, bulls, dolphins, porpoises, and apes. Like
sexuality, mating behavior varies across mammal species: some pairs mate for life (jackals), some
have multiple partners (zebras, whales, chimpanzees), and some are homosocial, seeking out
members of their species solely for procreation. The protests against the New York City Zoo’s
male penguin couple who hatched a penguin egg and raised the offspring as their own show
both the depth of homophobic fears about gay parenting, and the wisdom of inspired
zookeepers around the world, who have subsequently allowed same-sex penguin couples to
adopt eggs.
To destabilize heteronormativity even further, queer approaches to plant studies reveal
that plant species display a range of behaviors in reproduction, kinship and association that rival
that of animals: triads, multiple partners, self-pollination, and multiple genders all exceed
compulsory heterosexuality’s mandates in their queer botanical vitality. Because so many
species have their own sexualities and cultures that don’t fit with dominant human cultural
models, it appears impossible to require humans to comply with “nature,” for which species’
“nature” would be the model? Would it be the black widow spider, who eats the male after
mating, or the praying mantis, who eats the male while mating? Would it be the lesbian lizards,
who reproduce by virgin birth? Evidently, attempts to naturalize one form of sexuality above all
others are, at root, attempts to foreclose investigation of sexual diversity and sexual practices.
Such attempts manifest Western culture’s homophobia, erotophobia, and ecophobia.
Climate Change Homophobia
Climate change homophobia is evident in the media blackout of GLBTQ people in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina, an unprecedented storm and infrastructure collapse which occurred
just days before the annual queer festival in New Orleans, “Southern Decadence,” a celebration
that drew 125,000 revelers in 2003. The religious right quickly declared Hurricane Katrina an
example of God’s wrath against homosexuals, waving signs with “Thank God for Katrina” and
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publishing detailed connections between the sin of homosexuality and the destruction of New
Orleans. It is hard to imagine GLBTQ people—mostly people of color--not facing harassment,
discrimination, and violence during and after the events of Katrina, given the fact that Louisiana,
Alabama, and Mississippi lack any legal protections for GLBTQ persons and would have been
unsympathetic to such reports. And it is hard to imagine wealthy white Americans being left in
such a situation at all.
Queer and transgendered persons already live on the margins of most societies, often
denied rights of marriage and family life, denied health care coverage for partners and their
children, denied fair housing and employment rights, immigration rights and more. Climate
change exacerbates pressures on marginalized people first, with economic and cultural elites
best able to mitigate and postpone impacts. As a global phenomenon, homophobia infiltrates
climate change discourse, distorting our analysis of climate change causes and climate justice
solutions, and placing a wedge between international activists. For example, at the First
Worldwide Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth held in Cochabamba, April
19-22, 2010, Bolivian President Evo Morales claimed that the presence of homosexual men
around the world was a consequence of eating genetically-modified chicken: “The chicken that
we eat is chock-full of feminine hormones. So, when men eat these chickens, they deviate from
themselves as men." This statement exemplifies a dangerous nexus of sexism, speciesism, and
homophobia that overlooks the workings of industrial agribusiness, and simultaneously vilifies
gay and transgendered persons as unnatural “genetic deviants.” And it illustrates the need for
queer feminist climate justice—because all our climates are raced, gendered and sexualized,
simultaneously material, cultural, and ecological.
Given the correlation and mutual reinforcement of sexism and homophobia (Pharr 1988),
it should be no surprise that the standpoints on climate change for women and LGBTQ
populations are comparable. While skeptics have debated whether a higher participation of
women leads to better climate policy, and whether there is any verifiable gender difference in
climate change knowledge and concern, the data suggest that women would make different
decisions about climate change problems and solutions (See Figure 1).1
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Women are more skeptical about the effectiveness of current climate change
policies in solving the problem, whereas men tend to put their trust in scientific
and technical solutions
Women are more willing to change to a more climate-friendly lifestyle
Climate protection policy areas—energy policy, transportation planning, urban
planning—tend to be male dominated
Women are underrepresented in areas of climate change policy
Women underestimate their climate change knowledge more than do men
While gender balance at all levels of climate change decision-making is necessary, it does not
automatically guarantee gender-responsive climate policy. A wider transformation is needed,
involving progressive men and genderqueer others, prepared to work together to uncover the
embedded gender, race, and sexuality of power relations in climate change policy and mitigation
strategies.
Very few studies have recognized a queer ecological perspective, much less brought that
perspective to climate change research and data collection. Yet according to a U.S. poll
conducted by Harris Interactive, “LGBT Americans Think, Act, Vote More Green than Others”
(2009; see Figure 2). 2
Most significant in the Harris Poll—given that heterosexuals are more likely to have children--
was the LGBT response expressed for what kind of planet we are leaving for future generations,
a question which concerned LGBT respondents at 51% as compared with 42% of heterosexual
respondents. Yet in United Nations discourse to date, when LGBTQ people seek an entry point
into the ongoing climate change conversations, the primary entry point is one of illness,
addressing only HIV and AIDS. From these studies, it appears that structural gender inequality,
and more specifically the underrepresentation of women and genderqueers in decision-making
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bodies on climate change, is actually inhibiting national and global action in addressing climate
change.
The culturally-constructed fear, denial, and devaluation of our embodied erotic is not lost
on eco-activist youth, who are among the first to mention sexual well-being in climate change
discussions. At COP 18 in Doha, Qatar, Nov. 26-Dec. 8, 2012, a Youth Gender Working Group
emerged, emphasizing issues like the right to financing and technology, and how disasters
impact women, LGBT communities, sexual health and reproductive rights. Updating the Gender
& Climate Change Network’s slogan, youth agreed, “there will be no climate justice without
queer gender justice.”
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The road to education about racial, gender, and sexual justice includes working within
existing organizations to build broader pathways toward intersectional analysis and activism.
Groups such as the gay and lesbian Sierra Club chapters in California, Colorado, and Washington,
the US-based Queer Farmer Film Project, San Francisco’s Rainbow Chard Alliance, Toronto’s
EcoQueers, and Minnesota’s Outwoods all bridge the queer/environmentalist communities that
are working to address white-hetero-privilege in the environmental movement. Given the
persistent racial segregation of the United States, LGBTQI organizations within diverse urban
centers or with a national reach are more able to organize queer and trans* communities of
color. The Washington state-based Out4Sustainability, for example, has chapters in San
Francisco Bay, Phoenix, Vermont, and New York, and organizes annual Earth Gay service
projects, an annual Fab Planet Conference, and Greener Pride. Publisher of the daily news site
ColorLines, Race Forward organizes the Facing Race National Conference and provides
mobilization, skill-building, leadership development, organization- and alliance-building, issue-
framing, and research reports. While the climate justice movement clearly addresses racial and
gender justice, its ability to integrate an intersectional approach that foregrounds climate
impacts on queer and trans* communities of color is still in progress.
Queer Alternatives to Climate Crises
Creating sustainable and just alternatives to climate change is a crucial part of the climate
justice movement, and queers are contributing in many ways. Queer food justice grows out of
today’s budding eco-queer movement, and is shaped by queer farmers and gardeners who feel
uncomfortable in the mainstream white, heteromale and middle class locavore movement. The
grassroots food justice movement is far from this stereotype, and reaches back to Black women
rural gardeners in the post-Reconstruction South and in Harlem’s rooftop gardens. In San
Francisco, Queer Food For Love (QFFL) provides food, community, and a safe space against
prejudice, while the Rainbow Chard Alliance bridges the organic farming movement and the
queer movement, creating community for like-minded “eco-homos” in the Bay Area. In the U.S.,
the queer food justice movement is articulated through groups ranging from Vermont,
Massachusetts, California and Connecticut to Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, and
Washington. Concerned about the intersections between environment, sexuality, and gender,
these queer groups use food to build community, fight oppression, and take care of planetary
and human bodies.
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Just as the exploitation of animals initially set the stage for race-based exploitation of
people, VINE recognizes that today’s racial and economic injustices perpetuate both
environmental racism and the continued exploitation of animals. Dangerous and
environmentally destructive factory farms and processing plants are often located in
communities of color. Local citizens must live with the pollution while working at dangerous and
degrading jobs. The products of these industries are often marketed to communities of color,
regardless of the impact on physical health or cultural welfare. U.S. dietary guidelines
recommending high consumption of meat and dairy products are a form of food racism, as up to
95 percent of adult Asians, 74 percent of Native Americans, 70 percent of African Americans, and
53 percent of Mexican Americans are lactose intolerant. Recommendations concerning meat
consumption ignore the high rates of heart disease, hypertension and diabetes among African
Americans. Low-income communities of color continue to be the sites of high concentrations of
fast food restaurants (i.e., “food deserts”) without grocery stores offering fresh fruits and
vegetables, bulk grains, and other inexpensive ingredients for a healthy diet.
At the forefront in articulating intersections between disability, queerness, and
environments, queer communities have responded to the intersecting environmental justice
concerns for aging queers who may face reduced economic circumstances, mobility issues,
isolation, and barriers to food and housing. The Gay and Lesbian Association of Retiring Persons
lists a range of rural and urban communities in the U.S., but as of 2015, the Los Angeles LGBT
Center’s Triangle Square is the only queer retirement community offering affordable housing to
seniors who live on less than $2,000 a month, and providing assistance with navigating
governmental programs for seniors, as well as support groups, health and wellness activities,
enrichment classes, cultural excursions and other social outings, educational seminars and
workshops, and best of all, a climate free of homophobia. As climate change crises escalate,
aging queers will need such resources and community to survive.
Finally, queer cultural skills such as queer aesthetics, queer performativity, pageantry,
drag, and polymorphous perversity are all tools useful to the climate justice movement.
Ecosexuality is but one example of the activist potential for queer feminist climate justice. In
their eco-documentary, “Goodbye Gauley Mountain,” Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle expose
the ways that coal mining and mountaintop removal affect queers, working class poor people,
and ecosystems. The Black miners who died of silicosis in the 1930s, working to build Hawks’
Nest Tunnel for the coal company; the mountaintop-removal communities of poor white people
who have a 50% increase of cancer, and are 42% more likely to have children born with birth
defects—both illustrate the “slow violence” of rural environmental racism and classism, wiping
out the culture and ecocommunities of West Virginia, where a monoeconomy keeps people in
thrall to the coal industry. Bringing a homegrown queer performance artist like Beth Stephens
and her wife and former porn star, Annie Sprinkle, to West Virginia’s embattled mining
communities, Beth and Annie’s ecosexual weddings bridge the urban/rural, queer/straight,
white/people of color schisms by affirming a shared and longstanding love of the mountains, and
celebrating that love in drag and polyamorous commitment. Ecosexuality “shifts the metaphor
from earth as mother to earth as lover,” says Annie Sprinkle, “to entice people to have more love
of the planet.”
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For a Queer and Present Climate Justice
The tragedy at Pulse nightclub effectively outed the climate justice movement. As
Suzanne Pharr explained in 1988, homophobia is rooted in cultural misogyny, and the liberation
of women, people of color, and queers are inextricably interconnected. Moreover, an economic
system reliant on enslaving people, animals, and the earth cannot survive. Nature is far from
heteronormative, and real climate justice will have to include all of us.
References
Anderlini-D’Onofrio, SerenaGaia and Lindsay Hagamen, eds. Ecosexuality: When Nature Inspires
the Arts of Love. Puerto Rico, USA: 3WayKiss, 2015.
Arquero, Darren, Nayantara Sen, and Terry Keleher. “Better Together in the South: Building
Movements Across Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation.” Applied Research Center,
2013.
Bagemihl, Bruce. Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Clare, Eli. Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. Cambridge, MA: South End Press,
1999.
Gaard, Greta. “Ecofeminism and Climate Change.” Women’s Studies International Forum 49
(2015) 20-33.
Hall, Kim Q. “No Failure: Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures.”
Radical Philosophy Review 17:1 (2014), 203-225.
Klein, Naomi. “Why #BlackLivesMatter Should Transform the Climate Debate.” The Nation.
December 12, 2014. Accessed at https://www.thenation.com/article/what-does-
blacklivesmatter-have-do-climate-change/ on July 12, 2016.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics,
Desire. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010.
Pharr, Suzanne. Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism. Little Rock, AR: The Women’s Project,
1988.
Pineda, Ceci. “The Dangerous Erasure of Queer and Trans* People of Color from the Climate
Movement.” Bluestockingsmag.com, May 5, 2015. Accessed at
http://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/05/05/the-dangerous-erasure-of-queer-and-trans-
people-of-color-from-the-climate-movement/ on July 11, 2016.
Richards, Gary. “Queering Katrina: Gay Discourses of the Disaster in New Orleans.” Journal of
American Studies 44:3 (2010), 519-534.
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Sbicca, Joshua. “Eco-queer movement(s): Challenging heteronormative space through
(re)imagining nature and food.” European Journal of Ecopsychology 3(2012), 33-52.
Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Boston: South End
Press, 2005.
Stein, Rachel, ed. New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism.
Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Stephens, Beth, and Annie Sprinkle. “Ecosexuality.” In Renee C. Hoogland, ed. Gender:Nature.
London: Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, 2016.
Valenza, Alessia. “Bolivian President: Eating Estrogen-Rich Chicken Makes You Gay.”
International Lesbian Gay Association, 25 April 2010. Accessed at http://ilga.org/bolivian-
president-eating-estrogen-rich-chicken-makes-you-gay/ on July 16, 2016.
1
The careful methodology of these studies affirms their validity. International findings on gendered differences in
climate change causes, analyses, and solutions in Ergas & York (2012) rest on 60 peer-reviewed studies, which then
shape the questions and statistical analysis these authors undertake. McCright (2010) tests the arguments about
gender differences in scientific knowledge and environmental concern using eight years of Gallup data on climate
change knowledge and concern in the U.S. public. Alber & Roehr (2006) report on the project “Climate for Change
– Gender Equality and Climate Policy” that performed data surveys of the gender balance in climate policy at local
and national levels for ten major cities in four European countries (Germany, Italy, Finland, Sweden). The studies
are cited and discussed in Gaard (2015). I recognize that “gender” here is defined in binary terms and searched for
but could find no research on trans* perspectives about environmental issues, though I suspect these perspectives
would be comparable to other non-dominant gendered views.
2
Because the findings may surprise some readers, I include links to Harris Interactive Methods for LGBT surveys:
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/MethodsTools/DataCollection/SpecialtyPanelsPanelDevelopment/LGBTPanel.as
px .
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