Today, Roxanne calls in to ask about gay and queer nature, y'all! Guess what, the heterosexist and binary "norms" surrounding gender and sexual identity are harmful to the earth.
Today, Roxanne calls in to ask about gay and queer nature, y'all! Guess what, the heterosexist and binary "norms" surrounding gender and sexual identity are harmful to the earth. Roxanne asks about gay and queer behaviors and family structures in the animal kingdom. We're going to explore queerness in the animal kingdom and beyond! Queer trees and mushrooms? Yes, indeed!
Queer ecology understands that society’s norms around gender and sexuality are actually harmful to the earth. Queerness can offer us a different and new paradigm for relationships between humans and our relationship with the natural world as earthlings. The idea of “natural” and "unnatural" comes from the human perspective of nature, and not from nature itself. This has caused tremendous harm to humans and to the earth by othering individuals and groups that lead to violence and destruction.
But in nature, almost everything is queer! Nothing really fits into this little tiny box of whiteness, cisgenderness, and heterosexualness. The world is far more interesting and impressive than that. Same-sex behaviors are common in the animal kingdom and so are intersex animals. In fact, bisexuality is a beneficial animal characteristic when it comes to species' success! The fungal kingdom shatters the notion of a binary with many species numbering sexes in the thousands and tens of thousands. And most plants in the world have both male and female sexual organs. There are many plants that, like many animals, switch between male and female.
Read up on and stay informed on queer ecology at the Institute for Queer Ecology
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