Queer Posthuman Ecology: Redefining the Boundaries of Self and Community

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action as intrinsically queer dismantles human exceptionalism and fosters more fluid relationships between self and others. By emphasizing boundaries and identities as fluid and performative, embracing radical kinship, reworking environmental ethics, and fostering new modes of community, queer posthuman ecology offers a theoretical framework that problematizes normative notions of human subjectivity in relation to the ecological realm. Drawing from queer theory’s critique of heteronormativity and posthuman thought’s challenging of anthropocentrism, this article argues that environmental ethics can be deepened by making explicit the queerness inherent in our relationality with the non-human world. This contributes to conversations surrounding environmental ethics and human/non-human relationality. Queerness operates at the intersection of self and other, in conversation and co-constituted within the structures of cisgender-heteronormative patriarchy. Within a queer posthuman ecology, the human entity is not separated from animal, plant, or inorganic entities. In order to dissolve perceived boundaries that contribute to ecological degradation and extractivist perspectives, queerness must intervene to question such delineations on an intrinsic level. Just as queer identity and subjectivity is always in flux and in relationship to larger hegemonic structures, queer posthuman ecology disrupts and reorients existing conversations.