Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination By Nicole Seymour (review)

In 1983, the British Marxist critic Raymond Williams famously stated that “nature” is likely the most complicated and contested word in the entire English language.¹ In her debut 2013 book Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination, Nicole Seymour indubitably recognizes this terminological inconsistency and criticizes in particular queer scholarship’s failure to negotiate or even acknowledge the unstable definition of the term. In a rather polemical fashion, Seymour begins her book by citing such key queer theorists as Lee Edelman, José Esteban Muñoz, and Jack (Judith) Halberstam, only to critique what she deems to be their relatively careless assumptions about the natural in relation to sexuality and the impossibility of the project of environmentalism in the face of queer antisociality and antifuturity. This is not to say, however, that she does not similarly point out the shortcomings of ecocritical thought. Throughout the course of the book, she consistently cites scholars from various fields, then points out the limitations of their arguments in a similar manner, highlighting, along the way, her persistent concern with the lack of willing engagement between queer theory in ecological work and ecological praxis in queer studies. It is here, in this recognition of a scholarly gap that she finds recourse in post-1960s fictive literature and cinema from the Americas, which, as she demonstrates through particular case studies, unexpectedly address a queer ethics of ecological empathy in such a way that also takes up postwar issues of intersectionality (23).

As such, she opens her book by laying out the existing groundwork and discourse of the emergent interdisciplinary field of queer ecology, conscientiously identifying its strengths and flaws. Following her introduction, she delves into an analysis of her first cultural text: Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues (1993). While also bringing into the discussion the Caribbean-set novels No Telephone to Heaven (1987) by Michelle Cliff and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1998), she argues that all three works demonstrate what she calls “organic transgenderism,” the conception of gender transitioning as a relatively natural, biological phenomenon that privileges the subject’s self-knowledge outside of medical-technological institutions (36). This change in understanding of transgenderism from the culturally constructed to the partially natural occasions the recognition of the transformational potentiality of contact between the human and nonhuman, one that offers an empathy-based vision of a holistic ecological state rooted in interrelationality. Beyond the Feinberg novel, Seymour dedicates the subsequent two chapters to stylistic and thematic examinations of Todd Haynes’ film Safe (1995) and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2006), respectively. The nonclassical Hollywood mode of spectatorship that is required of the first film foregrounds not only the center onscreen spaces but also the marginal spaces, extending the popular AIDS metaphor reading of the film to the realm of envirohealth issues as it relates to race, class, gender, and sexuality. Likewise, Seymour brings the topic of observational practices into her exploration of Brokeback Mountain, focusing on the film’s advancement of a natural, noncommodified, and public queerness; the private/public divide in relation to queer desire and environmental ownership is emphasized through the pervasive motif of surveillance. Shelley Jackson’s ironic and highly intertextual postmodern novel Half Life (2006), on the other hand, which serves as Seymour’s final textual object and tells of a story about a society postnuclear attack that produces a minority subculture of conjoined twins, resonates with her earlier thematic engagements with empathy. As such Seymour posits that Jackson’s book dwells on an empathetic love for the grotesque queer Other, one that can be, for instance, manifested in the form of an ecological disaster site. Altogether, Seymour’s choice of such contemporary texts, works that have emerged from the poststructuralist moment, support her assertion that, in the treatment of the natural, the queer literary work is essentially an environmental one...