Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire

5. Non-white Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature

chapter 5 Non-white Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature andil gosine In Euroamerican-dominant cultural contexts, two kinds of sex have been (are) said to be toxic to nature: reproductive sex between non-white people, and sex between men. From their preservationist-conservationist origins right through to the twenty-first-century canonization of Al Gore as global eco-crusader, leading North American environmental movements have invested in the production and circulation of discourses on “overpopulation” that pit blame for global ecological disaster on the reproducing proclivities of the world’s poor; due to the easy collaboration of capitalism with patriarchy and racism, that has meant the economically dispossessed non-white peoples of the world, particularly child-bearing (or potentially child-bearing) women from Asia, Africa, and South and Central America, as well as First Nations and non-white women in North America. All were collectively held responsible for “overpopulating” the earth and placing too much pressure on its natural resources. Paul Ehrlich succinctly laid out the rationale for this position in his influential 1968 text, The Population Bomb: “too many people” with “too little food” leads to “a dying planet.”1 In more direct terms, Ehrlich and the rest were making (still make) the claim that heterosexual (reproductive) sex between poor men and women burdened natural environments and threatened the survival of earth itself. More recently, various scholars have called attention to ways in which male, homosexual sex has also been articulated in public policy discourses and legal frameworks as harmful to healthy environments. Public cruising and sexual activity by men in parks and beaches, in both rural and urban landscapes across the world, have his- 150 Green, Pink, and Public torically been construed as illicit and dangerous acts that degrade the sites they cross (Castells and Murphy 1982; Chauncey 1995; D’Emilio and Freedman 1988; Ingram 1997; Schultz 1998).2 In this essay, I want to begin to think through the representation of both kinds of sex as ecological threats, and invite a more engaged consideration of them. Although overpopulation propaganda and its material offshoots (family planning programs, coercive sterilization practices, etc.) and the criminalization and policing of sexual acts between men have been and are generally treated as distinct phenomena, their genealogies are intimately interwoven through the projects of colonialism, development, and nation building. Read against the heterosexist, racialized formations of nature engendered through these projects (the creation of national parks, etc.), heterosexual, potentially reproductive sex between non-white people and homosexual sex, I argue, threaten colonial-imperialist and nationalist ambitions. Both are “queer acts” in that they challenge the stated norms of collaborating colonial narratives of race, sex, and gender, through which modern formations of nature have been constituted. Both fail to meet and are threatening to the white nation-building projects engendered through the process of colonization, and uncritically buttressed in historical and contemporary discourses of the environment and ecology. I consider three shared features of discourses on the ecological dangers of overpopulation and homosexuality that demonstrate how they similarly function and are similarly invested in the production and maintenance of white heteronormativity: their commitment to projects of white nation-building; their use of linked arguments about public safety and morality to make claims about the dangers that non-white heterosexual and homosexual sex pose to nature; and their denial of the erotic, through their insistent nonrecognition of sexual desire and of sexual acts as pleasurable . Toward this end, I examine a range of texts in which these discourses take shape: newspaper and other media reports, textbooks and other scholarly publications, government documents, including those scripted by police agencies, and materials produced by environmental organizations. My characterization of both kinds of sex acts as “queer” is a recognition of their imbrications, and is intended as a kind of provocation to the theorization and practice of queer ecology. Through this work, I am trying to think through how the production of racialized sexual anxieties links the colonial encounter to projects of industrialization-development and nation-building, as expressed, for example, in contemporary population control and HIV/AIDS prevention programs, as well as in the policing of Non-white Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism 151 homosexuality in parks and beaches. I argue that these projects strive for and work to sustain white heteropatriarchy, and any acts seen to upset this agenda are constituted as not just unnatural, but toxic to nature. This...