Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire

2. Enemy of the Species

chapter 2 enemy of the Species ladelle mcwhorter For at least a decade, a common strategy for promoting acceptance of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in many corporate and educational institutions has been to insist that diversity in any population is superior to homogeneity. Homogeneity, it is said, tends toward stagnation. If the “population” is a work team, for example, advocates of diversity suggest that homogeneity of perspective is likely to equal redundancy of ideas and approaches—in other words, impoverished creativity leading to reduced productivity. If the population is a student body, advocates suggest that homogeneity of background and social position is likely to result in reinforcement of received opinions rather than educational challenge and advancement. Diversity, then, is a crucial factor in healthy development; it is a stimulus to improvement and a defense against the stupidity of unquestioned routine. Some advocates for lgbtq inclusion in corporate and educational institutions have claimed the same benefits for sexual diversity and diversity of gender expression. Steven Keyes, vice president for compensation, benefits, and human resources policy at Nationwide Insurance, explains, “Having a corporate culture that embraces diversity improves the productivity of our associates, helps the company recruit the best talent and makes Nationwide more competitive in the insurance and financial services industry” (Keyes 2007). In my home university, the University of Richmond, lgbtq and allied groups have spent years petitioning for inclusion in the institution ’s ongoing “diversity initiative” in the hope of receiving recognition, material support for programming, and protection from discrimination and harassment. Institutions such as mine consider diversity valuable, 74 Against Nature? so the most obvious way to persuade institutional elites to accept and protect queer people is to present ourselves as representatives of a form of diversity, sexual diversity. The value of diversity of whatever sort is not self-evident, however. Value depends upon empirical conditions and institutional goals. Nevertheless , opponents of this or that group’s inclusion rarely attack the value of diversity per se; instead, they insist that the group or institution under scrutiny has enough diversity already or that other principles—efficiency or speed or standard measures of merit—outweigh diversity’s importance in a given situation. But why? Why not bring the value of diversity itself into question? Why does diversity as a concept have such political currency and force? The reason that diversity’s value so often goes unchallenged, I believe, is that behind this sociological notion of diversity lies a biological principle that lends the sociological notion much of its persuasive power even when not explicitly invoked: genetic diversity is a species’ shield against extinction during environmental upheaval and a resource for its evolutionary advancement.1 If all individuals in the population are alike genetically, everyone is vulnerable to disease or predation in exactly the same ways. A single catastrophe could wipe out the entire line. Environmentalists warn of this danger constantly. If, for example, all the corn plants in all the fields for millions of square miles are clones of one parent plant, any genetic susceptibility that parent plant had is replicated in all its daughters, so one virus could kill them all. Genetic diversity allows for the possibility that not all the plants would be vulnerable to the same degree, so some would likely survive to perpetuate their species . Simultaneously, as this example also shows, genetic diversity enables evolutionary development. After introduction of a virus fatal to many corn plants, the remaining plants would constitute a gene pool slightly different from the one that existed before. The species, thus, would have adapted to a changed environment, namely, one including the new virus. Sometimes such adaptations are direct results of catastrophe, as in this example, but they can also result from mutations that give some organisms an advantage over others of their own species; individuals bearing the mutated genes produce more offspring, which eventually edge out their non-mutant cousins in the gene pool. Thus the species evolves. In short, genetic variation promotes species survival through adaptation across generations. From the perspective of “the species,” then, genetic variation (at least to some degree) is a good thing. When this principle crosses out of biology and into public discourse, it lends value to diversity Enemy of the Species 75 of morphology and diversity of outlook as well as diversity of genotype. From the perspective of “the human community,” one might say, racial, ethnic, religious, and other forms of diversity...