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

What does it mean to practice a queer ecocriticism? Such a query animates Nicole Seymour’s Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination, a work as invested in lingering with the paradigms of intersectionality that such a question foregrounds as it is in developing a definitive answer to it. While Strange Natures is not the first monograph in the field of queer ecology, it is—to this reader’s mind, at least—a groundbreaking book, one that carefully traces the barriers to such work (namely, queer theory’s vexed relationship to “nature” and the two fields’ ostensibly conflicting relationships to the status of futurity) in order to develop a queer ecocritical practice that engages, rather than resists, such difficulty. Indeed, Seymour’s work revels in the surprising and the paradoxical; from its chosen archive to a reading practice that insists upon interrogating how conceptions of “nature” have been wielded to validate harm to vulnerable populations, human and non-human, Strange Natures is not necessarily what readers expect from traditional ecocriticism. And that, of course, is part of the point.

Also part of the point is the book’s commitment to complexity, philosophical and ethical; Seymour is not content to demonstrate how the queer and the ecological meet, but also seeks to show how a queer ecological project intersects with other political projects, including anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-classism. This is perhaps the chief accomplishment of Strange Natures: that it refuses to think queerness and environmentalism apart from questions of social justice, insisting that a queer ecological methodology, practiced well, cannot help but attune us to questions of race, class, disability, and colonialism.

After a powerful introduction outlining the difficulties of queer ecological work, Strange Natures unfolds over four chapters. The first, which puts Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues in conversation with contemporaneous works of Caribbean literature (Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night), argues for an “organic transgenderism,” an understanding of gender transitionality that is as natural as it is cultural, that can dwell outside the medical establishment (or before medical intervention), and that contributes to an environmentalist and anti-capitalist imaginary. Conceptually, this chapter is echoed not by what immediately follows it but instead by Seymour’s final chapter, which treats Shelley Jackson’s novel Half Life—a sardonic depiction of conjoined twins living in the fallout of Nuclear testing—as the occasion to imagine an ethic of care that is performed irreverently, that embraces “ugly” landscapes and “grotesque” bodies (164), and that welcomes the dissolution of self-sovereignty. These two chapters are linked both by their insistence on the role of the non-normative body in queer ecological ethics (Seymour explicitly reminds us that “conjoinment is not unlike transgenderism” [149]), and by questions of genre (Cliff’s and Mootoo’s magical realism returns implicitly as a concern in Seymour’s engagement with Jackson’s speculative fiction). This latter point is in keeping with Seymour’s important attention throughout the book to questions of genre, tone, and form. Her middle two chapters—one on Todd Haynes’s Safe and the other on Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain—operate through a formal investigation of the filmmakers’ cinematic vision. Thus Seymour argues that Haynes’s famed long shots “make possible a consideration of the envirohealth risks to those bodies and the habits of seeing that otherwise obscure them” (73) and that surveillance in Brokeback Mountain indicates “that mainstream gay identity emerges not just alongside, but through the privatization of public and natural spaces” (109). Particularly within the context of existing work in queer ecocriticism, Strange Natures is exemplary for its demonstration of how texts’ conceptual claims emerge from the particularities of literary form.

Worth reading as much for its methodological inventiveness as for its local arguments, Strange Natures is powerful not only in what it claims but also in what it asks—of texts, of us, of queer theory, and of...