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Queer ecologies and interspecies relations

Class at Faculty of Humanities |
YMGS636

Syllabus

a detailed syllabus will be distributed at the beginning of the semester. weekly topics include extractivism and exterminism; queer ecologies, anthropcentrism; anthropocene, petrocultures, companion species; care for the more than human world; mutltispecies resistance; indigenous analytics and epistemologies.

GOMEZ-BARRIS, Macarena (2017) The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University.

HALBERSTAM, Jack (2020) Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press.

HARAWAY, Donna (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press.

KIRKSEY, Eben (Ed.) (2014) The Multispecies Salon. Durham: Duke University Press.

MORTIMER SANDILANDS, Catriona and Bruce ERICKSON (eds) Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Annotation

The frequency of dramatic weather events, floods, droughts, and the mobilisations around environmental and climate justice bring matters of rapid environmental degradation, species extinction and global warming into critical visibility, and underscore the urgency for collective action. This course introduces students to feminist, queer and indigenous knowledges and activisms around the nexus of ecological and sexual politics.

The course examines feminist critiques of the nature-culture divide, human exceptionalism, eco-heteronormativity, petrocultures and their alternatives. Case studies into companion species, petro-sexual relations and queer and speculative feminisms investigate the implications for rethinking bodies, care, reproduction and queer feminist politics with and beyond rights-based frameworks.