ABSTRACT

There is a growing recognition of the importance of transgender perspectives about the environment. Unlike more established approaches in the environmental humanities and queer studies, transecology is a nascent inquiry whose significance and scope are only just being articulated. Drawing upon the fields of gender studies and ecological studies, contributors to this volume engage major concepts widely used in both fields as they explore the role of identity, exclusion, connection, intimacy, and emplacement to understand our relationship to nature and environment.

The theorists and ideas examined across multiple chapters include Stacy Alaimo’s notion of "trans-corporeality" as a "contact zone" between humans and the environment, Timothy Morton’s concept of "mesh" to explore the interconnectedness of all beings, Susan Stryker’s notion of trans identity as "ontologically inescapable," Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson’s history of the development of queer rural spaces, Judith Butler’s analysis of gender as "performative"—with those who are not "properly gendered" being seen as "abjects"—and Julia Serano’s contrasting rejection of gender as performance.

Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature will be of great interest to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in transgender studies, gender studies, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction

Transecology—(re)claiming the natural, belonging, intimacy, and impurity

chapter 1|14 pages

“The bog is in me”

Transecology and The Danish Girl

chapter 2|23 pages

Coming out, camping out

Transparent’s eco-ethical approach to gender

chapter 4|18 pages

A journey through eco-apocalypse and gender transformations

New perspectives on Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve

chapter 6|17 pages

Gendercrossing at the frontier

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s transgender memoirs in the Alborz Mountains

chapter 7|20 pages

Transplacement

Nature and place in Carter Sickels’ “Saving” and “Bittersweet”

chapter 9|16 pages

Transgender

An expanded view of the ecological self

chapter 10|15 pages

“Good animals”

The past, present, and futures of trans ecology

chapter |4 pages

Afterword

You’d be home—meditations on transecologies