ABSTRACT
This chapter delineates the wide spectrum of debate emerging within ‘queer ecology’ which raises concerns about the heteronormative stances within environmental movements and discourses. Though environment and ecology movements do invoke sustainability and justice frameworks, yet they seem to have reinforced the reproductive heteronormativity knowingly or unknowingly. Heteronormative assumptions are often entangled in debates about sustainability and environment crisis. Queer ecology not only recognizes the poorly explored diversity of biological and cultural relationships but contests the aesthetics which fail to appreciate the bodies and landscapes suggesting polymorphous directions and sexual pluralism in the natural world. The insertion of a language and knowledge which transcends reproductive heteronormativity would not only enrich the environmental discourses but feed into the policy concerns with a democratizing bearing for those bodies and sexualities which find ‘justice’ and ‘sustainability’ within ecological concerns as partial and even stifling. The chapter also engages with ecofeminism’s essentialist gendered imageries being challenged and critiqued by environmental feminism and demonstrates how queer ecology further radicalizes the diversity, plurality concerns while also being conscious about the anti-capitalist arguments inhered in the ‘sustainability’ discourse. The chapter maps these nuances within the queer ecology perspective(s) and what promises the latter offers to the environmental concerns both globally and locally.
