ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author brings Carolyn Merchant’s work into dialogue with new conversation partners from the realm of Queer Theory (QT). In particular, she argues that her work in environmental history has done much to bring to light the ways in which dominant narratives of progress and decline are performed by earth-bodies. One of Merchant’s critiques has been that the narrative of modern science has subordinated all life to humanity. Further, that this subordination of life to humans does not understand all humans as equal: women and people of color are often not as valuable as elite, White males. The mechanical model was then incarnated on the earth as sciences such as biology, geology, and zoology drew from Newtonian mechanics. These mechanical metaphors and models were even extended to the human body in the field of medicine suggesting, again, that the disembodied soul, or thinking-thing, is the only thing that is agential and has real value.
