In the opening of her 1997 memoir North Enough, Jan Zita Grover describes moving to the north woods of Minnesota from San Francisco: "I did not move to Minnesota for the north woods," she writes. "I had only the vaguest idea of what the term meant when I first saw them in early spring, the birch, aspen, and tamarack skinned of their needles and leaves. I thought they looked diseased. 2 Given that Grover had been a front-line AIDS worker in the 1980s in a city violently decimated by the disease, it is hardly surprising that she saw sickness everywhere. "I moved there," she writes, "to try to leave behind -or at least, at a remoter distancethe plague that had consumed my life for the past six years." 3 Of course, Grover was not able to leave her plague behind; she was still "heavy with mourning, thick with sorrow." 4 Although she moved to the north woods with the hope of finding some sort of healing in the natural landscape, a "geographic cure" as she put it, she soon realized that it was not possible.The idea that one might find natural wholeness in this hard, boreal landscape was shattered at the sight of its large, multiple clear-cuts and the thin "idiot strips" of trees along the highways that foolishly attempt to conceal the scars to the landscape caused by the softwood pulp and paper industry. The post-contact history of the north woods reveals a region repeatedly marked by human greed and error: Farming was next to impossible on the thin, acid soil, and attempts to drain the ever-present swampland in the 1920s resulted only in crippling debt.Logging, the only commercial option left for the region, proceeded virtually without restraint: No paradise found, here. As Grover writes, "the Upper Midwest is a mosaic of such local disasters, once-intact, living systems plundered in ignorance, greed, and unbounded hopefulness." 5 Exactly in their ecological defilement, however, these wounded landscapes ended up teaching her. "Instead of ready-made solutions," Grover writes that the north woods: offered me an unanticipated challenge, a spiritual discipline: to appreciate them, I needed to learn how to see their scars, defacement, and artificiality, and then beyond those to their strengths -their historicity, the difficult beauties that underlay their deformity. 6 In this landscape, she came to understand that her challenge was not to leave AIDS behind, but to recognize and accept the impact it had had. In fact, the lasting resonances of AIDS allowed her to meet the challenge of coming to love the north woods not in spite, but because, of their wounds: "In learning how to love the north woods, not as they are fancied but as they are, I discovered the lessons that AIDS had taught me and became grateful for them." 7 Grover's metaphoric connection between "AIDS and other clear-cuts" is both painful and beautiful. She describes, for example, changing the dressing on a dying friend's leg macerated by Kaposi's Sarcoma: "It did not look like a leg. It looked like freshly-turned soil, dark and ruptured." 8 But Grover finds i...
In his compelling genealogical history of twentieth century English understandings of landscape, David Matless offers a number of shrewd observations about the relationships between nature and modernism. Particularly in the chapter concerning the interwar years, he documents a significant current of thought and politics in which, in the wake of World War I, calls to preserve rural English landscapes were articulated as much with a modernist project as an anti-modernist one. Against monolithic accounts focused on English anti-modern longings for a "rural idyll" in which traditional village-and-manor land uses occupy a purely nostalgic position in relation to industrial and political "progress," he emphasizes that many advocates of rural landscape preservation in the 1920s and 1930s saw no particular contradiction in the articulation of "a nostalgic evocation of past village order with an imagery of modern settlement networks." 2 Particularly in the face of widespread postwar suburban expansion, 3 a significant preservationist element called not for a "return" to a past countryside ideal of dispersed villages and estates, but rather a harnessing of the moral fabric of "traditional" rural English landscapes toward ideals of "good grouping and community." 4 Planners and politicians alike raised their voices against disorganized, laissez-faire countryside development in favour of what Matless calls a "moral modernity," a modernism "of orderly progress driven by planning." 5 This modernity was highly disciplined; not surprisingly, the ideal way of perceiving the moral character of the "true" English countryside was in regular and planned open-air exercise, which cultivated through hiking and observation a morally modern body in articulation with a preserved and organized rural landscape. The moral modernist landscape of carefully organized rural "tradition" was, of course, born of a longing for an idea of the countryside that was far more the product of suburban development than it was a genuine opposition to it. As Raymond Williams documents extensively, literary depictions of English landscape in the period generally evacuated the realities of, for example, agricultural work, urban migration, and persistent poverty from the harmonious manors and villages of the imagined past. 6 Rural England became residential, a place (as in colonialism) from which one came and a place (as in urbanization) to which one returned for a segregated, composed retreat; in Williams' words, "a traditional and surviving rural England was scribbled over and almost hidden from sight by what is really a suburban and half-educated scrawl." 7 Although the tendency to abstract the idea of the countryside from its constitutive labour is, for Williams, much older and larger, a key issue in the Georgian period was that its country writers so often came to the country. The nerves were already strained, the minds already formed…. If they could have gone and only looked, as at times happened, it would have been a different mode. But they had brought wit...
Key words: queer ecocriticism, environmental justice, ecophobia, performativity, normative heterosexuality This essay outlines the necessary role of queer ecocriticism as one of unsettling normative thinking about environmental issues and defamiliarizing some ecocritical practices. In particular, a queer ecocritic can propose a rethinking of what our reinhabitation of the world should be like. Other questions as the implications of the intersection between sex and nature or the rethinking of nature itself as queerly performative in the fact that species become themselves over and over again through a process of evolutionary “satisficing” according to the demands of their environment should also be addresssed. Likewise, queer ecocriticism can question the role of the senses and corporeal relations in experiencing place. Palabras clave: ecocritica queer, justicia medioambiental, ecofobia, performatividad, heterosexualidad normativa Este ensayo esboza el papel necesario de la ecocrítica queer para cuestionar el pensamiento normativo sobre temas medioambientales y como defamiliarización de algunas prácticas ecocríticas. En particular, un/a ecocrítico/a queer puede proponer un nuevo planteamiento de cómo debería ser nuestra re-habitación del mundo. Otras cuestiones son las implicaciones de los cruces entre sexo y naturaleza o el volver a pensar en la naturaleza como “performativa” desde una perspectiva queer en el sentido de que las especies se convierten en sí mismas una y otra vez a través de un proceso evolucionario de satisfacer en grado suficiente según las demandas de su entorno. De la misma manera, la ecocrítica queer puede cuestionar el papel de los sentidos y de las relaciones corporales al experimentar el lugar.
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