Queer/ing Space: Symposium at Tampere University (22 November 2024)

Stacy Alaimo writes that “[t]he Anthropocene is no time to set things straight” (2016, 1). Queer/ing space therefore becomes a crucial process to make sense of our current place in time. Of late, there has been increasing interest in queer/ing spatial studies and ecocriticism. On the one hand, queer and feminist studies’ emphasis on performativity has been central for posthumanist and new materialist reconceptualisations of space. Moving away from a Euclidean understanding of space as a container for objects and people, for instance, Karen Barad’s agential realism (2007) highlights how interactions between people and/or things continuously remake the world in an ongoing spacetimemattering. Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology (2006) similarly argues that orientation matters and reveals how queerness reorders and disrupts the social relations that produce space.

On the other hand, there is growing scholarship in the field of queer ecologies (e.g. Mortimer-Sandilands and Erikson 2010) which challenges concepts like the ‘(un)natural’, the many binaries that structure Western societies, as well as the implicit reproductive futurity in environmental discourse. Connecting LGBTQIA+ people, thoughts, practices, texts, and spaces with environmental studies, queer ecologies ask whether there is a “queer way of thinking environmentally and ecologically,” and conversely an “environmental and ecological way of thinking queerly” (Seymour 2013, viii).

Queer/ing, then, is to be understood not solely in terms of queer theory but as an invitation to think beyond straight, fixed, or binary spaces; to explore the warped and shifting environments that explain the strangeness of our changing world.