An American River: Discourses of Ecocatastrophe, Sustainability, and Belonging in the Potomac River Basin and Beyond

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2019

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Abstract

An American River: Discourses of Ecocatastrophe, Sustainability, and Belonging in the Potomac River and Beyond is a queer ecological intervention in American, Queer, Trans(Gender), and Popular Culture Studies. It critiques the primary reliance on the category of culture to analyze the ways media, science, public policy, and the state make knowledge assumptions about sex, gender, and reproduction to construct stories about environmental catastrophe, species, and kind. Transdisciplinary methods are used to uncover the ecologies, relations, adaptations, and resiliencies that might not otherwise be possibly investigated and known, and challenge conventional popular discourses of environmentalism and conservation in an effort to create the intellectual equivalent of biodiversity.

Three distinct but interrelated cases are considered. First, an examination of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Island interrogates how sex, gender and reproduction were intimately tied to discourses of wilderness, nature and nation, and the ways in which those concepts have been sanitized for consistency with modern sensibilities about an appropriate memorial for an “environmental” president. Next, a consideration of the popular discourse around the emergence of “transgender fish” in the Potomac River leads to an analysis of how trans-related language and concepts can be used to enrich human understanding of transformations and interactions across ecologies, species, and populations. I offer “interdependent ecological transsex” as a term broadly defined through a hormonal, metabolistic, and adaptive prism to imagine other bodies—not just transsexual human bodies, but fish, bodies of water, and any other kind of body that experiences change in relation to a larger ecology. Third, I examine the possibilities for queering agriculture, or envisaging alternatives to mainstream rhetorics of agriculture, food security, and farming.

An American River concludes arguing human knowledge about nature, environmentalism, race, reproduction, and transsexuality is laden in antroheterocentric assumptions about progress, degeneracy, and evolution that is problematic for ethically and equitably addressing social and environmental problems. A queer eco ethic is presented to offer ways humans might begin to imagine nature and the environment differently.

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