Queer AIDS K

Queer AIDS K
The 1AC is an attempt to silence the queer the rationale for HIV/AIDS
Securitization began with the fear of contagion from the queer other
Queerness must be a starting point to understand biopolitical violence.
Cobb12 [Neil Cobb Contagion Politics: Queer Rights Claims, Biopower and the Public Health
Rationale for the Repeal of Sodomy Laws Lecturer in Law, School of Law, Durham University, England and
co-convenor, Research Centre on Gender & Law at Durham (GLAD) <n.a.cobb@durham.ac.uk>. T
hanks go to Professor Aoife Nolan and Professor Carl Stychin, to the two anonymous referees, and
to the Editors-in-Chief of the Jindal Global Law Review, for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft.]

In October 2011, the city of Perth, Australia, played host to the fortieth Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. 1 Two years
earlier, in Trinidad and Tobago, the Heads of Government had agreed in an Affirmation of Commonwealth Values

and Principles to establish an Eminent Persons Group made up of experts drawn from the member states
with a mandate to undertake an examination of options for reform in order to bring the Commonwealths
many institutions into a stronger and more effective framework of co-operation and partnership. 2 The
Eminent Persons Group submitted its final report in Perth, 3 the Foreword to which summarised the main challenge faced by the
organisation: a growing perception that the Commonwealth has become indifferent because it fails to stand up for the values that it
has declared as fundamental to its existence. 4 The report proposed primarily in response the need for a new Charter of the
Commonwealth and for the appointment of a Commonwealth Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law.

However, several of its recommendations also offered advice on the joint approach the Commonwealth
might take to tackle the high prevalence of HIV/ AIDS across its member states. In a section of the report entitled
Advocacy on HIV/ AIDS: A Commonwealth Health and Economic Development Priority, 5 the authors drew attention, among other
problems associated with the response to HIV/ AIDS, to criminal laws in many Commonwealth countries that
penalise adult consensual private sexual conduct including between people of the same sex. 6 The report
continued: These laws are a particular historical feature of British colonial rule. They have remained unchanged in many
developing countries of the Commonwealth despite evidence that other Commonwealth countries have been successful in reducing
cases of HIV infection by including repeal of such laws in their measures to combat the disease. Repeal of such laws facilitates
the outreach to individuals and groups at heightened risk of infection. 7 In the sections closing paragraphs, the
authors proceeded to recommend that Heads of Government should take steps to encourage the repeal of discriminatory laws that
impede the effective response of Commonwealth countries to the HIV/ AIDS epidemic. 8 The report received a frosty reception when
it was submitted formally to the Heads of Government in Perth, especially its proposal to appoint a Human Rights Commissioner who
would have been empowered to investigate human rights abuses by individual states. Consequently, some nations, including India,
took steps to suppress the reports findings by preventing its publication. 9 The report was eventually released but many of the
recommendations were nevertheless rejected outright or put on hold. 10 While the specific recommendation to repeal national sodomy
laws had been strongly supported by the Commonwealth Secretary- General, Kamalesh Sharma, 11 and state representatives including
the UKs Foreign Secretary and Member of Parliament William Hague 12 in earlier speeches to the Commonwealth Peoples Forum,
the recommendation was referred by the Heads of Government to a Task Force of Ministers for more detailed advice which will be
presented to Commonwealth foreign ministers for further discussion at their next summit in September 2012. 13 The Eminent Persons
Group reports criticism of sodomy laws across the Commonwealth reflects the positioning of these laws increasingly as sites of
contestation in local and global forums. 14 Not only do many state penal codes still retain and enforce sodomy laws

(most often laws introduced to postcolonial states by earlier imperial powers) but conservative backlash in
several countries has led to the more recent imposition of new or strengthened criminal sanctions against
homosexuality. Uganda is the most well-known (though certainly not the only) recent example. In 2009, the
Ugandan Parliament debated an Anti-Homosexuality Bill which would have strengthened offences against
homosexual sex, including the death penalty for aggravated homosexuality. 15 The Bill was dropped after
international condemnation but has been recently laid down again for debate.That the Commonwealth has been forced by the report to
confront the problem of sodomy laws across its member states is both understandable and welcome. No less than 46 out of the 76
countries that presently impose outright bans on homosexuality (including Uganda) are Commonwealth member states and the vast
majority of these offences were introduced to national penal codes under British colonial rule. 17 The Commonwealth s muted
response to the punitive treatment of queer subjects by member states has led previously to accusations that it remains a bastion of
homophobia. 18 The specific recommendation on sodomy laws in the Eminent Persons Group report suggests that, to an extent at
least, criticisms of this kind are beginning to be taken seriously. Moreover, while the Heads of Government may have failed to reach
agreement on the proposal in Perth, this has not stopped some member states from taking unilateral action in defence of its aims.
Shortly after the 2011 Heads of Government Meeting, for instance, UK Prime Minister David Cameron threatened (controversially) to
withdraw aid unilaterally from recalcitrant Commonwealth countries with poor gay rights records. 19 What remains most interesting
about the Eminent Persons Group recommendation on sodomy laws, however, is the primary justification it proposes for
decriminalisation across member states. Historically, struggles to repeal these laws have drawn on the liberal political and civil rights
of privacy, equality and dignity for support. 20 There exists now a canon of decisions by political and judicial bodies in which sodomy
laws have been challenged successfully on these constitutional or human rights grounds. 21 Conversely, the Eminent Persons

Group report is significant because it develops a mode of reasoning found increasingly in both
international and national legal and political norms that ties the justificatory basis for the repeal of
sodomy laws to tackling HIV/ AIDS and, in particular, the aim of reducing the onward transmission of
HIV. Moreover, India is no stranger to this form of argument; perhaps the most striking and significant example of the public
health rationale for decriminalisation is the litigation that led in July 2009 to the judgement of the Delhi High Court in Naz
Foundation, in which Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (another British colonial export) was read down to decriminalise
consensual sexual activity between adults of the same sex in private after the High Court accepted that the offence infringed several
fundamental rights guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. 22 I return to the approach in Naz Foundation in more detail below More
generally, this paper considers the wider implications of the public health rationale as a basis for advocacy, with particular focus on the
repeal of national sodomy laws. While acknowledging the obvious strategic potential of the rationale in effecting material change, I
admit to some ambivalence about its growing influence and I question whether recourse to the rationale can provide a suitably
inclusive, sustainable and progressive basis for contemporary queer rights claims. In the first part, the paper traces the

public health rationale from its origins in the early human rights and health movement to its present
position as official policy in the advocacy strategies of the UN Joint Programme on HIV and AIDS

(UNAIDS) and its co-sponsors, and now as the basis for queer rights claims within the Commonwealth.
Subsequently, it proposes that the public health rationale illustrates what Foucault described as biopower directed towards the
advancement of the health and welfare of populations and the governmentalisation of the state that this advancement demands. It will
be shown how biopower operates through global public health norms. These norms, legitimised by expert knowledge, now encourage
nation-states to dismantle repressive sovereign systems of criminal justice in order to facilitate the more subtle, productive forms of
disciplinary/ governmental interventions by public health experts which under these conditions of biopower govern over and through
bodies and populations judged to be at heightened risk of HIV infection. In the second part, the paper raises three concerns with the
public health rationale. First, it argues that the rationale depends for its political (bio)power on the exploitation of

the states fear of contagion by the queer subject and the exclusionary logic of securitisation , as opposed to
citizenship, that this provokes. As such, even if the rationale persuades states to repeal their sodomy laws, it
does so by (re)constituting queer subjects implicitly as anti-citizens or the enemy within, positioned in
opposition to the heteronormative family and nation. In addition, by marking queer subjects as risks to be
managed, the rationale may simply further reinforce the states urge to criminalise, given that sodomy laws
continue to be entrenched and indeed strengthened by states in part on public health grounds. Finally, by
inducing the states fear of contagion, the rationale works to silence those queer subjects, most notably
lesbian women, who are unlikely to be understood as sufficiently threatening to require legal protection on
public health grounds. In turn, the paper concludes that while the rationale may have short-term strategic
potential, to avoid these pitfalls it must be framed as far as possible by representations of the queer subject
conceived not simply as a threat to be securitised, but rather as a source of value or, in the words of Geeta
Patel, as a life lived differently; as a sustainable life.
THEIR CLAIMS OF SOCIAL PROGRESS MASK AN ANTI-QUEER TRUTH - QUEER
THOUGHT IS NECESSARY TO STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST THE QUEER BODY

Copenhaver 14 (Robert Copenhaver identified as a Queer person of faith, graduate of Idaho State University, whose
interests include queer theory, politics, and theology. He will be starting a masters in theological studies at The Lutheran School of
Theology at Chicago next fall; Queer Rage; published 2/19/14; http://coperoge.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/queer-rage/) GFD

I hate straight people who cant listen to queer anger without saying hey, all straight people arent like that. Im straight too, you
know, as if their egos dont get enough stroking or protection in this arrogant, heterosexist world. Why must we take care of them, in
the midst of our just anger brought on by their fed up society?! Why add the reassurance of Of course, I dont mean you. You dont
act that way. Let them figure out for themselves whether they deserve to be included in our anger. But of course that would mean
listening to our anger, which they almost never do. They deflect it, by saying Im not like that or now look whos generalizing or
Youll catch more flies with honey or If you focus on the negative you just give out more power or youre not the only one in
the world whos suffering. They say Dont yell at me, Im on your side or I think youre overreacting or Boy, youre bitter. The Queer Nation Manifesto Last weeks post involved a quote from The Queer Nation referring to the way in which straight

A good queer is one that accepts the progress that

others have made for us. According to straight people, and some queers who have accepted
the straight position, we should be thankful for things like same-sex marriage and the repeal
of DADT. However, the acceptance of progress is a form of passivity that forgets the
importance of queers of the past who fought for our recognition while maintaining the
uniqueness of queer identities. We forget about the politics of groups like ACT UP and the
protests of Stonewall. These histories are ignored in favor of assimilationist strategies that we
are taught are good because of straightness. Rather, we need to use our anger at straightness
as the starting point for our politics. We need to stop accepting liberal progress narratives that
keep us passive and have forced us to conform to what a good citizen should look like.
people have taught us that good queers dont get angry.

Benjamin Shepard writes, Thus, play intermingled with a full range of emotionsfrom despair to pathos, from pleasure to terror.
Charles King, a veteran of ACT UP New Yorks Housing Committee, which evolved into Housing Works, of which he is now
president, explained that these combined feelings of joy and anger fueled the groups work: I actually think its a combination of the

The AIDS movement in the 1980s was fueled by this amazing combination of taking grief
and anger and turning it into this powerful energy for action . But in the course of that,
developing this comradely love. Yes, the anger was the fuel. Its what brought us together and
taking that anger and not just sitting with it. . . not just letting grief turn into despair. Bringing
it into some sort of action was very cathartic, but also what was cathartic in the process was
all the loving that was taking place. Anger can be transformative. Anger is a strategy that
allows us to develop creative strategies for resistance against heteronormative institutions and
practices. I am tired, and we should all be tired of both straight people along others in our own community telling us that we
should be happy about all of the progress that has been made. FUCK THAT PROGRESS. Our passivity and acceptance
of it makes us forget about the queer bashing that so many in our community face everyday.
Anti-queerness is still just as prevalent as ever, but under the guise of tolerance we have
covered up the physical and psychological violence that so many queers face everyday. There
are homeless queer youth everywhere. There are queer people being assaulted in our streets.
There are parents telling their children they are going to get AIDS and die, that they are
perverts and should die, and are sending them to therapy to make them straight.
Governments state and local are complacent and strategically prevent us from having
access to housing, jobs, and other material resources. Instead of being fucking happy about
same-sex marriage, we should be fucking mad. We should be angry that we pretend that its
getting better. IT IS NOT! Stop pretending. Be angry. Utilize our rage to confront the ways in
which anti-queerness continue to perpetuate violence against queer bodies everywhere.
two. . . .

THE AFF IS A VIOLENT EXPRESSION OF WHITE MALE HETERONORMATIVITY - LOCKS

IN A POLITICS OF WAR AND VIOLENCE
Winnubst 06, philosophy PhD, Penn State University
Shannon, Queering Freedom 2006. p 5-6 GoogleBooks
This is the domination and violence of our historical present, late modernity: to reduce our lives so
completely to the order of instrumental reason that we cannot conceive of any political or philosophical
problem without reducing it to that narrow conception of reason. This renders us captive to presuppositions which assume
that solutions to problems must follow the same temporal register as the posing of the problem itself i.e., that they must appear
immediately effective and useful if we are to recognize them as solutions at all. But what if these are only truncated,
shortsighted views? What if a vital resistance to politics of domination comes through freeing ourselves from these closed economies of late
modernity and their clearly demarcated, controlled, mastered, and useful ends? What if a vital resistance to politics of domination requires a

temporal register other than that of immediate and clear efficacy? As Bataille tells us sympathetically, It is not easy to realize ones own ends
if one must, in trying to do so, carry out a movement that surpasses them (1988 91, 1:21). His orientation toward general economies asks us
to think differently from the habituated patterns of our historical present. In his language , this historical present is characterized

by the fact that judgments concerning the general situation proceed from a particular point of view (1988
91, 1:39). This particularity can be outlined, described, pinned down, and its blind spots excavated: I
attempt to do so in this text. But to think generally from and about the historical present may lead us into
different questions and different orientations: it has led me to query systems of domination through the registers of
temporality and spatiality, while framing them through the identity categories (race, gender, sexuality, class, religion) that are
their most explicit historical tools. For example, how does the temporality of a persistent future orientation ground systems of racism, sexism,
and heterosexism? What assumptions about the ontology of space allow for the biological conception of race that
groundsracism, or of sex that grounds sexism

and heterosexism? Bataille warns us that, if we do not learn to think

in this counter-cultural register of general economy, we will always be subordinated to the violent and even
catastrophic expressions of the excess, abundant energy of the planet, such as war and imperialist
domination. We do have a choice in this matter. But that choice is not one which will derive from
calculating our interest, analyzing the specific problem, or charting the solution: it will not derive from the
domains of instrumental reason and its persistent mandate of utility. It may, rather, involve recuperating senses of
freedom lost to us in late modernity, where nation-states promise freedom as the facile liberation from subservience and mastery as the
domination of nature and culture. To think generally may lead toward sensing freedom as a dangerous breaking

loose...a will to assume those risks without which there is no freedom (1988 91, 1:38). It is toward recuperating these more
general senses of freedom, which Bataille signifies as sovereign and I signify as queer in this historical period
of late modernity and phallicized whiteness, that this text moves.
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO QUEER THE 1AC - NATURE AND HUMAN ARE MADE ONE BY
AN EXISTENTIAL QUEERNESS. BREAK DOWN THE NORMS OF HETEROSEXUAL
MONOGAMY

Johnson 11
Alex Johnson, contributing author to the Orion magazine publication, a magazine devoted to ecology and reuniting
people with the harmony of the Earth. Its aim is to make humans more accountable for the world that they live in.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/5863/m, Issued in the May-June Issue of 2001
I ONCE THOUGHT I KNEW what nature writing was: the pretty, sublime stuff minus the parking lot. The mountain majesty and the
soaring eagle and the ancient forest without the human footprint, the humans themselves, the mess. Slowly, fortunately, that definition
has fallen flat. Where is the line between what is Nature and what is Human? Do I spend equal times in the parking lot and the forest?
Can I really say the parking lot is separate from the forest? What if I end up staying in the parking lot the whole time? What if it has

The problem is, the Nature/Human split is not a split. It is a

dualism. It is false. I propose messing it up. I propose queering Nature . As it would happen, Im

been a long drive and I really have to pee?

queer. What I mean is this: A) I am a man attracted to men. B) Popular culture has told me that men who are attracted to men are
unnatural, and so C) if my culture is right, then I am unnatural. But D) I dont feel unnatural at all. In fact, the love I share with
another man is one of the most comfortable, honest, real feelings I have ever felt. And so E) I cant help but believe that Nature, and
the corresponding definition of natural, betray reality. From my end of the rainbow, this thing we call Nature is in need of a good
queering. STEP #1: LET GO OF ECOLOGICAL MANDATES. Not so long ago, I read David Quammens essay The Miracle of the
Geese. In the essay, Quammen says this: wild geese, not angels, are the images of humanitys own highest self. By humanity, I can
only assume that he means all humans, collectively, over all of time. They show us the apogee of our own potential, Quammen says.
They live by the same principles that we, too often, only espouse. They embody liberty, grace, and devotion, combining those three
contradictory virtues with a seamless elegance that leaves us shamed and inspired. Quammen seems to be on to something. Who
could possibly be against liberty, grace, or devotion? But then he starts talking about sex. How geese are monogamous. How a male
goose will in fact do better evolutionarily if he is loyal to his mate. They need one another there, male and female, each its chosen
mate, at all times, he says. The evolutionary struggle, it turns out, is somewhat more complicated than a singles bar. Im a little
concerned about the evolutionary struggle thing, but Im still tracking. Life sure is complicated. And then he says this: I was glad to
find an ecological mandate for permanent partnership among animals so estimable as Branta canadensis. Boom. There it is. Geese are
wild. Geese are pure. They arent all mixed up with the problems of civilization and humanity. What we really need is to behave more
like geese. If you are a male, then you must find a female. You must partner with that female, provide for that female, fertilize that
female, and love that female for the rest of your life. If you are a female, well, youll know what to do. When I first read about
Quammens geese, Id been out as bisexual for a year. It was around the second Bush election, and I was writing very serious letters to
my conservative grandparents about my sexuality and politics. Now I know why his essay, so considerate, so passionate, so genteel,
hit me in the gut. I was not natural . STEP #2: STOP GENERALIZING. My instinct is to give Quammen the benefit of the
doubt; it was the late 80s after all. Regardless of his intentions though, Quammens notion that Canada geese offer humans an
ecological mandate not only reinforces a Nature-as-purity mythos (against which humans act), but at an even more basic level, his
assumptions are simply inaccurate: plenty of geese arent straight. In 1999, Bruce Bagemihl published Biological Exuberance, an
impressive compendium of thousands of observed nonheteronormative sexual behaviors and gender nonconformity among animals.
Besides giraffes and warthogs and hummingbirds, theres a section on geese. Researchers have observed that up to 12 percent of pairs
were homosexual in populations of Branta canadensis. And its not because of a lack of potential mates of the opposite gender. In one
case, says Bagemihl, a male harassed a female who was part of a long-lasting lesbian pair and separated her from her companion,

mating with her. However, the next year, she returned to her female partner and their pairbond resumed. Red squirrels are seasonally
bisexual, mounting same-sex partners and other-sex partners with equal fervor. Male boto dolphins penetrate each others genital slits

Observing
queer behavior in nonhumans is as easy as a trip to the nearest primate house, or a careful
observation of the street cats, or the deer nibbling on your shrubs, or the mites on your skin.
The world itself, it turns out, is so queer. Quammen assumed that geese are straight because it was easy to do. It

as well as blow holes. Primates exhibit all sorts of queer behavior between males and males and females and females.

was easy to assume I was straight, too; I did so for the first eighteen years of my life. But generalizing about the habits of both humans
and the more-than-human living world not only denies that certain behavior already exists, it limits the potential for that behavior to
become more common, and more commonly accepted. STEP #3: HONK. I dont mean to insist that there is an ecological mandate for
being gay. My interest in queering ecology lies in enabling humans to imagine an infinite number of possible Natures. The living
world exhibits monogamy. But it also exhibits orgies, gender transformation, and cloning. What, then, is natural? All of it. None of it.
Instead of using the more-than-human world as justification for or against certain behavior and characteristics, lets use the more-thanhuman world as a humbling indication of the capacity and diversity of all life on Earth. So many of us humans are queer. Across all

Beyond the
scope of sexuality, humans are capable of any number of imaginable and unimaginable
behaviors. That I do not eat bull testicles does not mean that that behavior is any less
human than my eating of baby back ribs. Why then, if I cohabitate with another man,
sharing the same bed, yes even having sex in that bed with that man, am I somehow less
human? A goose is a goose is a goose. STEP #4: ACKNOWLEDGE THE IRONY. In a review of Peter Matthiessens

social, political, and physical boundaries, 2 to 10 percent of people take part in nonheteronormative behavior.

book The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes, Richard White indicts the relentless and blinkered earnestness of nature writing.
White claims that because of its reluctance to deal with paradox, irony, and history, much nature writing reinforces the worst
tendencies of environmentalism. White points out that Matthiessens unflinchingly sincere narrative baldly contradicts the
circumstances: The birds are immortal, timeless, and they transport us back into the deep evolutionary past, writes White. But then
Matthiessen gives us the details. He is sitting in a loud and clattering helicopter during this particular trip to the Eocene. If you depict
cranes as pure and ancient, with no place in this modern world, then you must ignore all those species that have done quite well in the

Writing about nature means accepting that it will prove you wrong. And right.
And render you generally confused. Nature is mysterious, and our part in the pageant is
shrouded in mystery as well. This means contradiction and paradox and irony. It means
that there will always be an exception. Nature has always humiliated the self-congratulatory
scientist. Lets stop congratulating ourselves. Instead, lets give a round of applause to the
delicious complexity. Let us call this complexity the queer, and let us use it as a verb. Let us
queer our ecology . Cranes can be ancient, but they can also be modern. Might their posterity extend past ours? Weve

rice paddies.

inherited a culture that takes its dualisms seriously. Nature, on the one hand, is the ideal, the pure, the holy. On the other hand, it is
evil, dangerous, and dirty. The problem? Theres no reconciliation. We accept both notions as separate but equal truths and then

Take sexuality, for instance: We have come

to believe, over our Western cultural history, that heterosexual monogamy is the norm, the
natural. People who call gays unnatural presume that Nature is pure, perfect, and
predictable. Nature intended for a man and a woman to love each other, they say. Gays act
against Nature. And yet: we rip open the Earth. We dominate the landscape, compromising
the integrity of the living world. We act as though civilization were something better, higher,
more valuable than the natural world. Our culture sets Nature as the highest bar for
decorum, while simultaneously giving Nature our lowest standard of respect. Nature is at
our disposal, not only for our physical consumption, but also for our social construction . We

organize our world around them. Status quo hurrah! Irony be damned.

call geese beautiful and elegant and faithful until they are shitting all over the lawn and terrorizing young children. Then we poison

What Im getting at is this: those who traditionally hold more power in

societybe they men over women, whites over any other race, wealthy over poor, straight
over queerhave made their own qualities standard, natural, constructing a vision of the
world wherein such qualities are the norm. And in so doing, theyve made everyone elses
qualities perverse, against Nature , against God. Even Naturedefined impossibly as the nonhumanbecomes

their eggs. Or shoot them.

unnatural when it does not fit the desired norm: the gay geese must be affected by hormone pollution! A man who has sex with a man
must identify himself by his perversion, by his difference. If straight is the identity of I am, then gay becomes I am not. Women are not
men. Native people are not white. Nature is not human. Instead of talking about nonconformity, I want to talk about possibility and
unnameably complex reality. What queer can offer is the identity of I am also. I am also human. I am also natural. I am also alive and
dynamic and full of contradiction, paradox, irony. Queer knocks down the house of cards and throws them into the warm wind. STEP
#5: DONT FEAR THE QUEER. If these were still in vogue, I would tell you my thesis is queer ecology. But as Zapatista leader

Subcommandante Marcos told Pierluigi Sullo from the forest of southeast Mexico (and probably from a table in a house in a village in
that forest), I sincerely believe that you are not searching for a solution, but rather for a discussion. Hes right. So what discussion

Well, first, one that is happening at all. Ive met many kind people (arent we
all sometimes?) who are so afraid of being politically incorrect that they dont speak at all
well, at least not about race or gender or sex (this on top of the three taboos of religion,
politics, and money). How do I know how I should refer to Indians? Or blacks? Or gays?
Or bums, for that matter? Its just all so complicated now. Queer, then, remains a gesture of
hands under the table. A wink . In the recent past, conversationalists have at least had the weather to fall back on. But the

am I looking for?

record heat of late with its strange winds of change have whipped away that golden ticket of banality too. So people stop talking, at
least about difference, or flux, or complication, altogether. And the floor is left to those who are the loudest and quickest, and who
never had any intention of complicating their conversation with anyone or anything that doesnt conform to their tidy but limited

The problem with unnameably complex reality is that

its really hard to pin down and even harder to write about. Yet anyone who gives a damn
about the ecological health of life on Earth knows that theres no time for dillydallying . In the

worldview. STEP #6: ENJOY THE PERFORMANCE.

late nineteenth century, a Danish scientist named Eugen Warming first used the term ecology to describe the study of interrelationships
between living things. Henry Chandler Cowles, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, brought ecology across the Atlantic
with the 1899 publication of his treatise on the succession of the plant life of the Indiana Dunes. Instead of static forests and static
lakes and static prairies, Warming and Cowles recognized that these features of the physical world were in flux. As Cowles wrote in

Queer ecology, then, is the study of dynamics

across all phenomena, all behavior, all possibility. It is the relation between past, present,
and future. Yes, we need to act. But we also must recognize that any action is also a
performance, and possibly in drag. Any writer who chooses the more-than-human world as
subject must acknowledge both the complexity and paradox contained within the subject of
nature, as well as the contradictions wrapped up within the writers very self . Such a writer will

his introduction, Ecology, therefore, is a study in dynamics.

write about the parking lot and the invasive knapweed and the unseasonably warm weather and how he or she is undeniably mixed up
in the complications. The poet James Broughton calls it the mystery of the total self. Henry Chandler Cowles called it ecology. It is

A queer
ecology is a liberatory ecology. It is the acknowledgment of the numberless relations
between all things alive, once alive, and alive once again. No man can categorize those
relations without lying. Categories offer us a way of organizing our world. They are tools.
They are power. Acknowledge the power. Acknowledge the lie . STEP #7: IM DONE WITH STEPS.

the relation within the human and the natural and the god and the geese and the past, present, future, body-self-other.