A Glossary of Terms for Queer Ecologies
by the Queer Ecologies Research Collective
This glossary introduces new terms into an emerging research paradigm of queer ecologies. It is collaboratively generated by the Queer Ecologies Research Collective (QuERC), a network invested in collaborative, research-based, and interdisciplinary practices spanning art history, biology, community organizing, filmmaking, painting, performance, poetry, sculpture, and writing.
Intra- and inter-relations between terms are suggested by the hyperlinks within each glossary entry, inviting “rhizomatic” readings of the text.
for Queer Ecologies
Submerge
You enter the ocean from a beach. The water is cool and brings the edges of your body into sharp relief. You become aware of every inch of submerged skin surface as you wade further, and the water holds more of your body until at some point you cast off into a breast stroke. You swim out. It’s early summer in the Atlantic, small waves pass every five or six seconds, and a light wind textures the surface. Think about how your body behaves in the water like that, if you can. What kind of effort do you need to sustain in order to float? You swim one hundred feet offshore, how many room lengths is that? Your head is just above the surface of the water, and as waves pass, the beach comes in and out of view. What does this distance feel like to you? and how does your brain measure it? In breaths? In effort? In strokes?
In water, space and distance become reoriented. Lungs and arms become differently important, gravity is turned off, and our legs seem to change their function as well. Our relationship to the body changes in the water: its seemingly-prescribed, biologically- and genetically-fixed land functionality dissolves. The threat of predation and possibility for communion are directly related. To enter a body of water is an act of vulnerability that puts us out of our element. In that vulnerable state: isolation, but also: connection. A tangible substrate unites the body to both the shore it came from from and to the next continent, as well as to every living and non-living thing in-between. [see COSMIC FOLD]
Ryuichi Sakamoto recovers a piano from the Pacific Ocean after the Fukushima Disaster and composes with its altered, detuned body on the album async. Submerged, re-emerged changed, new sounds become possible.
Under water, one’s body is placed in direct co-existence with a soup of molecules, microorganisms, and history—it all runs off into the sea. To submerge is to open one’s self—body, mind, soul—to the whole of it.
“The body without organs is not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the organism and its organization.”[i]
[i]
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 30.
Joanie Cappetta with QuERC, 2023
for Queer Ecologies
Rage
- The Lycurgus Painter, calyx-krater, ca. 350–340 BCE, The British Museum
There is a minor goddess in Greek mythology called Lyssa. Goddess of rage, fury, and rabies, she occupies a liminal space between civilization and the wild. Lyssa, seldom mentioned in mythological literature, seems fairly even-tempered for a goddess of fury, only reluctantly introducing rage into the house of Hercules.
Rage is embodied negation. It is affective, difficult to qualify in language, and therefore seldom valued (“I have no words. My shaking hands cannot express my fury.” —Derek Jarman, The Garden, 1990). But rage has a depth, breadth of hue—it can be aesthetic. Rage can be utopic, or apocalyptic, like wildfire exploding after years of suppression. Rage can be born from grief. It can lend unparalleled clarity and utter unintelligibility. If we let it, it can light our way through deep tunnels of hopelessness and despair toward jouissance.
Rage is an important affect as it relates to queerness and ecology, both of which confront violence and the threat of collapse. Rage can lead to beautiful ruptures like Stonewall, to the burning of the third police precinct in Minneapolis during the George Floyd protests, to acting up, bashing back, and to eco-sabotage. Rage can be contagious, suddenly blooming everywhere. In plant ecology, disturbance-adapted species are called ruderal species. These plants are weedy—after an environmental disturbance they are often the first to move in. Though their tiny seeds may go unnoticed, they initiate new landscapes.
Rage can be scary. It can go too far, becoming dangerous; rage is not inherently good. Although it is a part of us, it should not be fetishized. Fighting back against injustice is not safe, but it can be beautiful, and queer rage can be extra!
Rage forces us to consider alternatives, to change the current narrative.[i] What if Lyssa, daughter of Nyx, goddess of night (or in some stories, daughter of Gaia) became infected by her own rage? What if Lyssa went feral? [see ANASYRMA] What would a ruderal myth look like? Let’s write it together. I’ll start:
Mad with the grief of generations, at the continuous unspeakable loss around her, as she beats her breast and tears her hair, Lyssa’s queer rage is contagious. We feel it now too. May the weeds of her contagion spread.
[i]
Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine call us to write new myths and tell new stories of uncivilization in their 2009 self-published “The Dark Mountain Manifesto,” accessed October 30, 2023, https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
briar coleman with QuERC, 2023
for Queer Ecologies
Oikos
Oikos (οἶκος) is the Greek root for eco, meaning house. Ecology is thus the study of the house. Houses are not neutral spaces, as any queer person could tell you. How we conceptualize the house is arguably related to how we conceptualize Nature. It has been pointed out that nature has, by exclusion, come to involve a binary separation from the human. If nature is like a house, it contains the hidden premise that humans can enter and leave it, and thus are fundamentally separate from it. The house and the human are enclosures. This ideology is apparent in the way houses are designed and what takes place in them; the desire for shelter is complicated by power, fear, exclusion, and violence.
The modern house is designed for the hierarchical nuclear family—to keep the unNatural at bay. This is hostile architecture for queer people; from childhood to adulthood, its structure is a conversion of assimilation. It helps to produce the nuclear family. The house is designed and maintained for sterility and separation from the other. Here the other is an exclosure, both social and ecological, itself a construction-by-exclusion of the enclosing walls of the house. The house also stands as a metaphor for the body, from the controlling center of the master bedroom as the head to the bathroom’s anus. The conceptual walls that enclose the human are myths that do not serve the world. People of color are systemically excluded from housing as well as from humanity. This is not a coincidence—this is the house that whiteness built. (Ernst Haekel, who coined the term ecology, was a racist and eugenicist.) But everywhere the house is failing in its duties: it can’t keep the other out. It has never been sterile. It is forever contaminated. Queerness perennially blooms from within. More-than-human and para-human beings enter and leave freely despite massive efforts at extermination. The materiality of the houses that we live in, which are considered to be safe havens from the wild, are themselves alive and vibrant matter. Houses, like our bodies, are multispecies and agential-material, queer kinship assemblages. The oikos is compost. [see COMPOST]
briar coleman with QuERC, 2023
for Queer Ecologies
Mutualism
Arnold Lobel, Frog and Toad, ca. 1975-1979. Watercolor and pencil on paper © Arnold Lobel
Frog and Toad are friends. Frog rakes the leaves at Toad’s place, while Toad is over at Frog’s house doing the same. It’s not about every frog and every toad being friends. It’s about this one and that one. Mutualisms make strange relations, coming together to create something more than themselves.
Mutualism is the mutation of the individual into the collective. Microbiomes blend: we are shaped by whom we hold close. We’re spinning in a circle with our hands held tight—feel the counterbalanced pull between you, the earth, and every beloved body as you fall.
When I map my mutualisms, I first consider what is nearest. [see MAP] A bloody ocean blooms within me; my microbiome is me, my health—it coconstructs my being. I cannot tend to other relationships until I shape this first one, internal.
What does mutualism look like as an economic system? As a city? Mutualism is leaving the place cleaner than you found it. [see OIKOS] It’s the sphere of eye contact and empathy, of reciprocity, collaboration. It’s a cleaning wrasse, and the moray eel opening its mouth tenderly, so tenderly. It’s the forest fungal network, it’s the rhizome and the tree. It’s you and me.
Mutualism emerges. This phenomenon of coming together and sharing in something that ripples out, boundlessly, is a generative process. It is a driver of emergence: complex systems arise from spontaneity and chaos. Perhaps the earth itself is an organism like this, a mutualistic web of interactions. The world is born of collaborations.
Is mutualism necessary? Mutualism is the joy of multiplicity, the syncing of two clocks. It’s harmony, a universal chord. Mutualism is the symbiosis of lovers, of pieces fitting into place, of double-bonded atoms, transference, generosity. Mutualism is moving through the world in a million duets with everything you share breath with, which is to say, with everything. Mutualism is home again, even after all this time.
Nicolas Baird and Lee Pivnik with QuERC, 2023
for Queer Ecologies
Mutability
Nicolas Baird, Lichen Painting, color photograph, 2014–present © Nicolas Baird. Lichens grow from the entwining of two distant branches on the tree of life; they can live in this mutualism for centuries
I’m trying to be more tidal. To embrace change. It’s a thought I have as I curl up, marooned at the bottom of this tide pool. The water is calm, and as I move it through the siphon on my mantle I realize my breath has synced with the waves. [see SUBMERGE]
Shattering my breathwork, a shadow consumes the tide pool and a hand plunges in! I spot a blob of sargassum, and frantically become it, painting its color and texture onto my skin. The hand reaches for me and I jet away, throwing myself over the edge of the tide pool and running up the shoreline. I try to balance as my suction cups hit the asphalt and contort into clumsy feet. I feel my eight limbs merge into four, and split into digits at the ends. My head has deflated, and my mouth slides up my face. I realize I am fully nude and I alter my pigmentation again to give the illusion of a shirt and pants. Nothing crazy: a gray vintage tee and jeans.
I wonder when humans and my species split. In a strange, timeless memory, I see two aquatic flatworms crawling along the Proterozoic shore. As the tide went out, one dove deep in the cool waters; the other remained near the rocky shallows, eventually coming out terrestrial.
I look backwards at the woman who scorned me and I become her. I take her form but not her anger, and the next person I pass greets me with a smile. I am getting good at giving human. I will continue to mimic, to learn slowly and closely, before I reveal my true form, which is formlessness made flesh. A cephalopodic code switch, I will walk among people until I can teach them the beauty of mutation, and trust that they’ll listen.
Lee Pivnik with QuERC, 2023
for Queer Ecologies
The Monster
- Ixodes scapularis
Godzilla first rose out of the ocean onto the silver screen in 1954 in direct response to environmental destruction caused by American H-bomb testing in the South Pacific. In the film, Godzilla destroys the rapidly-urbanizing city of Tokyo as retribution for the destruction of its habitat, and as a warning that technological dominance in the nuclear age would only end in pain and suffering. [i]
A monster is not defined by its terrifying countenance or tendency toward violence—these are just tools of monstering. The Greek and Proto-Italic etymological origins of “monster” in fact define it as a teacher (monstro, τέρας, to advise, teach, show) and a soothsayer (moneō, to admonish, foretell, warn). [ii] When we meet a monster, we ought to ask, what are you teaching? What do you warn of?
In most stories we are faced with a binary of the hero and the nemesis—on the one hand a savior, on the other a destroyer.[iii] For the queer ecologist, who has likely been accused of destroying the sanctity of the status quo, the false binary of hero and villain is familiar, and the “monster” becomes a matter of perspective.
In the Northeastern U.S., recent swarms of Spotted Lanternflies are seen as an unnatural invasion, but from another point of view, we see the monster in giant residents of New York City wildly stomping errant lanternflies (at the behest of the city government no less, despite laws that prohibit harming wildlife). The silhouette of the lanternfly stomper recalls Godzilla crushing buildings and humans beneath its feet.[iv] [see RAGE]
Outside the city, the same fear and hatred is directed toward the black-legged tick, unknowing carrier of Lyme Disease. Monsters are made from a society’s fears, often unconscious or unexamined. Behind the loathing of invasive and pathogenic insects lurk neglected problems of human ecology.
Queer ecology attempts to see beyond what is “natural,” perhaps to destroy the term nature and its implicit binaries altogether, for queerness has often been villainized in the same terms of abberation used to define monsters:
“ a. an animal or plant of abnormal form or structure. b. one who deviates from normal or acceptable behavior or character.” (Merriam-Webster)
Jack Halberstam characterized the monster as one who “always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities, and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities.”[v] To embrace the monster, queer ecologists must utilize its powers of teaching and foretelling, whether to emulate the flamboyant destruction of Godzilla or the invisible disruption of the black-legged tick.
[i]
Ishirō Honda, “Godzilla, The Uncut Japanese Original (Gojira),” YouTube, accessed October 30, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn-Wg1NU32I (0:24:43-0:28:09)
[ii]
“monster, n., adv., & adj., Etymology,” Oxford English Dictionary, accessed October 30, 2023, doi: 10.1093/OED/7407360444
[iii]
The term nemesis has evolved to mean enemy or villain in common practice, but the original word refers to the Greek goddess Nemesis, who operated more as a stand-in for a contemporary legal system, bringing justice and retribution to those who defied the gods, as found in “nemesis,” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed October 30, 2023, https://www.etymonline.com/word/nemesis
[iv]
NYC has put out a bulletin asking citizens to help stop the spread of the Spotted Lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) by stomping them on sight, despite existing laws that prohibit the harming of wildlife, as found in “Spotted Lanternfly,” NYC 311, accessed October 30, 2023, https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03449
[v]
Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 27.
CG Traitor with QuERC, 2023
for Queer Ecologies
Map
This art work cites the following: [1] John Pickles, “The cartographic gaze, global visions and modalities of visual culture,” in A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World (London: Routledge, 2004), 75–91; [2] Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: L.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2010), 18–20; [3] Edouard Glissant, Soleil de la conscience (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 39; [4] Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton University Press, 1987), 61; [5] ibid., 32–61; [6] Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 56; [7] Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2–3; [8] Glissant, 39; and [9] Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 12. © Darian Razdar
Darian Razdar with QuERC, 2023
for Queer Ecologies
Holes
Behold a gap
an orifice, a wound—
portal to the unknown
A sign that beyond its opening
there is another world,
potential for so much more.
How many holes are in the human body? There’s the mouth, the ears, the nostrils, anus, vagina, urethra, umbilicus. Any piercings you may have. Once you include the pores of the skin, there are millions of holes.
We stuff our holes. We avoid them. We fantasize about them. We push life out of them. We hide things in them. We fear them. We release fluids through them. And sometimes they leak, ache, quiver, pulsing rhythmically as if to send a message to us…no, to the great beyond.
Some believe that the universe itself was birthed from a giant hole. According to cosmologist Nikodem Popławski, the infamous Big Bang may have been the ejection of matter from a black hole in another universe. The story is full of theoretical holes, existing in the unprovable realm of things, since no one knows what lies beyond the event horizon. The ultimate hole contains the ultimate mystery.
Perhaps a goddex of some kind, overflowing with tremendous desire on their side of the Universal divide, created a most glorious hole and began to fill it with everything we know, love, and hate, thus instilling the primordial need for filling, filling, filling holes.
Holes are the universal manifestation of all that we, humans and other-than-humans, desire, fear, and need to survive. [see MONSTER] Rodents, rabbits, raccoons, and snakes all stuff their bodies into holes for safety and warmth. A hole is the puncture we make when placing a seed into fertile soil, implanting the desire for abundance. Every hole is an opportunity and for that all holes are risky. Not all seeds grow, not all holes make good homes, some holes go viral, and some have enemies on the other side. To holes we bring our hands, mouths, and genitals with hope that we will be met with pleasure, with a taste of what we lack. Will we encounter emptiness, pain, pleasure—or even glory?
Cy X with QuERC, 2025
for Queer Ecologies
Eros
Alex A. Jones, EROS Map (detail), 2023. watercolor, ink, and salt on paper © Alex A. Jones
The ancients did not take for granted the cosmic agency of love. In Plato’s Symposium, the classical Greek philosophers debated the nature of eros (ἔρως) as a universal force. Socrates credited eros with his skill in teaching and discourse, artes eroticas, by which he aroused desire for the pursuit of knowledge. An ambiguity between carnal and intellectual longing pervades the erotic dialogue, suggesting both spring from the same source. Socrates and Aristophenes also emphasize the relationality of eros, locating it neither in the lover nor the beloved, but within the action of their love.[i]
As an animating force of the universe, eros is the fire that drives bodies into creative encounter, found wherever life manifests. Phallic hydrothermal vents on the deep ocean floor spew heat and alkaline fluids, which are rumored to be the spawn of life itself. The floating caress of a honeybee touches the genitals of a flowering plant that have evolved specifically to attract it. A special, slippery mucous coats the skin of a clownfish, making it immune to the sting of anemone tentacles so the two organisms can live mutualistically.[ii] [see MUTUALISM]
Sexual selection is an evolutionary concept conceived by Charles Darwin to explain how some traits evolve not because they directly enhance an individual’s survival (natural selection), but because they make the individual more attractive to potential mates. These traits can be physical, such as the tail-feathers of male peacocks, or behavioral or cognitive. Contemporaries of Darwin rejected the aesthetic agency implied by this theory, skeptical that nonhuman animals could be motivated by beauty, but in recent decades the importance of sexual selection has been scientifically demonstrated in many species, particularly among birds, fish, and insects. Sexual selection likely played a role in the runaway cognitive development of Homo sapiens, recalling Socrates’ belief that eros fuels the intellect.
Eros is the universal longing for wholeness. A pollinator does not seek a flower because it is lovely, but because it is hungry for the nectar inside. Which is not to say that eros is deterministic—the story of Eve in the Garden of Paradise explains that humanity is driven funamentally by desire, not need. And like the myth of Paradise, the story of eros has a tragic heart—a pit at the center of the fruit—for we always desire what we lack. [see HOLES] At the middle of our galaxy is a black hole, and everything erotic—which is to say, every living in motion—spins out from this centrifugal center.
[i]
For a full exploration of eros in the Symposium, see Marina Berzins McCoy, “Eros, Woundedness, and Creativity in Plato’s Symposium” in Wounded Heroes: Vulnerability as a Virtue in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 114–139.
[ii]
The mutualism of clownfish and anemone is dependent on symbiotic bacteria which generate an epithelial mucous signature matching that of the anemone, so that its nematocysts (stinging cells) are not triggered by the fish. Because the mucous signature varies on an individual basis among anemones, the mimicry of the clownfish and its microbial symbionts is even more sophisticated than initially thought. Audet-Gilbert Émie et al., “Microbiomes of clownfish and their symbiotic host anemone converge before their first physical contact,” Microbiome 9, no. 1 (May 2021): 109, accessed October 30, 2023, doi: 10.1186/s40168-021-01058-1
Alex A. Jones with QuERC, 2025