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]
nyla coleman with QuERC, 2023