Queer Ecology and the Politics of Non-Normative Nature: Readings in Contemporary LGBTQ+ Anglophone Fiction

Madhusudhana H P; Kiran S N

doi:10.22161/ijels.v2.n3.1

Abstract

Queer ecology the field that examines the intersection of queer theory and environmental criticism has established itself as a productive theoretical formation in Euro-American scholarship, with Nicole Seymour, Catriona Sandilands, and Bruce Erickson’s foundational collections defining its conceptual terrain. Yet the application of queer ecology to contemporary Anglophone LGBTQ+ fiction from postcolonial and Global South contexts remains an almost entirely unexplored critical territory. This paper addresses that gap by examining how contemporary Anglophone LGBTQ+ fiction from India, South Africa, and the Caribbean represents the relationship between sexual dissidence and ecological space: how queerness is mapped onto non-normative landscapes, how LGBTQ+ characters inhabit, flee, seek refuge in, and are constituted by environments that resist developmental monoculture. The analysis draws on Nicole Seymour’s concept of strange natures, Stacy Alaimo’s trans-corporeality, and postcolonial queer theory as developed by Gloria Wekker and Rahul Rao, arguing that postcolonial Anglophone LGBTQ+ fiction develops a distinctly southern queer ecology one in which the non-normative landscape functions as both a figure for sexual dissidence and a site of resistance to colonial and postcolonial developmental heteronormativity. The findings call for a significant expansion of queer ecology’s geographic imaginary and for the development of a postcolonial queer ecocriticism as a distinct scholarly formation.

References

Seymour, Nicole. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination in Contemporary Literature. U of Illinois P, 2013.

Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Indiana UP, 2010.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Harvard UP, 2007.

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana UP, 2010.

Rao, Rahul. Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. Oxford UP, 2020.

Wekker, Gloria. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Duke UP, 2016.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford UP, 2011.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.

Published

06 Jul 2026

Issue

Vol-2, No-3, Jul - Sep 2026

Metric

11 │ 1 │ 1-5

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International