Urban political ecology III

I Introduction: What does feminizing and queering have to do with urban political ecology?

I am framing this final report within what Nagar calls ‘radical vulnerability’, which is for me best captured by a question she asks:

Can notions such as solidarity and responsibility, trust and hope, vulnerability and reflexivity serve a useful purpose in ethically navigating the forms of epistemic violence in which metropolitan academics are, and will always remain, complicit? (2014: 3)

There are, minimally, four nodes of thought that I want to bring into dialogue in this report, including feminist urban geography, feminist political ecology, queer ecology and queer urbanism. Each body of literature has made important contributions independently and at the same time created possibilities for feminist and queer urban political ecology to emerge. It is useful to begin with Rocheleau’s bridge-building logic when she suggests:

The center of gravity is moving [in political ecology] from linear or simple vertical hierarchies (chains of explanation) to complex assemblages, webs of relation and ‘rooted networks’…with hierarchies embedded and entangled in horizontal as well as vertical linkages. (2008: 724)

II Metabolizing feminist nature in the city

Situating and internalizing women’s lives and uneven gender relations within urban space took as long as the 1980s and 1990s to occur in earnest (see Massey, 1984; Monk and Katz, 1993; Kobayashi, 1994; Hanson and Pratt, 1988; Gilbert, 1997; McDowell, 1999; Katz, 2004). Taking gendered urban space seriously as a terrain for making connections between broader urban processes and the spaces that had been formerly thought of as women’s spaces, like the space of ‘the home’, laid a necessary foundation for understanding the metabolic creativity that can be extended toward analytically splicing socionatural processes together within UPE. At the same time, the abundance of innovative feminist urban geographic research that continues to be produced offers transformative ways for expanding these theoretical boundaries of feminist urban space (see Datta, 2016; Werner et al., 2017, and many others).

If gendering urban space was slow relative to other urban geographic traditions, the gendering of nature, specifically in geography, took even longer. While there were important precursors (see Merchant, 1980, 1992; Haraway, 1991), Rocheleau et al.’s (1996) landmark collection naming feminist political ecology as such is the most generative collection for bringing the importance of political ecology and gender into conversation. In the introduction, Rocheleau et al. (1996: 4) first helped to establish what had come by saying ‘Political ecologists have focused largely on the uneven distribution of access to and control over resources on the basis of class and ethnicity (Peet and Watts, 1993).’ Then, they helped foster a vision for important work that followed by suggesting:

Feminist political ecology treats gender as a critical variable in shaping resource access and control, interacting with class, caste, race, culture, and ethnicity to shape processes of ecological change, the struggle of men and women to sustain ecologically viable livelihoods, and the prospects of any community for ‘sustainable development’. (1996: 4)

Grove (2009: 207) helped explicitly to bring UPE into dialogue with feminist political ecology, critical geopolitics, as well as other post-humanist approaches to political ecology (Rocheleau et al., 1996, Dalby, 1990, 2002; Ó Tuathail, 1996; Escobar, 1999; Agrawal, 2005). He suggests doing so

holds out possibilities for addressing this lacuna and reconceptualizing urban environmental politics. The anti-essentialist approach to politics found in the former focuses on cultural meanings and practices of ‘nature’ that constitute identities which legitimize some ways of acting in the world, and delegitimize others (Escobar, 1998; Rocheleau et al., 2001). (Grove, 2009: 207)

III Metabolizing queer nature in the city

While the longer history of feminist scholarship has helped shape UPE in important ways, so too has queer theory made important contributions. Much of what has become associated with queer theorizing relates centrally to Butler’s contributions in Gender Trouble (1990) and other early work. Butler’s notion that identity is performed, as opposed to resulting from a fixed essence, permeates queer theoretical contributions and has generated important other openings for UPE. Jumping from this more general notion, according to Sandilands, queer ecology

refers to a loose, interdisciplinary constellation of practices that aim, in different ways, to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature, and also to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light of queer theory. (2016: 169)

Queer ecology in conversation with queer urbanism offers yet another theoretical move UPE is benefiting from. Oswin (2008: 91) suggests: ‘One frequent deployment of the term “queer” is as a synonym for non-heterosexuals. In geography, this usage is evident in the dominant equation of queer space with gay and lesbian space (particularly in urban contexts)’. Oswin goes on to argue:

Once we dismiss the presumption that queer theory offers only a focus on ‘queer’ lives and an abstract critique of the hetero-sexualization of space, we can utilize it to deconstruct the hetero/homo binary and examine sexuality’s deployments in concert with racialized, classed and gendered processes. Queering our analysis thus helps us to position sexuality within multifaceted constellations of power. (2008: 100)

The ways these ideas are coming together within urban political ecology, and further extending the theoretical and political terrain of the ‘second generation’ of UPE, is indeed exciting. Central to this effort, as it has been to all other phases of UPE, is Gandy’s (2012: 736) question: ‘What are the political implications of queering urban nature?’. Moving toward an answer, he suggests that:

by moving analysis beyond queer space as a politics of spatial appropriation towards an enriched engagement with the complexity of urban nature itself we may be opening up hitherto unnoticed lines of dialogue and intersection. In particular, we may begin to bring some of the political dimensions of urban ecology into closer alignment with the cultural and material complexities of urban space. (2012: 736–7)

Finally, Shillington and Murnaghan’s (2016) efforts to further develop queer urban political ecology beyond Gandy and Patrick focus on the ways children’s lives can expand our understanding of urban nature. They suggest:

To queer nature requires disrupting the human/non-human categories, the relations between the two and the relations each has with other categories, such as gender, sex and, in this article, children. Similarly, queering children entails detaching children from their position as non-adults, presumed heterosexual and innately connected to romantic nature. (2016: 2)

IV Toward a feminist and queer urban political ecology

UPE can continue to make substantial progress in helping theorize the uneven development of urban nature through taking seriously the notions of creativity within ideas of metabolization, as I discussed through Smith (2006) in the first report in this series (Heynen, 2015) and Nagar’s (2014) notion of ‘radical vulnerability’ that I started this report with. While Marxist urban theorists engaging the environmental consequences of uneven development helped generate the early foundations of urban political ecology, we continue to build more expansive and solidarity-centric models for thinking through the politics of urban nature and urban geography more broadly. The heterodox ideas that spring from feminist and queer UPE offer abundant potential for enacting the sorts of UPE analysis and political solidarity consistent with the arguments made by Rocheleau et al. (1996), Mollett and Faria (2013), and Doshi (2016), without abandoning early Marxist anti-capitalist and abolitionist antiracist commitments. Indeed, building more expansive forms of solidarity through heterodox forms of UPE is the best hope of understanding and combatting the ongoing uneven production of urban nature.