Queering environmental regulation?

JP Catungal

Environmental politics and queer politics share kinship in their shared interest over the regulation of the ‘natural’, and particularly on the question of what is at stake in the drive to protect and preserve ‘nature’. This is also, in part, their point of divergence. On the one hand, radical epistemologies of queer theorizing begin with questioning the very premise of the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’, noting particularly how these have underpinned multiple and overlapping discursive and institutional regimes of social exclusion (Warner, 2000). These frameworks foreground the point that such ideas about nature and normalcy enable the construction of certain socialities as abominable and at times even work to designate them, in public and legal discourses, as crimes against nature itself (Barad, 2011). Heteronormativity is the term usually used to refer to this system of socially constructing heterosexuality as normative, a process that occurs along not only sexual, but also class, gender and racial lines (Oswin, 2008). Furthermore, queer theorists, particularly queer of colour theorists, have argued that not all heterosexualities are normative in status, and that, indeed, certain heterosexualities (e.g., racialized heterosexualities) have been heavily regulated as part of projects of white supremacy and settler colonialism. The ‘naturalness’ of heteronormativity, then, is thus shaped heavily by regimes of raciality and imperialism. Of this, Cathy Cohen (1997) has written about how long histories of anti-Blackness in the North American context have so thoroughly denigrated Black familial and kinship formations so as to render them unassimilable within white heteronormative definitions of natural kinship. Indeed, Black familial heterosexual reproduction was tightly policed during the slavery era; enslaved Black women were routinely raped so as to ‘produce’ more enslavable Black people; and families were often forcibly broken apart as Black children were taken away to be sold off as slaves (Ellison, 1983). As Saidiya Hartman (2016) has argued, the ‘material relations of sexuality and reproduction defined Black women’s historical experiences as laborers and shaped the character of their refusal of and resistance to slavery’ (p. 166). These insights from Black feminist scholarship get us some distance into examining how regulations of sexuality, including legal controls on anti-miscegenation and racial segregation, are themselves premised upon purist ideas about racial and sexual difference as forms of ‘nature’ whose boundaries nevertheless require institutional enforcement. In this sense, the regulation of the ‘natural’ involves not only non-human natures, but also human bodies, relations and environments.

On the other hand, particular popular forms of environmental politics have historically mobilized investments in romanticized notions of the ‘natural’ to produce still cherished spaces such as parks and nature reserves, including in cities. Critical scholars have noted how such environmentalist practices were premised upon normative desires and visions that are classed, racialized and sexualized. For example, according to Renisa Mawani (2005), in the Vancouver context, recreation in spaces of urban nature (e.g., parks) was widely understood as productive of normative families. Her work on Vancouver’s Stanley Park has documented how the park was created in 1886 in part to service an emergent settler colonial city and to provide recreation to its emergent white settler families. Indeed, as she and others note (Kheraj, 2013), Stanley Park’s creation was premised on various forms of settler colonial violence: the name itself signals the canonization of Lord Stanley, a key figure of British colonialism as a former Governor-General of Canada, and the land was emptied through the razing of Chinese, Indigenous and mixed race homes and other land uses from this space. Mawani’s work thus signals how celebrated green spaces such as Stanley Park must be examined for the ways that white supremacist and settler colonial discourses and logics enable their very creation, producing non-White domesticities as non-normative in these white urban spaces of nature and thus obliterating them from such spaces.

The example of Stanley Park above suggests that environmental acts such as the creation of nature reserves and parks are tied to concerns over the regulation of sexualities, including adjudicating what kinds of sexual lives, relations and behaviours are understood to be beneficial or harmful to nature and human enjoyment of it. Other such examples of environmental logics for regulating sexualities exist. For instance, long-standing Malthussian concerns about overpopulation were articulated through the language of nature’s carrying capacity and on environmental assessments of stress on land and resources that overpopulation purportedly produces. Andil Gosine astutely notes that such concerns are racialized, classed and gendered in the way that they typically lay the blame on the overreproductive Third World woman as a threat to earth and nature, her excessive and unfettered fertility said to be the problem that requires regulation. In this spirit, Western interventions on Third World women’s sexual health and reproductivity might critically be read as attempts to usher Third World women into ‘proper sexuality’ in the form of the straight time of ‘proper’ motherhood and domesticity (Murphy, 2013).

Along with the overreproductive Third World woman, Gosine (2010) identifies the gay park cruiser as another figure that is often constructed as a threat to wholesome nature. This figure is constructed as dirty and unnatural in multiple ways. First, not only does his participation in worlds of public anonymous sex violate normalized constructions of ‘proper’ privatized romance, the objects that he leaves behind (e.g., condom wrappers) also become public health threats and environmental contaminations. The 2017 ‘morality raids’ in Marie Curtis Park in Toronto’s suburban Etobicoke neighbourhood are underwritten by these constructions of gay sexuality as both unnatural socialities and anti-nature forms of sexual practice (Gallant, 2017). This case is only one recent iteration of the otherwise longstanding policing of gay sexualities in ‘nature’. In my own previous work, I have also written about how romanticized notions of parks as wholesome green spaces were key to regulatory conversations about human uses of these spaces; in the case of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, homophobic and AIDSphobic reactions to a proposed AIDS memorial materialized in the form of defending the park against more general human encroachment in the form of built environments and the more specific attempt in this case to claim space in the name of marginalized people (Catungal and McCann, 2009).

This is not to say that environmental politics cannot be attuned to the intersectional racial, gender and sexual politics of nature and the environment. Indeed, these politics are key to contemporary activisms against resource extraction on Turtle Island and in the so-called Third World, including and especially those led by members of communities most intimately affected by these processes. One particular concern among these activists is the gender-based and sexual violence that often accompanies the entry of largely male-dominated labour forces to these communities as part of regimes of such incipient economic activities. For example, Secwepemc activists in so-called British Columbia actively centre, in their critiques of proposals for oil pipelines in their territories, the violence that arises from ‘man camps’ that accompany resource extractive industries. The Secwepemcul'ecw Assembly website notes, for example, that:

‘Camp culture’ has been reported to exacerbate isolation, mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, misogyny, and racism among the men living there … Amidst a culture of ‘hyper-masculinity, sexism, and apathy towards self-care’ direct and indirect impacts shift onto women, children, and two-spirit people … Impacts on women include higher levels of sexual assault and harassment, and family and domestic violence … research, the media, and communities have become increasingly vocal about the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women, children, and two spirits as a result of the colonial capitalist resource sector. (https://www.secwepemculecw.org/no-mans-camps)

As the examples above show, there is ample spaces for convergence between environmental studies and queer theorizing, not least due to their shared, if unacknowledged, common concern for more livable futures. As a queer geographer, I am especially interested in the possibilities of queer theorizing energizing how environmental studies conceptualizes its concern for the future, particularly by foregrounding the question of who gets to have a future at all. Debates about futurity within queer studies have usefully noted that projections of the future often rely upon normative socialities, with Lee Edelman noting that reproductive futurity, crystallized in the figure of the Child in whose name politics is often performed, is too invested in heteronormativity to be a viable plank of queer activism. Jose Esteban Muñoz counters by providing further nuance to how we might think about normative constructions of futurity, reminding us that, for queer children and children of colour, the promise of a future has never been a given due to the deadly violence of cisheteronormativity and white supremacy. Activists who organize around the twin and overlapping rubrics of reproductive justice and environmental justice are at the frontlines of a politics of the future that is attuned to the ways that reproduction and sexuality get folded into concerns over nature, resources and environment. For instance, activists who politicize the lead poisoning of Flint’s water supply have pointed to the detrimental effects on pregnant people and the disproportionate rates of foetal deaths associated with this unnatural disaster, thus illustrating the feminist political ecological insight that environmental contamination is lived in and through the body, differentiating along racial, classed, gendered and sexual lines who gets to live and have a future (Ingraham, 2017; see also Pulido, 2016). The work of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network also reiterates such an insight, noting more specifically, in the context of Indigenous communities, that the bodily effects of resource extraction and chemical and water contaminations are violences not unrelated to violence on their lands and territories. This is encapsulated quite succinctly in two key messages in their reproductive justice campaigns: ‘Our bodies are not terra nullius’ and ‘Violence on my body = violence on the land’.

One key lesson from the above examples is that a focus on sexual politics as a crucial component of regulations of nature and the natural must, by necessity, also attend to its entanglement with racial and colonial politics and processes. Farrales picks up on this thread below, highlighting particularly the wisdom of critical race and anti-colonial theories offered by Indigenous Two-Spirit and queer communities and by Black and people of colour communities.

May Farrales

I feel compelled to begin my commentary with a disclosure. I personally have a vexed relationship with queer theory. To borrow from a fellow Filipinx, Mel Matining, who lives and works on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Wautuuh peoples, ‘I feel like queerness is super-white’. ² When this propensity towards whiteness nags me, I try to retrieve my grounding in queer ideas and politics that centre the lived realities, stories, bodies, relationships and knowledges of queers of colour, Black and Indigenous Two-Spirit and queer communities. It is from these uncomfortable and embodied conversations generated from trying to find queer possibilities outside the domain of whiteness that I approach this question of how queer concepts and politics might be put to productive work in matters of the environment and nature. In what follows I outline lines of questions under the broad idea of queer desires, temporal and spatial horizons hope I provide for further deliberation and conversation under the broad intersection of queer theory and the environment/nature dualism, so central in environmental studies, including the regulation of the (white heteronormative) ‘environment’.

Media flew abuzz when popular boxing hero and Philippine Congressman Manny Pacquiao made public his opinions on same-sex marriage in his bid for a seat in the Philippine Senate 2017 election race. Pacquiao told the media that: ‘It’s common sense, do you see animals mating with the same sex? Animals are better because they can distinguish male from female. If men mate with men and women mate with women they are worse than animals’. ³ Pacquiao does two interesting things in this statement. First, he ranks animals and genders on a sexual hierarchy of ‘better’ and ‘worse’ in what would appear to be the ‘natural order’ of things. Two, he conflates animality with homosexuality insisting upon the 'common sense' or naturalness of heteronormative couples. The naturalness or normalization of the heterosexual couple and family has long been a concern in queer theory and politics.

The heterosexual couple reifies normative notions of family and secures a future dictated by the desire to reproduce the (settler) colonial and capitalist present. Concerns over the impacts of resource extractive projects often mobilize the well-being and futurity of the heteronormative family to draw attention to the social impacts of extraction. What if other than the heteronormative family, other than capitalist and colonial social formations and relationships are privileged in such scenarios? What futurities can flourish from queer non-normative relationships? Queer of colour and Black queer theorists insist on centring the materialities of queer brown and black bodies, lives and relations in theorizing the ways they exceed proper desires and naturalized and normalized categories of gender, sexuality and race. They have argued that this excess offers alternative possibilities for the futures. As Muñoz (2009) reminds us, ‘Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’ (p. 1).

What does the rejection of the here and now look like for questions of environment politics and justice? Staying close to the insistence of Black, queer of colour and Indigenous critics, I hold out that the queerness of environmental politics including those related to regulating the environment, can unfold from the knowledges, materialities and experiences of lives and relationships not normally privileged in movements for and theories of environmental justice. In this regard, one critical set of relationships that needs to be centred that rejects the here and now are those offered by feminist, queer and Two-Spirit Indigenous scholarship and politics. In their 2016 educational toolkit, also referenced above, Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies: Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence, the Native Youth Sexual Health Network and the Women’s Earth Alliance predicate their understandings of environmental violence in relation to resource extractive projects on their relationships to their lands, waterways, bodies, each other and other-than human beings. By centring their Nations and communities’ relationships and relations, they show how settler colonialism works at the intimate and embodied levels to continue its project of land theft and elimination in extractive landscapes. By centring their Nations' and communities’ other-than-colonial and non-capitalist relations, they show what other futures that reject the here and now are not only possible but are already being enacted. A similar possibility for other-than-capitalist and colonial futures is being theorized by Black and critical race theorists like Davis et al. (2019), Pulido and De Lara (2018) and Wright (2018) who insist that the networks crystallized and created by the lives, struggles, kinship and community formations among Black and people of colour communities theorize and organize against environmental violence and injustice in ways that embody alternative futures.

With the possibilities queer theory brings to destabilize normalized categories and notions of time and space, I return to my hesitations with queer theory where I began my comments. E Patrick Johnson’s (2000) question rings: ‘What is the utility of queer theory on the front lines, in the trenches, on the street, or any place where the racialized and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed – indeed, where the body is the site of trauma?’ (p. 6). In thinking about the productive possibilities of bringing queer theory and politics into conversation with work on environmental studies, ‘nature’ and regulation, this question, about the front lines of queer theory and the body as a site of trauma, should necessarily and critically be continually asked. In our next thread, Hoogeveen queers environmental regulation down to the body in terms of a recent turn in environmental assessment legislation within the colonial boundaries of Canada.

Dawn Hoogeveen

A third impetus for this piece is a tension between two seemingly disparate and irreconcilable conversations, theories and literatures. The main conundrum confronted in this section is how to address the gap between queer theory and environmental regulation, with particular attention to the practice of environmental assessment. My initial sense is that these are two completely different conversations, with quite jarringly separate epistemological foundations. There is the policy world, where second wave dialogues about gender, and the recent emergence of ‘Gender Based Analysis Plus’ (GBA+) make an appearance. When this happens in a meaningful way, it is positive and to many even a victory. I remain cautious as my purpose is not to criticize GBA+, as it is a significant framework in environmental policy circles (Arnold and Hanna, 2017). My intent is to queer state-led conversations around gender and Impact Assessment, attending particularly to the reproduction of whiteness and cisheteronormative frameworks within these critical interventions.

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is the regulatory framework used to adjudicate resource extraction projects in Canada. Within EIA practice, there is little room for the non-linear and non-normative. There is little space beyond the binary between man and woman in EIA literature, even in gender-based impact assessment, though reference to non-binary genders does exist (Dalseg et al., 2018). It is also a struggle to decentre whiteness and the masculine centre embedded in environmental assessment policy and practice. Following Farrales (above), I wonder what could happen if we take queer theory to the front lines of Impact Assessment. The purpose being to flag queer spaces, possibilities and openings within the confines of EIA, where the reification of a male/female binary persists.

In queer geography literature, Natalie Oswin suggests an approach that goes beyond queer space, urging ‘a queer approach to space’ (2008). Here, she urges an analysis beyond a heterosexual critique, towards a critical use of queer space, that necessarily works in tandem with critical race scholarship. This is a move away from white liberalism upon which state formation rests. Within EIA literature on gender, we are presented with a binary that aims to improve the inclusion of women and gender in impact assessment practice, and recent analysis and regulation, even, that urges gender be defined beyond the heteronormative binaries. Though this is somewhat far from a queer antiracist approach to space, it is an opening for imagining queer futurity (Munõz, 2009). Queer theorists, like Jasbir Puar (2007) or Chris Finley (2011), understand and explain the state to be heteronormative. Queer futurity reaches beyond the here and now, towards a queer aesthetic, to map the future (Munõz, 2009). Queer space may be more fully realized in thinking beyond the state, within Impact Assessment. Imagining this utopian future is necessary and there is an invitation to imagine this queer future in Canadian Impact Assessment processes, discussed further below.

Though it may be, in our minds, somewhat necessary to imagine queering Environmental Impact Assessment, tools to queer EIA are not readily available. Like literature on gay and lesbian neighbourhoods, queer geographies have analysed urban and social spaces well, yet this is incongruent with EIA policy studies, hence this intervention that also speaks to the centring of the white homosexual male or lesbian in queer geography. Catriona Mortimer-Sanilands and Bruce Erickson’s ‘Queer Ecologies’ begins with an analysis of queerness and environment through the film Brokeback Mountain (2010). This provides just on example of how queer and homonational ecologies have tended to focus more on cultural, literary space rather than the everyday of state-based resource regulations. This is a crucial gap to which this piece attends.

Work in relation to EIA is state-based assessment, regulated according to jurisdiction. In the colonial territorial boundaries of British Columbia, Canada, EIA policy analysts, practitioners and First Nation governments spent roughly two years from 2017 to 2018 observing and participating in both federal and provincial reform efforts to change EIA in British Columbia (hence the 2019 BC Environmental Impact Assessment Regulation) and Canada (Impact Assessment Act, as presented within Bill C-69, that received royal assent in July 2019). During this process there has also been significant attention to Indigenous-led impact assessment and what this means.

After closely following Canadian policy and legislative reform around EIA, I continue to ask the following questions: (i) How, do or can queer geographies and queer epistemologies challenge environmental assessment legislation and practice?; (ii) can heteronormative environmental regulation benefit from a reading nested in queer geographies, theory and futurity?; (iii) What tools and processes exist to push the implementation of gender-based analysis frameworks further within EA regulation? Within Canada’s Impact Assessment Act there is a list of factors to be considered, particularly in Section 22 that include a list of effects, including: cumulative effects; mitigation; impacts on Indigenous peoples; Indigenous Knowledge; sustainability and climate change, for example. Section 22 also includes factor(s) ‘the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors’.

There are a couple of things of note here. Firstly, it is not inconsequential that the letter S is the 19th letter in the alphabet, and thus the 19th factor listed in Section 22 of factors to be considered. Gender and sexuality are present, but somewhat buried amongst a long list of factors. There has been much discussion, including in Parliament and the media around the clause that includes sex and gender (see Hamilton, 2018 for example). While advocates for the inclusion of GBA+ refer to it as a novel and significant addition, others have argued that it is confusing and have fallen back on a criticism of the purpose of an unscientific clause that is too difficult to measure (both opinions are present in Hamilton, 2018). Gender, as an area of significance in EIA, remains largely invisible in conventional framing of ‘environments’, which in so-far as EIA is concerned, are largely derived from scientific evidence and are far from queer, though significant critiques of gender impact assessment exist (e.g., Dalseg et al., 2018).

Going through the Act in detail, many clauses demonstrate how decision-making power comes back to the federal Minister. Here we have a hetero-patriarchal system that seems difficult to destabilize in written word and ultimately practice. In conversations with Environmental Assessment experts, it has been suggested that we wouldn’t want it any other way. Change that happens in government happens slowly and for many, there is real difficulty with anything other than status quo arguments around leverage points, gender and sex being one area where there is currently leverage, as seen in Section 22 (s).

Lauren Arnold and Kevin Hanna write about best practices in EIA, including on gender and suggest that gender-based analysis is designed to give women a voice. They describe women as ‘disadvantaged stakeholders’ and argue to ensure gender equality (2017). Gibson et al. (2017) have also written a report on Industrial Camps, that places women at the centre. They outline how women and children shoulder the burden of impacts of industrial camps located in remote areas and indeed, industrial camps perpetuate cycles of historic trauma. This Report, co-authored by women from Lake Babine Nation and Nak’azdli First Nations, outlines impacts of industrial camps (or so-called ‘man camps’), an issue that has gained political traction provincially in British Columbia and federally within Canada. Yet provincial analysis has yet to take seriously the well documented gendered impacts of resource extraction on bodies (Million, 2018; Native Youth Sexual Health Network, & Women’s Earth Alliance, 2016), or bring queer theory to the front lines, as noted above though EIA regulation has created a small point of leverage to potentially ‘regulate’ the body as a site of trauma.

Queer geographies generally evade environmental regulatory analysis, unless it is the regulation of sexuality itself. For example, a queer analysis of the Canadian Bill C-16 the bill that added gender expression and gender orientation to the Canadian Human Rights Act and prevent transgender individuals from hate crimes becomes more transparent. It is illegal under the Act to deny someone a job or discriminate against them in the workplace based on the gender they identify with or outwardly express. Canadian law makers that have queer rights on their agenda, even if it ends up being only taken into account in Section 22 (s).

I come back to my main thread here and now and suggest an urgent need to make space for queer theory, geographies and futurity in environmental studies, policy and regulation. It would be prudent to not close the gap, for that might be very difficult – but narrow the distance between queer theory/queer geographies in a move to radicalize environmental assessment in literature and practice. I argue this is necessary, in order for Section 22 (s) to be meaningfully mobilized. What perhaps is less difficult might be to imagine a queer utopia or futurity in EIA, a la Munõz.

Following Oswin, I urge a queer approach to time, space and environment to examine how cultural indicators, economic and environmental value are constituted in environmental regulation and project assessment and how we might imagine a radical antiracist future for EIA. Section 22 opens the door for an analysis of queerness, race and culture, gender, sexuality and other identity factors, but it is begging for tools and processes that will allow for robust implementation, with the caveat of a general recognition of the limitations of the heteronormative state.

Queer theory or a ‘destabilizing theoretical and intellectual movements that centre on the significance and complexities of sexualities and genders’ (Brown, 2009: 613) does not fit neatly with EIA policy or practice, in that law makers and practitioners generally don’t want to destabilize state practice or they don’t know how – or are embedded in a practitioner way of knowing focused on what is reasonable to accomplish, given the government of the day, people in power, etc. For these reasons, and to address my initial questions above, I see the significance of queering EIA as paramount, in a desire to ask questions that push at the boundaries of the practical, and imagine a stronger queer foundation and future for gender and sexuality as a frames of analysis to inform environmental studies, policy and regulatory practice.

Human geography and the social sciences more broadly provide tools to think through the above questions, but in practice policy change and implementation are slow, erratic and embedded in shifting political contexts. The point here is to begin to enable an epistemological opening to re-imagine and queer environmental assessment. This is significant since the production of heterosexual space via the patriarchal state in EIA is being unsettled through Section 22 (s) ‘the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors’ creating a visible point of leverage. Does this point of leverage, however, remain nested within a politics of advancing resource extraction and settler futurity?

Vanessa Sloan Morgan

Futurity, Eve Tuck (Unangax), Marcia McKenzie and Kate McCoy (2014) explain, is: ‘more than the future, it is how human narratives and perceptions of the past, future and present inform current practices and framings in a way that (over)determines what registers as the (possible) future’ (p. 16). Expanding this concept to encompass settler futurity, Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) assert ‘when we locate the present of settler colonialism as only the production of the past, we overlook how settler colonialism is configured in relation to a different temporal horizon: the future’ (p. 80).

Dallas Hunt (Cree) (2018) reveals how settler r/emplacement is tethered to futurity and the disappearance of Indigenous bodies and lives. ‘This death, of Indigenous political and social life’ Hunt contends, ‘is the sine qua non of settler colonialism and Indigenous replacement narratives’ (p. 76). A settler hold on land through narratives, acts and regulations, as Indigenous scholars such as D. Hunt and Tuck demonstrate, is a central reproductive tool of (settler) coloniality and its idyllic futurity. Such hold manifests as colonial violence with the goal of securing and reproducing access to lands and ways of life. This goal of settler futurity necessitates engagement with the social, political and economic dimensions of the intersections of nature and space to interrogate settler futurity as environmental regulation. Doing so through a critical eye to settler futurity’s operation as straight time may present pathways to reveal (for the purposes of re-enlivening) the mechanization of regulations that define environmental decision-making and impact bodies and lands unevenly, perpetuating dispossession in nuanced and multiply-scalar ways.

Beenash Jafri (2017) reminds us that engaging colonialism and the ongoing violence that it breeds creates possibilities to untangle how gender, race and sexuality intersect and are wielded as difference for exploitative means (see also Hunt, 2013). At the same time as attending to colonial mechanisms – which I argue include environmental regulations employed as/for settler futurity – Jafri cautions how ‘generative insights into the workings of colonial power’ necessitates those working from settler colonial and/or critical race feminist/queer approaches ‘to be mindful of these distinctions and how they position us differently with respect to questions of decolonization’ (np). Walking into these questions as a ‘queer’ white-settler whose Irish and Scottish ancestors were and remain intricately entangled with the resource extractive industry that extended environmental regulations through colonial violence on unceded Indigenous (Coast Salish) territories, I enter these conversations in relation to and through critical Indigenous scholarship and queer Indigenous activists, who embody and are living decolonial and self-determined worlds through which ‘queerness’ is systemically and intimately transformative. Indeed, as many queer Indigenous and queer scholars of colour have reiterated, approaching these topics with caution is especially needed when glancing through the fraught lens of ‘queer theory’. Sarah Hunt (Kwagiulth) and Cindy Holmes (white settler of English, Irish and Scottish heritage) (2015) push our thinking on what constitutes ‘queer’,

While queer is often used as an identity category or umbrella term for non-normative sexual and gender identities, it emerged as a critique of essentialist constructs and identity politics. As a verb, queer is a deconstructive practice focused on challenging normative knowledges, identities, behaviors, and spaces thereby unsettling power relations and taken-for-granted assumptions. Queerness is then less about a way of ‘being,’ and more about ‘doing,’ and offers the potential for radical social critique (p. 156).

Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) writes that her Ancestors ‘lived in a society where what I know as ‘queer’, particularly in terms of social organization, was so normal that it didn’t have a name’ (p. 129). Recalling Two-Spirit Cree scholar Alex Wilson’s (1996) comments that ‘Traditionally, two spirit people were simply a part of the entire community’ (p. 305), Simpson reflects on how queerness just ‘was’. She elaborates by critiquing the antithesis of Nishnaabeg queer normativity:

Heteropatriarchy isn’t just about exclusion of certain Indigenous bodies, it is about the destruction of the intimate relationships that make up our nations, and the fundamental systems of ethics based on values of individual sovereignty and self-determination. The more destruction our intimate relationships carry, the more destruction our political systems carry, and the less we are able to defend and protect our lands, and the easier it is to dispossess (p. 123).

Queer Indigenous theorists and artists challenge the very premise of environmental regulation as it is commonly-colonially understood. Foregrounding intimate and embodied relations to and with land, and the futurities that are created through attempts to secure time, has the potential to reorient us to futurities that dismantle settler futurity. Doing so reveals how straight settler time attempts to maintain that there is no future but the here and now; that the only futurity, as late queer theorist and performer Jose Muñoz (2009) tells us, is that of a ‘majoritarian heterosexuality’ with ‘the spectacle of the state refurbishing its ranks through overt and subsidized acts of reproduction’ (p. 22). Ensuring its reproduction is the material and ideological premise of settler colonialism which reproduces itself through regulations of lands and of bodies. Such understanding of future makes way for settler colonial capitalism in places such as Canada by attempting to reproduce Indigenous dispossession and hetero-patriarchal relations materially and temporally. Thus, questions of if one can ‘queer’ environmental regulation in settler colonial contexts may unearth meaningful and grounded engagement with dispossession to ultimately re-orient towards Indigenous futurities. Yet, given queer theory’s fraught tendencies, distinctions between our relation to decolonial aims and the ‘doing’ of queerness to keep bodies – lived lives – present could locate us in the present, while keenly attuning to that beyond the horizon: the future.