Queer Ecologies Reading Circle
Queer Placemaking prepared by Billy Morgan
- The Queer Ecologies Reading Circle will meet to read out loud and discuss texts from the perspective of the the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of queer ecology. This field combines such areas as ecofeminism, queer theory, human and non-human geographies, posthumanism, postcolonial theory, urban studies and feminist materialism - to emphasize the interconnectedness between the discourses on nature, ecology, the environment and the embodied politics of sexuality, gender, class and race. The new field of queer ecologies is rooted in pink and green politics and responds to the current need for intersectional and ecological critical thought and action.
- The first 5 sessions will be lead by architect and performer Billy Morgan under the concept of ‘Queer Placemaking’.
- We will begin with two introductory sessions to the concept of queer placemaking and its relation to queer ecologies. We will then traverse three terrains - En-gendered Neighborhoods and the Heterosexist City, Out of the Closets, Into the Woods & Fantasy Islands – in order to discuss how sexuality, desire and queer placemaking constitute and are constituted by their environments. These terrains will each provide a spatial typology onto which the readings will be mapped. We will read from a range of sources - from anthropological case studies to poetry, diaries and excerpts from fictive works.
- Curator of the Kem residency: Michał Grzegorzek
- Programme
- 15/01/2019 and 22/01/2018
- In a Queer Place & Amongst a Queer Nature
- During the first two sessions we will familiarise ourselves with the queerscape, and think through notions of ‘place’ and ‘nature’ as unstable and entangled in the politics of desire, embodiment and sexuality. What does it mean to queer space? What does it mean to queer ecology? What potential does this open up?
- 29/01/2018
- En-gendered Neighbourhoods and the Heterosexist City
- Beginning with a comparison of gendered neighbourhoods in the neoliberal city, we will then explore how both the ‘gayborhood’, and the concept of public space, are constructed on exclusivities antagonistic to the formation of queer space. We will thereby read the queerphobic cityscape as a backdrop to queer futurity.
- 05/02/2019
- Out of the Closets, Into the Woods
- We will foreground the oft-neglected rural queer experience through case studies that exemplify the relations between community-building, geographical seclusion and proximity to wildness. We will also explore the role of ecofeminism in reclaiming land from patriarchal notions of ownership.
- 12/02/2019
- Fantasy Islands
- Taking the island as a topography of marooned sexuality, this meeting will draw out the affinities between a proximity to water and wetness as a quality of queer environments, and the utopian island as a shared fantasy of queer territoriality.
