Strange Nature, Weird Ecology, & Reanimating ‘queer’
(Cross-posted on the Queer Nature blog as well. Yes, I’m reading Mark Fisher again lul, this time his short collection of literary theory essays, The Weird and the Eerie.)
The queer in “Queer Nature” (the nature-based education & social sculpture project I steward with my spouse Pinar) only partially refers to the identity cipher that some LGBTQIA+ people use to refer to themselves. It also refers to the original meaning of the word before it was ever associated with sexuality or gender (as a slur or, alternatively, as a reclaimed, reinscribed identity). “Queer” was originally a synonym for strange, weird, or even eerie.
Because of the recent popularity of the show Stranger Things, a neon-streaked Lovecraftian tale, a lot of people generally have a decent sense of what “strange” has the potential to mean. It means something that is external or outside of what is familiar—something from elsewhere (it’s origin is ultimately from the Latin “extraneous” via French “estrange.”) Similarly, weird typically refers (in contemporary usage) to something that seems like it shouldn’t belong (and yet it curiously exists). Both strange and weird denote a kind of rupture, sometimes experienced as “profane,” in the typical or expected. Eerie, probably my favorite of them all, is about displaced agency, about haunting, relics, and the tension between presence and absence. (Wildlife tracking, for me, is an inherently eerie practice).
This may all sound gloomy, dystopian. But I believe in these words, in these aesthetics is the promise of a kind of enchantment, for the sacred, too, can feel strange. Especially when “we” may have forgotten how to relate to such a thing. Becoming reacquainted with animistic ways of being after the rupture created by colonial and extractivist processes, can be eerie. The fracture that many civilizations have experienced with the land and with the intimacy and immediacy of place-based living, is deeply Strange—and since it’s all some of us have ever known we fail to grasp just how very strange our “normal” is. Noticing the silence in the forest when a bobcat prowls through the understory (a function of inter species bird communication) can be eerie, as can stumbling across a fresh, bleeding deer carcass inside a halo of wolf tracks.
Indeed, the strange, the weird, and therefore the queer are ideal words to think-and-feel-with in Donna Haraway’s alternative to the Anthropocene; the Chthulucene (a nod to the Greek word chthonic meaning earth-bound or subterranean, but also to H.P. Lovecraft’s legendary monster Cthulhu, a cosmic water elemental with a humanoid, yet also octopus-like appearance)
These are all in some ways modes of queerness, and I don’t mean the newer meaning here, I mean the older meaning (though I can’t help but mean both...) Queer, as a word, carries linguistic memories of mystery, displacement, the unexpected, the cryptic, and the puzzling. This is why I think there is a sly, beyond-human fate in the fact that some small-minded people decided to use this wyrd as a slur (and unfortunately, some still do). [interestingly the word weird is related to “wyrd,” an Old English word connected to concepts of preordination, or what we might call fate.] Ah, if only they knew the power buried in the word, if only they knew that, bullies seeking control at the eve of climate chaos—a truly fateful dark weirding mostly perpetrated by the most powerful—the joke’s on them.
In these times many of our encounters with the more-than-human world are queer in a way that, perhaps with a twist of fate, touches these old, original meanings. Because of our estrangement from the languages and sensations of the more-than-human, encounters with what is relatively normal in the non-human world—a pile of bones, glowing mushrooms, a raven calling—appear to some of us strange (as that is a function of estrangement). As Fisher notes, the whole mood of the post-apocalyptic genre is eerie (this is especially true, I would argue, of the Western post-apocalyptic imagination, where there is an emphasis on absence, and often an expectation of horror. The post-apocalyptic imagination in other cultures, like for example out of Miyazaki’s films like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, seems far more equipped to embrace the other-than-human agency that can flourish in spaces of alleged rupture or collapse. The Iñupiaq video game Never Alone, which occurs in a post-event setting where a blizzard has nearly destroyed a village, also shows how the speculative imagination regarding such contexts can come from a place where animistic modes of being are more accessible, therefore a mood of estrangement is not as present).
Thus the strange, the weird, and so on are traces of something important at this time. They are clues, signs, of other worlds and next worlds. They are symbols of an unlikely hope, that we can heal, or at least, someone or something can. It gives me a queer* kind of comfort, to remember that.
*queer is here intentionally not capitalized to refer to its literary potential beyond (which also encompasses and does not in any way dismiss) contemporary identity
