Queering environmental “violence”: Extraction and the anti-documentary image

• In Event: Theory Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4

Abstract

Grounded in artistic practice (analog photography), this paper proposes a queer+ field guide to
critically analyze marine conservation in terms of interspecies relationality, focusing on marine
minerals. Both capitalism at sea and marine conservation are socially shaped by Western, white,
patriarchal, and capitalist representations of non-human life (animal, vegetal, mineral). These
social representations manifest themselves in how modern science and technology generate
forms of knowledge and methods of inquiry recognized as legitimate (such as sampling in
geology), and in how marine species are simultaneously apprehended as resources, commodities,
and objects of inquiry. On the contrary, queer, anarchist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist
environmental theories invite to redefine human-mineral relationships against forms of hierarchy
and exploitation that are rarely questioned in Western science. By doing so, these critical theories
invite to expand how we understand environmental violence (i.e., what can be considered as a
form of violence, against what form of life, and according to which criteria), and how this affects
how we apprehend and facilitate ocean equity. Because the notion of environmental violence is
fundamental in how ocean equity is imagined, theorized, and put into practice, this chapter not
only proposes to re-imagine this notion, but also to expand the range of disciplinary methods
used by marine social scientists to produce and distribute critical knowledge in the field.

Author

• Julie Patarin-Jossec, DePaul University