God Makes No Perfect Animal: Bestiality, Surveillance, and Un/Queering the Environment

• In Event: Gender and Queer Analytics in Environmental History

Abstract

This paper historicizes animal husbandry in the 1800s United States, particularly state tactics of surveilling, policing, and attempting to eradicate Indigenous nations within the slow death of ongoing settler-colonialism. The secular biopolitical regimes built on rendering productive species within industrial capitalism necessitated intimate interspecies contact while still maintaining sodomy, bestiality, polygamy, and other performances outside sexual hegemony as “crimes against nature.” The state incarcerating Indigenous peoples by naming their sexual contact bestiality as opposed to husbandry elucidates how the state hoped to unqueer what they imagined as a queer ecosystem. They did so not by enforcing heterosexual performances, but by establishing competing interspecies intimacies within a vast ecological network, an assemblage self-consciously beyond the liberal, buffered self. This was, the agents assured, avowedly cis-heteropatriarchal sex. This paper, then, looks to animal husbandry as the labor of undoing Indigenous queerness, the articulation of an erotic and sexual intimacy, an assemblage of humans, animals, and plants, as a decidedly unqueer ecological makeup, and one wholly opposed to the intimacies and futurities offered by Indigenous nations. Further, building from current queer and Indigenous scholarship centering queer ecological relations, this essay closes by rethinking the “hetero” of heteronormative settler-colonialism to illuminate the whiteness in many attempts to discursively queer ecology without first decolonizing it. “Queer ecologies,” I argue, is not enough: the presence and performances of non-heteronormative sex acts, of intimacies beyond the nuclear family unit, is part of a longstanding colonial tactic. Our soil and biology, however queer, offer little hope, and “queer ecologies” without first literally and materially decolonizing only furthers the catastrophic monocultural production of settler genres of the human, the animal, and the land.

Author

• Timothy Burnside, Florida State University