Decolonial Queer and Trans Ecologies Part 2 (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

“Queer, as in madly in love with the burning world” —radical emprints

Decolonial queer and trans ecologies offer creative, multi-species engagements that contend with racial capitalism, climate change, and “atmospheres of violence” (Stanley 2021) from the peripheries and interstices of late-stage American empire. The questions and provocations of decolonial queer and trans ecologies have been animating artistic, humanistic, scientific, and interdisciplinary inquiry in a variety of forms for more than a decade. An emergent field in conversation with Black and Indigenous feminisms, environmental justice movements, disabled ecologies, intersectional science and technology studies, and ecological art, decolonial queer and trans ecologies theorizes and analyzes the ecological violences of colonial extraction and the promise of radical relational work and resistance movements on multiple scales, with many forms of matter (and mattering), and from/with different geopolitical locations. Our 2025 American Studies Association panels specifically build on two recent conversations in decolonial queer and trans ecologies: the 2023 Queer and Trans* Ecologies Symposium and the 2024 “Trans* Ecologies” issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly. The back-to-back panels feature scholars in a variety of careers and career stages on the cutting edge of these fields who extend this work through anti-racist, anti-colonial theorizations and analyses in the contemporary moment when the United States federal government seeks to eliminate us and our scholarship. We convene at ASA to connect to friends, lovers, and comrades to co-create insurgent knowledges that support our lives and the altered, damaged, sick, surprising, and strange life on this planet.

Part of a two-part queer and trans ecologies conversation across two sessions, this panel attends to the call to not recuperate America or empire from its perpetual crisis, but to “imagine an American Studies otherwise, from the peripheries,” which this session locates within queer and trans ecologies. The session is comprised of five papers by scholars/artists/activist who employ an array of methodological approaches including authoethnography, counter/mapping, and theoretical analyses that read literary, historical, and environmental. Approaching the late-stage American empire as a “violent, terminal phase,” but also a “creative ground for new intellectual and political possibilities,” the papers grapple with the ongoing logics of colonial environmentality, extractive racial capitalism, ecocide, and increasing environmental toxicity. Looking for places of trans*formation with queer and trans ecologies, the papers travel across such sites as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Galapagos Islands, and post-apocalyptic life in the Dominican Republic to engage trans-corporeal (im)possibilities, critiques of purity, and rethink conceptions of nature and the human. Attending to questions of how we live, build relationships, and flourish in the end of this world, the session reimagines moments of possibility for trans utopias, mutualistic relationships with the more-than-human, and multispecies crip, queer, and trans worldmaking. The papers in this session are also in dialogue with the other conversation about queer and trans ecologies. Together they engage plastispheres, trans*plantation, transplantimalities, and categorization, such as human/nonhuman and plant/animal, all within the context of climate catastrophes induced by a colonial Anthropocene.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Estrogen Flooding, or Botanically Trans - Erin L. Durban, University of Minnesota

• Neither Soldier, Sacrifice, nor Savior: Trans*formative Sites, Stages, and Scenes in Rita Indiana’s Tentacle - Isaac H. Essex, Brown University

• Plastic Terra - the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as emergent queer dys/utopia and speculative trans world - Ashton Phillips, Otis College of Art + Design

• Trans/Plants within Conservation: Transplantimalities and Multispecies Entanglements in the Galapagos Islands - Jenne Schmidt, Colorado State University

Chair

• Dylan McCarthy Blackston, New Mexico State University

Comment

• Heather Davis, The New School

Biographical Information

Stephanie D. Clare is associate professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. They are a feminist, queer, and trans theorist and the author of Nonbinary: A Feminist Autotheory (2023) and Earthly Encounters: Sensation, Feminist Theory, and the Anthropocene (2019).

Erin L. Durban (they/them) is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Critical Disability Studies at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. They have a PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Arizona and have continued to contribute to feminist, queer, and trans studies. Durban’s first book, The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti (University of Illinois Press 2022), was awarded the National Women’s Studies Association–UIP First Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT+ Studies. It focuses on the gender and sexual politics of French colonialism and American imperialism in Haiti. Durban edited a special issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory titled “Nou Mach Ansanm (We Walk Together): Queer Haitian Performance and Affiliation” with Dasha A. Chapman and Mario LaMothe and, more recently, the “Trans* Ecologies” issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly with Megan Moore. Durban is currently working on their second book manuscript, “Enabling Ethnography: Crafting Anti-Ableist Fieldwork Methods,” which argues that a greater diversity of researcher bodyminds enhances ethnographic inquiry and analysis for interdisciplinary scholarship.

Isaac Essex (he/they) is a PhD student in American Studies at Brown University, where he also serves as Graduate Coordinator for the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown. Their work in trans studies thinks alongside decolonial environmental humanities and aesthetics, writerly practise, and visual culture, to think through queer and trans endurance amid hostile climates, extractive economies, and ecological precarity. They think with the notion of “weathering” as it refers to the act of endurance that is being worn down, and the attempts to withstand atmospheric pressure that foster modes of survival amid climates of hostility. His critical and creative work has been published or is forthcoming in such places as Transgender Studies Quarterly, Sinister Wisdom, Apiary, and PANK.

Ashton S. Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Action at Otis College of Art + Design and socially and ecologically-engaged artist and scholar working with dirt, water, pollution, plasticity, and interspecies agents of (dis)repair as primary materials and collaborators. He is interested in the transness of material, the plasticity of bodies (human and nonhuman), and the promise of queer ecological praxis, including interspecies collaboration, as pathways for making meaning, building resiliency, and generating new forms of knowing/feeling/being in the late Capitalocene.
Ashton’s multisensory, interspecies installations and performances have been exhibited across the United States and abroad, including recent solo shows and public commissions at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles; the Torrance Art Museum; Automata Arts; Maryland Institute College of Art; Cerritos College Art Gallery; Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook; and Glendale Central Park, in Glendale, CA.
He holds an MFA in Studio Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art; a JD from the George Washington University Law School; and a BA from the University of Maryland, where he served as the first openly trans president of the university’s LGBT student caucus. His creative scholarly writing has been published by Antennae - The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Trans Studies Quarterly, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and Cambridge University Press. Ashton’s work has also been featured in Bmore Art Magazine, Shoutout SoCal, The Gallup Independent, The Gallup Sun, Albuquerque Magazine, and The Santa Fe Reporter.
He is a resident artist at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, CA, where he maintains a living colony of polystyrene-metabolizing mealworm/beetles and a plastic-fertilized garden as trans ecological praxis. When he is not making, writing, teaching, and caring for metamorphosing creatures, he also curates exhibitions and performances at Monte Vista Projects and performs with his experimental sound collective Pure Filth Society.

Jenne Schmidt (they/them) is an assistant professor in the Department of Race, Gender, and Ethnic Studies at Colorado State University. They received a doctorate from Washington State University in Cultural Studies and Social Thought and a master’s degree from San Francisco State University in Women and Gender Studies. As an interdisciplinary scholar their research engages the tensions between transgender, disability, and queer studies and environmental discourses. Their research has been published in places like TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.