Queer worlding pedagogies with tree-girl-dog assemblages

• In Event: Crafting Common Worlding Pedagogies

Abstract

In light of feminist science and technology studies' (FSTS) critiques of the colonizing project of science, this presentation shows the potentialities of queer FSTS (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, 2010) for unsettling binary and settler logics about young children's gender subjectivity and relations with place. A queer ecologies framework is used to trouble human exceptionalism, the nature/culture binary, and norms. Heteronormativity is highlighted and understandings of children's gender subjectivity are expanded by extending it to include human child and non-human assemblages. This is a significant shift towards recognizing that nature (trees, sunshine, moisture, wind) plays an important role enabling and shaping subjectivity and social relations (Schnabel, Breitwieser, & Hawbaker 2016).

Drawing from an ongoing multispecies ethnography of children's everyday encounters with Eucalyptus trees, located on the traditional lands of the Kulin Nation, in Melbourne, Australia, I present queer assemblages of tree-girl-dog relations. These queer assemblages complicate the human child and nature relationship because they dissolve and mess-up all kinds of overlapping dichotomies (i.e., nature/culture, human/animal, adult/child, girl/boy, subject/object). In doing so, human gender subjectivity can be reconsidered in terms of relations and connections across all living and non-living entities and as a continual process of negotiation, rather than autonomous and biologically determined. While researching with trees, dogs, and girls I show how queer worlding pedagogies responds to these queer assemblages by being open-ended, entangled, and with the more-than-human.

Author

• Mindy Blaise, Victoria University