Did you know that yew trees can (and do) change sex? And that many trees are nonbinary? Genderqueer greenery is only one of the fascinating (tree) topics this conversation branches off into. If you want to em-bark on a journey into queer ecologies, this is the sapisode for you. Cate talks about leafing through the herbal archives at Kew Gardens, the role of storytelling in understanding ecologies, and about discovering female forests. Tune in now and everything will be coming up roses – or mulberries.

References:

Cate Sandilands’ The Good-Natured Feminist
Cate Sandilands’ Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times
Cate Sandilands’ “Mulberry Intimacies and the Sweetness of Kinship” (Ecologies of Gender)
Kew Gardens
Queer Nature
https://www.kew.org/kew-gardens/whats-on/queer-nature
Jamaica Osorio
K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary
Rosanna McLaughlin’s Sinkhole: Three Crimes
Callum Angus’ A Natural History of Transition
Joshua Whitehead’s Making Love with the Love
King James I
Alexis Shotwell’s Against Purity
Oriana Schwarzenshuber
Vin Nardizzi
Fortingall Yew
https://storyingclimatechange.com/
Sarah Orne Jewett
Willa Cather
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness
Diana Souhami
Vita Sackville-West’s The Land
Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned and M Archive
Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms At Night

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1. What might queer ecologies be?
2. Can you compare my definition with Cate’s? What is similar, what is different?
3. What roles can storytelling play in climate change and in queer ecologies?
4. What might the ‘Edenic past’ be and how does it relate to ‘purity’?
5. Which species is your life entangled with?
6. Bonus question: In this episode, Cate explains that “A lot of the most interesting thinking proceeds through story as much as it proceeds through theory.” Do you agree?