Call for Contributions:
Queer Climate Justice
Edited Anthology

Call for Contributions: 
Queer Climate Justice Edited Anthology (Scholarly & Creative Works)

Editors:

Vanessa Raditz (vanessa.raditz@uga.edu) and Jeff Feng (jeff.feng@northwestern.edu)
 
Context:
As seas rise, storms strengthen and wildfires blaze across the landscape, queer and trans people are among every community reworlding in the rubble, including those enacting both liberatory visions of the future and those investing in the further destruction of land and lifeways. As climate apartheid further widens the extremes between those with and without the resources for resilience, queer and trans people are among every community: the climate sacrificed, the climate abandoned, the climate privileged, and the climate responsible. 
 
What, then, is a “queer” climate justice politics and praxis for these times of transitions, transformations, and constantly changing change? Following the lines of thought in critical queer scholarship (Eng & Puar, 2020; Halberstam et al., 2005), this book is a call for a climate justice reckoning of queer politics, and a curiosity about what queer theorizing could trouble about “climate,” “crisis,” and “climate + crisis,” and the implications for climate justice movements. We are inspired by the call in the above-cited works for a subjectless queer critique that refuses/subverts/deconstructs the politics of recognition, liberal rights, and assimilation into the militarized, extractive fascism that enables growing climate apartheid.
 
Entangled with the changing climate, we are in a context of proliferating anti-trans bills across the country, and a moment in which mainstream LGBTQ+ organizing is becoming increasingly stalled in judicial procedures and appeals. By thinking with climate justice strategy, we seek to provide an ecologically-grounded compass for navigating within the assimilationist and liberationist impulses that have battled throughout LGBTQ+ history. We fear that forming movement strategies within the same discourses and logics of this violent legislation furthers the illusion that LGBTQ+ issues are “wedge” issues: “special rights” that pertain only to us (Segrest, 1994). Thinking with climate justice disrupts the illusions that the central issues impacting queer and trans life into the future have more to do with accessing bathrooms rather than the availability of clean drinking water. 
 
With this multi-directional dialogue between “queer” and “climate justice,” we hope to sort through claims to queer (as both an identity category and a theoretical analytic) and to lift up queernesses with 'radical potential' (Cohen, 1997) in these times. We seek contributions that hold complexity; that can acknowledge the existence of both extreme affluence and extreme poverty across our communities today and account for the active participation of LGBTQ+ people in fossil fuel extraction (e.g., Ru Paul’s fracking); and that can support movements shutting down the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, creating new solidarity economies of care, and shaping possible lifeways within the emergent, feral ‘freakosystems’ of an uncertain future (Huggins & Skulski, 2020; Tsing et al., 2020).  With a critical attention to these contexts, this book seeks ecologically-grounded constellations of alternatives for worlding a future, in pursuit of a queerness that is not yet here (Muñoz, 2009).
 

Call for Contributions:

A continued past, present, and future era of immense threat demands a radical envisioning of queer climate justice futures in which we shift our analysis, worldviews, being, and praxis. This is a future where our movements and people hold each other accountable, rematriate land as we decolonize our ways of relating to the world, and exercise self-determination.
 
This call for proposals emerges from the lineage of conversations within queer ecologies, pollinated with queer of color, decolonial, transnational, ecofeminist, and critical environmental and climate justice scholarship that offer complexly intersectional insights on the violence to mind-body-land-spirit at the root of climate change and ancestral strategies for a future otherwise (Gómez-Barris, 2017; Hall, 2014; Mikulewicz et al., 2023; Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson, 2010; Pellow, 2017; Pulido & De Lara, 2018; Rice et al., 2021; Seymour, 2013; Shiva & Mies, 2014; Simpson, 2017; Stein, 2004; Sultana, 2022; Whyte, 2017).
 
For the purposes of queer world-making, we seek contributions (scholarly and creative) that take stock of the contemporary and historical challenges of fighting for queer climate justice and inspire organizers, artists, educators, and scholars on the following questions:
 

• How can queer ecological lenses shift the discursive and political terrain on which our movements build power, especially in the context of external threats (legislative attacks, anti-trans violence, missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit relatives) and LGBTQIA2S+ community threats (homonationalism, homocolonialism, and homocapitalism)?

• How would an intersectional analysis of queer, trans, and Two-Spirit vulnerability to the climate crisis help shift the focus around who has access to land, water, medicine, and community and the necessary strategies for redistribution? 

• How does cisheteropatriarchy uphold racial capitalism? How can analyses of racial capitalism and environmental racism inform our understanding of abandonment and disinvestment in queer and trans communities (and/or by queer and trans communities)?  

• Given the necessity of experimentation for abolition and attempts to enact the unimaginable, what is the role of failure in queer climate justice? 

• Queer and trans resistance varies in degrees of opacity; what are the strategic uses of these varying opacities within climate justice? By contrast, what is the role of representation and visibility in queer climate justice? (How) can cultural organizers strategically use representations to subvert or disrupt liberal politics of recognition?

• What are queer forms of climate resilience? How have communities practiced resilience while resisting discourses of resilience? Are climate and environmental crises opportunities to disrupt the status quo and create new political possibilities?

• How can communities radically support each other in the name of solidarity, disrupt neoliberalism, and build coalition across geographies (Global North and South, multi-sited activism and research, language, and translation)?  

 
 
Contributions may also address the questions above alongside some of the following topics:
 

• Transnational & Translocal Activism

• Gendered Racial Capitalism

• Abolition & Demilitarization 

• Decolonization & Land Back

• Post-humanisms & Inhumanisms

• Mutual Aid & Community-Based Disaster Response

• Just Transition & Just Recovery

• Climate Futures

• Disability Justice

• Reproductive Justice

• Questioning & Reclaiming Resilience

• Sovereignty & Self-Determination

• Joy and Pleasure

• Hope

Types of Contributions:

We welcome a range of potential contributors, including activists, movement leaders, educators, and scholars, and contributions, including traditional academic papers, autoethnographies, poetry, songs, etc. You are welcome and encouraged to be disciplinarily and methodologically promiscuous in your potential contribution.
 

How to Submit a Proposal:
 

Please email your proposal to the editors and include the following:
 

• Title

• A short (maximum 500-word) abstract or summary of your proposed contribution

• A short (about 250 words) biography of each contributor

 
Vanessa Raditz (vanessa.raditz@uga.edu) and Jeff Feng (jeff.feng@northwestern.edu)
 

Timeline:

March 15, 2024: Deadline for proposals
April 15, 2024: Editor decisions
May 1, 2024: Response from contributors
November 1, 2024: Deadline for full chapter drafts

 
Bibliography:
 

• Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer politics? GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 3(4), 437–465.

• Eng, D. L., & Puar, J. K. (2020). Introduction: Left of queer. Social Text, 38(4), 1–24.

• Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). The extractive zone. Duke University Press.

• Halberstam, J., Muñoz, E., & Eng, D. L. (2005). What’s queer about queer studies now? Social Text, 23(3–4), 1–17.

• Hall, K. Q. (2014). No Failure: Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Future. Radical Philosophy Review, 17(1), 203–225.

• Huggins, A., & Skulski, M. (n.d.). Nature, by design? Freakological fallacies (part 3) (FE3.3). Retrieved December 30, 2020, from https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe-3-3-nature-by-design-pt3

• Mikulewicz, M., Caretta, M. A., Sultana, F., & JW Crawford, N. (2023). Intersectionality & Climate Justice: A call for synergy in climate change scholarship. Environmental Politics, 1–12.

• Mortimer-Sandilands, C., & Erickson, B. (2010). Queer ecologies: Sex, nature, politics, desire. Indiana University Press.

• Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. nyu Press.

• Pellow, D. N. (2017). What is critical environmental justice?. John Wiley & Sons.

• Pulido, L., & De Lara, J. (2018). Reimagining ‘justice’in environmental justice: Radical ecologies, decolonial thought, and the Black Radical Tradition. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(1–2), 76–98.

• Rice, J., Long, J., & Levenda, A. (2021). Against climate apartheid: Confronting the persistent legacies of expendability for climate justice. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. https://doi.org/2514848621999286

• Segrest, M. (1994). A Bridge, Not a Wedge. In Memoir of a race traitor (pp. 229–246). South End Press.

• Seymour, N. (2013). Strange natures: Futurity, empathy, and the queer ecological imagination. University of Illinois Press.

• Shiva, V., & Mies, M. (2014). Ecofeminism (2nd ed.). Zed Books Ltd.

• Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. U of Minnesota Press.

• Stein, R. (Ed.). (2004). New perspectives on environmental justice: Gender, sexuality, and activism. Rutgers University Press.

• Sultana, F. (2022). Critical climate justice. The Geographical Journal, 188(1), 118–124.

• Tsing, A. L., Deger, J., Keleman Saxena, A., & Zhou, F. (2020). Feral atlas: The more-than-human Anthropocene. Stanford University Press.

• Whyte, K. (2017). Indigenous climate change studies: Indigenizing futures, decolonizing the Anthropocene. English Language Notes, 55(1), 153–162.