Queering Evolution: The Socio-political Entanglements of Natural and Cultural Evolutionary Mechanisms

Abstract

This essay expands our previous explorations (Adsit-Morris CA, Gough N, J Environ Educ 48(1): 67–78, 2017) of queer theory’s potential to reinvigorate environmental education scholarship and practice, by queering commonplace understandings of evolution. Drawing on Darwin’s original ideas and writing, we explore the complex, creative and coevolutionary dimensions of life, and the implications for educational theory and practice of such a conceptual shift. We do this by revisiting Darwin’s so called “dangerous ideas” – those that were radically queer, creative and post-anthropocentric – to explore how they inspired non-reductive, feminist and queer movements of thought. We therefore argue that queer feminist critical inquiry (We adapt the phrase “queer feminist critical inquiry” from other authors (e.g. Cipolla C, Gupta K, Rubin DA, Willey A (eds), Queer feminist science studies. University of Washington Press, Seattle/London, 2017) because it succinctly captures the key dispositions we bring to the objects of this chapter is a crucial posthumanist intervention in educational theory and has the potential to reinvigorate environmental education by troubling the most formative, trenchant, and enduring heteronormative discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature by reimagining developmental, ecological, and evolutionary interactions and processes.