Queer Ecology Revisited

An undergrad just wrote with a query about queer ecology. Always happy to help, I decided to post my response here.

One could think of queer theory as the exploration of how identity is not given, but rather performed.

Queer ecology simply sees this performance happening "below" the human level of meaning, at the level of the genome and other physical beings.

This is because, from an OOO standpoint, there is a rift between essence and appearance. This gives rise to identity as an illusion-like display that can't be pinned down to some sort of givenness.

What is called Nature just is the reduction of things to their givenness for humans. This reduction must be policed, since it is inherently spurious and unstable.