Queer Botany is an ecocritical project that studies and affirms connections between queerness and nature. The project emerges from the theoretical lens of queer ecology, which brings together queer theory and eco-criticism. Queer Botany particularly focuses on the LGBTQ+ community and connecting to plant life. The project aims to share marginalised perspectives and support more diverse representations in the environmental movement and the outdoors.
Queer Botany has collaborated with Chelsea Physic Garden on A Dash of Lavender: Celebrating LGBTQ+ History Month, hosted online botanical drawing sessions, installed temporary interpretive displays at the Walthamstow Marshes, and held guided tours talking about plants from a queer perspective. Queer Botany has worked with Fringe! Queer Film & Art Festival, Elop, and Outcome: Islington Mind.
How can botany be queered and how can queerness be botanical?
Some references
“There is an argument that allegorical or metaphorical thinking is delimiting and has the capacity to reduce the importance of learning from plant life. However there is a force in “story” and in ‘metaphor’ that carries the relevance of vegetal life to a broader audience in order to avoid ecological catastrophe.”
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Gibson, Prudence, and Monica Gagliano. “The Feminist Plant: Changing Relations with the Water Lily” (2017, pp. 4).
“Queer ecology suggests … a new practice of ecological knowledges, spaces, and politics that places central attention on challenging hetero-ecologies from the perspective of non-normative sexual and gender positions.”
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Mortimer–Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010, pp. 22).
“Imagination and empathy allow humans to build political coalitions across divides such as race and sexuality, and to identify across species in ways that benefit the biosphere rather than the individual, the nation, or the corporation.”
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Seymour, Nicole. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. (2013, pp. 28).