{"id":311740,"date":"2026-06-02T07:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T11:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=311740"},"modified":"2026-06-01T14:58:44","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T18:58:44","slug":"9-books-that-practice-queer-ecology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/9-books-that-practice-queer-ecology\/","title":{"rendered":"9 Books That Practice Queer Ecology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I grew up in a small southern town. The models I had for queerness were people on television, living glamorous lives in New York City\u2014lives totally removed from the farmlands, marshes, and forests that surrounded my home. One day, desperate for a nearer, more intimate model, I went online and searched, \u201cCan animals be queer?\u201d This search eventually led me to Bruce Bagemihl\u2019s Biological Exuberance<\/a><\/em>. Clocking in at over 700 pages, this behemoth encyclopedia of \u201cgay animal sex\u201d was comprehensive, explicit, and exactly what I needed. With time, I created meaningful queer relationships with humans and outgrew the book, but I never forgot its evidence for queerness as natural. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Queer ecology is an emerging academic field that insists on queer and trans realities as a fundamental part of nature, ecology, and environmental politics. For me, the phrase highlights the necessary work of charting stories of queer and trans lives in wilderness spaces, but also encompasses literature that is queer in its refusal to enshrine borders and categories, and ecological in its focus on the relationships that make life possible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my forthcoming novel Mad Eden<\/a><\/em>, the narrator, Ro, has difficulty with communication. In one scene, after sex leaves them temporarily unable to speak, they wander away from their partner, out into the Florida backwoods, and spend a while observing an alligator. Ro doesn\u2019t know that male alligators sometimes show a distinct preference for other male alligators. But their time with the alligator helps. They return to their partner better able to communicate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was struck, writing this scene, by how easy it felt to put this genderqueer character on the edge of a secluded Florida retention pond, miles from the nearest town. Such a setting hasn\u2019t always felt easy to imagine. For a long time, my queer characters were alienated from rural spaces, as I was myself after coming out. But the idea of queer and trans characters finding refuge in forests and swamps feels straightforward now, thanks to a growing lineage of writers who are challenging ideas of queerness as a strictly urban (or strictly human) experience. From sea-creature-mediated gender transition to metafictional musings on the natural state of romance, each book below offers a taste of this expansive (and expanding!) queer ecological literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n