Abstract
We live in a time of renewed assaults on reproductive, transgender, and other human rights in the United States and elsewhere. But this is also a moment of possibility, when contemporary culturemakers are imagining new futures of cis-trans solidarity, cross-species sensitivity, and trans mutual aid. These imaginings respond to climate change and other environmental crises—thereby reminding us that these crises are driven in the first place by colonial cis-heteropatriarchy. My talk will focus on the work of three U.S. culturemakers: Latinx trans poet Oliver Baez Bendorf, white trans writer Callum Angus, and nonbinary Chinese-American artist Mary Maggic.
Biography
Nicole Seymour is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton, where she serves as the Graduate Advisor for the Environmental Studies Program. Her research in the environmental humanities asks how literature and other cultural forms – from documentary film to standup comedy – mediate our relationship to environmental crisis. She is the author of three monographs, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (University of Illinois Press, 2013), Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and her most recent publication Glitter (Bloomsbury, 2022). She is also a curator for NXTerra, an open-access repository of climate pedagogy materials developed by faculty across the California State University and University of California systems. In addition to her fellowship project, Dr. Seymour is currently working on topics including queer ecologies, feminist plastic art, vegan satire, and contemporary Indigenous poetry.