Queering Urban Ecologies: Reading the Forms and Aesthetics of Ecological Materialisms in Indigenous Queer Ecopoetics

This PhD project examines the representations of urban ecological materialisms (water, energy, and food-systems) in contemporary US Indigenous and queer, or “Indigiqueer”, ecopoetics, in order to register cultural attitudes towards urban ecological systems, and theorise the ways that queer cultural production has been shaped by them. This research takes place at the intersection of queer studies and environmental humanities, and contributes to the burgeoning field of queer ecology by introducing to it the first full-length study of urban Indigiqueer ecopoetics as both an aesthetic and formal mode for critiquing urban environmental mismanagement.
In Chapter One, I read the poetry of Kumeyaay poet, Tommy Pico, to theorise how his representations of food, hunger, waste, and food-related illnesses precipitate the importance of food culture in forming a sense of community, belonging, and kinship for urban Indigiqueer people. Throughout this chapter, I also read Pico’s metaphorization of food-systems and use of sarcasm to critique the colonial logics underpinning neoliberal trends in urban governance. Chapter Two reads the experimental ecopoetics of Mescalero and Lipan Apache poet Julian T. Brolaski in gowanus atropolis (2011) to register the ways that urban waterfronts have historically facilitated queer political programming and cultural production. By reading the ways that Brolaski utilises queer kinship metaphors, synecdoche, and translinguistics, I analyse how Brolaski writes contaminated and ensnarled relationships between Indigiqueerness and non-human life within and along the toxified Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York. Lastly, in Chapter Three, I move beyond a study of Indigiqueer cultural production in New York City, to explore representations of petrosexuality in proximity to sites of extractivism in Diné poet Jake Skeets’ Eyes Bottle Dark with A Mouthful of Flowers (2019). In this chapter, I read for how the colonialist-capitalist legacy of resource extraction and energy poverty in Gallup, New Mexico, is represented within his Indigiqueer ecopoetics, before conceptualising how Skeets uses motifs of glitter and water to imagine forms of rehabilitation with the land and sexuality.
This project develops a critical understanding of the ways that Indigiqueer ecopoetics interrogates urban ecological infrastructures and forms of environmental mismanagement and their role in whitewashing and invisibilising Indigenous and queer cultures in urban spaces. This project registers how the formal and aesthetic conventions of these emergent poetic forms write necessary ways of unpacking the legacies of colonialism and industrialisation in New York City and Gallup, New Mexico, and insist on recognising and facilitating the lives of intersectional marginalised communities in the development of urban futures.