The College Fix

“Did you know that some plants and animals demonstrate queer behaviour?”

So asks Canada’s Humber College Arboretum.

The public institution’s “Queering Nature” event — where you take a walk with Humber staff and “talk about the many ways we see queerness in nature” — takes place this coming Wednesday.

The event is “open for 2SLGBTQ+ Humber College and [University of Guelph-Humber] students, staff, and faculty and community allies,” according to the program website.

So called “queer ecology,” according to York University’s Catriona Sandilands, is “a loose, interdisciplinary constellation of practices that aim, in different ways, to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature, and also to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light of queer theory.”

Toronto’s Humber College is hosting a “2SLGBTQ+” ecology event that will feature discussions on “the many ways we see queerness” in plants and animals. #CampusWatch pic.twitter.com/LF0PIOLiAg

— Élie Cantin-Nantel (@elie_mcn) June 7, 2023

In 2020, Portland State University offered a course in which students could study “queer ecologies” and other topics via a “queer lens”: “queer bodies,” “queering settler colonialism,” “queer environmental politics,” “disability and queer environments,” “queering science,” “queer animals” and “queer environmental futurity.”

Last year at Princeton, a “queer-trans-feminist river scientist” talked about how “queer trans feminist thought can transfigure ecological science as it’s used by Indigenous and non-Native practitioners in river management.”

As noted by True North, other upcoming LGBTQ-related events at Humber include a “Pride T-Shirt Tye-Dye” (only open to those who registered to march in Pride parades), a Nicki Minaj-themed “Pride Dance Class,” a “Pride Theme Cupcake Decorate Session” and a “Dyke Pride Rally & March.”

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