Gathering (eBook)

Nature is Queer: We Could Learn a Thing or Two from That

Jasmine Isa Qureshi

I am a biologist. Well, I’m a failed biologist. I didn’t enjoy academia and the symmetrical balance we as students were forced to teeter upon to reach an ending that I saw as just being the beginning again, but with a different flavoured topping. 

Biology to me is magic. It is Sorcery. Squishy, living, breathing, toxic, untameable, nonsensical, dribbling, all-powerful magic. By magic, I am suggesting the abstract concept and title of ‘magic’ as pertaining to beauty, and ‘chaotic’ behavioural observation (chaos theory), chemistry – a science often referred to as ‘magical’ due to its explanation of natural processes in terms we cannot directly sense, and spontaneous reaction. I am suggesting that biology is an art of exploration. The art of asking questions, and the art of finding out. 

Words such as ‘magic’, and ‘art’ are normally personifications of more emotionally charged subjects, such as literature, and music. However, these terms can and should be used for science-based subjects too, especially biology and ecology, thus closing the gap between ‘creative’ subjects, and seemingly ‘non-creative, fact-based’ subjects. 

This gap ignores the intersectional and interwoven discrepancies that exist in all subjects and concepts. It limits the flexibility of perspectives that are needed to progress our understanding. Unlearning the bias of ‘emotionless’, and linear/binary science theory and study, helps us to collate the natural world into magic and art, and promotes a more ‘passion-based’ approach (which also seeks to topple false hierarchies, the viewing of nature as a simple ‘resource’, and promotes respect of the natural world, and by extension, the rest of the world). 

Furthermore, this flexible, more creative approach, also allows gatekeeping to be disintegrated, and elitist methods of teaching and accessing resources around these subjects to be disallowed. Nomenclature – and its usage as a key factor of identification – may be a small part of what we see, and perhaps rudimental, but its influence cannot be ignored. It often acts as an obstacle to those without the specific experience or background to access its pre-empted concepts.

To me, biology, and indeed the behaviour of the natural world is the music produced by the alchemy of existence. Music must be studied with care and attention. The overall passion, flexible mindset, creative flair and love a musician has will be the deciding factor in the quality of music. The same is true for a biologist. For example, as an ecologist and someone with a specific love for entomology and invertebrates, if I am to study an animal in this environment, I must approach this study from an angle with as little anthropocentric bias as possible, because viewing wildlife with ‘human characteristics’ can cause entire conclusions to be drawn upon false pretences. 

The patriarchal leadership in many of our societies does not exist in most insect colonies, suggesting a renewed understanding of how societies are formed or led in animal kingdoms. The care and attention I direct to my study will determine how much awareness I have of my subjects being worthy of respect as living organisms. Furthermore, the creative flair I allow in this study will progress it, as I find new ways of testing concepts and hypotheses that are as untethered to human behaviour as possible, all the while working against the common boundary of scientific review.

This approach is true of any scientist. But for a biologist, naturalist (professional or amateur), or anyone living in this world of chaotic, kinetic energy-powered soup, it is especially necessary. This approach promotes attention to detail, care, and respect of not just the study subject, but of your own emotions and identity.

So, if biology is part of this kinetic energy-powered soup, then I’m a soup witch. To be technical, a marine biologist. The bud of which grew from the branch of storytelling. 

I wanted to be a storyteller first anyway; I remember scribbling away when I was younger and making films about the animals I saw. I wrote short stories and drew little comics about power-hungry scientists. I developed an intense interest in how things worked; how did bees know which flowers to travel towards. How did whales ‘speak’. Why did planets revolve around the suns. Why does ice melt? Everything I do has grown from there. 

My need to know how the world works led me to science, and my love of nature led me even more specifically to natural science and ecology. My storytelling habits now bore fruit where before they had been hidden away by our education system’s Victorian-era roots. A system which was developed to enact ‘crowd control’ over large groups of working-class children, whilst their parents worked, often to prepare them for the same or similar line of work, usually under the control of private, home-educated superiors. 

It channels children into singular lines of economically efficient work, and my breaking out of it propped me up along the way and drove me to reach out to jobs in journalism and science communication. It actually stopped me from leaving STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)many times, usually when I became disheartened with the work environment, convincing me that I could make this industry comfortable and euphoric for myself one day.

I am one of those writer-scientist-poet people. The ones who trip and stumble through careers (since I left university and during my studies I’ve had at least ten different jobs) as they hold on to the promise of exploring and telling everyone how awesome those adventures are. 

I made my way up the mountain of Latin nomenclature and birds renamed after problematic leaders of boat trips; we often see the names of wildlife as their only name, however, studies usually discover a ‘renaming’ has occurred. Indigenous communities have previously allocated names, and these animals are then ‘discovered’ by colonialist collectors, and renamed after their expedition leaders. For example, a study found that the majority of eponymous bird names – birds named after a person – of up to 149 species in North America have been allocated names assigned by European and American naturalists in the nineteenth century. Of these, multiple are from figures associated with slavery and white supremacy, such as the McCown’s longspur, a grassland bird that was named after Confederate general John Porter McCown, renamed after the protests around racist nomenclature forced the hands of ornithological organisations. 

This resulted in a chase that has continued for all of my life. One for the magic and mayhem of biology.

The first taste of this magic was delicious. Addicting. Alluring and gourmet. It was a buzzing euphoric flavour of bumblebees and butterflies, woodlice and spiders.

The fascination with insects, invertebrates and entomology drew me in, and not strictly because I was a budding creepy crawly lover from the start, but almost out of a desperate thirst for natural life in the grey scape, I grew up in. A concrete tea caddy. Communities of spicy food, Urdu and Arabic. 

Graffiti splattered walls, glass breaking at night, orange gauze and sparkling jewellery of aunties and cousins. Smog, Quranic readings, prayer, loud engines and nightlife that never slept cloaked me like an oversized tee. But I was in a bubble within a bubble. 

The home-schooling of my early years, curated by my mother for me and my siblings, caught me before I fell into the sharp reality around me; I usually watched David Attenborough documentaries and Springwatch. These programmes weaved a complicated world. From whitened, elderly, soft music-filled chambers of fields – the people in them much the same as each other, never once darker than the clouds they stood under – to the exciting, gyrating, explosive monsters of the Amazon. 

There was no in-between. The reason I stayed with my nose stuck in the soil and my face to the wind even when I felt pushed out or underrepresented in these areas as a voice, was because I felt my connection to be more than just interest. I felt connected to the very foundations of nature, I felt my exploration of the natural world was a reflection of the ecosystem that was my identity.

I needed to touch, explore, observe and hunt dragons that were smaller than my palm, but no less gorgeous and inspiring. That was my way to nature. To biology. To ecology. 

At breakfast, I read Wikipedia pages and encyclopaedias of lands and creatures far, far away. I watched documentaries of a glossy, blue and green turquoise planet hanging in space. And spent time with my bugs of course.

This taste carried me to where I am today. But where I am today is a very different place to the start of my adventure. By this, I mean my arrival at queer ecology. 

Queer ecology is not a term I coined from my thought library. It has been around since the 1970s, weaving its gossamer webs in between the shards of ecofeminism and gender theory. In its current and most developed form, it speaks to me so directly and intimately that it is a wonder that I did not see it as the subject to counter all subjects before it. 

Simply put, queer ecology refers to the understanding and observation of ecology and biology in a manner that presents the natural world and all that it influences as an ever-changing, flexible spectrum. This defies the heteronormative binary...