#reductionism

Books such as Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (1999) (among many other examples) present possibilities for “radically rethinking nature as queer, by documenting the vast range of same-sex acts, same-sex childrearing pairs, intersex animals, multiple ‘genders’, ‘transvestism’ and transsexuality existing throughout the more-than-human world. Bagemihl restricts himself to mammals and birds but still manages to discuss nearly three hundred species and over 200 years of scientific research. “Bagemihl’s exhaustively researched volume renders any sense of normative heterosexuality within nature an absurd impossibility” (52).

Alaimo provides several other examples of challenges to heteronormativity in nature in recent years, including an exhibition at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo in Norway called, “Against Nature?” (2007). According to the website for the exhibit, “Homosexuality has been observed in most vertebrate groups, and also from insects, spiders, crustaceans, octopi and parasitic worms. The phenomenon has been reported from more than 1,500 animal species, and is well documented for 500 of them, but the real extent is probably much higher” (Against Nature 2007)(54).

The author argues that recognizing the sexual diversity of animals has several significant benefits; heteronormativity has damaged and diminished scientific knowledge (the author uses biology, anthropology as examples but I’d say this is an issue that science in general must contend with). The ‘scientific silence on homosexuality in animals amounts to a cover-up, deliberate or not’ (54) and thus scientists have a duty to correct this.

Researchers have documented how the ‘majority of scientists have ignored, refused to acknowledge, closeted, or explained away their observations of same-sex behavior in animals, for fear of risking their reputations, scholarly credibility, academic positions , or heterosexual identity” (54). Alaimo then gives examples of cases where this was the case in varying levels. As we’ve learned, the assumption of heterosexuality as the ‘only natural form’ is not an ‘appropriate benchmark for ecological research’ (54) and heteronormative bias might render already difficult work even more so.

“Endocrine disruptors alone demand an extraordinarily complex and nuanced understanding of the ‘mangling’ of environmental science, health, and politics, with misogyny, homophobia, and other cultural forces’ (55). The author recognizes that rather than simply tossing ‘queer animals into the ring of public opinion to battle the still pervasive sense that homosexuality is unnatural, we need to embrace the possibilities for the sexuality diversity of animal behavior to help us continue to transform our most basic sense of what nature and culture mean’ (55).