Ithaca College

Mat Fournier, Modern Languages and Literatures, published a chapter in Transecology, a new volume in Routledge series Studies on Gender and the Environment. Fournier’s chapter, “Gendercrossing at the Frontier,” describes the relation between the transgender body and the natural ecosystem of a high altitude landscape as they appear in the autobiographical writing of Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach.

https://www.routledge.com/Transecology-Transgender-Perspectives-on-Environment-and-Nature/Vakoch/p/book/9780367086510

Excerpt from the chapter:

To think in terms of transecology is to dwell on a paradox, or more accurately on a series of paradoxes. At the intersection of the fields of transgender studies and environmental studies, transecology aims to use the critical tools of both fields to look at the complex apparatus made up of discourses and living things we call “nature.” The most obvious paradox in this endeavor is the fact that we, transgender human individuals, are traditionally perceived as unnatural. Discussions of the gender binary are so enmeshed in ideas of the “natural,” and descriptions of biological phenomenon are so informed by the ideology of sexual difference,1 that any human body distancing itself from it falls under the category of the abnormal. As a matter of fact, transgender individuals are caught in a double bind. Without the use of gender-reassignment technologies, hormonal therapies, or surgery, we appear as  aberrations of nature: incongruent bodies, ambiguous physical traits, or social attitudes. But when we rely on those technologies, which sometimes allow us to pass as “normally gendered” individuals, we become artificial creatures again, techno-dependent cyborgs estranged from the realm of nature.