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[montanavenditti-blog]

For a long while I found myself harbouring the fantasy of thinking through the potential for understanding queer as the permaculture ‘edge’ – that highly productive space where two ecosystems meet and merge. In tentatively exploring this conceptualisation, I was thinking of ‘queer’ as more than a synonym for LGBT, and as something more than an oppositional space to normative sexual and gender arrangements. I was considering queer as an ethical stance of openness to sexual and gender difference and diversity, as a productive opportunity to do sexgender differently.

Gavin Brown

Queer Ecology: A roundtable discussion

https://sustainableunh.unh.edu/sites/sustainableunh.unh.edu/files/images/Anderson_et_al_Queer_ecology_-_A_roundtable_discussion.pdf 

-MAS

[montanavenditti-blog]

Neither earth, nor women. We are the territories of conquest. 

“What are the toxic residues of unrecognized or unacknowledged polluted politics that continue to reassert the normalized body and the naturalized environment and therefore impede the potential for a more just, green and sustainable future?”  (203). 

-MAS

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- MAS

[montanavenditti-blog]

In taking the same lines of evidence as researchers who have demonstrated environmental linkages to cancer, this article uses the evidence of toxins found in breast tissue and breast milk to further support the neoliberal ideas about personal responsibility for breast cancer within the home. 

- MAS

[montanavenditti-blog]

“Klawiter also describes feminist cancer activism, which challenges optimistic narratives, rejects the production of a normalized femininity signaled in the plethora of pretty pink ribbons and the hegemonic practices of prosthesis and breast reconstruction, engages in direct political action and social justice work, and includes many lesbian organizations. Feminist cancer organizations usually promote an environmental analysis of cancer, and, during the second half of the 1990s, started to work very closely with the environmental movement on various issues. They have also usually articulated a clear anti-capitalist and anti-corporate critique of what some have called the cancer-industrial complex. Klawiter argues that, over time, many feminists went from viewing breast cancer 'solely through the lens of gender and sexuality' to understanding it as 'an environmental disease and an issue of profits and pollution” (213).

Diedrich, Lisa, and Emily Boyce. “ ‘Breast Cancer on Long Island’: The Emergence of a New Object Through Mapping Practices.” BioSocieties 2, no. 2 (2007).

Photo source: http://www.contramare.net/site/en/ecofeminism/

-MAS

[montanavenditti-blog]

-MAS

[montanavenditti-blog]

This historical fiction book has been widely used for peace education in elementary schools. Can it counter the partial knowledge and historical amnesia about the atomic bomb?

-MAS

[montanavenditti-blog]

“Nation-building projects that pursue the public good through means that are simultaneously corrosive of the social contract are, in a sense, always “radioactive,” because they contaminate the public sphere, invading bodies and disrupting cosmologies in ways that promise to mutate over time. In this sense, the nuclear age has always been culturally toxic, but it is only after the Cold War that the long-term effects are becoming visible” (Masco, 25).

Masco, Joseph. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton University Press, 2013.

Image credit: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-third-battle-of-fallujah/5364369

-MAS

[montanavenditti-blog]

-MAS

[montanavenditti-blog]

“While the Vietnam War has become a distant memory for most, the devastating effects remain a reality for the millions of US veterans and Vietnamese exposed to the chemical spray Agent Orange, also known as dioxin. The chemical was used during Operation "Ranch Hand" to expose the enemy by clearing trees, plants and crops. The US military sprayed approximately 12 million gallons of the chemical agent across South Vietnam from 1962 to 1971. An estimated 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed and three million affected by Agent Orange. Once in the body, dioxin is retained in human fatty tissue where it can "alter cellular and chemical balance" involved in the reproductive process and be passed on to subsequent generations.”

Source: http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201504302234-0024723 

-MAS

[montanavenditti-blog]

“It was not objective science, nor was it blissful ignorance, that created the impression that DDT was somehow both our most lethal weapon against undesirable life forms (“killer of killers,” “the atomic bomb of the insect world”) and a completely benign helpmate. In fact, scientific study after scientific study showed that DDT was failing at both roles” (8)

Sandra Steingraber. Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1997.

Image: 1947 advertisement from Penn Salt Chemicals