Queering the Tropics: A Cartography of Tropical Materialism, Queer Ecology & Spectral Tropicality

• Main Authors: Benitez, Christian Jil, Chwala, Gregory Luke, Lundberg, Anita, Nyeck, S. N.
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: decolonial tropics; Indigenous queer; queer ecologies; queer tropics; queering the tropics; spectral tropicality; tropical materialisms; Arts and Humanities; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Queer Studies
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/filipino-faculty-pubs/118; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/filipino-faculty-pubs/article/1117/viewcontent/benitez_chwala_lundberg__nyeck_queering_the_tropics_part_1.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

This special issue entitled “Queering the Tropics” explores how queering as a methodology and gender and sexuality as a critical rubric complicate the study of the tropics and conceptions of tropicality. It also engages with how the tropics as a worldly zone, and the notion of tropicality as simultaneously material and imaginary, reconfigure notions of queer sexuality. In other words, our aim has been to study how the tropical might queer queerness itself. This is to attempt to understand queer as a way to initiate and pursue critical encounters with the tropical world—indeed to begin queering the tropics. This first part of the double special issue draws on queer and trans theories and LGBTQIA2+ studies to map encounters with tropical nature, including tropical materialisms, queer ecologies, and spectral tropicality. Decolonial praxis and Indigenous epistemologies also inform this cartography. The papers collected together in this special issue offer a richness that both critiques and expands queer studies.