As many feminists and other critical theorists have argued, the hetero-patriarchal structure that privileges male, white, able-bodied, wealthy bodies over others, and which tends to privilege Western ways of knowing over others, is also the same structure that places humans above the rest of the natural world. The descending hierarchy of value, or “Great Chain of Being,” that moves from ultimate reality/God to some males, to some females, to other males and females (poor and of color), then to animals, and then to the earth and other earth-beings is also tied to a heterosexual gender/sex binary: cis-male and cis-female. There is, within this hierarchy, an assumed ‘compulsory heterosexuality.’ Both religious discourses and discourses about ‘nature’ are tied up in maintaining white, heterosexual-patriarchy. It is not enough to declare “god is dead,” or “we live in a secular state,” since the secular, scientific world inherits patriarchal ideas from its past. This chapter argues that queering discourses about both ‘religion’ and ‘nature’ helps to destabilize foundational/essential and hierarchical understandings of the human and opens us up to understandings of fluid and emergent identities in a post-secular and post-human world. This essay explores how two different groups of activists articulate these ideas: the eco-sexual movement and the radical faeries.
