The Animal in the Wilderness

This panel offers four 15-minute papers that trouble boundaries between Latina/o studies and the environmental humanities. While Latina/o studies emphasizes social justice in relation to race, migration/immigration, the... [ view full abstract ]

This panel offers four 15-minute papers that trouble boundaries between Latina/o studies and the environmental humanities. While Latina/o studies emphasizes social justice in relation to race, migration/immigration, the U.S./Mexico border, gender, and sexuality, the field seldom considers environmental ideas in Latina/o literature and culture. Similarly, ecocriticism emphasizes earth-centered scholarly visions by examining the pastoral, space and place, and biosemiotics, but has not substantively engaged how Latina/o cultural productions resist environmental degradation. Moreover, some strains of environmental studies emphasize privileged perspectives over people of color and the poor. This panel addresses these gaps by highlighting how Latina/o literature and culture imagines environmental issues as integral to social justice. The papers (un)discipline environmental studies from the standpoint of Latina/o studies, while rethinking Latina/o studies from ecocritical perspectives.

Drawing on queer and animal studies, Rodríguez argues that, despite the mainstream embrace of We the Animals that reads the family conventionally and comprehends the text’s sense of animality as a surface-level metaphor, the multitude of species in Torres’ human-animal kingdom signify an array of queer sexual practices, environments, and subjectivities that take risks of desire, exclusion and belonging seriously.