Biodiversities of Gender is a pilot project that probes gender diversity and climate change as conjoined issues. Convened by Michael V Smith and Astrida Neimanis, in collaboration with Erin Scott and a number of guest performers and teachers, this project draws on queer feminist creative methods to celebrate gender abundance as a potential climate change mitigation strategy!
Feminist and queer studies have long documented how gender can shift in response to changing environments and climates (e.g., finding new gender expression when one leaves a family environment, or moves to a new cultural or sociopolitical milieu) but this is also the case for nonhumans in so-called natural environments (for example, amphibians and fish that change gender as the ambient temperature changes). Since nature and culture are inseparable, we refer to this abundance as biodiversities of gender. Our hypothesis is that this insight can be playfully yet critically deployed to respond to the conjoined crisis of climate change and rising anti-2SLGBTQ climates.
As evidence of climate crisis grows–warmer temperatures, changing weather patterns, rising seas, freshwater shortages, and biodiversity loss–, violence against 2SLGBTQ expressions of gender and sexuality is also intensifying, both legally and culturally, in many places. Gender and sexuality have long been sites where struggles over power get played out in times of major social crisis. This is well documented, for example, in relation to Indigenous gender and sexuality as targets of colonial violence. As colonialism now fuels catastrophic climate change at a planetary scale, is it a coincidence that gender and sexual expression is again under attack? Many young people in particular are experiencing skyrocketing levels of anxiety, isolation and suicide – overburdened by both climate
crisis and regressive gender politics.
Our project responds to these issues by offering gender abundance as both a substantiated and playfully speculative climate change adaptation strategy anchored in pleasure, creativity and joy. We will develop these insights via a series of locally-grounded, community-oriented creative workshops that explore the connections between gender diversity, climate change, and place.
Activities:
In 2024/2025, we were awarded a Partnership Engagement Grant, where in collaboration with the Inspired Word Cafe (IWC), we will host a series of three research-creation workshops and a roundtable discussion that explore the connections between gender diversity and climate awareness as important cornerstones of decolonial creative community engagment. These will culminate in a policy document that will support IWC in addressing a gender- and climate-informed, intersectional approach to decolonization.
In Spring 2024, we organized three workshops in March, May and June 2024. The third one to coincide with the annual queer performance extravaganza that is Pony Cabaret! Read more about these workshops in our FEELed Notes!
The FEELed lab 