Student: Laura Houlberg
Graduation date: May 2014
Capstone type: Thesis
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This senior thesis illuminates some ways in which trans women have been excluded both implicitly and explicitly from traditional environmentalism. The paper is largely based in rhetorical analysis, focusing on two discursive moments of exclusion: the rhetoric surrounding intersex fish, and the controversy around radical environmentalist group Deep Green Resistance’s anti-trans policies. In addition, I situate these moments temporally, showing the ways in which the values of environmentalism today still reflect racist, ableist, and misogynistic insecurities of early environmentalism in the 1890s. Inspired by Sarah Jaquette Ray’s analysis of ableism in environmentalism from her book, “The Ecological Other,” I use her concept of “corporeal disgust” to explain how environmentalism is a corporeally based movement, and that it is through a politics of bodily disgust that trans women are labelled as “ecological others,” farther from nature, or unnatural.