Boundary violations and extinction phobias: Trans studies meets invasion science
From its inception, trans studies has approached rigid categories critically, questioning both the stability of concepts like gender and the fixedness of boundaries like male/female and cis/trans. Thinking about geography through a trans lens, we explore the connection between the spatial, temporal, and moral as they appear in US discourses of plant invasions. We show that the concept of the ‘native’ rests on shaky grounds. Stories of good stationary bodies (both vegetal and human) and bad transplants reveal how transphobia and xenophobia intersect and undergird projects of biological control. We further explore the effects of this framework. Invasion science limits the horizon of just ecological futures by misdirecting blame from colonial land acquisition and ongoing resource extraction to a focus on organisms themselves as intrusive and aggressive. White settlers, meanwhile, are remodelled into guardians of the landscape in the process of protecting national purity. Finally, we use theoretical insights from trans studies about the paranoia of trans‐exclusionary feminisms to consider the affective dimension of invasion scientists' urgent calls.
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J. Baird Callicott, Larry B. Crowder, Karen Mumford
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- Published
- Aug 20, 2025
- Vol/Issue
- 58(1)
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