This seminar is interested in non-anthropocentric or even anti-anthropocentric understandings of gender-sexuality arrived at through transdisciplinary conversations between feminist theory, queer studies, the philosophy of biology, multispecies ethnography and environmental humanities. It posits that such understandings can emerge as accurate and effective translation practices across the material-semiotic continuum of multispecies worldmaking. In addition, it argues for aesthetic and affective valuations of multispecies desires, intimacies and sociosexual infrastructures.

George (2006) and Subramaniam (2024) observe that Linnaean taxonomy and the Darwinian theory of sexual selection gained traction owing to their reliance on conventional perceptions of heteronormative domesticity. In so doing, they suggest that the modelling of non/human paradigms of gender-sexuality on human ones is inherently flawed and in fact constitutes a political ecological project acknowledging the importance of power relations and inequalities within our biosociocultural worlds. They also make an appeal to maintain and nurture the otherness of non/humans without fetishizing it. Finally, they urge us to explore what happens to anthropomorphic notions of gender-sexuality when human exceptionalism is not available as an epistemic resource.

O’Laughlin (2023) goes further than using the non/human to reify or resist human formations of gender-sexuality and instead affirms that the conceptual category of gender-sexuality is itself a multispecies engagement. Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson (2010) address sexualized relations between humans and natural places. Maxwell (2025) asserts that heteronormativity is a climate issue and gestures toward an environmental politics of desire as an antidote. Eva Hayward (2008) sees both transsexing and transspeciating as forms of metonymy aimed at achieving bodily integrity. Building on the recent analytical move to view non/human entities or forces as agents capable of responding to their environments in a plastic and often goal-oriented manner based on their phenotypic repertoire, Cuciniello (2026) proposes that gender-sexuality be read as a subset of such biological agency used to enter and shape normative relations and sometimes direct evolutionary trajectories. 

In line with the abovementioned insights, this seminar invites papers on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Gender-sexuality as an ecosystem
• Gender-sexual identity as an index of fraught relationships with land and water
• Xenogenders
• Tranimalities
• Camouflage as drag beyond the human
• Portrayals of nature not as mother but as lover

Please write to [email protected] if you have any questions or if you would like to discuss an idea for a paper prior to abstract submission on the portal. A special issue publication is likely to be pursued with the selected papers.