Presentation short abstract

Queering political ecology through engagement with seaweeds, this paper explores how marine and coastal environments enable queer multispecies relations that contest heteronormative and extractivist ocean governance and offer alternative world-makings.

Presentation long abstract

Intertidal zones are liminal spaces where land and sea meet, and where lives, identities, and categories slip out of fixed form. Entering this dynamic environment through encounters with its dwellers, this paper brings political ecology into conversation with queer ecology by tracing seaweed as a queer and unruly figure: neither plant nor animal, neither fully oceanic nor terrestrial, celebrated as sustainable superfood yet dismissed as coastal waste. Beginning with a nineteenth-century poem declaring “Call us not weeds, we are ocean’s gay flowers,” I explore how seaweeds have long been entangled with queer desire and refuge. Engagement with archival materials – including Victorian women’s seaweed collections and writings – reveals how intertidal zones once served as safe spaces for women and queer people seeking to evade scientific exclusion and heteronormative domesticity. Drawing on several months of phenomenological (auto)ethnography conducted in the UK, the paper then explores how contemporary encounters with seaweed rehearse and reimagine these histories. As oceans become increasingly militarised and discovered as underexploited resource frontiers, seaweeds are subjected to novel forms of capitalist extraction – from industrial aquaculture to their mobilisation as climate-change mitigation tools. Against these extractivist logics, queer multispecies relations such as foraging, diving, dwelling, and making art with algae, open alternative world-makings grounded in care, attentiveness, and more-than-human intimacy. Reading the intertidal zone as a queer space and seaweeds as queer companion species, the paper argues that such relations contest heteronormative and extractivist ocean governance and offer new conceptual pathways for bridging queer and political ecologies.