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elfsHow are queer theory and the green energy discourse similar?
One of the books I’m happy to own is the somewhat infamous Fear of a Queer Planet, published in 1991, right in the center of the AIDS crisis. FoaQP was a distilliation of decades of queer theory, about how being queer was always an inherently political act, a challenge to a status quo. It didn’t incorporate everything: the influence of Roughgarden, Jane Ward, and Denny Lowell aren’t here, nor are the critical insights Pat Califia brought through the 80s and 90s, but overall it’s a good intro.
One thing queer theory does is explode the myth of “men are reliable and stable, women are fickle and unpredictable.” Gay men’s relationships are infamously less stable than heterosexual couples, and the ancient joke about what a lesbian brings on her second date still has a ring of truth to it. (Answer: A U-Haul.) The last 30 years since the publication of FoaQP has shown both significant progress in addressing this duplicity between the myths straight men tell about themselves and the reality straight women face in dating men, and often violent pushback from straight men that such truths should not be spoken.
I bring this up because we’re seeing it play out again in very strange ways when it comes to “green energy.” I’ve now encountered several conversations where the accusation is that green energy is “feminine,” that is, unreliable, fickle, and likely to fail when critically needed. “The wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine,” goes the refrain from these manly men, “which is why the market is stupid to embrace these technologies.” (Nevermind that “those technologies” produce electricity at the lowest cost and highest environmental respect.) Both fossil-fuel boys and nuclear boys are enamored of their own tech: it works, they say, and it’s reliable. You can turn it on and off with a switch, unlike the sun or the wind, and that’s why they like it, and that’s why we should embrace it. And they’re independent: you don’t need a whole network to just drive your gasoline-powered car.
Except they’re not really reliable. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island proved that about nuclear energy, and fossil fuels have contaminated enough of our planet it’ll be centuries before the taint of their passing is removed from our air, water, and soil.
Commodity streams of oil and nuclear fuel depend upon “a whole network” to deliver commodity fuels to gas stations and nuclear power plants. The transport of nuclear fuel and nuclear waste are both security and health nightmares for the people tasked with moving them, as well as the communities through which they might move.
Pro-nuclear-power and pro-fossil-fuel people lie about green energy the way men lie about women: because they like what they have, they like the feeling of power it gives them, they like the howling explosions– inside a V8’s cylinders and within the atoms at the core of any reactor– and they like the idea that it takes a lot of high-performance engineering to keep either from blowing apart the engines they power. Solar is disappointing: it just sits there. The worst thing a wind turbine does is catch fire and fall over, and that’s no fun. The opportunities to be manly, to engage in rescue, are few and far between.
The pushback against green energy resembles the pushback against queer theory: it’s an upset of the status quo, and it takes pieces of the carefully crafted “masculine” identity and says, clearly: you men are either lying or being lied to, and the lies are in service to a destructive (and self-destructive) lifestyle.
One of the books I’m happy to own is the somewhat infamous Fear of a Queer Planet, published in 1991, right in the center of the AIDS crisis. FoaQP was a distilliation of decades of queer theory, about how being queer was always an inherently political act, a challenge to a status quo. It didn’t incorporate everything: the influence of Roughgarden, Jane Ward, and Denny Lowell aren’t here, nor are the critical insights Pat Califia brought through the 80s and 90s, but overall it’s a good intro.
One thing queer theory does is explode the myth of “men are reliable and stable, women are fickle and unpredictable.” Gay men’s relationships are infamously less stable than heterosexual couples, and the ancient joke about what a lesbian brings on her second date still has a ring of truth to it. (Answer: A U-Haul.) The last 30 years since the publication of FoaQP has shown both significant progress in addressing this duplicity between the myths straight men tell about themselves and the reality straight women face in dating men, and often violent pushback from straight men that such truths should not be spoken.
I bring this up because we’re seeing it play out again in very strange ways when it comes to “green energy.” I’ve now encountered several conversations where the accusation is that green energy is “feminine,” that is, unreliable, fickle, and likely to fail when critically needed. “The wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine,” goes the refrain from these manly men, “which is why the market is stupid to embrace these technologies.” (Nevermind that “those technologies” produce electricity at the lowest cost and highest environmental respect.) Both fossil-fuel boys and nuclear boys are enamored of their own tech: it works, they say, and it’s reliable. You can turn it on and off with a switch, unlike the sun or the wind, and that’s why they like it, and that’s why we should embrace it. And they’re independent: you don’t need a whole network to just drive your gasoline-powered car.
Except they’re not really reliable. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island proved that about nuclear energy, and fossil fuels have contaminated enough of our planet it’ll be centuries before the taint of their passing is removed from our air, water, and soil.
Commodity streams of oil and nuclear fuel depend upon “a whole network” to deliver commodity fuels to gas stations and nuclear power plants. The transport of nuclear fuel and nuclear waste are both security and health nightmares for the people tasked with moving them, as well as the communities through which they might move.
Pro-nuclear-power and pro-fossil-fuel people lie about green energy the way men lie about women: because they like what they have, they like the feeling of power it gives them, they like the howling explosions– inside a V8’s cylinders and within the atoms at the core of any reactor– and they like the idea that it takes a lot of high-performance engineering to keep either from blowing apart the engines they power. Solar is disappointing: it just sits there. The worst thing a wind turbine does is catch fire and fall over, and that’s no fun. The opportunities to be manly, to engage in rescue, are few and far between.
The pushback against green energy resembles the pushback against queer theory: it’s an upset of the status quo, and it takes pieces of the carefully crafted “masculine” identity and says, clearly: you men are either lying or being lied to, and the lies are in service to a destructive (and self-destructive) lifestyle.
It sounds a bit like the fight over roundabouts versus traffic lights
Date: 2023-11-13 11:17 pm (UTC)Some of the status should be a whole lot less quo, IMO.