Pamela VanHaitsma
Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

While Rachel Carson’s public contributions to the mainstream environmentalist movement are widely recognized, few people realize how these contributions were enabled by her intimate, same-sex relationship with Dorothy Freeman. In the last few years, however, some writers and even organizations have started to celebrate Carson as a “queer icon” of environmentalism. My talk embraces this moment of remembering Carson’s queerness but calls for deeper consideration of its intersections with questions of gender, disability, race, and nation. How, I ask, can a queer public memory of Rachel Carson be fashioned to serve what activist and eco-communicator Leah Thomas theorizes as intersectional environmentalism?