CAS/WMNST 597: Special Topics
Penn State University
Spring 2025
Student Projects
“Aliveness” and “Creativity”: Reimagining Environmental Politics with Rachel Carson
Dylan A.
To recuperate what Lida Maxwell describes as the “aliveness and creativity” missing from contemporary environmental politics, this paper examines the romantic letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman. Presenting Carson’s “Firefly letter” (1956) as a frame to explore themes of wonder, reverence for life, creative inquiry, and the wish––for contact and shared experience––that animates the epistolary medium, I argue that their letters model “aliveness and creativity” in their frequent writing in the subjunctive-imperative. This particular grammatical mood, most clear when Carson and Freeman ask each other to imagine the environmental encounters and curiosities they recount in their letters, combines wish, command, and achievement. Questioning how the animating, not-quite-actualized qualities of the ‘wish’ might engender creative environmental ‘achievements,’ the subjunctive-imperative offers a powerful rhetorical framing capable of ‘commanding’ not only discrete solutions to our complex environmental problems but those impelled by a desire to co-imagine a shared future.
(air)Spaces of Unknowability: Rachel Carson, Birds, and Queer Archives
Ella Campopiano
Letters exchanged between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman reveal that the two women spoke of birds constantly—and how they understood their own intimate relationship through these birds. In 1944, Carson published a short piece on the chimney swift—a bird who “spends almost its entire waking life in the air.” Three birds had been observed tending nest. Carson’s two possible explanations for this are: one of these birds is a “nursemaid,” or, the swift is “polygamous.” “What the truth is, no one actually knows.” In this moment, Carson opens up space for accepting what is unknowable. In these openings up, I locate opportunities for cross-species entanglements and human/nonhuman becomings. These are spaces in which we may not only delve into the complexities of queer love, desire, and selfhood, but understand as intermediary spaces in which to take pleasure in unknowability and read queerness as that which is unknowable.
Queering Presbyterian Predeterminism through Silent Spring’s Embodied Environmental Epistemology and Intersectional Environmentalism
Ethan M. C.
This paper will track Presbyterian Christian influence on Rachel Carson’s environmental rhetoric and epistemology in Silent Spring and argue how her notion of interconnectedness subverts heteronormative understandings of ecology and being. Religion serves as a means to communicate the seemingly invisible, delicate threads that govern causality in ecologies. Through religion, we often imagine ourselves separate from these ecologies as our monetary time on earth pales in importance compared to the afterlife. Her environmental epistemology in Silent Spring magnifies interconnectedness by tracking how DDT flows through ecosystems into the human body (an ecosystem that mimics larger ecosystems). This resemblance imbues the reader with the invisible laws that dictate causality in nature, reconnecting them to nature. With religious notions and language, she ignites this embodied epistemology and encourages readers to act as stewards over the land and thus each other. This form of care evokes knowing defined by inclusion and interconnectedness, subverting traditional religious and biological justifications of heteronormativity in nature.
Ekphrasis in The Sea Around Us
Ryan Hall
In this presentation, I focus on Rachel Carson’s early book The Sea Around Us and her method of using ekphrasis, the ancient rhetorical practice of vividly describing real and imaginary scenes, to bring her readers into the world she created with her writing. Her ekphrasis both placed humans in the natural world and exhibited a desire to experience a thorough and embodied understanding of nature. Carson’s ekphrasis seems to have served an inclusive, yet somewhat hidden, purpose: I argue that Carson’s ekphrasis in The Sea Around Us served to make the ocean more accessible to audiences who had no other form of access to such bodies of water. Through her detailed description and embodied portrayal of the ocean and the natural world, Carson’s ekphrasis, read through the lens of queer and feminist methods, brought her audience to the ocean.
Rachel Carson and Asexual Desires in the Archives
Ashley Hay
A growing cohort of scholars have expanded asexuality in theoretical and political directions, asking that we resist compulsory sexuality logics in our reading practices. Extending this call, in this paper, I forward a specifically asexual method that does not merely sidestep sexual speculation, but asserts strategies for reading against dominant sexual teleologies in the archives. With Rachel Carson’s archives as the groundwork, I join asexual theorists to work through ecological theories of entanglement, dynamism, adaptation, and non/propagation to take a closer look at her romantic relationship with Dorothy Freeman. Theorizing asexual rhetoric through atelos recognizes ecologically directional systems while simultaneously allowing for—even expecting—alternative rhythms of expansion and contraction. I point to two places in Rachel Carson’s rhetoric we can see her disruption of sexual teleologies: through the eco-erotic entanglements present in her relationship with Freeman, and in their discussion about the intervals in their relationship.
The Rhetoric of Air Politics: War Metaphors in Silent Spring
Athena Lee
Rachel Carson’s rhetoric of war in her seminal work Silent Spring compares the use of pesticides to the nuclear bomb in the Cold War era. These metaphors of environmental war seem to be strategic in practice as they paint a picture of a precarious situation that forces the audience to grapple with the realities of entanglements with pests and pesticides. Michel Serres explicates that when humans fight against nature, they fight against fellow man. Similarly, when humans fight against fellow man, they fight against nature. This cycle of destruction can be remedied by what Serres calls a natural contract. The intervention that I make is in my discussion of queer precarity in making natural contracts. This research adds a valuable discussion of war metaphor in the broader context of environmental rhetoric and queer studies.
Queering Silences, Migratory Tensions, and the Oceanic in Rachel Carson’s Work
Shewit Mikael
Rachel Carson’s rhetorical strategy of silence in Silent Spring and The Sea Around Us opens up questions about who gets to be heard in environmental discourse and what silence might signal beyond ecological mourning. This paper explores how Carson’s lyrical yet activist tone leaves subaltern and climate-induced migration largely unspoken, positioning silence not just as absence, but as refusal, disavowal, and at times, complicity. Drawing from Cheryl Glenn, Logan Smilges, Eve Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, and Christina Sharpe, I interrogate silence as rhetorical method, motif, and resistance. How might we read Carson’s silences alongside the queer, migrant, and postcolonial voices that inherit the consequences of environmental devastation? Through a queer rhetorical methodology, I argue that Carson’s ecological silences and oceanic migrations gesture toward submerged knowledges and queer ecologies—where silence is not just loss but survival, not just absence but fugitive presence. Migration complicates Carson’s vision of silence and demands new rhetorical accountability.
Toxic Sensorium: A Daughter’s Witness to Cancer, Care, and Rachel Carson
Sidney Miles
My mother’s battle with breast cancer has reshaped how I think about toxicity, illness, and the environment. Anchored in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and theories from environmental rhetoric, my personal narrative situates cancer within the broader context of the “toxic sensorium,” a term used to describe the pervasiveness of harmful substances in everyday life. Drawing from a recorded conversation with my mother, I examine themes of intensive mothering, defensive consumerism, and the fragmented nature of healthcare systems. The essay highlights how environmental harm and medical care both rely on an ethos of tolerance, placing the burden of survival on individuals rather than systemic accountability. Through reflective storytelling and scholarly engagement, I advocate for a more integrated, justice-oriented approach to care that centers prevention, holistic understanding, and shared responsibility in both environmental and medical contexts.
Toward a Germinative Fluidity: Rachel Carson’s Uses of Immortality as Queer Worldmaking
Sergio Peña
In this project, I analyze Rachel Carson’s rhetoric of immortality as a form of queer worldmaking that contest normative ideals of relationality and the afterlife. In “Undersea,” an essay originally published in 1937, Carson describes the decomposition of life forms and their reintegration with water as “material immortality.” In her same-sex romantic letters to Dorothy Freeman, Carson describes shifts in her beliefs on immortality since “Undersea” to complicate the significance of remembrance. Notably, disability shapes these shifts as Carson’s health declined in the late 1950’s. I offer germinative fluidity as an analytic, based in Maria Lugones’ germinative stasis and active subjectivity to explain Carson’s shifts in consciousness. Carson’s embrace of material fluidity enables a transformative process of consciousness that germinates alternative possibilities for intimacy and connection beyond the living body. Carson’s immortal consciousness complicates normative practices of remembrance, and allows for relationships to flourish through spiritual, sensual and creative means.
The Queer Child in Rachel Carson’s Works: Playful Rhetoric and Epistolary Worldmaking
Maria Tsangarakis
Rachel Carson’s letters to Dorothy Freeman and connection with her adoptive son, Roger, highlight the profound impact relationships play in fortifying a childlike, wonderous relationship with nature. I examine Rachel Carson’s letters to Dorothy Freeman, and Carson’s text The Sense of Wonder: A Celebration of Nature for Parents and Children to uncover how Carson uses the epistolary genre to evoke the queer child. Carson’s letters engage in a “playful,” “wonderous,” and “childlike” flirtation with Freeman by producing a giddiness reminiscent of childhood crushes. However, scholars like Erin J. Rand, Robin Berstein, and Kathryn Bond Stockton note, white, cis-hetero child(hoods) is/are consistently re/configured as in need and worthy of protection, making them hyper-present, subsequently, denying queer children of color access to childhoods. The epistolary genre allows Carson to engage in a “playful” rhetoric, making the queer child present, but simultaneously overlooks queer children of color and their ability to access wonder.
Embodied Land Art and Ecofeminism: Reimagining Resistance Through Carson and Mendieta
Yi-Ning Zhao
This project explores the ecofeminist resonances between Rachel Carson’s environmental writings and Ana Mendieta’s earth-body artworks. While Carson’s Silent Spring critiques chemical pollutants framed through the patriarchal militarization of nature, Mendieta’s Silueta series physically integrates the female body with the earth, reflecting on cultural displacement and ecological harm. I explore the epistemological tensions between Rachel Carson’s scientific activism and Ana Mendieta’s embodied land art. Rather than reinforcing ecofeminism’s symbolic reclaiming of the female-nature connection, I argue a feminist ecological politics rooted in legibility, refusal, and untranslatability. Drawing on theories from Lugones, Jones, and Alaimo, I examine how Carson and Mendieta destabilize notions of knowledge, resistance, and care, inviting us to imagine a feminist environmentalism grounded not in coherence or redemption, but in an ethic of rupture, dissent, and unknowability.
Course Description
This course surveys the environmental rhetoric of Rachel Carson—both her published writing and more personal archives—through the intersecting lenses of feminist, queer, and disability studies.
Rachel Carson’s importance as a woman writer and rhetorician is impossible to overstate. Celebrated as a scientist whose poetic style appealed to a wide readership, Carson came into the public spotlight with the commercial success of the second book in her “sea trilogy,” The Sea Around Us (1951). But the rhetorical contribution for which she is best known is her fourth book, Silent Spring (1962). Having awakened readers to the damaging effects of unrestrained pesticide use, Silent Spring is frequently credited with inciting the emergence of the modern environmental movement. As rhetoric scholar Craig Waddell observes, “environmental historians are nearly unanimous” that “the modern environmental movement—with its emphasis on pollution and the general degradation of the quality of life on the planet—may fairly be said to have begun” by Silent Spring.
Scholars from across multiple disciplines have examined Carson’s published and archived writing, her public speaking and, to a lesser extent, her so-called personal life and letters. Within this larger body of work, feminist scholars explore the gendered backlash directed at Carson following the publication of Silent Spring. They examine this more targeted backlash within the broader context of sexism directed at her and other women scientists and public figures throughout the 1950s and 60s. In addition, scholars of queer studies have begun to examine Carson’s published work alongside her private love letters exchanged with another (presumably cisgender) white woman, Dorothy Freeman, from 1952 until Carson’s death in 1964. Here we consider the importance of that intimate relationship to Carson’s public contributions. Moreover, within disability studies, Carson’s life and work can be investigated in connection with questions of eco-normativity, toxicity, and breast cancer.
Through weekly reading, in-class discussions, and informal group presentations, we will survey these scholarly conversations alongside Carson’s own publications, speeches, and letters. Working to address gender, sexuality, and disability as intersectional, we will push existing scholarly conversations about Carson further to address more deeply questions about settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, intersectional environmentalism, trans and intersex sex panics, and so on.
Informed by and contributing to these scholarly conversations, each seminar participant will propose and carry out an original, interdisciplinary research project about Carson’s environmental rhetoric that is related to his/her/hir/their area of specialization within rhetoric and/or women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.
Objectives
Upon successful completion of the course, you will be able to:
- Develop original, interdisciplinary research projects about Rachel Carson’s environmental rhetoric.
- Participate in scholarly conversations within the subfields of feminist, queer, and disability studies.
- Approach gender and sexuality as interlocking systems of power and categories of identity that intersect with other systems and identities.
Reading Schedule
(Week 1) Introductions
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. “Introduction” and “Chronology.” In Rachel Carson: A Literary Companion, 3–77. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2021.
Gaard, Greta. “Ecofeminism.” In Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow, 68–71. New York University Press, 2016.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. “Ecofeminism.” In Rachel Carson, 125–28.
Sandilands, Catriona. “Queer Ecology.” In Keywords for Environmental Studies, 169–71.
Cram, Emerson. “Queer and Trans Ecologies as Care Practice of Indispensability.” Environmental Communication 18, no. 1–2 (2024): 21–27.
Cram, Emerson, Martin P. Law, and Phaedra C. Pezzullo. “Cripping Environmental Communication: A Review of Eco-Ableism, Eco-Normativity, and Climate Justice Futurities.” Environmental Communication 16, no. 7 (2022): 851–63.
For further reading:
Lear, Linda J. Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. H. Holt, 1997.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Vakoch, Douglas A., ed. Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature. Routledge, 2020.
Cram, Emerson. Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West. University of California Press, 2022.
Ray, Sarah Jaquette, and Jay Sibara, eds. Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory. University of Nebraska Press, 2017.
(2) Intersectional environmentalism
Thomas, Leah. The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet. Voracious, Little, Brown and Company, 2022.
Oglesby, Cameron. “The Generational Rift over ‘Intersectional Environmentalism.’” Grist, February 10, 2021.
Jarratt-Snider, Karen, and Marianne O. Nielsen. “Introduction.” In Indigenous Environmental Justice, 3–15. University of Arizona Press, 2020.
For further reading:
Bullard, Robert D. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Westview Press, 1990.
Sandler, Ronald D., and Phaedra C. Pezzullo, eds. Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement. MIT Press, 2007.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
(3) Water
Steingraber, Sandra. “Introduction.” In The Sea Trilogy, edited by Steingraber, xi–xxvii. Library of America, 2021.
Lear, Linda, editor. “Introduction” and “Part One.” In Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, ix–1. Beacon Press, 1998.
Carson, Rachel. “Undersea.” In Lost Woods, 3–11.
Carson, Rachel. “Lost Worlds: The Challenge of the Islands.” In Lost Woods, 63–75.
Carson, Rachel. “New York Herald-Tribune Book and Author Luncheon Speech.” In Lost Woods, 76–82.
Carson, Rachel. “Preface to the Second Edition of The Sea Around Us.” In Lost Woods, 101–9.
Carson, Rachel. “Two Letters to Dorothy and Stanley Freeman.” In Lost Woods, 168–71.
Madera, Judith. “The Birth of an Island: Rachel Carson’s ‘The Sea Around Us.’” Women’s Studies Quarterly 45, no. 1/2 (2017): 292–98.
Blum, Hester. “‘Bitter with the Salt of Continents’: Rachel Carson and Oceanic Returns.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 45, no. 1/2 (2017): 287–91.
Woelfle-Erskine, Cleo, and July Cole. “Transfiguring the Anthropocene: Stochastic Reimaginings of Human-Beaver Worlds.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (2015): 297–316.
Na’puti, Tiara R. “Oceanic Possibilities for Communication Studies.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 95–103.
Robyn, Linda M. “Environmental Racism: Contaminated Water in Indigenous and Minority Communities.” In Indigenous Environmental Justice, 92–114.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “Introduction.” In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, 5–14 AK Press, 2020.
Further reading:
Carson, Rachel. The Sea Trilogy. Edited by Sandra Steingraber. Library of America, 2021.
All of Women’s Studies Quarterly 45, no. 1/2 (2017), “At Sea”
Hazard, Cleo Wölfle. Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice. University of Washington Press, 2022.
Harrison, Michaela. “Whale Whispering.”
(4) Letters
Sowards, Stacey K. “Rhetorical Functions of Letter Writing: Dialogic Collaboration, Affirmation, and Catharsis in Dolores Huerta’s Letters.” Communication Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2012): 295–315.
VanHaitsma, Pamela. “LGBTQ+ Epistolary Rhetoric/Letter Writing.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies and Communication, edited by Isaac West, 2021.
Carson, Rachel, Dorothy Freeman, and Martha E. Freeman. Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964, xiii–242. Beacon Press, 1995.
Further reading:
Cram, Emerson. “Archival Ambience and Sensory Memory: Generating Queer Intimacies in the Settler Colonial Archive.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2016): 109–29.
VanHaitsma, Pamela. Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. [open access]
Hawkins, Ames. These Are Love(d) Letters. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019.
Grasso, Linda M. “Edited Letter Collections as Epistolary Fictions: Imagining African American Women’s History in Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends.” Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860. Routledge, 2016. 249-267.
(5) Dorothy Freeman
Carson, Rachel, Dorothy Freeman, and Martha E. Freeman. Always, Rachel, 247–551.
Lear, Linda. “Afterword: Searching for Rachel Carson.” In And No Birds Sing, 205–18.
Further reading:
Popova, Maria. Figuring. New York: Pantheon Books, 2019.
(6) Pesticides
Brooks, Paul. “Foreword: Rachel Carson and Silent Spring.” In And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, edited by Craig Waddell, xi–xviii. Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Further reading:
Waddell, Craig, ed. And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.
Jones, Christian, and Dave Evensen. “The Legacy of a Giant: David Sepkoski Examines Whether Racism Influenced the Ideas of a Renowned Scientist.” University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, April 12, 2022.
(7) Reception
Carson, Rachel. “The Real World Around Us.” In Lost Woods, 147–63.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. “‘Address’ to the Women’s National Press Club.” In Rachel Carson, 81–82.
Carson, Rachel. “Women’s National Press Club Speech.” In Lost Woods, 201–10.
Carson, Rachel. “A New Chapter to Silent Spring.” In Lost Woods, 211–22.
Waddell, Craig. “The Reception of Silent Spring: An Introduction.” In And No Birds Sing, 1–16.
Smith, Michael B. “‘Silence, Miss Carson!’ Science, Gender, and the Reception of Silent Spring.” Feminist Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 733–52.
Hazlett, Maril. “‘Woman vs. Man vs. Bugs’: Gender and Popular Ecology in Early Reactions to Silent Spring.” Environmental History 9, no. 4 (2004): 701–29.
Unger, Nancy. “Women, Sexuality, and Environmental Justice in American History.” In New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism. Rutgers University Press, 2004, 45–60.
Clapp, Tara Lynne. “Social Identity as Grammar and Rhetoric of Motives: Citizen Housewives and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.” KB Journal 5, no. 2 (2009).
(8) Birds
Carson, Rachel. “Ace of Nature’s Aviators.” In Lost Woods, 24–9.
Carson, Rachel. “Road of the Hawks.” In Lost Woods, 30–32.
Carson, Rachel. “Vanishing Americans.” In Lost Woods, 189–91.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. “Birds.” In Rachel Carson, 92–5.
Yeager, Liza. “Rachel Carson and the Veery.” BirdNote. January 4, 2022.
Maxwell, Lida. “Queer/Love/Bird Extinction: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a Work of Love.” Political Theory 45, no. 5 (2017): 682–704.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Whiteness of Birds.” Liquid Blackness 6, no. 1 (2022): 120–37.
Gross, Terry. “Central Park Birder Christian Cooper on Being ‘a Black Man in the Natural World.’” Fresh Air. NPR, June 12, 2023.
Lanham, J. Drew. “A Convergent Imagining.” Emergence Magazine. February 1, 2021.
Huck Distinguished Lecture: J. Drew Lanham, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Clemson University, “Coloring the Conservation Conversation”
Future reading:
Lanham, J. Drew. The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. Milkweed editions, 2017.
Cooper, Christian. Better Living through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. Penguin Random House, 2024.
(9) Love
Maxwell, Lida. Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love. Stanford University Press, 2025.
Visiting Speaker: Lida Maxwell, Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Boston University
(10) Ida Sprow
Dove, Sylvia. “Ida Sprow (1920–2011).” Rachel Carson Landmark Alliance, n.d.
Lear, Linda, and Ida Sprow. “Notes from Interview with Ida Sprow,” October 6, 1991. The Linda Lear Collection of Rachel Carson (MS-001). The Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives.
Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth. “Introduction,” “4. A’ Endless Miration: Live-in Service,” and “6. This Work Had a’ End.” In Living in, Living out: African American Domestics in Washington, DC, 1910–1940, 1–7, 97–122, 147–72. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.
Hartman, Saidiya. “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 18, no. 1 (2016): 166–73.
Jackson, Kellie Carter. “‘She Was a Member of the Family’: Ethel Phillips, Domestic Labor, and Employer Perceptions.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 45, no. 3/4 (2017): 160–73.
(11) Reproduction
Carson, Rachel. “Address to the National Council of Women of the United States.” Speech transcript. New York City, October 11, 1962. Rachel Carson Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. “Reproduction.” In Rachel Carson, 204–6.
Langston, Nancy. “Rachel Carson’s Legacy: Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals and Gender Concerns.” GAIA: Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 21, no. 3 (2012): 225–29.
Ensor, Sarah. “Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity.” American Literature 84, no. 2 (2012): 409–35.
Gaard, Greta. “Reproductive Technology, or Reproductive Justice? An Ecofeminist, Environmental Justice Perspective on the Rhetoric of Choice.” Ethics and the Environment 15, no. 2 (2010): 103–29, 131.
Murphy, Mollie K. “What’s in the World Is in the Womb: Converging Environmental and Reproductive Justice through Synecdoche.” Women’s Studies in Communication 40, no. 2 (2017): 155–71.
Pollock, Anne. “Queering Endocrine Disruption.” In Object-Oriented Feminism, edited by Katherine Behar, 183–99. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Fritsch, Kelly. “Toxic Pregnancies: Speculative Futures, Disabling Environments, and Neoliberal Biocapital.” In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara, 359–80. University of Nebraska Press, 2017.
(12) Breast cancer
Carson, Rachel. “Letter to Dr. George Crile, Jr.” In Lost Woods, 223–26.
Leopold, Ellen, ed. “A Private Little Hell: Selected Letters of Rachel Carson.” In Coming out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic, 60–71. Seal Press, 2000.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. “Carcinogens.” In Rachel Carson, 95–97.
Steingraber, Sandra. “‘If I Live to Be 90 Still Wanting to Say Something’: My Search for Rachel Carson.” In Confronting Cancer, Constructing Change: New Perspectives on Women and Cancer, edited by Midge Stocker, 181–200. Third Side Press, 1993.
Pezzullo, Phaedra C. “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 345–65.
Lorde, Audre Geraldine. Cancer Journals. Aunt Lute Books, 1980.
Gatison, Annette Madlock. “The Pink and Black Experience: Lies That Make Us Suffer in Silence and Cost Us Our Lives.” Women’s Studies in Communication 38, no. 2 (2015): 135–40.
Clare, Eli. “Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure.” In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities, 242–65.
(13) Toxicity
Carson, Rachel. “The Pollution of Our Environment.” In Lost Woods, 227–45.
Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco-Normativity.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 199–230. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Ah-King, Malin, and Eva Hayward. “Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption.” Technosphere Magazine, March 20, 2019.
Dykstra, K. J. “Toxic Sexing: Aaron Apps’ Intersex Poetics in Our Chemically Altered Age.” In Interdisciplinary and Global Perspectives on Intersex, edited by Megan Walker, 73–88. Springer International Publishing, 2022.
Boast, Hannah. “Theorizing the Gay Frog.” Environmental Humanities 14, no. 3 (2022): 661–79.
Chen, Mel Y. “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, no. 2 (2011): 265–86.
Packer, Melina. “Becoming with Toxicity: Chemical Epigenetics as ‘Racializing and Sexualizing Assemblage.’” Hypatia 37, no. 1, (2022): 2–26.
(14) Change
Carson, Rachel. “The Edge of the Sea.” In Lost Woods, 133–46.
Carson, Rachel. “Clouds.” In Lost Woods, 175–85.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. “Climate.” In Rachel Carson, 100–102.
Hawhee, Debra. “Introduction: Intensifications.” In A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis Is Changing Rhetoric, 1–19. University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Belser, Julia Watts. “Disability, Climate Change, and Environmental Violence: The Politics of Invisibility and the Horizon of Hope.” Disability Studies Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2020).
Bloomfield, Emma Frances, and Rebecca M. Rice. “Care and Constraints in the Climate Crisis: An Intersectional Rhetorical Analysis of News Comments about the El Dorado Fire.” Women’s Studies in Communication 46, no. 4 (2023): 433–55.
Sackey, Donnie Johnson. “Introduction: Rhetoric and the Placing of (Invasive) Species” and “Holy Mackerel! Reconsidering Invasion Ecology in the Anthropocene.” In Trespassing Natures: Species Migration and the Right to Space. Ohio State University Press, 2024, 1–27, 107–35.
Barnett, Joshua Trey. “Rhetorical Ecologies of Violent Care: Thinking with Spotted Lanternflies.” In Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture, edited by Christopher J. Gilbert and John Louis Lucaites, 21–37. University of Alabama Press, 2025.
(15) Preservation
Carson, Rachel. “Mattamuskeet: A National Wildlife Refuge.” In Lost Woods, 41–9.
Carson, Rachel. “Our Ever-Changing Shore.” In Lost Woods, 113–24.
Carson, Rachel. “The Lost Woods. A Letter to Curtis and Nellie Lee Bok.” In Lost Woods, 172–4.
Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. “(Not So) Strange Bedfellows: Indian Country’s Ambivalent Relationship with the Environmental Movement.” In As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock, 91–110. Beacon, 2019.
Unger, Nancy C. “From Book Joints to Sisterspace: The Role of Nature in Lesbian Alternative Environments in the United States.” In Queer Ecologies, 173–98.
DeMirjyn, Maricela. “Queering Eco-Activism: Ways of Organizing and Uplifting Conservation Efforts by Queer and Trans Eco-Activists.” Parks Stewardship Forum 39, no. 2 (2023): 312–20.
Pamela VanHaitsma 