Abstract

Queer Nature is a nature-connection project in service of the queer community and their allies. Queer Nature was launched in 2016 by Altai, Pinar, and So Sinopoulos-Lloyd on Arapaho, Ute, and Cheyenne territories (Boulder Country, Colorado). They offer sliding scale workshops and ‘wilderness’ immersions that facilitate multispecies relationship-building and access to ancestral skills while bringing awareness to Indigenous and settler colonial histories. In parallel to these activities, the Queer Nature co-founders regularly share photographs and stories on the corporate social media platform Instagram. Now followed by more than 14,000 people online, this artistic, activist, and scholarly project is representative of the ways that systematically marginalized communities can use social media as a means for community building and circulating ideas and practices. The market-driven nature of online networking services and the financial interests that dictate them mean that platforms such as Instagram are constantly changing. The infrastructures that support these services are, further, fragile and vulnerable, particularly with regard to the crisis of climate change. With these considerations in mind, this thesis creates a space in which Queer Nature's online artistic practice is given a careful, critical contextualization as both participating in queer visual culture and contributing to a “futurist” sensibility. Grounded in photographic visual analysis, this thesis investigates the radical potential of Queer Nature’s images, and their circulation, in a time of great uncertainty. The context of this work is both political, in that attacks against queer and racialized communities have not ceased, and environmental, in that the dramatic loss of biodiversity and the rapid rise of sea levels have the most profound impact on the most vulnerable populations.