In \u201cPlace,\u201d Eli Clare describes his nature-filled childhood in rural Oregon as he reconciles with the contradiction between the way he was raised and his urban, metronormative, reality as a queer adult. Clare\u2019s writing takes a deeply personal tone as he describes his connection to the land he was raised on, which was both immersed nature and at odds with the natural environment through the town\u2019s logging industry. Clare serves as an environmentalist in this section, identifying the ways in which his perspective on what was \u201cgood\u201d for the environment shifted as he got older. He separates his \u201cold self,\u201d a child who believed the environmental propaganda taught to him in his hometown, and his \u201cnew\u201d self, an activist who questions that propaganda. By interweaving ideological arguments about class, race, and sexuality with vignettes from his childhood, Clare encourages readers to have empathy toward his childhood self and the propaganda-based environmental beliefs common in his hometown.<\/p>\n
The relationship between Clare\u2019s sense of nature and his sense of self is complex, which is partially caused by the feeling that he cannot return \u201chome\u201d to the place he was raised. This tension between childhood and adulthood has many causes for Claire, but his queerness and conflict between rurality and queer identity is an undercurrent to this section. Although he misses the connected nature of his childhood environment, he can also identify with the stereotypically urban, visible queerness in his future. Queerness was one of many reasons Clare left the environment of rural Oregon, allowing him to discover new perspectives contrary to the propaganda he was raised within.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In \u201cPlace,\u201d Eli Clare describes his nature-filled childhood in rural Oregon as he reconciles with the contradiction between the way he was raised and his urban, metronormative, reality as a queer adult. Clare\u2019s writing takes a deeply personal tone as he describes his connection to the land he was raised on, which was both immersed … Continue reading Metronormativity and the Environment in \u201cPlace\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5706,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344663],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5706"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1435,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434\/revisions\/1435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}