Zane McNeill – författare

Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future uses the lens of queer ecologies to explore environmental destruction in Appalachia while mapping out alternative futures that follow from critical queer perspectives on the United States' exploitation of the land. With essays by Lis Regula, Jessica Cory, Chet Pancake, Tijah Bumgarner, MJ Eckhouse, and other essential thinkers, this collection brings to light both emergent and long-standing marginalized perspectives that give renewed energy to the struggle for a sustainable future. A new and valuable contribution to the field of Appalachian studies, rural queer studies, Indigenous studies, and ethnographic studies of the United States, Deviant Hollers presents a much-needed objection to the status quo of academic work, as well as to the American exceptionalism and white supremacy pervading US politics and the broader geopolitical climate. By focusing on queer critiques and acknowledging the status of Appalachia as a settler colony, Deviant Hollers offers new possibilities for a reimagined way of life.

This collection posits three questions. 1) What structures of violence and oppression are experienced and shared by human and nonhuman laborers working and dying in these necropolitical facilities? 2) If there is an intersection between class and species, which, in turn incorporates race, gender, abilities, and other categories of oppression, in which ways is the contemporary Animal Activist Nonprofit Sector (AANS) reifying or disrupting these hierarchies in its mission towards animal liberation? 3) If there are classist and racist biases in AANS, how can the AANS incorporate social class in dialogue with the liberation of nonhuman animals in order to build strategic alliances and coalitions between social movements and political subjects? This book not only envisions a world without these hierarchies but offer tangible steps the AANS can take to achieve liberation for human and nonhuman animals.

This book offers a critical exploration of the interplay between law, care ethics, and the body, emphasizing how legal systems both reflect societal values and regulate and  discipline bodies and sexualities that deviate from normative standards, branding them as deviant or pathological. The authors contend that visibility—often celebrated as empowering—frequently serves as a mechanism of state control, subjecting marginalized bodies to cycles of hyper-visibility and erasure. Grounded in critical disability studies, queer theory, and Foucault’s theories of power, the book challenges liberalism’s focus on rights and autonomy, advocating instead for a framework centered on care ethics.