Transnatural Ethics: Rocky Flats and the Queer Ecology of NuClia Waste - Presentation by Shiloh Krupar October 7, 2010

Shiloh Krupar is on the geography faculty of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

For over forty years, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Rocky Flats facility near Denver, CO produced the plutonium trigger device of nearly every nuclear weapon in the U.S.'s arsenal and in the process amassed an incomprehensible amount of waste. Wiped clean of all former buildings and signs of human labor and industrial production, the site is slated to open to the public as a national wildlife refuge. Its conversion from wasteland to refuge serves as a DOE model of environmental remediation applicable to other decommissioned nuclear facilities across the vast U.S. nuclear landscape.

The talk then turns to the performative persona of radioactive drag queen comedienne NuClia Waste, who provides one striking example of transnatural practice with potentially profound implications for Rocky Flats. NuClia Waste reconstructs subjectivity in waste and cultivates a specifically "queer ecology" that displays relations of power, critiques normative dimensions, questions boundaries, and plays with new ways of being in the world.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/quadrantcal.php