Dragon Lovers and Plant Politics: Queering the Nonhuman in Hoa Pham’s Wave and Ellen Van Neerven’s “Water”

This article examines strategies of queering the nonhuman in two texts: Vietnamese Australian author Hoa Pham’s novel Wave and Indigenous Australian author Ellen Van Neerven’s eco-novella “Water.” In these texts, queer signifies non-normative sexuality and a restless process facilitating the dynamic relationship between self and environment in diasporic and postcolonial contexts. The human-nonhuman coupling of queer desire illuminates posthuman relations as a site for alternative political becoming. Reading these texts as examples of a localized queer ecology, this article interrogates how imaginations of nature and place can bridge queer theory, ecocriticism, and Asian diasporic and Indigenous speculative fiction.