Copyediting:

Here is the paragraph of the “Queer Ecology” article that I will be editing:

The theoretical beginnings of queer ecology are often traced back to foundational texts in queer theory. Catriona Sandilands, a foremost scholar in the field, cites queer ecology's origins back to Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1976). Sandilands suggests Foucault “lays the groundwork for much contemporary queer ecological scholarship in his observation that, beginning in the nineteenth century, modern regimes of biopower came to conceive of sex as a specific object of scientific knowledge, organized through, on the one hand, a ‘biology of reproduction’ that considered human sexual behavior in relation to the physiologies of plant and animal reproduction, and on the other, a ‘medicine of sex’ that conceived of human sexuality in terms of desire and identity.”[1]

The first thing I want to change about this paragraph is the block quote that takes up half the paragraph. I think it could be paraphrased to be much more concise and accessible. To do this, I am planning on removing the part about the “modern regimes of biopower” as that is a scholarly concept that most people probably do not understand and it does not need to be defined to understand queer ecology. I also want to define some of the terms used in this quote, such as “medicine of sex”. I plan on doing this by going to the citation on the Wikipedia page and reading that source, or referring back to Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. I also might rephrase the first sentence a little bit but I think it’s pretty clear.

From there, my next step is to add on to this paragraph. I want to explain the origins of the actual term “queer ecology” and dissect its meaning a little more. Specifically, how it intersects with queer theory, ecology, and feminism, but is also distinct from all of them. Next, since the paragraph opens with a reference to the early texts in queer ecology, I want to talk a little more about these sources and their influence on the subject. I might also mention some other early sources as well.

If necessary, I will also go into how to apply queer ecology in real life. Using the article, “How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time” by Alex Johnson, I will explain how one can incorporate the ideas of queer ecology into their lives and through feminist praxis.