Tournament: Las Vegas | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge: 

Once upon a time...

 there lived an ordinary man and an ordinary woman who lived in the ordinary town of Rocky Flats, Colorado. The town was like any other town except that it lay in the shadow of the massive Rocky Flats Nuclear Power Plant. Now the residents of Rocky Flats did not mind their little town being so close to a nuclear power plant, for the plant provided them their main source of income and employment. Not to mention an endless supply of electricity to keep the town's bowling alley up-to-date in the latest ten pin technology. Nuclia's parents, like most citizens of Rocky Flats, were both employed at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Power Plant. Mr. E. Lastic Waste, was the head janitor at the plant, sweeping up plutonium waste spills and uranium dust. His wife, Toxic Waste, worked in the company cafeteria serving on the microwave buffet line. They both loved their work very much, for it afforded them great luxuries such as 1976 Bicentennial Edition dinnerware and shag carpeting for their bathroom. Lastic and Toxic had everything a loving couple in Rocky Flats could want, except for one thing....a child. When Toxic finally became pregnant, the couple was happy beyond belief. Toxic continued to work at her job at the power plant as she still had 2 more place settings to go on her 1976 Bicentennial Edition dinnerware. Little did she know she was exposing little developing Nuclia to very high doses of nuclear radiation that would change her life forever.

We welcome Nuclia Waste to center stage. Her power goes beyond human comprehension. Not because we cannot fathom it, but rather because we choose to exclude it. How silly does it seem that such a quaint town, such as Rocky Flats, could produce such a monstrosity?

Heteronormativity has constructed the city as the place where the unnatural and sinful acts of homosexual activity flourish. However, even in the rural town of Rocky Flats can create a monstrosity like Nuclia.

Our current relationship to Ecology Privileges the “natural”, which creates a binary that normalizes heterosexism and justifies the denigration of queer sexualities as deviant. This is the same for areas that are rural, such as Rocky Flats, the queer is erased in the name of masculinity and heteronormativity.

Mortimer-Sandilands 05 Catriona. “Unnatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology”. Invisible Culture Issue 9. http://www.invisibleculture.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_9/issue9_sandilands.pdf

Here, I would like to turn our attention away from ecology as a science and toward environmentalism as a politics of natural space, in which sexuality has also had interesting influences. Indeed, the sexual values enacted in struggles over space have had at least as strong an influence on environmentalism as those enmeshed in the science of ecology. Although there are many stories I could tell, what I would like to talk about, briefly, is the fact I mentioned in my discussion of national parks at the beginning of the paper. To reiterate: In its early incarnation, North American environmentalism emerged as a response to the rise of industrial cities. As I have argued, wilderness and rural spaces came to be valued as sites to be preserved “away” from the corrupting influences of urban industrial modernity. In addition, the cultivation of “natural” spaces inside cities, including urban parks such as Central Park in New York, was conceived as a way to bring health and morality to the city’s inhabitants. Nature was, here, a space of intensive moral regulation; given the increasing association of sexuality with ideas of nature, sex became a key element in the organization of nature as a regulatory space. The early parks movement was, as I mentioned, born partly from a desire to facilitate recreational practices that would restore threatened masculine virtues. Of course, this desire was also planted in the assumption that cities were sites of the particular moral “degeneracy” associated with homosexuality. In part as a result of the idea that homosexuality was a sort of illness, medical thinkers of the late nineteenth century came to believe that the environmental conditions of large urban centers actually cultivated homosexuality. There were various explanations offered for this supposed urban moral degeneration: the idea that the work men did in cities no longer brought them into close and honorable contact with nature; the racist belief that homosexuality was associated with “immigrant” populations; and the growing idea that homosexuality might have environmental causes. To quote Boag, “pollution, tainted foods, and even the fastpaced nature of urban life,” in the minds of some Victorian physicians, “induced” homosexuality. 15 In response, the creation of remote recreational wild spaces and the demarcation of “healthy” green spaces inside cities, was understood partly as a therapeutic antidote to the social ravages of effeminate homosexuality. The joint construction of sex and nature is quite complex; although I will not get into it here, it is also strongly tied to modern ideas of nationalism in both the United States and Canada. There are, however, two sets of ideas I would like to pull out. First, there is the assumption that homosexuality is a product of the urban, and that rural and wilderness spaces are thus somehow “free” from the “taint” of homoerotic activity. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. At the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the western wilderness was a space heavily dominated by communities of men. These men – prospectors, cowboys, ranchers, foresters -like British sailors at sea for more than six months, frequently engaged in homosexual activity. Indeed, if sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s research was correct, there was in the nineteenth century actually more same-sex activity in the remote wilderness than there was in the cities. As I suggested earlier, such men were not understood as “homosexuals.” To quote Kinsey, “these are men who have faced the rigors of nature in the wild…. Such a background breeds the attitude that sex is sex, irrespective of the nature of the partner with whom the relation is had.” 16 It was not until homosexuality became coded as an inherent and biologically-based identity that it came to be understood as an illness and located in the “artificiality” of cities. Certainly, cities made it easier for interested men to find anonymous homoerotic contacts. Also, port cities such as New York and San Francisco eventually became very important places for homosexual men to carve out spaces for their fledgling sexual communities. But it was the growing visibility of these communities, and the increasing association of homosexuality with artificiality, that tied the homosexual to the urban, not some actually greater homoerotic presence. Simply put, it was not until the homosexual became urban that he became “unnatural”; emerging environmental critiques of the artificiality of cities were thus instrumental in shaping ideas about the artificiality of queers. The linkage of homosexuality and cities, here, was clearly a product of ideology, but that ideology has had an enormous material impact on both queers and natural spaces. The pervasive assumption that queer communities are essentially urban has had the effect of erasing the ongoing presence of rural gay men and lesbians whose lives might not look much like Christopher Street. This erasure has contributed to the flight of rural queers from their homes to find “true” community in cities, to the ghettoization of queer culture, and to the widespread assumption that country spaces are inherently hostile to queer folk. Although one must not ever forget Brandon Teena and Mathew Shepard, it is abundantly clear that urban spaces are often far more dangerous for us than rural ones. In addition, these spatial processes have also affected the spaces of nature. On the one end of the spectrum, we see the physical concentration of gay men and lesbians in particular urban neighborhoods; their distinct and diverse patterns of community organize urban nature in particular ways. Less well known, however, is the fact that heterosexism in rural landscapes has physically shaped what rural nature looks like. Recreational and rural natures are materials marked with heterosexism. In the former category, such spaces as national parks clearly bear the developmental imprints of specific gendered and sexualized ideas of nature. For one small example, think about public campgrounds. Particularly after the 1950s, many camping facilities were intentionally designed to resemble suburban cul-de-sacs, each campsite clearly designed for one nuclear family, and all camping occurring in designated “private” spaces away from “public” recreational activities such as swimming, hiking, and climbing. Trees were cut down in a pattern that screened campsites from one another, but not from the roadway or path, so that the rangers or wardens could still see in and make sure nothing illegal (such as sodomy) was taking place. For a second and earlier example, consider the settlement of much of the state of Oregon. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Donation Land Act (DLA) encouraged a heterosexual pattern of colonization because of the way land was allotted to settlers. “A white male who was twenty-one or older … received a 160-acre parcel and an additional 160 acres for his wife." 17 Women were not eligible for allotments as single people, and it was clearly in the advantage of men to have the two parcels, so “very young girls suddenly became marriageable and were soon wives.” 18 Because of the comparatively large size of these allotments and the popularity of the program, not only did the DLA encourage heterosexual marriage along with the settlement of the west, but it imposed a monolithic culture of single heterosexual family-sized lots on the land, with significant effects on the economic and environmental history of the region from nuclear family farming patterns, the inhibition of town development, and even increased forestation. As a result of the association of degenerate queers with cities, and rural and wilderness landscapes with wholesome, heterosexual family life, there developed in the nineteenth century the idea that nature is a primary place in which to develop moral and physical fitness. With the hetero-masculine deployment of wilderness at the turn of the century – which, incidentally, also saw the rise of organizations like the Boy Scouts – we can see the antecedents of how nature was deployed during the Great Depression and into World War II as a site for the cultivation of a rigidly disciplinary heteromale ideal.In the United States, for example, organizations such as the Civilian Conservation Corps provided unemployed young men with physically and morally healthy work in the wilderness. At apparent risk of degeneracy in cities, such men were located in camps far from urban centers and, between 1933 and 1942, strenuously “installed 89,000 miles of telephone line, built 126,000 miles of roads and trails, constructed millions of erosion control dams, planted 1.3 billion trees, erected 3,470 water towers, and spent over 6 million hours fighting forest fires.” 19 All of these developments are markers of a national desire for a particular kind of man as much as they are about the infrastructural needs of particular landscapes.

The Natural/Unnatural binary sets up the way we relate to Nuclear Power, as well. Energy is a productive creation while it’s waste is seen as unclean. Nuclia Waste, born out of the ashes of radiation, performs her identity as ultimate embodiment of the queer and the “unpure”.

When Nuclia was born with a full head of green hair, Toxic, Lastic and the whole town of Rocky Flats were shocked and amazed. But like most strange things, the town eventually accepted little baby Nuclia just as easily as they accepted that all the fish in Rocky Flats Lake had three eyes. Little baby Nuclia grew up like any child in the little town of Rocky Flats and did play well with the other children. They especially liked to take her along to catch lightening bugs, since she seemed to attract them in large numbers with her unusual green glow, though the moths were a bit of a problem. Over time, Nuclia's radiation caused the local insect population to mutate into butterflies, in a variety of day-glo and bio-luminescent colors, often in a paisley pattern.  Although voracious in their caterpillar stage (accounting in part for Rocky Flats' interesting barren appearance), the butterflies have become one of the major features that make Rocky Flats the tourist Mecca it is today. It was obvious from the start that Nuclia's radiation destroyed natural fibers.  Lead diapers had to be specially produced for her.  Cotton would burst into flames on contact with her skin, and wool would simply disintegrate.  (She is a mixed blessing to sheep, as one touch will cure them of cancer and hoof-and-mouth, but also renders them completely and permanently bald.  On the plus side, it is now known that mating cloned "Nucliated" sheep with common stock results in lambs which provide sensuously soft hot-pink wool, and a crown roast which cooks itself to a delightful medium-rare.) This is why, to this day, you will only find Nuclia swathed in the finest of polyester fashions. When Nuclia began to grow triple breasts at puberty, her parents knew they had more than a daughter on their hands — they had the Plutonium Princess, as was written in the ancient Rocky Flats Nuclear Prophecy, available now in bookstores across the nation. Of course, being the Plutonium Princess and having three breasts only served to make Nuclia the most popular date in high school. She was elected the Rocky Flats High School Homecoming Queen, beating Miss Dee Contaminate by one vote. This would be the beginning of a lifelong feud between Dee and Nuclia. Dee swore by her EPA approved prom gown that she would someday rid Rocky Flats of Nuclia Waste forever. Nuclia, resplendent in a gown of her own design (acid green with Brillo pads at collar and cuffs, now on display in the Smithsonian; protective goggles recommended), took no notice of her new nemesis. Dee could only look on in impotent rage as Nuclia danced the Atomic Bomb to the music of Lise Meitner and her Nuclear Fission Band.

Like anything impure, after Nuclear waste became a visible danger to the general of Rocky Flats the Government went in and turned the area into a Nature Refuge, burying the waste underground- along with violent impact the waste had on the individuals living in the area.

Conceptions of the pure of body, and the environment, continue to be based on sexualized politics that privileges heteronormative roles.

Shiloh R. Krupar 2012(“Transnatural ethics: revisiting the nuclear cleanup of Rocky Flats, CO, through the queer ecology of Nuclia Waste” http:~/~/cgj.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/05/24/1474474011433756.pdf)

Nuclia Waste’s spectacular habitation of a national sacrifice zone and the suggestion of the porosity of her body and the environment also offer a performance-based ‘transuranic queering’ of the post-nuclear nature refuge, fantastically exaggerating dominant environmental norms and challenging discourses of fitness and progress that might underlie the ‘return to nature.’ ‘Queers’ have often been positioned as boundary-creatures, neither fully natural nor fully civilized. Queers have responded to their positioning as unnatural/artificial/pathologized in different ways: from sexual authenticity and the living of one’s nature, to a transgressive embrace of their supposed perversion and the radically inauthentic.76 ‘Queer’ as a verb has been used by environmental ethicsand environmental education to question the adequacy of dualisms, to reevaluate pedagogy and nature.77 Catriona Sandilands argues, to queer nature is to question its normative use, to interrogate relations of knowledge and power by which certain truths about ourselves are allowed to pass unnoticed, without question; to queer nature is to ‘put out of order’ our understandings so our ‘eccentricities’ can be produced forcefully.78 Queer theory, as it informs the emergent field of queer ecology, strives to disrupt the ‘naturalness’ of nature and sexuality, transforming, destabilizing, and subverting sexual identity and sexual norms as they inform environmental positions and practices – particularly the enmeshment of hetero-normativity and eco-normativity.79 This operation provides a way to reframe the DOE’s environmental cleanup actions as practices that contribute to the reproduction of a particular sexual order. In the context of the changes occurring in the US’s warfare economy, including a way of organizing life that historically eroded the distinction between civilians and soldiers and founded the nation-state on military-backed industrial capitalism, the nuclear complex has had ‘a presence in our lives far beyond the explicit debates about energy generation; it has a strong hand in defining who we are and what we should become.’80 The cleanup and management of Rocky Flats as a wildlife refuge is a highly visible project within this context; it is praised as the first nuclear weapons complex to be completely cleaned up. The figure of the drag queen illuminates a crucial aspect often overlooked in the discussion of militarization and nature: any production and management of nature is intimately part of a genealogy of regulation of sexuality. Discourses of nature have been employed to formulate and regulate specific sexual identities; likewise, understandings of sexuality have informed ideas about nature. The Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge – its naturalization as a wild space – is largely successful due to the traditions of landscape aesthetics and pastoralism, and the US’s history of environmental conservation and recreation, which have historically essentialized and racialized nature as a space apart, as a space of intensive moral and sexual regulation.81 Further, the nature refuge rehearses a fantasy of self-enclosure that permeated Cold War America. As Peter Coviello has argued, power in the nuclear age was thoroughly sexual and ‘queer’; it could penetrate anywhere, knowing no bounds and creating anxiety over radiation and sexuality alike. Sex and sexuality, therefore, were an intimate part of militarization during the Cold war, constructed to manage the population. Militarization entailed more than the material-economic organization of society around the production of weapons; it also molded social institutions seemingly not connected to weaponry or directly to war, from fields of knowledge to (re)definitions of proper masculinity and sexuality.82 As many scholars of the Cold War have noted, this period involved intense efforts to ensure biological and ideological reproduction, through the containment of women in homes, suspicion of the homosexual as the weak link in the domestic order, and the defense of white heterosexual masculinity.83 The DOE’s recent turn to the traditionally gendered role of cleanup demonstrates a reinvestment in Cold War sexual politics. During the cleanup of Rocky Flats, the DOE and Kaiser-Hill occasionally invoked the feminine, supposedly taking on the qualities of a ‘good housekeeper’ in the spectacular removal of the site from public burden and the organization’s frugal spending on the cleanup.84 This ‘gender bending’ may appear to be preferable to the many practices previously noted at Rocky Flats. However, the DOE’s cleaning actions can also be understood as a continuance of Cold War masculinity that militarized the boundaries of the domestic and the natures of sexuality, strategically reiterating traditional domestic usages of the feminine.85 In the contemporary instance, the rhetoric of domesticity attempts to alleviate public scrutiny of the cleanup effort and re-claim safety; it also mobilizes longstanding ideas about the resilience of nature and the US nation to naturalize the bounding and policing of the site and thereby maintaining the institutional ethical framework ultimately effacing the cleanup labor. Nuclia Waste’s mutant drag runs contrary to this attempt at heterosexualized containment and reproduction of nature. If ‘home is radiance,’86 then Nuclia Waste devotes her energies to reirradiating this wonderland, subverting the DOE’s rhetoric of domestic responsibility and security by playfully committing to the restoration of the Rocky Flats facility as her Plutonium Palace.

This continued attempt to secure the environment, as exemplified by Rocky Flats, leads militarism and violence by the eradication of impurity.

Jon Barnett, 2001 (Fellow in the School of Social and Environmental Enquiry at University of Melbourne, The Meaning of Environmental Security: Ecological Politics and Policy in the New Security Era, pg. 47 p3 – pg. 49 p1)

The most important critique of expanded conceptions of security, of which environmental considerations are part, concerns the possibility of olonizatio responses. Because the prevailing approach to security is still ‘mired in ideological straitjackets’, and carries with it an array of sentiments a narrow problem-solving mindset, its utility for comprehending responding to non-military issues is questionable (Dalby 91 29). When examining discourses of ‘the war on drugs’, ‘water wars’, Third World turbulence and so on, it becomes increasingly apparent that this post-Cold War security agenda is still basically the same realist agenda that prevailed throughout the Cold War, although now exhibiting previously secondary concerns brought forth in the sudden absence of the olonizati West—East threat. Campbell argues that the Western response to the current era of world politics is ‘characterised by the representation of novel challenges in terms of traditional analytics, and the varied attempts to replace one enemy with (an)other’ (Campbell 1992: 8). This is borne out in the 1998 US National Security Strategy which states that ‘the current international security environment presents a diverse set of threats to our enduring goals and hence to our security’, including transnational threats such as ‘terrorism, international crime, drug trafficking, illicit arms trafficking, uncontrolled refugee migrations and environmental damage’ which ‘threaten US interests, citizens and the US homeland itself (Clinton 1998: 10). A key part of the US response is to ‘maintain superior military forces at the level of readiness necessary to effectively deter aggression, conduct a wide range of peacetime activities and smaller-scale contingencies, and, preferably in concert with regional friends and allies, win two overlapping major theater wars’ (Clinton 1998: 11). This holds true for environmental security as well, as Smil argues: In thinking about the new horse of environmental degradation, it is really the old gibbon’s heart of national security that many of the new securitarians want to preserve. They alter, dilute, and extend the meaning of security beyond any classical recognition, but they never give up on its original idea which embodies conflict and violence. This is because the idea carries them to the heart of existential anguish and moral peril, fears without which their message would not merit such an anxious hearing by politicians, the military, or the mass media. (Smil 1997: 108) Thus the hidden goal of security — that of maintaining power within the state — remains unchallenged so long as security is projected as an absolute imperative. In short, the effect of broadening national security to include social, political and environmental issues — without changing the nation- state as the referent — is the further colonization of domestic society by realism’s ultimately violent logic. For as long as security remains tied up in the state-centric realist paradigm, introducing new issues will be conceptually counterintuitive and practically counterproductive to these issues, and to the broader goal of justice. In most of the accounts discussed in this chapter, the logical confines of conventional security reasoning are not broken, and the state remains the site of politics. So, adding new issues to the agenda of security studies does not necessarily equate to a modification of the conceptual base, and may lead to a bolstering of the state-centered approach (Shaw 1993). Expanding the security agenda without seriously contesting the meaning of security perpetuates the failure of the security concept to take into account the needs of people. In this broader (but not deeper) agenda, security is still the preserve of states acting in their own interests — interests which for the most part do not correspond to the needs of people.

This logic extends across borders. The purity of Masculinity seeks to label those who are outside of its dominant frame as deviants that must be eradicated. This makes war inevitabable.

Ramazani 2001 (Vaheed Ramazani. “September 11: Masculinity, Justice and the Politics of Empathy” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 21.1-2 (2001) 118-124)

What we might call the implied author of Bush's narrative is an imaginary construct that exceeds the immediate text and permeates the discourse of our culture at large. Masculine-gendered and misogynistic, "pro-life" and yet pro-war, this invisibly normative narrative persona is equally available to women and men. Our women-in-uniform, Newsweek proudly reports, are assertive, competitive, masculinized warriors, Amazons who say pithy things like "Get out of my way."27 Terrorists, on the other hand, are feminine-gendered,28 "cowards" who go after "soft," not "hardened," targets. "When we perceive a threat to locations we can protect," says one impressively hard marine brigadier general, "we are there with increased vigilance and a really bad attitude."29 What this kind of threat display is intended to do is not only to establish, once and for all, which country is in the position of global alpha-male, but also to restore to health and security the mutilated body of that reigning superpower. "Our wounds as a people," says President Bush, "are recent and unhealed" (14 September). "I will not," he insists, "forget this wound to our country" (20 September). And therein lies the magic of the fetish: we remember our wounds to heal our wounds; we keep our wounds open not the better to remember the similar wounds we inflict around the world, but the better to forget, belittle, or ignore them. The president's refrain, "We will come together" (20 September), performs rhetorically this collective "healing," transforming the incomplete body of the nation—a cracked and bleeding female form—into a sturdy and purposeful masculine agent. "This country will define our times, not be defined by them" (20 September). With these words, too, the president turns the nation-state from the passive (female) recipient of a violating aggression into the virile progenitor of world solidarity. Healing requires a sex-change operation.This change does not merely compensate for feminine lack, shoring up an unsound and effluent surface; it fulfills, in the process, a hygienic function, purging the body politic of foreign impurities. The tight fit between normative gender stereotypes and the American fantasy of moral and physical purity is cogently summarized by a navy photograph showing antigay graffiti on one of the many bombs destined to fall on the Taliban "fags."30 These bombs may initially, the president warns, cause the verminous or rodent-like terrorists to "burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places" (7 October).31 But terrorists, like weeds, will be mercilessly "rooted out"; like household pests, they will be exterminated as we "rid the world of evil" (14 September). Like metastasizing cancer cells or a deadly contagion from which, we suddenly realize, "we are not immune" (20 September), the "enemies of freedom" (20 September) are a subhuman life form, devoid, by definition, of the capacity to reason. Terrorists are not people with political grievances, and terrorism is not a symptom of anything but itself ("terrorism is terrorism," quips President Bush); it is best treated, then, by radical surgery, by technologically antiseptic military "operations."This kind of pathologizing, dehumanizing rhetoric facilitates escalation rather than understanding, sweeping ultimatum rather than "patient justice": "These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. ... Every nation, every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" (20 September). This is the language of "conflict dissolution," which Wai Chee Dimock, in discussing the concept of rights, counterpoises as follows to "conflict resolution":This conflict dissolution, the reduction of every conflict to a nonconflict, the reduction of every opposing claim to a nonclaim,...confers on the concept of rights not just a coercive authority but what appears to be a moral authority, making it 'morally legitimate for one human being to determine by his choice how another should act.' The triumph of rights is, above all, an epistemological triumph, one that confers reality on one claim, one body of evidence and one line of reasoning, over that of its opponent. And the undoing of the losing claim, the erasure of its evidence and the dismissal of its reasoning, is perhaps the necessary basis for the authority granted the right holder, an authority which, to be seen as moral authority, must appear to issue not from the successful demolition of its opponent, but from a Reason immanent in the nature of things.32

Fast forward to present day....

Now that Nuclia is an adult and has matured into a full grown radioactive beauty, she has realized the full potential of her Special Plutonium Powers. They allow her to ward off evil voodoo curses, break fashion rules with a single outfit, and grow extra appendages at will, including lengthening her legs for parades. Her Plutonium Powers also allow her to tame wild beasts such as her favorite pet reptile, Gaytor, an alligator she found one day living in the Rocky Flats Swamp.  Her garden is also quite something, producing, among other things, parsnips the size of Louisville Sluggers.  All of her produce has a half-life instead of a shelf-life.  Dee Contaminate, forever bitter, once tried to sabotage the garden.  She was thwarted, however, when the cabbage she was molesting with her machete started to roll downhill, nearly crushing her.  As she crawled painfully away, she muttered, "I fought the slaw and the slaw won. This time..." Nuclia Waste has always used her Special Plutonium Powers for good, and never evil. She used her special architectural powers to completely rebuild the town of Rocky Flats into the Plutonium Palace it is today, incorporating the original nuclear power plant into the design -- much to the chagrin of Miss Dee Contaminate, who tried to thwart Nuclia’s town rebuilding every step of the way. Always searching to rid Rocky Flats of Nuclia Waste, Dee is quite alone in her sinister endeavors, for Nuclia constantly draws more and more admirers (of many sexes, races, and galactic origins) into her orbit. Her personal physicist, Dr. Miles Island III, attributes this to a previously unknown attractive force he has dubbed "Groovity." Enjoy your visit to Nuclia Waste’s Radioactive Pad. Be sure to take the tour of Rocky Flats and peek in on Nuclia in her Plutonium Palace. If you like the site, be sure to send an email to the Plutonium Princess and tell her so. She always answers her fan mail personally. And remember, "It’s never too late to have a happy childhood!"

Instead of waste being the monster that must be cleansed from the earth, it should be a constant reminder because, like the queer, it is always present.

Thus, Tia and I affirm a Queering of Nuclear Power.

Nuclia Waste’s Camp performance is the moment of interjecting difference into set binaries that attempt to purify waste.

Shiloh R. Krupar 2012(“Transnatural ethics: revisiting the nuclear cleanup of Rocky Flats, CO, through the queer ecology of Nuclia Waste” http:~/~/cgj.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/05/24/1474474011433756.pdf)

This form of drag shows potential in its playful insistence on impurification and irreverent critiques of nature/culture and waste/human binarisms.72 Such drag does not so much de-naturalize as it embraces the natural as the always already transnatural. Relishing the impossibility of purity, mutant drag queers nature because nuclear waste and radioactivity are queer. In place of an environmental politics grounded in a purified version of nature, and rather than the heterosexual family and home as the place for environmental practice, mutant drag directs attention toward the impurifications already in existence as that which requires responsibility, creative ethical responses, and broader kinship. The camp aspects of Nuclia Waste’s visual register flout conventions understood to be human, suggesting that ‘the human’ has been irrevocably changed by nuclear technologies. In spite of the danger of mutant drag potentially normalizing mutant bodies as outrageous and consumable spectacle, this performance practice opens up possibilities for unruly biological and social exchanges to serve as material resources for environmental politics that do not respond to toxicity with purifying logics, hidden eugenics, or transphobia. Mutant drag begs the question: Why respond to toxicity with austerity? This is particularly interesting in the present context of neoliberal cost-benefit discourses that limit environmental performances to individually mindful consumption and rational recycling. By contrast, mutant drag plays with an overload of kitsch and celebrates life through boundary-breaking yet light-hearted engagement with the ‘grotesque body’ of the irradiated mutant and nuclear waste. Such queer attachments work to ‘celebrate the excess of life and politicize the sites at which this excess is eradicated.’ More specifically, Nuclia Waste’s mutant drag potentially cultivates public memory of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge as the residue of an earlier era of nuclear technologies, family, becomes irradiated with glamor, and ‘pure nature’ as retroactive construction. As nostalgia for the Cold War intensifies, and as the bomb production period appears outdated and available as retro, the drag queen plucks Rocky Flats from the dustbin of history to serve as both domicile and sartorial inspiration. The drag queen’s use of camp rediscovers history’s waste in the former plutonium plant, amplifying the excesses of the nuclear regime of power and nation-making as riotously ‘bad taste.’ Her radioactive retroactivity calls attention to the weird temporality of waste – the continuing presence of the leftover, the elusive, the remnant – potentially anything that has escaped progress and the technological reproduction of the nature refuge.74 Rocky Flats, in the margins of a spent historical mode of Cold War industrialization, manufacturing labor, and the nuclear family, becomes irradiated with glamor, a recurrent theme of camp humor.75 Rather than paralyzing fear of fallout or apocalypse, Nuclia suggests a risibility politics that starts with the ridiculous or oppositional meanings of exposure. Such an approach might serve to cultivate plural modes of constituting public culture rather than resort to containment and conservative preservation efforts. Camp in this sense offers a modality of ‘counter publicity’, wherein ‘getting a laugh’ might provide an opening for critique that grapples with the contradictory and absurd ways waste is produced and lived with.

Continuously, the Role of the Ballot is to interrogate systems of power through the performance of queerness. Nuclia is an example of how queerness allows us to challenge systems of power, such as heteronormativity and environmental control, and subvert domination.

Winnubst 06 (philosophy PhD, Penn State University Shannon, Queering Freedom 2006. p 195 AJM  GoogleBooks)

The scarcity at work in the production of our cheap consumer goods is not the scarcity of the middle class in the U.S. The United States is not a country of scarcity, but of a remarkably lopsided distribution of immense wealth. 15 The excess that drives our market economy perpetuates inhuman scarcity in the lives that produce its goods. To excavate these lost pasts erased from our consuming consciousness opens middle-class consciousness onto the actual scarcities at work in the fictional scarcity of our consumption practices. To cultivate these ‘memories’ opens onto a queer consciousness of how desire perpetuates systems of domination. It can also open onto possibilities that things could be otherwise: we could consume differently, buying and growing and exchanging locally; we could even enjoy our lives without the onslaught of cheap consumer goods that increasingly keep most of the world’s population trapped in economic dependency and political subordination, while also locking us into the endless cycle of anxious consumption and future satiety. And we could recognize that the alleged scarcity of goods that sends us into buying frenzies and their promise of a more secure future is nothing but another marketing tool, one that depends on our not remembering how or where or why or for whom these objects are made. Our senses of power and freedom change when we begin to think and act in these queer ways. Power is not about one class wielding economic and political power over another; it is about a web of interlocking values that perpetuate the domination of the most privileged at the expense of all other lives, most often through the narrative of desire and its myth of scarcity. And freedom is not to own as much as we desire; it is not to gain an illusory and impossible security in George W. Bush’s “Ownership Society.” Freedom is to recognize the lost pasts embedded in our everyday practices and to cultivate pleasures that do not perpetuate these violences. It is to stop ignoring and erasing these lost pasts in our idolatry of the (market’s) future, and thereby open onto different kinds of pleasures. These snapshots of different subject positions’ responses to living life without a concept of the future give us some sense of how cultures of phallicized whiteness perceive a call to a politics without a future. To halt the temporality of the future anterior as the dominant mode in which we live our lives is to resist these cultures and their values. It presents a way of interrupting and disrupting the domination of phallicized whiteness, decentering its grip on us. At the same time, to halt the temporality of the future calls us to risk radical uncertainty in the politics and erotics of our lives, to open ourselves to not-knowing and unknowing as viable modes of experience. For bodies in power, such a call to risk will likely affront our deepest senses of our selves and worlds: it will likely fall on deaf ears. For oppressed and dominated bodies, this may already be how we are living and to embrace it consciously may be experienced as a call to joy and creativity or, at a minimum, a profound relief. (I use “we” on both sides of this division to express the multiple subject positions I hold on the social map of power.) The call to a politics without a future strikes us in varying ways; it can be decentering, or even a relief, hilarious, and a sense of grounding for movements already underway, giving voice and a space in which to cultivate unimaginable pleasures. How we respond may tell us much about how queerly multiple our “I” of identity can become.