Queer Ecofeminism in Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades

Abstract In India, as elsewhere, the global environmental crisis has been propelled by the binary thinking of self and other to the detriment of the nonhuman animals and environment as well as the poor and queer in a devastating form of human exceptionalism that intersects with coloniality and patriarchy. First published in 2011, Walking with the Comrades is a collection of three essays by Arundhati Roy on the topic of the Maoist rebels in east-central India who have been fighting the Indian government for more than five decades. In this article, the author closely reads both the visual and verbal aspects of this book to argue that Roy queers the binaries of human and nonhuman, masculinity and femininity, capitalism and communism, and even violence and nonviolence as she describes the rebels fighting, yet also trying to live sustainably. The author calls this queer ecofeminism. While some might see Roy’s interest in gender and the environment as ecofeminist, the author shows how her disruption of binaries queers ecofeminism in this book.