Feminist Scholar Analyzes History Of Pelicans And ‘Racialized, Sexual Violence’
13th January 2018
I am not making this up.
Logan O’Laughlin, a gender studies graduate student at the University of Washington, conducted a lecture titled “Queer Toxic Ecologies: Analyses and Implications of the Pelicans of the BP Oil Spill” at the University of British Columbia.
The workshop description explains that oil-stained pelicans represented the massive impact of the BP spill.
“But what do these pelican images tell us about gender, race, and sexuality in ecological contexts?” O’Laughlin asked in the description. “Utilizing feminist discourse analysis of pelicans in post-spill popular media and historical analysis of pelicans as the state mascot of Louisiana, this presentation articulates how this bird is symbolically and materially implicated in a history of racialized, sexual violence.”
Something tells me this guy is ‘gender fluid’.