Environmental Justice
How do children in Nightwork pay the price for environmental injustice?
Possible answers: children protesting dump site, Myers' children going to a barely funded school, Melvil and his brothers scared for their lives/their mother's life
In which ways are womxn/feminine identities problematically aligned with "nature" and gender stereotypes within the novel?
Possible answers: most womxn characters defined solely through motherhood/caretaking, Amanda's most noticeable identifier being that she's good at interior decorating, womxn constantly fixing drinks for Dave
Name at least one male character who Dave/Hansen describes as beautiful/attractive.
Possible answers: Navarro, Salazar, Cecil
In what ways are womxn excluded from the majority of this novel/how is womxn's environmental activism erased?
Possible answers: Almost all womxn characters are the wives of other characters, no female leadership in institutions or environmental justice movements
What is the most important tenet of environmental justice theory in Hogan's essay?
The right to a safe environment where anyone can work/live/play.
How does Hansen describe the dualism between "nature" and "civilization" as false/a myth?
Possible answers: Shields's house on the hill near toxic waste dump, river overflowing into Gifford Gardens, any description of landscape
DeWitt is a complex character; how is his gender presentation normalized in the novel?
Possible answer: any of Dave's responses to DeWitt
How does Hansen’s novel critique white, male, heterosexual conceptions of nature and environment?
Possible answers: Shields, DeWitt, Angela Myer's brother
How does Hansen (or Dave) employ principles of environmental justice in Nightwork?
Possible answers: Salazar and Dave discussing suing Tech-Rite, Dave's protection of Melvil, showing the CEO, Shields, as inherently guilty
How is nature portrayed as something that privileged people own in this novel?
Possible answers: Shields living in big house in "nature," how Hansen describes landscape, DeWitt's mansion
How are healthy queer relationships juxtaposing unhealthy straight relationships in the novel?
Possible answer: Angela Myers and Bruce Kilgore vs Cecil and Dave.
What is one way the textbook explains how lesbian and gay detective fiction writers construct murder and crime as another greater crime?
Possible answers: prejudice, systemic exploitation of land
What are some explicit and implicit examples of environmental racism in the novel?
Possible answers: Gifford Garens populated by the poor/minorities, Ossie Bishop exposed to toxic chemicals unknowingly
What similarities can you draw between the environmental injustices committed by Tech-Rite and those being committed by institutions in our world today?
Possible answers: Nuclear testing by US military, maquiladoras and industrial waste, I70 Ditch project
How does Hansen’s use of a nonchalant gay man reject the notions of dualism in terms of sexuality?
Possible answers: Dave is gay/rational, marginalized/of dominant culture
Hogan explains that Nightwork frames prejudice as criminal. In what ways have we succeeded/failed to make this true in the real world?
Possible answers: Title IX, militarization of police force, gay panic laws
What is one way in which the novel subverts the concept that ‘nature’ is (and only is) ‘untouched wilderness?’
Possible answers: Shield's house, Gifford Gardens
How is blame for environmental injustice shifted by those with privilege/power to those with less?
Possible answers: Shields blaming Paul Myers for his wife's death, gangs blamed for making Gifford Gardens a "bad" place to live, Salazar/Dave conversation where it's explained that Tech-Rite won't face consequences for pollution
How does this book exemplify the paradox in queer eco-feminism that positions gay as both natural and unnatural?
Possible answers: reactions to DeWitt's gender presentation, Dave and Cecil's relationship, DeWitt's description of "pastoral lovers"
What is your understanding of the interconnections between the environment and social injustice?
Possible answers: open to interpretation