Div III Student Forrest Fleur S23 Talks Drag and Environmental Justice

Below is drawn from the transcript of their conversation. You can watch the video here.

ASH: Hi, my name is Ash Richardson-White. I use they or he pronouns, and I am an intern with Sustainable Hampshire, and I am here with Forrest Fleur.

FORREST: Hi, I’m Forrest, I use any pronouns in and out of drag, and I’m a Div III here at Hampshire.

ASH: Awesome! It's so great to talk with you today. So my first question is: I know that your Division III project had been involved with sustainability. Will you tell us a bit about what it is and how it's gone?

FORREST: So, my Div is a lot of things, working at the intersections of different spaces that I’ve felt really passionate about throughout my education. Namely, it’s looking at a lot of queer justice and environmental justice and different ways that I can imagine them intersecting. It’s looking like a community garden project that’s co-sponsored by a drag house in downtown Albany; it’s looking like exploring my drag through like an eco-contextualized lens and the designing and conceptualizing process that goes along with that; and it’s looking like a collection of writing that’s kind of centering queer ecology and an approach to agriculture, social gardening.

ASH: That’s really awesome. So, tell us about what your process looked like. How did you get started in sustainability and environmental justice and queer justice? What started you thinking about all that?

FORREST: Yeah, so I’ve been a person that would always be outside — like in high school I was a cross country runner, always in the woods. I grew up going to summer camp every summer and then worked at that same summer camp for five years, and being outside among the animate world has always been a really important part of my life and something that I really care about — and working with kids in outdoor education, environmental education, has been really inspiring to me and felt like really important work.

And then in 2020, in quarantine, I started gardening for the first time in my backyard. Couldn’t really leave the house, wanted something to do, picked that up, and really fell in love with it. And working with plants, working with food, is so central to an environmental movement and food justice, being a really queer intersection of the environmental and social justice that I feel really passionate about exploring. Yeah, that’s kind of what brought me to do stuff…

ASH: Yeah! What’s it been like to continue to explore that through like educational and non-educational things here at Hampshire? Like, over the course of your Division II, did you ever get involved with any extracurriculars here, anything like that?

FORREST: I actually came in with a lot of my environmental sciences perspective already fulfilled from my time at Carnegie Mellon [where I transferred from], so being at Hampshire, a lot more of my coursework has been more focused on social inquiry and that side of looking at environmental humanities more, so that's been really critical to informing [my Div]. And also, my work at the Hampshire College Farm and getting a lot of practical skills and hands-on experiences have been very good for me. And then outside of the strictly environmental lens, thinking about producing and organizing and empowering others through their art...

ASH: Will you tell us a bit about how your drag intersects with sustainability?

FORREST: Yeah, yeah. So, funnily enough, I actually found drag for the first time right around when I started gardening for the first time through the one friend that I was spending time with during quarantine encouraging me to watch Drag Race. So those two things kind of came into my life at a really similar time, and I was really interested in exploring drag and design and performance and activism through that lens.

And I sat for a while with like, What is my perspective? What do I have to say as an artist? A lot of performers are performing to perform, but it felt really important to me to perform because I have something to say and something that I think that people should hear, and that's when I kind of met with the vision of What about a drag artist whose work is inspired by the animate world and is working with themes of environmental justice, building a relationship with nature? Then through my studies, the queer-ecological piece became very relevant because we, as queer people, are socially taught that our identities are “other,” are unnatural, something outside of that natural order of things, which is a total project of the Western side of the narrative, and something that I really try to center in my work and empowering others which is a major part of the artform of drag — that's where I’m kind of driven from.

ASH: That's really lovely. Anything else you wanna say to first years or incoming students or other people at Hampshire who are interested in exploring similar things?

FORREST: I think for anyone coming into Hampshire, the most important thing that I can name is: the world is your sandbox, and it is what you make it, especially if you're at Hampshire, and I feel like you’re gonna have so much choice and so much in terms of like your direction, and that can be really hard trusting yourself sometimes, but leaning into your interests and your explorations is how you’re gonna really get the most out of your experience here.

ASH: Cool, thank you so much for taking the time to interview with us, it’s been a fantastic time. I hope that your journey continues and is fruitful.