Truck Sluts, Petrosexual Countrysides, and Trashy Environmentalisms

Abstract

If the climate crisis, undergirded as it is by oil dependency, can be called “cis” insofar as it is driven by cisheteronormativity, then it requires a response to oil that is broadly trans—transgender, transspecies, trans-corporeal, trans-material. Rural petro-masculine iconography elides and erases our oil dependencies by pretending to a total control over fossil fuels and thereby a control over cultural and material formations of stable, binaric gender and sex. To think outside these foreclosures of both nonbinaric genders and oil's animacy, this essay introduces readers to Truck Sluts, an Instagram account that puts rural trucking culture at the center of a three-fold t4t exchange: trans-for-trans, trans-for-trucks, and a more expansive trans-for-trans* that crosses materialities. The author argues that Truck Sluts explicitly models these kinds of exchange and that doing so unseats the cisheterosexism of the petro-masculine rural, which is necessarily environmentalist work.