Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9962937
Ina Linge
Dance orients the performer's body toward both environment and pleasure, yet the intersection of environmental and sexual attunement in dance practice remains an underexplored area of research. This article considers how environmental and sexual readings of dance practice can be brought together by proposing a queer ecological approach to modernist dance. Drawing on research in dance studies, feminist and queer science studies, and sexology studies, the article examines the work of Loïe Fuller, an early pioneer of modernist dance, to show how Fuller's work engages with themes of both sex and nature and consequently introduces environmentally attuned thinking to early twentieth century sexual knowledge production. By examining the parallels and divergences between Magnus Hirschfeld's early twentieth-century sexological writing about "transvestitism" and Loïe Fuller's modernist dance, via the copycat dancer Henry Cyril Paget, I show that both dance and sexology rethought the relationship between sex and nature by grappling, to different extents, with a queer vision of nature, where nature loses its explanatory force and moral authority. This reveals the importance of nature and the nonhuman in the production of modern concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality and the important role that dance can play in illuminating the intersection of sex and nature.
{"title":"Queer Ecology in Loïe Fuller's Modernist Dance and Magnus Hirschfeld's <i>Die Transvestiten</i>.","authors":"Ina Linge","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9962937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962937","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Dance orients the performer's body toward both environment and pleasure, yet the intersection of environmental and sexual attunement in dance practice remains an underexplored area of research. This article considers how environmental and sexual readings of dance practice can be brought together by proposing a queer ecological approach to modernist dance. Drawing on research in dance studies, feminist and queer science studies, and sexology studies, the article examines the work of Loïe Fuller, an early pioneer of modernist dance, to show how Fuller's work engages with themes of both sex and nature and consequently introduces environmentally attuned thinking to early twentieth century sexual knowledge production. By examining the parallels and divergences between Magnus Hirschfeld's early twentieth-century sexological writing about \"transvestitism\" and Loïe Fuller's modernist dance, via the copycat dancer Henry Cyril Paget, I show that both dance and sexology rethought the relationship between sex and nature by grappling, to different extents, with a queer vision of nature, where nature loses its explanatory force and moral authority. This reveals the importance of nature and the nonhuman in the production of modern concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality and the important role that dance can play in illuminating the intersection of sex and nature.</p>","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7613976/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9750491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9962827
Brian Williams, J. M. Porter
This article examines how racial capitalism has shaped the ecological and technological dynamics of cotton production in the United States South. Cotton’s destructive dependence on chemicals and on the extraction of lives and resources was animated and enabled by anti-Blackness, which sanctioned a systematic hostility to life that encoded environmental violence in plantation landscapes from the seed to the root. Agrotechnological notions of scientific progress and development conceived places, plants, and Black people as interchangeable parts. Tracing these trajectories during slavery and after abolition, the article focuses on two dynamics: the use of chemicals to augment soil fertility and manage cotton’s ecologies, and the deployment of chemicals to protect cotton monocultures. In both instances, the manipulations of cotton’s ecologies and biophysical properties helped maintain plantation profitability and dominance in the face of conjoined crises of political-ecological and racial control. Racialized conceptions of chemical-scientific “innovation,” relations of indebtedness, and notions of threat also siphoned capital gains from Black workers and communities. By converting waste products into fertilizers and poisons, planters and industrialists continued to render Black communities, their labor, and their land as fungible but necessary components in the industrialization of racial capitalism.
{"title":"Cotton, Whiteness, and Other Poisons","authors":"Brian Williams, J. M. Porter","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9962827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962827","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines how racial capitalism has shaped the ecological and technological dynamics of cotton production in the United States South. Cotton’s destructive dependence on chemicals and on the extraction of lives and resources was animated and enabled by anti-Blackness, which sanctioned a systematic hostility to life that encoded environmental violence in plantation landscapes from the seed to the root. Agrotechnological notions of scientific progress and development conceived places, plants, and Black people as interchangeable parts. Tracing these trajectories during slavery and after abolition, the article focuses on two dynamics: the use of chemicals to augment soil fertility and manage cotton’s ecologies, and the deployment of chemicals to protect cotton monocultures. In both instances, the manipulations of cotton’s ecologies and biophysical properties helped maintain plantation profitability and dominance in the face of conjoined crises of political-ecological and racial control. Racialized conceptions of chemical-scientific “innovation,” relations of indebtedness, and notions of threat also siphoned capital gains from Black workers and communities. By converting waste products into fertilizers and poisons, planters and industrialists continued to render Black communities, their labor, and their land as fungible but necessary components in the industrialization of racial capitalism.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44460696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9962970
I. Fleishman
Rolf Hammerschmidt, one of Europe’s most prolific gay porn directors and producers, first came to notoriety with an eco-utopian fantasy that descends into the dystopian. His two-part Boytropolis (1993, 1996) imagines a secluded woodland society of horny loincloth-clad young men whose insatiable sexual appetite appears to derive from a juice diet consisting of a mysterious emerald-colored potion that they extract from the local foliage, at least until they are denied indulgence in either this nectar or the sexual activity it inspires and vanish in a puff of smog. Attending to the unexpectedly rich cinematic history on which the film draws, which centrally includes not only Fritz Lang’s Metropolis but also Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937), this article puts forth that Boytropolis exposes and explores a troublingly normative homotopian vision, one that relies on environmental and racial homogeneity, and on an eco-imperialist politics of conquest, for its erotic charge.
{"title":"Rolf Hammerschmidt’s Boytropolis and the Ethno-Ecological Imaginary","authors":"I. Fleishman","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9962970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962970","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Rolf Hammerschmidt, one of Europe’s most prolific gay porn directors and producers, first came to notoriety with an eco-utopian fantasy that descends into the dystopian. His two-part Boytropolis (1993, 1996) imagines a secluded woodland society of horny loincloth-clad young men whose insatiable sexual appetite appears to derive from a juice diet consisting of a mysterious emerald-colored potion that they extract from the local foliage, at least until they are denied indulgence in either this nectar or the sexual activity it inspires and vanish in a puff of smog. Attending to the unexpectedly rich cinematic history on which the film draws, which centrally includes not only Fritz Lang’s Metropolis but also Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937), this article puts forth that Boytropolis exposes and explores a troublingly normative homotopian vision, one that relies on environmental and racial homogeneity, and on an eco-imperialist politics of conquest, for its erotic charge.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48723593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9962948
M. Szczygielska
Contemporary zoological gardens are hoping to delay the sixth mass extinction through captive breeding of endangered species. This article explores the dominant temporal orders invoked by managing animal sex in captivity in order to unfold unnatural histories of the zoo. Departing from the queer critique of reproductive futurism, it demonstrates that in the modern zoo, reproduction is removed from sexuality. By mapping out the more-than-human dimensions of chronopolitics at the zoo, this article unravels the complex process of transposing sexual acts into temporally fixed sexuality. To account for multiple pasts and futures of captive sex, this analysis employs the category of queer animality. Tracing the fascination with animal homosexuality to early sexological taxonomies, this article argues that anchoring sexual identity in animality is an anachronistic move that rests on the myth of timeless nature. At the same time, the sexological distinction between constitutional and circumstantial homosexuality relies on two types of teleological temporality: developmental and degenerative time of evolutionary change. The zoo is not only a place where education of desire occurs along the deep time line of natural history but also a contested terrain of captivity that can cancel any claim to atemporal naturalness.
{"title":"Animal Sex in Public","authors":"M. Szczygielska","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9962948","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962948","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Contemporary zoological gardens are hoping to delay the sixth mass extinction through captive breeding of endangered species. This article explores the dominant temporal orders invoked by managing animal sex in captivity in order to unfold unnatural histories of the zoo. Departing from the queer critique of reproductive futurism, it demonstrates that in the modern zoo, reproduction is removed from sexuality. By mapping out the more-than-human dimensions of chronopolitics at the zoo, this article unravels the complex process of transposing sexual acts into temporally fixed sexuality. To account for multiple pasts and futures of captive sex, this analysis employs the category of queer animality. Tracing the fascination with animal homosexuality to early sexological taxonomies, this article argues that anchoring sexual identity in animality is an anachronistic move that rests on the myth of timeless nature. At the same time, the sexological distinction between constitutional and circumstantial homosexuality relies on two types of teleological temporality: developmental and degenerative time of evolutionary change. The zoo is not only a place where education of desire occurs along the deep time line of natural history but also a contested terrain of captivity that can cancel any claim to atemporal naturalness.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43987487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9962926
Joela Jacobs
This article traces the emergence of and shifts in ideas about plant sexuality in European literature from the late seventeenth century to the present, with a particular focus on influential British and a few less well-known German texts. Positioned as a specifically phytopoetic history of plants and sexuality, it demonstrates with the help of literature how plants have been shaping human culture—in this context, the sociocultural norms and understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. Moving from vegetal visions of virtuous, virginal women-plants and their corruption by pollen and “plant prostitutes” to concerns about “crimes against nature” and the persecution of male same-sex desire, this history ultimately arrives at queer reproduction and pleasure as a collective endeavor.
{"title":"“These Lusting, Incestuous, Perverse Creatures”","authors":"Joela Jacobs","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9962926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962926","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article traces the emergence of and shifts in ideas about plant sexuality in European literature from the late seventeenth century to the present, with a particular focus on influential British and a few less well-known German texts. Positioned as a specifically phytopoetic history of plants and sexuality, it demonstrates with the help of literature how plants have been shaping human culture—in this context, the sociocultural norms and understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. Moving from vegetal visions of virtuous, virginal women-plants and their corruption by pollen and “plant prostitutes” to concerns about “crimes against nature” and the persecution of male same-sex desire, this history ultimately arrives at queer reproduction and pleasure as a collective endeavor.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42215856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9962959
Hannah Boast
The gay frog has taken on a surprisingly prominent role in contemporary environmental culture. Primarily associated with American shock jock Alex Jones and the so-called alt-right, fears of frogs being turned gay by hormones in water have nevertheless entered the mainstream, while gay frog memes are shared online by users from across the political spectrum. This article offers a genealogy of the gay frog, situating this recent moment in the longer history of “sex panics” over gay animals described by queer ecologists, and in the context of an ongoing backlash against feminism and trans liberation. It argues that the potency of the gay frog as alt-right symbol derives from the capacity of the frog to instantiate racialized and sexualized anxieties about border crossings. By examining the role of humor in gay frog clips and memes, this article shows how liberal mockery of Jones has inadvertently mainstreamed far-right beliefs and served to consolidate alt-right notions of victimhood. In spite of this, it argues that the comic potential of the gay frog holds promise for queer ecologists seeking to think differently about sex and nature.
{"title":"Theorizing the Gay Frog","authors":"Hannah Boast","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9962959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962959","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The gay frog has taken on a surprisingly prominent role in contemporary environmental culture. Primarily associated with American shock jock Alex Jones and the so-called alt-right, fears of frogs being turned gay by hormones in water have nevertheless entered the mainstream, while gay frog memes are shared online by users from across the political spectrum. This article offers a genealogy of the gay frog, situating this recent moment in the longer history of “sex panics” over gay animals described by queer ecologists, and in the context of an ongoing backlash against feminism and trans liberation. It argues that the potency of the gay frog as alt-right symbol derives from the capacity of the frog to instantiate racialized and sexualized anxieties about border crossings. By examining the role of humor in gay frog clips and memes, this article shows how liberal mockery of Jones has inadvertently mainstreamed far-right beliefs and served to consolidate alt-right notions of victimhood. In spite of this, it argues that the comic potential of the gay frog holds promise for queer ecologists seeking to think differently about sex and nature.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46360229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9962981
Astrida Neimanis
How do settler colonialism, control of women’s and differently gendered bodies, sex, industry, pollution—but also pleasure, love, care, desire, bodily autonomy, and survival—cleave together and apart in the inland wetland of Windermere Basin park? Starting with this question, this article explores my own attraction to this tiny place in postindustrial and settler colonial Hamilton, Ontario. I am curious about what it can teach us about the complex entanglements of these things, and the toxic desires that are both enabled and foreclosed by the relations that gather here. In the first section, I briefly rehearse the basin’s toxic history and, guided by Audre Lorde’s definition of erotics and Catriona Sandilands formative work on queer ecologies, my own desirous attachments to the life it nonetheless sustains. The next section reveals how, in the context of settler colonialism and climate catastrophe, these erotics are queerly tangled in questions of more-than-human gender, sex, and reproduction, too, in ways that invite a capacious and multivalent understanding of reproductive justice. The final section examines the performance art of white settler ecosexuals Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, but sets this alongside a performance by Vanessa Dion Fletcher at Windermere, in order to insist on a version of ecosexual erotics that, while joyous, remains imbricated in fraught histories, complicity, and an inalienable attention to what Michif scholar Max Liboiron parses as “differences and obligations.” Taking a cue from settler feminist artist and scholar Lindsay Kelley, I refer to this as “bad ecosex.” In its refusal of purity, bad ecosex holds the trouble of contemporary ecological relations together with the pleasurable power of erotics to build a politics of change grounded in feeling deeply.
{"title":"Toxic Erotics and Bad Ecosex at Windermere Basin","authors":"Astrida Neimanis","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9962981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962981","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 How do settler colonialism, control of women’s and differently gendered bodies, sex, industry, pollution—but also pleasure, love, care, desire, bodily autonomy, and survival—cleave together and apart in the inland wetland of Windermere Basin park? Starting with this question, this article explores my own attraction to this tiny place in postindustrial and settler colonial Hamilton, Ontario. I am curious about what it can teach us about the complex entanglements of these things, and the toxic desires that are both enabled and foreclosed by the relations that gather here. In the first section, I briefly rehearse the basin’s toxic history and, guided by Audre Lorde’s definition of erotics and Catriona Sandilands formative work on queer ecologies, my own desirous attachments to the life it nonetheless sustains. The next section reveals how, in the context of settler colonialism and climate catastrophe, these erotics are queerly tangled in questions of more-than-human gender, sex, and reproduction, too, in ways that invite a capacious and multivalent understanding of reproductive justice. The final section examines the performance art of white settler ecosexuals Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, but sets this alongside a performance by Vanessa Dion Fletcher at Windermere, in order to insist on a version of ecosexual erotics that, while joyous, remains imbricated in fraught histories, complicity, and an inalienable attention to what Michif scholar Max Liboiron parses as “differences and obligations.” Taking a cue from settler feminist artist and scholar Lindsay Kelley, I refer to this as “bad ecosex.” In its refusal of purity, bad ecosex holds the trouble of contemporary ecological relations together with the pleasurable power of erotics to build a politics of change grounded in feeling deeply.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45798250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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