Desiring nature, queering ethics: Adventures in erotogenic environments

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 169-187

  Sandilands, Catriona ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0009192940     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200123226     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. I use this unwieldy term to illustrate, not homogenize, the diverse identities and politics associated with the "queer" community. Note, however, that this paper does not significantly address the particular concerns of transgendered persons.
2. Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 481.
3. See Martha Freeman, ed., Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
4. Douglas Botting, Gavin Maxwell: The Life of the Man Who Wrote Ring of Bright Water (London: HarperCollins, 1993).
5. Chris Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 151.
6. Chaia Heller, Ecology and Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999), p. 1.
7. Ibid., p. 1.
8. Ibid., p. 3.
9. Ibid., p. 96.
10. Ibid., p. 96.
11. Ibid., pp. 125-26.
12. Yi-Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture (New York: Kodansha International, 1993), p. 7.
13. Ibid., p. 12.
14. Ibid., p. 13.
15. There are, of course, other influential traditions that potentially link desire with ecological politics, notably Critical Theory. Space restrictions prevent a fuller discussion.
16. The newly forming field of queer geography includes many such discussions. See, for example, many of the essays in Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter, ed., Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Sites of Resistance (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997); David Bell and Gill Valentine, ed., Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1995).
17. The newly forming field of queer geography includes many such discussions. See, for example, many of the essays in Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter, ed., Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Sites of Resistance (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997); David Bell and Gill Valentine, ed., Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1995).
18. Maurice van Lieshout, "Leather Nights in the Woods: Homosexual Encounters in a Dutch Highway Rest Area," Journal of Homosexuality 29, no. 1 (1995): 32.
19. Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1987), p. 46.
20. Gordon Brent Ingram, "'Open' Space as Strategic Queer Sites," in Queers in Space, p. 102.
21. Anne Filemyr, "Going Outdoors and Other Dangerous Expeditions," Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 18, no. 2 (1997): 165.
22. Ibid., p. 165.
23. Despite the existence of a distinct "gay pastoral" literary tradition. See David Shuttleton, "The Queer Politics of Gay Pastoral," in Richard Phillips, Diane West and David Shuttleton, ed., De-centring Sexualities: Politics and Representation beyond the Metropolis (London: Routledge, 2000). I would argue that there is a distinct "lesbian pastoral" tradition as well.
24. See Jerry Lee Kramer, "Bachelor Farmers and Spinsters: Gay and Lesbian Identities and Communities in Rural North Dakota," in Bell and Valentine, Mapping Desire, pp. 200-13; and Beverly A. Brown, In Timber Country: Working People's Stories of Environmental Conflict and Urban Flight (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
25. See Jerry Lee Kramer, "Bachelor Farmers and Spinsters: Gay and Lesbian Identities and Communities in Rural North Dakota," in Bell and Valentine, Mapping Desire, pp. 200-13; and Beverly A. Brown, In Timber Country: Working People's Stories of Environmental Conflict and Urban Flight (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
26. On rural gay male communities, see the journal RFD; on rural lesbian communities, see the journal Maize and Joyce Cheney, Lesbian Land (Minneapolis: Word Weavers, 1985). For general discussions of rural gay and lesbian life, see Phillips et al, De-centring Sexualities, Michael Riordan, Out Our Way: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Country (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996), and David Bell and Gill Valentine, "Queer Country: Rural Gay and Lesbian Lives," Journal of Rural Studies 11, no. 2 (1995): 113-22.
27. On rural gay male communities, see the journal RFD; on rural lesbian communities, see the journal Maize and Joyce Cheney, Lesbian Land (Minneapolis: Word Weavers, 1985). For general discussions of rural gay and lesbian life, see Phillips et al, De-centring Sexualities, Michael Riordan, Out Our Way: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Country (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996), and David Bell and Gill Valentine, "Queer Country: Rural Gay and Lesbian Lives," Journal of Rural Studies 11, no. 2 (1995): 113-22.
28. On rural gay male communities, see the journal RFD; on rural lesbian communities, see the journal Maize and Joyce Cheney, Lesbian Land (Minneapolis: Word Weavers, 1985). For general discussions of rural gay and lesbian life, see Phillips et al, De-centring Sexualities, Michael Riordan, Out Our Way: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Country (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996), and David Bell and Gill Valentine, "Queer Country: Rural Gay and Lesbian Lives," Journal of Rural Studies 11, no. 2 (1995): 113-22.
29. On rural gay male communities, see the journal RFD; on rural lesbian communities, see the journal Maize and Joyce Cheney, Lesbian Land (Minneapolis: Word Weavers, 1985). For general discussions of rural gay and lesbian life, see Phillips et al, De-centring Sexualities, Michael Riordan, Out Our Way: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Country (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996), and David Bell and Gill Valentine, "Queer Country: Rural Gay and Lesbian Lives," Journal of Rural Studies 11, no. 2 (1995): 113-22.
30. Greta Gaard, "Toward a Queer Ecofeminism," Hypatia 12, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 115.
31. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
32. Foucault, of course, points out that the nineteenth-century "sexual sciences" such as Havelock Ellis' sexology had little real relation to biological science, and that the knowledge regimes of medicine and biology were not particularly congruent. Since then, the two have converged more fully, with results ranging from sociobiology (or, as it is now called, "evolutionary psychology") to the search for a genetic, chemical or hormonal determinant of homosexuality.
33. Foucault calls it "the perverse implantation." See Foucault, History of Sexuality, chap. 2.
34. Ibid., p. 39.
35. Partly as a result of the persistence of a wide variety of different modes of sexual regulation, queers have the dubious distinction of being considered simultaneously "unnatural," in the sense of deviants from a biological norm, and "uncivilized," in the sense of being more subject to "animal" instincts and passions and thus further from god, mind, and spiritual life.
36. Simon LeVay, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
37. Bonnie Spencer, "Lessons from 'Nature': Gender Ideology and Sexual Ambiguity in Biology," in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, ed., Body Guards: The Cultural Production of Gender Ambiguity (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 330.
38. LeVay, Queer Science, p. 195 (emphases in original).
39. See Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).
40. It has happened. See Martin Silverstone, "The Case of the Lesbian Gulls," Equinox 110 (May 2000): 6. In Biological Exuberance, one of Bagemihl's arguments is that homosexuality can be seen as an adaptive response to certain environmental conditions. In my view, this kind of evolutionary justification of same-sex sex in other animal species is less important than the possibility that human beings might accept that animals have non-reproductive erotic lives, i.e., that they are beings who experience pleasure. This possibility is embraced by a very few biological researchers such as Paul Vasey; see "Kama Sutra Primates," Equinox 110 (May 2000): 32-33.
41. It has happened. See Martin Silverstone, "The Case of the Lesbian Gulls," Equinox 110 (May 2000): 6. In Biological Exuberance, one of Bagemihl's arguments is that homosexuality can be seen as an adaptive response to certain environmental conditions. In my view, this kind of evolutionary justification of same-sex sex in other animal species is less important than the possibility that human beings might accept that animals have non-reproductive erotic lives, i.e., that they are beings who experience pleasure. This possibility is embraced by a very few biological researchers such as Paul Vasey; see "Kama Sutra Primates," Equinox 110 (May 2000): 32-33.
42. It has happened. See Martin Silverstone, "The Case of the Lesbian Gulls," Equinox 110 (May 2000): 6. In Biological Exuberance, one of Bagemihl's arguments is that homosexuality can be seen as an adaptive response to certain environmental conditions. In my view, this kind of evolutionary justification of same-sex sex in other animal species is less important than the possibility that human beings might accept that animals have non-reproductive erotic lives, i.e., that they are beings who experience pleasure. This possibility is embraced by a very few biological researchers such as Paul Vasey; see "Kama Sutra Primates," Equinox 110 (May 2000): 32-33.
43. This is very dangerous ground; most population discourses are strongly tied to racist forms of sexual regulation - literally, management - which is why alternative forms of sexuality are not considered. See my essay "Sex at the Limits," in Éric Darier, ed., Discourses of the Environment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 79-94.
44. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time And Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995).
45. Ibid., p. 201.
46. It is worth noting that sociobiologists really have no way of speaking about pleasure for its own sake. Rather, sex is part of a teleological narrative that begins and ends with the assumption that the reproduction of genes drives behavior, and that those behaviors that are good, normal, "fit," etc., are those that facilitate the reproduction of genes. There have been elaborate attempts to explain same-sex eroticism within the confines of this narrative.
47. Ibid., p. 194.
48. Ibid., p. 201.
49. Of course, the narrative of sex, death and redemption is not absent from queer communities, especially in the age of HIV, and homoeroticism is not, by itself, politically subversive.
50. His account echoes Merleau-Ponty in this respect - and suggests a conversation with an already-established phenomenology of nature - but his explicit focus on the erotic marks his contribution (and Grosz's) as distinct.
51. Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, p. 198 (emphasis in original).
52. Ibid., p. 199.
53. Ibid., p. 200.
54. Significantly, as Grosz notes, it also disrupts the notion of sexual "drive" in which the desiring subject can claim an erotic encounter with a non-desiring other, as in rape.
55. Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful, p. 42.
56. Ibid., p. 46.
57. Ibid.Z, p. 41.
58. See, for example, Karen Warren's now-famous (if not very erotic) description of her relationship with a rock during the act of climbing it in "The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism," Environmental Ethics 12 (1980): 134-35.
59. My thanks to Connie Russell for insisting on this point.
60. Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, p. 217. She also notes, crucially, that hegemonic social relations prevent a view in which gays and straights can be understood as "all the same." Although heterosexuals can practice erotogenic subversion, and although queers can strive toward 2.2 children and a monster house in the suburbs there remain systemic barriers to both.
61. The question of agency and consent in inter-species touching is as important as it is in intrahuman touching; it is certainly a properly ethical question to consider the power relations involved in the communication of sexual desire. However, it would be a mistake to suggest that nonhuman animals are not capable of inter-species sensual desire, or that they cannot express it just as they are capable of expressing avoidance.