Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Ecopoetics of Contact: Touching, Cruising, Gleaning

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/isle/isy011

1759-1090

Sarah Ensor,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

In their “Ecosex Manifesto,” first published in 2011, queer performance artists Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle lay bare their eroticized habits of environmental care: “[Ecosexuals] make love with the earth… .We shamelessly hug trees, massage the earth with our feet, and talk erotically to plants… .” Such an approach, which counters mainstream environmentalism’s ascetic imperatives by advocating unbounded pleasure, playfully indexes one of the foundational impasses inhibiting the development of a queer ecocriticism: the conflicting status of embodied desire—and thus of touch—in its two constitutive fields. In her 1997 essay “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” ecofeminist scholar Greta Gaard analyzed a pervasive “erotophobia” in Western Culture that other critics have identified in environmental discourse more specifically (139). As cultural critic Andrew Ross pithily suggests, “Unlike other new social movements, ecology is commonly perceived as the one that says no, the antipleasure voice that says you’re never gonna get it, so get used to going without” (268). Clearly, a significant part of the environmentalist ethos is to make do with less: to reduce our consumption, to limit our desires, to forego what we so deeply want. In keeping with familiar imperatives like “leave no trace,” the practice of stewardship is often understood to be predicated on forms of restraint and inaction, leaving little room for either desire or pleasure—except, of course, to the extent that both are denied. The emphasis on self-deprivation ingrained within environmentalism conflicts—potentially violently—with the discourses of queer theory, which are foundationally concerned with desires and their free expression.