Sexual Ecologies: Space, nature and queer cinema
‘Eco-cinema’ has become a commonplace term within contemporary environmental approaches to film studies over the past two decades, encompassing debates over cinema’s formal and aesthetic capacity to represent environmental catastrophe as well as the medium’s own role in fostering climate activism. As Rust et al argue, the medium of cinema now finds itself imbued with ‘the potential to become a mediating interface that at last allows us to comprehend what we have done, both to the world and to ourselves, but also how and where we might begin remaking that relation: in the image, in the imagining, of a healed world’ (2022). Amid these many reimaginings and remakings, the fundamental relationship between the two terms that comprise the category of eco-cinema – that is, the ecological and the cinematic – has often been taken for granted, with the former understood merely as a synonym for the natural and the latter taken simply as a tool for visualising environmental collapse.
Recent waves of eco-media across the world, from nature documentaries to dystopian blockbusters, have in this way collectively resulted in a homogenised conception of nature, often reducing the environment to its didactic or symbolic function while maintaining a thoroughly anthropocentric vision of our relationship to – and dominion over – the natural world. Environmental crises, as these works suggest, are paradoxically both (hu)man-made and on the verge of escaping our control. This one-day workshop takes its cue from Timothy Morton’s conceptualisation of an ecology without nature, in which he challenges the ‘anthropocentrically scaled concept of Nature’ (2007) in order to reimagine the critical potential of the term ecological. Similarly, we aim to reassess the intellectual and analytic value of both the terms ‘ecological’ and ‘cinematic’ in these contexts, doing so from the specific vantage point of contemporary queer cinema, a domain and a practice so often tasked with challenging hegemonic social and historical perspectives, and one invested in visibilising the ‘potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’ (Muñoz 2009).
By considering the queer and the ecological in tandem, we are interested in what these terms might do for an analysis of cinema, space, landscape and surroundings. How might contemporary queer film figure the ecological beyond its habitual function as merely a synonym for the natural? How might we understand queer cinema’s capacity to render and register the ecological in spatial terms? This critical reappraisal has the potential to open up a range of questions regarding cinema’s capacity to represent and render spaces on screen, to queerly inflect geophysical spaces by way of formal or narrative experimentation, and to suffuse spaces, places or landscapes with an ambiently queer or erotic potentiality. Possible lines of investigation may consider what a queer gaze on natural, non-human landscapes might signify within cinema, especially when these spaces are vacant, emptied out, abandoned, or ravaged by environmental neglect or extraction. Other avenues of analysis may conceive of spatio-sexual practices in explicitly ecological terms (c.f Ensor) or critically reappraise the term ‘sexual ecology’ by wresting it from its contested history within AIDS activism (c.f. Rotello).
The primary aim of this workshop is to spark debate within a burgeoning area of contemporary film and media studies, facilitating a forum for emerging scholarship that collaboratively explores the nexus of queerness, landscape, and lens-based art.