Toxic Erotics and Bad Ecosex at Windermere Basin
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract 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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it