The Ecological Turn: Sex, Art, Affect

Sex Ecologies, a recently published anthology edited by the curator and writer Stefanie Hessler, gathers contributions from artists, activists, researchers, and poets that explore the possibilities of environmental studies in the creation of queer ecological futures. With photography, digital media, essays, and interviews, the anthology highlights how futurity is less a destination than it is a set of aesthetic and relational practices. The thirty-two entries offer a diverse range of research methods and artistic approaches, yet each traces the false dualities between nature and the human. The book itself is an aesthetic work; the cover image is from Alberta Whittle's afrofuturistic photo collage, C.R.E.A.M. Throughout the book, photography and performance stills intermingle with interviews and research essays, which facilitates a flexible engagement with the book, as if you can pick it up and start anywhere.Sex Ecologies exists alongside a curatorial exhibition of the same name. The exhibition, which showcased newly commissioned works by nine artists, was the result of a collaboration between Kunsthall Trondheim Art Institute and the Seed Box, a humanities research consortium based out of Linköping University in Sweden. Indeed, collaboration is central to the methodological vision and interdisciplinary scope showcased throughout the book. In “Transdisciplinary Encounters Between Art and Environmental Humanities,” an interview between the Seed Box directors Katja Aglert and Victoria Wibeck, Aglert suggests that understanding feminist method as an “active agent for making worlds informs many of the practices we engage with, such as writing this text in the form of a conversation” (30).Dialogue is a central tenet of the book, with artists from the “Sex Ecologies” exhibition and researchers from the Seed Box co-creating “The Glossary,” which appears at the end of the book and is made up of quotes taken from texts throughout the book's chapters. The glossary's first entry is “affect,” taken from Filipa Ramos’ essay “When Species Mate.” Ramos writes, “To rethink species as groups of individuals connected by affects and affinities is not a mere exercise in linguistic mannerism or speculative fabulation. It is a concrete practice that manifests itself with considerable frequency” (239). “Wildness” ends the glossary with an entry in which queer theorist Jack Halberstam offers that “noise is the sonic component of a nature-culture formation that I have called wildness and that joins human to animal to vegetal within an ever evolving, highly unpredictable world ecology” (246). The glossary encapsulates much of the book as it resists definitional positions and instead gestures toward sensibilities and approaches one might take when engaging each of the concepts.Thinking with a text or concept is further explored in the collaborative annotations written alongside Audre Lorde's classic essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” The annotations, compiled by the curators and artists involved with “Sex Ecologies,” are a highlight of the book and offer new ways of reading and engaging with Lorde to conjure other voices, temporalities, and polemics. To this end, the collaborators ask, “Can we consider the essay from the perspective of ecology and multi-species justice, without failing to care for the specificity and urgency of the context from which it was originally written?” (71). These annotations highlight the erotic as a resource for relationality and the necessity of thinking about the environment, the land, and multispecies beings as constitutive: “The erotic as a more-than-human life force transported through all connected entities” (72). It follows that directly preceding the annotations is the digital poster “25 Ways to Make Love to the Earth” by feminist artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, both of whom are credited with founding the ecosex movement. Sprinkle and Stephens describe the movement as about making environmentalism sexier. But I think that their work makes environmentalism more relational. With its bright red borders and images of colorful flowers and fruits, the poster shares with us twenty-five ways that we can act in better relation with the earth, all of which encourage us to lend materiality to the erotic energy surrounding us (79). Lay on top of the earth, Sprinkle and Stephens suggest, or “let her get on top of you” (79).Throughout, artists and writers resist the common trapping of treating sex as an abstraction used to superimpose a theory or concept. Rather, across the entries, sex is the material object of analysis. In the visual essay “Gentle Breeze: Changing Sex in Ecology,” Pauline Doutreluinge and Anne Duk Hee Jordan investigate the “sexual habits of flatworms, sea slugs, and sea cucumbers from a queer perspective” (58). Elvia Wilk's “This Compost—Erotics of Rot” argues that the visual field itself is saturated in heteronormative ways of seeing and conceptualizing. In this way, the anthology revisits central questions of feminist science studies with more emphasis on queering such questions.This anthology thinks expansively about the conditions of possibility for queer methods and sex. The coupling of sex with ecology speaks to how various contributors are interested in pushing against normative Western models of what sex entails, aesthetically, materially, and affectively. Central to this reimagining is Indigenous thought. Here, the anthology excels at centering Indigenous writers and cultural producers such as Léuli Eshrāghi and Kim Tallbear, respectively. Eshrāghi explores fa‘afafine (becoming woman) and fa‘atane (becoming man), Sāmoan terms for the Indigenous gendered peoples of the Sāmoan diaspora. Fa‘afafine embodiment refuses the coloniality of sex and gender and “are best represented in English by the constellation of possibilities including class solidarity, non-binary gender, fluid/queer sexuality, community care, and expansive kinship with all beings” (105). Similarly, Dakota feminist science scholar and performer Kim Tallbear, in an interview with Montserrat Madariaga-Caro, unpacks compulsory settler monogamy and marriage, which Tallbear understands as the Western rescription of relations to construct them as property. Both Eshrāghi and Tallbear are mindful of the constraints of settler language and logic. Tallbear writes that although she uses the terms polyamory, sex, and sexuality, what she's trying to get at is “relationality and relational ways of being” (112). Polyamory, then, is a useful tool in pushing against the classification and hierarchization of life. Such settler logics of property relations only serve to redeem the state, Tallbear argues. And so, what happens when we consider “our expansive relatedness, not only among humans, but with nonhuman relations?” (115).Feminist and queer ecology underscore the biological, cultural, and technological enmeshment between a variety of species such as humans, insects, microbes, and the viral (65). Such entanglements are necessarily biopolitical and reproduce modes of relations that are sexual, erotic, and affective but also extractive and life denying. Disability scholar Mel Chen reminds us of the ongoing planetary catastrophe that is settler colonialism in one of the book's final chapters, “The Deaths of Reproduction.” Paying particular attention to the bionecropolitical logics undergirding what it means to be alive at our present moment, Chen analyzes carceral extraction and exploitation of land alongside COVID-19 and the animacy of pollutants and toxins that inhabit their own garden. Such life/death relations remain of urgent concern, and Sex Ecologies's approach to environmental destruction is less prescriptive and more multidisciplinary and affective. Despite ongoing catastrophe, the artists and authors across the book's chapters gesture toward future temporalities where life is organized relationally.

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