Goodbye Gauley Mountain,hello eco-camp: Queer environmentalism in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This article considers the effectiveness of queer environmental ethics in the Anthropocene, a word increasingly used to describe the anthropogenic destruction of ecosystems that marks our current geological era. Taking as my subject the contemporary ecosexuality movement popularised by performance artists Annie Sprinkle and her co-collaborator and partner Elizabeth Stephens, I explore the ethics behind ecosexuals’ encounters with the natural environment. Stephens and Sprinkle's performances, captured in their documentary Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2013), make clear ecosexuality's concurrent urgency and playfulness, which is embodied in a theatrical environmental sensibility that I call eco-camp. Eco-camp is a mode of florid performance, spectacle and ostentatious sex-positivity that champions new forms of relationality between humans and other earthly inhabitants. Drawing from diverse theoretical perspectives, including Mikhail Bakhtin's (1968) carnivalesque, Chris Cuomo's (1998) ethics of flourishing and Cynthia Willett's (Willett et al., 2012; Willett, 2014) theorisation of feminist humour, I argue that ecosexuality's campy ecological ethics provide an alternative to the didacticism and moralism that characterise much contemporary environmentalism. In the spirit of carnival, the tragi-comic and, at times, parodic tone of ecosexuality generates an affective dissonance that spurs us to feel the full effects of our discordance with nature.

Keywords

Anthropocene camp eco-camp ecofeminism ecosexuality interspecies ethics mountaintop removal queer ecologies

One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that ‘sincerity’ is not enough. (Sontag, 1966: 288)

This article probes queer environmental ethics in the Anthropocene, a word increasingly used to describe the anthropogenic destruction of ecosystems that marks our current geological era.¹ The term, coined by ecologist Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s and revived by chemist Paul Crutzen (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000: 17–18), recognises that ‘human beings, through their own actions, have jolted the planet into a new, unprecedented [geological] epoch […]’ (Nixon, 2014). Taking as my subject the contemporary ecosexuality movement, I want to explore how ecosexuality answers the Anthropocene’s call to urgency and responsibility. What do ecosexual encounters with nonhuman nature offer current discussions of environmental ethics? Can ecosexuality’s posthumanist tendencies queer our speciesist modes of belonging and foster an environmentalism that is not foundationally anthropocentric nor steeped in ‘reproductive futurism’ (Edelman, 2004: 2–3)? Might ecosexuality provide a model of non-normative relational ethics that responds to calls to ‘liberat[e] nature, the erotic, and queers’ (Gaard, 1997: 122)?

In the pages that follow, I contend that ecosexuality’s concurrent urgency and playfulness embodied in a theatrical environmental sensibility I deem eco-camp exemplify a carnivalesque interspecies flourishing. While ecosexual thought and experience do not necessarily move us beyond the human, they do challenge human exceptionalism through a mode of florid performance and ostentatious (eco)sex-positivity that champions new forms of relationality between humans and other earthly inhabitants. Drawing on a number of sources, including Susan Sontag’s (1966) ‘Notes on “Camp”’ (first published in 1964), Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1968) carnivalesque and Chris Cuomo’s (1998) ethics of flourishing, I explore the performative facets of ecosexuality’s campy ecological ethics and their tragi-comic and parodic tone to argue that this seeming affective incongruence provides an alternative to the didacticism and moralism that characterise much contemporary environmentalism. That ecosexual art and activism elicits confusion, scepticism and squeamishness from audiences (Miraudo, 2016) imbues the movement with the potential to disrupt environmental rhetoric per usual. While much environmental philosophy emphasises attunement with nature that reinforces an idyll that is increasingly untenable, ecosexuality’s campy eco-erotics simultaneously entertain and bewilder (and perhaps even arouse), stirring an unsettling array of responses apropos to these unsettling times.

A number of scholars have written about the rampant anthrocentrism in mainstream environmentalism (Gaard, 1993; Heller, 1993; Plumwood, 1996). Noël Sturgeon has compellingly incorporated critiques of heteronormativity into her exploration of environmentalist popular culture, which, she argues, has ‘become a common narrative framework used to understand and legitimate certain aspects of U.S. consumerism, family values, global military power, and American history’ (2009: 6). Scan any number of contemporary environmental campaigns and Sturgeon’s assertion that environmentalists ‘arguing from or for the natural can support the very relations of power that produce environmental problems’ (2009: 12) rings true. For example, a Greenpeace ad produced by Almap BBDO Ad Agency in São Paulo, Brazil (Almap BBDO Ad Agency and Greenpeace, n.d.) mobilises ‘the image of the Child’ (Edelman, 2004: 2) to raise awareness about rising sea levels. A fair-skinned toddler with bright eyes and a stark white bow in her hair is being subsumed by murky water. The ad reads: ‘Your child is growing, but not as fast as the oceans are rising’. Queer theorist Lee Edelman identifies ‘reproductive futurism’, embodied in the ubiquitous ‘image of the Child’, as the engine that drives contemporary political participation. Like other political rhetoric, much environmental and conservationist thinking is couched in preserving the planet for ‘our children’, which, according to Edelman, forecloses other modes of political discourse and action (2004: 2).

If not focused on children and future generations, many environmental campaigns are nonetheless human-centric. A 2014 illustration for Greenpeace’s #standforforests campaign contains a pastoral scene and the slogan ‘Protecting Forests = Protecting Yourself’. The ad relies on a win:win logic to appeal to humankind’s selfish desire to save itself. In another example of this anthrocentrism, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund, entreats, ‘Preserve Your World. Preserve Yourself’, adjacent to a drawing of a waterfall wherein one sees the silhouette of a human face (see: Ecorazzi, 2012). One WWF illustration produced by Germainead Ad Agency of Belgium ironically mobilises fear of human/nonhuman hybridity, so-called ‘freaks of nature’, to help protect the natural in a digitally altered image that melds a fish head with a human’s body (see: Trend Hunter, 2008). Its warning, ‘Stop climate change before it changes you’, resembles toxic discourse that scholars like Giovanna Di Chiro have linked to sex panics and fears of gender ambiguity. If conventional environmentalism reeks of anthrocentrism, speciesism and ‘eco-normativity’ (2010), what might alternative, even queer responses to contemporary environmental crises look like?

Queer(ing) environmentalism

This article builds on existing scholarship that attempts to think the queer and the ecological together. Prior studies specifically attuned to queerness and nature have often focused on how rhetoric of ‘the natural’ has been used against marginalised groups – indigenous peoples, women, people of colour and queers. For example, in ‘Toward A Queer Ecofeminism’, Greta Gaard (1997) examines the social construction of ‘the natural’ in Christianity and colonialist rhetoric. Deploying a queer ecofeminist lens, she elucidates ‘the ways in which queers are feminized, animalized, eroticized, and naturalized in a culture that devalues women, animals, nature, and sexuality’ (Gaard, 1997: 119). While Gaard advocates for ‘queers to come out of the woods and speak for ourselves’ (1997: 115), she does not offer examples of queer environmentalism.

The oft-cited anthology Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, 2010) addresses topics ranging from queer animals (Alaimo, 2010) to reproductive justice (Sturgeon, 2010). Queer Ecologies illuminates three ways in which sexual politics and the politics of the natural have informed one another: rhetorically through sexological and medical discourse (i.e. who and what are considered un/natural); biopolitically through regulation of nature-spaces (for example, the ways in which fears of the queer, particularly male homosexuality, became associated with urban degeneracy and were one of several factors spurring the American National Parks movement – an effort to reignite masculine vigour and restore national character); and socio-culturally as sites of queer resistance (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, 2010: 6). Examples of the latter include ethnographies of actual queer communities, such as land dyke communities in rural Oregon (Sandilands, 2002), as well as fictional accounts of gay or queer pastoralism (think: Brokeback Mountain). While a number of the articles in the anthology critique mainstream environmentalism for its normativity, few of the authors focus on environmental efforts by LGTBQ-identified individuals.

My exploration of ecosexuality attempts to fill this gap by focusing on queer-identified ecosexuals – performance artists Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle. However, unlike back-to-land groups such as lesbian separatists or Radical Faeries, who retreated from mainstream society to live among individuals with shared sexual identifications, ecosexuality is a movement open to queers and non-queers alike. I see ecosexuality and its deployment of eco-camp as queer in multiple senses of the word. The interspecies ethics espoused by Stephens, Sprinkle and other ecosexuals have the potential to queer how we think about human/nonhuman relations, as I will demonstrate below. In addition, the packaging of these ethics in a campy performativity that is a far cry from conventional environmentalism challenges us to consider the possibility of alternative modes of environmental activism. Thus, this article uses ecosexuality to think through eco-camp with hopes that the latter can be applied outside the LGBTQ community such that Stephens and Sprinkle’s performances become one among many examples of ‘queer’ environmentalism.

‘Here Come the Ecosexuals’

The emergent ecosexual movement challenges ‘eco-normativity’ (Di Chiro, 2010) through its pleasure seeking and ‘pollen-amorous’ eros (Stephens and Sprinkle, 2011: 7), which also expands conceptions of sex in the process.² This is evident in ‘SexEcology’, a term developed by ecosexual pioneers Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens. The duo uses the word to delineate ‘a new field of research exploring the places sexology and ecology intersect’ (Stephens and Sprinkle, 2011: 20). Sprinkle and Stephens, who lead ecosexual workshops and speak and perform regularly at art galleries and performing arts centres, playfully revamp traditional sexology – the scientific study of human sexuality made famous by figures like Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfield – through pseudo-scientific definitions and diagrams. Traditional sexology has focused on human-to-human contact, while SexEcology pushes the boundaries of normative and even non-normative sexuality by encompassing practices like ecosexuality.

In a glossary on their website, Stephens and Sprinkle provide the following definition of an ecosexual:

ecosexual \i-‘k $\bar{o}$ -sek-sh(–-)w–l: Eco—From Latin oeco: home, household. 1: A person that finds nature sensual, sexy. 2: A new sexual identity. 3: Person who takes the Earth as their lover. 4: A term used in dating, i.e. metrosexual. 5. An environmental activist strategy. 6. A new movement. 7. Other. (2011: 20)

Ecosexuality emerged as an identificatory category in online forums and dating sites in the early 2000s. Stephens estimates that today there are 100,000 individuals around the world who identify as ecosexuals (Callaghan, 2016). While Stephens and Sprinkle did not invent the term, they have been credited with popularising the practice and mobilising ecosexuality into a global grassroots political movement. The anthology Ecosexuality: When Nature Inspires the Arts of Love (Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Hagamen, 2015), as well as a spate of articles in mainstream news outlets like Vice (McArthur, 2016) and the Guardian (Miraudo, 2016; Theobald, 2017), attest to the movement’s growing notoriety.

Whereas some environmentalists expend their energy making human intercourse more earth-friendly (i.e. spreading the word about fair trade condoms and chemical-free lubricants (Weiss, 2010)), many ecosexuals encourage erotic encounters that are not just nature-friendly but with nature itself. One ecosex practitioner explains ecosexuals as falling along a spectrum: ‘On one end, it encompasses people who try to use sustainable sex products, or who enjoy skinny dipping and naked hiking. On the other are people who roll around in the dirt having an orgasm covered in potting soil’ (McArthur, 2016). In a diagram that resembles Gayle Rubin’s ‘charmed circle’ of ‘Good, Normal, Natural, Blessed Sexuality’ and its ‘Outer Limits’ (1984: 281), Sprinkle and Stephens impart their own proliferation of nature-inspired perversions.³ In clause (ii) of their ‘EcoSex Manifesto’, Stephens and Sprinkle declare: ‘We shamelessly hug trees, massage the Earth with our feet, and talk erotically to plants. We are skinny dippers, sun worshipers, and stargazers […] We make love with the Earth through our senses. We celebrate our E-spots’ (2011: 7). Undergirding these practices is a philosophy that tweaks former ecofeminist and environmentalist imaginings of Earth as mother to reconfigure the Earth as a lover. As Stephens and Sprinkle avow: ‘The Earth is our lover […] and we are grateful for this relationship each and every day. In order to create a more mutual and sustainable relationship with the Earth, we collaborate with nature. We treat the Earth with kindness, respect and affection’ (2011: 7).

Taking the earth as a lover raises a number of legitimate concerns regarding nonhuman consent as well as asexuality, someone who does not experience sexual attraction. In a recent interview, Stephens remarked:

You can be asexual and still be ecosexual. It has to do with your feelings toward the earth. We’re not actually out there humping trees—even though sometimes we will kind of perform that—but it’s more about breaking down separations between humans and nature. If you can separate yourself from nature, then you don’t have much of a problem killing nature, exploiting it for resources, and so on. But if you look at a tree as your lover, you’re going to think twice before you cut it down or burn it. (Callaghan, 2016)

That Stephens notes that they are ‘not actually humping trees’ but are instead performing these acts is significant to this discussion of eco-camp. In the same 2016 interview, Sprinkle also underscores the duo’s performative aims by drawing inspiration from drag queen RuPaul: ‘When RuPaul won an Emmy, it was a huge breakthrough because people need that glitter, that glam, that joy that drag queens bring. And if we could bring that to the environmental movement? I mean, we have the Sierra Club, which is huge, but we can’t be the flamboyant, queer, porn star kind of people [in it]’ (Callaghan, 2016). While some ecosexuals use the tenets of the ecosexual movement for their own ends and engage in erotic forays with plants without any sort of overarching environmental justice framework (and certainly no sense of irony), I see Stephens and Sprinkle’s ecosexual interventions as a performative environmentalism intended to reshape our ethical imagination by making us more conscious of our everyday interactions with nonhuman nature. Like the playful spoofs of gender evident in drag shows, the campy elements of ecosexuality are a self-conscious parody of ‘tree hugger’ environmentalism that is nonetheless undergirded by earnest commitment to environmental campaigns. This disconnect between the aesthetic presentation of Stephens and Sprinkle’s environmentalism, which is packaged in a tragi-comic tonal incongruence and staginess that I am calling eco-camp, and the ethical weight of the ecological issues they are raising awareness about – from mountaintop removal (MTR) to the corporatisation of water – can be confusing, even off-putting. Yet, as I will argue, being confronted with this unconventional environmentalism may be just the thing to jolt us out of conventional modes of thought, even if temporarily, and to resonate with crisis-weary viewers so accustomed if not immune to the alarms of environmental catastrophe.

Although there has been growing interest in environmental performance art (Szerszynski et al., 2003), less attention has focused on queer performative engagements with the environment. Literary and film scholar Nicole Seymour’s work stands out as a rare example of scholarship that brings together contemporary queer cultural production and ecocriticism. Building on her previous articles on ironic ecocinema, Seymour’s (forthcoming) book Bad Environmentalism includes a discussion of Queers for the Climate and their tongue-and-cheek ‘It Gets Wetter’ campaign, in which New York drag queens pose for underwater portraits to raise awareness about rising sea levels (I see ‘It Gets Wetter’ as another example of eco-camp). Seymour writes, ‘there is something both admirable and thrillingly ironic about queer environmentalism: that those with a foreclosed relationship to “the future” in heteronormative terms would be very deeply concerned about the future in ecological terms’ (2012: 63). As a champion for ‘irreverent environmentalism’, Seymour laments that ‘the affective and dispositional range of ecocritical work has historically been extremely narrow—favoring decisive sentiments, be they positive (reverence and hope) or negative (fear, despair, gloom, and doom)’ (69). Alternatively, she proposes ‘that we open ourselves up to complex combinations of sentiment’ (Seymour, 2012: 69), that ‘instead of remaining serious in the face of self-doubt, ridicule, and broader ecological crisis, we embrace our sense of our own absurdity, our uncertainty, our humour, even our perversity […]’ (57). Seymour’s work spurs questions about what an irreverent queer ecology of complex, even contradictory sentiment might look like, and whether these divergences from the doom and gloom of conventional environmentalism can be politically effective.

In what follows, I consider ecosexual performance art as an embodiment of the irreverence Seymour encourages. Examining Stephens and Sprinkle’s ‘marriages’ to ecological entities, as captured in their unconventional documentary Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2013), I contend that the political efficacy of this absurdist environmentalism hinges upon Stephens and Sprinkle’s campy ‘politics of imperceptibility’ (Grosz, 2002). This imperceptibility – the product of Stephens and Sprinkle’s tragi-comic performativity – has the potential to flummox our affective and moral registers such that the sanctity of our exceptionalism is shaken, and we are more willing to consider the sentience of nonhuman nature.

Since 2008, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle have held thirty three-way marriages/performance art installations in which they take the Earth, Sea, Snow, Rocks and even the Appalachian Mountains as partners and lovers.⁴ In an era in which mainstream LGBT politics has been almost exclusively focused on marriage equality, Stephens and Sprinkle employ marriage to further their environmental agenda by using these ceremonies as inspiration for their activism throughout the year. The weddings, which have taken place across the United States and Europe, are often large-scale collaborations with local artists and activists. Stephens and Sprinkle explain, ‘Our networks include artists, sex workers, academics, drag queens, queer folks and others whose voices do not necessarily fit easily into the existing environmental movement’ (2012: 66). Initially intended as ‘a performative protest’ against the Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA, the now defunct US federal law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman, these mass weddings have gradually become less human-centric (Stephens and Sprinkle, 2012: 61). Rather than merely championing more inclusive marriage rights, Stephens and Sprinkle’s nature-based nuptials defy perceptions of marriage as solely between humans. By marrying supposedly inanimate objects, Stephens and Sprinkle queer mainstream matrimony to show ‘that the institution of marriage is not the only kind of serious, committed relationship possible’ (61–62).

The vows exchanged during these ceremonies are often flamboyant affirmations of ecological commitments. For example, in 2010, Stephens and Sprinkle entered into ‘holy and irreverent matrimony’ with the Moon (62). This wedding was spurred by their concern over NASA purportedly prospecting the Moon for water and other resources. Stephens and Sprinkle collaborated with fellow performance artist Reverend Billy Talen, who is known for his Church of the Stop Shopping performances. Talen leads anti-capitalist and environmental protests against companies like Chase Bank and the Union Bank of Switzerland, both linked to the funding of MTR, a form of mining that blows the peaks off mountains to access coal. During Stephens and Sprinkle’s Wedding to the Moon, Talen performs an environmental evangelism as he guides the group in vows like, ‘Do you promise to be more conscious of your water consumption, in order to protect the Moon from more human exploitation?’ (63). Just as Stephens and Sprinkle shatter the sanctity and human-centrism of traditional marriage in the service of queer environmentalism, Talen utilises his status as a self-proclaimed reverend to preach against close-minded religions, state-sanctioned violence and environmental abuse. In this way, Stephens, Sprinkle and Talen employ eco-camp in their comical parodying of evangelical religion and ‘the wedding-industrial complex’ (Ingraham, 2008: 17) to draw attention to serious environmental issues and the human exceptionalism that justifies such destructive actions. This affective confluence of the serious with the absurd results in an effective ‘politics of imperceptibility’ (Grosz, 2002).

Reflecting on the theoretical framing for their nature-based nuptials, Stephens and Sprinkle draw from feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz’s ‘politics of imperceptibility’, which Grosz explains as: ‘a politics of acts, not identities’, ‘in which inhuman forces, forces that are both living and non-living, macroscopic and microscopic, above and below the human, are acknowledged and allowed to displace the centrality of will and consciousness’ (Grosz, 2002: 470). Stephens and Sprinkle’s ‘weddings’ to ecological entities are largely imperceptible in a world of ‘state-sanctioned, legally delineated couplings’ (66), and they welcome this confusion: ‘Nonhuman marriage or communal human marriage threatens to disrupt time-honoured patriarchal power relationships […] Our weddings incorporate humour and critique to acknowledge that the wedding ritual is an example of exploitation and servitude as well as love, collaboration and community-building’ (65). Stephens and Sprinkle’s imperceptibility, irony and seeming inconsistency – their weddings are both earnest affirmations of environmental stewardship and campy challenges to traditional marriage – stem from their belief that their unorthodox environmental antics ‘can generate new energy and perspectives for engaging the depressing prospects of our planet’s dwindling future […]’ (66). In the analysis that follows, I will use Goodbye Gauley Mountain to further illuminate three dimensions of eco-camp: its serio-comic tone; its tinges of the carnivalesque, including its embrace of the grotesque; and its reliance on performance and spectacle to foster and model interspecies flourishing.

Goodbye Gauley Mountain, hello eco-camp

In her canonical 1964 essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’, Susan Sontag explains camp as a sensibility, a stylisation, a ‘love of the exaggerated, the ‘off’, of things-being-what-they-are-not’ (1966: 279). As Sontag herself notes, camp is quite queer. Scholars like Esther Newton (1979), Michael Bronski (1984) and Moe Meyer (1994) have expanded upon the queerness of camp, countering Sontag’s claim that ‘Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical’ (1966: 277). Ann Pellegrini has also examined camp for its political potential. In her essay ‘After Sontag: Future Notes on Camp’, Pellegrini asks, ‘what remains of camp as an oppositional strategy?’ (2007: 169). She perceives camp as a ‘form of queer resilience, imagination, and […] “moral seriousness” in the face of vulnerability’ (Pellegrini, 2007: 174). Whereas Sontag emphasises camp’s ‘failed seriousness’ and playfulness, Pellegrini stresses camp’s ‘moral seriousness’, what she deems ‘camp sincerity’ (2007: 174). Using examples such as Albert J. Winn’s Summer Joins the Past (1997–2002), a haunting photographic series of abandoned Jewish summer camps, as well as Paige Gratland’s (2004) The Sontag, a hairpiece with a swatch of grey hair that enables its wearer to emulate Sontag’s hallmark bangs, Pellegrini’s (2007: 184–185) camp operates in simultaneously melancholic and comic modes.

The ecosexuality movement helps us to reconcile these seemingly antithetical readings of camp; and camp, or eco-camp, offers us insights into the comic-tragic character of ecosexual thought and activism. Ecosexuality embodies Pellegrini’s ‘camp sincerity’ and Sontag’s ‘failed seriousness’. It is simultaneously irreverent and solemn, flirty and earnest, hopeful and melancholic, and this bewildering affective register is nowhere more evident than in Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story. This self-produced film is part biography of Stephens’ youth spent in the mountains of West Virginia, part exposé revealing the horrors of MTR and part performance piece, as the garish bright red warning at the start of the film makes clear. Instead of an FBI notice about copyright infringement, Goodbye Gauley Mountain begins with the following disclaimer: ‘This film contains environmental destruction, explicit ecosexuality, and performance art’. From this startling yet playful warning, it is apparent that the film differs from the straightforward somberness and relentless moralising of so many environmental documentaries.

However, Goodbye Gauley Mountain begins with a classic trope of environmental film, a pristine landscape jarringly interrupted by ecological destruction. For example, throughout An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Al Gore’s poetic meditation on a flowing river contrasts with images of polluting factories, drought-ridden terrain and meteorological views of Hurricane Katrina. In Josh Fox’s Gasland (2010), recordings from the US Senate’s Subcommittee on Energy and Minerals are interspersed with hazy footage of rivers, streams and mountains and dramatic operatic music. Similarly, the expository moments of Goodbye Gauley Mountain contain picturesque scenes of the Appalachian Mountains abruptly unsettled by hums of static and footage of dump trucks and factory-filled smokestacks. This preliminary scene culminates in a slow-motion explosion as a mountain is decimated to access the coal buried beneath. Tragedy is the go-to tonal armature of environmental documentaries, which establish early on their environmental cause and its culprits. Where Goodbye Gauley Mountain differs from its fellow environmental films is in its inconsistent tonality. The montage-like opening sets a discordant tenor for the film, as the playful faux warning and scenic nature footage clash with images of horrific destruction. These incongruences are palpable throughout the film, which contains statistics about the harms of MTR – high rates of cancer, sludge-filled rivers, polluted drinking water – underscored by tense cello riffs and interspersed with Stephens and Sprinkle’s quirky yet earnest environmental activism.

This simultaneous playfulness and poignancy, a hallmark of eco-camp, is evident throughout Goodbye Gauley Mountain. In one of the film’s most emotive moments, Stephens visits the abandoned community of Lindytown, West Virginia, where mining companies essentially drove out the town’s inhabitants. Sitting in the midst of boarded up homes and an abandoned church is a peach tree now full of fruit that no one is there to enjoy. In another moving scene, Vivian Stockman talks about what it means to be ‘rooted to a place’. She recalls growing up on land passed between generations and her grandmother’s homeopathic tutelage that showed her that the woods could be her ‘medicine cabinet’. Stockman describes this intergenerational knowledge and shared sense of place as a ‘cultural continuum’ that is jeopardised when these communities are threatened by environmental devastation.

Amongst these emotional scenes and historical footage of early twentieth-century West Virginia, home videos of Stephens as a child and the recounting of local tragedies like the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster,⁵ there is tree hugging, earth massaging and talk of ‘cloudgasms’. During their Wedding to the Appalachian Mountains, which is featured in the film, we watch an elderly Larry Gibson, famed anti-mining activist from Kayford Mountain, share his harrowing account of MTR and then clap in time to Tony’s Circus, a band of performers in outlandish animal costumes. These unlikely environmentalist troubadours sing ‘Let’s All Be Keepers of the Mountains’ with lyrics like ‘they’re making our mountains into a molehill’. Just prior to this zany performance, a bouncing white ball appears and in sing-along style tracks the lyrics of the West Virginia anthem. Sontag asserts, ‘In naïve or pure Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails […] the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve’ (1966: 283). The incongruous tone of Goodbye Gauley Mountain is the result of a ‘seriousness that fails’. Ecosexuals are sincere in their advocacy for the earth and are even elegiac when it comes to the more than 500 mountains destroyed by MTR; however, unlike most mainstream environmental efforts, they package their environmentalism in a comic and erotic ebullience that refuses to take itself too seriously.

Sontag observes, ‘Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is “too much”’ (284). When I discuss ecosexuality with others, some retort, ‘it’s too much!’ – marrying seemingly inanimate objects, fondling lichen, flamboyant costumes and gaudy sex positivity – yet, this kneejerk reaction seems to stem not solely from a rejection of ecosexuality’s eccentricity, but from an unwillingness to let the implications of ecosexuality’s eroticism take our presumed human primacy to task. Through their eco-camp escapades, Stephens and Sprinkle playfully proposition us while proposing radical challenges to human exceptionalism. Sontag alleges, ‘The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious […] More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious”. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious’ (Sontag, 1966: 288). In the face of ‘King Coal’ and MTR, what one interviewee in the film calls ‘a protracted form of genocide’, Stephens and Sprinkle flirt with the earth (and with the viewer) in an attempt to ‘entice others to join the environmental movement’ and to challenge human supremacy over nature. Ecosexuality dares us to take ourselves a little less seriously and simultaneously entreats us to take seriously the momentous impact that our habits and ways of thinking have on the planet and its ecosystems. These queer environmental ethics are thus rendered all the more palatable through a campy charm that amuses us even as it challenges us.

In this way, Stephens and Sprinkle ‘use humour to disarm audiences who are tired and overwhelmed by hearing how dire the plight of the planet really is’ (2012: 66). They write, ‘What we bring to the table is style, creativity, love and fun in the face of disaster in order to allow people to experience and connect with the Earth anew’ (66). Eco-camp’s failed seriousness imbues ecosexuality with what philosopher Cynthia Willett deems ‘an erotic politics of feminist humor’ (Willett et al., 2012: 227). In ‘The Seriously Erotic Politics of Laughter’, Willett and her co-authors ask, ‘what devices are more explosive in the social sphere, more discomforting to our conventional modes of thought, more invasive of our quasi-private store of associations, than the well-packed joke, the display of wit, or the well-honed use of irony?’ (218). Stephens and Sprinkle delight in witty spoofs of sex and sexuality – cloudgasms, e-spots, pollen-amorous, SexEcology. Stephens explains, ‘We try to bring a fresh approach to environmentalism and those living in the coalfields seem to respond to our work with relief and even some laughter after continuously being reminded of the impossible odds that they face each and every day’ (Stephens and Sprinkle, 2011: 14). Thus, this comic relief is not only cathartic but also communal. In Comedy, Seriously: A Philosophical Study, Dmitri Nikulin asserts that ‘people practice comic reason in reflective deliberation with others’ (2014: x). He observes, ‘In the tragic theatrical trial of everyday life, the modern subject appears at once as accused, prosecutor, defender, and judge […] as hero, producer, and director of its own tragic drama […]’ (Nikulin, 2014: vii). Much like the narrative trajectory of most environmental messages, ‘the modern subject is both protagonist and sole actor’ (Nikulin, 2014: vii). While ‘tragic reason grows out of the specifically modern notion of autonomous subjectivity—which […] is lonely and self-reliant’, ‘comic reason reflects a life with others’ (Nikulin, 2014: x). For Stephens and Sprinkle, comedy in spite of tragedy is part-and-parcel of their campy environmentalism as well as a mode of interspecies community building.

Thinking about the role of the comical in eco-cinema, Seymour observes, ‘A comedic stance entails flexibility and humility, those qualities required for humans to coexist with nonhumans, or maybe even for us to contemplate our possible demise’ (2012: 63). Similarly, in her work on interspecies ethics and the laughter of nonhuman animals, Willett draws from subaltern studies to argue for comedy’s potential to reshape our political will. She explains, ‘subaltern studies have established that ridicule and other forms of humor serve not only as accessories of cruelty and props of power but also provide discourses and technologies of reversal, leveling hierarchies by turning stratified structures upside down’ (Willett, 2014: 30). Ecosexuality rebukes the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals, arguing that such ‘leveling [of] hierarchies’ is no more ridiculous than blowing up mountains to access coal. Ecosexuality challenges the absurdity of environmental destruction and the anthropocentrism that spurs it through absurdist eco-camp with hopes that ‘the moment of laughter may jolt one out of habitual habits and cognition and open up fresh possibilities’ (Willett et al., 2012: 229). Whether we laugh with ecosexuals or awkwardly at them (‘what is this?!?’), Stephens and Sprinkle’s ‘laughing libertinage’ facilitates a carnivalesque challenge to human exceptionalism (Bakhtin, 1968: 32).

Stephens and Sprinkle’s extravagant eco-weddings embody the carnivalesque, a term developed by Russian literary critique Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) in his well-known study of folk culture Rabelais and His World. The word derives from carnival, a celebratory period found in many Catholic cultures. With roots in medieval festivals like the feast of fools and the feast of the ass, carnival is a period of celebratory and Bacchic disorder, which typically takes place prior to the Christian season of Lent. According to Bakhtin, ‘carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions’ (1968: 10). These festivities ‘offered a completely different, nonofficial, extraecclesiastical and extrapolitical aspect of the world, of man, and of human relations; they built a second world in which all medieval people participated more or less […] the serious and comic aspects of the world and of the deity were equally sacred, equally “official”’ (5–6). As captured in Goodbye Gauley Mountain, Stephens and Sprinkle’s ecosexual weddings are inclusive collaborations that combine the comic and serious, the sacred and profane. Participants are often self-identified artists and performers, but participation is open to all. In their Wedding to the Earth (2008), self-proclaimed priests and priestesses like performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña guide the group in prayer, and poets earnestly recite poetry such as Grace Paley’s ‘A Walk in the Woods’. These reverential moments are interspersed with the comical, such as a nonsensical rendition of ‘That’s Amore’ by performance artist Linda Montano. Campy costumes complete with peacock feathers and fake flowers pervade. One participant performs an operatic (and orgasmic) strip tease in an unexpected amalgamation of so-called high and low culture.

In their Wedding to the Appalachian Mountains (2010), the organist plays ‘Here Comes the Bride’, yet the processional of near naked performers, people in animal costumes,⁶ an emcee in a lavender tux and Stephens and Sprinkle’s extraterrestrial-looking costumes make clear that this is far from a traditional wedding. Bakhtin explains that carnival exhibits ‘the peculiar logic of the “inside out” (à l’envers), or the “turnabout” […] it is to a certain extent a parody of the extracarnival life, a “world inside out”’ (1968: 11). Stephens and Sprinkle’s weddings are ‘a parody of the extracarnival life’, with the world as we know it turned ‘inside out’ as polyamory, queerness, carnality and other social taboos are celebrated. Among these ‘turnabouts’ is ecosexuality’s inversion of longstanding Western social strictures about cleanliness and purity. Reflecting on her childhood love for jumping in mud puddles, Stephens comments, ‘it was also a way of embodying my belief that dirtiness was next to godliness and not the other story about cleanliness’ (Stephens and Sprinkle, 2011: 11). In Stephens’ rendering, getting dirty (literally) is divine and getting closer to the divine is sensuous, getting dirty (figuratively). This championing of the abject and grotesque is a primary trait of ecosexuality and eco-camp, more specifically; it is also a noteworthy characteristic of carnival.

Bakhtin discusses the prominence of what he calls ‘grotesque realism’ in his examination of folk humour (1968: 18–19). He writes that the culture of carnival embraces the grotesque – bodies defecating, excreting and aroused – and opposes ‘severance from the material and bodily roots of the world; it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or independence of the earth and the body’ (19). The carnivalesque embraces earthly delight, which is apropos since etymologically carnal and carnival share their Latin root ‘carn-’ meaning flesh. Likewise, ecosexuality celebrates the carnal and grotesque, particularly in some of its campiest moments. Wedding performers wear dildos outside their clothing and don costumes that accentuate and exaggerate their genitalia. In their Wedding to the Earth, one performer pulls her monologue from her vagina à la Carolee Schneemann’s (1975) Interior Scroll. In Goodbye Gauley Mountain, Stephens and Sprinkle bask in the sun on a muddy riverbank, playfully rubbing mud on their bodies. Instead of continuing to posit the Earth as an abject mother, ecosexuals welcome abjection as a mode of interspecies connection.

In the spirit of carnival, ecosexuality embraces degradation and decomposition. Sprinkle describes her first encounter with redwood trees at Yosemite National Park: ‘I loved the scent of the trunk, like vanilla mixed with soil. I have a strong memory of coming across a redwood that had fallen over from a storm. I walked around off the trail and peeked at its freshly exposed roots. So soft, so sensuous, so sexy! I had to touch them’ (Stephens and Sprinkle, 2011: 16). According to the tenets of ecosexuality, the abject, from fallen trees to slimy discharge from earthworms to the dankness of the forest floor, is not only erotic but also ethical. Paul Preciado’s homily in Stephens and Sprinkle’s Wedding to the Sea affirms this: ‘let us get rid of fear of the other, fear of queerness, fear of sickness, fear of ugliness, fear of the grotesque, fear of the virus, fear of death’ (2009). Through the theatrics of eco-camp, ecosexuality champions and embodies a grotesque worldview that has ecological foundations and ethical implications.

In an overview of carnival imagery, Bakhtin notes a ‘blend[ing] with the world, with animals, with objects’ (1968: 27). His discussion includes grotesque ornaments found in ancient Roman caves and burial sites and popularised during the Renaissance. As Bakhtin explains, the roots of grotesque are ‘grotta’, an Italian word for cave (with ‘grottesco’ meaning of a cave). Bakhtin describes the imagery of the grotesque motif as:

extremely fanciful, free, and playful [in its] treatment of plant, animal, and human forms. These forms seemed to be interwoven as if giving birth to each other. The borderlines that divide the kingdoms of nature in the usual picture of the world were boldly infringed. Neither was there the usual static presentation of reality. There was no longer the movement of finished forms, vegetable or animal, in a finished and stable world; instead, the inner movement of being itself was expressed in the passing of one form into the other […] (32)

Unlike our contemporary usage of grotesque as something unwanted and repulsive, here a wondrous hybridity of ‘interwoven forms’ is celebrated. To my eye, these queer ecosystems of fantastical human and nonhuman forms and intricate systems of flora and fauna are precursors to an ecosexual worldview. Like these grotesque landscapes, ecosexuality recognises the dynamism in nonhuman nature and advocates for ‘anarchic communitarianism’ (Willett, 2014), an interspecies flourishing that reimagines relations across species.

Stephens and Sprinkle’s eco-camp manifests in florid performances and spectacle, a facet of the carnivalesque that Bakhtin (1968: 7) underscores. Synonymous with spectacle is flourish, a word that has traces of the ecological in its etymology, which is based on the Latin ‘florere’ meaning flower. Stephens and Sprinkle’s ecosexual weddings are indeed flourishes – garish costumes, bawdy (eco)sex-positivity and sensational performances – that they hope will foster ethical flourishing. In Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing, philosopher Chris Cuomo explains that ‘a defining feature of ecological feminist thought is its commitment to the flourishing, or well-being, of individuals, species, and communities’ (1998: 62). As in ecosexuality, Cuomo’s model of flourishing hinges on interdependence: ‘The relevant common feature for ecological feminist ethics is the capacity of living things and systems to flourish […] and the fact that their flourishing—whatever it actually entails (and it will entail vastly different things for different entities)—depends on the flourishing of others’ (73). Stephens and Sprinkle embrace this model of symbiotic flourishing. They write, ‘What we hope is that through embodied offerings of performance, poetry, music and art we are creating rituals that open human hearts to all life forms and perhaps this […] helps the Earth continue to flourish’ (Stephens and Sprinkle, 2012: 64).

Such a call for universal trans-species flourishing is doubtless a tall order, especially in light of global capitalism, income inequality, factory farming and other manifestations of systemic oppression, in which the flourishing of some often results in hardship for others. In advancing her model of flourishing, Cuomo admits that ‘an array of ethical tools are needed to distinguish when and how it is justified to disrupt someone or something else’s flourishing’ (1998: 78). Cuomo does not offer concrete examples of these ‘ethical tools’, but she does think through some instances of flourishing at the expense of others, such as times when human welfare may trump animal interests (75). Ultimately, Cuomo advocates for the import of considerations of flourishing in historically and culturally contingent contexts: ‘useful and accurate notions of human flourishing can only emerge from richly contextualized, sometimes local, evaluations of what it means to be human, what people want and strive for, and what enables their living in ways they value in specific historical and cultural locations’ (79). For me, Cuomo’s work raises more questions than it answers about universal notions of flourishing: How can models of flourishing accommodate conflicting interests within such an immeasurably diverse category as ‘human’? How are we to balance human versus nonhuman welfare? How do we advance ‘conceptions of human flourishing that are sufficiently rich to accommodate the variety and complexity of forms of life—especially the lives of women and other Others [here she means human and nonhuman Others]—without rendering the concept meaningless with specificity’? (80).

Recent scholarly work in feminist philosophy and feminist science studies is helping us think through these ethical quandaries (Haraway, 2008; Willett, 2014; Alaimo, 2016; Haraway, 2016). Essential to many of these models of interspecies flourishing is what Kelly Oliver has called an ‘ethics of response-ability’ (2009: 77). Oliver argues that ‘subjectivity is responsivity and that the ability to respond brings with it ethical responsibilities. Responsibility has the double sense of opening up the ability to response—response-ability—and ethically obligating subjects to respond by virtue of their very subjectivity itself’ (77). Ecosexual philosophy offers a model for environmental ‘response-ability’. This is embodied in Stephens and Sprinkle’s ‘Vows for Marrying the Earth’, which include the mantra: ‘everyday, ears to the ground, we listen, and are changed’ (2011: 5). In this fashion, ecosexuality has the potential to render us strange to ourselves, a step towards desubjectivisation, or a dethroning of the human subject as we know it, that reveals new worlds and ways of being in the process. As Cuomo avers, ‘living feminist environmental ethics entails […] a radical shift in how one sees and interacts with the world’ (1998: 81). The aim of ecosexuality’s carnivalesque environmental ethics is to jostle us out of hubristic complacency by unsettling our conceptions of ourselves as not only separate from but also superior to nonhuman nature. Through a campy embrace of the grotesque, including a cultivation of ‘the eros of interspecies life’ (Willett, 2014: 26), ecosexuality yields a vein of environmental advocacy that destabilises human exceptionalism by ‘nam[ing] a desire larger than the self’ (12). As Willett explains, ‘Eros is not a bare striving for pleasure or wild intensity, but a meaning-laden yearning’ (23). Likewise, Stephens and Sprinkle’s eco-camp is the embodiment of a carnivalesque worldview for which they yearn.

Pellegrini claims that camp ‘is both “anticipatory”, in its in its ability to imagine different social worlds, and a form of historical memory’ (2007: 184). She explains, ‘Camp engages in a creative recycling of the past as a way to produce a different relation to the present and the future’ (184). It is an ‘ethical horizon [of] what might be’ (184). In Goodbye Gauley Mountain, Stephens and Sprinkle employ familial and communal lore, historical film footage, home videos and racy performance art in ‘a creative recycling of the past’ that renders the present moment strange: how did we get to the point of demolishing mountains to harvest their resources? Bronski writes that camp entails ‘critical act[s] of imagination’ that foster ‘a re-imagining of the material world’ (1984: 42, 43). Stephens and Sprinkle deploy eco-camp for this ‘re-imagining of the material world’, and the dissonance between their zany propositions and our destructive, anthropocentric status quo creates a generative estrangement with the potential to render us strange to ourselves.

This estrangement is an especially instructive exercise for the Anthropocene. At a time when we are saturated with intensified environmental urgency, might ecosexual practices and philosophies point to other ways that we can be disturbed? Can we metaphorically come undone – psychically, ethically, subjectively – before we are truly, irrevocably undone? While ecosexuality does not offer a prescriptive blueprint for future ecological intervention, it does provide a mode of thinking and being that demonstrates a certain openness to the world. Describing queer pleasure and community, Sara Ahmed writes that ‘pleasure involves an opening towards others’ (2004: 164). The interspecies ethics of care espoused by Stephens and Sprinkle have the potential to ‘queer’ us all by challenging our speciesist modes of belonging with a recognition of human-nonhuman contingency, what Donna Haraway calls a ‘knot of species co-shaping one another’ (2008: 42). After all, living in the Anthropocene will require us to be more open – to fellow humans and nonhumans, to cringe-worthy environmental antics, to an uncertain future and to absurdity, especially our own.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback, as well as Lynne Huffer, Cynthia Willett, Michele Schreiber, Mairead Sullivan, Natalie Turrin and Talia Levine, all wonderful interlocutors who engaged with this manuscript and helped spur its growth.

Notes

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