In this article, ecosexuality – as popularized by activist-artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle – is explored through archaeological and genealogical means. Through an archaeological le...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:'I am cringe, but I am free':A Reparative Reading of Assuming the Ecosexual PositionVanesa Raditz (bio) and Jess Martinez (bio)Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, Jennie Klein, and Linda Montano. Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. University of Minnesota Press, 2021. ISBN 9781452965796.INTRODUCTIONEcosexual: Eco from the ancient Greek oikos; sexual from Latin, sexuales 1. a person who finds nature romantic, sensual, erotic, or sexy, which can include humans or (...) not. 2. A new sexual identity (self-identified). 3. A person who takes the Earth as their lover. 4. A term used in dating advertisements. 5. An environmental activist strategy. 6. A grassroots movement. 7. A person who has a more expanded concept of what sex and orgasm are beyond mainstream definitions. 8. A person who imagines sex as an ecology that extends beyond the physical body.Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth As Lover (Sprinkle and Stephens 2021, 2)What does it mean to take the Earth as a lover? How does it change our experiences of pleasure in our bodies to give attention to the eroticism of air in our lungs, mud on our skin, or water in our throats? How would it shape our ethical commitments to these elements that we depend upon for life if we were to reconnect with them as pleasurable extensions of our own bodies? These questions are at the heart of the decades-long research-creation performance-art collaboration between Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens that has built an international "ecosexual" identity and movement, a tale that they document in their new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. Part travelog, part relationship memoir, part how-to guide, Assuming the Ecosexual Position chronicles [End Page 105] the emergence and evolution of their ecosex concept and community through a playful recounting of over a decade of productions: performative weddings to the earth, moon, lakes, rocks and beyond; theatrical two-women sexecology performances that culminate in explicit sex in piles of earth; ecosex walking tours; workshops; public sex clinics; documentary films; and so much more.Woven throughout are philosophical reflections on the entanglements between bodies, land, sex, eroticism, and love, many of which emerge from ecofeminist thought, pollinated with the post-porn, sex-positive, queer feminism of the 80s and 90s. In introducing their philosophical inspirations, they name Greta Gaard's classic piece on queering ecofeminism (18) which stimulated a body of work describing the ways that patriarchal systems of power simultaneously oppress women, the erotic, and nature (1997). Drawing upon Sprinkle's background in porn and post-porn modernist theater, Stephens' background as a queer artist with a doctorate in Performance Studies, their mutual interest in sex education, and their love for the redwoods of Santa Cruz, the pair crafted ecosexuality as a particular lens for expanding queer ecofeminist inquiry into the power of sexual liberation for ecological liberation, which they do through the creative methodologies of performance. The performance art practice that they develop has significant inspiration from the Fluxus art movement, which resisted the authority of museums to define the meaning or value of art, and encouraged the active practice and production of art throughout life.Among the inspirations they list in the introduction to Assuming the Ecosexual Position, Donna Haraway and Kim TallBear stand out. Donna Haraway's presence is felt throughout the book—as a colleague of Stephens at UC Santa Cruz, as a friend at their Wedding to the Earth, as a collaborator in the documentary Water Makes Us Wet, and ultimately, as a posthuman philosopher (Haraway 2000) who has inspired Stephens and Sprinkle to "see ecosex as a conceptual art practice and a way of thinking beyond individual identity, and even beyond human beings, to envision a larger system—an ecology of relationships" (8). The authors also express the influence of their evolving relationship with Kim TallBear, with whom Beth studied while pursuing her PhD, and who has encouraged the pair to leverage this posthuman and new materialist consciousness towards decolonial politics (TallBear 2015). They cite one of TallBear's blog posts on ecosexuality, where she encourages ecosexuals to use a critical eye towards "New Age" appropriation of Native American ceremonies... (shrink)

By bringing queer ecologies to bear on the blue humanities, this essay promotes a queer hydropoetic investigation that attends to the forms, aesthetics, and politics of pools. Pools are sites of aquatic enjoyment, sport, and revelation that have long been understudied within the blue humanities. We ask whether the promises and failures of swimming in these geographies can provide a queer heuristic in which submersion, immersion, and staying afloat subtend coming out, queer eroticism, and queer of color coalitional politics. Our (...) tripartite examination engages the independent film Saved! (2004), the ecosexual documentary Water Makes Us Wet (2019), and the young adult novel and graphic novel adaptation of Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016/2019 and 2020, respectively). Our analysis of pools, as intimate bodies of water that capture media and literature alike, reorients the blue humanities to consider closer proximities and smaller scales of water’s queer potentiality. (shrink)

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 (...) class='Hi'>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. (shrink)

In this article, I advance how the work of transfeminist artistic collective Quimera Rosa formulates new understandings of gender and sexuality in the attempt of ‘becoming plant’. I will first analyse their earlier post-porn work and the use of hacked devices for the formulation of human/nonhuman erotic connections. I will then move to their most recent Trans*Plant project, which involves a human – plant transition. In relation and comparison to the notion of ‘ecosexuality’, I will finally draw an anti-capitalist, (...) posthuman sex/gender practice that radically escapes legibility and identity formulations to create open-ended planetary erotic alliances. (shrink)