- Events
- Feb 8 Author Meets Critics: Pamela VanHaitsma—“Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age”
- Feb 11 Science and Values in Climate Risk Management Speaker Series: Kevin C. Elliott
- Feb 18 Science and Values in Climate Risk Management Speaker Series: Matthew Adler
- Mar 25 Science and Values in Climate Risk Management Speaker Series: Wendy Parker
- Apr 1 Science and Values in Climate Risk Management Speaker Series: Elisabeth Lloyd
Events
Job Talk - Eco Camp: Queer(ing) Environmental Ethics in the Anthropocene
When |
Mar 30, 2017
from 9:30 AM to 10:45 AM |
---|---|
Where | 216 Willard Building, University Park, PA 16802 |
Add event to calendar |
![]() ![]() |
Presented by Dr. Lauran Whitworth
This presentation explores queer environmentalism 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, I think the queer and the ecological together to examine how ecosexuality answers the Anthropocene’s call to responsibility and action. I contend that ecosexuality’s concurrent urgency and playfulness embodied in a theatrical environmental sensibility I deem eco-camp exemplifies a carnivalesque ecological 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, spectacle, and ostentatious sex-positivity that champions new forms of relationality between humans and other earthly inhabitants. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque (1968) and Chris Cuomo’s feminist ethics of flourishing (1998), I argue that ecosexuality’s campy ecological ethics offer an alternative to the didacticism and moralism that characterize much contemporary environmentalism. In the spirit of carnival, the tragi-comic and, at times, parodic tone of this eco-queer performance art generates an affective dissonance that spurs us to feel the full effects of our discordance with nature. I maintain that this irreverent environmentalism is capable of resonating with crisis-weary viewers so accustomed, if not immune, to the alarms of ecological catastrophe. Ultimately, ecosexuality’s campy eco-erotics simultaneously entertain and bewilder, stirring an unsettling array of responses apropos for these unsettling times.