Environmental Eros

The films of Barbara Hammer as “Creative Geographies” 1

Bibliographic Data

ID12459141
AuthorsLauran Whitworth (Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Agnes Scott College, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume29
Issue3
Pages234-250
Publication date2024-10-11
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Lesbian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1089-4160 • E-ISSN: 1540-3548
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10894160.2024.2396711
PMID39394684
OpenAlexW4403360614
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited16

In her 1978 essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde avers, "The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information" (1984, p. 54). Part of our maligning of the erotic, according to Lorde, is our separation of the spiritual from the erotic, a holdover of enlightenment thinking that insists on parsing apart that which is thought from that which is felt and sensed. This paper examines 1970s lesbian-feminist esthetics, specifically the works of American avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), to delineate an environmental eros, in which more-than-human nature is a source of erotic inspiration and interspecies connection. Just as Lorde theorizes the erotic as a "reminder of [one's] capacity for feeling and joy" (1984, p. 56), environmental eros understands the erotic as expansively sensual and sensory instead of solely sexual. My close readings of Hammer's films Dyketactics (1974), Women I Love (1976), and Multiple Orgasm (1976) challenge critiques of these materials as escapist relics of an essentializing past. Instead, I use feminist and film phenomenological theory to argue that the natural environment was an actor in radical re-imaginings of subjecthood and relationality that constitute an eco-erotic ethics with clear implications for contemporary environmental politics and ecological feminisms

Art · Art history · Hammer · Metallurgy · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · European history and politics · Materials Science

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