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Queering Ecological Feminism: Erotophobia, Commodification, Art, and Lesbian Identity

Wendy Lynne Lee and Laura M. Dow
Ethics and the Environment
Vol. 6, No. 2 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 1-21
Published by: Indiana University Press
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40339010

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Ethics and the Environment © 2001 Indiana University Press
Abstract:

Utilizing examples from recent art, we critique Greta Gaard's argument that an inclusive ecofeminism must account for the role played by erotophobia in oppression. We suggest that while Gaard offers valuable insight into how fear of the erotic contributes to maintaining heteropatriarchal institutions, it fails to account for forms of oppression specific to lesbians. Moreover, Gaard's analysis unwittingly reinforces the conceptual, hence political, economic, and social invisibility of lesbians that, following Marilyn Frye, we argue is not merely consequent to compulsory heterosexuality, but constitutive of it. Lastly, we sketch a lesbian erotic whose potential for generating conceptual dissonance within heteropatriarchal value dualism contains the seeds of a creative "sensibility" out of which a genuinely queer ecofeminism might emerge.