WGS Symposium Keynote Lecture with Lauran Whitworth of Agnes Scott College "Loving the Land and Each Other: Environmental Eros & Trans-Species Ethics in Feminist and Queer Ecologies"

The keynote lecture with Lauren Whitworth of Agnes Scott College will take place Tuesday, March 26, at 5 p.m. in the Pat Peterson Museum Education Room, located in the GCSU library.

In her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde avers, “[The erotic] 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” (54). Part of our maligning of the erotic, according to Lorde, is our separation of the spiritual from the erotic. In this talk, I will examine writings and illustrations by feminist and queer activists who perceive the environment and more-than-human organisms as a source of ethical, spiritual and erotic inspiration. My case studies include feminist back-to-land communes, the Radical Faeries, the Queer Ecojustice Project and essays by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I locate in these materials an environmental eros that combines a Platonic/Greek sense of the word eros, a desire for that which is “larger than the self” (Willett 2014, 10), with Lorde’s understanding of eros as a life force and creative energy. By desiring in and with nature, these feminist and queer ecologies model relationality between human and nonhuman others that welcomes interdependence and challenges human supremacy.

Bio:  Lauran Whitworth (she/they) is an assistant professor and chair of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and co-director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies minor at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. Her current book project, Environmental Eros: Picturing Feminist, Queer and Trans Ecologies, brings together gender and sexuality studies, film studies and ecocriticism. The book focuses on the environmental ethics and aesthetics of 1970s ecological feminisms, the Radical Faerie movement and several contemporary environmental groups, including the Queer Ecojustice Project. Her scholarship has appeared in Feminist Theory, Intersections and CAA Reviews.

Co-sponsors: Women and Gender Studies, Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, Women’s Center, Cultural Center