from Ethics & the Environment Volume 6, Number 2

QUEERING ECOLOGICAL FEMINISM Erotophobia, Commodification, Art, and Lesbian Identity

Wendy Lynne Lee and Laura M. Dow

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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 hetero‚patriarchal 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 ěsensibilityî out of which a genuinely queer ecofeminism might emerge.

QUEERING PHILOSOPHY OF ECOLOGY:
1. GRETA GAARD'S ANALYSIS OF EROTOPHOBIA

In "Toward a Queer Ecofeminism" (Hypatia 12.1), Greta Gaard argues that because heteropatriarchy (and hence homophobia) is intimately linked to antifeminism and antienvironmentalism, it is not enough to undertake critical analyses of either of the latter without simultaneously addressing the former. Moreover, given the link between theory and practice intrinsic to the feminist, environmental, and lesbian/gay rights movements, political action must either be collective or risk repeated failure. As Gaard put it, "all forms of oppression are now so inextricably linked that liberation efforts must be aimed at dismantling the system itself." 1 She thus agrees with Catriona Sandilands that if our aim is to articulate a robust and comprehensive ecofeminism, it's not enough to "just add queers and stir."2

Drawing from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Epistemology of the Closet" (1990) and Val Plumwood's Feminism and the Master of Nature (1993), Gaard argues that ecofeminism needs to be "queered," a task which calls for the examination of the extent to which the fear and consequent devaluation of the erotic or "erotophobia" parallels and reinforces other forms of devaluation within the ideological framework of heteropatriarchal culture: "The first argument linking ecofeminism and queer theory is based on the observation that dominant Western culture's devaluation of the erotic parallels its devaluation of women and of nature; in effect these devaluations are mutually reinforcing."3 Moreover, as Karen Warren argues, such devaluations may be best conceived in terms of exclusive/ oppositional value dualisms: 4

Value dualisms are ways of conceptually organizing the world binary, disjunctive terms, wherein each side of the dualism is seen as exclusive (rather than inclusive) and oppositional (rather than complementary), and where higher value or superiority is attributed to one disjunctive (or, side of the dualism) or the other.5

Following Warren's call to dismantle dualisms such as reason/emotion, culture/nature, mind/body, men/women, master/slave, self/other, intrinsic worth/instrumental worth, and so forth, which support the maintenance of heteropatriarchal social institutions, Gaard argues that erotophobia plays a central role in the identification of women and nature: 6

As queer theorists have shown, the larger problem is the erotophobia of Western Culture, a fear of the erotic so strong that only one form of sexuality is overtly allowed; only in one position; and only in the context of certain legal, religious and social sanctions . . . The oppression of queers may be described more precisely, then, as the product of two mutually reinforcing dualisms: heterosexual/queer and reason/the erotic.7

If Gaard is correct, erotophobia underwrites what feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray argue is women's assumed and exclusive "use value"; that is, only heterosexual, missionary-style sex within the bounds of monogamous marriage is "overtly allowed," its value the reinforcement of a compulsory heterosexuality which in turn sustains social institutions privileging some (primarily white, affluent, straight, Christian) men through the commodification and consequent oppression of "others." "Woman," claims Irigaray, extending her analysis from women to nature, "is never anything but the locus of a more or less competitive exchange between two men, including the competition for the possession of mother earth."8

Irigaray has, of course, sustained a good deal of criticism for essentializing or overgeneralizing both "woman" and "nature," and we agree with the substance of much of this critique. However, we also think that it may be possible to argue for a somewhat more modest view of com‚modification, that this view may contribute something vital to the analysis of erotophobia, and hence to the inclusion of queers in any robust philosophy of ecology. To illustrate this possibility, we have chosen to concentrate our attention on a domain both narrow and broad in its scope, namely, production and commodification in the visual arts. We will argue that the dynamic and evolving relationships among and between erotophobia, commodification, and compulsory heterosexuality can be traced through the visual arts, especially as such art intersects and interprets culturally specific concepts of women, nature, and sexuality in value dualistic ways. As art theorist Suzann Boettger argues in her essay, "In the Missionary Position," art is no stranger to value dualism, and often enough serves to both represent and reproduce the identification of reason, men, and culture in opposition to the "primal" or "irrational" woman identified with nature:

[t]raditional archetypes of "woman" associate her with "nature" conceived of as capricious and irrational . . . in contrast to the identification of masculine qualities with things "manmade": aspects of culture that are reasoned, or socially mediated. The latter have been valued more highly because they are constructed intentionally and are further removed from primal nature. 9

Our claim, then, is that if women and queers are commodified and oppressed through the maintenance of value dualisms like reason/erotic and heterosexual/queer, analyzing how these dualisms are reproduced and sustained within relevant social institutions like art, that is, institutions which are both culturally diverse and yet common in some form to all known cultures, may shed some light on the ways in which we conceive women, non-human nature, and queers.

However, while we agree with Gaard that such analyses may provide new axes along which to examine "the ways in which queers are feminized, animalized, eroticized, and naturalized in a culture that devalues women, animals, nature, and sexuality," as well as providing a way to "explore how nature is feminized, eroticized, and even queered," we will also argue that her approach does not go far enough.10 That is, in light of what we can discover about how such dualisms are reproduced in institutions like art, it becomes clear that because her use of "queer" does not specifically distinguish between either "lesbian" and "gay man" or "lesbian" and "woman," she is not able to adequately account for those forms of oppression specific to women or queers qua lesbian. If we infer the meaning of "queer" from the passage above, for example, it seems evident that its implicit reference is primarily to gay men. An analysis of reason as it is opposed to the erotic can illustrate how queers are eroticized, feminized, and naturalized as well as how nature is feminized, eroticized, and queered. Gaard's emphasis on the extent to which queers and nature are feminized, however, evokes images arguably better suited to stereotypically effeminate gay men in drag, and by extension, to a nature feminized as flighty, alluring, volatile, or coquettish.

Moreover, as an analysis of the representation of women in contemporary visual art will make clear, although both "woman" and "gay man" are associated with "femininity," "lesbian" is not. For while stereotypical images of lesbians certainly do not preclude the feminine (lipstick lesbians or butch-femme, for example), these images are not readily distinguished from those of straight women, and hence not always recognized as lesbian. As feminist art critic and theorist Cassandra Langer points out her essay, "Transgressing Le Droit du Seigneur", lesbians within much of Western heteropatriarchal culture are so routinely coded (and hence effaced) as masculine that depictions of affection, intimacy, or love among women portrayed in feminine dress and pose are rarely recognized as sexual, much less as lesbian, a condition which, Langer argues, helps to reinscribe and reinforce lesbian invisibility well beyond art.11

By failing to include a specific analysis of woman/lesbian and gay man/lesbian within her account of erotophobia, Gaard unwittingly reinforces what philosopher Marilyn Frye identifies as the conceptual invisibility of lesbians within heteropatriarchal social institutions.12 That is, while even a cursory surf of the internet, the "adult" shelf of the local video store, or a music video illustrates the extent to which particular lesbian lives are as commodifiable as any, the value dualistic form this commodification takes helps to reinforce a specifically heteropatriarchal conceptual scheme or metaphysics within which opposed concepts like "women," "men," "nature," and "culture" function to sustain the prerogatives of those who must benefit from regulating the erotic, namely, those men for whom sexual identity is only as relevant as sexual access. Heterosexuality, then, is likely to be as compulsory as the metaphysics it sustains, that is, as compulsory as the prerogatives it can naturalize by rigidly identifying women, nature, and the erotic with the commodifiable.

Since our aim, then, is to queer an ecological feminism, that is, to articulate an ecofeminism sensitive to the ways in which our metaphysical assumptions inform the ways in which we conceive women, nature, and the erotic, we must account not only for those dualisms which oppress lesbians qua women, but for the omission of "lesbian" within the hetero‚patriarchal conceptual framework as well as its implications for the ways in which we conceive nonhuman nature. Given the prerogatives maintained by this framework, any identity omitted and hence not fully regulable qua compulsory heterosexuality threatens to expose its claim to the "real" as culturally contingent and historically constructed. The omission of "lesbian" is thus not merely residual, but consitutive and prerequisite to the extent that it cannot be readily identified with that sexual access which defines "woman."

The attempt to fit "lesbian" to the heteropatriarchal conceptual scheme brings us, however, to a perhaps less than surprising result, namely, that analyses organized around value dualisms are themselves limited enterprises. Such limits, we argue, apply as readily to Warren's model as to any given its aim at some level of conceptual generality. That is, at least some historically and culturally specific concepts of nature, women, and sexuality are inevitably either under- or over-represented, in this case so-called Western concepts over others. Acknowledging such limitations does not necessarily diminish the value of projects like Warren's or Gaard's, but rather urges us to go further—perhaps much further—recognizing that a metaphysics just is an organizing framework of concepts naturalized over time, habituation, and practice. Such, then, is the aim of the last section of this essay where, in the hope of providing some translation from critique to political practice, we sketch a lesbian eros or erotic: A self-critical, contextually circumspect, deliberately eroticized lesbian feminist reason or perspective from which to approach, examine, reject, subvert, satirize, or appropriate the diverse ways in which relationships between women, nature, and sexuality have been represented in institutions like the visual arts.

2. Susan Bordo: From the Commodifiable to the Compulsory to the Erotophobic

As one of the multiple "others" of heteropatriarchy, argues Gaard, "queer," along with "woman" or "person of color," is conceived as "closer to nature" and is thereby both feminized in the sense that Irigaray suggests qua commodifiability, and eroticized via metaphors which evoke images of carnality, bodiliness, pleasure, or irregulable sexual desire.13 During the 17th century, however, this identification appears to undergo a violent conceptual transformation into the now common ideological refrain that whatever is queer is nonprocreative, "carnal," or a "crime against nature." Gaard spells out this conceptual torsion when she observes that

[t]he charge that queer sexualities are "against nature" and this . . . depraved and devalued would seem to imply that nature is valued—but . . . this is not the case. In Western culture just the contrary is true: nature is devalued just as queers are devalued . . . [Hence] from a queer perspective, we learn that the dominant culture charges queers with transgressing the natural order, which in turn implies that nature is valued and must be obeyed . . . from an ecofeminist perspective, we learn that Western culture has constructed nature as a force that must be dominated if culture is to prevail . . . in effect, the "nature" queers are urged to comply with is none other than . . . heterosexuality.14

Erotophobia informs both axes of this valuation of nature, straightening out the apparent torsion. For both the charge that queers are "unnatural" and that women, by virtue of their association with nature, are dangerously carnal converge to legitimate and reinforce heterosexual social institutions and practices insofar as both are alleged to stand in need of the external control afforded through the strict moral (and religious) proscription of sexual impulses. Here too, however, a curious conceptual torsion erupts. For the use-value Irigaray ascribes to compulsory heterosexuality is at once erotic and erotophobic in that actions or intentions taken to be perversely sexual, namely, the (natural but dangerous) pleasure of women, or the "crimes against nature" performed by (feminized) queers, also become commodifiable products on the "open" capitalist market.15

Susan Bordo's analysis of the "agonistic construction of personality" produced by this torsion well-illustrates the erotic nature of capitalist consumption. She argues that

[I]n advanced consumer capitalism . . . an unstable agonistic construction of personality is produced by the contradictory structure of economic life . . . [A]s "producer selves" we must be capable of sublimating, delaying, repressing desires for immediate gratification; we must cultivate the work ethic . . . [A]s "consumer selves" we serve the system through the boundless capacity to capitulate to desire and indulge in impulse; we must become creatures who hunger for constant and immediate satisfaction. The regulation of desire thus becomes an ongoing problem [in the course of which] . . . women and their bodies will pay the greatest symbolic and material toll.16

Consumer capitalism is thoroughly eroticized in that it depends on women's "boundless capacity to capitulate" to desires which fuel the consumption of commodities themselves defined by the social construction of desire as heterosexual and feminine (cosmetics, diet, and fashion, for example). Yet consumption is also deeply erotophobic precisely because it is constructed along that value axis which locates femininity in opposition to masculinity and hence defines it exclusively in terms of male heterosexual pleasure and female sexual passivity.

A similarly "agonistic construction of personality" emerges for some queers in that, following Gaard, the desire to consume stereotypically ascribed to gay men is at once eroticized through, for example, the promotion of drag queens (commodified in films like The Bird Cage), and de-eroticized/controlled via its association with the feminine, hence passive, side of the feminine/masculine value dualism. Pervaded by erotophobic tension, the queer "consumer self" becomes wholly commodifiable in that his presumably feminine desire to capitulate to impulse both fuels the marketing of products aimed at immediate gratification and stereotypes which sanction the reinforcement of compulsory heterosexuality. "Crimes against nature," in turns out, do have a use-value.

As "producer selves" women are indirectly eroticized as laborers who must be enjoined to restrain their natural propensity to indulgence, cannot be counted on to do so, and hence are coded as unreliable workers whose lower wages and consequent economic vulnerability form a central component in the legitimation of compulsory heterosexuality. Underwritten through the valuation of women as mothers whose "place" is in the home, itself eroticized in terms of its guarantee of sexual availability and de-eroticized via the home's traditional association with procreative duty and family, the contradictory coding of women as producers supports forms of unpaid domestic labor fully concordant with heteropatriarchal ideology. Similarly, employment discrimination against queers gains legal sanction through the feminizing of gay men as unreliable (and potentially diseased) workers who, like women (though against nature), are economically vulnerable, yet unlike women (and in accord with nature), occupy privileged economic positions as men so long as they retain appearances appropriate to the heterosexual status quo (that is, so long as they stay in the closet).

What such analyses illustrate is that the regulation and commodification of desire within capitalist economies proceeds along conceptual axes which value production and consumption in terms which support hetero‚patriarchal privilege, and thus help to sustain the erotophobia which underwrites agonistic constructions of personality for both gay men and women. By introducing a consideration of erotophobia qua queer into Bordo's analysis, we can demonstrate that the compulsory heterosexuality which sanctions the material and symbolic toll suffered by women's bodies has its analog in gay-bashing, queer-baiting, and the enforcement of the closet. On this reading of Bordo, heterosexuality must function in as compulsory a fashion as does gender in that nothing less could serve to effectively regulate impulse regardless whether we conceive it as natural or unnatural.

In other words, identifying the desires of women and gay men as either with or against nature helps to endorse compulsory heterosexuality as metaphysical truth for the same reason that fear of the erotic is rooted in the fear that a disruption of those value dualisms which sustain privilege will lead to the dissolution of the real qua "man" and "woman." However commodifiable and thus essential to sustaining privilege desire in fact is, it must always be seen to contain the seeds of social instability and moral turpitude, for, as Bordo shows, no construction of personality other than the agonistic one produced by the tension between erotic desire and erotophobic fear could motivate either the consumption or the work ethic requisite to consumer capitalism.

3. Erotophobia, Karen Warren's "Logic of Domination," and the Example of Art

Reading Gaard in light of Bordo, we can see how erotophobia forms an integral component of what Warren calls the "logic of domination," that is, how through regulating desire, "a structure of argumentation which leads to a justification of subordination" is legitimated.17 Mapping queers onto the topography of Warren's "logic" reveals the extent to which regulating the erotic reinforces heteropatriarchy:

(B1) Women [queers] are identified with [against] nature and the realm of the physical; [heterosexual] men are identified with the "human" and the realm of the mental.

B2) Whatever is identified with [against] nature and the realm of the physical is inferior to ("below") whatever is identified with the "human" and the realm of the mental; or conversely, the latter is superior to ("above") the former.

(B3) Thus, women [queers] are inferior to ("below") [heterosexual] men; or, conversely, [heterosexual] men are superior to women [queers].

(B4) For any X and Y, if X is superior to Y, then X is justified in subordinating Y.

(B5) Thus [heterosexual} men are justified in subordinating women [queers].18

We suggest that although such mappings can illustrate how the subordination of queers is analogous to that of women, the introduction of additional variables associated with the regulation of the erotic raises serious questions about the extent to which value dualisms are useful in the evaluation of oppression across other relevant differences like economic class, ethnicity, or in this case, sexual identity. For example, while queers qua gay men occupy positions "below" heterosexual men, they are both "above" all women as men and "below" heterosexual men, they are both "above" all women as men and "below" heterosexual women as queer. Given the "logic's" internal constraints, this is at least a difficult dynamic to map. Moreover, while neither "woman" nor "queer" is identified with the fully "human" and the "realm of the mental," "with nature" carries a different conceptual freight in Warren's formulation than does "against nature" in that, however opaquely in the case of gay men, "against nature" both is and is not aligned with rationality or the "realm of the mental."

As Laura Cottingham demonstrates in her essay, "The Masculine Imperative," art provides an apt example of both the force and the limits of the "logic of domination." Here, she compares the production of Abstract Expressionism with the rise of Pop in American art during the Cold War:

[Art historian] Jonathan Katz suggests that Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, because of their "closet" tradition as gay men, were best placed to conform to the politics of containment that defined the height of the Cold War period, that they were already positioned as "organizational men" who could "work, as they had all their lives, within the terms of the national consensus." And if gay codes and personal homosexual experiences both influenced and were even then obvious in Pop . . . it's equally not surprising that the gay content of this artwork rarely made it into print.19

Pop, argues Cottingham, came to "eclipse" Abstract Expressionism because, despite both the political repression of the Cold War and its (mostly effaced) queer content, artists like Rauschenberg and Johns were already positioned not only as men whose "superior" place in the "logic of domination" was secure (and thus contained) but also as artists, as producer/critics of culture, whose work countered the avowed political "neutrality" of Abstract Expressionism.20 As art critics, Pop artists aligned themselves squarely with the "realm of the mental" in that their art both satirized and reinvented a distinctively American, predominantly white, male (heterosexual) culture. As queer, however, the value dualisms presupposed by this alignment, culture/nature, men/women, reason/the erotic appear less than plausible (less than the "natural"), despite their reinforcement through the commodification of Pop as art in that "queer" qua "gay men" both means and does not mean "with culture" (and hence "against nature") and, by the same token, cannot mean "lesbian," much less "woman." The place of gay men as producers and critics of art, hence as members of the "realm of the mental" (or not), seems then as difficult to determine as their metaphysical status within the "logic" seems opaque.

Women's place within this "logic" is, as Cottingham's analysis demonstrates, less opaque, but clearly subordinate. She shows how art production and consumption reflects and reproduces heteropatriarchal privilege by reproducing the conditions under which women continue to be identified with nature as opposed to culture. She argues that given the ideological and economic constraints which defined women's "place" in post-war, pre-feminist movement America "to be a woman was by definition not to be an artist."21 Thus, post-Cold War artists such as Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning signed for a period with their initials only, while others like Grace Hartigen adopted male pseudonyms.22 Along similar lines, Suzann Boettger argues that although "the majority of current ecological artists are women" whose work is "predominant in the genre" and often depicts themes aimed both at subverting the identity of women and nature and at revalorizing women's environmental conscience, "their recognition is not an example of a new egalitarianism in the art world, since the appreciation of women's work does not extend to museum and/or gallery exhibitions of painting and sculpture."23

It is tempting, of course, to think that the social and political conditions of art production, and hence the viability of the "logic of domination" with respect to women's place in art, have changed thanks to the feminist, lesbian/gay, and civil rights movements. But such optimism, cautions Cottingham, must be weighed against the recognition that, well-evidenced by the failure to represent women artists in recent art exhibitions, and by the complementary exclusion of women artists in recent ‚volumes of contemporary art history (with the important exception of the Gueril-la Girls), change has come grudgingly at best.24 Instead, she argues, women continue to be commodified as the eroticized but regulable objects of art.

Consider, for example, "bad boy" Jeff Koons whose photograph-based sculptures of himself and his wife (Illona Staller) engaged in assorted sexual acts are intended by Koons to be pornographic additions to, as Cottingham puts it, his "repertoire of hypertrophied kitsch." According to one critic, Koons's depictions of " the insatiable woman-child with hairless pudenda" are both erotic and ordinary, violent, and yet so de-eroticized as to be "banal."25 Despite being "packaged and sold as the product of a "rebel," the content of Koons's "kitsch," argues Cottingham, "does nothing to disrupt the dominant aesthetics of straight white male centrality," but rather, "reinscribes it."26 In his 1998 sculpture Naked, for instance, Koons "calls forth the Judeo-Christian determination for female subjugation made cohesive in the Adam and Eve myth,"27 a theme he later announces (1989) will be the subject of a film entitled Made in Heaven featuring Koons himself in the role of Adam "fucking / raping / plugging / ploughing – or whatever transitive verbs are implied by the contemporary use of the term "pornography" by a heterosexual male – his wife," Eve.28

Were Koons's work largely alone with respect to its arguably misogynist content, and did it not receive the critical acclaim that it does as art, we might be tempted to tag it as late 20th-century aberration of backlash against feminism. But such is not the case. Koons does stand tall, as it were, but in the considerable company of fellow artists such as Richard Prince and Matthew Barney.29 What analyses like Cottingham's show is just how deeply heteropatriarchal value dualisms are entrenched within American culture and thus how the erotic/erotophobic permeates one of its institutions, the visual arts. Perhaps more important, however, is that analyses of art like Koons's provide clues about the extent to which value dualistic conceptions of women, men, nature, and culture are commodifiable in/as art, and hence how, both in theory and practice, art production actively participates in the maintenance of the oppressive conceptual and political systems Gaard seeks to see dismantled.

What also emerges in the exploration of examples like Koons are the limits of categorizing commodification and oppression via value dualisms. As we have suggested, these limits become particularly clear when we inject "queer" into Warren's conceptual matrix. Whereas women's place within Koons's "logic of domination" seems unambiguously subjugate, were we to transpose a gay man into the kitsch-religious "Made in Heaven" plot line we would find his position obscure at best. For while a gay man may be as well-equipped to "fuck, plough," and so forth, as the real man Koons has in mind, he has no "natural" sexual object in other "real" men. For in Koons, "nature" operates to distinguish Eve from Adam, the "primitive" from the "cultural." It is only to her (nature, women, and feminized queers) that Cottingham's "transitive verbs" apply. What, on the one hand, is so readily commodifiable in Koons's art just is the confirmation of that hetero-patriarchal order which proscribes women and feminized queers as the "fucked" and the earth as the "ploughed." On the other hand, Koons's limits are also the "logic's" in that, given the conceptual and metaphysical rigidity of this order, only nature, women, and feminized queers conceived in value-dualistic terms can be (at least readily) commodified.

4. DIANA FUSS AND MARILYN FRYE: DISSONANT INVISIBILITIES/ INVISIBLE DISSONANCES

To the extent that Koons makes for a representative example of Warren's "logic" within art, he also exemplifies the violence—in theory and practice—sanctioned by the "logic's" demand for metaphysical stability. Keeping women metaphysically constrained is integral to maintaining heteropatriarchal institutions precisely because it supports the privileges, including the privilege to define what counts as valuable, of those, like Koons himself, who claim authority. As Cottingham remarks, the "post‚modern" resistance to "the (hegemonic) discourse of traditional European aesthetics" is itself buttressed by men's prerogative to define what counts as art.30

By the same token, that such prerogatives are sustained by whatever force is required to maintain metaphysical stability, they are also, we suggest, bordered by that which, by definition, both must be and cannot exist, must function to constrain and thus stabilize the "logic," yet, given its metaphysical status as exterior or opposite, always threatens to disrupt or contaminate it. Such is the conceptual freight borne by, as Diana Fuss remarks, the "homo" or "queer":

[t]he difference between the hetero and the homo . . . is that the homo becomes identified with the very mechanism necessary to define and to defend any sexual border. Homosexuality, in a word, becomes the excluded; it stands in for, paradoxically, that which stands without. But the binary structure of sexual orientation, fundamentally a structure of exclusion and exteriorization, nonetheless constructs that exclusion by prominently including the contaminated other in its oppositional logic.31

Both included and excluded, existent and abject, "homo" according to Fuss defines what counts as the metaphysical border of the "logic of domination." That is, the exclusion of queers is constructed as an interior exteriorization—a border—whose purpose is to insure against the disruption of the natural or given "places" of its members, "men" and "women" themselves defined in terms of compulsory heterosexuality. What else, we might ask, could sustain "place" as compulsory other than neutralizing the "logic's" metaphysical status:

(B1) [Heterosexual] women are identified with nature and the realm of the physical; [heterosexual] men are identified with the "human" and the realm of the mental.

(B2) Whatever is identified with nature and the realm of the physical is inferior to ("below") whatever is identified with the human" and the realm of the mental.

(B3) Thus, [heterosexual] women are inferior to [heterosexual] men.

(B4) For any X and Y, if X is superior to Y, then X is justified in subordinating Y.

(B5) [Heterosexual] men are justified in subordinating [heterosexual] women.32

While men can be feminized as queer within the "logic" the location of lesbians seems plainly indeterminate. Subordinated as both women and queer, lesbians seem to occupy the peculiar metaphysical status of the omitted, that is, inferable yet invisible. Little is gained, moreover, by substituting "lesbian" in place of "woman" (or by paranthetically including "homosexual" next to "heterosexual" woman) in this logic, for it is not clear that lesbian can be identified with or against nature, inside or outside the "realm of the mental," even though lesbians are (tacitly) positioned "below" heterosexual men as women (with nature) and like gay men (against nature), and "above" women (hence within the "realm of the mental") as (stereotypically construed as masculine) like men.

Moreover, even on the querulous supposition that lesbians are pseudo-men (one possible meaning of "butch"), woman qua queer cannot substitute for men in, for example, art like Koons's. For given the rigidity with which such representations appropriate (even while satirizing) the "logic," no prosthetic (such as a dildo) could adequately take the "natural" place of the penis. Such devices are not merely poor substitutes, but on this view violate the "natural" order wherein only "real" men "fuck." "Above" and "below," "inside" and "outside," "with" and "against," attempting to locate "lesbian" within a logic dominated by value dualisms generates a kind of conceptual noise or dissonance that is bound to exceed the disruption created by "mere" opacity. For while accommodating some men—as feminized queers—creates an "agonistic construction of personality," nonetheless commodifiable in virtue of those feminine characteristics stereotypically associated with consumption, attempting to accommodate lesbians—neither pseudo-men nor "real" women—suggests a "personality" whose fit is not merely "agonistic," but resists commodification to the extent that "lesbian" can be aligned neither with a masculine work ethic nor with feminine indulgence without risking the disruption of the value dualistic matrix itself.

No doubt our argument bears a family resemblance to Marilyn Frye's contention that lesbians are largely invisible to the heteropatriarchal conceptual scheme:

[l]esbians are outside the conceptual scheme, and this is something done, not just the way things are. One can begin to see that lesbians are excluded by the scheme, and that this is motivated, when one begins to see what purpose the exclusion might serve in connection with keeping women generally in their metaphysical place.33

Frye goes on to argue that "[s]peaking of women who have sex with other women is like speaking of ducks who engage in arm wrestling," reinforcing the notion that, given the "masculine imperative," "lesbian" lacks the metaphysical credentials necessary to confer "place" within the "logic." Fear of a lesbian erotic, then, would seem to involve not only the fear of a sex which could occur in the absence of a penis, but a sex not yet readily regulable and hence not (yet) commodifiable in terms of the assignment of metaphysical "place." Erotophobia must then be differentiated along its queer axis. For while "queer" qua feminized male still operates within the "logic" in virtue of having a penis (literally and metaphorically), "lesbian" can only represent the fear of any form of "having sex" which cannot be made to conform to this conceptual scheme, and hence resists being made into a ready consumable.

Note that we are not suggesting that particular lesbians are not commodifiable; as mainstream film and television make clear (for instance, "Two Girls and a Guy," countless installments of "Jerry Springer," and adolescent male-focused music video), a woman's possible sexual desire for another woman does not necessarily impugn her metaphysical status as a woman, that is, as sexually accessible to men. What we are suggesting is that, given the conceptual dissonance created by failing to meet the metaphysical requirements of the "logic," "lesbian" is not readily commodifiable as "lesbian." For however we characterize what actions, orifices, affective attitudes, expectations, prosthetics, and so forth, qualify as erotic qua lesbian desire or sex, and however much we differ across cultural, ethnic, economic, geographical, or experiential lines about what so qualifies, whatever could count as erotic qua lesbian is by definition, on this argument, not compulsorily heterosexual, not aligned with what counts as the "natural," and thus not necessarily accessible to men. To claim that it is possible to fit "lesbian" within the matrix of the "logic" is to claim that it is possible to commodify a metaphysical omission. Maybe so, but not, we suggest, without seriously undermining the "logic's" dualistic, compulsorily heterosexual, and necessarily erotophobic structure.

5. PHILOSOPHY OF ECOLOGY AND LESBIAN EROS: FROM DISSONANCE TO CREATIVITY

By the same token that critiques which serve to undermine the metaphysical structure of the "logic" can remind us of its cultural and historical contingency, the dissonance thereby created prods us to consider whether it might be possible to develop, as Frye might put it, a different kind of "seeing," or epistemic vision. In a sense, the most difficult and important step is already made in recognizing both the force and the limits of the "logic." For in this recognition resides the hope that the conceptual noise created by lesbian resistance to commodification can become the creative font for a differently eroticized artistic "vision," or for new tools with which to craft ecologically focused political coalitions. Such a possibility is surely vital to Gaard's vision of building "our common liberation," for the very reasons she herself gives: dismantling the oppressive conceptual systems which continue to paralyze collective political action requires an analysis of heteropatriarchy and erotophobia.

Nonetheless, runs the objection, can the dissonance generated by such analyses be sufficient to ground a vision distinctively but nonreductively lesbian and feminist and ecological? We think the answer to this question is "no," but that it can point us in a direction which promises to incorporate valuable forms of expression like the visual arts whose feminist, erotic, and ecological potential remain undervalued as avenues of political resistance. Hence, our aim in this last section is briefly to explore a vision of what might constitute the beginnings of an identifiably lesbian feminist eros, that is, an eroticized reason or perspective borne of but irreducible to the attempt to "add and stir" lesbians into the "logic," a vision through which resisting commodification can be made deliberate.

Such a perspective could be developed in a variety of ways relevant to exploring, satirizing, subverting, and creating reconceptions of "women," "nature," and the "erotic" in the visual arts. Indeed, one might imagine the development of such an eros as a way of making good on Frye's claim that

[I]t is also true that lesbians are in a position to see things that cannot be seen from within the system. What lesbians see is what makes them lesbians and their seeing is why they have to be excluded. Lesbians are woman-seers. When one is suspected of seeing women, one is spat summarily out of reality, through the cognitive gap and into the negative semantic space.34

The notion that lesbians are woman-seers might be read to suggest questions about what and how we see women, questions whose potential for disruption require that we be "spat summarily out of reality," questions whose answers might well be painted, drawn, set to music, built, or written as eros. Compare Frye's with Harmony Hammond's opening observations in her essay, "A Space of Infinite and Pleasurable Possibilities: Lesbian Self-Representation in Visual Art":

I am an artist, a feminist, a lesbian, middle-class, white. When I'm good, I'm an artist. When I'm bad, I'm a feminist. And when I'm horrid, I'm a goddamn dyke. I feel like being horrid these days. Given the current political climate around art and the threat of being artistically silenced for being queer and female, I can't afford to be quiet or let others define who I am and what kind of art I may or may not make.35

As a "goddamn dyke," Hammond's dissonant lesbian voice disrupts the silence which defines her "place" as neither seen nor heard, but rather as "queer and female," in the visual arts. Unwilling to be silenced, Hammond's dissonant lesbian voice disrupts the silence which defines her "place" as neither seen nor heard, but rather as "queer and female," in the visual arts. Hammond demands "to see and be seen" as queer and as a woman despite the risks entailed by speaking (or painting or putting to music) what is seen (for example, the National Endowment for the Arts ongoing assaults on the funding of, as Senator Jesse Helms puts it, "perverted" art work).

The danger, of course, is that when women look deliberately and begin to see other women, to value other women in ways not concordant with the logic of domination, their seeing inevitably creates not only ontological but epistemic disruption. As the example of the visual arts demonstrates particularly clearly, this disruption need not be understood solely in terms of what it threatens, but, as Hammond suggests, as a potential "space of infinite and pleasurable possibility," that is, a "space" which invites the exploration of what Gaard calls "the eroticism of reason and the unique rationality of the erotic."36 For Hammond, such a "space" can be identified as distinctively lesbian to the extent that it is created out of nothing. It would establish a lesbian subject full of complexity and contradiction, unfixed, ever shifting and reinventing itself in order to embrace and reflect an artic‚ulation of difference not only from men and straight women, but among lesbians.37

Such a subject deliberately eschews single engine definitions of "lesbian," but remains open to "complexity and contradiction" in a fashion which, while resisting definitive theorizing as lesbian, also resists easy commodification as woman. Read through our analysis and Frye's notion of a "woman-seer," Hammond's "seeing" suggests an erotic pleasure that is distinctively lesbian in its potential to create the kind of epistemic dissonance that fuels, for example, satire and subversion.

Hammond profiles two artists, Deborah Bright and Kaucyila Brooke, whose work subverts heterosexist images of women by inserting, for example, erotic and "lesbianized" images of Bright herself lighting Audrey Hepburn's cigarette, or Brook's self-portrayal as "Badgirl" (modeled after comic strips of Batgirl and Spiderwoman) who battles in defense of women's sexual desire. "Perhaps," Hammond argues, "it is the invention that turns us on. Lesbian pleasure is multiple and not fixed, and I would suggest that it is precisely in this unfixedness that the lesbian erotic is located."38 On the one hand, both Bright's and Brooke's art is commodifiable to the extent that its display makes each work an object of public consumption. On the other hand, each work invites us to see not merely erotically, but erotically as women in that the content of the art is not simply sexualized,
but "lesbianized." It is in this latter sense, then, that we might conceive such "invention" as "multiple and not fixed," for if our analysis is correct, it is at least less commodifiable than, say, the work of artists like Koons.

We might wonder just what Hammond means by "lesbianized," or even by "subversion," especially given the risk of heterosexist consumption under the guise of popular male pornographic fantasy. This risk is mitigated to some extent by the discomfort created by the deliberate lack of attention paid to male interests. Unlike Koons, whose work serves to reinscribe heteropatriarchal conceptions of women and nature in the course of satirizing what he takes to be their comedic (arguably misogynist) features, Bright's lighting of Hepburn's cigarette both satirizes a stereotypically male-privileged gesture and eroticizes its content in light of what cigarettes have been taken comedically to represent (penises—or, rather, small ones). Locating herself in the scene, it is as if Bright promises Hepburn that, after all, she can do better. And, following Gaard, so, we think, can we.

If our aim as ecological, feminist, and lesbian philosophers and political activists is to contribute to the dismantling of oppression, it seems clear that we must attend to the ways in which forms of oppression are perpetuated and confirmed in those institutions empowered to reinforce dualistic and hierarchical conceptions of value. We must also attend to the limitations of analyses which rely more or less solely on the logic of domination. For, as we hope to have shown, what is occluded in both the logic and consequently, in critical evaluations of it, are precisely those whose "fit" is disruptive, and hence whose ready commodifiability is compromised. Such disruptions, we suggest, are opportunities for the creative articulation of subversive and distinctively lesbian work in art, in philosophy, in political action.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Gaard, Greta (1997). "Toward a Queer Ecofeminism," Hypatia 12 (1):117.

2. Ibid., 115. Because any possible definitions of terms like "queer," "gay," "lesbian," are themselves aspects of the terrain contested in the following essay, the reader should understand our uses of these terms as "work in progress."

3. Ibid., 115.

4. See, for example, the following by Karen J. Warren (1990), "The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism," Environmental Ethics 12 (2): 125–46; Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, ed. Michael E. Zimmerman et al. (1993), Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Originally published in Environmental Ethics 12 (2):125–46; "Ecofeminism and Ecosystem Ecology," (co-authored with Jim Cheney, 1991) Hypatia 6 (1); and "Toward an Ecofeminist Ethic," (1988) Studies in the Humanities, ed. Patrick Murphy, 15(2): 140–56.

5. Gaard, Greta, "Toward a Queer Ecofeminism," 115–16.

6. Ibid., 117.

7. Ibid., 118

8. Irigaray, Luce (1985). "This Sex Which Is Not One." In Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 355.

9. Boettger, Suzann (1994). "In the Missionary Position: Recent Feminist Ecological Art."In New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action. New York: HarperCollins, 253.

10. Gaard, Greta. "Toward a Queer Ecofeminism," 119.

11. Langer, Cassandra (1994). "Transgressing Le Droit du Seigneur: The Lesbian Feminist Defining Herself in Art History." New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, ed. Joanna Frueh, Cassandra Langer, and Arlene Raven. New York: HarperCollins, 306–26.

12. Frye, Marilyn (1995). "To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality." In Feminism and Philosophy: Essential Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation and Application, ed. Nancy Tuana and Rosemarie Tong. Bolder, Colo.: Westview Press, 162–74. Originally published in (Frye 1983) The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 152–74.

13. Gaard, Greta. "Toward a Queer Ecofeminism," 119.

14. Ibid., 120–121

15. Ibid., 120–132

16. Bordo, Susan (1995). "Reading the Slender Body." In Feminism and Philosophy: Essential Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation and Application, ed. Nancy Tuana and Rosemarie Tong. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 476; 484. Originally published in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (1990). New York: Routledge, 83–112.

17. Warren, Karen. "The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism," 125–46.

18. Ibid., 130.

19. Cottingham, Laura (1994). "The Masculine Imperative: High Modern, Post-modern." In New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, ed. Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven. New York: Harper Collins, 136.

20. Ibid., 137.

21. Ibid., 136.

22. Ibid., 136.

23. Boettger, Suzann, "In the Missionary Position," 248–9.

24. Cottingham, Laura, "The Masculine Imperative," 136–7.

25. Ibid., 141.

26. Ibid., 140.

27. Ibid., 140.

28. Ibid., 142.

29. Ibid., 143–6.

30. Cottingham, Laura,"The Masculine Imperative: High Modern Post Modern," 33; 132–5.

31. Fuss, Diana (1991). "Inside/Out," Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York: Routledge, 3.

32. Warren, Karen, "The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism," 130.

33. Frye, Marilyn, "To See and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality," 173. Judith Butler makes a similar point in "Decking Out: Performing Identities" when she argues that "for [Senator Jesse] Helms, gay men exist as objects of prohibition
. . . ; [but] in a sense, the lesbian is not even produced within this discourse as a prohibited object . . . oppression works not merely through acts of overt prohibition, but covertly, through the constitution of viable subjects and through the corollary constitution of a domain of unviable (un)subjects . . . who are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of the law." Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (1991). New York: Routledge, 15–16.

34. Ibid., 173–4

35. Hammond, Harmony (1994). "A Space of Infinite and Pleasurable Possibilities: Lesbian Self-Representation in Visual Art." In New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, ed. Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven. New York: HarperCollins, 97.

36. Gaard, Greta, "Toward a Queer Ecofeminism," 132.

37. Hammond, Harmony, "A Space of Infinite and Pleasurable Possibilities: Lesbian Self Representation in Visual Art," 98–99.

38. Ibid., 122. A roughly similar point about the potential value of dissonance is made by Judith Butler in "Decking Out: Performing Identities" when she queries "[w]hat, if anything can lesbians be said to share? . . . If I claim to be a lesbian, I "come out" only to produce a new and different "closet." The "you" to whom I come out now has access to a different region of opacity. Indeed, the locus of opacity has simply shifted; before, you did not know whether I "am," but now you do not know what that means, which is to say the copula is empty, that it cannot be substituted for with a set of descriptions. And perhaps that is a situation to be valued." Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, ed. Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 15–16. We would add that while considerations of space have moved us to focus fairly narrowly on a single axis of lesbian identity, much further exploration is called for with respect to other intersections not able to be accommodated by the logic of domination, especially those intersections which bear on, for example, environmental racism and the commodifiablility of children, issues often ignored, but fully relevant to the lives of lesbians.

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