ABSTRACT
The medium of film is in multiple ways connected to its larger environment, an environment in which it is shot, edited, and screened, and that also produces the raw materials necessary for film production, distribution, and exhibition. Films are materially embedded in various environments and at the same time represent such environments on screen. Characters and their actions make stories, but these stories inevitably take place within some kind of setting, a cinematic environment. It may be natural landscape, like the Virunga Mountains in Michael Apted’s Gorillas in the Mist (1988), or it may be urban and specifically built for the film, like the futuristic cityscape of Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). It may also be wholly artificial and virtual, such as Pandora’s enticing forest in James Cameron’sAvatar (2009). Regardless of the origin and degree of authenticity of a cinematic environment, characters stand in relation to that environment and to the nonhuman actors that populate it. Studying film from an ecocritical perspective means paying attention to the ways in
which such environments are represented, and how characters relate to them. It also means taking account of how race, class, ethnicity, sex, gender, and other social identity markers inflect and sometimes determine such relationships in the actual world and in its representation on film. There are multiple linkages between gender and a variety of environmental issues related to representation, access, sustainability, and justice. Susan Buckingham-Hatfield reminds us in Gender and Environment (2000) that in the developing world “women’s work is often linked to the environment” and “much of that work is made harder through environmental degradation” (1). While many people in the West are increasingly more distant from the sources of their food, energy, and water supply, Buckingham-Hatfield suggests that women’s biology and accepted social role as caregivers nevertheless makes them more vulnerable and more attentive to environmental hazards and to the environment in general, especially so if they belong to a minority group (ibid.). But it is not only women’s relationship to the environment that deserves special attention from an ecocritical perspective. Recent research on queer ecology highlights important questions concerning the intersections of sexuality and environmental studies that broaden the scope of feminist inquiry. As ecocritic Greta Gaard has pointed out, “dominant Western culture’s devaluation of the erotic parallels its devaluation of women and of nature” (2004: 22). In effect these multiple devaluations are mutually enforcing,
which is why a chapter on ecocinema and gender must consider both feminist and queer studies approaches, which in many ways complement one another. The complex interlinkages between gender, sexuality, and the environment are receiving increasingly more attention from scholars in the relatively young field of ecocinema studies, but to date there is no systematic ecocritical approach from a feminist, queer or gender studies perspective. What I will therefore attempt in this chapter is bringing together recent scholarship in ecocinema studies, ecofeminism, and queer ecology. In the final part of the chapter, I will also suggest some ways in which an integration of feminist film theory might further enlarge and enhance the analytical scope of the gender-related study of ecocinema.
