ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how ecosexual art and activism may take the cultural politics of sexuality beyond the figure of the human and into the more-than-human world. Ecosexuality emerged in the early 21st century as a new sexual orientation and as a grassroots movement that combines environmental activism, performance art, sex-positive feminism, and queer community-building to invent new modes of struggle for environmental and sexual justice. Drawing on recent scholarship in queer ecology and feminist environmentalism, the chapter demonstrates that thinking with ecosexuality allows us to break away from prevailing human-centred understandings of sexual desire. It argues that such a shift is both epistemically and politically necessary for the development of gender and sexuality studies as a field of scholarship prepared to reckon with the global challenges of the current environmental crisis, no less than with the ongoing marginalisation of queer sexual lives. To substantiate this argument, the chapter examines selected works of the American artist couple Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle who, over the past 20 years, have pioneered the ecosex movement.
