Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

This presentation analyzes how Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2013), demonstrates the value of liminality as a transformative space for activism that is aimed at protecting natural places. The film tackles one of the processes of capitalist exploitation of wider nature, namely mountaintop removal for coal mining, in Stephens’s childhood home of West Virginia. While one might expect a traditional, informational, nature documentary approach to such an issue, Stephens and Sprinkle take a different route, arguably owing to the insights that their own liminal situations have afforded them. These queer scholars and activists, who openly identify as ecosexual, document in this film how their own struggle for equal rights for same-sex couples, was transformed into a war against the destruction of nature of which we are a part. In this regard, Stephens and Sprinkle’s weapons of choice became ecosexual weddings, during which they married various natural entities such as forests, mountains, and the Earth, to promote renewed connectedness between themselves and wider nature. That is, within the context of such performance art, Stephens and Sprinkle reconnect with wider nature by bringing their own bodies back into place, as it were, to show how human relationships with Earth’s life can be more intense than previously imagined – to the point of eroticism, and beyond. In this presentation, it is advanced that the cinematic dynamics of Stephens and Sprinkle’s ‘love story’ illustrate the value of liminality, a state between identity and non-identity, for catalyzing pro-environmental change.