The Ecofeminist Lens: Nature, Technology & the Female Body in Lens-based Art Nikki Zoë Omes Nikki Zoë Omes S2103605 Master’s Thesis Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University MA Media Studies, Film & Photographic Studies Supervisor: Helen Westgeest Second Reader: Eliza Steinbock 14 August 2019 21,213 words Contact: [email protected] ​ Cover page collage created by writer. 1 Table of Contents Introduction 3 Chapter 1: Photographic Transitions in Representing the Human-Nature Relation 10 ​ ​ 1.1. From Documentary to Conceptual: Ana Mendieta’s Land Art 11 1.2. From Painterly to Photographic: The Female Nude in Nature 17 Chapter 2: The Expanding Moving Image of the Female Body in Nature 27 ​ ​ 2.1. From Outside to Inside: Ana Mendieta’s Films in the Museum 28 2.2. From Temporal to Spatial: Pipilotti Rist’s Pixel Forest as Media Ecology 35 Chapter 3: An Affective Turn Towards the Non-human/Female Body 42 ​ ​ 3.1. From Passive Spectator to Active Material: The Female Corporeal Experience 43 3.2. From Iconic to Immanent: The Goddess in Movement 49 Conclusion 59 Works Cited 61 Illustrations 68 2 Introduction I decided that for the images to have magic qualities I had to work directly with nature. I had to go to the source of life, to mother earth (Mendieta 70). Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) was a multimedia artist whose oeuvre sparked my interest into ​ researching the intersection between lens-based art and ecofeminism.1 Mendieta called her interventions with the land “earth-body works,” which defy categorization and instead live on within several discourses such as performance art, conceptual art, photography and film. ​ While her photography practice allowed her to work “outside the museum walls and beyond category and convention” (Walker 24), Mendieta’s process was like a sculptor working with the land as her clay (Cecilia). As an artist who worked directly with nature and was active ​ during the brink of the ecofeminist movement, many scholars associate her work with ecofeminism and goddess feminism.2 But what is ecofeminism? Francoise d’Eaubonne was the first to use the term “ecofeminism,” an abbreviation for ecological feminism, in 1974. As the word suggests, the movement brings together feminist and ecological concerns and sees a connection between the domination of nature and the subordination of women. Being an activist, Eaubonne believed not only that the liberation of women was tied to the liberation of nature, but also that ecofeminism should be “anti-theory, anti-science, [and] anti-rational” (qtd. in Glazebrook 20) (Gersdorf 213). However, the responsibility to challenge and critique the prevailing patriarchal traditions also lies in academia. One of the first and most influential ecofeminist literary critics, Patrick Murphy stated that, “any ethically based criticism [...] is a type of intervention, and therefore ​ ​ can function as a form of activism and certainly a method of encouraging others to become activists” (qtd. in Claaren et al. 106). Moreover, the systems of domination that ecofeminism seeks to expose continue to be perpetuated and justified not only in politics and the media, 1 Mendieta’s work is often analyzed with regard to her biography, having immigrated from Cuba to the United States of America as a child without her parents. Her tragic and controversial death at the age of 36 - some believe she was murdered by her then-husband and famous sculptor Carl Andre - often overshadows the thematic and art historical significance of her work. For this reason, I solely focus on Mendieta’s art (practices) in this thesis. 2 Goddess feminism is a movement closely tied to ecofeminism that bases spirituality in female divinities. The significance of goddess symbolism in lens-based art will be elaborated upon in sections 1.2 and 3.2 of this thesis. 3 “but also less obvious [places], like the academy, intellectual community, avant-garde artistic practices and radical theories - especially in feminism” (de Lauretis 3).3 Thus, ecofeminism penetrated the academic sphere, where theorists sought to challenge the permeating male perspective in environmental disciplines. Deep ecology, for instance, is a branch of environmental philosophy that addresses the interconnectedness of humans and nature. Ecofeminism seconds this notion, but adds that patriarchy and capitalism - not only in Western culture - are to blame for the anthropocentrism that dominates society.4 Instead of ignoring difference, ecofeminists address the multiplicity of perspectives towards the environment (Selam 81). As Irene Diamond and Feman Orenstein write in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (1990), life should be ​ considered as, “lived awareness that we experience in relation to particular beings as well as ​ ​ the larger whole” (137). Although the domination of nature and women are central concerns, ecofeminism is an intersectional branch of feminism that considers interconnections between all systems of domination. Karen J. Warren, in Ecological Feminism (1994), calls ​ these the “isms of domination” (2), amongst which are sexism, racism, classism, hetereosexism, and ethnocentrism.5 This thesis, however, will focus on the core of ecofeminism, exploring how the value dualism between nature and humans is conceptually tied to the value dualism between man and woman. Art theorist Suzann Boettger outlines this connection as forth: Traditional 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 (253). 3 Feminist scholar Teresa de Lauretis was referring to the continuous social construction of gender in this sentence, but her argument can also be applied to other culturally ingrained notions and hierarchies that remain invisible in many fields. 4 Val Plumwood was a key player in ecofeminism but also in the development of “ecosophy,” meaning the philosophy of ecological harmony, which was first conceptualized in the nineties by post-structuralist Félix Guattari and deep ecologist Arne Næss. Her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) is a ​ ​ ​ philosophical account of ecofeminism and its relation to other feminist and ecologist theories. 5 María Mies & Vandana Shiva reflect upon the more political rather than strictly philosophical side of ecofeminism and how these “isms of domination” function in real situations, reflecting upon interviews with women about environmental devastation in Ecofeminism (1993). ​ ​ 4 Warren calls these differences between what is considered “masculine” and “feminine” in Western culture as value dualisms - human/nature, man/woman, mind/body, reason/emotion - that function to keep the systems of domination intact (2).6 Art is then also traditionally considered as something “manmade,” where men create order out of the chaos of the earth or their female model/muse.7 Warren suggests that, “a less colonizing approach to nature does not involve denying human reason or human difference but rather ceasing to treat reason as the basis of superiority and domination” (68). The discipline of ecofeminism faced critique for its sometimes essentialist view of the woman-nature relation - believing there is some essential connection between women and nature that men do not have - and universal generalizations of femininity and female experience. (Post-)structuralist feminists wanted to instead liberate women from the connection to nature, since it distanced them more from the cultural and scientific realm dominated by men. Feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir for example, thought women needed to become autonomous subjects free from the associations of nature. Yet, in the same text, The Second Sex (1952), Beauvoir contends that both women and nature are seen as ​ ‘other’ in the patriarchal order (114). The fact that this was written in the fifties suggest that there was already a need for deeper ecofeminist analysis within earlier feminist discourse. Although the aim of ecofeminism was to research why cultural dualisms exist and how they function, its dismissal in the 1990s led to an outright rejection of the term ‘ecofeminism’ by most scholars entering the 2000s. Currently, however, ecofeminism is experiencing somewhat of a resurgence. In “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism” (2011), Greta Gaard pleads for a “new ecofeminism” (44) that embraces its history but is simultaneously critical of its earlier pitfalls.8 Even though the scepticism about ecofeminism persists, the field continues to expand, being linked to 6 Ecofeminism has been critiqued as generalizing that the woman-nature relation is a global phenomenon, since many Eastern cultures have a very different cultural conception of women and nature. It is therefore necessary to specify that these modes of thinking are specific to Western culture. 7 For example, the earth is “ordered” by landscape painters romanticising its wilderness and figurative painters for instance historically censor and conceal women’s bodies. 8 This “new ecofeminism” takes the form of a “critical ecofeminism,” “anthropocene ecofeminism” and “posthumanist anticolonial ecofeminism” in Gaard’s 2017 book. 5 different disciplines such as queer theory and materialism.9 The editor’s introduction by Margarita Estévez-Saá and María