Ecoporn & Feminism

In his essay, Ecoporn, Welling discusses how “It [ecoporn] is pornographic and not simply like porn,” (Welling 57). He goes on to state that it “places the viewer in the role of the ‘male surveyor,’” (Welling 57) This role can also be described as a gaze or perspective. Ecoporn invites the viewer to take up an androcentric perspective. Feminists such as Shulamith Firestone would argue that it is an example of how “males had defined truth, beauty, love, and justice since the beginning of time” (Smith 339). Welling draws attention to the objectification of nature and women. He also describes the way through participatory agency by which many forms of ecoporn simultaneously portray femininity and nature in an explicitly male gaze. This is evident in the quote “I will, however, touch upon the processes of pornographic substitution by which landforms and nonhuman animals come to stand in for women in the public eye, and on the other hand, the processes by which women are naturalized and animalized,” (Welling 56).
 

There seems to be a linking theme of a perspective based in exploitation. There is interplay between the subject or focus of ecoporn. Is it “the processes by which women are naturalized and animalized,” (Welling 56)? Feminist author Simone de Beaufoir “argued that one is not born a woman, one is made into a woman by society,” (Smith 337). Through our participation as an audience, we are entertaining the rhetoric of the forms of ecoporn Welling is most concerned with. We are enabling the androcentric perspective . As Beaufoir postulated that “woman” is a social construction, Welling fears that through the exploitative ecoporn, “nature” will too become a social construction.

Welling, Bart H. “Ecoporn: On the Limits of Visualizing the Nonhuman.” Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature. Ed. Sidney Dobrin and Sean Morey. Albany: State U of New York P, 2009. 53-77.

I was unable to find a citation for the Smith background on "Feminism in the Postmodern World" (337-346).