Ecoporn

To me the reading on Ecoporn was the most interesting text I’ve gotten to explore in this class so far. In the dictionary “porn” is defined as something that sensualizes a non sexual subject and stimulates a compulsive interest in their audience. This made me think of rhetoric right away. Isn’t that what rhetoric is attempting to do in many ways? Convey a meaning so that the audience is effected with out necessarily realizing they have been? As I read on I realized how much Ecoporn there is surrounding us in our everyday lives. Every time a television show or movie shows an image of a beach or a mountain could that be considered ecoporn? Okay maybe not, but it’s definitely influencing the way we view the world around us. A large part of Ecoporn, to me, seemed to be the hiding of what’s really going on with the environment, and therefore only showing the beautiful and full side of nature seems to be wrong.

In the text Ecoporn is defined as a “type of contemporary visual discourse made up of highly idealized, anthrompomorphized views of landscapes and nonhuman animals.” These images are then aimed to relate to the human body and manipulate certain social structures. This immediately had me thinking back to the feminist paradigm and the social structure of the patriarchy. What is it about ecoporn that is generating a rhetoric that speaks to these structures?

Well, ecoporn represents the female in many ways. The images are in whole constructed by humans and don’t speak to the process that the animals or environment is put through in order to produce the picture. This is much like the experience of a women when she is put in front of an audience. Ecoporn is doing to nature in photographs what the male gaze is doing to women in film. Women are exploited and their exploitation is saying something to the world about the feminine experience. In Ecoporn animals are exploited and the rhetoric that is generated from their exploitation is rooted in deceit.

Not only could this issue be related to the feminist paradigm, but it could also be viewed through campbell’s lens of agency. Agency is something that is generated by society and causes certain rhetorical views to form. Those views help establish and keep in place certain societal views and structures. In this example, agency could be ecoporn and then rhetoric that it’s producing is speaking to society’s unlawful views of nature.

- Jiana Estes