An Erotic Re-Imagination of Human/Nature Relationality: Ecosexuality and the Legacies of Coloniality in Love and Sex

Abstract

In this paper, I set out to uncover the legacies of coloniality in our understandings of love and sex by looking at ecosexuality as a conceptual framework. I argue that sex and love as defined and categorized by the logic of Western modernity stand in the way of imagining a manner of otherwise relating to others (both humans and non-human beings or matter). To imagine love and sex differently and to uncover their intertwined complexity within the pervasive discourses of coloniality, I base my approach on trans-corporeality, which problematizes relation as understood in terms of subject/object binary. In the first part of this paper, I give an overview of how ecosexuality is defined and how it proposes a change in the way we see the earth from as mother to as lover. After reflecting on the logic of modernity and Western coloniality to criticize the category of the human in opposition to nature, I think with Stacy Alaimo s work on queer animals. Attempting to expose the anthropocentricism in our understanding of sex acts, I engage with the implication of likeness to dissect the ecosexual idea of having sex with nature. Finally, in a discussion of the entanglement of sex and love and their rootedness in modernity, I bring forth both the pitfalls and the potentialities of ecosexuality for a reimagining of love and relationality.