I would like to start by asking you to do something - please take a minute to imagine a landscape. 

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What did you see? Perhaps an idyllic pastoral valley broken only by scattered cottages and dots of sheep. Maybe a mountain range with insurmountable grey peaks and thick blankets of snow. Possibly you subverted expectations and imagined a bustling, glowing cityscape. But here’s some questions for you and your imagined place - who lives in the landscape? How do they affect what it looks or sounds like? What is its history? Where does the landscape officially begin and end? What would it feel like to walk through it? These are the questions that start to crack open our traditional idea that a landscape is a pretty rural view, something only to look at where nature lives without us. When you delve into what really defines a landscape, it isn’t an object, but an experience.

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Historically, Western thinkers have worked to dissociate space from the bodies that occupy it by seeing it as universal, something that just is regardless of human perception. Therefore, space was understood as an object to be interacted with. But the reality is that space is formed into places and experienced by us, so historians and geographers have defined three types of landscape (West & Ndlovu 2010). Natural landscapes are areas of natural beauty and/or ecological importance, whereas cultural landscapes are areas of human significance spiritually or historically. Cognitive landscapes somewhat combine the two by acknowledging the role of collective social memory and the ongoing processes of dwelling in and defining a landscape.

 

These definitions have been useful for designating World Heritage sites, but there are problems in how it frames our relationship to nature. In the modern Western world there is a hypersensitivity to humans interfering with nature. The paradigm of national parks and nature reserves has created an obsession with so-called “untouched” natural landscapes and the concept of “wilderness”. A false dualism between “natural” and “cultural” landscapes has been embedded in the Western psyche, whereby humans are considered exogenous to certain environments and inherently damaging to the natural world. Importantly, this dualism has provided a convenient narrative for those in power. For example, the “wilderness” of US National Parks was created by evicting Indigenous peoples (Martin 2020) and many conservation and anti-deforestation projects continue the colonial legacy by taking control of land away from local people (Bartholdson et al 2019; SurvivalInternational.org).

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Monuments are the clearest example of how the politics of collective memory are formed. When you erect a statue in honour of a person or event, it asserts a dominant cultural narrative upon the landscape. Anyone walking through the area knows who they are supposed to venerate and remember, while marginalised history is erased by omission. There is good reason the Black Lives Matter movement is so concerned with statues of slave traders – that these monuments remain is a political statement in itself. The monuments’ very existence say “we want to celebrate what these men did for our economy and ignore their evil atrocities, and you’re going to remember that every time you walk through this place.” Graffiti and street art are very interesting forms of resistance I don’t have time to explore now, but I would recommend Kimvall’s (2010) piece on the subject if this interests you.

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It is clear that landscapes are not simply a rural view or a place we live - instead, ‘landscape emerges as a matter of everyday life and an ideological vehicle’ (Wylie 2007: 216). Place is not an object outside of ourselves, but is an experience of politics, social relations, and belief systems. Therefore, phenomenological anthropologies – the study of humanity through conscious sensation – have deconstructed objective geography and focus instead on subjectivity of the body. In other words, as we walk through/pass by/graffiti monuments in a landscape, our bodies are the conduit of our experience.

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There are of course many aspects of the body that affect our experience of a landscape but I would like to focus on gender. Ashmore (2006) argues that gender is the most formative aspect in our relationship to the land, even suggesting that the traditional way of objectifying the landscape as I have discussed was Western analysts (meaning geographers, artists, business leaders and more) way of dominating and thereby feminising the landscape. We gender features of the landscape all the time without even noticing it. Ashmore raises multiple examples: for the Ancient Egyptians the male sky impregnates the female land; for the Aztecs the brother sun chases the sister moon; across cultures mountains are phallic while the flowing changeability of rivers and seas are feminine. These genderings may seem inconsequential, but they dictate how people experience landscape and crystallise gender roles – in some ancient societies these designations quite literally dictated where a gendered person was allowed to live and work.

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One of the clearest impacts in our current society is the feminisation of Nature as a whole, particularly as “Mother” Nature. Some feminist scholars such as Ashmore and Carolyn Merchant argue that the environment has been so cruelly exploited because it is viewed as female by the Western world. Therefore, environmentalism often goes hand in hand with dismantling the patriarchy by revering Mother Nature and encouraging “feminine” virtues of nurture. However, this can backfire, as studies have shown that men often actively reject eco-friendly actions, even polluting on purpose so as not to be seen as unmanly (Brough & Wilkie 2019). 

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You’ll notice that all of these analyses are very male versus female. The gender binary that has been ascribed to the world around us and the biological essentialism that it creates - equating women/nature with mothers, for example - is so ingrained in our entire culture that at times it is difficult to even see. Which is why I want to ask: what do these gendered landscapes mean for queer people and our relationship to nature? It is important to try and deconstruct how binaries are framing our entire perception. Escobar’s article ‘Culture Sits in Places’ is game-changing as he calls for anthropologists, historians, geographers, economists and more, to remember that ‘culture is carried into places by bodies’ (p143), but even he, along with Wylie, thoroughly underestimate the individual subjectivity of the body. Let me explain with an example - imagine the experience of a black visibly-queer person walking through the countryside. They may feel free and safe away from judging eyes or fear of assault, but equally they may feel vulnerable out in the middle of nowhere away from the safety net of urban queer communities. Now compare how their queer body will relate to the nature around them to the experience of a white cishetero man. When we study the social and political formation of landscapes the latter is considered the default, universal perspective, which then forms the foundation of the culture that shapes our relationship to the environment. 

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What I would like us to explore for the coming month, therefore, is our process of connection to landscape. Not that I’m bias or anything, but I believe the queer perspective is particularly fruitful because of how queerness inherently dismantles binaries and dominant culture - and on this subject, I cannot recommend enough For The Wild’s podcast ‘Queer Natures: On Reclaiming Wild Safe Space’. Pinar and So go a long way in answering the questions I have raised here. That said, reimagining how we connect to the landscape around us is of course open to everyone, and de-colonial and anti-ableist work is also vital to deconstructing strict regimes of nature interactions. But whatever our subjective bodily experience is, there’s also a universalising factor for modern humanity - globalisation and the climate crisis.

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Our sense of landscape has expanded far beyond what we can see, hear, and touch. Global political and/or digital spaces have forced our navigation of nationality, economy, identity, society, landscape onto a global rather than local stage. This has been of particular importance to marginalised groups - consider the cultural and emotional significance of online communities for LGBTQIA+ people, or the worldwide movement for Indigenous rights that has transcended place-based political alliances.  And these somewhat unifying global experiences are only being exacerbated by climate change. Timothy Morton describes global heating as a ‘hyperobject’ - a physical thing so large that it breaks our usual way of thinking about time and space, saturating everything in our lives to the point that we are inside the object. We can no longer ignore that nature is as much a part of our political lives as society, which begs the question - with globalisation and climate change, how do we navigate the new frontiers of landscape?

 

References

• Ashmore, W. (2006) ‘Gender and Landscapes’, in Nelson, S. M. (ed.) Handbook of gender in archaeology. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press (Gender and archaeology series).

• Bartholdson, Ö. et al. (2019) ‘Is REDD+ More of an Institutional Affair than a Market Process? The Concealed Social and Cultural Consequences of an Ongoing REDD+ Project in Kolo Hills, Tanzania’, Forests, 10(8), p. 618. doi: 10.3390/f10080618.

• Brough, A. R. and Wilkie, J. E. B. (2017) Men Resist Green Behavior as Unmanly - Scientific American. Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/men-resist-green-behavior-as-unmanly/ (Accessed: 2 December 2020).

• Escobar, A. (2001) ‘Culture sits in places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization’, Political Geography, 20(2), pp. 139–174. doi: 10.1016/S0962-6298(00)00064-0.

• Kimvall, J. (2010) ‘The border fortification as symbol of freedom’, Ord&Bild, 1–2. Available at: https://www.eurozine.com/the-border-fortification-as-symbol-of-freedom/# 

• Martin, Kasidy (2020) ‘Recreating in Color: Promoting Ethnic Diversity in Public Lands’ Water Savvy, 10 November. Available at: https://watersavvysolutions.com/recreating-in-color/ 

• SurvivalInternational.org. (Oct 2019) EXPOSED: WWF execs KNEW they were funding rights abuses in Africa, but kept report under wraps. Available at: https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/12247

• West, S. and Ndlovu, S. (2010) ‘Heritage, Landscape and Memory’, in Benton, T. (ed.) Understaning Heritage and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 202–237.

• Wylie, J. (2007) ‘Prospects for Landscape’, in Landscape. Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9780203480168.

• Young, A. (2018) ‘QUEER NATURE on Reclaiming Wild Safe Space’. (For The Wild). Available at: https://forthewild.world/listen/queer-nature-on-reclaiming-wild-safe-space

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If you are interested in reading any of these texts but have trouble finding them because you don't have university access, don't even think about getting in touch with me. I couldn't possibly help you out by illegally sending you PDFs of knowledge that has been arbitrarily restricted to the privileged few.