China, EcoFeminist and Queer

When artist Ma Liuming presented himself in his female-identified performance Fen Ma Liuming Walking the Great Wall (1998), he was staging his naked body in the vast space of nature disrupted by the Great Wall, the very symbol of human-made sites of power. Ma explains his return to the historical site was in order to explore “an environment of the future” because “sexual ambiguity is an issue that transcends space and time.” Situating sexual identity in the enduring context of the Chinese monument that withstood millennia of forces of both nature and man (since 221BCE), the Wall represents the human construction of the nature/culture divide. My study questions the extent to which gender-queer identities and ecofeminist ideals are compatible with human-as-nature forms of environmental advocacy in the twenty-first century. The stakes have been raised in the shift toward a wholistic understanding of a planetary population affected by greenhouse gases and global warming. Defined by the Anthropocene, the ‘human’ is the global identity that is implicated in the destruction of ecological life, and yet, the solution to environmental crisis is presumed to come from the same petro-capitalist humanity. As acknowledged by artists like Ma, an argument for ecofeminist-queer is centered on rejecting the continuing denigration of “primitive nature” which is a gendered and sexualized position. As supported by the Capitalocene discourse, the potential for environmental solutions would have far greater success if developed from eco-feminist ecologies, indigenous (primitive) knowledge, queer-reproductive biologies, and the belief that humans are inseparable from nature.