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- Title
ANN SCALES "IMAGINES US": FROM THE ECOPORNOGRAPHIC STORY TO THE MEDUSAN COUNTERNARRATIVE.
- Authors
CAPUTI, JANE
- Abstract
Drawing upon the MacKinnon/Dworkin understanding of pornography, Ann Scales introduced a feminist application of "ecological pornography" in her 1990 article Feminists in the Field of Time. She critiques Mount Rushmore as a "scar" on the sacred, a form of ecological pornography which proselytizes "nature as being enhanced by being mutilated in the image of what white males think nature ought to be and do." Ecological pornography is enacted in popular culture, where images of the Earth, animals, and land are cast into the convention of sexually subordinated, demeaned, used, marginalized, consumed, and violated women (and those used in the place of women). In a subsequent article, Ann Scales invokes the ancient Goddess Medusa as signifying "the unvarnished, undomesticated--and incomplete--counternarrative to patriarchy." She calls for the reclaiming of "Medusa, in wholeness and in solidarity." Wholeness is key to solving the crisis of ecological devastation, founded in the splitting of culture from nature, with elite humans seen as over and above nature and all oppressed deemed "closer to nature." A related hierarchical splitting is that of life over death. Professor Scales's Medusan counternarrative understands time not as linear, but as a continuum. In the former, death is feared as termination, leading patriarchal men to seek immortality, in part by conquering nature. Professor Scales opens Feminists in the Field of Time by naming the ecologically pornographic story conveyed by Mt. Rushmore. She concludes by imagining us as whole, as "mere specks in the plasma of the universe," but nonetheless "part of something entire," something enduring.
- Subjects
MOUNT Rushmore National Memorial (S.D.); UNITED States; FEMINISM &; pornography; SCALES, Ann, 1952-2012; FEMINISTS; MEDUSA (Greek mythology); POPULAR culture; PORNOGRAPHY &; society; PATRIARCHY -- Social aspects
- Publication
Denver University Law Review, 2014, Vol 91, Issue 1, p65
- ISSN
0883-9409
- Publication type
Article