Abstract
Through a study of two queer contemporary photographers working with landscape imagery, the author proposes a theory of anti-assimilationist landscape: a politicized rejection of the conventions of landscape imagery and the repressive systems of land ownership, gender and nation-building it sustains. Collier Schorr and David Benjamin Sherry make landscape images in places with histories of gendered settler-colonial and white supremacist violence. The essay argues that their works function as both an interpretation of those sites and a queer reclamation of them, enacting a political ecology of difference that can allow for a politics outside of the liberal humanist notion of nationhood and the fascist notion of ‘blood and soil’. Arguing for its applicability to landscape architecture theory and practice, the author contrasts this anti-assimilationist mode with the turn-of-the-millennium concept of ‘eco-revelation’, proposing instead a queer aesthetics of obscuring and the potential of ‘becoming illegible’ as an environmentalist practice.
Published Version
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