Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature

Abstract

Queer ecology is a cultural, political, and social analysis that interrogates the relations between the social organization of sexuality and ecology. As a part of this analysis, this article explores the ideas and practices of lesbian separatist communities in southern Oregon. It considers that separatists have, since 1974, developed a distinct political-ecological culture to challenge the heterosexual, patriarchal, and capitalist organization of rural North America. Although lesbian separatism was founded on essentialist constructions of gender and nature, the Oregon communities have developed, over time, a blend of lesbian principles and local environmental knowledge. This has produced a complex tradition of lesbian ecopolitical resistance. Organizing threads of this tradition include opening access to land and transforming relations of rural ownership, withdrawing land from patriarchal-capitalist production and reproduction, feminizing the landscape ideologically and physically, developing a gender-bending physical experience of nature, experiencing nature as an erotic partner, and politicizing rurality and rural lesbian identity.