Down and Dirty: Ecosex intimacies and the appeal of the ‘personal’

Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens’s Ecosex practice makes an erotic appeal to embrace a new version of environmental politics. Their various ecosex activities flirt with the ridiculous but are serious about getting us into a freshly perverted relationship with the otherwise ordinary and familiar that is both politically and sexually embodied. They exhort us to get intimate with the earth, to get down and dirty, in a way that re-engages with ‘the personal is political’. Suggestive ‘eco-intimacies’ are modelled by them to forge new eco-aware subjectivities. But as they roll naked in soil during one of their shows, they seem to compost themselves, symbolically disaggregating themselves, in an entropic and erotic unforming. What might be composed out of the new aggregate? And what about my intimate engagement with them? How do I gauge the correct distance from my personal attachments while it permits critical closeness?