Finding queerness in nature and the animal-world
Molly Moss
Queers have long sought to reconnect with nature as an act of protest in a dominant culture that says we are unnatural and don’t belong. Othered by society, we’ve long found ourselves empathising with animals, plants, trees, mountains and rivers.
Sound crazy to you? This year’s Fringe programme has a perfect selection for the earth-based queer community and animal-lovers out there. Both ‘The Whisper of the Jaguar’ and ‘Swedish Candy, Some Violence and a bit of Cat’ use themes related to nature and the animal-world to get messages across about what it means to be natural, and what it means to belong.
Thais Guisasola and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau’s ‘The Whisper of the Jaguar’ is a queer-punk road movie following the story of Ana as she journeys across the Amazon in the footsteps of her late queer Brazilian sister. Under the influence of various sacred hallucinogens and medicinal plants, and guided by the Amazon’s shamans who open the door to the underworld, Ana reconnects with an earthy queerness. Her journey proves to be sexually, spiritually and culturally liberating as she recovers her pre-colonial and queer authentic self.
During one of Ana’s trance states, she has a vision of her sister wishing she could be a jaguar, and transform into the animal-world with which she could empathise and connect her queerness. In Ana and her sister’s world, queerness becomes a sort of fluidity and limitlessness, and a freedom too strange to be othered. It becomes a decolonising structure. Queerness becomes a sexuality, a gender and a landscape: a place full of possibilities of a boundless world.
Ana eventually comes to terms with the loss of her sister, realizing that our impermanence is the key to life. In Ana’s words, (re)discovering ‘nature as something that surpasses us. If we become, we surrender.’
Queerness, like nature, is something that should be eternal, but that continues to be threatened. Thais and Paetau track the environmental destruction of the Amazonian forest by GMO crops and monocultures. An end to biodiversity would, of course, also mean an end to medicinal plants and hallucinogens.
The film challenges the false divisions between different species, encouraging co-existence, fluidity and empathy between nature, animals and humans.
Ester Martin Bergsmark’s latest surreal, comical and uncategorizable film ‘Swedish Candy, Some Violence and a Bit of Cat’ also questions what it means to be natural, but this time with whispers from a much smaller cat— the tabby from next door. If you like your queer film to be a challenge, pretty dark and a little fucked up, then this one’s for you.
Bergsmark interweaves three different elements: as little girls chew gelatinous sweets and poke at a dead cat in the forest, performance artists Eva Johansson and Louise Lowenberg portray lesbian cousins whose Tarzan and Jane routine sees the two dance around their desire for each other. And all this while a man in an apron takes us through the modes of gelatin production with a creepy smile. This seems random as hell at first. But, by showing us that gelatin is made from the natural bonds in animal body parts, he makes us ask: where is the line between what is natural and what is man-made?
The cousin’s attempts to come to terms with their queerness, desire for each other and to figure out where they belong ends in tragedy. If their set of model trees, green ikea furniture and rendition of Jane and Tarzan— a story of otherness— is an attempt to reconnect with the natural and find where they belong, then it fails spectacularly.
Between the four walls, love seeps into hate, attraction becomes repulsion, and their psychotic, co-dependent relationship spirals into disaster as they realise they can’t just be ‘normal’ cousins.
Featuring a lot of vodka and a melon-(and cat)-shaped disaster, the film asks whether right and wrong is as simple as society makes out, and why we label things as unnatural just because the dominant narrative tells us to do so.