Queer Ecology and the Ecology of Queerness in the Work of Jean Giono

Abstract

The importance of the natural world for Jean Giono is well known and commented upon in the critical literature. Sadly, the novelist’s ecological consciousness seems to be too often yet one more reason to call him conservative, pastoralist, or backward-looking. This interpretation, however, can only be made by ignoring the eroticism that infuses the images of the nonhuman world. This essay shows how Giono depicts a proliferation of sexual and affective possibilities with and within the natural environment, resisting all norms and prescriptions. His writing thus falls into the purview of what is now called “Queer ecology,” a term that indicates “interdisciplinary constellation of practices that aim, in different ways, to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature” (Sandilands). Giono refuses to confine his characters to traditional gender roles and shows the affective and sexual lives of bodies whose sexuality is traditionally repressed or denied by society (fat, handicapped, or old bodies). He writes of mutual and reciprocal relationships between human beings and other living or non-living things, and even shows bestiality, not as a perverse practice, but as the revenge of nature on the men who exploit it. Finally, he separates eroticism in general from the sexual act, liberating pleasure in contact with the environment and allowing for the full range of meaning of the word “biophilia.”