Plastic and Lawns: As American as Mom and Apple Pie....
The pink flamingo, as an emblem of American nature-artifice relations, is an extension of the American love of plastic and of lawns, arguably two of the most evil icons in the environmentalist imagination.
What are some ironies that the pink flamingo symbolizes?
Is the pink flamingo potentially subversive?
In what universe, that is, does Water's film Pink Flamingos operate as a class critique of elite and heteronormative views of nature?
From a "queer ecocritical" perspective, why does the pink flamingo stand in for queer pride, and what does this have to do with nature?
As a symbol of everything anti-heteronormative, the pink flamingo is the perfect icon. It’s the transvestite of the lawn ornaments: flashy, “unnatural,” and often considered tacky. Its history as a subversive statement against the lawns of good taste, which are just as artificial as their tacky cousins, makes the pink flamingo a great analogue for the naturalness argument surrounding hetero- and homosexuality.
ReplyDeleteLawns of good taste are simplistic: a tree here, some flowers there, all embedded in a lush green carpet of grass. Simple it may look, but it certainly is not simple to attain. This type of lawn requires pesticides, fertilizers, pruning, and copious watering, and through one chemical cocktail or another can be grown in Maine or in Arizona. And yet the idea here is that this type of “simplistic” lawn is an attempt at a natural lawn. How can this really be called natural when an untended lawn tends towards prairie grasses, moss, or desert? The stereotypical suburban lawn is no less artificial when it is tended than if it were covered in a flock of plastic pink flamingos.
So good taste is an artificial concept; that’s not hard to figure out. The problem is that good taste is also heteronormative. What’s considered “tasteful” when it comes to clothing and gender roles is no more or less than the stereotypical feminine and masculine. It perpetuates the gender binary. These cis-gender heterosexual roles are portrayed as natural by appealing to reproduction and genetics, while trans-gender and homosexual roles are shunned as unnatural. This can be achieved by the other side effect of good taste, the perpetuation of the man/nature binary, or the idea that nature is where man is not. In the confines of this binary it is conceivable that transgender and homosexual people are not natural due to the idea that man is not inherent in nature, leading to the idea that only specific sexual expressions are natural. But if we dismiss this as an artificial concept and accept that man is as much a part of nature as nature is of man, all forms of sexual expression because natural simply by the virtue of their existence.
It all comes back to the two sides of the paradox, nature and artifice. A green lawn is just as natural as a pink flamingo, and a heteronormative society is just as artificial as a homonormative one would be. As a queer icon, the pink flamingo paints everything as natural through its own artificiality.
Hope we were supposed to do a post this week and that I wasn't just not listening...
DeletePeople want some kind of "nature" or a part of "nature" in their lives, somewhere close. Especially for people who live in urban and suburban area, it is hard to experience nature like we do here in Alaska, so they want some sort of nature at home, office, gardern, or somewhere close to them. For example, central park in New York City does not look like a "nature" at all for people who live in rural area, but it is a great place to feel nature and some wilderness for New Yorkers, and I personally felt so when I visited New York City. It was just very small park surrounded by tall buildings, but I felt really comfortable just walking inside the park.
ReplyDeleteOwning Pink Flamingo makes them feel they have a part of nature in their house, and that fancy color and the appearance of flamingo make them feel special and make them feel they own wild animals which cannot seen very often in their lives. Compare to having real birds or pets, just buying ornaments is much cheaper and you feel the ownership of the animal, I assume people even lower class of people purchase pink flamingo ornaments and it becomes really popular in this country.
I have never seen or met anyone who has pink flamingo ornament in their garden in Japan or even in Alaska, so it was hard to understand what pink flamingo means to people, but I assume this is simple reason. People want some sort of "nature" in close to their lives, and the "nature" can be plastic bird ornament, gardern, or small park like central park in NYC. It depends on each person what they call "nature."