Katherine Fusco Knihy

"Bad Environmentalism examines how contemporary artists identify and respond to the ironies and absurdities surrounding environmental activism with their work in film, reality TV, poetry, fiction, performance art, and standup comedy. Focusing on texts such as the TV show Wildboyz and film series Green Porno, the book shows how such "bad environmentalists" use absurdity, camp, playfulness, and repulsiveness to counter climate skepticism and forces of environmental degradation as well as to question mainstream environmentalism's earnest prescriptiveness. Using affect theory and queer theory as her primary theoretical frameworks, Seymour considers the potentials and pitfalls of bad environmentalism and expands our understandings of environmental art and activism"-- Provided by publisher

Focusing on the intersection of naturalism and early cinema, the book explores how these mediums challenged concepts of temporality and human freedom. It examines US naturalist novels that interrogate the relationship between individual agency and the relentless passage of time, while also analyzing early films that emerged from these literary experiments. The author highlights the preference for narrative progression over character development in both forms, linking this choice to broader social and aesthetic issues, including representation, historiography, and labor reform.

Kelly Reichardt's 1994 debut River of Grass established her gift for a slow-paced realism that emphasizes the ongoing, everyday nature of emergency. Her work since then has communed with--yet remained apart from--postwar European realisms, the American avant-garde, independent film, and the emerging slow cinema movement. Katherine Fusco and Nicole Seymour read such Reichardt films as Wendy and Lucy and Night Moves to consider the root that emergency shares with emergence --the slowly unfolding or the barely perceptible. They see Reichardt as a filmmaker preoccupied with how environmental and economic crises affect those living on society's fringes. Her spare plots and slow editing reveal an artist who recognizes that disasters are gradual, with effects experienced through duration rather than sudden shock. Insightful and boldly argued, Kelly Reichardt is a long overdue portrait of a filmmaker who sees emergency not as a break from the everyday, but as a version of it.

"From Cleopatra to Coachella, this book tracks the enduring, emotionally-charged human relationship to glitter-a variously-composed object that reveals the gendered and sexualized ways we interact with our environment and respond to its crises"--

Investigates the ways in which contemporary queer fictions offer insight on environmental issues.