The Wildcrafting Our Queerness Project

Beth Stephens

Beth Stephens (left) is a performance artist, professor at the University of Southern California, and an environmental and feminist activist. Born and raised in the coal-mining town of Montgomery, West Virginia, Stephens has engaged in artistic performances across the world, including numerous digital spaces. Much of her artistic work in the past decades has emerged from her identity as an ecosexual and her collaboration with sex educator and adult film actress, Annie Sprinkle (right). Ecosexuality, as a sexual identity and theoretical framework, stems from a queer ecological reconsideration of humanity's reciprocal and deeply physical relationship to the natural world--often transcending into the stimulating, sensual, affective, and even erotic. Stephens and Sprinkle have made their ecosexuality public through a series of yearly Ecosexual Weddings, highly theatrical marriage ceremonies to various aspects of the natural world (including coal, the moon, and the dirt). Through these wedding ceremonies and other pieces of performance and digital art, Stephens and Sprinkle blur lines not only between gender and sexual binaries, but the binary between humanity and nature as well.

More about ecosexuality can be found on the Sex Ecology website.

Stephens and Sprinkle's seven-year wedding and love art project, The Love Art Lab, is available on the project's archived website. 

Click the title of each piece to view the full image and listen to an audio recording of Beth Stephens describing her inspiration and process behind the work of art. 

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