Beautiful People in Beautiful Places: Pastoral Landscapes as Heterotopias in Early Modern Art and Queer Cinema
Abstract
This dissertation explores how pastoral spaces represented in early modern art and literature are reconfigured and mobilized in constructions of nature in contemporary queer cinema. Specifically, how these cinematically reimagined spaces enable negotiations of queer identities that have been marginalized by the patriarchal order. I explore the critical potential of the pastoral through Michel Foucault’s foundational notion of the heterotopia, which recognizes the productive nature of these spaces and the essential role they perform in both constructing and representing queer identities. I interpret the heterotopia as a site of alternate order and knowledge connected to and separate from hegemonic or other spaces of conformity. While the early modern pastoral —a term that traditionally designates poetry and art that offers an idealized portrayal of the life of shepherds and their rural surroundings – is presented as an idealized un/real space, it is not entirely removed from or impervious to the difficulties of daily life. I treat the pastoral as a heterotopia to provide a new model for considering early modern landscapes as malleable and capable of negotiating social constructs and civic value. By treating representations of natural sites as heterotopic, I seek to bridge queer cinema and early modern pastoral imagery to create a lineage of queer spatialities and bring attention to overlooked connections between early modern art and contemporary cinema.