Lesbian Separatist Communities Sandliands, Catrolanda. (2002).Lesbian Separatist

Lesbian Separatist Communities

Sandliands, Catrolanda. (2002).Lesbian separatist communities and the experience of nature:

Towards a queer ecology. Organization Environment, 15 (131).

Environmental movements have begun to link racial injustice with injustice towards the environment. Indigenous communities point to the fact that environmental destruction and the destruction of their ways of life are conjoined. However, according to Catrolanda Sandilands' article "Lesbian separatist communities and the experience of nature: Towards a queer ecology," sexuality is also a dimension in terms of how the environment is treated or mistreated. Sandilands specifically discusses lesbian separatist movements that attempted to 'go back to the land' and who articulated an ideology linking mistreatment of Mother Earth with mistreatment of women. She specifically focuses on one community still in existence, which began in the 1970s during the first flowering of the environmentalist movement.

Lesbian separatists argued that women were innately more connected to nature than their male counterparts, and this connection would enable them to develop new, positive woman-woman connections (Sandilands 2002: 122). The discourse of what is natural has informed how sexuality is viewed in Western culture, and lesbian separatists attempt to question and challenge this. Queer ecology fuses a non-heterosexist view of the landscape with ecofeminism. Sandilands analyzes a lesbian separatist community in Oregon to examine this issue. The community wished to create a kind of utopian existence, free from heterosexual norms. Land was to be owned commonly. But inevitably divisions begin to emerge between owners and non-owners and the community began to shrink. Sandilands ascribes clear ideological motivations to the separatists, whom she suggests consciously felt rural landscapes were sites of domination by men (Sandilands 2002: 146). Women used traditional agriculture and strove to be in harmony with the land, ethics that still remain today in the remaining separatist's attitudes.

Going back to rural life was seen as a political act, and a rejection of male, urban culture based on ownership. Gardens were gynocentrically designed; women took on the names of natural forces. Sandliands paints a highly idealized portrait of this community, and she also stresses how ideology was woven into the relationship of the women to the land. However, there are hints in the article that this uncomplicated and natural relationship may not be as harmonious as Sandliands' dominant tone. During the collective's early years, she vaguely notes that there were profound conflicts between members about practical matters such as land ownership, hygiene, and farming practices. Practical matters pertaining to how the land was used did not always conform to the collective's ideology. Sometimes, the women were led astray by their ideology, as their zeal for planting trees caused them to plant conifers which interfered with the growth of white oak (Sandilands 2002: 147).