Debates over nature and sexuality have become, recently especially, a frequent affair in mainstream U.S. political discourse. U.S. presidential candidate Rick Santorum attracted a wave of controversy from the mainstream center left for his equation of homosexuality with bestiality, the subtext being of course that attraction to one’s own sex is inherently “against nature.” Reproduction-centered sexuality and heterosexual familial relations are, according to adherents of this position, the foundation of a functioning society. Contemporary queer theorists not only take issue with the assumption of a universal “natural” normative sexuality but critique the entire imperative of reproduction and future-oriented sexualities in favor of a politics of immediacy and contingency. Identities exist within a complex social network, and a variety of genders and sexualities emerge from that network. The critical response to people like Santorum rests on the reality of socialization, of complexity, of difference, multitude, and contingency, and diverges from the language of hegemony employed by Santorum to approach the debate from an entirely different epistemological framework.

Isabella Rossellini’s video series, both “Green Porno” and the similar “Seduce Me” cleverly re-opens this discourse, and reinscribes the question of nature in polemic opposition to its appropriation by crusaders for heteronormativity. The video depicts the head of Rossellini in the bodies of various animals, and explores (in a scientifically accurate manner) the ways in which their many bodies do sexuality, and the way the “nature” of a body changes the nature of sexuality. Normative conceptions of sex are, as Rossellini displays, impossible to impose outside of the limited reach of their own discourse and the limited bodily representations they encompass.

Rossellini’s fun, absurd, cleverly stylized and narrated series depicts a variety of modes of animal embodiment and sexuality. The female bedbug’s lack of genitalia, the self-cloning sexuality of the earthworm, parthenogenetic (virgin birthing) insects…Rossellini employs a perverse, ironic perspective, herself appearing as an absurd and disorienting hybrid of animal and narrator. Breaking down these normative relations, which are “by nature” hierarchical, Rossellini brings the viewer into a world of heterogeneity, absurdity, and bodily difference and multiplicity—the absurd world of nature in stark contrast to the hegemonic narratives of monoamorous, heterosexual embodiment parading as self-evident natural law.

The “Green Porno” and “Seduce Me” series can be found at http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno/