Nature as Cultural Discourse

14 15
16 17
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The fourth block explores the nature of Nature as (re)presented by American culture. They all indicate that Nature, instead of embodying a sublime presence outside of human culture, is actually generated by cultural production of signs of Nature that circulate in economies of fashion and politics--in other words, in systems of power.

15 connects the objectification and aestheticization of the land and the woman into commodities to be controlled and exploited.

14, itself a simulation of calls for "green" thoughts and actions, reminds the viewer that "this is not a tree," and that the images of Nature in films and books are often mistaken for the reality of Nature. Nature serves to disguise the political operations of cultural power that operate as "absolutes," unquestionable because of their association with an eternal Nature.

16 and 17 compare the manipulation of the signs of Nature to the manipulation of the signs of gender in drag. As the mad scientist cum transvestite Dr. Frankenfurter of Rocky Horror and the disco diva drag queen Divine suggest, one's identity or nature is open to simulation and subversive inversion. Both play on fashion and the artifice of supposedly inherent and immutable "natures." There is "nothing like the real thing" precisely because the "real" has vanished.