Ian Fleishman: Eco Porn and Propaganda: The Erotics of Ethnonationalism

For the second Sunrise Lecture on Media and Technology, hosted by the Department of German, Dr. Ian Fleishman, Associate Professor of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke about "Eco-Porn and Propaganda: The Erotics of Ethnonationalism."

Fleishman excavated the ecological erotics of propaganda films produced by the Hitler Youth and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Core. Common across these archives is pastoral imagery of homosocial bonding: strapping young men stripped to the waist while frolicking in nature or cheerfully laboring outdoors. Arguing that these images are intended in part to titillate, the lecture traces this media history to theorize the role of arousal in an eco-imperialist politics attracted to both racial and environmental homogeneity.

 Ian Fleishman is Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of Francophone, Italian & Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also affiliated with the Programs in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies, Comparative Literature & Theory and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. He has published widely on subjects ranging from the Baroque to contemporary cinema and moving-image pornography. His most recent monograph, Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing, appeared in December with Northwestern University Press.