Eco-Queer Imaginaries in God’s Own Country, Portrait of a Lady on Fire , and Call Me by Your Name

This paper works toward a closer conversation between environmental humanities and queer studies, whose overlapping interests in space, exposure, and belonging remain largely untheorised together. Reading Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017), Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), and Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017) together, it examines how each film constructs the natural setting as a provisional refuge from oppressive heteronormative structures, and what that spatiality reveals about the precarious conditions under which queer expression becomes possible. Drawing on Timothy Morton and Stacy Alaimo’s queer ecological frameworks, Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, and related theoretical frameworks, the paper argues that the three films articulate radically different yet mutually illuminating modes of ecological resistance. Departing from sequential film analysis, the argument proceeds thematically across three conceptual axes: the stylisation of the countryside as a geography of refusal; the phenomenology of bodily orientation and trans-corporeal entanglement; and the cruelties embedded in the optimism that attaches to such temporary natural spaces.