This is the eighth post in the Succession III: Queering the Environment series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Estraven Lupino-Smith, and Addie Hopes. For this series, contributors were invited to explore ideas of queer rebellion as interruption and resistance.

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Tank Girl, the titular character of the 90s cult classic post-apocalyptic science fiction film and the comic book series that inspired it, is a queer icon. She is also an icon for queer (and kink) ecology. The film is set in the year 2033, about a decade into a global drought caused by a comet striking Earth. Water & Power is a corporate monopoly that controls what little water is left. As Tank Girl narrates, “the world is screwed now.” There are “no celebrities,” there is “no cable TV.” And because water is scarce, “now 20 people got to squeeze inside the same bathtub.” So at least for her, “it ain’t all bad.” Tank Girl—dirty, dehydrated, defiant—becomes the accidental anti-hero(ine) who brings down Water & Power. 

The film opens with Tank Girl riding a water buffalo through a sand dune desertscape. She dons a sleeveless denim vest decorated with patches and drips in an assortment of dangly accessories, including a blue-haired troll doll. Both she and the water buffalo wear DIY masks and goggles. And because today is Tank Girl’s boyfriend’s birthday, she is “out shopping for that perfect gift,” i.e., whatever she can “scrounge up.” The desertscape is rather barren apart from the bedecked pair and a bloodied body from whom she plunders a pair of boots to gift her boyfriend Richard.

The masked and goggled duo return home to Renegade HQ, a small collective with the last water well not under corporate control. In contrast to the desolate and dusty desertscape, Renegade HQ, while rundown and patchworked, is colorful and tchotchke-filled. The way of life there appears part solarpunk, part squatter, and entirely communal. Residing there are adults and children without roles or relationality clearly delineated. They demonstrate a commitment to caring for one another, and it is a care that seems to extend beyond that which is “bound by biology.”¹ This more expansive idea of care is indicative of a queer ecological attitude.

Upon her return, Tank Girl sneaks up on Richard as he pumps water from the well, a cigarette casually hanging from the corner of his mouth. She poses as a representative from Water & Power who has caught him pilfering water. With a laser gun cocked, she commands him to remove his clothes. Their role play continues until two children, also playing, run onto the scene, exclaiming “gross out! . . they’re being weird again.” The role play ruined, Tank Girl and Richard fall about one another laughing.  

For even in the midst of an ecological crisis, Tank Girl does not concede pleasure. Rather, she is unabashedly thirsty.

This scene could be interpreted as insubstantial, as just some fooling around. Though this role play isn’t merely a crude dig at a depraved corporation. This role play is enacting resistance, even if it is contained within a basement and two bodies. Through reinventing power relations, Tank Girl and Richard are able to reclaim and redistribute pleasure.² And it is a pleasure that is consensual and caring. This role play, which recovers freedoms and re-envisions futures, is aligned with a kink ecology approach. Afterall, “kink practices are not procreative but creative. Rather than reproducing that which is, kink reimagines that which could be.”³ 

Though the world might be screwed, Tank Girl and her friends haven’t stopped screwing. Instead, pleasure and playfulness are a priority. Neither festivities nor fantasies are dismissed as frivolous. A birthday is still cause for celebration. And BDSM play still has a place. Even in the midst of a drought, Tank Girl still finds ways to get wet.

The Revolution is Raunchy

That night, it is Tank Girl’s turn for guard duty, something that she takes “very seriously.” She’s dressed up for her shift, wearing a denim dress that reveals the red bra beneath, a candy necklace, and a full face of makeup. At no point does Tank Girl forsake fashion as a superfluity. During her shift, she amuses herself by playing with stuffed animals and action figures and painting her fingernails blue with a repurposed paintbrush, all while sipping beer and smoking cigarettes. That is until Water & Power troopers ambush the commune. After confirming the commune has been siphoning water, they start shooting everyone in sight. Tank Girl survives the attack, and is instead brought back to Water & Power headquarters by the troopers, where she is imprisoned and made to do penal labor, digging water pipes and whatnot. 

Through her capture and captivity, Tank Girl stays cheekily defiant. When a trooper tries to provoke Tank Girl, commenting “That cut looks painful,” she counters, “I like pain.” When she is kicked in the face by the same trooper, she briefly recoils before responding, “You’re going to have to stop this. You’re really getting me hot.” And when the foreman deliberately knocks over a bucket of gravel, dumping it onto her head, she asks, “Hey, what time is it? I don’t want to miss Baywatch.” When Tank Girl meets another prisoner, Jet Girl, a mousy jet mechanic, she tries to persuade her to make an escape plan, “It’s been swell, but the swelling’s gone down. What do you reckon? We go to New York and see CATS.” Punished for her plotting, Tank Girl is put in confinement, where she is clothed in a straitjacket and chained to a pipe. And when Kesslee, the head of Water & Power, pays her a visit, Tank Girl says to him, through her noticeable pain, “It’s really hard for me to play with myself in this thing.” In resistance, Tank Girl retains her silliness and smuttiness. 

Though silly and smutty, there are also serious, if sometimes subtly addressed, issues attended to in this film. The primary conflict of the film is access to water, an issue central to environmental justice. Due to the drought, water has become a scarce resource. And water is being stockpiled by a corporation, instead of shared throughout the community. On an episode of Green Screen, an environmental movie podcast, hosts Sean Munger and Cody Climber, suggest the similarity of Kesslee, the head of Water & Power, to Nestlé to be no coincidence. In 2000, Nestlé lobbied at the World Water Forum, resulting in weakened language regarding access to water being a human right. And the former Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe was quoted saying, “Access to water should not be a public right.” Nestlé, which owns at least eighty brands of bottled water, has been buying up water around the world. The repercussions of this have been wide-ranging, from draining Michigan’s Dead River to decreasing the water table by several hundred feet in Bhati Dilwan, Pakistan. While Nestlé is privatizing and packaging water for profit, people around the world deal with depleted and dirtied water. 

Tank Girl shows us that looking good, feeling good, and finding things to laugh about are a productive part of the rebellion.

Tank Girl and Jet Girl eventually escape during an attack on Water & Power by the Rippers, a population of mutant human-kangaroos.  After they escape, the pair wander through the desert, with a stopover at a strip club, until they stumble upon the Rippers’ hideout. There they learn that the Rippers were originally developed by the scientist Johnny Profit as super-soldiers from human and kangaroo DNA. When the Rippers were no longer necessary to the military, Johnny Profit was ordered to kill them but has instead kept them in an underground hideout. Though they occasionally emerge to fight Water & Power. One of the Rippers, Booga, becomes Tank Girl’s boyfriend. 

Though the production company insisted that the scene of Tank Girl and Booga post-coitus be cut, even though the prosthetic penis for Booga cost $5,000 to create (a rather large investment for a low budget film).⁴ It is likely that the production company was uncomfortable with anything reminiscent of bestiality. And likely for this reason, representations of (romantic) interspecies relationships are not common. Yet this particular relationship is rooted in consent and care. And it shows that pleasure is central to the surviving and thriving of all beings, human and human-kangaroo. For even in the midst of an ecological crisis, Tank Girl does not concede pleasure. Rather, she is unabashedly thirsty.

An Oh So Bad Environmentalism

Tank Girl, Jet Girl, and the Rippers combine forces, defeating Water & Power and reinstating water as a resource to be freely consumed by all. And while it is likely not that Tank Girl would self-identify as an environmentalist, she does fight for environmental justice. However, her approach to environmentalism is aligned with what Nicole Seymour has termed a bad environmentalism. Tank Girl is neither serious nor sincere, neither responsible nor restrained, as are the common affective and aesthetic associations of environmentalism—associations which are, in many ways, uninviting, unappealing, and unpleasant.⁵ Instead, Tank Girl is gleeful and goofy, frivolous and flawed, indulgent, indecent, occasionally immature, and often irreverent. Though, Tank Girl’s attitude sometimes seems to teeter on the edge of apathy. And as Jessica Regan aptly points out in her interview on Green Screen, it’s important “to not confuse total irreverence with not giving a shit about anything . . . You can be as irreverent as I’ll get out, but you need to care.” There is a meaningful difference between irreverence and indifference. And though a bad environmentalism might be gleeful and goofy it still recognizes the graveness of these matters. 

Though the world might be screwed, Tank Girl and her friends haven’t stopped screwing. Instead, pleasure and playfulness are a priority.

A bad environmentalism is a queer environmentalism (and perhaps a kinky environmentalism too), queer as “a refusal to participate in . . . the social order” and as “improper affiliation,” kinky as deviance and defiance.⁶ While Tank Girl doesn’t declare a sexual orientation during the film and only has romantic relationships with masc men and masc human-kangaroo, she is included on Wikipedia’s list of fictional bisexual women (she does make some flirty remarks to Jet Girl, though she makes such remarks to most everyone). Though Tank Girl’s queerness is about more than who she fucks. Tank Girl does make her kinkiness much more apparent. Though her kinkiness is also about more than a penchant for BDSM. Both her queerness and her kinkiness are realized through her affect and aesthetic, persona and politics, and perhaps even, in her ecological ethos. Tank Girl is “bringing the bawdy and the body into environmental activism.”⁷

Some consider the film a flop. And maybe by some standards it is. But I don’t need my antihero(ine), or the filmic universe from which she comes, to be perfect; and in fact, I prefer she not be. She may not consider herself an environmentalist, good or bad. And that doesn’t really matter. She fights for the common good over corporate greed. And she refuses to accept that there is any body that is not deserving of pleasure and playfulness. Tank Girl shows us that looking good, feeling good, and finding things to laugh about are not pointless but are a productive part of the rebellion. She’s rowdy and raunchy and red-lipsticked. She is improper, immodest, and oh so irreverent.⁸ And through embodying queer and kink ecology, she relates to her community with care, reinvents power relations, and reclaims and redistributes pleasure. Above all, she aims to make the world more just and joyful.

For the hell of it and for the love of the world. — Rosi Braidotti

Featured image: Tank Girl promotional poster, United Artists, 1995.

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Notes

1. Heather Davis, “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures,” philoSOPHIA, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 2015, pp. 245.

2. Mamello Sejake, “The Aesthetic of Kink as Political Resistance,” People’s Stories Project, https://www.psp-culture.com/culture/the-aesthetic-of-kink-as-political-resistance/.

3. Madeleine Bavley, “Getting Kinky With Ecology,” Edge Effects, 23 June 2022, https://edgeeffects.net/kink-ecology/.

4.  Tank Girl Trivia, IMDB, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114614/nltrivia/?item=tr0706508

5.  Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age, University of Minnesota Press, 2018, pp. 122.

6. Heather Davis, pp. 240; Nicole Seymour, pp. 115; Mamello Sejake, “The Aesthetic of Kink as Political Resistance.”

7.  Nicole Seymour, pp. 210

8. There were several other scenes cut from the film, including one where Tank Girl seemed “too ugly” while being tortured,  one which showed her bedroom “decorated with dozens of dildos,” and one which concluded the film with a burp, which sanitized the film a bit further. See Tank Girl Trivia, IMDB.