Cody Norton

The Land Looking Back

The Land Looking Back explores how queerness and hunting intersect, challenging the cultural boundaries that define who belongs in hunting spaces. Within contemporary hunting culture in the United States, the landscape has been shaped by traditions of heteronormative masculinity and rigid expectations of identity and behavior. Queer bodies often appear out of place within these environments—highly visible, different, and most times unwelcome.

Rather than resisting this difference, the work embraces it. Queerness becomes a generative force within the hunting landscape, introducing warmth, attentiveness, and new ways of relating to the land. In this space, hunting is not framed as domination or sport, but as participation—an act of working with the land and existing within its rhythms.

The presence of queer hunters suggests another possible future for these environments. One where difference does not separate the body from the landscape, but instead allows it to blend into it with care and reflection. The Land Looking Back imagines hunting spaces that are more inclusive, more attentive, and more reciprocal—places where identity, land, and practice transform one another, opening the possibility for a culture of hunting grounded not in spectacle or conquest, but in presence, responsibility, and belonging.