1st Edition

Ecologies of Gender Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn

Edited By Susanne Lettow, Sabine Nessel Copyright 2022
    264 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    264 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn examines the role of gender in recent debates about the nonhuman turn in the humanities, and critically explores the implications for a contemporary theory of gender and nature relations.

    The interdisciplinary contributions in this volume each provides theoretical reflections based on an analysis of specific naturecultural processes. They reveal how "ecologies of gender" are constructed through aesthetic, epistemological, political, technological and economic practices that shape multispecies and material interrelations as well as spatial and temporal orderings. The volume includes contributions from cultural anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, literary studies, media studies, philosophy and theatre studies. The essays are organized around four key dimensions of an "ecological" understanding of gender: "creatures", "materials", "spaces" and "temporalities".

    The overall aim of the volume Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn is to explore the potentialities and limitations of the nonhuman turn for a critical analysis and theory of ecologies of gender, and thereby make an original contribution to both the environmental humanities and gender studies.

    This book will be of great interest to scholars and students from the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities and environmental studies more broadly, as well as from gender studies and cultural theory.

    Introduction: Ecologies of Gender and the Nonhuman Turn

    Susanne Lettow and Sabine Nessel

    Part 1: Creatures

    1. Mulberry Intimacies and the Sweetness of Kinship

    Catriona Sandilands

    2. The Vegetal Subjects of Feminist Speculative Fiction

    Natania Meeker

    3. The Arboreal Feminine: An Analysis of Affect and Activism in Two Ecofeminist Re-Enchantment Narratives from India

    Swarnalatha Rangarajan

    Part 2: Materials

    4. Plastic Ambivalence

    Nicole Seymour

    5. Political Drugs: Materiality in Testo Junkie

    Kathrin Peters

    6. Unthinkable Ecologies in Theatres of the Anthropocene

    Ramona Mosse

    Part 3: Spaces

    7. Gender, Nature, Nonhuman Animal: Bird People (2014) and the Proliferation of Difference in Cinema

    Sabine Nessel

    8. Wildlife Among Us: Post-Natural Worlds and Interspecies Encounters in Nicolette Krebitz’s Wild

    Andrea Seier

    9. Creating Emotion with Space in Nanouk Leopold’s Brownian Movement

    Angelica Fenner

    10. An Ecohumanist Perspective: Theorizing Ecofeminism through a Spatial Analysis of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

    Sangita Patil and N S Gundur

    Part 4: Temporalities

    11. The Figure of the Human: Philosophical Narratives on Sex, Race and Organic Kinship in the "White (M)anthropocene"

    Susanne Lettow

    12. Speculative Ecologies: Salmon Farming and Marine Microplastics as Slow Disasters

    Sven Bergmann

    13. Futures of Plant-Human Mutualism: Science, Technology and Speculative Fiction

    Antónia Szabari

    Biography

    Susanne Lettow is a Senior Researcher at the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies and teaches at the Institute of Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

    Sabine Nessel is a Professor for Film Studies in the Institute of Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.