Climate Change and the Natural Environment in Contemporary Women’s Writing

Dear Colleagues,

In Undomesticated Ground, Stacy Alaimo argues that the discourse connecting ideas of ‘women’ and ‘nature’ is so pervasive that the nature/culture distinction must be entirely destabilized. Examples of such destabilization are readily apparent in the work of thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Recent examples of and challenges to the idea of the ‘new nature writing’, ranging from Daisy Hildyard and Joanna Pocock to Kathleen Jamie and Amy Liptrot, have similarly approached the dual lenses of nature and gender from a critical perspective, while the rise of environmentally focused epics (e.g., Annie Proulx, Alexis Wright, Barbara Kingsolver) has shown the utility of fictional forms for approaching these ideas. Such works challenge traditional hierarchies and binaries in order to present, in Braidotti’s words, ‘a “we-are-(all)-in-this-together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same” kind of subject’. Experimental fiction, ranging from Tanya Tagaq to Sara Baume, likewise challenges stable definitions of self and environment.

Such questions are particularly important in the context of climate change and ideas of the Anthropocene. As many critics have noted, climate change requires new stories, new forms, and new ideas of creaturely life. While discussions of the Anthropocene, nonhuman and posthuman life, and environmental change are increasingly frequent in accounts of twenty-first-century literature, limited attention has been paid to their intersection with discourses of gender. This Special Issue, then, calls for a wide range of papers on all forms of contemporary women’s writing concerned with climate change and the natural environment. The editors especially welcome papers focusing on Indigenous authors and authors from the Global South, and more experimental forms of writing. Submissions from Early Career Researchers are particularly encouraged. Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:

• new nature writing;
• life writing;
• speculative fiction;
• graphic fiction;
• poetic forms;
• intermedial forms; and
• interdisciplinary approaches.

Abstracts of 250 words to be submitted by 1 February, 2020.

Final submissions to be received by 15 July, 2020.

Dr. Timothy C. Baker
Ms. Marlene Simoes
Guest Editors

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• climate change
• environmental writing
• women’s writing
• Anthropocene
• posthuman
• nature writing