Browsing by Author "McKisson, Kelly A"

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    Weirding Feminist Ecology: American Literature in the Age of Climate Change
    (2023-06-20) McKisson, Kelly A; Comer, Krista; Wolfe, Cary
    Weirding Feminist Ecology analyzes twenty-first century American novels and novellas to make an argument for how this body of literature not only represents changing environments but also produces new conceptual understandings of ecology via more-than-representational weird literary figurations. I bring to the fields of literary and environmental studies the insights of ecofeminism and feminist social reproduction theory to develop my sense of a feminist ecological framework, which understands environments as more strangely interconnected with human bodies and communities. The project addresses issues of climate change and the challenges raised by Anthropocene discourse through this feminist ecological framework in order to rearticulate environmental problems as also social and political, structured by large-scale forces of capitalism and colonialism. Across chapters which take off from different weird literary figurations—unhomely, untimely, unsettling, uncountable—I develop feminist analyses that refigure approaches to sustainability, to linear temporal models of progress, to structures of power that become infrastructures of environment, and to quantifying mass extinction. Ultimately, I address the question of literature’s response-ability in the contemporary context of climate change, when variable environmental conditions and unprecedented climate events defy the predictive patterns and models that the Western world has traditionally used to observe, measure, and understand our ecologies. A feminist ecological framework forwards accountability as one way to address the insufficiencies of current models and the difficulty of navigating the uneven distribution of and responsibility to climate impacts.