Constructing an Interdisciplinary Course on Literature and Environmental Feminism

Abstract

Feminist Studies 40, no. 2. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 333 Melanie Dawson Constructing an Interdisciplinary Course on Literature and Environmental Feminism In her recent book, Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet, Elizabeth Ammons describes her investment in environmental literature, a subject matter that is appealing to her in part because of its roots in what she casts as tangible realities. Ammons positions ecocritical work as a corrective to her perception of academic abstraction. Creating contrasts between environmental writing and a literary emphasis on what she terms the “‘inexpressibility’ of language,” Ammons views the former as privileging real-world consequences that ground the text and, with it, the discipline of literary study.1 While I understand the intersection of world and text in somewhat different ways and have no wish to suggest that ecological criticism is valuable because of its referentiality alone, there is in ecofeminist writing a real-world application that helps students both probe literary texts and confront theoretical complexity in ways that are enhanced by the kinds of tangible realities Ammons highlights. Powerfully organizing the ways that students imagine their personal and collective pasts as well as their material, corporeal, and familial futures, environmental writing offers various avenues through which to address feminist concerns—those situated in the colonial past, the present day, or the 1. Elizabeth Ammons, Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2010), 5. 334 Melanie Dawson dystopian future. From global climate change to rising food prices and ethical approaches to the consumption of fuel, food, and imports of all kinds, environmentally sensitive literature confronts a host of social, economic, and gendered consequences. Like Ammons, I am a specialist in late nineteenth- and early twentieth -century US fiction who, like many teaching in this era, encourages students to interrogate fiction in light of historical contexts. I view environmentally oriented writing as approachable through mechanisms very similar to the historically saturated approaches to literature that have supplied the grounding of many scholars who were educated in the 1990s and beyond. Environmental concerns offer unique opportunities to explore fiction in light of historicized narratives of land use; they also encourage readers to investigate the consequences of alterations to the natural world, which are now proceeding at an unprecedented rate of speed. The genetic modification of edible plants, for example, as well as species depletion, weather-related disasters, and massive oil spills can be invoked to argue that it is precisely the time to historicize the present and to imagine the tangible consequences of environmental change in the making. Many of the texts I teach in my Feminism and the Environment course (taught at the undergraduate level in the English department and cross-listed with the women’s studies program) posit that at moments of historic rupture and cataclysmic disaster, social structures alter so as to limit women’s access to resources and power. Linking domination of the environment to the domination of women (a connection that ecofeminist theory helps elucidate for students), fictions such as Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) urge readers to recognize the ideological components of responses to environmental change. Alongside other readings in the class, these fictions imply that environmental change can be used to justify hierarchies of gender as well as class and race in the service of reasserting order in the wake of disaster. Invested as such fictions are in the conditions that alter social structures, they assert that “the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land” can be used to consolidate and intensify forms of political and social control , as in Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel The Hunger Games, with which I began my class in fall 2012. As the quotation above suggests, the damaged and shrinking land mass of North America brought about a “brutal Melanie Dawson 335 war for what little sustenance remained” and led to victory on the part of Panem, the repressive state that stages a brutal spectacle of its domination over the nation’s youth.2 In exploring what ecofeminists recognize as interwoven...