‘Let’s sharpen the blades’: ecofeminism in American COVID literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the spring of 2020, literary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were quick to appear. Poetry, essays and diaries proliferated, and collective initiatives sprang up, with authors delving into a crisis that was national as well as global; political as well as health-based. In their lockdown works, US-based authors tackled their experience in the context of the country, chronicling the virus alongside inequality, racism and environmental challenges. Sheltering in place on either side of the Continental Divide, Pam Houston and Amy Irvine maintained an intense correspondence that was later published as Air Mail. Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place, which this article approaches as representative of ecofeminist COVID literature. It tracks their epistolary journey from the self to the social and back, discussing their narrative of the pandemic within the framework of their shared stance. Their letters are read as heirs to second-wave feminism and analysed as one instance of the current permeation of ecofeminist theories, specifically the material perspective. Through the study of Houston and Irvine’s correspondence, this article aims to illuminate the cultural work done by American ecofeminist writers during an extraordinary period.