Contemporary Literary Studies Network

Wednesday 5 December, 3.00-4.30pm, A35 Trent Building

Amy Bower, University of Nottingham

Backlash to the Future: Anti-Utopianism in Contemporary Feminist speculative fiction

In the wake of #MeToo, feminist visions of a united, transnational front against sexual harassment and rape culture are growing increasingly hazy. High-profile domestic abuse cases such as those against Johnny Depp and Marilyn Manson have reinvigorated backlash narratives and deepened the rifts not only between gendered activist groups but also within the feminist movement itself. Doubts about due process, overreach, and false accusations fuel anti-feminist sentiment that women have ‘gone too far’ – that feminists are ‘dangerous extremists’ with a ‘zeal to destroy men’ (Hillstrom 2018: 5).

This narrative has, significantly, found new expression in feminist speculative fiction. Where gynocracies and single-sex societies once operated to cognitively estrange readers from their patriarchal realities, recent works eschew utopianism altogether. In this paper, I investigate a distinctly anti-utopian trend in contemporary speculative feminism, drawing on Talulah Riley’s The Quickening (2022) and Christina Dalcher’s Femlandia (2021) as core examples of ‘backlash’ texts. My analysis hinges on Lucy Sargisson’s definition of utopia as engendering a desire for ‘radically different “nows”’ (1996: 52); rather than prompting ‘paradigm shifts’ (Whitford 1991: 20) or educating desire (Levitas 1990: 8), Dalcher and Riley misrepresent feminist utopia as a misandrist blueprint. Despite invoking the literary traditions of feminist eutopias (Herland) and dystopias (The Handmaid’s Tale), Femlandia and The Quickening advocate for a retreat from radicalism. After tracing the paradoxical use of feminist utopian allusions to promote an anti-utopian stance, I will discuss how these novels – and feminist dystopias more generally – provide critical insight into an increasingly fractured political movement.

Biographical Note: Amy Bouwer is a PhD researcher in the School of English at the University of Nottingham. Her thesis, funded by Midlands4Cities, examines the feminist imaginary in women’s dystopias from 2016 to 2020, with particular emphasis on their expansions (and sometimes explosions) of the legacy of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Wednesday 7 June, 4.00-5.30pm, A35 Trent Building

Dr Samantha Walton, Bath Spa University

Everybody needs Beauty: eco-anxiety, climate change and the search for 'healing nature'

Increasingly in the UK, it is possible to walk into a doctor’s surgery with anxiety or depression, and walk out with a prescription for nature. Drawing on history, science, literature and art, in this talk I explore the cultural precedents, politics, and future of the ‘nature cure’. From sacred springs to transcendent peaks, beliefs that human health and wellbeing are dependent on contact with and immersion in the more-than-human have been expressed across diverse cultures and historical traditions. The rise of modern medical nature treatments, eco-spiritualities and activist ritual alike give insight into how such practices might help manage legitimate ecological anxieties, build solidarity, and express care for and empathy with the living world. At the same time, it is important to reflect on the many ways in which the history of natural healing has been far from liberatory. Adopting an intersectional lens, Dr Walton will reveal how colonial and capitalist power-relations shaped the history and development of the nature cure, and in our present moment, are contributing to new crises of ecological anxiety and climate trauma. Engaging seriously with the connection between nature and health, to ultimately ask how the 'nature cure' might lead towards a more just and radical way of life: a real means of recovery, for people, society and nature.

Wednesday 29 March, 4.00-5.30pm

Dr Sharae Deckard, UC Dublin

The Contemporary Literary Studies Network were pleased to present a research talk by Dr Sharae Deckard of University College Dublin, followed by wine reception in room B16 in the Trent Building.

Sharae spoke about her work on the project 'Precarious Work: The Labour and Ecology of Social Reproduction in World-Literature', of which a resume is given below.

Labour in the realm of social reproduction draws heavily upon natural “resources” and is preponderantly affected by forms of depletion and environmental crisis including water scarcity, land degradation, and pollution. As Wilma Dunaway has observed, “women's work is dominant in food production and processing, in responsibility for fuel, water, health care, child-rearing, sanitation and the entire range of so-called basic needs”(2001: 16).  One of the fundamental social contradictions of capitalist accumulation is that even as it is dependent on exploitation of the world’s households, the modern capitalist world-ecology threatens their survival by expropriating and degrading the land and extra-human nature that is essential to household provisioning. Women in peripheries of the world-ecology are more exposed to toxicity in workplaces and households, and more likely to perform gruelling forms of physical labour in connection to social reproduction, whether as water-carriers or agricultural labourers in peasant, subsistence and peripheral urban situations. Dietary unevenness, malnutrition, and water shocks disproportionately affect women from peripheries, particularly in conditions of drought or famine exacerbated by global warming and resource imperialism.  This talk calls for world-literary critics to examine the particularly gendered implications of environmental degradation and to conceptualize how women’s centrality to resource acquisition might be figured in resource fictions and poetics. Comparing texts from Senegal, India, and Turkey, I will analyze world-literary imaginaries of the gendered ecology of social reproduction, focusing on depictions of food-getting, water-carrying, and waste-picking labour gendered as so-called “women's work.” Furthermore, I will examine how novels portray the terrain of social reproduction both as a zone of appropriation and as the potential ground for women’s organized resistance.

This was the second of three talks scheduled in the 2022/23 spring semester.

Wednesday 8 February, 4.00-5.30pm

Siân Adiseshiah, Loughborough University

On Wednesday 8^th of February, the Contemporary Literary Studies Network (in the School of English) hosted Dr Siân Adiseshiah (Reader in English and Drama at Loughborough University), who will be giving a talk entitled ‘Old Women and the Contemporary’ (see the attached poster).

The talk was held in Trent, A35.  This was the first of three invited speaker events to be held across the semester.