Ecologies of Gender Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn

Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn examines the role of gender in recent debates about the nonhuman turn in the humanities, and critically explores the implications for a contemporary theory of gender and nature relations. The interdisciplinary contributions in this volume each provides theoretical reflections based on an analysis of specific naturecultural processes. They reveal how "ecologies of gender" are constructed through aesthetic, epistemological, political, technological and economic practices that shape multispecies and material interrelations as well as spatial and temporal orderings. The volume includes contributions from cultural anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, literary studies, media studies, philosophy and theatre studies. The essays are organized around four key dimensions of an "ecological" understanding of gender: "creatures", "materials", "spaces" and "temporalities". The overall aim of the volume Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn is to explore the potentialities and limitations of the nonhuman turn for a critical analysis and theory of ecologies of gender, and thereby make an original contribution to both the environmental humanities and gender studies. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students from the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities and environmental studies more broadly, as well as from gender studies and cultural theory.

Introduction: Ecologies of Gender and the Nonhuman Turn Susanne Lettow and Sabine Nessel Part 1: Creatures 1. Mulberry Intimacies and the Sweetness of Kinship Catriona Sandilands 2. The Vegetal Subjects of Feminist Speculative Fiction Natania Meeker 3. The Arboreal Feminine: An Analysis of Affect and Activism in Two Ecofeminist Re-Enchantment Narratives from India Swarnalatha Rangarajan Part 2: Materials 4. Plastic Ambivalence Nicole Seymour 5. Political Drugs: Materiality in Testo Junkie Kathrin Peters 6. Unthinkable Ecologies in Theatres of the Anthropocene Ramona Mosse Part 3: Spaces 7. Gender, Nature, Nonhuman Animal: Bird People (2014) and the Proliferation of Difference in Cinema Sabine Nessel 8. Wildlife Among Us: Post-Natural Worlds and Interspecies Encounters in Nicolette Krebitz’s Wild Andrea Seier 9. Creating Emotion with Space in Nanouk Leopold’s Brownian Movement Angelica Fenner 10. An Ecohumanist Perspective: Theorizing Ecofeminism through a Spatial Analysis of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide Sangita Patil and N S Gundur Part 4: Temporalities 11. The Figure of the Human: Philosophical Narratives on Sex, Race and Organic Kinship in the "White (M)anthropocene" Susanne Lettow 12. Speculative Ecologies: Salmon Farming and Marine Microplastics as Slow Disasters Sven Bergmann 13. Futures of Plant-Human Mutualism: Science, Technology and Speculative Fiction Antónia Szabari

Susanne Lettow is a Senior Researcher at the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies and teaches at the Institute of Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Sabine Nessel is a Professor for Film Studiesin the Institute of Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.