Learning to Read Outside: The Vital Role of Feminist Literature in Creating Lively Futures Amidst Environmental Change

Abstract

In this dissertation, I argue that literature is a site for environmental record-keeping, imagining paths of thriving amidst climate crisis, and valuing the more-than-human, and thus plays a vital and lively role in environmental education. I demonstrate that by centering feminist writers who challenge normative concepts of sustainability and prioritize multispecies care as a tool for survival, reading diverse environmental literatures can lead to transformational and just environmental futures. Taking a genre-oriented approach, I explore a broad range of texts to trace the ways that non-canonical feminist environmental writing contributes to environmental discourse across many genres. My first chapter, The Roots of a Clear-Cut: Tracing Feminist Orientation and Environmental Legibility in Twentieth Century Women’s Life Writing, engages with Jody Aliesan’s journalistic archive alongside poetry and prose life writing by Aliesan, Sharon Doubiago, and Jan Zita Grover. In chapter two, Spaceships, Butterflies, and Plastic Bags: Confronting Change in Contemporary North American Novels, I map a genre of “literatures of arrival” in novels by women writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Ruth Ozeki, and Margaret Wappler, that explore environmental change outside of the popular conventions of dystopian and disaster-focused climate fiction. In chapter three, The Party Place: Imagining Survivable Futures through the Genre of Speculative Fiction, I extend my discussion to both popular culture texts and small press publications to trace the emergence of speculative fiction black, queer, and crip writers across film, music, fiction, and self-help for activists and organizers. My scholarly interlocuters include feminist materialists, such as Sara Ahmed and Donna Haraway, and disability studies scholars who see environment and disability as intersecting experiences in and around bodies, such as Alison Kafer and Eli Clare. I also engage with the anti-racist work of community activists and arts-based practitioners including adrienne maree brown and Petra Kuppers. With the support of these feminist environmental methods, I approach my primary texts with a method of reading that identifies their pedagogical perspectives – how the writers learned about their environments through writing and what environmental lessons are conveyed to their readers. The final chapter of my dissertation, Tracks for Teaching: Forging an Experiential Feminist Pedagogy at the Brink of Pain and Change, is devoted to applying what I have learned from reading literature as a feminist-environmental archive to place-based and experiential pedagogical experiences in diverse learning spaces, including undergraduate classrooms. I engage with student voices and disability culture practices of place-based and experiential learning across writing and Women’s Studies classes to ask, how might environmental education transform by centering care between teachers, students, and more-than-human beings?