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“so Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings”: Towards An Ecosexual Feminine Affect
Nelson, Mia
Nelson, Mia
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Abstract
While scholarly work has been done to trace––and even prove––that personal experiences of climate and gender inform Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, attention hasn’t been given to the novel’s ecological and feminine concerns as a mode of writing that can be denatured from Shelley’s biography. Laying Shelley’s text alongside Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Louise Glück’s Averno, this thesis names, articulates, and traces a writerly mode that I’m calling the ecosexual feminine affect. To identify the elements that––when composed––create the ecosexual feminine affect, I explore how each text exhibits a sense of societal alienation, a rhetorical attunement to the natural world, a sexual tie to the earth, a melancholic tone, and a proximity to death. Paying close attention to ecofeminist theory and queer ecocriticism, this thesis argues that the ecosexual feminine affect provides, as an analytical lens, the opportunity to read the painful ties that feminized characters often have to the earth for a survival strategy for our own increasingly traumatic associations with the climate. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the ecosexual feminine affect opens up the possibility for new relational grounds with the environment––ones that resist normative climate activism’s future-oriented stance and instead turn towards an embrace of the overlapping living and dying of the present.
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2025-01-01