Arboreal Feminisms in the (M)Anthropocene

Guest: Catriona Sandilands
Moderator: -

In this talk, Cate Sandilands will explore the idea of "arboreal feminism" in three recent literary texts: Richard Powers' The Overstory, Sumana Roy's How I Became a Tree, and Han Kang's The Vegetarian. Considering themes of vegetal intimacy, arboreal communication, and gendered and interspecies violence, she will consider, especially, whether becoming-tree might represent an arboreal feminist praxis of the human, of desiring vegetal forms of connection and responsibility, against a Man that, in Sylvia Wynter's words, "overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself."

Bio: Catriona (Cate) Sandilands is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, where she has taught since 1994. Her research, graduate supervision, and teaching lie at the intersections of environmental literature, history, and cultural studies; feminist, gender, and queer studies; and social and political theory