Visualizing Changing Climates: Feminist Ways of Seeing the 19th-Century Desert West
Audrey Goodman
Georgia State University
Audrey Goodman is Professor of English at Georgia State University. The author of Translating Southwestern Landscapes and Lost Homelands (both with the University of Arizona Press) and essays on Willa Cather’s Acoustic Archive (Miranda) and Ansel Adams (Acoma), she has also contributed to Postwestern Cultures (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), Blackwell’s Companion to the Literatures and Cultures of the American West (2011), and Cambridge’s History of Western American Literature (2016). Her current book project, Local Apertures: The Photopoetics of Western Women’s Writing, explores how contemporary women's phototexts imagine new relations between writers, communities, and lands in the U.S. West.
Abstract
When Lucy Lippard asked what a “feminist landscape” might be, she proposed that it could be an “acculturated landscape,” one viewed from within, shaped by a body’s intimate knowledge of place, and defined by... [ view full abstract ]
When Lucy Lippard asked what a “feminist landscape” might be, she proposed that it could be an “acculturated landscape,” one viewed from within, shaped by a body’s intimate knowledge of place, and defined by intersectional social, cultural, and environmental relations.[1] Viewing western landscapes and the visual climates in which they circulated from a feminist perspective might also mean seeing them from the ground up; recognizing that local places reflect global crises; looking at them again across a historic interval while re-situating them in natural and print contexts; exploring the interfaces between cultural perspectives; and re-calibrating scales of seeing and periodization.
I argue in this paper that such conjectural feminist landscapes emerge from 19th-century women’s writings about desert wests, writings that juxtapose many ways of seeing to attend to the condition of the land and its relations to the people who inhabited or sought to settle it. Following Susan Friedman’s recommendation in Planetary Modernisms (2015) to re-read classic works from feminist and planetary perspectives, I’ll focus on a few familiar texts, Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes (1882) and Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain (1903) and The Flock (1906). I suggest that these texts engage multiple and embodied modes of viewing Western spaces and raise a series of questions at the center of feminist critical regionalism: How do women writers locate their perspectives? Which intersecting forms of visualization represented desert climates and the forces of cultural and environmental change in the late nineteenth century? How can our current awareness of both 19th-century print and visual cultures and 21st-century climate change provide new perspectives on the environmental and cultural work of women’s literature?
[1] “Undertones,” in Reframings, edited by Diane Neumaier, Temple UP, 1995, 38-9.
Authors
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Audrey Goodman
(Georgia State University)
Topic Area
Feminist Critical Regionalism and the Climate of Western Literary Studies
Session
S3 » Seminar 3: Feminist Critical Regionalism and the Climate of Western Literary Studies (15:45 - Thursday, 22nd March, Boardroom East)
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