Date of Award
1-1-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in English
First Advisor
Jaime L. Harker
Second Advisor
Leigh Anne Duck
Third Advisor
Ann Fisher-Wirth
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
Lesbian Ferality: Eco/Kin Disturbance in Sapphic Modernist Literature considers the intersections of lesbian literature, queer modernity, and multispecies ecofeminisms in its discussion of literary kinship and worldmaking practices. Colette’s La Naissance du jour (1928), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Olive Moore’s Spleen (1930), and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) are all texts committed to unsettling various binaries through attempts at non-normative kinship. This dissertation examines these attempts and encounters as modes of disturbance for personal and political ends. The limiting dualities of natural/unnatural, political/anti-social, insider/outsider, and domestic/wild are challenged by an attention to and intimacy with nonhuman entities that I term lesbian ferality. Lesbian ferality constitutes a dynamic, multispecies, affective practice through ecological networks of meaning. The connections made through lesbian ferality complicate the “affirmative turn” of contemporary queer cultural aesthetics, wherein pride, social integration, and neo-liberal political acceptance are often indicators of “success.”
While lesbian ferality as a reading practice can be understood broadly as disturbing assumptions of gendered interactions, ecological connections, and definitions of kinship, each chapter of Lesbian Ferality emphasizes a specific aspect of unsettling. Chapter One explores the possibilities of a creaturely form and feral speculation informed by attachment to the nonhuman and how these intimacies transform relationships in Colette’s La Naissance du jour (1928). Chapter Two revisits Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) as a trans*feral text of contact zones with the nonhuman that give rise to movement, association, eroticism, and resistance in and to black respectability politics. Chapter Three considers Olive Moore’s Spleen (1930) as a manifestation of ecofeminist transformation from patriarchal confinement and performance to a promising skepticism of identitarian power. Finally, by reading Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) alongside ecosemiotics, Chapter Four challenges readings that characterize Robin Vote’s trajectory as devolution from human to animal, arguing instead that the text promotes a feral positionality that calls into question the melancholia of lesbian possibility and textual epistemologies. Lesbian Ferality: Eco/Kin Disturbance in Sapphic Modernist Literature proposes multispecies, nonhuman attachments of women-oriented-women as an alternative lesbian literary genealogy that disrupts cultural assumptions of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and political alignment. My guiding methodology, lesbian ferality, underscores the ways in which attempts at both domestication and escape from heteronormativity are informed by and made possible by affective orientation with the nonhuman.
Recommended Citation
Russell, Kara Michelle, "Lesbian Ferality: Ecco/Kin Disturbance in Sapphic Modernist Literature" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2867.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2867