The ‘Gated Community’ of North American Women’s Nature Writing: Reclaiming Indigenous Epistemologies and Literary Environmental Activism since the 1970sTools Hughes, Carys (2025) The ‘Gated Community’ of North American Women’s Nature Writing: Reclaiming Indigenous Epistemologies and Literary Environmental Activism since the 1970s. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
AbstractThis thesis explores U.S. and Canadian white settler women’s nature writing and Indigenous women’s writing between 1970 and the present. I analyse how the genre of white settler women’s nature fiction is connected to colonial centres of power, and how white settler feminism positions the white settler woman as a colonised subject without fully interrogating how white settler women’s literature has operated in part to maintain and consolidate colonial spatialities and racialised power hierarchies. My analysis brings Indigenous women’s writing and white settler women’s nature writing into dialogue by evidencing how the U.S. and Canadian settler nation-states’ increasing interest in Indigenous ecological epistemologies is reflected by white settler feminism’s romanticisation of indigenisation and appropriation of Indigenous narratives. My thesis is structured into three sections that cover different but interconnected forms of life: Land; Water; and Beyond-Human existence. Each section includes a chapter on Indigenous women’s literary explorations of these elements, followed by a chapter about how white settler women’s nature writing portrays these specific aspects of nature. My readings of Indigenous women’s literature focus on how gynocentric and matrilineal Indigenous knowledges are emphasised as resurgent methods to resist and refute colonial spatialities, temporalities and violence. I examine how Indigenous decolonial feminist portrayals of Indigenous corporeal, land and cultural sovereignty articulate nature through modes of kinship, reciprocity and humility. Written during the Racial Capitalocene, my thesis draws attention to how white settler and Indigenous women continue to use fiction to explore transformational relations with nature that articulate different epistemological and semiotic knowledges, as the man-made impacts of colonialism and capitalism on the environment become increasingly evident.
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