IMC 2016: Sessions
Session 525: Women Who Hunt: Ecocriticism, Gender Theory, Posthumanism
Tuesday 5 July 2016, 09.00-10.30
| Organiser: | Sara Petrosillo, Department of English, University of California, Davis |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Roberta Magnani, Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Research (MEMO), Swansea University |
| Paper 525-a | Hostess or Huntress?: Women and Agency in Feasting Spaces of the Íslendingasögur (Language: English) Index terms: Daily Life, Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Scandinavian |
| Paper 525-b | Queer/Trans/Butch Hunting (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - French or Occitan, Sexuality, Women's Studies |
| Paper 525-c | 'Þer is fair game': Women, Birds, and the Hunt in Sir Orfeo (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English, Women's Studies |
| Paper 525-d | The Falcon's Feast: Falconry as Feminist Poetics (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies |
| Abstract | In Diana's Hunt Giovanni Boccaccio weaves a narrative entirely populated by women who hunt. Fearsome, violent, rebellious, seductive, the huntress is a recurrent trope in medieval literary traditions and historical documents testify to women's engagement with hunting practices. As well as disrupting gender dynamics, the figure of the huntress raises important questions about the relation between humans and their environment, and the stability of the boundaries between the two. In Identity Machines Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that reading animals as 'insubstantial allegories […] ignores what might occur between animals and humans, what processes, desires, identities might circulate in the interspace where animal and human difference come together and come apart'. Profoundly and often violently imbricated in nature, the huntress also 'circulate[s] in the interspace' of a number of binaries: femininity/masculinity; animal/human; chastity/desire; destructive/generative relationship with the environment etc. |