‘Let’s sharpen the blades’: ecofeminism in American COVID literature

ABSTRACT

During the spring of 2020, literary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were quick to appear. Poetry, essays and diaries proliferated, and collective initiatives sprang up, with authors delving into a crisis that was national as well as global; political as well as health-based. In their lockdown works, US-based authors tackled their experience in the context of the country, chronicling the virus alongside inequality, racism and environmental challenges. Sheltering in place on either side of the Continental Divide, Pam Houston and Amy Irvine maintained an intense correspondence that was later published as Air Mail. Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place, which this article approaches as representative of ecofeminist COVID literature. It tracks their epistolary journey from the self to the social and back, discussing their narrative of the pandemic within the framework of their shared stance. Their letters are read as heirs to second-wave feminism and analysed as one instance of the current permeation of ecofeminist theories, specifically the material perspective. Through the study of Houston and Irvine’s correspondence, this article aims to illuminate the cultural work done by American ecofeminist writers during an extraordinary period.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• 2020 lockdown
• ecofeminism
• American politics
• epistolary literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I use ‘COVID’ as an adjective when the virus is a key topic in the text. Works written during the pandemic but not tackling it directly are not included under the ‘COVID literature’ label. As nouns, ‘COVID’ and ‘COVID-19’ are interchangeable here, because they are in the popular understanding of the terms as of 2023. I am aware that ‘COVID-19’ is the correct form to refer to the disease from a scientific point of view.

2. The 2022 Kindle version of Quinn’s book provides positions instead of page numbers.

3. See also http://sirihustvedt.net/life/events-news/news/i-think-of-the-sirens-as-new-yorks-heartbreaking-music and https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-03-08/living-in-a-world-that-we-had-never-imagined.html

4. Floyd was a 46-year-old African-American citizen who was murdered on 25^th May 2020 by the White police officer Derek Chauvin. With Floyd handcuffed and lying on the floor, and with three more policemen stopping bystanders from intervening, Chauvin stood on the man’s neck for over nine minutes, while Floyd repeatedly complained that he could not breathe. The killing was recorded by security cameras and passers-by, and the four officers were fired immediately. Months later, Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for murder, and the four policemen faced federal charges for violating Floyd’s civil rights (they received sentences of around three years). The event created outrage in and outside the US, and protests supporting the Black Lives Matter movement took place in several American cities and over 60 other countries, despite the restrictions due to COVID-19.

5. Erdrich lives in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed. The city is the setting of the novel, and Erdrich features as herself. The story takes place around Birchbark Books, which she owns in real life.

6. https://orionmagazine.org/category/together-apart/

7. To avoid unnecessary repetition, the primary text will be cited only by its page numbers. All the quotations are from the 2020 Torrey House Press edition. Unless otherwise stated, the italics in the citations are in the original.

Additional information

Funding

Research supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [grant # PID2019-109565RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033].

Notes on contributors

Marta Fernández-Morales

Marta Fernández-Morales, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at the University of Oviedo, Spain, where she teaches literature and gender studies. Her research explores contemporary American cultural products, in particular literature, film, and television. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Television and New Media, Feminist Theory, Auto/Biography Review, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and American Drama, among others. She is the author of four books and the editor of eight scholarly volumes, the most recent one being Rethinking Gender in Popular Culture in the 21st Century. Marlboro Men and California Gurls (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017; co-editor). She is a member of the research team in a project about illness narratives funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and developed by the Research Group ‘HEAL’ at her home university (https://www.unioviedo.es/heal/). More information at academia.edu