Restoring Touch in Ecofeminist Speculative Fiction
Abstract
Focusing on The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk and The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson, this article intends to map out the ways in which touch is restored as a reliable yet complex epistemological path in ecofeminist speculative fiction. While touch is a sense that boasts immediacy between the touching subject and the touched object, The Fifth Sacred Thing portrays it as a mode of knowing that requires effort and proceeds gradually, following its own regime and geography and literalizing the spacing at the heart of touch theorized by Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. While it produces instantaneous effects, it also induces stases which allow both texts to frequently feature touch as a place, or the touched thing as a pattern, which gives literary presence to the neuroscientific hypothesis of a tactile field. The interpenetration in which touch often results in the two novels also sets touch as an exemplary sense to meet the universe halfway.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
- Work submitted for publication must be original, previously unpublished, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. If previously published figures, tables, or parts of text are to be included, the copyright-holder's permission must have been obtained prior to submission.
- Authors of accepted manuscripts will assign to L'Atelier the right to electronically distribute their article, or publish it in any form (Internet, CD ROM, printed copy) but authors will retain copyright and, after the article has appeared in L'Atelier, authors may republish their text (in print and/or electronic form) as long as they clearly acknowledge L'Atelier as the original publisher.
