Across Cultures, Across Species: Animals in Women’s Writing
Description
From Margaret Cavendish’s satirical “Animal Parliament” to Chi Zijian's novel Blue Sky above Clouds, women across cultures wrote with striking insight about non-human animals in all genres. These literary engagements reveal more than mere metaphor—they interrogate the boundaries of species, gender, race, and power. Over the past three decades, ecofeminism and human-animal studies have demonstrated how feminist theory and animal ethics intersect, generating new methodologies and diverse critical perspectives.
This panel invites interdisciplinary conversations on how women’s literary representations of animals complicate dominant frameworks and offer fresh approaches to understanding women’s creative expression. By examining texts from varied cultural and historical contexts, we seek to explore how animals function not only as symbolic devices but as embodied presences, agents, and interlocutors within women’s writing. These representations often challenge anthropocentrism, resist allegorical reduction, and foreground the politics of vulnerability, care, and autonomy.
We welcome papers that engage with, but are not limited to, the following questions:
- How do animal figures in women’s writing reflect or resist the intersecting oppressions of speciesism, sexism, and racism?
- How do literary animals conform to or defy the “absent referent” in human language and metaphor?
- In what ways do animal representations challenge anthropocentrism and contribute to non-normative subjectivity?
- How do animals in women’s texts critique bodily autonomy, vulnerability, and the ethics of care?
- How are animals’ embodied experiences portrayed, and how do these depictions resist symbolic or allegorical reduction?
- How do authors represent animal agency without appropriating or distorting it—and what ethical tensions arise?
- What literary innovations emerge when women center animals as subjects rather than symbols?
By foregrounding the role of animals in women’s literature, this panel seeks to rethink the boundaries of subjectivity, authorship, and representation. It invites scholars from literary studies, feminist theory, animal studies, and cultural history to explore how women’s writing reimagines the human-animal relationship and contributes to broader discourses of embodiment, ethics, and creative agency.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sam Brierley is a PhD student in English Literature at Arizona State University. She studies how animals and insects are represented in 18th–19th century British print culture, examining how these nonhuman figures intersect with gender, sexuality, and power—and reflect deeper fears and questions about who counts as human, and why. She’s interested in how literature’s comic, creepy, and creaturely moments invite us to rethink cultural norms. You can reach her at [email protected].
Speaker Bio
aria L. Swanson is Associate Professor of Arabic Language, Literature, and Culture at the U.S. Naval Academy. Her research bridges comparative literature, gender studies, and translation, focusing on Russian–Arabic cultural ties and Arab women’s writing in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria. She examines Russian influence on modern Arabic prose and studies women’s narratives of gender, exile, and memory within global feminist frameworks.
Speaker Bio
Lisa R Timmermann is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and teaches in the German department at Binghamton University, New York. In her dissertation, she is examining how contemporary global women writers use dark humor to critique the neoliberal condition. Lisa holds a BA (Hons) in Film Studies with Modern Writing from the University of Gloucestershire, UK, an MA in Film Studies from Concordia University, Montreal, and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Portsmouth, UK.
Speaker Bio
Alba Elliott is a sixth-year PhD student in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is a joint-track student in French and Spanish, with a secondary field in Women, Gender and Sexuality studies & also works with contemporary English-language literature. Alba currently works within animal, environmental & gender studies, exploring the connection between the human and the more than human in ultra-contemporary literature in French, English, & Spanish.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Melanie Doherty is the Rufus K. and Jane Mulkey Green Professor of English at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, where she teaches courses on intersectional feminisms, eco-critical climate fiction, creative writing, college writing, and social and racial equity. She received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University and undergraduate degrees in Comparative Literature and Art History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Speaker Bio
Philosopher and literary scholar with a Master's degree in Philosophy from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. Holds a specialization in Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside, focusing on animal representations in Latin American literature and film through intersectional and socioenvironmental approaches.
Speaker Bio
Magdalena Cabaj is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream of Polish Language, Literature, and Culture in the Department of Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures. She completed her joint PhD in Philosophy at École Normale Supérieure — Paris Sciences & Lettres, and in Literature at the University of Warsaw. Her areas of interest include Polish studies from a comparative perspective, relationships between contemporary philosophy and art, and cultural and women's studies.