Description
Symbols and tropes of liquidity have long been connected to notions of the feminine and, therefore, with orthodox constructions of femininity and womanhood. Underpinning these ideas is the vital importance of water as life force, which has given it a central place in cultural vocabularies worldwide. These symbolic economies, in turn, inform the discourses through which positive or negative associations of women with water come to bear impact on the social positioning of female gendered identities.
Women and Water in Global Fiction brings together an array of studies of this phenomenon as seen in writing by and about women from around the world. The literature explored in this volume works to make visible, decodify, celebrate, and challenge the cultural associations made between female gendered identities and all kinds of watery tropes, as well as their consequences for key issues connected to women, society, and the environment. The collection investigates the roots of such symbolisms, examines how they inform women’s place in the socio-cultural orders of diverse global cultures, and shows how the female authors in question use these tropes in their work as ways of (re)articulating female identities and their correlative roles.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Women and Water – Mapping a fluid terrain
Emma Staniland
Part One. Mythologies and Spiritualities of Water
The Atlantis Effect: Aquatic invocations and the (re)claiming of women’s space in the works and archives of Gloria Anzaldúa, tatiana de la tierra, and Lydia Cabrera
Sarah E. Piña
Connecting Women through Water: Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2003) as matrifocal speculative fiction
Leighan Renaud
Grottoes and Mermaids: fairy tales and transformations in Marie Nimier’s Sirène (1985) and La Plage (2016)
Rebecca Rosenberg
"Water, Water, Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink": spiritual renewal through destruction in Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Hurricane (2011)
Angela Watkins
Part Two. Rivers, Lakes and Oceans
Of Deserts and Oceans: spaces of womanhood in the work of Malika Mokkedem
Elizabeth H. Jones
Re-writing the Colonial River: Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed (2005) and Murray River narratives
Brigid Magner and Emily Potter
Ko wai koe? identity and water in contemporary women’s writing from Aotearoa New Zealand
Paula Morris
Time and Tide: topographies of trauma in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013)
Kamil Naicker
Watery Subjectivities: exploring female Somali diasporic experiences of the sea in Cristina Ali Farah’s Little Mother (2011) and "A Dhow is Crossing the Sea" (2011)
Ayan Salaad
Part Three. Metaphors of Liquidity
Flowing along Endlessly: Banana Yoshimoto’s female protagonists and water as guiding force
Carrie Giunta
Women, Water and the House Built on Sand: tropes of liquidity in the feminist Latin American dictatorship novel – Cristina Peri Rossi’s The Ship of Fools (1984) and Diamela Eltit’s The Fourth World (1988)
Emma Staniland
Water metaphors as communication structures in Astrid H. Roemer’s Was getekend (Was Marked) (1998)
Emma Van Meyeren
