On Mothers and Nature: Reassessing Reproduction in the Midst of Crisis (ASLE 2025)
To face climate change is, in part, to grapple with a narrowing range of possible futures. Thus, we find that reproduction itself is up for interrogation, reimagination, and revision. This panel explores precisely these shifts in thought by inviting papers that consider environmental crisis through the lens of sex and gender studies. As invoked by the panel’s title, the trope of Mother Nature exemplifies the powerful role that gender has historically played in environmental cultures. And although Mother Nature has undergone successive waves of critique, human norms of gender and sexuality continue to inflect ecological discourse.