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. This panel invites us to consider the confluence of reproduction and environmental crisis anew, perhaps in relation to the critical tools and terms offered by developments in the field of sex and gender studies. Papers might cover a range of historical periods and contexts, genres and forms, and investments in identity and futurity.
Papers might (or might not) constellate around the following topics:
Queer Kinship
Multispecies Kinship
The Climate Generation
Age Studies
Biological Reproduction
Temporality Studies
Anti-Futurity
Demography / Population
Social Reproduction
Queer Theory
Trans Theory
Ecofeminism
Human Ecology
Send abstracts of 300 words or less in .doc or .docx format to Rachael DeWitt (dewitt@wustl.edu) by 10 December 2024. Please include the following with your submission:
· a title for your presentation,
· your full name as you would wish it to appear on the program,
· your e-mail address,
· your phone number, and
· your institutional affiliation and rank (if applicable).