Women Reclaiming Landscapes. Space and Affect in Two Short Stories about the South

Boulder y virtualmente

Congreso; 4th International Feminist Geography Conference; 2022

University of Colorado - Boulder

?Sur?, by Ursula K Le Guin, and ?Camino al sur?, by Angélica Gorodischer, present speculative worlds in which the female protagonists relate to landscapes in ways that deviate from the norm established by patriarchal systems of knowledge and economy. Literary imagination offers alternatives for constructing our knowledge about the world. As Mary Louise Pratt puts it, ?people act in the world as they imagine the world? (my translation). Speculative fiction, because it takes past and present trends as its source material, is a very fertile ground from which to imagine possible (not here yet) modes of interconnected existence within the world. The stories chosen here attest to this assertion. In ?Sur? it is a group of women who are the first to arrive to the geographic south pole, months before Roald Amudsen, subverting heroic narratives of exploration. In ?Camino al sur?, a woman defends the land that she inhabits (an imaginary place by a river which can be any place in the American tropics) from the extractivist drive of a foreign man and the complicit ambition of the local men. It is my contention that women strategically contest the mores and conventions by which they are historically set in enclosed/depoliticized/devalued places through appropriating and inhabiting landscapes in ways which entail affects and practices (care and solidarity) that are presented as sustainable and alternative to the male counterparts of heroic exploration and colonial extractivism. I thus intend to analyze the stories in the light of the relationship between landscape and affect theory.