Thanks to Jennifer Gustar, Caleb Sivyer and Sarah Gamble for including my work in their new volume “Ludics and Laughter as Feminist Aesthetic” with Sussex Academic Press.
http://www.sussex-academic.com/sa/titles/literary_criticism/gustar.htm

Angela Carter’s 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber teems with erotic connections between female figures brimming with lost innocence and a wilderness of textual desires. While the feminist agenda of these postmodern fairy tales is contested, this essay proposes that the metamorphosing ecologies of Carter’s fairy tales offer new habitats for ecocritical thought. Responding to the ecofeminist new materialism developed by Stacy Alaimo and Donna Haraway, this essay argues that Carter’s revisited fairy tales offer an opportunity of working irony, laughter and joyous sensuality into the ecofeminist framework.

Three questions drive this enquiry: Firstly, how can irony and laughter offer an ecofeminist vision that does not re-affirm – even if unintentionally –  the nature-culture divide? Secondly, how do Angela Carter’s tales offer new perspectives on the role of ecology and embodiment in postmodernism, which does not simply treat nature (as James Applewhite has suggested) as an “object of contempt”? And thirdly, how do modes of irony and laughter negotiate the friction between the new materialism advocated by Stacy Alaimo with its emphasis on human and non-human matter, and a cultural eco-criticism inscribed in language?

This encounter between fairy tale beasts and cyborgs thus offers new vistas for ecofeminism. Interrelating concepts of irony and embodiment, intertextuality and materiality, this essay updates feminist agendas within the environmental humanities.