Female Corporeality, Abjection And The Grotesque At The Intersection Of The Gothic And Ecocrıticism In Contemporary Women’s Fiction

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3422556

This dissertation aims to study contemporary women’s fiction and cinema in terms of its representation of the grotesque and abject female body entangled with morethan- human nature, which subverts the patriarchal coding of female corporeality and sexuality as repressed, excess, and non-agential. Drawing primarily from Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body, I establish an ecogothic, material ecofeminist, and queer ecological framework to investigate the complex interplay between nature, gender, and intersectional structures of oppression. I base my analysis on Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, Latife Tekin’s Zamansız, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Julia Ducournau’s Raw as examples in which the grotesque and abject female body, marked by race, class, and gender, becomes a site of resistance against the interlinked oppression of women and nature. By foregrounding the intersections of gender and nature through an ecogothic lens, I focus on the theme of the metamorphosing female body to expose how sense of abjection and grotesqueness, a category of the patriarchal register attributed to any female body that does not conform to norms, are defined through ideas of what counts as natural. I posit that these texts seize the subversive and transgressive potential of the abject female body, in its grotesque materiality, to engage in a ‘carnivalesque uncrowning,’ redefining what counts as woman and what counts as human from a non-anthropocentric perspective.