Nickianne Moody Memorial Lecture: Botanical Nightmares (in person)

Botanical Nightmares: Gender, Nature and Vegetal Ecohorror in Speculative Fiction from 1890-present

Dr Teresa Kirkpatrick, Manchester Metropolitan University

This lecture explores how plant metaphors within speculative fiction from the nineteenth century to present day are used to explore progressive views to changing definitions of masculinity, femininity and gender identity. Through a material ecofeminist gothic framework, the paper begins with fin-de-siècle short stories where exotic plants are positioned as eco-femmes fatales at a time when the figure of the New Woman was hotly debated. These stories set a trend for reflecting changing gender ideology constructed through gendered nature, offering ways of re-reading ecological metaphors beyond patriarchal ideologies of female/nature binaries to foreground both as interactive agents. Tracing the re-appearance of vegetal horror and changes to these ecological metaphors throughout speculative fiction of the long twentieth century in literature and film, this research offers not just a new perspective for gender studies but equally provides an opportunity to consider plant-thinking and human-nonhuman entanglements as avenues for greater understanding of our ecological kinship with the vegetal world. From vampiric orchids, treacherous trees, killer cacti, triffids, Audrey Junior and vegetal aliens, to plant-human hybrids and fungal zombies – you will never look at your houseplant in the same way again!

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Teresa Fitzpatrick is a Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests are in the ecogothic, ecohorror and speculative eco-fiction in narratives from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Her doctoral thesis developed a material ecofeminist Gothic framework to explore the intersectionality of nature and gender through cultivated plant monsters and their gardeners in speculative fiction of the long twentieth century and the eco-social changes this illustrated. She has contributed chapters on exotic flowers as eco-femmes fatales; wisteria as a signifier of domestic abuse; and on ecoGothic monstrosity to several edited essay collections. Her current research also includes Fungal Gothic.

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