Instructor: Garza WF 11:00 AM – 12:20 PM
Environmental Degradation: Poetic Resistance in Climate Change Apocalypse
What does the environment have to do with society? Where do we place the non-human natural world in terms of importance? In a world suffering urgently from the effects of climate change, at least in the U.S., society has decided to turn its full attention to more ‘important’ things. Things like policing femme bodies, running education into the ground, banning books, and creating an even less livable world for trans individuals. In this class, we will tease out the connections between all of these issues and the ecological degradation we are currently experiencing. Through an ecofeminist lens, we’ll be exploring how hierarchies and power structures of capitalistic patriarchy cause not only violence upon ‘othered’ bodies (gendered, sexed, and racialized) but also cause violence upon the global environmental body. By studying books of ecopoetry throughout the semester, we will discuss what common tools of resistance these poets are utilizing in their craft. We will also be writing our own poems throughout these conversations, ultimately culminating in the class’s final project: a poetic sequence of work that tells the story of a body in non-human nature. We will grow intimately close to the world beyond the human in this class. It is the hope that we are all able to gain ideas for resistance in the face of our deteriorating world. Central authors for our class include Ada Limón, Sasha West, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Maya Jewell Zeller, Emily Skaja, Fred Wah and Rita Wong.