POSTHUMAN ECOFEMINISM AND CLIMATE ANXIETY IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION: A STUDY OF THE NEW WILDERNESS

Abstract

This paper analyzes The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (2020) as a posthuman ecofeminist text to understand how climate fiction (cli-fi) symbolizes ecological collapse, relational survival, and climate anxiety. The study uses the posthuman theory of Donna Haraway (2016) to stress the moral and emotion relationships between human and non-human subjects, displacing anthropocentrism, and emphasizing distributed agency when it comes to survival discourses. The primary textual sequences of the novel were subject to a qualitative textual analytic to determine the theme of gendered ecological vulnerability, female ecological knowledge, and anxiety about climate as an ethical and affective experience. Results indicate the mediation of the nature of the mother-daughter relationship between environmental knowledge and emotional resilience, the active role of non-human agents in influencing the narrative outcomes, and the embodied, multisensory experience in promoting ethical engagement to the ecological uncertainty. Combining ecofeminist and posthumanist insights, this paper shows how cli-fi can prefigure relational ethics, human-non-human relationships, and affective reactions to environmental crisis to provide a more complex sense of survival, care, and agency within the Anthropocene age.