Saviors, nurturers, or magically insane
A braided reading of white women characters in three ecological narratives
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12689849 |
|---|---|
| Authors | E M Mcmain (0000-0002-2267-9590, Educational Psychology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA, corresponding author), Jt Torres (0009-0003-0167-7144, Quinnipiac University) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1643-1658 |
| Publication date | 2022-02-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Media Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1468-0777 • E-ISSN: 1471-5902 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14680777.2022.2041692 |
| OpenAlex | W4213374709 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 24 |
Media can both perpetuate and disrupt the patriarchal, anthropocentric discourses that shape social understandings of “woman” and “nature.” Using a braided feminist lens, we investigated media discourses about white women’s relationships with the human and more-than-human world. We present our analysis in three cases: Olivia from the novel, The Overstory; mother from the film, mother!; and Eleven from the Netflix series, Stranger Things. These characters illuminate stories of injustice and separation at the intersections of gender, race, species, and settler colonialism. We specifically consider the discourses of woman as crazy, woman as magical, woman as white savior, and woman as nurturer. Recognizing that no text tells a single story, we explore how we might re-story the discourses around white womanhood to invite a more reciprocal and feminist orientation to relationships, building from Donna Haraway’s notion of the Chthulucene (a trans-species, non-hierarchical response to the Anthropocene). Finally, we discuss how “othering” may not always occur as explicit marginalization and inferiority. For instance, by constituting white women as “saviors” or essentially magical (and possibly crazy), media may reinforce social and ecological hierarchies
Aesthetics · Anthropocentrism · Art · Environmental ethics · Injustice · Literature · Narrative · Reading (process · Sociology · White (mutation · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
Woman and nature
Bad Environmentalism
Whiteness as Property
The Troubled Past, Present Disjuncture, and Possible Futures
A Woman by Nature? Darren Aronofsky’s mother! as American Ecofeminist Gothic
The Death of Nature
A Melus Interview
A thousand plateaus
Animacies
Composing with Gaia
Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data
Living a Feminist Life
The Narrative Reproduction of White Feminist Racism
Replacing heteronormative views of kinship and marriage
Necropolitics
The New Materialisms and Indigenous Theories of Non-Human Agency
Introducing
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |