The magical agency of matter: an ecotransfeminist reading of contemporary anglo-european fairy-tale retellings

This dissertation proposes an ecotransfeminist reading of the representation of magical and material agencies in contemporary Anglo-European retellings of the European folk- and fairy tale archive. It investigates the interconnection, in the Euro-Western context, between gender oppression and the human/non-human and nature/culture divide as heteropatriarchal and anthropocentric weapons to disenchant the body, the world, and the collective imagination, and to extract profit from silenced bodies. In such context, the magical dimension of the fairy-tale world, where matter is endowed with agency, becomes crucial for imagining speculative futures and re-enchanting the collective imagination. The ecotransfeminist methodology proposed for reading the literary corpus refers to Anglo-European queer, posthuman and new-materialist theoretical movements, with particular regard to Haraway’s “oddkin” and compostist turn, and to Karen Barad’s queer “spacetimemattering”. Such approaches will be put in dialogue with the already queer and posthuman representations of non-human and material agencies offered by the European fairy-tale archive, which emerge from the selected contemporary feminist retellings by Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Antonia Susan Byatt, Margo Lanagan, Katherine Vaz, and Sharon Blackie. Through the close reading of the literary corpus, this study highlights how such fairy-tale narratives function as speculative tools for re-enchanting a disenchanted world, suggesting sustainable horizons of ecotransfeminist multispecies co-existence to overcome the repressive (hetero)patriarchal narrative of the Anthropocene.