The Embodied Planet: Sex and Gender in the Characters of Raoul Schrott

RSVP to kmc156@duke.edu by Sep. 4 for advance reading materials This chapter focuses on the role gender and sexual imagery play in imagining and structuring humanity's relationship with the natural world. I examine two novels by the contemporary Austrian writer Raoul Schrott that reflect meta-aesthetically on such gender/sexual imagery in order to effect a figural shift in the imagination of the world from "globe" to "planet." I ground my analysis on Gayatri Spivak's notion of "planetarity," which notes the historical association in psychoanalysis between the vagina and the uncanny and the changing influence of this association in depicting encounters with natural space, as well as other theories from ecofeminism and queer ecology.