Chair: Eagan S. Dean
Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, 1843 is remembered for its comparative approach to women’s gender roles across American regions and attention to scholarly process in its accounts of the Midwestern American “frontier;” at the same time, it performs crucial justificatory work for the “Manifest Destiny” model of Indigenous displacement and frames land as a resource to be mined for white feminist visions of vigor and economic independence–a vision which depends on the exclusion of Indigenous women from narratives of teleological progress. In light of this complex, fascinating, troubling legacy, the Margaret Fuller Society assembled papers for a special session engaging with the relationships among race, ecology, and feminism, in Fuller’s time and beyond.
Chip Badley and Kathleen Lawrence look to Fuller’s history and aesthetics to explain the intertwined philosophical and personal tensions which inform Fuller’s work as a woman philosopher and travel writer, and to reckon with the opportunities and burdens of that history, particularly in terms of the white gaze on Indigenous subjects. Lawrence Lorrain Mullen works to rethink white relationships to American land through a trans studies lens, reading Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” as an extension of Fuller’s regionalization/geologization of American gender, one with decreasing space for queerness, produced in part through the narrative disappearance of Indigenous nations. Reaching beyond the 19th century to address these very disappeared narratives, Chadha Brahem reads Leslie Marmon Silko’s late-20th century novels for the historical and contemporary workings of indigenous womanhood, ultimately arguing that an understanding of Pueblo gender categories reveals Silko’s route for the “reclamation of land, power, heritage and identity” through “female emancipation and sexual liberation.” Ultimately, this panel aims to stimulate conversation about the influences, impacts, and legacies of feminist understandings of the relationships between gender, race, and American land, especially in the Midwest and West.
Image credit: Sarah Freeman Clarke, “Arched Rock from the Water,” illustration #6 from Summer on the Lakes
