Entangled Life on a Damaged Planet

Entangled Life on a Damaged Planet is the sixth seminar of "Eating Well in Women's Creative Arts Bodies, Politics, Ecologies", a series of eight online seminars that together explore eating disorders, consumption and patriarchy, food cultures and placemaking, cannibalism, ecological crisis, multispecies worlds, and the politics of meat-eating. See our website for further details.

Date: Wednesday, 14 April, 5.00 - 6.30 pm BST/ 4:00 - 5.30 CEST
Location: Online

Speakers, Abstracts & Bio:

Katarina Labudová, University of Ostrava: "Survival Appetites: Women's Dystopian Writing and Contemporary Catastrophe"

Abstract: In contemporary dystopian women's writing, appetite emerges as both a biological necessity and a political language through which ecological crisis, war, pandemic, and social precarity are experienced. Food, hunger, and consumption become central to narratives that examine how bodies endure catastrophe while negotiating care, desire, reproduction, and environmental collapse. Rather than treating eating as a private act, these texts reveal it as deeply entangled with systems of power, inequality, and ecological interdependence.

I examine representations of food and appetite in contemporary fiction, memoir, and autofiction by women writers working across dystopian, climate fiction, pandemic, and speculative genres. Drawing on feminist food studies, biopolitics, and ecofeminist theory, it considers how acts of feeding, fasting, scarcity, and communal eating challenge dominant narratives of resilience and individual responsibility. The seminar argues that women's catastrophe writing reimagines eating as an ethical and political practice that exposes the fragile connections between human bodies and damaged environments.

Biography: Coming Soon

Méliné Kasparian-Le Fèvre, Independent Researcher: "'What does loss taste like?' Recovering Traditional Food and Ecological Knowledge through Contemporary Poetry"

Abstract: As Kathryn Yusoff writes, “[t]he Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence.” Indigenous peoples have already faced catastrophic world endings through colonialism: the loss of land, of culture, but also of food, through the destruction of ecosystems, forced displacement, or the banning of foodstuffs. For example, in the 16 th century, Spanish colonizers banned the use of amaranth, a plant that was not only very nutritious but also integral in Aztec spirituality. This loss of access to traditional foods threatened not only the physical well-being of indigenous communities, but also the very survival of their cultures. Today, a movement to recover ancestral foods, recipes and techniques, or to “decolonize food” has gained momentum, as exemplified by the “Sioux chef” (Sean Sherman) who seeks to preserve and popularize traditional Sioux recipes.

This paper would study a similar dynamic in the works of contemporary Indigenous women poets, who also focus on traditional foodways and the impact of colonization on Indigenous food systems and cultures. Reading authors such as Sarah Biscarra Diley, Megan Dorame and Deborah A. Miranda through the framework of decolonial ecology reveals how their poetry about ancestral foods denounces the intertwined ecological and cultural losses caused by colonization, in the past and in the present. The paper will argue that their poems act both as mourning sites and as repositories of traditional ecological knowledge, in which food is tied to a sense of collective responsibility as well as to a message of hope, conveyed through botanical poetics. Through their poetry of ancestral foods, these authors defend environmental justice and promote sustainability by turning towards knowledge from the past, not future technosolutions.

Biography: Méliné Kasparian completed a PhD in American literature at Université Bordeaux Montaigne, focusing on the writing of food in the works of contemporary Mexican American women writers. She has contributed to edited volumes such as Consumption and the Literary Cookbook (2020), and Significant Food: Critical Readings to Nourish American Literature (2024). Her main research interests include food in literature, women’s writing, ecocriticism, and ecofeminism.

Organisers
This seminar series is organised by Phoebe Chetwynd (CY Cergy Paris Université) and Poulomi Choudhury (University College Dublin), with thanks to Héritages: culture/s, patrimoine/s, création/s.

Cover image by Yassin Mohammadi on Unsplash, free to use under the Unsplash License.