Anthropocene feminism and the Weird temporalities of landscape

This article presents an overview of the topic I have been exploring in recent years – the role of landscape in contemporary British women’s fiction. Here I focus specifically on the use of the short story in relation to temporality and the Anthropocene. In discussing stories by Zoe Gilbert, Sarah Hall, Daisy Johnson and Lucy Wood, I contextualize them within what has been termed as ‘Anthropocene feminism’, which regards the effects of climate change and species loss as man-made, and posits a posthuman future after the end of patriarchy. As the first section argues, this revolutionary project is in sharp contrast with the melancholia that underwrites the work of critics such as Mark Fisher, Robert Macfarlane and Adam Scovell. Instead, I argue that it has much more in common with how China Miéville understands the Weird in non-hauntological, ‘abcanny’ terms. The second section applies this critical vocabulary to short fiction and demonstrates how it describes patriarchy as moribund, visualizes landscape and the natural world in non-anthropocentric terms, utilizes Weird temporal effects and figures a posthuman future at the expense of animal and sexual differences.