Transcorporeal Ecofeminism: Women, Earthly Elements and All Entities Entangled in Selected Poems of Kathleen Jamie’s Jizzen

Abstract

Pinpointing ecofeminist currents in pre-2000 female-authored poetry presents notable challenges. Kathleen Jamie’s poetic works, for instance, were often interpreted through conventional lenses—foregrounding themes of motherhood and the socio-cultural aspects of Scottish identity prevalent at the time of her writing. However, such readings tend to overlook the ecological and feminist undercurrents embedded in her work. This paper reconfigures Jamie’s Jizzen (1999) through the critical lens of ecofeminism, particularly its interrogation of binary social structures, to offer a new reading of Jamie’s poetic vision. It first explores how dualistic frameworks illuminate ecofeminist resonances within selected poems, drawing specifically on Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality and integrating empirical insights from the chemical and biological sciences. This interdisciplinary approach—bridging the arts and sciences—reveals the material entanglements between human corporeality, chemical substances, and microbial life, ultimately suggesting a profound sense of ecological wholeness. Through hermeneutic interpretation, paratextual analysis, and contextual engagement, the paper further argues that Jamie’s invocation of mythic figures—such as Pandora and St Kevin—implicitly maps the convergence of imagination and reality. These ancient narratives can mirror as well as forecast the looming environmental emergency we encounter in contemporary times.