Revisioning Women and Water in Contemporary English- and Dutch-Language Poetry

There has been a long-standing and problematic coupling of women and water in the (western) imagination, as the field of ecofeminism has shown and criticized (e.g. Gaard 2001). Indeed, woman as water has alternatively been associated with a flowing female pollution in antiquity (e.g. Carson 2000), a destructive wave in Judeo-Christian imagery (Helmreich 2017), religious ecstasy due to her wet nature in medieval times (e.g. Fraeters 2004), and a distant deep as a “territory of desire” to be conquered in fascist ideologies (e.g. Theweleit 1987: 294). Now that questions of water become increasingly more important as the Blue Humanities take off, it seems time to take stock of this woman-water imagery. Poetry has especially been deemed suitable to engage with such watery questions due to its ability to interweave different temporal scales (see François 2017, Mentz 2024: 8, 13). Analyzing a contemporary selection of poems (in translation) by Dutch and Canadian poets Sophia Blyden, Anne Carson, Rozalie Hirs, and Alycia Pirmohamed, this paper will consider how contemporary women writers reimagine questions of female identity at the intersection of ecology, spirituality, and the body. Building on Astrida Neimanis’s (2013, 2017) identification of types of “hydro-logics,” this paper will argue that water does not only function as an “archive” but also as a (distorting) mirror in these poems, shaping as much as preserving what these women writers would like to see in our current societies. Reflecting on water’s inherent danger and the complexity of women-water relationships, these poets consider what role water can play in imagining more sustainable futures for women in the Anthropocene. Works Cited Carson, Anne. “Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity.” Men in the Off Hours, Jonathan Cape, 2000, pp. 130-57. Fraeters, Veerle. “Gender and Genre: The Design of Hadewijch’s Book of Visions.” The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in a Men’s Church, edited by Thérèse de Hemptinne and María Eugenia Góngora, Turnhout, Brepols, 2004, pp. 57-81. Brepols Online, doi:10.1484/M.MCS-EB.3.3594. François, Anne-Lise. “Ungiving Time: Reading Lyric by the Light of the Anthropocene.” Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, The Pennsylvania State UP, 2017, pp. 239-58. Gaard, Greta. “Women, Water, Energy: An Ecofeminist Approach.” Organization & Environment, vol. 14, no. 2, 2001, pp. 157-72. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26161568. Helmreich, Stefan. “The Genders of Waves.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 45, nos. 1-2, 2017, pp. 29-51. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/wsq.2017.0015. Mentz, Steve. An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. Routledge, 2024. Neimanis, Astrida. “Feminist Subjectivity, Watered.” Feminist Review, vol. 103, no. 1, 2013, pp. 23-41. Sage Journals, doi:10.1057/fr.2012.25. ---. “Water and Knowledge.” Downstream: Reimagining Water, edited by Dorothy Christian and Rita Wong, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2017, pp. 51-68. Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, I. Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Translated by Stephen Conway, foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, U of Minnesota P, 1987.