Socio-Environmental Crisis in Women’s Novels and Films in The Americas

The climate crisis has reached a critical point, necessitating urgent global action. Women’s activism against environmental dispossession in the Americas manifests not only in protests and classrooms but also through artistic filmmaking and writing. This book focuses on the overlooked contributions of women filmmakers and novelists, highlighting how their work reveals the connections between environmental dispossession and various injustices related to gender, ethnicity, age, class, and labor. It demonstrates that contemporary women in the Americas engage deeply with ecological issues, analyzing their representations and identifying common principles across texts. Using an interdisciplinary approach from environmental humanities, gender and Indigenous studies, and film and literary studies, the author compares works from Canada and Latin America. Three poetics emerge: environmental destruction critiques harmful development; care expands notions of reciprocity beyond the human; and insurgency showcases struggles against extractivist models. These works invite readers to understand the complex interconnections of environmental justice within society.

Victoria Jara is an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She teaches cross-listed courses in the Departments of Languages and Cultures, English and Writing Studies, and Film Studies. Her research examines how contemporary Latin American and Canadian women novelists and filmmakers depict environmental injustices, with a particular focus on representations of girls, Indigenous women, and environmental migrants. She has contributed book chapters to Ibero-American Ecocriticism: Cultural and Social Explorations (Lexington) and several forthcoming volumes, including The Handbook of Postcolonial and Ecofeminist Literature and The Handbook of Transgender Science Fiction, both edited by Douglas Vakoch; Environmental Activism, Decoloniality, and Literature of the Global South, edited by Gutam Karmakar and Sule Egya; and Eco-Horrors: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Health and Environmental Anxieties in Media and Culture, edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell. Her work has also been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Imagofagia, Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism, Chasqui, INTI, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Future Humanities