Queerifying nature: between Frankenstein and Frankisstein

Abstract

This essay is a thought experiment or exercise that seeks in Mary Shelley's novel – Frankenstein – the foundations of an ecological awareness that destabilizes the concept of nature. Such destabilization will be read/interpreted alongside discussions on queer ecology that call into question the normative character of the so-called nature. In Frankisstein, a contemporary interpretation of Mary Shelley's novel, the writer Jeanette Winterson addresses key issues of the nineteenth-century novel and highlights the binaries that inform Western scientific thought, especially with regard to the apparent natural/anti-natural opposition. The abandonment of the novels here will be read from the perspective of climatic shocks/ abnormalities and theories that destabilize the invisible lines that establish the boundaries between humans and non-humans, by understanding that such limits are always based on positions of power.