Ms Stephanie Dotto

Research project: Female Tricksters and the Redistribution of Power in American Fabulist Fiction

Abstract

This research focuses on the significance of gender in the fabulist genre of American literature—specifically the role of the trickster in contemporary fables written by women. By tracing trickster stories back to their indigenous roots, I aim to better understand the relationship between mythology/gender, human/nature and self/world, exploring how these notions have changed over time.

Fables have always been a productive means of working through thorny problems, presenting complex issues in tidy, emblematic packages. In contemporary fiction, fabulism is a genre dominated by women; a space that embodies the inherent strangeness of a marginalised experience. As such, it is an effective mode for examining changing attitudes towards gender and shifting relationships with matter.

Ultimately, I want to understand how present-day fabulist literature is re-inscribing the trickster in a fluid way, raising questions of gender that have the potential to disrupt power hierarchies. By applying new materialist and feminist methods of analysis, I aim to dissect the ways in which matter has influenced representations of gender from one generation of storytellers to the next.