Feminist Digital Ecology: Mimesis, Fictocriticism and Altering Technological Space

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the ways authors of fictocriticism—a hybrid form of writing that blurs literature and literary-critical commentary— reenvision the affordances of digital media and the rise of networked technologies in feminist materialist terms. I consider the crucial role of mimesis in fictocriticism to foster “becoming similar with” one’s environment, including its media, and how fictocritical mimesis can serve as a feminist tool for space-making and betweenness. Through close readings of Mauve Desert (1987) by Nicole Brossard, Places Far From Ellesmere (1990) by Aritha van Herk, and Steven Shaviro’s Doom Patrols (1995–97), I make the case that fictocriticism affords an altering and ecological conception of our digital age in which the land and architecture are also understood as networked spaces of nomadic identity and capacious flux.