Foreword: Gender, Ecology, and New Materialisms

The title of this rich, ambitious collection, Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century, poses conceptual questions for the essays that follow. The first two words offer a provocation, in that ecologies, or systems of relations between organisms and their environments, would seem to be worlds apart from gender, a cultural system of usually hierarchical differences overlaid upon biological sexual difference. Ecology, as part of nature, dwells in the purview of the natural sciences, while gender, part of culture, would seem to be best approached through the humanities. However, these clear divisions deceive. Though