Writing, Gender and the Natural World: Unnatural Being

18 August 2022

The Creative People, Products and Places (CP3) Research Centre and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund invite you to the second event in the series on Writing, Gender and the Natural World: 'Unnatural Being' featuring writer Jennifer Mills. This is an Auslan-interpreted hybrid event which can be attended in-person or via zoom.

Unnatural Being

In an era of unnatural disasters, stories about the future of nature are often dominated by loss and mourning. Perhaps what we have thought of as ‘nature’ no longer serves us. If nature is not a place but a set of relationships, what values might spring from writing that disturbs, disrupts, and unsettles those relationships?

Jennifer Mills’s fiction and non-fiction amplify the uncanny in the Anthropocene. Here, Mills invites us to consider how a queer imaginary might see nature in crisis, working to dissolve the borders between self and other, human and non-human, and natural and unnatural beings.

Jennifer Mills is an author, editor and critic based on Kaurna Yerta (Adelaide). Her latest novel, The Airways (2021), was recently shortlisted for an Aurealis Award for Horror. Dyschronia (2018) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, Aurealis (for Science Fiction), and Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. A widely published essayist and a strong advocate for the rights of writers and artists, her key interests include labour, art, climate, ecology, power, gender and the body. In 2022 Mills is pursuing these subjects and more as Artist in Residence at Vitalstatistix.

This speaker series is curated by Dr Jessica White, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at UniSA.