Session Abstract

Shapeshifting as History:  Crosscurrents of People, Nature and Gender in Latin America and the Caribbean

These papers offer four different perspectives on stories in which people turn into animals, birds, and wood. They explore in turn the forms of subjectivity these stories presuppose, how gender is implicated in these processes, how female shapeshifters are sexualized, and finally how narratives of tree identification relate to the increasing scarcity of the forest over time. The panel  thus offers four different points of interrogation of a narrative form which links nature and culture, and lives to place, in a most intimate genre of identification.