The Embodied Planet: Sex and Gender in the Characters of Raoul Schrott

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This chapter focuses on the role gender and sexual imagery
play in imagining and structuring humanity's relationship with
the natural world. I examine two novels by the contemporary
Austrian writer Raoul Schrott that reflect meta-aesthetically on
such gender/sexual imagery in order to effect a figural shift in
the imagination of the world from "globe" to "planet." I ground
my analysis on Gayatri Spivak's notion of "planetarity," which
notes the historical association in psychoanalysis between the
vagina and the uncanny and the changing influence of this
association in depicting encounters with natural space, as well
as other theories from ecofeminism and queer ecology.