Women writers of the Southwest present the challenge of being human amidst a seemingly inhospitable landscape and surviving that experience through writing. This panel investigates what it means to embody the human as women in the literary and physical American desert. Furiously swirling debates about climate change and unlivable conditions might be well-informed to reflect back on the original hostile territory within the American psyche in the desert. Women writers of the 20^th century write the desert in close proximity to their own bodies and reimagine a space of life and possibility where others saw only heat and death. Questions about the women of the Southwest and their attachments to the land yield important conversations about human connections to environments on a larger scale. This panel investigates the experience of the women in the Southwest desert and how it produces some of the most critical writing of America’s most emblematic landscape. Women survive and appreciate a landscape that many men writers deemed unlivable, barren, and too far from green for redemption.

Considering the presidential theme of “being human,” this panel fuses discussions of marginalized voices in the Southwest with discussion of climate change, environment, and literary conceptions of what it means to be human. As a scholar at the University of New Mexico, the amount of archival material related to women writers of the Southwest is staggering. Much work needs to be done to elevate, recognize, and analyze important texts from the Southwest, especially for their focus on climate, change, and human relationships to their environment. At a time of immense anxiety surrounding the future of being human on a planet facing human-caused catastrophe, women writers of the desert provide paramount insight into living in spaces deemed too dangerous or hostile for the human body. Scholars on this panel consider the desert landscape in critically important ways, and all focus on the agency of the woman within a space already once decimated by the atomic tests of the second world war.

Scholars like Scott Slovic have identified a gap in representation of women’s writing of the Southwest in anthologies like his Getting Over the Color Green. Annette Kolodny also chronicles the close relationship between the female body and the American conquest of the new landscape across the nineteenth century. Male explorers and writers alike frequently ascribed gender to landscapes in need to settling, which negatively impacted the overall connection between American identity and natural landscapes. Women writers reclaim and redefine the possibilities of what it means to be human and to be women in diverse environments and amidst varying degrees of adaptation to their surroundings. Scholarship on women writers of the Southwest repeatedly identifies the unacceptable lack of awareness and attention paid to this important group of authors. The region itself repeatedly gets ignored by mainstream canonical studies of literature, and women of the space are overlooked. Scholarship about desert landscapes like that of Wendell Barry, Richard Slotkin, and Lawrence Buell emphasize the critical need for understanding the realities of these spaces, immortalized for their inhospitable qualities and racialized in their seeming disposable nature. As the world’s climate changes, the American desert becomes a focal point for ecocriticism and the locust of understanding the human self. Women writers in the desert chronicle the violence of that terrain along with the attention to detail that yields fruitful understanding of the intricate and delicate ecosystems of the desert. Writers like Elena Zamora O’Shea, Rachel Carson and Terry Tempest Williams understand these ecosystems by inhabiting them. Several of these panelist address issues directly relating to Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands: La Frontera and other regional texts by women writers. Many of Anzaldúa’s important conceptions of place, borders, and identity are expanded and enhanced by this panel’s discussion of women writers across the region and their experiences of these border spaces.

The individual presentations of this panel address issues of domesticity, landscapes of violence, the Colorado River and toxic masculinity, as well as environmental health activism. Laurie Lowrance’s presentation interrogates the relationship between resistance, resilience, and continuance in Helen Sekaquaptewa’s Me and Mine and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Garden in the Dunes. Vanesa Fonseca-Chávez’s paper analyzes navigating inhospitable landscapes of violence in Josefina López’s 2011 play, Detained in the Desert. In this presentation, Fonseca-Chávez analyzes the perceived inhospitability of the Sonoran Desert through border violence of the play written in response to Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, chronicling the myriad survival strategies that undocumented and documented Latinx communities must enact to navigate the Arizona landscape. Rachel Hanson’s paper considers the trends in America that devastate wildlife, bridle rivers and lands, and consider how this devastation and “bridling” is analogous to violence against women and the legislation of their bodies and how these issues parallel expeditions of the Colorado River and toxic masculinity. Finally, Mia Alafaireet’s presentation draws on the contexts of black homesteading in the American West and the New Negro movement’s conceptual ties between home and health, illuminating connections between Anita Scott Coleman’s representations of desert landscapes and her domestic fiction.

Together, these presentations highlight compelling and important arguments for the existences and persistence of women as human bodies in the desert landscape of the Southwest. The challenges women face are compounded in this continuing struggle to have their writing reach larger audiences and be accepted as integral works to the region of the Southwest. Each panelist will present for thirteen minutes. At the end of the presentations, the panel moderator will facilitate and prompt crowd questions. The panel moderator will start off the Question and Answer fifteen minutes with questions that tie the presentations together. This panel’s discussion of women writers as humans, especially in this marginalized, atomically devastated region, matters greatly in the current discussion of the planet’s changing climate. IF women have survived in the desert, perhaps more adeptly and through more arduous circumstances than their male counterparts, then women’s writing of landscape and climate reveals a great deal about what it means to survive as humans on this planet.