Disturbing the Weather: How Women Have Been Written and Viewed in Nature and Place

Abstract

This chapter explores the perception and representation of women between the city and the land with particular reference to disrupted/diasporic community/Irish women in Britain.

Drawing on my own experience as a member of the Irish diaspora, I look at how as women we experience, reveal and are revealed through the outdoors, from women walking city pavements and claiming their place to how we find ourselves written into public spaces (urban and pastoral). Are women best represented by the broken sections on early maps, those areas where cartographers warn of monsters and sea dragons? Or as mythical and often monstrous beings, such as witches? From the ‘underbellies’ of the city to the windswept ghost on the heath, women are historically represented in art and literature as disturbing presences who appear to threaten the outdoors and disturb the weather. Women as troubling presences were written into our pre-industrial history, and the use of the feminine wherever land is recalled, named and given to shared memory, shows gendered associations with land. Yet, in my own practice, a more authentic relationship to land and landscapes is explored in my use of settings, and through this, the complexities of body and place are explored in a way where traditional notions of the female and the earth are undermined, and the weight of such tropes tested and often discarded.