God is a Female Plant: Femininity and Divinity in the Stories of Anne Richter, Kathe Koja, and Karen Russell

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the relationship between femininity and divinity in feminist speculative fiction. It equates becoming divine with becoming plant, and studies the transformations that attend women in this process in modernity, postmodernity and transmodernity. Taking as its point of departure Mark Taylor’s evolution of the concept of God through immanence, transcendence and immanent transcendence, and Rosa María Rodríguez Magda’s definition of transmodernity, it examines “The Sleep of Plants” (1967) by Anne Richter, “The Neglected Garden” (1991) by Kathe Koja, and “The Bad Graft” (2014) by Karen Russell. It argues that by becoming plants these women locate themselves in opposition to the norms of divinity created by men, and proposes to delineate the contours of a new feminist paradigm in the present transmodern age through the study of botany.