More Books Influencing Ecocinema Work

Donna Haraway’s (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women explains how the cyborg combines elements of technology and machines with organic physical (probably human and female) bodies. 

For Haraway, though, cyborg fiction and film also offers a space in which women can deconstruct binaries that construct nature and the feminine as inferior to their binary opposites, the masculine and culture. 

We see such an exploration in contemporary Japanese body modification horror like Machine Girl, RoboGeisha, and Tokyo Gore Police. 

In these films, women, nature and the machine merge creating new organisms with the ability to modify themselves from within.

In her Dinner with a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind’s Oldest Taboo (2008), Carol A. Travis-Henikoff provides evidence for multiple types of cannibalism, from the survival cannibalism noted in Jamestown to the medicinal cannibalism of the Inquisition. 

She notes, for example, that cannibalism is celebrated in at least one book and film, Alive (1993). Her work builds on the research of scientists and scholars from multiple fields, substantiating the existence of cannibalism without condemning its practice.

These books opened up avenues for aligning our early experiences with animals and the land ethic with less pleasant elements of the natural world.