Conference Program

This paper investigates the intersection between female sexuality and natural elements in contemporary illustrated books, adopting an ecofeminist perspective that foregrounds the connections between the disciplining of women's bodies and the exploitation of nature as parallel outcomes of the same patriarchal and anthropocentric system. The starting point of the analysis is Il piacere (2020) by Maria Hesse, a work that traces the history of female pleasure through an iconographic apparatus in which bodies and natural landscapes merge into a visual and symbolic continuum. The Spanish author and illustrator systematically employs botanical, aquatic, and ecological metaphors to restore narrative dignity to a desire historically silenced, constructing an imaginary in which the reappropriation of pleasure coincides with a reconnection to the natural world. In works such as Il Piacere and other illustrated books addressing menstruation, desire, and bodily autonomy, flowers, seeds, tides, forests, and ecosystems become metaphors not of biological determinism but of relationality, cyclicality, and interdependence. The body is represented as a dynamic ecosystem rather than a passive object of surveillance. Pleasure, in particular, emerges as an epistemic category capable of disrupting disciplinary and capitalist logics that frame sexuality primarily in terms of risk, productivity, or consumption.

Building on this text, the paper broadens its scope to other illustrated nonfiction works that share a similar representational strategy, including Katharina Hotter, Lisa Sonnberger and Flo Staffelmayr’s picturebook Lina l’esploratrice (2022), and contemporary illustrated books such as Post pink. Antologia di fumetto femminista (2019), in which the femininity interweaves the vegetal world.

Methodologically, the paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach combining iconotextual analysis with ecofeminist criticism, drawing on the thought of Val Plumwood, Carolyn Merchant, and Vandana Shiva, who have theorized the structural nexus between the domination of nature and the domination of women. Within this framework, the visual representation of female sexuality through natural metaphors is not read as an essentialist reduction of the feminine to the biological, but rather as a countercultural strategy that subverts the nature/culture dualism upon which the logic of domination is founded.

The paper aims to demonstrate that the analyzed works perform an implicit educational function: by offering non-normative representations of sexuality and of the relationship with nature, they challenge anthropocentric and patriarchal views and propose alternative models grounded in the recognition of interdependence between the human and the non-human. In this sense, these texts operate as tools of gender eco-pedagogy, capable of fostering critical reflection on both ecological justice and gender discussion.