Violence, relation and beauty in Toni Jensen’s “Women in the Fracklands”

Year, pages: 2023, 101 - 112

Through a close reading of Métis US writer Toni Jensen’s “Women in the Fracklands”, a standalone chapter in her memoir-in-essays Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land (2020), this article aims at making a culture-specific and narrative-focused contribution to the current theory of resilience. It does so by emphasizing Jensen’s denouncing of violence against Indigenous bodies and lands – particularly women in and around fracking sites – and her articulation of the Indigenous value of relationality as the embodiment of lands, bodies and language. The resulting account of resilience is both individual and communal; simultaneously based on the connection to place and history and focused on the present and the future; affirming sovereignty and becoming a decolonial tool of visibilization and empowerment.

Martínez-Falquina, S. 2023. Violence, relation and beauty in Toni Jensen’s “Women in the Fracklands”. In World Literature Studies, vol. 15, no.2, pp. 101-112. 1337-9275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.2.9

Martínez-Falquina, S. (2023). Violence, relation and beauty in Toni Jensen’s “Women in the Fracklands”. World Literature Studies, 15(2), 101-112. 1337-9275. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.2.9

Publisher: Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV, v. v. i.