Vectors and Vermin: Gendered Violence and the Role of Insects in the Arthropoetics of Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Abstract:Theorized in this essay as a central element of ecoGothic horror, the threat of gendered violence functions in contemporary ecoGothic texts as a revision of traditional conflicts between agential nature and the human. Examining the arthropoetic works of Fronterista poet and educator Natalie Scenters-Zapico, this essay argues that heteropatriarchy complicates understandings of "the human" in ecoGothic literature, as the already flawed idea of human agency is markedly less stable in the context of Scenters-Zapico's women speakers. In examining the ways that sexism, gender inequality, and gendered violence inhabit a large portion of the ecoGothic, this essay also charts new territory in critical scholarship by focusing on the role of insects in literary representations of the ecoGothic. Read through the lens of what I deem the Latinx ecoGothic, this essay suggests that the poems "The Hunt," "He Finds a Kissing Bug," and "Last Night I Was Killed by Man" situate their female speakers in ambivalent relationships with insects and arachnids in ways that mirror the horrors of sexualized/gendered violence as well as the actions that subjects of said violence take to resist these horrors.