Zora Neale Hurston’s Trans-Corporeal Imagination: A Reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

This study examines Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God through the lens of Stacy Alaimo’s concept of Trans-Corporeality. The recent emergence of materiality in feminist thought has been prompted by the debate around the linguistic turn and its social constructionist models. Postmodernism and post-structuralism have enriched feminist theory to deconstruct the biological determinism and the dichotomies of nature/culture, matter/mind, and female/male. However, these theories have perpetuated Western dualism by keeping women away from nature and disregarding the materiality of bodies. Alaimo introduces the concept of Trans-Corporeality as an epistemological zone that explores the material interchanges between bodies and the wider nonhuman environment. This paper has two primary objectives. First, employing Alaimo’s concept as a framework, it examines the material transit between human bodies and the environment within the novel. It redefines Hurston’s environmental vision and the political nature of the text. Second, it remaps the geography of criticism about the novel via the material turn’s interpretations of biological essentialism as well as social constructionism. There has been a schism in Hurston criticism between identity politics over African American folk culture and post-structural interpretations of race and gender. This paper argues that by focusing on the microscopic interactions between the human and nonhuman worlds, it is possible to bring about substantial change in the dominant scholarship that appear irreconcilable.