Ecofeminism in Mesha Maren's Sugar Run (2019): Familiar Territory, Intersectional Pathways, and Fresh Trails

Abstract: West Virginia writer Mesha Maren's premiere novel, Sugar Run , crafts a Central Appalachian setting and characters ripe for ecofeminist analysis. Some of the novel's themes are familiar territory: protagonist Jodi McCarty's generational poverty interferes with her ability to protect her family's land from frackers, and ecofeminist critics have long explored extraction economy's dual dominations of land women. Similarly, Jodi's exploitation by ostensibly well-meaning outsiders is reminiscent of the work presented in Elizabeth Engelhardt's book The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature (2003). Significantly, however, Sugar Run also reveals fresh trails for ecofeminist exploration. Jodi's inability to protect the mountain is exacerbated by her outsider status as a gay woman in Appalachia and by her experiences in and out of prison. The current trend of constructing federal prisons on former sites of mountaintop removal extends ecofeminist concerns around incarceration beyond the plot of this novel. Additionally, the storyline of Rosalba, an immigrant from Mexico, connects the dual dominations of Appalachian women and land to those of the Global South. This essay investigates Sugar Run 's familiar ecofeminist themes of extraction economies and exploitative outsiders while also exploring ways that the novel presents fresh trails for analysis through queerness, incarceration and immigration.