Mémoire - Georgi DE RHAM

Moving Waters: Hydrosocial Relations in Contemporary North American Poetry

Georgi DE RHAM

Water shapes human life, but human life also shapes water. In the past two decades, geographers and environmental scholars have popularized the terms “hydrosocial cycle” and “hydrosocial relations” to describe this co-constitutive relationship. In this thesis, I argue that three contemporary North American poets – Erin Robinsong, Claire Wahmanholm, and Natalie Diaz – invite readers to inform their relationship to water with an ethics of care. Through their attention to water’s fluid transits through human, glacial, and riverine bodies and their critical engagement with the linguistic, representational, and political apparatuses regulating water, these poets cultivate an embodied awareness of hydrosocial relations. Cultural geographer Jamie Linton’s relational-dialectical reading of water, Astrida Neimanis’s posthuman feminist phenomenology, and John Durham Peters’s philosophy of elemental media provide a theoretical framework for my argument, which places select poems from Robinsong’s Wet Dream (2022), Wahmanholm’s Meltwater (2023), and Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem (2020) in conversation with hydrology, physiology, time-lapse photography, environmental reports, and museums. Through comparative analysis grounded in diverse theoretical approaches, I argue that Robinsong, Wahmanholm, and Diaz powerfully influence our hydrosocial relations, in turn demonstrating poetry’s unique capacity to shape environmental imaginations and invite new relationships with water to emerge.