Mimesis Reconfigured: Material-Feminist and Posthumanist Transformations of the Female Body in British Women Writers

Abstract

This article rethinks the concept of mimesis through the lenses of feminist theory, material feminism, and posthumanism. It argues that the mimetic is no longer a matter of aesthetic resemblance or passive imitation but a dynamic, embodied, and ethical mode of becoming. The study, challenging the classical, gendered binaries embedded in Platonic and Aristotelian frameworks, traces how thinkers such as Irigaray, Cixous, Butler, Barad, Alaimo, Braidotti, Malabou, and Lawtoo reconceptualize mimesis as an intra-active, plastic, affective contagion with relational inclinations. Drawing on these reconfigurations, the article offers a constellation of literary analyses from British women writers—ranging from Marie de France and Julian of Norwich to Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Jeanette Winterson— showcasing how mimesis operates as a site of corporeal inscriptions, ethical resonances, and onto-epistemological transformations. Across six thematic clusters—mystical affect, reproductive horror, spatial confinement, temporal fluidity, post-traumatic haunting, and interspecies becoming—the essay demonstrates how British women’s literature mobilizes mimetic processes to reimagine embodiments beyond representational captures. In doing so, it proposes a mimetic ethics grounded in vulnerability, response-ability, and co-becoming, and offers new directions for material-feminist literary criticism and posthumanist thought.