The Harvey Hazard. Community-Building and Empowerment in Chantal Bilodeau’s Whale Song

Abstract

The article examines the interconnection between the oppression of women and nature as products of patriarchal power structures in Chantal Bilodeau’s play Whale Song. By using an ecofeminist approach, the article explores mechanisms of empowerment and community-building in Bilodeau’s play on the intratextual level through acts of naming and the topic of migration, and on the extratextual level through liminal audience-performer interaction. Blurring the lines between the real and the fictional, the speaker in Whale Song draws on real-life events and intertwines them with examples from her life to connect the threat of patriarchal power structures to the lived reality of the individual audience members. Thus, the interconnection of the oppression of women and nature is made more accessible to the audience and the speaker empowers the audience to take action against climate change and patriarchal oppression in a communal endeavor.