ABSTRACT
In Nicolette Krebitz’s film Wild – similar to Donna Haraway and/or Bruno Latour – wilderness, traditionally determined by the absence of human agency, paves the way into an environment which is socially permeated by multiple human and non-human species. This chapter reconstructs several general theories about the relationship between wilderness and femininity, including the most recent developments in feminist theory. It focuses on how the film Wild updates the topos of a female becoming wild. The chapter particularly concerns the question of whether the film manages to conceptualize the wilderness as part of a post-natural world. Wilderness is a utopia which – as a feminist topos – is not new. It runs through feminist theory as it does through literary and film history. Feminist new materialism is regarded as one of the more heterogeneous research areas that have been gathered together under the umbrella term the “nonhuman turn”, alongside Animal Studies and Object-Oriented Ontologies.
