Margaret Mahy: Embodying Feminism

Throughout her career, Margaret Mahy both reflected and contributed to evolving feminist concerns about embodiment, particularly in the ways she employed fantasy to explore the relationship between the body and consciousness. Moreover, Mahy’s political and philosophical attitudes underscore her ideas about gender, particularly in her fantasy novels with female protagonists, because that genre allows authors to experiment with how consciousness is embodied. Three novels demonstrate Mahy’s increasingly complex understanding of the relationship of thought to feminist concepts of the body: The Changeover (1984), Dangerous Spaces (1991), and Kaitangata Twitch (2005).