“This superb collection will soon prove to be indispensable to any serious reader, be they

thinker or activist, who seeks a deeper understanding of the causes of our current environmen-
tal crises and how to meet the challenges these crises pose to all of us. A great achievement that
assembles and addresses the profound work of a century, a volume which one hopes will help
us survive the future.”
—Susan Griffin, author of Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her

“With 49 chapters covering numerous languages, works of literature, cultures, and literary
periods and genres across the world, The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature is a
truly global compendium of ecofeminist theory and praxis. It is undoubtedly a tour de force on
ecofeminism, the most comprehensive overview ever published. I highly recommend this im-
pressive volume.”
—Serpil Oppermann, Cappadocia University, Turkey;
coeditor of International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism

“The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature is an indispensable resource for both spe-
cialists in ecocriticism and newcomers to the field. Douglas Vakoch has orchestrated a hand-
book that demonstrates the global reach of ecofeminism and its relevance to an impressive range
of themes and genres, from animal studies to climate fiction.”
—Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA;
coeditor of Nature and Literary Studies

“Interrogating varied oppressive discourses and practices driven by patriarchal, racist, sexist,
and imperialist ideologies that have continued to harm women and nature, the authors offer us
alternative ways of cohabiting our earth equitably and sustainably. This handbook is an invalu-
able resource for teachers and students of ecofeminism and literature.”
—Zaynab Ango, Federal University Dutse, Nigeria

“This book is an excellent scholarly achievement with an astounding range of topics and depth
of research. By presenting brief surveys of ecofeminist literature from around the world, it
investigates key periods and genres in world literatures as well as core topics such as activism,
intersectionality, and posthumanism. This is a must-have for postgraduates, scholars, and teach-
ers eager to broaden their knowledge of ecofeminism and literature.”
—Katarzyna Burzy ń ska, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland;
author of Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford

“The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature is an encyclopedic reference for practi-
tioners of ecofeminism involving ecocritics from six continents. Douglas Vakoch has edited a
must-read handbook for anyone considering ecofeminism from diverse perspectives, literary
periods, and genres. A delightful guide providing an insightful analysis of key examples of
ecofeminism in canonical texts that makes it the most comprehensive study of ecofeminism
and literature to date.”
—Bechir Chaabane, Majmmah University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

“Featuring the work of an impressive range of international scholars in dialogue with each
other, this book is a timely and valuable contribution to ecocritical studies at this critical junc-
ture in the history of the biosphere.”
—Anita Balakrishnan, Queen Mary’s College, India;
author of Transforming Spirit of Indian Women Writers
“Narratives, life writings, and critical studies in ecofeminism have been posing critical chal-
lenges to fetishizing the manner of canon formation. This wonderful book engages with these
and so many other challenges, turning our customary gaze towards women, particularly mar-
ginal, and the visualized lives they live. This essential collection of essays is a detailed invitation
to rethink our received theoretical frameworks that remain an obstacle.”
—Hatem Mohammed Al-Shamea, Sana’a University,
Yemen; author of Islam and Woman: Decoding the ‘DNA’ of Patriarchy

“The voices in this volume collectively address the environmental emergencies and challenges
of our current time, providing critical analyses of gender dimensions of literary texts. Con-
ceptualizing the convergence of gender and environmental issues, the volume highlights the
analogous forms of oppression and domination, which result in the degradation of the lives of
women and the natural world. Hence, the volume contributes to a more multifaceted explora-
tion of gender and the environment, applying different perspectives to dismantle dichotomous
categorizations driven by patriarchal power structures.”
—Işıl Şahin Gülter, Fırat University, Turkey

“An astonishing array of perspectives, intersections, and in-depth as well as overview insights
into ecofeminist literature and the many correlating approaches across genres and literary pe-
riods thankfully not focused on just one region, but spanning literature from six continents.”
—Dunja M. Mohr, Erfurt University, Germany;
author of Worlds Apart?: Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias

“The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature is a much-needed volume bridging var-
ied concepts of ecofeminism through the ages as well as in modern times. In a post-pandemic
world, when environmental degradation in the Anthropocene has become an eye-opening
reality, this handbook emerges with a sense of urgency.”
—Nibedita Mukherjee, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, India;
editor of Gendering the ­Narrative: Indian English Fiction and Gender Discourse
 THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
ECOFEMINISM AND LITERATURE

The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination
of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays
from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Cov-
ering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes:

• Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, in-

cluding Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish,
Slovene, and Icelandic.
• Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature,
including: activism, animal studies, cultural studies, disability, gender essentialism, hege-
monic masculinity, intersectionality, material ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism,
postmodernism, race, and sentimental ecology.
• Surveys key periods and genres of ecofeminism and literary criticism, including chapters on
Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures; children’s and young adult literature; mystery
and detective fictions; the interconnected genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fan-
tasy; and distinctive perspectives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry.

This collection explores how each of ecofeminism’s core concerns can foster a more emancipatory
literary theory and criticism, now and in the future. This comprehensive volume will be of great
interest to scholars and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender studies, and the
environmental humanities.

Douglas A. Vakoch, PhD, is President of METI, dedicated to Messaging Extraterrestrial Intel-

ligence and sustaining civilization on multigenerational timescales. He has explored ecofeminism
in seven of his earlier books, including Feminist Ecocriticism (2011), Ecofeminist Science Fiction (2021),
and (with Sam Mickey) Literature and Ecofeminism (2018). Dr. Vakoch is general editor of two book
series: Environment and Society and Ecocritical Theory and Practice. As Director of Green Psychother-
apy, PC, he helps alleviate environmental distress through ecotherapy.
 ROUTLEDGE LITER ATU R E H A N DBOOKS

Also available in this series:

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Edited by Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston

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Literature-Handbooks/book-series/RLHB
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF ECOFEMINISM
AND LITERATURE

Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch

 Cover image: fona2, Getty
First published 2023
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Douglas A. Vakoch; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Douglas A. Vakoch to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.

ISBN: 978-1-032-05011-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-05012-6 (pbk)
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610
Typeset in Bembo
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 To Susan Griffin,
for Woman and Nature
 CONTENTS

List of Contributors xiii

Preface xxv
Douglas A. Vakoch
Acknowledgments xxvii

1 Ecofeminism and Literature 1

Patrick D. Murphy

PART I
Literatures in Diverse Languages 15

2 Chinese Literature and Ecofeminism 17

Chan Kit-sze Amy

3 Taiwanese Literature and Ecofeminism 26

Peter I-min Huang

4 Philippine Literature and Ecofeminism 36

Christian Jil Benitez

5 Vietnamese Literature and Ecofeminism 46

Quynh H. Vo

6 Australian Literature and Ecofeminism 57

Melanie Duckworth

7 Tamil Literature and Ecofeminism 68

Chitra Sankaran and Gayatri Thanu Pillai

ix
 Contents

8 Hindi Literature and Ecofeminism 78

Sangita Patil

9 Bengali Literature and Ecofeminism 88

Abhik Gupta

10 African Literature and Ecofeminism 101

Nicole Anae

11 Arabic Literature and Ecofeminism 126

Pervine Elrefaei

12 Turkish Literature and Ecofeminism 137

Hatice Övgü Tüzün

13 Slovene Literature and Ecofeminism 147

Katja Plemenitaš

14 Latin Literature and Ecofeminism 157

Artemis Archontogeorgi and Charilaos N. Michalopoulos

15 Francophone Literature and Ecofeminism 167

Giulia Champion

16 Spanish Literature and Ecofeminism 177

Irene Sanz Alonso

17 South American Literature and Ecofeminism 186

Nicolás Campisi

18 Brazilian Literature and Ecofeminism 195

Izabel F. O. Brandão

19 Native American and First Nations Literature and Ecofeminism 204

Benay Blend

20 Icelandic Literature and Ecofeminism 213

Auður Aðalsteinsdóttir

21 Nordic Literature and Ecofeminism 223

Katarina Leppänen

22 Estonian Literature and Ecofeminism 233

Julia Kuznetski and Kadri Tüür

x
 Contents

23 English Literature and Ecofeminism 244

Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman

24 Welsh Literature and Ecofeminism 256

Michelle Deininger

PART II
Core Issues and Topics 269

25 Activism and Ecofeminist Literature 271

Sunaina Jain

26 Animal Studies and Ecofeminist Literature 282

Lesley Kordecki

27 Cultural Studies and Ecofeminist Literature 290

Nicole Anae

28 Disability and Ecofeminist Literature 301

Nicole A. Jacobs

29 Gender Essentialism and Ecofeminist Literature 311

Asmae Ourkiya

30 Hegemonic Masculinity and Ecofeminist Literature 321

Lydia Rose

31 Intersectionality and Ecofeminist Literature 331

Chan Kit-sze Amy

32 Material Ecocriticism and Ecofeminist Literature 344

Başak Ağ ın

33 Postcolonial Literature and Ecofeminism 354

Aslı Değirmenci Altın

34 Posthuman Literature and Ecofeminism 364

Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu

35 Postmodern Literature and Ecofeminism 375

Karen Ya-Chu Yang

36 Race and Ecofeminist Literature 385

Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman

xi
 Contents

37 Sentimental Ecology and Ecofeminist Literature 395

Richard Magee

PART III
Literary Periods and Genres 405

38 Gothic Fiction and Ecofeminism 407

Anja Höing

39 Romantic Literature and Ecofeminism 417

Kaitlin Mondello

40 Victorian Literature and Ecofeminism 428

Nicole C. Dittmer

41 Children’s Fiction and Ecofeminism 438

Anja Höing

42 Young Adult Fiction and Ecofeminism 448

Michelle Deininger

43 Mystery and Detective Fiction and Ecofeminism 458

Casey A. Cothran

44 Climate Fiction and Ecofeminism 469

Iris Ralph

45 Science Fiction and Ecofeminism 479

Deirdre C. Byrne

46 Fantasy and Ecofeminism 490

Rhian Waller

47 Travel Writing and Ecofeminism 500

Lenka Filipova

48 Autobiography and Ecofeminism 510

K. M. Ferebee

49 Poetry and Ecofeminism 520

Andrew David King

Index 533

xii
 CONTRIBUTORS

Auður Aðalsteinsdóttir is a postdoctoral researcher at HM Queen Margrethe II´s and Vigdís

Finnbogadóttir’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate and Society (ROCS),
where she studies creative responses to climate change in contemporary art and fiction. She earned
a PhD in literary theory from the University of Iceland. The results of her PhD research on Ice-
landic book reviews in the media were published in her book Þvílíkar ófreskjur (2021). She has also
worked as a journalist, editor, and radio host for the program Book of the Week at the Icelandic
National Broadcasting Service. Aðalsteinsdóttir’s academic publications include an article discuss-
ing the works of Icelandic author Gyrðir Elíasson from an ecofeminist viewpoint. She recently
presented a paper on ecofeminism in relation to the works of Gyrðir Elíasson and Tove Jansson as
part of a lecture series on feminism and climate change at the University of Iceland’s Institute for
Gender, Equality and Difference, which will be published in the Institute’s Fléttur series.

Ba ş ak A ğ ın, PhD, is an associate professor of English literature at TED University, Ankara,

Turkey. Her monograph, Posthümanizm: Kavram, Kuram, Bilim-Kurgu ([Posthumanism: Con-
cept, Theory, Science-Fiction], Siyasal Kitabevi, 2020), introduced to the Turkish academic
and general audiences the new materialist aspects of posthuman theory with literary and filmic
sci-fi examples. She edited M. Sibel Dinçel’s Turkish translation of Simon C. Estok’s The Eco-
phobia Hypothesis (Routledge, 2018), which came out as Ekofobi Hipotezi (Cappadocia University
Press, 2021), and coedited the volume Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Media, and
Arts with Şafak Horzum (Routledge, 2022). Her research articles have appeared in scholarly
journals such as Ecozon@, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Neohelicon, and Transla-
tion Review. She is currently editing a Turkish handbook on environmental, medical, digital, and
posthumanities.

Nicole Anae graduated from Charles Sturt University with a BEd and DipT before earning her
PhD through the Faculty of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of
Tasmania. Her research interests include creative writing, English literatures, Shakespeare, theatre
history, Australian colonial and postcolonial writing, and the interplay between literature, perfor-
mance, and identity. She is a senior lecturer in literary and cultural studies at Central Queensland
University, Australia. Her published work appears in a variety of refereed journals and edited
collections.

xiii
 Contributors

Artemis Archontogeorgi teaches classics at the Muslim Minority High School of Komotini,
Greece. She received her PhD in Latin literature from Democritus University of Thrace. Her
thesis offers an investigation of Ovid’s Heroides in view of the theory of emotions with special
emphasis on verbal expression and literary representation. Her research interests include Augustan
poetry, especially Roman love elegy; gender studies; ecocriticism and ecofeminism; and digital
humanities. She has participated in numerous conferences and research seminars in Greece and
the UK. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Democritus University of Thrace working
on ecocriticism in Ovid. She is also actively engaged as a research fellow in programs on ecocriti-
cism in Latin poetry (Ecocriticism in Latin literature: Man and Nature in the Thought, Language
and Literature in Augustan Times) funded by the European Union (European Social Fund-ESF)
and Greece (Greek Ministry of Development and Investments), and on ancient mythology (Myth-
ological Routes in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace) funded by the Operational Programme ‘Com-
petitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation’ (NSRF 2014–2020) and co-financed by Greece
and the European Union (European Regional Development Fund).

Christian Jil Benitez is a scholar from the Philippines. He earned his AB and MA in literature
from the Department of Filipino at the Ateneo de Manila University, where he currently teaches
literature and rhetoric. Hailed as the Poet of the Year 2018 by the Commission on the Filipino
Language, his critical and creative works in both English and Filipino have been published in var-
ious anthologies and journals, including eTropic, Res Rhetorica, and Kritika Kultura. His first book,
Isang Dalumat ng Panahon, which intuits the Philippine notion of time through the rubrics of the
tropical, the poetic, and the material, was published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Benay Blend received her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico.
She has taught at the University of Georgia, Memphis State University, and the University of New
Mexico. Currently, she is a retired professor of Native American, American, and New Mexico
history. She has published widely in such fields as southwest women writers, Native American
studies, and nature writing. Her published articles include “Challenging the Official Story: Alicia
Kozameh, Alicia Partnoy, and Mother Activism During Argentina’s Dirty Wars (1976–1983)” in
Mothers under Fire (2015), “Intimate Kinships: Who Speaks for Nature and Who Listens When
Nature Speaks for Herself?” in Ecocriticism and the Global South (2015), “‘I Learnt All the Words
and Broke Them Up / To Make a Single Word: Homeland’: An Eco-Postcolonial Perspective of
Resistance in Palestinian Women’s Literature” in Ecofeminism in Dialogue (2017), and “‘Neither
Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native
American Writers” in Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays (2018). Her current re-
search focuses on place as a means of resistance in Native American and Palestinian writers.

Izabel F. O. Brandão is a professor of literatures in English and contemporary Brazilian women

writers at the Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil (now retired). She has edited and coedited
several books about women writers and feminist criticism, and she has published extensively both
in Brazil and in France, England, Italy, Spain, and the United States. She coedited (with Ildney
Cavalcanti, Claudia de Lima Costa, and Ana Cecília A. Lima) a feminist anthology in translation
titled Traduções da cultura: perspectivas críticas feministas – 1970–2010 (Translations of Culture: Feminist
Perspectives 1970–2010). In 2019, she edited (with Laureny Lourenço) the book Literatura e ecologia:
trilhando novos caminhos críticos (Literature and Ecology: Tracking New Critical Paths), published by Ed-
ufal. She is also a poet and has four collections published.

Deirdre C. Byrne is a full professor in English and Gender Studies at the University of South
Africa. She completed her PhD on the work of Ursula K. Le Guin and has published widely on Le

xiv
 Contributors

Guin’s work, including a recent article on her poetry in Extrapolation. She is the Director of ZAPP
(the South African Poetry Project), a group of researchers, poets, and educators who are dedicated
to fostering a love for Indigenous poetry in schools and universities. She is the coeditor of Fluid
Gender, Fluid Love (with Wernmei Yong Ade, Brill, 2018) and Entanglements and Weavings: Diffrac-
tive Approaches to Gender and Love (with Marianne Schleicher, Brill, 2020). She is also a published
poet and creative nonfiction author.

Nicolás Campisi is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tu-
lane University. He received a PhD and MA in Hispanic studies from Brown University and a BA in
art history and Hispanic studies from Washington College. His current book project, The Return of the
Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times, received the Joukowsky Family Foundation
Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Humanities from the Brown University Graduate School. His
scholarship has appeared in journals such as Revista Hispánica Moderna, A Contracorriente, and Transmo-
dernity. He received the Lyle Olsen Graduate Essay Prize from the Sport Literature Association (SLA)
for his article “Football at the End of the World: The Origins of Football Literature in Argentina and
Uruguay.” He has also co-edited an anthology of Latin American soccer short stories published in
Chile as Por amor a la pelota and in Scotland as Idols and Underdogs. His work lies at the intersection of
Latin American and US Latinx literature and visual arts and the environmental humanities.

Giulia Champion, PhD, is an early career research and teaching fellow at the University of
Warwick. Her doctoral research considered how the acceleration and exacerbation of climate
change in the Americas can be traced through the history of colonialism and imperialism by fo-
cusing on extraction as a way to connect slavery, plantation agriculture, and neoliberal practices
of extractivism. She is currently working on transdisciplinary climate change communication,
material histories, and the Blue and Energy Humanities. She has recently coedited a collection
entitled Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction with Palgrave Macmillan, published in February
2020, and she has edited a collection entitled Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and
There (Routledge, 2021). She is currently coediting two journal special issues—one on “Activism
and Academia in Latin America” for the Bulletin for Latin American Research and the other on “An-
imal Futurity” for Green Letters: Studies in Eco-Criticism.

Chan Kit-sze Amy is an associate professor at Caritas Institute of Higher Education, Hong
Kong. She is the co-editor of World Weavers: Globalization, Science Fiction, and the Cybernetic Revolu-
tion (2005), Science Fiction and the Prediction of the Future (2011), Technovisuality: Cultural Re-enchant-
ment and the Experience of Technology (2015), and Deleuze and the Humanities (2017). Her research
interests include Deleuzian philosophy and Chinese culture, ecofeminism, technoscience culture,
science fiction, cultural and literary theories, and gender studies.

Casey A. Cothran is chair and an associate professor in the Department of English at Winthrop
University. Since receiving her PhD in 2003, Cothran has taught classes at the University of
Tennessee, the College of William and Mary, and Winthrop. Her classes address such topics as
“British Gothic Literature” and “Literature of the Victorian Era,” as well as specialized courses
such as “Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing,” “Mystery and Detective Fiction,” and “Fairy
Tales and Heroic Quests.” Cothran is the co-editor of New Perspectives on Detective Fiction: Mystery
Magnified (Routledge, 2015) and has published on detective novelist Wilkie Collins in the Victori-
ans Institute Journal and the Wilkie Collins Society Journal. Her work on New Woman writers of the
late nineteenth century has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Working Papers in Irish
Studies, and in the book collection New Woman Writers: Authority and the Body. Cothran also has
published in YA fantasy novels, crime fiction, and graphic novels.

xv
 Contributors

Aslı Değirmenci Altın is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and
Literature at Hacettepe University, where she has taught since she completed her PhD in English
literature at the University at Buffalo in 2013. Her doctoral dissertation focused on magical realist
literature from the developing and postcolonial world. She has published articles on postcolonial
fiction and British novel. Her most recent publications include two book chapters: one in Ecofem-
inist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature (2021) and the other in
Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film (2021). Her research interests are postcolo-
nial theory and literature, the contemporary British and American novel, science fiction, climate
fiction, and environmental humanities.

Michelle Deininger, PhD, is a coordinating lecturer in humanities in the division of Con-

tinuing and Professional Education at Cardiff University. She leads the broader adult education
humanities provision as well as teaching courses in English Literature, Media, and Cultural Stud-
ies. Deininger completed her undergraduate studies as a mature student at Oxford and Cardiff
University, before undertaking an MA and PhD at Cardiff. Her doctoral thesis mapped a tradition
of Anglophone short fiction by women from Wales and uncovered a number of authors and texts
that had been previously neglected or forgotten. More recent work has focused on environmental
humanities, including work on the EcoGothic, in Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and
Early Environmental Justice (Lexington, 2017) and a chapter on ecofeminism and apocalypse in the
young adult (YA) fiction of Louise Lawrence (with Gemma Scammell), in Dystopias and Utopias on
Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction (Routledge, 2021). Current projects include
a monograph on YA environmental fiction.

Nicole C. Dittmer received her PhD in English/Gothic studies from Manchester Metropoli-
tan University, United Kingdom. Her thesis, “Wilderness and Female ‘Monstrosity’: A Material
Ecofeminist Reading of Victorian Gothic Fiction,” examines female monstrosities and nature in
Victorian Gothic fiction. She was published in the edited collection Global Perspectives on Eco-Aes-
thetics and Eco-Ethics: A Green Critique, and she has presented a variety of papers at the annual
International Gothic Association, among other conferences. Dittmer is currently in the process of
editing and publishing a collection, Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic. She is the proofreader and edi-
torial board member at the Studies in Gothic Fiction Journal, as well as an adjunct professor of Horror
Studies at The College of New Jersey. Her research interests include penny narratives, Victorian
literature, nineteenth-century medicine, ecoGothic, and Salem “Witches.”

Melanie Duckworth is an associate professor of English literature at Østfold University College,

Norway. A settler Australian of British heritage, she grew up on Kaurna and Boandik lands in
South Australia and holds a BA Hon from the University of Adelaide, a Master’s in medieval En-
glish literatures from the University of York, and a PhD in Australian literature from the Univer-
sity of Leeds. Her research encompasses the overlapping fields of Australian literature, children’s
literature, contemporary poetry, and ecocriticism. She coedited (with Lykke Guanio-Uluru) the
volume Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Routledge, 2022) and is currently working
on a follow-up volume entitled Plants in Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Children’s and Young
Adult Literature. Her articles have appeared in Australian Literary Studies, International Research in
Children’s Literature, Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, Social Alternatives, and
Environmental Humanities. Duckworth has also published in several edited collections, most re-
cently “Arboreal Magic and Kinship in the Chthulucene: Margaret Mahy’s Trees,” in Fantasy and
Myth in the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

xvi
 Contributors

Pervine Elrefaei is a professor of cultural studies at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts,
Cairo University. She participated in many international conferences and has a number of pub-
lications on film studies, gender studies, feminism, border studies, and postcolonial literature.
Among her publications are “Egypt’s Borders and the Crisis of Identity in the Literature of Nubia
and Sinai,” “Egypt and the Prison as a Dual Space of Repression and Resistance: The Dialectics
of Power Relations in Literature and Film,” “Egyptian Women in the Cartoons and Graffiti of the
January 2011 Revolution: A Janus-faced Discourse,” “Memory, Identity and Resistance in Susan
Abulhawa’s Morning in Jenin,” “Intellectuals and Activists Writing under the Sign of Hope:
Radwa Ashour and Ahdaf Soueif ’s Manifestos of the 2011 Revolution,” “The Cultural Politics of
Food in Selected Egyptian Films,” “Cultural Trauma and Scheherazade’s Gastro-national/Trans-
national Discourse in Tamara al-Refai’s Writings,” “The Egyptian Nubian Archival Discourse:
Identity Politics in Selected Works by Yehia Mokhtar” (forthcoming), and “Deconstructing Bor-
ders: Arab American Immigrants and Body Politics in Mohja Kahf ’s The Girl in the Tangerine
Scarf ” (forthcoming).

K. M. Ferebee is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Narrating the Mesh Project, located
within the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. From 2019 to 2020, she served as
assistant professor of English and humanities at the American University of Afghanistan, located
in Kabul. She holds a PhD in English from The Ohio State University, where her dissertation
focused on narratives of contamination in literatures of the Anthropocene. Her work on posthu-
manism, contamination, and ecological collapse has appeared or is forthcoming in ISLE: Interdis-
ciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Studies in the Humanities, Prose Studies, and The Latin
American Literary Review.

Lenka Filipova completed her doctorate in the English Department at the Free University Ber-
lin. Her monograph Ecocriticism and the Sense of Place (Routledge, 2021) examines the notion of
place in contemporary environmental writing from across the world, and she coedited a collection
of essays on gender and the genre of travel writing entitled Encountering Difference: New Perspectives
on Genre, Travel and Gender (2019). Her research interests include environmental humanities, post-
colonial studies, and gender studies, and she has published articles on contemporary environmen-
tal writing and eighteenth-century travel writing.

Abhik Gupta is a former professor and pro vice-chancellor at Assam University in Silchar, India.
With a Master’s and PhD degrees in Zoology, his interests are freshwater ecology and pollution,
behavioral ecology, and environmental policy and ethics, in which he has published over 50 re-
search articles in international journals and over 60 book chapters. He has also presented papers
in over one hundred international, national, and regional seminars and conferences in India and
fourteen other countries. He was the recipient of the Water Voice Award from the World Water
Council; fellow of the National Institute of Ecology, India; and recipient of the Erasmus Mundus
Senior Scholarship and Erasmus Mundus IndiaNAMASTE Academic Staff Grant in the Neth-
erlands and Spain in 2008 and 2014. He has delivered invited lectures at diverse universities and
research institutes in Australia, Spain, the United States, the Netherlands, Japan, and India. He has
successfully guided 27 PhD and eight MPhil scholars. He has also completed five projects, includ-
ing two international projects. He was the vice-president (India) of the Asian Bioethics Associa-
tion, and he is currently on the board of directors of METI International. Gupta has served as the
team leader on several environmental impact assessment (EIA) projects, and he was the resource
person and narrator in several educational telefilms.

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 Contributors

Anja Höing is a faculty member at the Institute for English and American Studies at the Uni-
versity of Osnabrück and the author of Reading Divine Nature: Religion and Nature in English Animal
Stories (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier). She studied English and biology, and earned her PhD in
religion and culture in English animal stories at the University of Osnabrück, where she teaches
a range of undergraduate courses on British literature. Her main research interests are representa-
tions of the natural world in literature, ecocriticism and ecofeminism, Renaissance literature, and
interfaces between childhood and the nonhuman environment. She has presented her research at
several conferences, such as “BASN: Loss” (2021) and “ASLE UK-I: Co-Emergence, Co-Cre-
ation, Co-Existence” (2019). Her most recent publications include the book chapter “Vegetal
Individuals and Plant Agency in Twenty-First Century Children’s Literature” (Plants in Children’s
and Young Adult Literature, edited by Melanie Duckworth and Lykke Guanio-Uluru, Routledge),
and the article “A Winged Symbol: The Power of the Child-Animal Bond in Gill Lewis’s Sky
Hawk” (Children’s Literature Association Quarterly).

Peter I-min Huang, PhD, is a professor emeritus of English at Tamkang University, Taiwan.
His areas of interest are English and Chinese literature, ecofeminism, ecopoetry, postcolonial
ecocriticism, Indigenous studies, science fiction, and climate fiction. Huang served as the chair of
the English Department at Tamkang University for two terms between 2007 and 2011. A found-
ing member of ASLE-Taiwan, Huang also served as the conference organizing chairperson for
The Fourth Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse (May 23–24, 2008) and The Fifth
Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse (December 17–18, 2010). His journal articles
include publications in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Neohelicon; Jour-
nal of Poyang Lake; CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture; and Foreign Literature Studies. He
has published book chapters in Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender, Ecol-
ogy, and Literature (Routledge, 2021); Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature
(Routledge, 2020); Literature and Ecofeminism: Intersectional and International Voices (Routledge, 2018);
Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts (Lexington, 2016); and East Asian Ecocrit-
icisms: A Critical Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Huang also is the author of the monograph
Linda Hogan and Contemporary Taiwanese Writers: An Ecocritical Study of Indigeneities and Environment
(Lexington, 2016) and the coeditor with Xinmin Liu of Embodied Healing, Embedded Memories:
New Ecological Perspectives from East Asia (Lexington, 2021).

Nicole A. Jacobs, PhD, teaches in the departments of Women’s, Gender & Queer Studies and
English at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She is the author of Bees
in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony (Routledge, 2021). Her articles have ap-
peared in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals, Studies in Philology, Criticism, The
Shakespearean International Yearbook, and Appositions. Living with congenital mobility impairment
and chronic illness, she integrates disability studies and activism into her pedagogy and service.

Sunaina Jain is an assistant professor of English at MCM DAV College, Chandigarh, and cur-
rently, she is supervising three PhD candidates working on a diverse range of topics. She holds
a doctorate in English from Panjab University, Chandigarh. Her areas of interest include Afri-
can literature, American literature, Indigenous studies, postcolonial literature, Indian writing in
English, ecofeminism, and creative writing. She has published many research papers in refereed
national and international journals. Her poems and short stories have been featured in a num-
ber of literary journals as well as international anthologies including Shout It Out by Lost Tower
Publications, London in 2016, Tranquil Muse, Aquillrelle’s Anthologies: Selecting the Best, USA in
2018, and the multilingual international anthology Amravati Poetic Prism 2017 and 2018. She is
a panelist reviewer for the literary journal Muse India and has reviewed books of varied genres

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including short stories, travelogues, and poetry collections. She is also the subject editor of the
research journal New Horizons. A couple of her academic projects with reputed publishers are in
the pipeline this year.

Andrew David King is a student in the PhD program in English at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley. They hold an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where they were a teach-
ing-writing fellow, and an MA in philosophy from Central European University. In 2019 and
2020, they were Provost’s visiting writer and visiting assistant professor at the University of Iowa’s
Department of English and research assistant at the Walt Whitman Archive. A former Global
Academic Fellow at NYU Shanghai, their work has appeared twice in the University of Virgin-
ia’s Best New Poets anthology, in 2018 and 2020. Their critical writing has appeared, or is slated
to appear, in boundary 2, A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke (Ohio University Press/
Swallow Press, 2020), Vanguard: Exercises for the Creative Writing Classroom (Texas Tech University/
RAIDER Publishing, 2020), Parenthesis 37 (the journal of the Fine Press Book Association), a
forthcoming volume on critical instruction design (Hybrid Pedagogy Books), and a forthcoming
volume on pedagogy and the book arts (University of Virginia Rare Book School).

Lesley Kordecki received her MA and PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the Uni-
versity of Toronto and is a professor emerita of English at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois.
A recipient of DePaul University’s Excellence in Teaching Award, she is a former director of the
MA in English at DePaul and served as chair of English at Barat College in Lake Forest for over
20 years. She worked as dramaturge for the Shakespeare on the Green productions in Lake Forest,
Illinois, for seven years and co-authored with Karla Koskinen Re-Visioning Lear’s Daughters: Testing
Feminist Criticism and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). She is the author of Ecofeminist Subjec-
tivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds (Palgrave, 2011), as well as articles as chapters on medieval texts,
Shakespeare, ecofeminism, and critical animal studies.

Julia Kuznetski (née Tofantšuk) is a professor of English at the School of Humanities, Tallinn
University, Estonia. Among the topics of her international publications are present-day Anglo-
phone literature and culture, gender studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and diaspora and migra-
tion literature. She has co-edited (with Silvia Pellicer-Ortín) a special issue of Women: A Cultural
Review titled “‘We Too’: Female Voices in the Transnational Era of Crises, Migration, Pandemic
and Climate Change” (forthcoming in 2022) and a volume titled Women on the Move: Body, Mem-
ory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (Routledge, 2019), and she has
published numerous articles and book chapters. Kuznetski is a member of ESSE, FINSSE, and
ASLE, a founding member of the gender studies research group at Tallinn University, Ecocritical
Theory and Practice book series advisory board at Lexington Books, and a reviewer for ISLE and
Ecozon@ journals.

Katarina Leppänen is professor of intellectual history at the Department of Literature, History

of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research focuses on transna-
tional feminism in the early and mid-twentieth century, ecological feminism, social movements,
nationalism and internationalism, and regionalism. She combines intellectual history and literary
studies and has published on diverse topics such as women and political violence, literature and
nationalism, and trafficking in women.

Richard Magee is a professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at Sacred Heart
University. A native Californian, he received his BA in English from the University of California
at Berkeley and his MA from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He moved

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to New York to continue his graduate studies and received his PhD from Fordham University
in 2002 for his dissertation “Sentimental Ecology: Susan Fenimore Cooper and a New Model of
Ecocriticism.” His research interests include nineteenth-century American literature, especially
sentimental literature and ecocriticism. He is the author of the book The Haunted Muse, he has ed-
ited a reprint of Susan Fenimore Cooper’s only novel, Elinor Wyllys, and he has published articles
on Cooper, ecofeminism, and food writing.

Charilaos N. Michalopoulos is an associate professor of Latin at Democritus University of

Thrace. He has studied classics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (BA in Classics, Byzantine
and Modern Greek, and Linguistics, 2001) and the University of Leeds (MA in Latin, 2002; PhD
in Latin, 2006). His research interests include Augustan poetry, Roman epigrams, gender studies
and classics, and modern reception of Latin literature. He is the author of Myth, Language and
Gender in the Corpus Priapeorum (Pedio, 2014). He has also published in collaboration with A.N.
Michalopoulos three textbooks on Roman Love Elegy (HEAL, 2015), Horace’s Odes (HEAL, 2015),
Roman Epic (HEAL, 2015), an electronic Latin vocabulary (Saita, 2016), and A Modern Greek
Anthology of Latin Love Poetry (Kedros, 2019). His most recent publications include a commentary
with an introduction, Latin text, and a modern Greek translation of Ovid’s Heroides (in collabora-
tion with V. Vaiopoulos and A.N. Michalopoulos, Gutenberg, 2021) and papers on Ovid, Seneca,
Martial, and the Corpus Priapeorum. Currently, he is actively engaged in research programs on
ecocriticism in Latin literature (Ecocriticism in Latin literature: Man and Nature in the Thought,
Language and Literature in Augustan Times), and on ancient mythology (Mythological Routes
in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace). He is also an associate member of the European network on
Gender Studies in Antiquity EuGeStA.

Kaitlin Mondello is an assistant professor of ecostudies in the Department of English at Mill-

ersville University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in English from The Graduate Center,
CUNY (City University of New York) with a focus on the environmental humanities and Ro-
manticism. Her scholarly work focuses on Romanticism, feminism, ecocriticism, ecofeminism,
science studies, animal studies, and new materialism. Her work has appeared in Essays in Romanti-
cism, European Romantic Review, Journal of Literature and Science, and Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins &
Legacies. She is a contributor to Teachingclimatechange.org.

Patrick D. Murphy is a professor emeritus in the Department of English at the University of

Central Florida, where he served seven years as department chair. Prior to that, he taught at In-
diana University of Pennsylvania. Founding editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies Literature and
Environment, he has authored Persuasive Aesthetic Ecocritical Praxis (2015), Transversal Ecocritical Prac-
tice (2013), A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and Prose of Gary Snyder (2000), Literature, Nature, and
Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (1995), and other books. He has also edited or coedited eleven books,
such as The Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook (1998) and Ecofeminist Literary Criticism
and Pedagogy (1998). Most recently he published “The New Macho Man Is Out to Destroy Us All”
in the 50th-anniversary issue of Women’s Studies and “Hydrocarbon Enslavement and Fantasies of
Freedom” in Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change, edited by Tatiana Provokova Konrad.
He has book chapters on teaching Japanese environmental literature in translation, the novels of
Paolo Bacigalupi as environmental detective fiction, the environmental problems with medical
plastic waste, and the introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature.

Asmae Ourkiya is a Moroccan philanthropist and award-winning researcher and writer whose
work centers around queer ecology, ecofeminism, climate justice, and intersectionality. After suc-
cessfully completing a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Studies and a Master of Arts in Green

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Cultural Studies, they are currently in their final year writing a PhD thesis on ecofeminism at
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. Ourkiya’s most recent publication
is a book chapter entitled “Representation in Media Texts: Shaping Contemporary Perceptions
of the Anthropogenic Climate Change in Documentaries” in Global Perspectives on Eco Aesthetics
and Eco-Ethics: A Green Critique (2020), where they explored the arguments presented in two
contrasting documentaries on climate change with the aim of understanding the politics behind
climate change documentary filmmaking. Ourkiya has published multiple articles for pop aca-
demia platforms, where they wrote on queer ecofeminism and climate denialism. Ourkiya has
recently signed a publishing agreement where they will publish the majority of their PhD thesis as
a book by Rowman & Littlefield entitled Queer Ecofeminism: Gender and Sexuality in The Journey of
An Anti-Far Right Environmental Justice.

Sangita Patil earned her a PhD in ecofeminism from Tumkur University. She teaches English at
LBS Govt First Grade College, Bangalore North University. Her academic publications include
the book Ecofeminism and Indian Novel (Routledge) and “Reconstructing Ecofeminism: A Study
of Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve” in Cogent Social Sciences (Taylor & Francis Online). Patil
has published several journal articles and chapters in edited collections, and she has presented at
various international conferences. She is short story writer, and her areas of research interest are
Kannada theater, cultural studies, and ecofeminism.

Gayatri Thanu Pillai is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English Language
and Literature at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She holds a PhD jointly awarded
by King’s College, London and NUS. She was awarded the Maurice Baker Prize for her doctoral
research on colonial South Indian literature. Her areas of research interest are postcolonial theory,
South and Southeast Asian colonial and postcolonial literature, ecocriticism, and translation stud-
ies. She is the managing editor of The Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism and has in the past held
editorial positions at Orient BlackSwan.

Katja Plemenitaš is an assistant professor of English in the Department of English and Amer-
ican Studies of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Maribor. She earned her BA degree in
English and French in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana, and she later completed
her master's and doctorate in linguistics in the same faculty. As an assistant professor of English,
she gives lectures at the BA and MA levels. She currently teaches courses in morphology, dis-
course analysis, and language and gender. Her research interests include all aspects of discourse
analysis and cognitive linguistics, and she also takes a keen interest in language and gender. She is
a member of the Gender Studies Network (ESSE). Plemenitaš’s work is predominantly based on
the systemic-functional model of language in context. She has published several papers and book
chapters based on her research. Her recent academic interests focus on linguistic appraisal in polit-
ical rhetoric, the application of cognitive linguistics to discourse analysis, and the gendered forms
of political discourse. She is currently working on a book about the analysis of logico-semantic
relations in political texts.

Iris Ralph, PhD, is a professor in the English Department, Tamkang University, Taiwan. Her
areas of specialty are literature, ecocriticism, animal studies, and plant studies. Publications by
Ralph include a monograph, Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-sides (Routledge
2020), and book chapters in Embodied Healing, Embedded Memories: New Ecological Perspectives from
East Asia, edited by Xinmin Liu and Peter I-min Huang (Lexington 2021); Dystopias and Utopias
on Earth and Beyond (Routledge 2021), edited by Douglas A. Vakoch; Doing English in Asia (Lex-
ington 2016), edited by Patrician Haseltine and Sheng-mei Ma; Ecocriticism in Taiwan (Lexington

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 Contributors

2016), edited by Chia-ju Chang and Scott Slovic; and Ted Hughes (Palgrave Macmillan 2015),
edited by Terry Gifford. Ralph’s journal articles include articles published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment, Kritika Kultura, Neohelicon, AJE: Australasian Journal of Ecocriti-
cism and Cultural Ecology, Tamkang Review, William Carlos Williams Review, and Journal of Ecocriticism.
Between 2020 and 2021, Ralph served as the editor-in-chief of the Tamkang Review and published
two special issues on Australasian and Sinophone ecocriticism.

Lydia Rose, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Kent State University,
earned a PhD in sociology from Purdue University. Her research centers on environmental jus-
tice, ecofeminism, and inequality. Rose’s teaching and scholarship emphasize the intersectionality
and impact of race, class, gender, and other inequalities in our social institutions including educa-
tion, family, economy, food systems, and the environment. Her praxis emphasizes the connection
of theory, research, and social action to alleviate the injustices created by social inequalities from
both a micro and macro level. Rose is the co-author of Pink Hats and Ballots: An Ecofeminist Per-
spective of Women’s Political Activism in the Age of Trump, Coronavirus, and Black Lives Matter (2021).

Chitra Sankaran, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of English, National Uni-
versity of Singapore. She is the departmental chair of literature. Her research interests include
ecocriticism, South and Southeast Asian fiction, and feminist theory. She recently edited a spe-
cial issue of The Journal of Ecocriticism on ecocriticism in ASEAN. Her other publications include
monographs, edited volumes, book chapters, and research articles in journals including Material
Religion, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Theatre Research International, Australian Feminist Studies,
and Critical Asian Studies. Her most recent monograph is Women, Subalterns, and Ecologies in South
and Southeast Asian Women’s Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 2022). She is the founding presi-
dent of ASLE-ASEAN: The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in ASEAN.
She is also the chief editor of The Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism.

Irene Sanz Alonso is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Philology at the
University of Alcalá, Spain. She finished her PhD in 2014 with a dissertation entitled Redefining
Humanity in Science Fiction: The Alien from an Ecofeminist Perspective. She is a member of the Span-
ish research group on ecocriticism and environmental humanities, GIECO, and the secretary
of the online journal Ecozon@. Her main fields of research are ecofeminism, animal studies,
science fiction, and fantasy. Her recent publications include: “Ecofeminism and Science Fiction:
Human-Alien Literary Intersections” (Women’s Studies. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-Caring:
Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(s) 47.2); “Alien Ecofeminist Societies: Sharers in Joan Sloncze-
wski’s A Door into Ocean” (Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science
Fiction, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch); and “New Worlds Beyond Reality: Imagined Futures in
Laura Gallego’s Las hijas de Tara” (Imaginative Ecologies: Inspiring Change through the Humanities, ed-
ited by Diana Villanueva-Romero, Lorraine Kerslake, and Carmen Flys-Junquera).

Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman, PhD, is an associate professor in the Humanities Department at

Brenau University. She is most interested in the intersections of race, gender, and nature, and her
current research project examines the concept of the Anthropocene and its possibilities for under-
standing the entanglements of colonialism, empire, and constructions of race with climate change.
She currently directs the University Writing Center.

Kadri Tüür received her PhD in semiotics from the University of Tartu, Estonia. She works as a
researcher at Tallinn University, Estonia, and has served as the head of the Estonian Centre for En-
vironmental History (KAJAK) from 2017 to 2021. Tüür has published articles on Estonian nature

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 Contributors

writing and on the semiotics of nature representations, and she has coedited several volumes, such
as The Semiotics of Animal Representations (with Morten Tønnessen), Umweltphilosophie und Land-
schaftsdenken (with Liina Lukas and Ulrike Plath), and “Eesti looduskultuur” (Estonian Naturecul-
ture, with Timo Maran). Her research interests include nature writing, ecocriticism, zoosemiotics,
and environmental humanities. She is a member of EASLCE and ESEH.

Hatice Övgü Tüzün received her BA in English language and literature from İstanbul Uni-
versity and her MA and PhD from the University of Kent, UK. She spent eight years as a faculty
member of the Department of English Language and Literature, Beykent University, and then
moved to Bahçeşehir University, where she has been a faculty member of the Department of
American Culture and Literature since 2008. She has published articles on Victorian and mod-
ern literature, Turkish literature, science fiction, travel writing, and political novel. Her recent
research interests include posthumanism and emotions in literature. She is currently chair of the
Department of American Culture and Literature at Bahçeşehir University.

Quynh H. Vo is a professorial lecturer of Asia, Pacific, and diaspora studies at American Uni-
versity. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and her research
focuses on globalization and Asian literature, Asian American interdisciplinary studies, Vietnam-
ese American literature and culture, and neoliberalism in American transnational literature. Vo
is working on her book manuscript tentatively titled Transnational Kinship: Neoliberal Peace and
Economic Violence in Vietnamese American Literature and Culture, an interdisciplinary project that
weaves together literary analysis and personal narratives to scrutinize Vietnamese Americans’ rela-
tionships to Vietnamese nationals; to histories of war, colonialism, and US neoliberal empire; and
to each other. Vo’s writings (in English and Vietnamese) have appeared in the Los Angeles Review
of Books; diaCRITICS; Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies; Journal of Vietnamese Studies; Da Mau;
Saigoneer; Peace, Land, & Bread; and other venues.

Rhian Waller holds a PhD in critical and creative writing. She works at the University of
Chester, where she lectures in journalism. She is an early career researcher, and her interests span
mental health in media, questions of genre, landscape and postcolonial criticism, ecocriticism,
and feminism. Her published articles include “Concentrated Noir: Reinforcing and Transgressing
Genre Boundaries in Echo in Short Film Studies” and “Stigma: The Representation of Anorexia
Nervosa in UK Newspaper Twitter Feeds” in the Journal of Mental Health. She has been a fan of
fantasy literature since before she was able to read.

Karen Ya-Chu Yang is an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and
Literatures at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. She received her PhD in
comparative literature from Indiana University–Bloomington. Her research mostly concerns fem-
inist and ecological inquiries in contemporary fiction. Some of her recent publications include
“Angela Carter’s Postmodern Wolf Tales” (2018), “Restoring Life: Carnivore Reintroduction and
(Eco)feminist Science in Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border” (2018), “Multicultural Matters of Love in
Contemporary Historical Fiction” (2018), “Female Biologists and the Practice of Dialogical Con-
nectivity in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer” (2021), and “Fit to Breed: Exercise and Sport
in Women’s Speculative Fiction” (2022).

Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu is an assistant professor of English literature at Niğde Ömer Halisdemir
University, specializing in the contemporary British novel, climate change fictions, ecocriticism,
posthumanism, green cultural studies, and gender studies. He obtained his PhD in English litera-
ture from Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey in 2018. His PhD research was on contemporary

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 Contributors

ecotheories and pollution in twenty-first-century British fiction. He has written on such topics as
ecogender, the posthuman body, non-human animals, climate change, postnatural environments,
postecology, and ecoesthetics. Most recently, he has contributed to the edited volume Turkish
Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes (2020) with his chapter “Postecological Aes-
thetics and the Contemporary Turkish Art in the Anthropocene.”

xxiv
 PREFACE
Douglas A. Vakoch

In 1974, Françoise d’Eaubonne coined the term “écoféminisme” to explore the interplay between
the domination of nature and the oppression of women, with the goal of liberating both nature
and women from exploitation. Since then, ecofeminism has attracted scholars and activists from
a range of disciplines. The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature (hereafter simply The
Handbook) examines the intersection of women and nature as seen through literary studies. Bring-
ing together essays by scholars representing 23 countries on six continents, this volume demon-
strates the ongoing relevance of ecofeminism for facilitating critical readings of literature. The
Handbook shows that ecofeminism is not limited to the critique of literature, but also helps identify
and articulate emancipatory ideals that can be realized in the world. This comprehensive volume
is written for the needs of academics and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender
studies, and the environmental humanities.
In Part I, we examine ecofeminism through literatures written in a diverse sampling of lan-
guages. Chapters are organized to take us on a meandering journey that begins in East Asia with
Chinese, moves into Southeast Asia and Australia, travels through South Asia into Africa and
the Middle East, passes through Romance languages, makes a sharp turn to South America, and
finally spirals on to northern Europe, where we end with Welsh. Languages include those spoken
by large populations of speakers, such as Hindi, Arabic, and Spanish; a middling number of native
speakers, like Tamil, Vietnamese, and Turkish; and many fewer speakers, such as Slovene and
Icelandic.
Part II is organized alphabetically, with chapters ranging from activism to sentimental ecology.
This section covers core issues and topics that intertwine with ecofeminism to offer innovative ap-
proaches to interpreting literature. Chapters on well-established fields like animal studies and cul-
tural studies are juxtaposed with contributions on foundational topics like hegemonic masculinity
and material ecocriticism. Three essential “posts” are scrutinized: postcolonialism, posthuman-
ism, and postmodernism. The remaining chapters in Part II help us expand beyond the limitations
of some early conceptualizations of ecofeminism by delving directly into race, disability, gender
essentialism, and intersectionality.
Part III applies ecofeminism to literary criticism through surveys of key periods and genres.
Chapters on Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures study the changes and constancies in
conceptualizations of the relationship between women and nature across time. Works that target
children and young adults are explored, as are mystery and detective fiction. The interconnected
genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy are examined, as are the distinctive perspec-
tives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry.

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 Preface

Throughout The Handbook, contributors cross-reference each other’s chapters, fostering a dia-
logue about the links between the destruction of the environment and the domination of women.
In the process, these scholars offer tools to counteract those intertwined oppressions, helping cre-
ate a foundation for a truly habitable world.

xxvi
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their innovative contributions that follow, I thank the authors of the chapters in The Routledge
Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature (hereafter simply The Handbook): Auður Aðalsteinsdóttir,
Ba şak Ağ ın, Nicole Anae, Artemis Archontogeorgi, Christian Jil Benitez, Benay Blend, Izabel F.
O. Brandão, Deirdre C. Byrne, Nicolás Campisi, Giulia Champion, Chan Kit-sze Amy, Casey A.
Cothran, Aslı Değ irmenci Altın, Michelle Deininger, Nicole C. Dittmer, Melanie Duckworth,
Pevine Elrefaei, K. M. Ferebee, Lenka Filipova, Abhik Gupta, Anja Höing, Peter I-min Huang,
Nicole A. Jacobs, Sunaina Jain, Andrew David King, Lesley Kordecki, Julia Kuznetski, Kata-
rina Leppänen, Richard Magee, Charilaos N. Michalopoulos, Kaitlin Mondello, Asmae Ourkiya,
Sangita Patil, Gayatri Thanu Pillai, Katja Plemenitaš, Iris Ralph, Lydia Rose, Chitra Sankaran,
Irene Sanz Alonso, Kadri Tüür, Hatice Övgü Tüzün, Quynh H. Vo, Rhian Waller, Karen Ya-
Chu Yang, and Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu. Among our contributors, I single out Patrick D. Murphy
for writing an insightful introduction to the rest of The Handbook. All of these scholars have my
deep gratitude.
In my work as president of METI International, my colleagues have shared with me their in-
sights about what it takes for civilizations to remain stable across the millennia—a prerequisite for
the success of our organization’s namesake Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, given the im-
mense timescales of interstellar communication. It is rare to find a community that sees a natural
link between sustainability and the search for life in the universe, as reflected in METI’s strategic
plan that affirms the “ways that ecofeminism can provide insights into fostering environmental
sustainability on multigenerational timescales.” This book’s focus on environmental critique and
engagement is informed by conversations with current and past members of METI’s Board of Di-
rectors: Jacques Arnould, Jerome Barkow, Kim Binsted, Steven Dick, David Dunér, Abhik Gupta,
Adam Korbitz, Derek Malone-France, Anson Mount, Alan Penny, Florence Raulin Cerceau, Da-
lia Rawson, Ian Roberts, Jill Stuart, John Traphagan, Ariel Waldman, Laura Welcher, and Sheri
Wells-Jensen. I especially thank four of the contributors to The Handbook for joining a strategic
planning workshop on ecofeminism that was held at METI’s headquarters in San Francisco: Abhik
Gupta, Peter I-min Huang, Katja Plemenitaš, and Iris Ralph.
I warmly acknowledge the insights I have gained in integrating sustainable actions into our
everyday lives through the clients I work with as director of Green Psychotherapy, PC, a clinical
psychology and ecotherapy practice on the West Coast of the United States.
I am indebted to Michelle Salyga at Routledge for her suggestion that I should create The
Handbook, as well as for shaping and shepherding it through the editorial process. Bryony Reece
has my gratitude for moving the book swiftly and efficiently into production. Finally, I thank

xxvii
 Acknowledgments

Gayathree Sekar for conscientiously overseeing all aspects of the production process, as the final
manuscript was transformed into the published volume you are now reading.
I am grateful to Susan Griffin for her pioneering book Woman and Nature, which has introduced
and articulated the possibilities of ecofeminism to a wide readership, starting with its publication
in 1978 and continuing strong today, more than four decades later. For her leadership in a field
that has become increasingly crucial with each passing year, I dedicate The Handbook to Susan.
Most importantly, I thank my wife Julie Bayless for helping me understand, each day, what it
means to be an ecofeminist.
Douglas A. Vakoch
San Francisco, California and
Ashland, Oregon

xxviii
 1
ECOFEMINISM AND LITERATURE
Patrick D. Murphy

Introduction
With the coining of the term “ecofeminism” in the mid-1970s, a movement already well un-
derway, recognizing and utilizing the convergence of gender and environmental issues, gained
a name by which it could be analyzed, debated, and theorized. Several chapters in this volume
provide brief overviews of ecofeminism in their introductory remarks, such as Abhik Gupta in
Chapter 9 and Sunaina Jain in Chapter 25. Other books detail the history of the development of
ecofeminism as a political movement that was recognized by the academy and worked into the
discourse of philosophy, religious studies, political science, economics, sociology, and literary
studies. It is the last of these areas on which the chapters in this book focus. Divided into three
sections, The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature offers a series of overviews and exam-
ples of ecofeminist literature and criticism across nearly two dozen languages and regions in Part I,
key topics and issues in Part II, and literary periods and genres in Part III.
Rather than broad, superficial surveys, these chapters situate ecofeminism within a particular
historical, national, or linguistic subject and provide key examples of ecofeminist attributes in
literary works or the value of ecofeminist analysis of canonical texts. The second set of chapters
explores core issues in ecofeminist theory and criticism as they affect and shape literary practice.
Some of these chapters focus on literary examples while others elaborate the positions of critical
texts. A concluding section examines a diverse range of genres and selected periods. Together
these three sets of chapters provide a global overview of ecofeminist literary production and crit-
ical practice. Not every country or language is represented here, but then ecofeminism has not
made equal strides in entering the halls of academia or been taken up by authors in every country
in equal measure either.
Ecofeminism as a movement continues to gain adherents around the world and literary critics
recognizing the value of ecofeminist theory and analysis continue to arise anew in universities and
colleges in every country. In some places, ecofeminism is well integrated into the literary curric-
ulum; in others, junior faculty work tirelessly to gain acceptance for their ecofeminist publishing
and teaching. As would be the case for a volume on literary feminism or ecocriticism, this volume
demonstrates how far ecofeminist literary criticism has come and how much farther it can yet go
both in depth and breadth of analysis.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-11
 Patrick D. Murphy

Part I Literatures in Diverse Languages

Chan Kit-sze Amy offers an analysis of classical Chinese literature. Recognizing that feminist
thought is absent from classical Chinese philosophy, she first discusses its orientation toward na-
ture and the environment, particularly in terms of Daoism. She then makes a foray into the de-
pictions of women in relation to plants in poetry, treating works by both male and female authors,
such Li Qingzhao of the twelfth century, as well as other female poets from the Tang and Song
dynasties. Chan then takes a similar approach to the analysis of animals and female goddesses pre-
dating Confucius in Chinese literature. These goddesses often found ways to escape patriarchal
oppression as well as another group of female characters in fiction: tree spirits and bestial ghosts.
She concludes her chapter by noting that her approach is designed to uncover the yin aspects of
classical Chinese literature, which can only be done through ecofeminist analysis.
Beginning with an explanation about the emergence of Taiwanese creative writing as a
body of texts distinct from mainland Chinese literature, Peter I-min Huang focuses on three
works that exemplify distinctly Taiwanese characteristics that also demonstrate attention to
ecofeminist concerns. Ang Li’s 1983 novel, The Butcher’s Wife, is an early example of this liter-
ature focusing on the lives of Taiwan’s rural poor. While explicitly a feminist novel about the
mistreatment and oppression of women through a plot about the trial of a wife who kills her
abusive husband, the novel also, although Huang argues unintentionally, also highlights the
mistreatment of domesticated animals. Huang then turns to the 2004 novel, Ma-zu’s Bodyguards
by Jade Chen. With its three female protagonists, this work foregrounds a female deity adored
by Indigenous people in Taiwan. Mazu links the novel’s feminist concerns with environmental
issues, since environmental activists utilized a temple devoted to this goddess in protests against
the Dupont corporation in 1986. Huang observes that this is an implicit connection between
feminist and environmental issues in the novel recognized by Taiwanese readers but not actu-
ally emphasized by the author. Huang then turns to an analysis of Pangcah Woman by Yao-min
Gan. The author focuses this novel on the oldest inhabitants and environments of Taiwan. An
antilogging and anticolonial novel, it dismantles many of the dualisms essential for the ideology
of patriarchal domination.
Christian Jil Benitez opens his chapter on Philippines literature with the point that this country
is repeatedly listed at or near the top of the Global Climate Risk Index because of its location on
the “ring of fire,” its numerous low lying islands, and its latitude, making it a frequent target of
climate-change intensified typhoons. It is no wonder, then, that in recent years, there has been
a plethora of disaster and climate-change-focused literature produced by authors in this country.
Several collections of prose and poetry, Benitez argues, have been produced precisely to influence
the discourse about, and attention to, anthropogenic climate change. Perhaps as to be expected,
the development of a robust body of Philippines ecocriticism and ecofeminist analysis has lagged
behind this explosion in creativity. While numerous essays have been published, only two book-
length collections had appeared when this chapter was authored. Determining the extent and
depth of an ecofeminist literary history is difficult, he argues, because this critical orientation
is often not labeled as such, but subsumed under other categories, including the post-colonial,
Indigenous, and feminist. Nevertheless, certainly by 1998, Agnes Miclat-Cacayan had explicitly
identified ecofeminism as a necessary critical approach because of its parallels with the articulation
of Indigenous spirituality. In addition to this reservoir of material enabling a particularly Philip-
pines ecofeminism, there is, according to Rosario Torres-Yu, the writings of the “third generation
of Philippine feminists,” who came to prominence in the 1980s. Through discussing the criti-
cism produced on their repertoire and that on Indigenous spirituality, Benitez is able to provide
a rudimentary ecofeminist literary history of the Philippines that promises even more significant
contributions to the global reach of ecofeminist analysis in the future.

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 Ecofeminism and Literature

Vietnamese literature, argues Quynh H. Vo, is marked by the stark contradiction of concur-
rent images of lush natural landscapes and military violence, local natural resources, and global
exploitation. Greed and exploitation ravage not only the landscape but also human lives. While
male writers in Vietnam have shied away from “green letters” or “nature writing,” many women
writers have addressed precisely those issues that challenge the country’s headlong post-war rush
into a global techno-future. Vo begins her commentary with the ways that postwar U.S. presi-
dents have drawn on nineteenth-century Vietnamese poetry to portray the country as damaged
and weak and just waiting for the benefits of neoliberal modernization. Indeed, she argues that
much of the rhetoric of the Vietnam War era feminized the country while promoting a typical
masculinist image of the oppressive colonial power.
Thus modern Vietnamese literature cannot simply build on a national literary history but
must, or at least should, contend with a colonial cultural discourse that reinforces destructive
hierarchical dichotomies. Vo contends that it is the women writers who have shown themselves
most able to take up this challenge. Analyzing three major literary works by such women writers,
Vo demonstrates how their works have addressed the multiple forms of oppression that bind the
women and the natural world of Vietnam in opposition to the violence pervading their nation,
both military and economic.
Melanie Duckworth approaches Australian literature through a synthesis of ecofeminism and
the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty. British claims on Australia in the eighteenth century
were based on the big lie of “terra nullius,” a land that must be uninhabited because it has not
been “improved” by environmental destruction. Thus, from the beginning of colonial conquest
an erroneous concept of nature and native peoples as passive. Nevertheless, this false identification
needs to be carefully critiqued so that the overlapping interests of ecofeminism and Indigenous
sovereignty are not erroneously perceived as identical rather than differentially related. Duck-
worth first explores Australian historical fiction before turning to women’s genre writing, depic-
tions of animals, and more recent forays into posthuman representations. She also addresses tropes
in children’s literature and poetry.
Duckworth begins with a 1929 novel Coonardoo and brings her multigenre analysis up to recent
Indigenous satire. Coonardoo is the first novel to portray an Indigenous female protagonist and the
identification of such a woman with the environment that settlers sought to colonize. More recent
historical fiction by women writers have also sought to rewrite the official Australian story, such
as the 2012 verse novel Ruby Moonlight. Because of Australia’s unique landscape, nature writing
and biography have been important literary genres for women writers challenging the dominant
androcentric culture. Duckworth also includes analysis of poetry and children’s literature in her
survey of works with significant ecofeminist elements and draws specific attention to representa-
tions of animals and the posthuman.
Tamil literature spans a history well over 2,000 years and authors Chitra Sankaran and Gayatri
Thanu Pillai survey examples from numerous moments in this long history from varied genres
to consider representations of the concurrent devaluation of women and the more than human
world, as well as moments of resistance to such devaluation. They begin with the Sangam period
spanning some 600 years before and after the set point of the common era. They argue that in this
period the thinai concept of poetics holistically aligns geographic regions, religions, and peoples
allowing for a fluid development of identity and difference. They find that in this period women
enjoyed tremendous freedom as poets. They then discuss depictions of the divine feminine in me-
dieval Tamil poetry before turning to the rise of the novel form in the period of British colonial
rule. In these novels, they note frequent depictions of the subaltern, new norms for femininity,
and opposition to antifemale religious practices. At the same time, the restrictions on women in
education, and society-reinforced colonial concepts that promoted a second-class status aligning
women with wild nature. Female deification carried forward from previous times then works

3
 Patrick D. Murphy

against women’s participation in society. The postcolonial period then ushers in a complex re-
imagining of land, ethnicity, and class, as well as gender roles and critiques of essentialist repre-
sentations. These reconceptualizations are aided by the fluidity already replete in thinai from the
earliest period of Tamil literature.
Sangita Patil notes that ecofeminism is a western praxis-oriented criticism and considers both
how ecofeminist concepts are reflected or adapted in Hindi literature and how ecofeminism must
adapt to critique such literature adequately. She considers works from the nineteenth century to
the present day, including plays, a genre not usually considered in ecocritical discourse. Recogniz-
ing that nature has always held an important place spiritually as a result of ancient Vedic literature
and as a result of the daily lives of most Indian people, Hindi authors pay close detailed attention
to nature in their writing and eschew dualisms common in western texts. Patil delineates three
phases in Hindi literature during this time frame. One, the depictions of nature to express human
feelings and proximity to the natural world, two, a recognition of the extent of environmental
destruction, and three, a specifically feminist response to the environmental crises.
After outlining his own perspective on the history of ecofeminist thought and contending that
ecofeminist literary criticism remains less developed than ecofeminist philosophy and political sci-
ence, Abhik Gupta turns his attention to literature written in Bengali. Like the English language,
Bengali is a language that straddles more than one nation state as a result of the British partitioning
of the Asian subcontinent. Gupta begins with the world-renowned poet Rabindranath Tagore. As
early as 1892, Tagore blended his concerns about the oppression of women and the destruction of
nature in a short story. Likewise, Bandyopadhyay’s 1939 novel, Aranyak (Of the Forest) also made
these connections. Gupta also treats more recent male novelists’ recognition of the intertwined
oppression and destruction, particularly in the Bengal delta, as well as the melancholy poetry of
Jibanananda Das. Gupta also treats works by women, such as the contemporary writers Leena
Gandopadhyay and Jaya Mitra.
Nicole Anae begins by noting two key points about an ecofeminist analysis of African liter-
ature. One, given the strong orality of so many of the cultures on the continent the concept of
genre has to be reconsidered beyond Aristotelian categories. Two, despite the long history of
women’s contributions to African literature, particularly in the oral realm, they are underrepre-
sented in literature anthologies. Anae finds it necessary to define the word “African” in relation
to the term “African literature” before delving into the literature itself. She then discusses wom-
en’s cultural roles that would have led to the oral development of occasional songs, poems, and
narratives and their contributions to the African aesthetic of “nommo.” She then moves into a
consideration of both African ecofeminism and African ecowomanism, which have significant
differences. This differentiation leads to the treatment of “négritude” and the concepts of “Mother
Earth” and “Mother Africa.” She then closes out with analyses of a variety of poems and lyrics by
African women.
Pervine Elrafaei presents the need to take a postcolonial ecofeminist approach to Arabic liter-
ature. She demonstrates the value of this approach through analyzing a cross-genre range of such
literature, beginning with the point that nature as Motherland sets up a series of false impressions
of both women and nature, particularly the prevalence of woman-as-hunted and man-as-hunter
tropes. As early as 1934, however, female authors have challenged such tropes in their novels.
More recently, the depiction of rape as part of the colonial legacy has been deconstructed by fem-
inist novelists. The long legacy of patriarchal discourse that degrades both women and the natural
world is currently being challenged in literature by the deployment of a new woman-nature para-
digm in such varied ways as addressing water scarcity and environmental illness in part as a result
of climate change. Ecofeminist memory and the promotion of narratives of the sustainability chal-
lenge the dominant paradigms of a male-dominated Arabic literature and offer counternarratives
of an entirely different feminine principle.

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 Ecofeminism and Literature

Hatice Övgü Tüzün focuses on contemporary women writers in Turkey with explicit environ-
mental and feminist concerns beginning with the well-known authors Buket Uzuner and Latife
Tekin. The first of these two authors bases her ecofeminist orientation in the shamanistic tradition
of Anatolia. The second of these authors has said that she finds herself sympathetic to ecoanarchists
and ecofeminists and utilizes a strong animistic basis for her magical realist novels. In her writing,
she seeks to break down binaries and promote heterarchical thinking about human and more-
than-human natural relationships. Ayla Kutlu rewrites the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, placing an
allegedly disreputable woman in the position of the protagonist to give voice to the women long
silenced throughout male-dominated history. Tüzün addresses the work of several other contem-
porary women writers and notes the frequency with which they utilize traditional mythological
imagery to subvert nature/culture binaries and gendered hierarchies.
Slovene literature receives attention from Katja Plemenitaš. She begins her treatment of this
literature with commentary on the state of ecofeminist criticism in Slovenia, noting that it has
been subsumed under ecocriticism in general with only individual chapters here and there taking
an ecofeminist approach and no full-length study as yet published, unlike the situation in neigh-
boring Croatia where such a monograph was published in 2020. Nevertheless, Plemenitaš points
out that interest in ecofeminism is growing and there is a significant body of literature available
for ecofeminist critique. Although male dominated, Slovene literature in the nineteenth century
contains works by women worthy of ecofeminist analysis, including domestic novels that demon-
strate the sense of freedom that engagement with wild nature provided for women whose lives
were under strict social control. In the socialist realism period that followed that of Romanticism,
oppression and exploitation take center stage, including works that address not only women’s
oppression but also the despoliation of the natural world. While most of her analysis is devoted to
prose and drama, Plemenitaš concludes with a section devoted to women’s poetry of the 1970s.
Although many of the chapters in this volume treat modern and contemporary literature, two
scholars from Greece demonstrate the value of ecofeminism for analyzing the works of any period,
and they do so by investigating the works written in Latin patriarchal antiquity exclusively by
men for a male audience. Artemis Archontogeorgi and Charilaos N. Michalopoulos demonstrate
how Latin literature constructed female identities through the use of nature imagery that rendered
them delicate or destructive, wild or tame, but always subordinate. The fertility of both women
and nature is invariably constructed to demonstrate the power of men to exploit nature. One
might say to make it both fruitful and to force it to multiply. Nature imagery to depict women’s
beauty was constructed in order to reinforce social stereotypes. They also address the depiction of
emotions, with men always logical and the women not, motherhood, and sexual violence, which
is often associated with military conquest over enemies. Their observations, however, apply not
only to Latin literature but also to the tremendous negative influence it had on the western liter-
atures that adopted it as a model, particularly in the Renaissance, and imitated many of its worst
misogynist and patriarchal representations.
Giulia Champion begins her assessment of French literature by clarifying that she is not cover-
ing the national literature of France, but rather the global phenomenon of Francophone literature,
that is, works written in French by authors of various nationalities. Her focus will be, then, on de-
colonial and postcolonial texts and not those of France’s years of colonial domination. Champion
points out that the rhetoric feminizing nature and depicting women as natural rather than cultural
were practices central to colonial practices and cites Silvia Federici in support of this contention,
as well as Édouard Glissant. She then looks at Françoise d’Eaubonne treatment of the “earth
mother” in Le féminisme ou la mort before turning to four novels that deconstruct and interrogate
this essentialist construct.
Irene Sanz Alonso notes that ecofeminist literary analysis in Spain is not as developed in ac-
ademia as ecofeminist activism in the public sphere and in philosophical circles. Many of the

5
 Patrick D. Murphy

Spanish scholars taking it up in literature departments are working with texts mainly written in
English and French, located in foreign language and comparative literature departments. Never-
theless, there is a growing body of literature deserving and receiving criticism as demonstrated by
the three authors that she discusses in this chapter. These three women, Rosan Montero, Laura
Gallego, and Concha López Llama, write across several genres, including science fiction and fan-
tasy. As Sanz Alonso notes, one of Gallego’s novels has been developed by Netflix as an animated
series, with that company’s global reach guaranteeing it an international audience. The role of
such streaming platforms in broadening the audience for the films and television series of coun-
tries such as Spain should not be underestimated and with many of these audiovisual works being
based on Spanish novels, it seems reasonable to expect that interest in the original literary works
will be spurred by their translation to the international small screen, which in turn will provide
a basis for more general acceptance of the ecofeminist analyses that works such as those discussed
by Sanz Alonso invite.
Nicolás Campisi takes readers away from Europe to South America and begins with the prem-
ise that ecology is inherently revolutionary, according to Peruvian Patricia de Souza, who sees
environmental activism placing women at the center of struggles for fundamental change aligned
with Indigenous and African descent communities. De Souza has contributed to ecofeminism
as a theorist, novelist, and memoirist. The first of Campisi’s chapters focuses on Indigenous and
­A fro-descendant writers who use traditional and historical knowledge to dismantle the West-
ern binaries fundamental to epistemologies of oppression and domination. In this section, he
treats such writers as Marisol De la Cadena, Cecilia Vicuña, Daniela Catrileo, Luz Argentina
­Chiriboga, and others. Campisi then shifts attention to a particular trend in South American
literature: novels of ecohorror and global environmental damage written by such authors as Lina
Meruane, Augustina Bazterrica, and Anna Paula Maia. Campisi concludes with brief remarks
about the activist art of Carolyn Caycedo.
Isabel F. O. Brandão focuses on Brazil to discuss that country’s literature written in Portuguese,
which is different from that of Portugal itself. She focuses on contemporary poetry by women
writers, arguing that they represent a “culturally absent referent,” with women writers only able
to come into their own in recent decades in Brazil. These are twenty-first-century poets who
evoke a continuity between the nonhuman and the human. Brandão groups the writers according
to two specific sets of green themes: transcorporeality and environmental destruction, and pollu-
tion and toxicity. These poets range from a biologist to a performance artist and demonstrate both
the intensity of ecofeminist themes in contemporary women’s poetry and the diversity of their
aesthetic approaches to their subject matter.
Benay Blend presents the concept of Indigenous ecofeminism in order to understand Native
American and other Indigenous women’s prose and poetic narratives of resilience and resistance.
An Indigenous orientation requires the recognition that for these people land, life, and culture are
inextricably intertwined. And for native women writers, there is a sense of a gender identity that
is both land-based and woman-based simultaneously in ways that are similar to but distinct from
urban and cosmopolitan conceptions of feminism. Exploring the poetry and prose of a range of
writers, Blend demonstrates the validity of her concept of Indigenous ecofeminism and at the same
time shows how such writing has influenced ecocriticism in general.
Auður Aðalsteinsdóttir treats contemporary Icelandic literature. She begins with a novel pub-
lished contemporaneously with Francois d’Eaubonne’s Feminism ou le mort. This novel demon-
strates how ecofeminist and Marxist currents of thought influenced each other in the production
of a dystopian critique of “mechanical modern society.” By the 1970s as women writers persisted
in their efforts to be taken seriously in Icelandic literary circles, they took on patriarchal society
in part by reinterpreting and adapting Norse mythology in prose and poetry, defying its ongoing
male orientation in the culture. Thus, while in some countries ecofeminist writers and critics

6
 Ecofeminism and Literature

opposed the use of earth goddess imagery as essentialist, in Iceland it was taken up as a powerful
cultural revisionist tool. More recently authors have emphasized the global interconnectedness of
environmental injustice and women’s oppression, while addressing Iceland’s postcolonial status
as a former colony of Denmark. The strong cultural dimension of Icelandic “Islandness” is being
recognized in literature as both a positive force in terms of topophilia and local solutions and a
potentially negative force for parochialism and a false sense of utopic isolationism.
Katarina Leppänen notes in her opening that Nordic literatures have experienced an avalanche
of writing about climate change, environmental disasters, and dystopian visions of our planetary
future. Although a small segment of the total authorial output, there have been notable ecofemi-
nist works among these publications. She begins her broad survey, however, with what she terms
proto-ecofeminist works from early in the twentieth century by Swedish and F ­ innish-Estonian
authors. But perhaps more significant than their original dates of publications in the 1920s and
1930s has been their contested reception upon being reprinted more recently. Noting that ecofem-
inist writing often transgresses genre boundaries, Leppãnen looks at works that invoke intergen-
erational responsibility in a global context while focusing on local environmental effects. Science
fiction serves authors well for this purpose. There has also been a flurry of Nordic young adult
(YA) dystopian novels with female protagonists. Shapeshifting and animal/human eroticism are
also depicted and the frequency with which it is met with violence indicates patriarchal oppression
and the masculinist fear of women’s otherness.
Estonia is well known for its contributions to linguistic theory, but Julia Kuznetski and Kadri
Tüür argue that it also has a uniquely idiosyncratic, yet cosmopolitan literature that demonstrates
significant ecofeminist characteristics. To demonstrate their contention, they analyze seven works
by different authors from different historical periods and drawn from different genres, thereby
proving the diverse presence of the characteristics they attribute to Estonian literature. One of
these aspects is the strong influence of folklore and myth. Hence, they address the phenomenon
of the werewolf and question the popular masculinist representation of this creature. One partic-
ularly intriguing aspect of some Estonian werewolf texts is the sympathetic portrayal of wolves in
contrast to bloodthirsty hunters. They then take up the case of Kunsmoor, whose eponymous hero
is something more than a botanist and something slightly less than a mage. They also treat poetry
about motherhood and transcorporeality. They conclude by focusing on a text written during the
first lockdown of the coronavirus pandemic.
Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman initiates her discussion of English literature with the premise that
ecofeminism challenges dualisms. In the course of her analysis, she cites such critics as Susan Grif-
fin and Carolyn Merchant, among others. She points out that both American and British writers
inherited a broad array of essentialist correlations between women and nature from both religious
and secular myths. And, although most writers at least since the days of modernism would reject
facile dualisms, the concept of “Mother Earth” produces a highly ambivalent response. Pointing
to examples from such Native American authors as Joy Harjo, Taylor-Wiseman notes that de-
pictions of nature as female are not always derogatory or supportive of oppression. Essentialist
ideas that paint nature as maternal ignore such characteristics as “wildness,” “randomness,” and
“variety.” Beginning with British Romantic writers, Taylor-Wiseman focuses on female authors’
treatments of nature in contrast to those of male authors, with the exception of Walt Whitman.
She sees his attention to actual, lived bodies as a potential precursor to some of the insights of ma-
terialist ecofeminism. She concludes her argument about dualisms by contrasting late nineteenth
and early twentieth-century writers, such as Frank Norris and Rebecca Harding Davis.
Michelle Deininger rounds out this section of the Handbook with a discussion of Welsh litera-
ture, noting that such writing has always shown a strong concern for the land and its interrelation-
ship with its people. Too often, she notes, women bear the brunt of environmental damage, but
that does not mean they should be always represented as victims, which would reinforce negative

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 Patrick D. Murphy

stereotypes and dualisms, such as that of active versus passive. She notes also that due to the long
history of attempting to impose the English language on the Welsh-speaking people that there are
two literary traditions there: one of works in Welsh and one of works in English. Ecofeminism
has important work to do in Wales both in terms of analyzing and critiquing the established canon
and in terms of recovering and reevaluating works by women writers. Deininger organizes her
discussion of the literature itself by first treating the movement from rural to urban life due to
industrialization in the writing, then a shift over time between travel writing and the depictions
of dystopia, and, finally, environmental poetry.

Part II Core Issues and Topics

In this section, contributors switch from addressing ecofeminism through a focus on literature in
diverse languages and from different countries, to focusing on critical matters to the development
of a more comprehensive ecofeminist analysis. In some cases, the integration of other theoretical
orientations will enrich applied ecofeminist criticism. In other cases, bringing ecofeminist analysis
into other disciplinary and transdisciplinary areas will provide new insights and explanations.
Sunaina Jain leads off this section of the Handbook with attention to the very starting point
of ecofeminism: activism. She begins by noting that the damage done to the earth and the on-
going oppression of women, as well as issues of race and class, cannot be addressed successfully
in a disjointed manner. Rather, a holistic and intersectional orientation, such as ecofeminism, is
needed to provide comprehensive redress. At the same time, she recognizes that ecofeminism is
an umbrella term that covers a diverse range of positions, whether spiritual, postcolonial, or mate-
rial. Jain’s concern here, then, is whether or not what she calls “First World” and “Third World”
ecofeminists work in tandem or at cross purposes.
She begins with the positive example of the African American author Alice Walker before
turning to look at ecofeminism in relation to agriculture and forestry and turning to the example
of Vandana Shiva. The African activist Wangari Maathai becomes her third individual example,
followed by the Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy. The example of the American spiri-
tual ecofeminist Starhawk lets her take up a “First World” example linked to the concept of “per-
maculture.” That example provides a convenient segue into consideration of Rosemary Radford
Ruether’s position on the relationship between religion, feminism, and ecology. Jain concludes
that her examples demonstrate that indeed there need be no divide in pursuing common interests
in a consortium of ecofeminist activism.
Animal studies, as it is labeled, has appeared more recently on the academic scene than many
other such interdisciplinary or transversal programs. It seeks to challenge instrumental views of
our fellow creatures and contradict claims of human exceptionalism. Here Lesley Kordecki takes
up this topic in terms of its overlap with ecofeminism. She starts with linguistic issues and then
quickly turns to women’s roles in altering the scientific understanding of other animals. In devel-
oping her literary examples, Kordecki reaches all the way back to Ovid, particularly the myth of
Medusa, before turning to Geoffrey Chaucer before jumping forward to contemporary writers,
Barbara Kingsolver and Mary Doria Russell.
A more established interdisciplinary field in academia is cultural studies. In her chapter, Nicole
Anae first defines cultural studies, then ecofeminism, then ecofeminist literature, and, finally, the
most slippery term to consider: literature. And while a very diverse range of written works with an
aesthetic dimension can and ought to be considered literature, such as various forms of biography
and nonfiction writing, Anae limits herself to the established Aristotelian genres of poetry, fiction,
and drama. She establishes five key concepts informed by cultural studies theory that would ori-
ent the study of ecofeminist literature and she notes that many of the works that fit this category
would be considered materialist. One example she provides of the materialist overlap of cultural

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studies and ecofeminist literary criticism is the significance of “care” and “care giving.” She then
discusses cultural ecofeminism and postcolonial ecofeminism, noting how postcolonial studies has
tended to be very much part of the purview of cultural studies. She concludes with a look at future
directions for this rich and promising intersection of theoretical and critical interests.
Nicole A. Jacobs notes that the scholar and activist, Alison Kafer, has called on ecofeminists to
forge an alliance with those engaged in disability studies and points out that the need to address
the concept of “ableism” has been raised in ecofeminist circles and she highlights such areas as
toxicity, public policy, and industrial practices, and to that one can add the broad category of
environmental justice. Jacobs contends that disability studies was established as a disciplinary field
of investigation in 2002 and that women of color have been crucial participants, while observing
that the embrace of the LGBTQ community has been more advanced in disability studies than
in ecofeminism and herein lies an opportunity for the latter to learn from the former. She then
turns to disability in literature. Teratology, the medical study of bodily anomalies, links writers as
diverse as Margaret Cavendish in the seventeenth century and N. K. Jemison in the twenty-first,
two examples that Jacobs develops in detail.
Asmae Ourkiya addresses an issue that has vexed ecofeminism since day one: the charge that it
is essentialist and based on the false assumption that women are innately closer to nature than men.
Ourkiya explains the history of the dichotomy pointed out by numerous feminist scholars of man
equals culture and woman equals nature and the ways in which men benefit from this construct
in terms of power and hierarchy, a dichotomy demonstrated in the Latin literature discussed in
an earlier chapter. Taking up Diana Fuss’s book that addresses in detail debates about essentialism
from various ideological and experiential positions before focusing on the need to break down
dichotomies and imposed static environmental identities, Ourkiya then discusses the “collision”
between ecofeminism and heterosexism. Ourkiya concludes with a discussion of current research
that posits the potential for a postgender, nonbinary, and nondichotomous ecological feminism: a
“queer hybrid ecofeminism.”
Following the point made by Ourkiya that dominant culture essentialist gender attributes have
worked to promote male hierarchical power, Lydia Rose discusses hegemonic masculinity in re-
lation to ecofeminist literature. “Hegemony” consists of the ways that hierarchy is represented as
some normal condition of the human species rather than a cultural, political and social construct
designed to enable men to maintain power over women and to justify the limitless exploitation
of the environment. After setting up the ubiquity and variety of the features of this hegemonic
masculinity, Rose then looks first at the “hunting narrative” in culture and then in the context of
green crimes and blood sports. She concludes by asking whether or not there can be ecofriendly
masculinity, and, if so, what might it look like.
Chan Kit-sze Amy provides a detailed discussion of a term that appears in much of current
ecofeminist thought: intersectionality. She does this through a reading of various novels, begin-
ning with Kamala Markandaya’s 1954 novel, Nectar in a Sieve. This novel not only addresses the
oppression of women in India’s patriarchal society but also the impact of climate on agriculture
and the contradictions of a conversion of the locale of the novel from being predominantly agrar-
ian to increasingly industrial. She then turns to Ana Castillo’s 1993 novel, So Far from God, set in
New Mexico. The struggle for environmental justice here is tied in with the direct experience of
the destructive impact of the industrial pollution of the military-industrial complex, with analy-
sis of the novel benefitting from the inclusion of affect theory with ecofeminism. She concludes
with a combined analysis of two novels, Barbara Kingsolver’s 2000 Prodigal Summer and Elizabeth
Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things published in 2013. Four novels with female protagonists expe-
riencing a complex intersection of environmental issues and factors in their lives.
Ba şak Ağ ın provides readers with a composite theoretical analysis of new materialism, posthu-
manism, and ecofeminism. After establishing her theoretical orientation, she then reads a series

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 Patrick D. Murphy

of texts that tell and retell the myth of Medusa, from a thirteenth-century Persian-Anatolian text
by the poet Rumi to contemporary online hypertext retellings. A key element of the online reit-
erations of Medusa’s story is the effort to deconstruct the original in order to represent Medusa as
a victim of the patriarchy. These retellings, Ağ ın argues, then position the story as one of female
empowerment and resistance. Key to her theoretical orientation is the concept of “mattertex-
tuality,” a posthumanist intertwining of matter and textuality building on the work of French
feminists as well as that of recent posthuman ecofeminists, such as Serenella Iovino and Serpil
Opperman.
Ash Değ irmenci Altin turns to a field of intense interest among comparativist scholars of con-
temporary culture and one rife with varied definitions: postcolonial literature. As with many of
the other chapters in this section, Değ irmenci Altin first provides his definitions of postcolonial,
ecofeminism, and postcolonial feminism. She notes crucial terms that developed in the 1980s
from both postcolonial studies and ecocriticism, such as “environmental racism” and “biocolo-
nialism.” She then reviews some of the various dualistic structures that have been developed to
justify oppression and exploitation and the ways they are interwoven in relation to nature, col-
onies, and women. Değ irmenci Altin then turns to a consideration of activism and literature in
South Asia to tease out a postcolonial ecofeminism and the varieties of concepts and meanings that
appear in such literature and the complexity involved in trying to develop a unifying ecofeminist
postcolonial critique.
Another extremely important “post-” in the development of ecofeminist literary theory and
analysis is that of the “posthuman,” which Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu tackles in his chapter. He
argues that posthuman thought exposes how anthropocentrism combined with speciesism works
to imagine a human world separate from nature rather than fully imbricated in it. Key concepts
of posthumanism for ecofeminism to address are “embodied subjects,” “posthuman bodies,” and
“ecological genders.” A key aspect of ecofeminism to which posthumanist thought is indebted
is that of the dismantling of Cartesian dualisms. Working with Rosi Braidotti’s critique of the
“anthropos,” he shows how to develop that sort of posthuman feminism into a richer posthuman
ecofeminism. Yazgünoğ lu concludes by providing a posthuman ecofeminist reading of a novel and
a short story, the former by Liz Jensen and the latter by A. S. Byatt.
Another “post-,” one that preceded posthumanism and that is more immediately associated
with literature is “postmodernism,” which is addressed by Karen Ya-chu Yang in her chapter.
Yang notes in her opening remarks that postmodernism and ecofeminism mutually reject Enlight-
enment hierarchies and Cartesian dualisms. Because it has been repeatedly attacked as essentialist,
unlike ecocriticism with its historically grounded interest in realist writing, ecofeminism has
developed a more sophisticated recognition of the entanglements of material realities and “ideo-
logical frameworks.” This attention to the latter provides a clear link to postmodernist thought.
Perhaps that is why ecofeminism from the start has been more open to and interested in other lit-
erary forms, including the pastiche, parody. And metafictions of postmodernist style. In develop-
ing her argument, Yang discusses such postmodern writing as John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s
Woman, Angela Carter’s short stories, Joanna Russ’s and Ursula K. Le Guin’s feminist science
fiction, The Female Man and Always Coming Home, respectively.
In addition to her chapter on English literature, Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman also addresses the
topic of race in relation to ecofeminism. Concurring with arguments that “race” is a concept and
not a scientific fact, she contends that it must therefore be addressed in the ideological realm. Fur-
ther, although matters of race are not limited to a white/Black binary, the construct of “Blackness”
has to be confronted by ecofeminism both because people of color have demanded that it be done
but also because racism is so intertwined with issues of environmental destruction and the possi-
bility of environmental justice. Teasing out the intersectionality of race and environmental issues
requires searing critique not only of colonial narratives and their white supremacist structures but

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also of the continuation of racist inflections in everyday life. Taylor-Wiseman unpacks the origins
of the concept of race as part of the process of hierarchical othering. An important strand, then,
of environmental writing is the resistance to othering by writers of color. She provides examples
of such resistance in works by contemporary poets and novelists, such as Audre Lorde and Toni
Morrison. Taylor-Wiseman concludes with the example of differential literary depictions of trees
as the type of attention to race, difference, and othering to which ecofeminism must attend.
Although sentimental literature is usually thought of in the context of popular writing by
women in the nineteenth century, Richard Magee argues for a much more inclusive conception
of the term “sentimental.” He argues that it encompasses a broad range of fiction, poetry, and
nonfiction by both women and men. He begins with an extended discussion of Susan Fenimore
Cooper’s Rural Hours, a work that few people realize was a major inspiration for Henry David
Thoreau’s Walden. Even less well known is that, like much other sentimental literature of its day,
Cooper’s work was a bestseller while Thoreau’s book remained relatively obscure until the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century. He then shows how application of the term “sentimental” also
applies to late-nineteenth-century English poetry, as well as contemporary novels, such as one by
Ruth Ozeki. Clearly, his revisioning of this concept ties in with recent developments in ecofem-
inism and affective criticism.

Part III Literary Periods and Genres

Anja Höing provides readers with a chapter on gothic fiction, which one might note often draws
on and contributes to the development of both fantasy and science fiction. She notes in her open-
ing remarks that while gothic literature has been well researched with significant attention by
feminist critics given the strong presence of female authors, much work remains to be done about
the interrelated representations of nature and women in such literature. Höing sets up a highly
informative contrast between two of the major early shapers of gothic fiction, Ann Radcliffe and
Lewis Monk before turning to the grandmistress of the genre, Mary Shelley. She then briefly
addresses the continued use of gothic tropes in Victorian fiction before analyzing ways that the
genre has been carried out and radically revised in the twentieth century by such authors as Angela
Carter.
Kaitlin Modello turns her attention to the British literature of the Romantic period of the
nineteenth century. She notes that this brief period was rife with works addressing key struggles
for justice, such as women’s rights and labor organizing, as well as a worshiping of nature that ties
the ideas and imagery of this movement directly to key aspects of ecofeminism. After identifying
a large list of women writers from the period initially ignored by literary scholars, Modello turns
to ecofeminist critiques of a “masculinist” romanticism. She then turns to the argument for female
romantic writers as ecofeminists, focusing on the mother–daughter duo of Mary Wollstonecraft
and Mary Shelley. She then concludes with a look at further developments that are unfolding in
this field.
Nicole C. Dittmer follows Modello’s discussion of the Romantic period with a look at the
one that followed it, the much longer Victorian era. This era relied extensively on denigrating
dichotomies and hierarchical associations of allegedly unstable women at the mercy of untamed
nature. Unlike men who were supposedly freed from the dictates of biology by their higher
reasoning power, women were doomed to inferiority because their biology was their destiny.
Dittmer demonstrates how the “penny literature” of the nineteenth century reinforced and re-
produced this patriarchal hierarchy through negative imagery. Although insignificant in terms
of literary aesthetics, these highly popular “penny dreadful” works circulated widely in society
and functioned as part of the state ideological apparatus that worked to maintain support for the
subjugation of women and nature.

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 Patrick D. Murphy

In addition to writing about the gothic, Anja Höing also treats children’s literature and ar-
gues that ecofeminism has arrived belatedly to the study of children’s literature, but that much
valuable work has been produced since calls for its inclusion began around 2008. One possible
reason for this delay may have to do with the generally conservative nature of the genre, which
tends to follow very time-worn paths in narrative; another is that the criticism itself tends to-
ward conservative values and forms of analysis. Ecofeminism, then, introduces an unsettling chal-
lenge to the master narratives of the field and to the criticism that reifies these narratives. Early
­t wentieth-century stories portrayed static worlds, ones that were quickly upended by the turbu-
lence and violence of that century, causing a distinct change in the way that works in the field
were presented. Even when environmental narratives, rather than merely set-in-nature stories,
did develop even into the twenty-first century, they still tended to challenge one dualism while
reinforcing others. Thus, children’s literature is both an area of literary production that dramat-
ically calls for ecofeminist critique, both to analyze what has been written but also to challenge
emerging writers to create new nondualistic narratives that better represent human-rest of nature
relationships and contradictions.
Michelle Deininger then looks at the next age level of popular writing, YA fiction, geared to-
ward teenagers but quite often read by adults as well. She begins with reference to internationally
known teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg and points out how frequently the threats
due to anthropogenic climate change that she addresses are also treated in YA literature. After
noting that only recently has the academy begun to take YA literature seriously in terms of critical
analysis, Deininger organizes her discussion of this literature by beginning with treatments of nu-
clear disasters and their aftermath. These almost invariably emphasize dystopian, post-apocalyptic
scenarios. She then turns to the frequent inclusion of magic in YA fantasy novels wherein magic
becomes a form of environmental activism, pointing out that Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series
blazed the trail in the production of such narratives. Then there are works that treat overpopula-
tion and scarcity due to excessive consumption, including concern over oxygen depletion and re-
duction of arable due to sea-level rise. There are also numerous novels that address the intersection
of race and environmental crisis. Yet, as Deininger points out, structural impediments remain in
the publishing industry for adequate representation by authors of color.
While gothic fiction certainly emphasizes eerie and mysterious settings and events, its plot
structure often would make them fit into the category of mystery and detective fiction, a genre
explored here by Casey A. Cothran. These works focus on the ability usually of a single character
or a team to decipher other people and past events in order to solve an actual crime or a suspected
one. Cothran notes that the mystery plot affords an opportunity for authors to interrogate violence
perpetrated against women and the natural world. And, rather than merely pinning the blame on
an evil individual, novels deploying this plot structure can critique “social, political, and episte-
mological systems.” In the works receiving elaboration here, Cothran finds women who possess
knowledge that enable punishment for misogynistic and ecophobic violence. These works are
written by both male and female authors and span a period from the late nineteenth through the
early twenty-first centuries.
In recent years, a subgenre of speculative fiction, especially works written for the YA reader,
has come to be called “cli-fi,” short for climate fiction. Such work is often dystopian in nature
and usually, but not always, set in a postapocalyptic environmentally destroyed landscape. Iris
Ralph provides an overview of this subgenre before engaging in close readings of three works:
two novels and one short story. As Ralph indicates, critics tend to argue that the focus of such
works, distinct from, say, technologically oriented science fiction, tend to focus on ethical and
social issues, including the dilemmas and angst of coming of age in a destroyed world. Many of the
ecofeminist critics of cli-fi, according to Ralph, express disappointment that so much of it seems
to emphasize masculinist narratives of male action. Ralph, though, wants to emphasize here that

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there are works of ecofeminist cli-fi and her three Australian examples demonstrate that point. At
the same time, she demonstrates how each of these works displays distinctly different approaches
to writing in this subgenre.
Deidre C. Byrne analyzes the genre of science fiction, one that is broader than, but includes,
the cli-fi discussed by Iris Ralph. Byrne’s examples in her introduction range from the late
­seventeenth-century work of Margaret Cavendish to early twenty-first-century film, but she fo-
cuses on “second wave” ecofeminist science fiction written by such luminaries as Marge Piercy
and Ursula K. Le Guin. In particular, she looks at the range of Le Guin’s works that span decades.
Rhian Waller addresses ecofeminist dimensions of fantasy literature, which tends to be quite
different from cli-fi and other forms of science fiction in setting, time period, and representations
of technology. Waller begins by noting that landscape depictions are crucial to this literary genre
and that often the nature of such places is highly gendered in its representations. The benefits of
using fantasy to address environmental issues and to interrogate cultural norms about both nature
and gender and their intertwining come from its being untethered from the constraints of realism,
allowing the exploration of what-if constructs, alternative histories, and otherworldly phenomena
from an outsider’s perspective. Indeed, often in fantasy, the main character is not a local but some
type of “other,” who requires education by locals as to the nature of the world in which he or
she finds oneself. After briefly touching on very early works, Waller moves into eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century works before turning to the twentieth century when, according to Waller,
fantasy becomes part of mainstream culture. It is not, though, until the second half of the twen-
tieth century that such authors as Ursula K. Le Guin and Angela Carter put a popularly received
feminist spin on the fantasy genre, paving the way for more works in the contemporary moment
that might combine feminist and environmental concerns.
Lenka Filipova addresses travel writing, a genre that has always been quite popular and that
has always had a significant portion of female authors but was often neglected by literary critics
until the advent of ecocriticism and its efforts to make nature writing a part of the academic cur-
riculum. As she notes, it is a hybrid genre, relying often heavily on biography or autobiography
with a strong emphasis on nonfiction description, while at the same time often developing a plot
structure based on the principles of narrative fiction. It is highly inflected by changing landscape
aesthetics in various historical periods and the values ascribed to those landscapes by different
cultures. Filipova considers such authors as Mary Wordsworth in the nineteenth century and Nan
Shepherd writing in the 1970s. More recent writing, she argues, both addresses changing concep-
tions of “wilderness” as well as paying attention to the psychological experiences of the travelers.
One also sees in more recent travel writing by women an awareness of both the intersectionality
inherent in particular types of individual women traveling solo and the agency of the more than
human, the kind of agency addressed by new materialism. Filipova wraps up her analysis with a
consideration of efforts to “decolonize” the places and spaces the travelers visit.
K. M. Ferebee takes a look at autobiography, a genre that has received much attention in eco-
criticism as part of the study of literary nonfiction, which has often been neglected in canonical
literary studies. She begins with a consideration of a new type of such writing labeled by Stacy
Alaimo as “material memoir,” a type of contemporary writing that incorporates more scientific
information, such as medical history, than was previously the case in many autobiographies. Such
writing gives more attention to the “trans-corporeal” reality of human existence and does not
ignore the environmental construction of the body and in turn that body’s role in the formation
of concepts of the self. Such writing, unsurprisingly then, attends not only to illness in general
but also to toxic illnesses. Ferebee notes, though, that there are often problems with such writing
in terms of setting up a parallelism that renders the natural world as female and posits a norma-
tive heterosexuality with a goal of universal individual reproduction. These works also confront,
as recognized by Alaimo herself, that general knowledge of environmental contamination and

13
 Patrick D. Murphy

anthropogenically induced diseases does not necessarily enable a proof of the cause at the root of
an individual case history. Finally, Ferebee raises the concern that these narratives, for all they
reveal about the unequal impact of anthropogenic toxins on men and women, are fundamentally
anthropocentric in their frequent starting point that what is poisonous for a human being is nec-
essarily destructive for the nonhuman.
Closing out this section of the Handbook with a commentary on the overarching genre of po-
etry, Andrew David King argues that poems have long demonstrated the anti-dualistic recogni-
tions that guide ecofeminist thought and analysis, which contradict the cosmological and socially
constructed binaries that justify hierarchies and separation. To demonstrate his argument King
begins with pieces from the ancient Chinese Book of Songs and other ancient Chinese works and
remarks about East Asian poetics. King then turns to the Iliad and the poems of Sappho. The dis-
cussion then moves into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including consideration of such
authors as Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton, and Brenda Hillman, and other contemporary poets.

Conclusion
These chapters, then, present the most comprehensive discussion of ecofeminism and literature
to date. They do so both in terms of the international scope of the examples and languages
treated and in terms of the topics and issues they address. Throughout a sophisticated treatment of
ecofeminist and other relevant theories are presented while also providing numerous and diverse
literary examples. These examples include praiseworthy ecofeminist texts drawn from fiction,
literary nonfiction, and poetry. They also include works the shortcomings of which are exposed
through ecofeminist critique.

14
 PART I

Literatures in Diverse Languages

 2
CHINESE LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Chan Kit-sze Amy

Introduction
Ecofeminism was coined by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 “to call attention
to women’s potential to bring about an ecological revolution” (Warren 2000, 21). According to
Karen Warren, all ecofeminists agree that there are connections between females and nature, but
there are disagreements regarding what kind of connections there are and whether these connec-
tions are advantageous to further the cause of feminism or detrimental to it. Just like there are
different schools of feminism, there are different branches of ecofeminism. Mary Mellor (1997,
45) suggests to divide ecofeminisms in the United States into two big camps: one is radical/cul-
tural/spiritual “which tended to stress the ‘natural’ affinity of women to the natural world”; and
the other is social constructionist and radical political. Warren’s division is more meticulous and
complex with a web-like structure. For example, there are historical, conceptual, socioeconomic,
empirical, linguistic, symbolic and literary, spiritual and religious, epistemological, political, and
ethical interconnections. As the development of ecofeminism has shown, Warren’s idea of inter-
connectedness captures the essence of ecofeminism.
There has been a turn to Chinese philosophy and religions by scholars worldwide in ecolog-
ical ethics since 1990. Chinese scholars have also participated in the discussions.1 Nevertheless,
a discussion on ecology and Chinese literature with a focus on ecofeminism is not an easy task
since feminism is almost nonexistent in classical Chinese literature. Having said this, it does not
mean ecofeminism does not have anything to do with Chinese literature. It is just an unexplored
territory that affords us exciting opportunities. In this chapter, I will first briefly discuss the main
ideas in the Chinese philosophy that are related to ecology and then I will turn to discuss how
ecofeminism may open up a new perspective in reading classical Chinese literary works. Texts se-
lected for discussion range from myths (ancient China), folk songs (Western Zhou period), poetry
(Tang to Song dynasty), and stories and novels (Ming and Qing dynasties).

Tien Ren He Yi and Yin-yang

The main reason why ecosophy finds a great opportunity in Chinese philosophy and culture is
due to the concept of tien ren he yi 天人合一 (unity of man and nature)2, which is an overarching
theme shared by Confucianism and Daoism. According to the historian Yu Ying-shih (2014), this
concept can be traced back to shamanism in ancient China where tien 天 (heaven) refers to the
spiritual world. The watershed is the first millennium BCE, which Karl Jaspers called the “Axial

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-317
 Chan Kit-sze Amy

age.” After the Axial age, tien is equivalent to dao 道. Both Confucianism and Daoism hold the
belief that human, heaven and earth, and all living and nonliving things share the same body.
However, Confucianism is the philosophy of the ruling class (and thus patriarchal) for centuries,
the concept ren 人 (human) unsurprisingly refers to men only. Daoism, in contrast, is more con-
cerned with nature. Since mid-Tang dynasty (circa seventh century), an imperial examination
based on the Confucian classics had been adopted to select officials by merit. As a result, Confu-
cianism has been the mainstream philosophy among intellectuals for centuries. So, to explore the
potential of constructing an ecofeminist discourse in Chinese literature, I suggest that we should
look to Daoism.
One of the founding concepts of Daoism is yin-yang 陰陽, often symbolized as a circle divided
into black and white with a curved line. It is “under Confucianism that yin-yang is transformed
into two hierarchical male and female principles, inscribing yin-yang within a set of natural laws”
(Wong 2016). Given that ancient China is an extremely patriarchal society, it is rare to have yin,
the female force, to come before yang, the male force. However, if we dig deeper into the history
of the Daoist canon, Yijing 易經 (Book of Change), we may discover that it is perhaps not by chance
that the term is phrased in that order. Besides Yijing, there were two other divinities in ancient
China, they are Guicang 歸藏 (Return to the Hidden) and Lianshan 連山 (Connect the Mountains).3
All three texts are based on 64 hexagrams made up of solid and broken lines. Among the three
texts, only Yijing or Zhouyi 周易 was well-preserved throughout history. The main difference
between Zhouyi and Guicang is that the former starts with qian 乾, but the first hexagram of the
latter is kun 坤. Qian is considered male and symbolizes heaven, while kun is female and symbol-
izes the earth. Far from being dualistic, yin-yang is seen as interdependent and is constituted by a
deterritorializing–reterritorializing relationship in Deleuzian terms. In fact, the yin principle can
be found as a destructive force of yang in Chinese literary texts. Given that feminism is virtually
nonexistent in classical Chinese literature, the strategy of introducing ecofeminist reading literary
works is to explore the yin elements embedded in them.
As Gaard and Murphy write in their definitive work Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (1998, 5),
ecofeminist principles and interpretation can relate to literary study “by building on feminist
attention to the concept of the ‘other’.” They continue to write that the “other” is to “reject the
notion of absolute difference and the binary construct of inside and outside” (Gaard and Murphy
1998, 5). This approach echoes the nonbinary concept of yin-yang which renders legitimacy to
the reading strategy I propose here.

Plants in Chinese Poetry

I will start our journey from the traditional motif of ecofeminist literary criticism, that is, ex-
ploring the relationship between women and plants in classical Chinese literature. According to a
comprehensive survey by Pan (2012), over 50% of the poems in classical Chinese literature make
references to plants. Shi-jing 詩經 (The Classic of Poetry), the oldest existing collection of Chinese
poetry comprising poems dating from the eleventh to seventh centuries BCE, is usually selected
for discussion on ecology in classical Chinese literature due to its extensive references to plants,
fruits, animals, and trees. These references to nature, however, have been interpreted in different
ways. For example, in “Tao Yao” 桃夭 (The Beautiful Peach):

桃之夭夭, The Peach tree stands wayside,

灼灼其華。 With blossoms glowing pink.
之子于歸, I wish the pretty bride
宜其室家。 Affluence in food and drink.4

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 Chinese Literature and Ecofeminism

The pink blossoming peach tree literally refers to the tree; yet, metaphorically, it is the bride’s
face. The first poem in Shi-jing, “Guan ju” 關睢 (The Cooing), is named after a bird and there
are also references to plants. Literally, it refers to the courting between young men and women.
However, it was later appropriated by Confucians to mean searching for someone virtuous and
capable to serve the emperors. Plants are frequently mentioned in Chinese poetry but they are
rarely given a chance to speak for themselves. More than often, they are vehicles to express the
poet’s mood and thought.
Shi-jing is considered to be the classics of the north and its equal in the southern part of China
is Chu Ci 楚辭 (Songs of Chu). Chu Ci is an anthology of poems that were written during the
Warring States period (475–221 BCE). The poems of the south have a distinctive style of itself. For
example, there are references to beasts and other beings in mythologies and shamanism. In terms
of writing style, the poems were written in various formats instead of complying with a rigid
standard and there is a sing-song quality. For our discussion here, the most relevant feature of all
is the so-called xiang cao mei ren 香草美人 (herbs and the beauty). In “Li sao” 離騷 (Lament of
Parting), there are numerous references to beasts, plants, and beautiful ladies. However, all these
should not be read literally because they are analogies to something or someone else – fragrant
herbs are symbols of the virtuous and loyal ministers and the beautiful ladies are that of sage kings.
Shi-jing and Chu Ci share a similarity in the aspect that plants and nature play an important role
in the poems; however, they either function as symbols or are endowed with symbolic meanings
by the antecedents.
Yutai Xinyong 玉臺新詠 (New Songs from the Jade Terrace) (420–589) is a unique collection
of Chinese poetry in that it involves a discussion of sex and genders. Not even one of the collected
poems has not mentioned the female sex. Pan (2012) has counted a total of 113 types of plants
being mentioned in the collection. In the poem Shang Shan Cai Miwu 上山採蘼蕪 (Going up the
hill to collect Miwu), the abandoned wife runs into her ex-husband and asks about his new wife.
The husband tells her that the new wife is good but is not her match in almost every aspect. That
makes the readers wonder why he abandoned this woman in the first place and married an inferior
one then. The plant miwu provides a clue. Miwu is a fragrant herb that the ancient Chinese be-
lieved to be a cure for infertile women. That explains the reason for the divorce as well as showing
the unfair treatment of women in ancient times. In another poem Fu Ping 浮萍 (Duckweed), the
plant that floats on water is an analogy of women who mostly depend on men. There are also
four other plants mentioned in the poem – fruit of cornel, cinnamon, bluegrass, angelica root –
each of which is analogous to the ex-wife and the new one. Among the poems collected in Yutai
Xinyong, there is the first long narrative poem in Chinese literature titled Kong Que Dong Nan Fei
孔雀東南飛 (Peacocks flying Southeast). It tells the story of a couple who are forced to separate by
the mother of the husband. Before the wife leaves her husband’s house, the husband vows never
to let her down. Then the wife replies, “If you are a huge rock, I will be a reed. A reed is soft
like silk but tenacious and the huge rock is not movable” 君當作磐石，妾當作蒲葦。蒲葦紉如絲,
磐石無轉移。 The analogy here is most apt. The reed looks weak and fragile but it is actually very
tough. The wife as a woman in feudal China has no power over her own life. Once she leaves her
husband’s house, she is at the mercy of her brother who forces her to remarry. However, the lady is
so determined not to marry another man that she throws herself into a pond on the wedding day.
The husband, by contrast, is much weaker and passive. First, he is unable to protect his wife from
his mother; second, he only follows his wife’s suicide act after hearing her death news.
In the essay Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange, Josephine Donovan (1998, 77)
suggests that the mentality of domination in western symbolic discourses has “enabled destruc-
tive Western dominative practices toward nature.” She presents Margaret Homans’s analysis of
Dorothy Wordsworth’s poems which exemplify “a presymbolic or literal language, with its lack
of gaps between signifier and referent” (Homans 1986, 14 cited in Donovan 1998, 77). Homans

19
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(1986, 51) comments that Dorothy Wordsworth leaves images “uninterpreted” as interpretation
of images suggests the “repression of the referent” (Homans 1986, 51). We are further reminded
that Dorothy Wordsworth “guarantees that she never imposes meaning on nature” (Homan 1986,
53)5. There are far too few female poets in the West and China for a comparison between male
and female poets’ interpretations of nature; however, we may get some ideas from female poets on
how to let plants, animals, and nature speak.
The most famous female poet in classical Chinese literature is Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084–
1155). Below is the first stanza of one of her poems:

臨江仙 Immortal at the River 6

庭院深深深幾許？ Deep, deep the courtyard. How deep is it?
雲窗霧閣常扃。 Cloud and mist encircle the always closed window and door
柳梢梅萼漸分明。 Top of the willow is getting green and bud of the plum flowers are blossoming
春歸秣陵樹， Spring is coming back to the trees in Mo-ling
人老建康城。 I am getting old in the city of Jian-kang.

The first two and the last lines express the melancholy of the poet who feels that she will get
stuck in Jian-kang and never be able to return home. The third and fourth lines are a descrip-
tion of the scenery. Obviously, she lets nature speak itself instead of projecting her sadness onto
them. As mentioned above, we have to turn to Daoist thought for inspiration on constructing an
ecofeminist discourse. What the poet demonstrates here is the relationship between humans and
nature according to the Daoist canon, Dao De Jing 道德經. In Chapter 5, it is written that “The
heavens and the earth are not partial to institutionalized morality. They take things and treat them
all as straw dogs” 7. Then, in Chapter 25, it says that “Human beings emulate the earth,/The earth
emulates the heavens,/The heavens emulate way-making,/ And way-making emulates what is
spontaneously so (ziran)”8 (Ames and Hall 2003). The heaven and the earth, which form part of
nature (ziran 自然), is indifferent to all myriads of things (including human morality) and only run
in their own spontaneous way. Thus, the poet may feel gloomy or depressed but nature is totally
oblivion to her feelings. The poet does a great job here by letting nature appear as it is instead of
projecting her dejected feeling onto the scenery. This is the kind of ecological consciousness we
may look for in classical Chinese poetry.
There were some other well-known female poets in the Tang Dynasty (681–907) and the Song
Dynasty (960–1279). Similar to Li Qingzhao, they wrote about plants, scenery, and nature in
their works; however, the meaning of the poems may be distorted by the critics (majority of them
male) throughout history. In the next section, the discussion will turn to goddesses in Chinese
mythologies.

Animals and Chinese Goddesses

In Huang’s Chapter 3, Taiwanese Literature and Ecofeminism, he quotes Greta Garrd’s “notice of the
ancient roots of environmentalism in Buddhism.” While it is most apt to attribute the roots of
environmentalism to Buddhism, in fact, environmentalism in ancient Chinese literature existed
long before Buddhism traveled to China. In this section, my discussion will set out from creation
myths. Goddesses in mythologies are important in the sense that they existed primordially and
they enjoyed equal status with the male gods. In the Chinese creation myth, the most prominent
goddess must be Nuwa 女媧. Nuwa’s appearance is stunning – she has a human head and torso;
and, instead of legs, there is a snake. It is said that she has a brother/husband, Fuxi 伏羲, who has
the same snake-like tail as her. The couple Nuwa and Fuxi can be read as nonbinary as their tails

20
 Chinese Literature and Ecofeminism

are intertwined in ancient paintings which show that they are the one and same being. Accord-
ing to the first large encyclopedia of ancient China, Taiping Yulan 《太平御覽》(976–983), there
was no human being when heaven and earth were first created. Nuwa molded some yellow clay
into human forms to people the earth. One of the versions goes that the creation process was so
difficult that other gods and goddesses came to her help and only succeeded after 70 attempts.
Another version is the process was so slow and tedious that Nuwa dipped a rope into the muddy
water and dropped the water on the ground to form human beings that populated the world. An-
other famous story is her mending the sky. According to Huainanzi 《淮南子》(circa 139 BCE),
after Nuwa inherited the throne from Pangu 盤古9, the water god revolted and Nuwa sent the
fire god to combat him in a battle. As a result, the four corners of the sky collapsed, and the nine
provinces broke apart; there were also blazing fire and serious flooding. Wild beasts ate humans
and big birds preyed on the old and the weak. Out of her compassion for human beings, Nuwa
melted five-color rocks and mended the sky with the rocks. Pangu may be the creator of heaven
and earth, but it is up to Nuwa to salvage them from the stupidity of two males and people on the
earth with human beings.
The most well-known goddess is perhaps Chang Er 嫦娥. She was the wife of Hou Yi 后羿,
who is remembered for his brave act of shooting down nine of ten suns. Due to this act to save his
people from sunburnt and drought, Emperor Ku, the father of the suns, was furious and retaliating
by decreeing that Hou Yi and his wife Chang Er, who was a fairy in the heavenly court, were
forever forbidden to go back to heaven and condemned them to hell after their death. Hou Yi
undertook a difficult journey to reach Hsi Wang Mu’s 西王母 (The Queen Mother of the West)
home in Mount Kunlun and begged her for the elixir of life. Hsi Wang Mu had pity for him and
granted him the elixir. She reminded him that if he shared the potion with his wife, both of them
would enjoy immortality. If one of them gulped down the whole bottle, he or she would fly to
heaven. Chang Er stole the elixir from her husband and drank all of it. She found that her body
got much lighter after taking the elixir and eventually floated in the air. Initially, she wanted to fly
up to heaven; however, she was afraid that Emperor Ku would refuse to let her in, so she decided
to fly to the moon and settle down there. There are various versions of this myth but none seems
to explain satisfactorily why Chang Er did not share the elixir with Hou Yi. The Tang poet, Li
Shangyin 李商隱 (813–858) wrote a poem about the goddess and said she should have regretted
stealing the elixir because she was condemned to loneliness on the moon eternally.10 This is typ-
ically the Confucian patriarchal interpretation of the myth. Why is an immortal life on earth a
better choice than eternity on the moon accompanied by a rabbit, an Osmanthus tree, and a man
named Wu Gang11?
It is not possible to discuss all the female deities in Chinese mythologies and folktales in this
chapter. Before I end this section, I would introduce Hsi Wang Mu very briefly for she is granted
the same status as the male king, Yu Di 玉帝, who is the ruler of heaven and all realms of existence
below. Hsi Wang Mu embodied the ultimate dark female force, yin, and created the world and
maintained cosmic harmony. She is a hybrid of humans and beasts – human head and torso, but
leopard’s tail and tiger’s teeth. Her image underwent a transformation during the Han dynasty.
She is portrayed as an elegant and stately lady endowed with jewelry from then onward. This
humanizing of the female deity does not only eradicate the animalistic aspect of her but also erase
the dark female force of Hsi Wang Mu. On one hand, she is the creator of everything on earth; on
the other hand, she is also the destructive force. In this earliest record of her in Shanghaiji 山海經
(Classics of Mountains and Seas) (before 221 BCE), she appears as a bizarre and dreadful figure
who brings sufferings to the world. And it is this yin aspect of her that the later portrayal tries to
eliminate. I would also like to draw attention to the posthuman aspect of Chinese goddesses. Not
only are they hybrids of animals and humans, they also destabilize the dualisms perpetuated by
patriarchy. Yazgünoğ lu’s Chapter 34, Posthuman Literature and Ecofeminism, in which he discusses

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in length Nayar’s and Braidotti’s posthuman theory, sheds light on how we may approach the
goddess figures in mythologies, Daoism and Buddhism in a posthuman way.

Tree Spirits and Bestial Ghosts in Fiction

Besides the goddesses who existed before Confucius, there are also other female characters who
enjoy some kind of freedom from patriarchal oppression. They are spirits originated from trees
and plants or beasts transfigured into human forms. It is interesting to note that these are mostly
female characters in stories and plays. Pu Songling’s 蒲松齡 Liaozhai Zhiyi 聊齋誌異 (Strange Tales
from a Chinese Studio) (1740) is a collection of 491 fantasy stories. The tale He Hua San Niang Zi 荷
花三娘子 (The Third Madam of Lotus) has a protagonist who is first a fox transfigured into a beauti-
ful woman and then transforms into a lotus flower that has the ability to manifest itself in whatever
form it desires. She gets married to a young man and gives birth to his son as well as brings wealth
to his family. One of the most well-known tales, Lian Xiang 蓮香, involves a beautiful young girl
transfigured from a fox. The story goes that a man is sleeping with two women – one is a ghost
who sucks up his male energy and the other is a fox-turns-woman who revitalizes him by having
sex with him. Among the various animals, the fox has a unique status in Chinese culture. Similar
to the image of the fox in the West, the animal usually symbolizes cunningness, cleverness, and
slyness. However, when the fox first appeared in Chinese mythology, its image is positive as the
wife of Da Yu 大禹, the king who controls the flood, is said to be a fox with nine tails.12 The
nine-tail fox recorded in Shanhaijing is an auspicious symbol. It is not until the Han Dynasty (202
BCE–220 CE) that the fox was degraded into a cunning, flirtatious, and evil woman. The cultural
significance bestowed on animals changes with time but the example of the fox shows us clearly
that to a large extent animals in literary works are not treated as real animals but as allusions to
humans. Kordecki, in Chapter 26, Animal Studies and Ecofeminist Literature, comments that “[t]he
use of animals as symbols for people can lead to a deepening of the issues at hand, but inevitably
propels a diminution of the creature itself, an instrumentalizing.” While it also holds true that
­a nimals-turn-women diminish animals to an instrument and demonstrate the anthropocentric
and androcentric ideology of ancient Chinese literature, women do gain freedom from the patri-
archal oppression with the nonhuman status.
Another popular beast in Chinese literature is the snake and, unsurprisingly, it is also always
female. Bai She Zhuan 白蛇傳 (The Legend of the White Snake) is a famous Chinese legend that has
been adapted into more than 80 works in a number of artistic forms: drama, opera, film, anima-
tion, pop song, and television series. There are also different versions of the story. The basic plot
is a white snake is saved by a young man who soon dies of sickness. The white snake then trans-
forms itself into a beautiful woman and finds out that the man has already been reborn as a young
scholar named Xu Xian 許仙. She courts after him to repay his kindness. They get married with
a son and live with the green snake that the white snake saves from a butcher. But before long, a
self-righteous monk vows to salvage Xu from his wife since he could see she is a snake. By trick-
ing her into drinking some wine with sulfur, the monk forces Xu to admit that his wife is indeed
a giant snake. Xu is so scared that he drops dead on the spot. In order to resurrect her husband,
the white snake goes a long way to steal some spiritual herbs. Xu, on knowing how much she has
suffered on the trip, cannot help but loving her more deeply after coming back to life. The monk
is so furious that he decides to force Xu to convert into a monk and also imprisons the white
snake under a tower. The green snake begs a mountain goddess to bestow some magical power
on her and finally relieves the white snake from the tower. The symbolic meaning of the snake in
Chinese culture is quite similar to that of the fox. In the traditional interpretation of the story, the
monk is highly respected as a hero who combats the evil beasts, Xu is a fool enticed by the beauty
of a woman, and the two snakes are devils. In more recent adaptations, there emerges a critical

22
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reproach to the monk and even Xu. The former is a self-righteous man who doesn’t appreciate
love and the latter being a coward who fails to stand up for his wife. In the novel Qing She 青蛇
(Green Snake) (1986) by the Hong Kong writer Lee Pik-wah 李碧華, the story is told from the
perspective of the green snake as the title suggests. By retelling the story in this way, Lee suggests
that men in the patriarchal society are not to be trusted; instead, love between two women should
be treasured and celebrated.
There are indeed a few male characters in literary works that are transformed from plants or
animals. For example, the official in the tale Liu Xiu Cai 柳秀才 in Liaozhai Zhiyi, is the god of
willow. He sacrifices the willow trees in order to save the crops from the locusts. In an earlier col-
lection of stories, Taiping Guangji 太平廣記 (Extensive Records of the Taiping Era), compiled in the
early Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE), there are also sections on beasts and plants. One of the stories,
Gu Mi 賈秘, tells the mysterious experience of a man named Gu Mi who runs into seven guys
on his journey. They drink together and chat a bit before these guys reveal that they are actually
trees. There are also women who are transfigured from plants and trees. However, compared to
the tales in Liaozhai Zhiyi, they are less anthropomorphized in the sense that they do not marry
the man or give birth to babies.
It is impossible not to mention the greatest novel in classical Chinese literature before I con-
clude this chapter. Hong Lou Meng 紅樓夢 (Dreams of the Red Chamber) (1791) takes place in a big
mansion with an enormous garden that houses more than 200 types of flowers, plants, and herbs
(Liu 2011; Pan 2012). In fact, the flowers are not the only backdrop to the story for they are sym-
bols of the female characters. For example, the tragic character Lin Daiyu is symbolized by the
confederate rose that usually blossoms between September to November. Lin is born beautiful
but weak and thus destined to live a short life like the confederate rose. On the contrary, the most
glamorous girl Xue Baochai is the peony that is known as the king of flowers, symbolizes prosper-
ity, happiness, elegance, and royalty. If the flowers and plants in Shi-jing are conferred metaphor-
ical meanings by the Confucians long after the poems were written, the meanings of the flowers
in Hong Lou Meng are definitely meant to be symbolic at the outset.

Conclusion
The concept of tien ren he yi provides ecological studies access to find resonance in Chinese culture
and literature. We may find an echo of it in Hindi literature as discussed in Patil’s Chapter 8, Hindi
Literature and Ecofeminism. In both Chinese and Indian cultures, nature is an integral part of their
lives and nature is endowed with a divine nature (at least in ancient times). Nature plays a vital part
in Chinese and Indian literature. Nevertheless, ecofeminist criticism of Chinese literature should
be critical of its being androcentric and anthropocentric with a strong influence from Confucian-
ism. No matter it is a fox, a snake, or a plant, the tales in Liaozhai Zhiyi fall into the pattern that
the female protagonist is anthropomorphized not only in form but in mind as well. They may
be flirtatious or lecherous at the beginning of the story; nevertheless, they will be a chaste wife
and a good mother after getting married. On the contrary, the male protagonist remains rather
consistent throughout. They are easily tempted by the beauty of the woman and carry them into
bed without knowing who they are or where they come from. They enjoy the sex as well as the
wealth brought by the woman; however, as soon as they discover that the wife is a ghost/beast/
plant, or simply put, nonhuman, they will turn against them without any hesitation. In Confucian
thought, this is the only right thing to do. These women should be condemned to annihilation for
they trick men with their beauty.
Amidst this negative picture portrayed by the Confucians, I have to claim here that there is
an opening for liberation from patriarchal oppression. For example, in the tale He Hua San Niang
Zi, the story opens with the scene where the female protagonist is having sex with a young man

23
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in the field. When discovered by another man, she accepts his invitation to have sex with him
later. The erotic scene and the unorthodox attitude of the woman are not common in classical
Chinese literature, not to mention that it was simply not acceptable in mainstream literature. Por-
traying women as bestial and plant spirits bestows some freedom on the literary works from the
constraints of Confucianism as well as patriarchy. I would also like to draw attention to the fact
that the genre of fiction, which is translated as xiao shuo 小說 in Chinese, literally means “small
talk.” It never gains equal status with poetry in classical Chinese literature. It is in fact this status
of minor literature that grants freedom to the authors to write about flirtatious women and erotic
sex scenes.
The reading strategy that I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter is exemplified by the
idea of discovering the yin aspect of literary works, for example, in the reinterpretation of the
power relationship between male and female, man and snakes in Bai She Zhuan; also, the fox or the
snake, though treated as beasts, are usually loyal to their husbands and bring wealth to his family
instead of bringing him any harm. A yin reading may also refer to the studies of minor literature,
such as fantasy, mythology, and even folktales of minority tribes in China. Being uncontaminated
by Confucian thought, they may provide more exciting insights into Chinese literature.

Notes
1 Wei Qingqi wrote two articles on Chinese ecocriticism back some years ago in one of which he (2014a)
wrote an overview of the development of ecocriticism in the previous decade and focusses on the con-
struction of ecofeminism in the other (2014b). In the former article, he has applied the comparative
literature model to the study of Chinese ecocriticism, that is, trying to fit Chinese culture into the
western ideas and discourses. In the latter article, he (2014b) draws on the yin-yang principle of Daoism
to discuss how Daoism may contribute to a harmonious ecological culture. Ever since 2010, there has
been a flourishing of ecocriticism in China, but the literary texts are mainly Anglo-American literature.
2 Tien ren he yi 天人合一 is often translated as unity of men and nature now; however, the literal mean-
ing of the phrase should be “unit of heaven and men.”
3 Yijing, Guicang, and Lianshan are texts of divinations in ancient China. Guicang was lost for almost 2,000
years until it was discovered in 1993. Little of Lianshan is known. Yijing is also called Zhouyi because
it was written in the West Zhou dynasty (1,000–750 BCE). All three texts are based on 64 hexagrams
made up of solid and broken lines. The complete line symbolized the male organs thus yang and the
broken line the female yin.
4 Translations are mine unless stated otherwise.
5 For a detailed reading and criticism of Dorothy Wordsworth’s poetry, please see Kenneth R. Cervelli’s
Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology (2007).
6 The most popular form of poetry in the Song Dynasty (960–1279) is ci 詞. They are lyrics written ac-
cording to a specific melody. So the title here refers to the melody instead of the poem.
7 The original reads: 天地不仁，以萬物為芻狗.
8 The original reads: 人法地，地法天，天法道，道法自然。
9 Pangu is a primordial being with a dragon head and snake torso in prehistoric period. He is also the
creation god who separated yin from yang and heaven from earth.
10 The original reads: 嫦娥應悔偷靈藥，碧海青天夜夜心。
11 Wu Gang is penalized by the Heavenly King to cut down a self-healing tree on the moon for eternity.
12 It is said that the fox’s tail will split into two after a hundred years’ practice. So a nine-tail fox is believed
to have strong power in magic and achieve immortality.

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Ames, Roger T., and David L. Hall. 2003. Dao De Jing “Making This Life Significant”: A Philosophical Transla-
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Cahill, Suzanne E. 1993. Transcendence & Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cervelli, Kenneth R. 2007. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology. New York: Routledge.

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Donovan, Josephine. 1998. “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orage.” In Ecofeminist Literary
Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D Murphy, 74–96. Urbana
and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Gaard, Greta, and Patrick D Murphy. 1998. “Introduction.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Inter-
pretation, Pedagogy, edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D Murphy. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University
of Illinois Press.
Homans, Margaret. 1986. Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s
Writing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Liu, Shi Biao. 2011. Hong Lou Meng Zhi Wu Wen Hua Shang Xi. 紅樓夢植物文化賞析A Study of the Botanic
Culture in Dreams of the Red Chamber. Beijing: Chemical Industry Publishing.
Mellor, Mary. 1997. Feminism & Ecology. New York University Press, New York.
Pan, Fu Jun. 2012. Zhong Guo Wen Xue Zhi Wu Xue.中國文學植物學 The Botany in Chinese Literature. 2nd
ed. Taipei: Owls Publishing.
Wei, Qingqi. 2014a. “Chinese Ecocriticism in the Last Ten Years.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism,
edited by Greg Garrard, 537–546. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2014b. “The Way of Yin: The Chinese Construction of Ecofeminism in a Cross-Cultural Con-
text.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 4: 749–765. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/
isu148.
Warren, Karen. 2000. Ecofeminist Philosophy: a Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Rowman &
Littlefield.
Wong, Kin Yuen. 2016. “Yin-Yang,” In The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender & Sexuality Studies, edited
by Nancy A. Naples, Renee C. Hoogland, Maithree Wickramasinghe, Wai Ching, and Angela Wong.
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Yu, Ying Shih. 2014. Lun Tian Ren Zhi Ji. 論天人之際: 中國古代思想起源試探 Discourse on the intersection
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Publishing.

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 3
TAIWANESE LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Peter I-min Huang

Introduction
Taiwanese literature emerged as a distinct body of literature in the 1980s, after more than three
decades of debate between proponents of a distinctively local, Taiwanese, literature known as
Xiang-tu (country and earth) and advocates of literary undertakings reflective of writers’ mani-
fest embrace of literary traditions across the Taiwan Strait. Writers who identified with the latter
direction perceived Taiwanese literature, also known as Chinese frontier literature, as being an
outpost of Chinese literature more so than literature standing on its own and so as belonging
to Third-World literature, a term that also was used to refer to literature from both China and
Taiwan. Both directions were dogged (and on both sides of the strait) by attitudes of belittlement
toward Taiwanese authors. Considerable anxiety about the ties between the Xiang-tu movement
and Dang-wai, a democratic movement whose members were pushing for an independent politi-
cal Taiwanese consciousness, also interfered with (and, paradoxically, propelled) the emergence of
a distinctive body of Taiwanese literature. Other factors that shaped the birth of Taiwanese liter-
ature included Taiwanese writers’ rejection of modernism, a rejection that specifically associates
with the Xiang-tu path. Writers who identified with this path also bid farewell to or broke with
the lonely courtier and orphan literary traditions, which are distinguished by nostalgia for and a
longing to return to China.1
Han Chinese colonial-settler people migrated to Taiwan in large numbers after the seven-
teenth century. Many of these newcomers took over and wittingly or unwittingly effaced the
languages and cultures of Taiwan’s oldest Indigenous people. Various European powers at one
time or another also sought control of Taiwan and domination of the oldest people and Taiwan’s
oldest environments. Between 1899 and the end of World War II (also known as the Second
Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945), Taiwan was a colony of Japan. Following the defeat of Japan,
Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang [KMT] leader), Chiang Kai-shek, established a government
in Taiwan and imposed the rule of martial law. That ended in 1987 and in this momentous year,
which represented a major turning point in modern Taiwanese history, writers increasingly tested
the limits of what could or could not be written about. One of those subjects was the political
identity of Taiwan. Writers asked questions about rights, autonomy, independence, and so forth,
and specifically so in the context of Taiwan’s separation from China. Other writers were tackling
such subject matter that included women’s rights. Ang Li stands at the forefront of these feminist
writers. Her novel, The Butcher’s Wife (1983), is a hallmark of feminist writing in Taiwan, and it
also is highly praised for exemplifying Xiang-tu literature, which drew attention to the oppressive

26 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-4

 Taiwanese Literature and Ecofeminism

condition of Taiwan’s rural poor in addition to the oppressive condition of women in traditional,
patriarchal, Chinese society in Taiwan.

The Butcher’s Wife by Ang Li (1983)

In The Butcher’s Wife, Li depicts Taiwan’s post–World War II poor rural classes and their so-called
vulgar language and unsophisticated dialects, a far cry from those spoken and privileged in the
capital cities in Taiwan and across the Taiwan Strait. The language and subject matter of Li’s novel,
which includes descriptions of sexual acts, shocked and offended many contemporary critics and
other readers: “Indignant critics, government officials, and self-styled defenders of the public mo-
rality were outraged that such an honor could be bestowed on a work that [was] little more than
pornographic” (Goldblatt and Yeung 1989). In recent decades, critical opinion has shifted. Critics
now praised the novel for its bold and frank language and for representing Taiwan’s rural poor and
working classes. These same critics also commended Li for her scathing critique of the low status
bestowed on women in traditional Chinese society. The Butcher’s Wife deserves accolades for other
content as well. This content refers to the novel’s implicit ecofeminist statements.
The ostensible inspiration for the plot of Li’s novel were several sensational news reports from
Shanghai, China, published in the 1930s, about a woman who killed her abusive husband. “In
traditional Chinese society,” Li writes in the “Author’s Preface” to the English-language transla-
tion of her novel,

any woman who kill[ed] her husband [was] presumed to have done so because of an extra-
marital affair; there could be no reason for committing the heinous crime of killing her own
husband other than the desire to be with her lover.
(Li 1989, 1)

However, in this “particular case,” the prosecution “was unable to prove the existence of a ‘lover’”
(Li 1989, 1). Thus, “instead of being just another in a long line of women labeled promiscuous by
society,” the woman accused of killing her husband was recognized as an individual “who had
suffered the oppression of traditional society” (Li 1989, 1).
What an ecofeminist would add to Li’s feminist account of the 1930s woman who killed her
husband is that while the trial of this woman brought into focus the patriarchal institutions that
oppressed women it did not notice at all the humanist and anthropocentric institutions that le-
gitimized the brutal treatment of animals. Li’s novel highlights that treatment in the context of
porcine slaughter. No other work of Chinese or Taiwanese literature and no widely disseminated
account of a homicide in Taiwan or China reflects that treatment so remarkably and memorably
as Li’s novel does. This aspect of Li’s novel does not appear to have been the intention of Li, but it
is the novel’s most remarkable achievement2.
Mary Phillips and Nick Rumens, in defining recent trajectories in ecofeminist theory and
practice, note that since the beginning of the discipline of ecofeminism a consistent concern has
been interest in “corporeality and the animal” (2016, 1). In the 1980s, at the height of poststruc-
turalism, many other feminist scholars were critical of this interest. They saw it to be one that in
effect reinforced the patriarchal ideological links between women and nature. Those links stated
in effect that women and nature are objects and are defined essentially by their bodies, while men
are subjects and are defined less by their bodies and more by their apparently superior capacity for
transcending and escaping bodily and other material finitudes.
The material turn in literary theory and criticism, and, in particular, the material turn ten
years ago in the area of literary theory and criticism of ecocriticism, helped to overturn the
­a nti-materialist feminist charges against ecofeminism of recidivism, essentialism, and reductionism.

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Since this turn, scholars have not as a matter of course or blithely dismissed the matter of the body,
and ecofeminists have played a key role in this turn. Stacy Alaimo is one of those figures, and her
now-famous term, “trans-corporeality,” emphasizes the body and the irreducibly and morally
complex bodily ties that connect humans to other beings (2010, 2).
Basak A ğ ın, in Chapter 32 of the present anthology, also examines the complex moral ties
between humans and other beings. A ğ ın does that in the specific context of the critical in-
tersections between material ecocriticism and ecofeminism and in a reading of, among other
aesthetic and philosophical texts, Persian-Anatolian poet Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Discourses or Fihi
Ma Fihi and Canadian illustrator Jacqui Oakley’s depiction of the mythical figure of Medusa.
A ğ ın draws upon Serenella Iovino and Serpel Opperman’s seminal coedited anthology, Material
Ecocriticism (2014) and their concept of “storied matter.” As A ğ ın explains this term, in addition
to what one normally associates with narratives—namely, narratives that humans produce and
include (e.g., oral histories, printed books, cellulose acetate film and nitrate film, and digital
archival matter)—there are infinite other kinds of narratives that are embedded in and embody
the world. The notice of those narratives distinguishes the work of Eastern poets and philoso-
phers inclusive of the Anatolian poets, Yunus Emre, Pir Sultan Abdal, and Jalal al-Din Rumi.
Discussing at length the work of Rumi, A ğ ın points out that the extraordinary respect for Rumi
among people of diverse religious and cultural beliefs owes deeply to a belief in unity among
all things and beings. A ğ ın also expresses this by referring to these words by Rosi Braidotti:
“We-are-(all)-in-this-together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same” (qtd. in A ğ ın). Discussing
Oakley’s artistic representation of the mythological Medusa, Ağ ın relates it to an article, “Snake
Eyes,” by the US-American writer McKenzie Schwark. Oakley’s art was commissioned for Bitch
Magazine and accompanies Schwark’s “Snake Eyes.” As A ğ ın comments on both texts from an
ecofeminist perspective, the texts question androcentric narratives and interpretations of reality.
Oakley’s Medusa depicts the figure as being a force that will restore ecocentric values and so as
being a counterforce to androcentric (as well as anthropocentric) institutionalized and all but
universalized forms of power.
There also are productive exchanges between posthumanism and ecofeminism that foreground
the value of corporeality and the relationships that unite humans and more than human beings
and things. Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu, in Chapter 34 of the present anthology, summarizes some
of these exchanges as they have stood to intervene in and question seemingly fixed, Eurocen-
tric, anthropocentric, androcentric, and hetero-patriarchal, divisions between things and beings.
Yazgünoğ lu sorts through and brings together concepts and terms generated out of both ecofem-
inist and posthumanism scholarship inclusive of terms that include the term, relational ontology;
Rosi Braidotti’s term, “zoe-centered ontology;” and Donna Haraway’s, term, “naturecultures.”
These have generated and helped to raise more awareness of and interest in modes of existence that
support and represent multispecies ethical frameworks. Yazgünoğ lu illustrates this in a reading of
Liz Jensen’s novel, Ark Baby (1988), and A. S. Byatt’s short story, “A Stone Woman” (2003). They
represent a rich vein in contemporary (twenty-first-century) British literature, one that is also rep-
resented by the literary output of such authors as Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Sarah Hall, Daisy
Johnson, Zadie Smith, and Max Porter. As Yazgünoğ lu points out in particular about Jensen’s and
Byatt’s fictions, the two authors explore the kinships between humans and other beings in ways
that question speciesist, androcentric, and anthropocentric notions of personhood and so in ways
that raise high the critical beams of what deserves ethical consideration.
Despite the great leaps forward in understandings of moral ties between humans and other
beings, understandings that ecofeminists forge in their attention to materiality and the body, the
critical reception of Li’s novel, The Butcher’s Wife, continues to reflect feminist discomfort and un-
ease with addressing materiality and the body, for such address asks one to question why humans’
bodies (women’s as well as men’s bodies) are reified and other beings’ bodies are debased. Feminist

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scholars argue that Lin Shi should not be treated by her husband, Chen Jiangshui, a pig butcher, in
the same ways that he treats the pigs whom he raises and slaughters, for she is human not a non-
human animal. An ecofeminist reading of Lin Shi would emphasize that pigs are no less worthy
of moral consideration than the figure of Lin Shi is, and the porcine body is no less beautiful and
vulnerable than is the human body. Li makes this ecofeminist argument, intentionally or not, by
eliding distinctions in her narrative between Chen’s body and pigs as well as between Lin’s body
and the bodies of pigs, and so Li ushers readers into ecofeminist territory, which explores the links
between the oppression and exploitation of humans’ bodies—namely, the bodies of women and
those of the rural poor—and the oppression and exploitation of the porcine species.
On the first night of Lin’s arranged marriage to Chen, Chen rapes her. People living nearby
hear her “screams of pain” (Li 1989, 13). They “[last] so long…that [the people take] them to be
the bleating of ghostly pigs” (Li 1989, 13). After Chen rapes Lin, he “stuff[s] into her mouth, skin
and all,” pieces of pork (Li 1989, 13). Lin is represented here as being constitutionally both human
and porcine. Chen also is represented here as being both porcine and human in the sense that he
physically resembles the pigs whom he raises and slaughters. He has a

short, stocky body and a prominent paunch—more fat than a man ought to have—he walked
with a sort of waddle, kept his hair cut very short… and his small beady eyes were sunk deep
into a swelling of flesh around the sockets.
(Li 1989, 12)

His eyes are “pig-eyes” (Li 1989, 12). Lin represents a terrifically exploited class of animals, human
females. Chen represents an equally terrifically exploited class of animals, human males who are
from rural and poor backgrounds. The pigs represent another no less horrifically exploited class of
animals, nonhuman animals in food production.
When Lin tries to find work outside of the house, Chen reacts with rage and drags her to the
slaughterhouse. It is “nothing less than…hell” (Li 1989, 134). She is forced to confront the “endless
cries of squealing pigs” and the “sharp, acrid stench” of the bodies of those who have just been
slaughtered (Li 1989, 134). In the “dim yellow light,” she watches her husband cut open “the gul-
let of a pig,” who gives a final “prolonged raspy squeal” before dying (Li 1989, 134). The abdomen
of another one of the pigs whom Chen kills “part[s]” from the main mass of the pig’s carcass and
“a mass of pulsating gray innards of varying thickness spill[s] out along with some dark-colored
organs” (Li 1989, 134). Chen “thrust[s]” these at Lin without speaking (Li 1989, 134). “Automat-
ically, she reached out and took them from him. They were soft and sticky to the touch, and still
quite warm” (Li 1989, 135). Moments later, Lin passes out. When she wakes up later that day, she
is at home. Chen returns to the house in the evening and rapes Lin as usual. When he “roll[s] off
her” and falls asleep, Lin takes the knife by his side and “stab[s]” him: “Then it was a squealing,
struggling pig with a butcher knife buried…in its gullet, buckets of dark red blood gushing from
the wound, the animal’s body wracked with convulsions” (Li 1989, 138).
In The Butcher’s Wife, Lin kills Chen to tear herself apart from a condition that her society
forces upon women and many nonhuman animals. To do that, she kills her husband, also an ex-
ploited animal. Feminism highlights the condition of subjugated human animals under patriarchal
frameworks but shows relatively little interest in the nonhuman animals who are subjugated under
related, speciesist, frameworks. Ecofeminism shows such interest; it examines the intersections
between patriarchy and speciesism. “[U]nique for bridging human justice, interspecies justice,
and human-environmental justice” ecofeminism differs from “other feminist environmental per-
spectives,” which either ignore or subordinate “the species question” (Gaard 2016, 69). More so
than any other area of critical inquiry with the exception of Critical Animal Studies, ecofeminism
places “species at the center of… praxis” (Gaard 2017, 34).

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 Peter I-min Huang

Mazu’s Body-Guards by Jade Chen (2004)

Jade Chen’s novel, Mazu’s Body-Guards, highlights hybridity and indigeneity as these terms refer
to processes of indigenization of colonizer-settler people who settled in Taiwan during the time of
the Qing dynasty, or in the time of Japanese colonization (1899–1945), or at the end of the Second
Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). The novel also is a powerful feminist statement. Disappointingly,
Chen makes no references to the ecocritical and ecofeminist significance of the novel’s central
figure, Mazu, the protector of the sea and its ecologies.3 Such oversight is not surprising. Ecocrit-
ical neglect of Mazu is mirrored in mainstream Taiwan society. Nonetheless, Mazu’s Body-Guards
implicitly reaches out to ecocriticism scholars, who engage in and support work that brings about
greater tolerance of and respect for differences, and especially so to ecofeminist scholars.
In Mazu’s Body-Guards’ three main female protagonists—a grandmother, her daughter, and
her granddaughter—represent the diffuse political, ethnic, and cultural identities of Taiwanese
people.4 The three women are united by their love for the indigenized goddess, Mazu, a love that
enables them to overcome what threatens to divide them. That threat comes from or traces to their
fathers, who represent significant conflicting historical, political, cultural, and ethnic allegiances.
Ayoko, the grandmother, who identifies neither as Chinese or Taiwanese, was born in Okinawa,
once ruled by the Ryukyu Kingdom. She migrates to Taiwan in the 1930s and marries a Taiwan-
ese man of Han Chinese descent after her fiancé, a Japanese police officer, is killed in one of the
many battles between the oldest people of Taiwan and the Japanese colonial forces (a battle that re-
fers to the historical Wushe Rebellion in October of 1930). Ayo ko’s husband had fought with the
Japanese imperial army in the Second Sino-Japanese War. He disappears on or near February 28,
1947, an explicit allusion to the 228 Incident, when the KMT government executed people whom
it charged with being Japanese sympathizers and politically and socially dangerous or degenerate.
Lin Fen-fang is the daughter of Ayoko and her husband. When Lin (who also has a Japanese name,
Shizuko) is a young woman, she elopes with a Chinese Nationalist (KMT) soldier and gives birth
to a daughter, the narrator of the novel. The narrator grows up somewhat estranged from both her
mother and grandmother. However, she learns to overcome what threatens to separate her from
her mother and grandmother: pathways that are dictated by patriarchal and colonialist forces. All
three women are united by the eponymous figure of Mazu. Ayoko treasures a statute of Mazu
protected by two bodyguards. The statue was given to Ayoko by her lover (Ayoko’s husband’s
younger brother). Ayoko passes the statue down to her daughter, Lin Fen-fang, who in turn be-
queaths it to her daughter, the narrator. When the narrator falls in love with a young man and
announces her plan to marry him, her family joyfully attributes the union to Mazu.
Critics praise Jade Chen’s novel, Mazu’s Body-Guards (2004) for both its feminist statements
and its work of political amelioration. Through this novel, Chen seeks to reconcile divisions in
Taiwanese society and celebrate rather than disavow Taiwan’s politically and culturally checkered
history. She does that through the central figure of Mazu, a universally popular deity in Taiwan.
Yet, in Chen’s novel, as in Taiwan in general, Mazu worship reflects the significant attenuation
of interest in Mazu’s ancient connections with the environment and so with the role that Mazu
worship might and has played in Taiwan’s environmental consciousness. Mazu worship, in fact,
has played a critical role in that consciousness, but that role is not well known and promoted. It
distinguishes the 1980s, the decade that marks the emergence of Taiwan’s modern environmental
consciousness. Du Pont, a USA company, set up factories in central Taiwan in 1986. Environmen-
talists staged a protest in opposition to a Du Pont plant when they learned that it was poisoning
people and the environment. On August 17, 1986, the protestors were blocked by the police. In
response, the protestors moved to a local Mazu temple. Large crowds gathered, impressed by the
protestors’ respect for and enlistment of Mazu in their cause. The significant public support was
crucial in the decision by DuPont to close its plant (Chang 2008, 192). Another example of the

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 Taiwanese Literature and Ecofeminism

role that Mazu worship has played in Taiwan’s environmental consciousness refers to an incident
that took place in Kong Liao, a small remote fishing village on the northern coast of Taiwan, in
2014. Mazu worshippers joined in a protest against the government’s plans to complete Taiwan’s
controversial fourth nuclear power plant (Liou 2014, 265).
Ecocritic Kate Rigby calls attention to ecofeminist Greta Gaard’s notice of the ancient roots
of environmentalism in Buddhism and the exciting possibilities of cross-cultural conversations
between nonmodern, faith-based forms of environmentalism and modern, scientific-based
forms (2014). Rigby cites fellow Australian Freya Mathews’ notion of the “resacralization of the
cosmos” and comments on the growing interest in nonmodern Aboriginal Australian and Chi-
nese Daoist philosophies that challenge the modern “sado-dispassionate rationality of scientific
reductionism” (2014, 285). This reductionism, which Rigby traces to modern Euro-Western
onto-epistemologies and ecofeminists specifically locate in the patriarchal paths of those epis-
temologies, also is seen in the East; it accompanies the secularization of societies in the East. In
these societies, people of faith—namely, Mazu worshippers and Buddhists—have played a sig-
nificant role in efforts to protect Taiwan’s oldest remaining environments, but the government
in Taiwan hardly acknowledges this. Also, as Chan Kit-sze Amy argues in Chapter 2 of the
present anthology, there is much patriarchal oversight, misapplication, and obfuscation of many
ecofeminist principles and practices embedded in Daoism, and the Confucianist appropriations
of those beliefs. These neglect, misrepresentation, and effacement are seen, for example, in the
Confucianist redaction of the concept of tien ren he yi: the human and the environment are
one. The concept underpins both Daoist and Confucianist teachings, but under Confucianism,
which is a manifestly patriarchal and classist belief system, as Chan emphasizes, the concept is
distorted. Instead of using this concept to refer to the unity between the human and the envi-
ronment, the shared bodies of all living and nonliving things, and the indivisibility between the
earthly (material) and heavenly (immaterial) realms of being, many Confucianist scholars use it
to imply that humans have the highest status among species and the male members of the human
species are more valuable than the female members.
Chan also comments on the ancient Daoist concept, yin-yang, which is represented pictorially
as a circle divided by a curved line into black and white halves. Under Confucianism, the con-
cept came to be understood as symbolizing two opposing, male and female, forces, and these two
forces are regarded as being in a hierarchical relationship. According to this same understanding,
yang, the male force is superior to or stronger than yin, the female force. As Chan argues, under
the older Daoist formations of yin-yang, it represents an equal, nonbinary, form of forces, not a
dualist form of separated and distinct forces.
In addition to plumbing ancient Daoist principles for their ecofeminist content, Chan exam-
ines several classics of literature inclusive of the work of Li Qingzhao. Li’s poetry is steeped in
references to the natural world, but differently from her male peers, Li describes that world in
an unusually frank and so-called naturalist language. As Chan explains, that language works to
respect the autonomy and independence of that world rather than to use that world merely as a
metaphor for the human. Certainly, Li does not avoid or disdain the use of metaphors or the use
of the pathetic fallacy, but when she writes about nature’s moods, and shifts and swings of states,
she is not only if at all imposing or projecting her own affective states on nature. In other words,
in Li’s poetry nature represents a peer of and even a companion to the human more than either a
metaphor for the human or a backstage prop against which the human stands out5.
If Chen’s novel, Mazu’s Body-Guards makes no allusions to the role that Mazu worship has
played in Taiwan’s environmental movement and the role that it might play in the future then, in
emphasizing the calls to respect and accommodate political and cultural differences rather than
eliminating all of those differences or cutting them down to a one-size-fits-all identity, the novel
speaks to environmental concerns inclusive of ecofeminist approaches to environmentalism.

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Pangcah Woman by Yao-ming Gan (2015)

Yao-ming Gan’s Pangcah Woman (2015) represents the most recent direction in Taiwanese liter-
ature, a postcolonial ecocritical one, and, as I will argue, an ecofeminist one. The novel speaks
for Taiwan’s oldest environments when it speaks for the oldest human languages, cultures, and
identities of Taiwan, and it does that in a profound ecofeminist as well as postcolonial ecocritical
language6. The novel also merits attention based on work by scholars in the “cutting-edge aca-
demic field” of Critical Plant Studies, an area of critical inquiry that also pushed ecofeminism in
new directions (Gaard 2017, 27). Gan’s novel’s implicit questioning of common, phyto-phobic as
well as androcentric, understandings of relationships between vegetal and human life ties to those
ecofeminist directions.
The titular figure of Gan’s novel, “Pangcah” refers to a young woman, Gu Axia, the daughter
of an Ami woman. “Pangcah” is the ancient name for Taiwan’s Indigenous Ami people. Gu Ax-
ia’s father, an African-American soldier, met her mother when he was on leave from active duty
during the Vietnam War (the Second Indochina War, 1955–1975). When he leaves Taiwan, he
does not return. Later, as a young woman, Gu Axia runs away from her single-parent home and
finds work in a restaurant in Hualien, a town on the east coast of Taiwan. She falls in love with
a young man, Pajilu, who is autistic and works as a lumberjack. Like Gu Axia, Pajilu is of mixed
ethnicity, the son of a Taiwanese woman of Han Chinese descent and a Japanese man. Pajilu’s
grandfather, Pajilu’s mother’s father, teaches Pajilu most of what he knows about Taiwan’s forests.
Pajilu can identify individual tree species by both smell and sight. Pajilu’s grandfather, Liu Shuimu,
also raises Pajilu to protect the forest on their land, but Pajilu betrays his grandfather’s teachings
when, because of his love for Gu Axia and his desire to help her to raise money to restore a local
school for Aboriginal children, he sells the forest to an international lumbar conglomerate run by
Japanese and other foreign interests. This betrayal is represented in the scene where Pajilu discards
his handsaw and takes up a chainsaw; it also signals the death of Pajilu and what he was taught to
cherish. The tree that he fells falls on and fatally crushes him.
“Pajilu” is the local word for the breadfruit tree, a native plant of Hualian and one that makes a
prominent appearance in Pangcah Woman. In addition to pajilu, Gan mentions the fiddlehead fern,
another old plant species, as well as yellow rotang palms, and several species of cypress and pine.
Liu Shuimu, Pajilu’s grandfather, endeavors for much of his life to preserve these plants, purchas-
ing an area of forest from the Japanese colonizers after their defeat in World War II and retreat
from Taiwan. Liu puts the forest in Pajilu’s name and raises his grandson to keep a distance from
other humans. Pajilu grows up unable to talk to people but able to communicate with trees. At the
age of 60, Liu commits suicide. He instructs Pajilu to severe his head and hang it at the entrance
of the forest so as to ward off loggers, for several hundred trees in the forest are at least a thousand
years old and there is a price on their limbs. These majestic trees (only a few of which survive
today in Taiwan), include the Taiwan cypress, red cypress, and spruce.
The notice in Pangcah Woman of beings in Taiwan includes attention to Taiwan’s incomparable
vegetal realms. Gu Axia’s grandmother names her after different plants. She calls Gu Axia, Alio-
alo, the Chinese tallow tree, on the first day of her birth; Papociay, a type of sorrel, on the second
day; rong, or shell ginger, on the third day, Papowahay, a kind of balloon vine, on the fourth day;
Polet the Ami word for banana, on the fifth day Kidafes, or guava, on the sixth day; and Fanlitan-
shi, the Formosan sugar palm, on the seventh day.
In Pangcah Woman, Gan pays special attention to the devastating masculinist as well as co-
lonialist industry of logging old-growth forests in Taiwan when it was a Japanese colony, and
later, when the Chinese Nationalist government came to power. Deforestation accelerated under
the rule of the Chinese Nationalists (Thornber 2012, 84). The Japanese colonial government
established the first modern lumber industry in Taiwan in 1895, and between 1940 and 1980,

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the Chinese National government continued to fell Taiwan’s camphor, cypress, and yew, and
many other species of trees on a massive scale (Thornber 2012, 85). Today, there are few trees left
that are more than a thousand years old. Those that survived the period of “hyperdeforestation”
between 1940 and 1980 were illegally cut down in subsequent decades, when the government
restricted logging (Huang 2016, 84; Thornber 2012, 85).7
Distinguished by critics for its powerful language, Pangcah Woman also is worth reading because
it questions the dominant, patriarchal, and androcentric, belief that nature either is without lan-
guage and culture or possesses the most rudimentary forms of languages, inferior by far to human
language. Pajilu’s first language is the language of plants. When one of his teachers, Ms. Wen, begins
to teach him human language, Pajilu’s grandfather worries that Pajilu will forget the language of
plants and so falsely accuses Ms. Wen of being a Communist, knowing that this will lead to the loss
of her career and even her life. Wen is executed by the government, and in one of the many twists
and turns that the narrative takes, her corpse merges with the body of a tree. This occurs in the
narrative in the time of the White Terror, a reference to the actual White Terror, which refers to
the suppression of political dissidents in Taiwan when they demonstrated against the government on
February 28, 1947, the so-called 228 Incident. Pajilu and Gu Axia eventually find where Mrs. Wen’s
body has been buried, a mass unmarked grave in Tainan. A strangely shaped tree, a native species of
crape myrtle, the tree grows above the body of Ms. Wen. Wen had not dissuaded Pajilu from com-
municating with trees. She was merely teaching him to be bi-lingual, that is to say, conversant with
the plant as well as the human world. When Pajilu looks at such a strangely beautiful tree, he thinks
she would not mind that her body helped give life to a tree (169).

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have attempted to extend, by way of ecofeminist perspectives, scholarly interest
in three of Taiwan’s most celebrated works of fiction: Ang Li Butcher’s Wife, Jade Chen’s Mazu’s
Body-Guards and Yao-ming Gan’s Pangcah Woman. Pangcah Woman, the most recently published
of the three texts, reflects the greater interest among writers today in issues that are or closely tie
to the concerns of ecofeminists, and I have read it here according to those concerns as well as ac-
cording to the concerns of postcolonial ecocriticism scholars and according to what critical plant
studies scholars address under such terms as ecobiography, phyto-biography, and phyto-history8.
The Butcher’s Wife foregrounds the shared identities of human animals and the porcine species in
ways that invite an ecofeminist interpretation more so than any other critical interpretation. Ma-
zu’s Body-Guards implicitly draws attention to Mazu worship in Taiwan, worship that has played a
role in Taiwan’s environmental consciousness and could continue to play such a role, and the novel
does that in a way that also invites ecofeminist interpretations.

Notes
1 For a detailed summary of this history, see Chen (2001); Chen (2020); Chiu (2007); and Liou (2020).
2 Apart from an influential article by Su-hsin Huang, “The Authenticity of Fake Meats” (2012), the criti-
cal reception of Li’s novel in recent years reflects interest in the novel’s feminist statements more so than
it does interest in the novel’s manifest ecofeminist content.
3 In Taiwan, Mazu has many identities in addition to that of a sea goddess. For a full account of the local,
Taiwanese, indigenizations of Mazu, see Chang (2008, 8). For more on Mazu’s older origins, see Chou
(2001) and Huang (2017).
4 For an extensive summary of the plot of Mazu’s Body-Guards, see Huang (2018).
5 For a fuller ecofeminist evaluation of Li Qingzhao’s poetry, see Huang (2021).
6 Nobel Laureate writer Mo Yan characterizes Gan’s language in Pangcah Woman as so astonishing that it
“can scare the sky” (qtd. in Yan 2020). Comparative Studies scholar, Bert Scruggs, also praises Gan’s lan-
guage, which includes Gan’s deft interweaving of different dialects as well as different languages. Many

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 Peter I-min Huang

of these languages in Taiwan, inclusive of the Southern Min language (Minnayu), and most if not all of
the indigenous languages spoken in Taiwan, at least 16 of which survive today, were prohibited under
the Japanese colonial rulers and the Chinese Nationalist (KMT) government (2019, 47).
7 For more on the logging industry in Taiwan, see Wu (2014).
8 For an explanation of these terms, see White (2021).

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ture and Environment 28, no. 1 (2 April): 312–328. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa074.
Huang, Su-hsin. 2012. “The Authenticity of Fake Meats.” 2012. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
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Li, Ang (李昂). 1983. The Butcher’s Wife (殺夫). Taipei: Linking Books (台北：聯經出版社).
———. 1989. The Butcher’s Wife. Translated by Howard Goldblatt and Ellen Yeung. London: Peter Owen
Press.
Liou, Liang-ya (劉亮雅). 2014. Belated Postcoloniality: Post-Martial Law Taiwanese Fiction (遲來的後殖民:再論
解嚴以來台灣小說). Taipei: National Taiwan University Press (台北:台大出版中心).
———. 2020. Postcoloniality and Memories of Japan: Twenty-First Century Taiwanese Fiction (後殖民與日治記
憶：二十一世紀台灣小說）. Taipei: National Taiwan University Press (台北：台大出版中心).
Phillips, Mary and Nick Rumens. 2016. “Introducing Contemporary Ecofeminism.” In Contemporary
Perspectives on Ecofeminism, edited by Mary Phillips and Nick Rumens, 1–16. London and New York:
Routledge.
Rigby, Kate. 2014. “Spirits That Matter: Pathways toward a Rematerialization of Religion and Spirituality.”
In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 283–290. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Scruggs, Bert. 2019. “It all starts in Hualien: Pangcah Woman; Rose, Rose, I Love You; and The Man with the
Compound Eyes.” In Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context, edited by Bi-yu Chang and Pei-yin Lin, 45–60.
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igan University Press.

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White, Jessica. 2021. “Botanically Adrift: Writing Ecological Estrangement in Two Trees Make a Forest—On
Memory, Migration, and Taiwan.” Tamkang Review 51, no. 2 ( June): 45–62.
Wu, Sheng (吳晟). 2014. Protecting Mother’s River: Diary on the Jhuoshuei River (守護母親之河：筆記濁水溪).
Taipei: Unitas Publishing (台北：聯合文學).
Yan, Hui [楊卉]. 2020. “Pangcah Woman” (邦查女孩). April 19, 2020. Accessed September 30, 2021. https://
www.jasve.com/zh-tw/cnswenhua/db7bca86d8dac2f 7408f28799f67f3c9.html.

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 4
PHILIPPINE LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Christian Jil Benitez

Introduction
Being located along the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Philippines has always been most vulnerable to
various natural hazards: aside from volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, the archipelago is also fre-
quented by typhoons that emerge from the warm waters of the region. On average, 20 typhoons
visit and ravage the country every year, leaving damages amplified by the very rural and urban to-
pographies of the islands. As such, the present climate emergency has been posing the gravest dan-
ger to the country and its people. In the 2019 Global Climate Risk Index (CRI), the Philippines
was ranked fifth among those that have suffered the highest economic loss due to ­weather-related
causes: from 1998 to 2017, it is estimated to incur a loss amounting to US$ 3.47 trillion after ex-
periencing more than 11,500 instances of such events. By 2020, the country even climbed up the
ranks and became second; although by the following year it managed to move down to the 17th
place, it remains to this day among the countries remarked by the CRI to be the most affected by
extreme weather-related events. And considering the worsening climate conditions projected to
most fatally impact developing countries such as the Philippines, no sign seems to indicate that it
would be removed from this watchlist in the near future.
With such lived reality, apprehensions regarding disasters and climate change unsurprisingly be-
came an urgent concern in recent literature in the country. Anthologies such as Elbert Or’s (2010)
After the Storm: Stories on Ondoy, Joycie Dorado Alegre’s (2015) Lunop Haiyan: Voices and Images, and
Merlie M. Alunan’s (2016) Our Memory of Water: Words After Haiyan aim to c­ ommemorate—and
perhaps, however implicitly, work-through—the experiences of disasters each particularly tends
to. Other anthologies, such as Dean Francis Alfar’s (2013) Outpouring: Typhoon Yolanda Relief An-
thology and Eileen Tabios’s (2014) Verses Typhoon Yolanda: A Storm of Filipino Poets, were created to
generate economic aid for the victims themselves. Meanwhile, the anthologies Agam: Filipino Nar-
ratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change by the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (2014)
and Rina Garcia Chua’s (2017b) Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry were
particularly created to propose crucial paradigmatic shifts in thinking about the environment
and literature in the Philippine context: while the former is a conscious attempt to alter the often
“wooden, dense, and constipating” discourse surrounding climate change (Constantino 2014,
xvii), the latter prides itself as the first anthology of such literary genre in the country, and thus
“a creative renewal of not only language but of local literature itself ” (Chua 2017a, xlviii). In all
these literary anthologies, however, it bears underscoring that the specificities in the experience
of climate change according to the rubric of gender are not necessarily foregrounded or chiefly

36 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-5

 Philippine Literature and Ecofeminism

explored, leaving the “masculinist” holistic tendencies in such writings predominantly unprob-
lematized, as in the case of climate fiction in Iris Ralph’s Chapter 44.
This attention to the intersection between the environment and literature, however, is yet to
produce in the Philippine literary landscape a corpus in the critical genre as sizable as its creative
counterpart. Although numerous essays on Philippine ecocriticism have already been published
on local and international platforms, it bears emphasizing that to date, only two collections par-
ticularly gathering such works have been published in the country, both in the year 2019. First is
a special issue of the journal Katipunan, titled Suring Likás (Natural Critique), featuring articles in
Filipino that aim to problematize the “aspirations and directions taken in adapting ecocriticism in
the Philippine condition” (tunguhin at direksiyong tinatahak ng pag-aangkop ng ekokritisismo sa
kalagayang Filipino) (Yapan 2019, 1), as well as “translating keywords in ecocritical discourse to
the Filipino language” (pagsasalin… ng mga salitang sangkot sa diskursong ekokritiko sa wikang
Filipino) (Benitez 2019, 5). The other is the anthology Látag: Essays on Philippine Literature, Culture,
and the Environment, edited by Timothy Ong and Isabel Lacuna (2019), which similarly “hopes to
contribute to gaps in ecocritical scholarship in the Philippines” (Ong 2019, 6). Such common aim
of these anthologies ultimately reveals how Philippine ecocriticism, at least in its present currency,
is primarily attuned to postcolonial and even intersectional considerations, as discussed by Aslı
Değ irmenci Altın and Amy Chan Kit-sze in their Chapters 33 and 31, respectively; however, it is
also worth noting that among the total 21 essays from both collections, only one of them, written
by Lian Sing (2019), explicitly concerns itself with ecofeminism, attempting to translate the said
sensibility to existent Philippine vernacular ideas.
This does not mean, however, that ecofeminism is practically nonexistent in the Philippine
discursive field, for as how this essay demonstrates, its core sensibilities have been perceptibly pres-
ent in the country albeit commonly categorized under other traditions of ideas. For while there
are indeed lines of Philippine critical thoughts that particularly attend to the mutual concerns of
women and the environment, these are often not explicitly labeled as “ecofeminist,” but instead
usually subsumed to other predominant critical nomenclatures such as the “postcolonial”/“anti-
colonial”/“decolonial,” the “feminist,” or even the “Indigenous.” And so, undertaking the task of
outlining ecofeminism in the country’s critical traditions demands a simultaneous articulation of
its possible particular rendition from the Philippines, similar to the strategic recourse rehearsed by
Chitra Sankaran and Gayatri Thanu Pilla to the concept of thinai (Chapter 7) to reconsider Tamil
literature in ecofeminist terms. This is especially urgent in a postcolonial context such as the
Philippines, for as Altın points out in Chapter 33, there is a tendency for ecocritical frameworks
to overlook, if not to neglect, the diversity in and specificities of histories and cultures across the
globe, given the own embeddedness of the history of ecocriticism to the West1. In other words
then, to historicize ecofeminist thought in the Philippines is to assert at the same time a Philippine
ecofeminism—or perhaps, ecofeminisms—that might not consciously identify itself as such, yet
still recognizably sharing of orientations with ecofeminism as it is globally understood. There-
fore, to attempt historicizing Philippine ecofeminism is to also aspire contributing to the ongoing
transformations of ecofeminism itself—to partake in the planetary discourse on what shape such
sensibility might take, all from the specific vantage point of this part of the world. In a way, it is
to actually put ecofeminism into practice, rehearsing its acuity for denaturalization, in intimating
the constructedness even of itself as a critical sensibility.

Indigenous Spirituality and the Babaylan: Premise for a Philippine Ecofeminism

One of the earliest overt articulations of ecofeminist stake in the Philippine context can be found
in Agnes Miclat-Cacayan’s (1998, 11–12) rumination on Filipino “Indigenous spirituality,” which
she describes as “the primal vision, the original beliefs, concepts and rituals observed by the

37
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Filipino people prior to the coming of the revealed religions Christianity and Islam.” Consid-
ering the particular history of the Philippines as a southeast Asian archipelago that has endured
multiple colonial duress, namely, from the Spaniards, the Americans, and the Japanese; and whose
narrative has been predominantly “written from the perspective of the coloniser or the majority,”
Miclat-Cacayan (1988, 32) proposes to confront the urgent “enigma that is the Filipino” through
turning to documented oral traditions, as to initiate a method that ultimately “learn[s] ‘from’
the indigenous people rather than ‘about’ them” (cf. Miclat-Cacayan 2002, vii). In this sense,
vital then to the aspiration for such “spiritual renewal” is imperative to stand for the very lives of
these Filipinos, “our vanishing indigenous peoples,” especially the women among them, which
in turn entails a similar attendance to the specific environments they inhabit (Miclat-Cacayan
1988, 33; cf. Miclat-Cacayan 2002, 53). In other words, for Miclat-Cacayan, the attempt toward a
decolonizing articulation of what the “Filipino” might mean necessitates taking into account the
intersection of Indigenous spirituality, the lives of indigenous people, and the Philippine environ.
This way, it is only palpable that the “challenge to renewal [of spirituality] is also the challenge of
ecofeminism,” which she defines as follows:

Ecofeminism pertains to current women movements raising environmental and development

issues affecting the global community and the condition and position of women in these. In
other words, ecofeminism merges the mutually affecting concerns of women and ecology.
This being so, it cannot but be guided by a holistic and creation-centered spirituality.
(Miclat-Cacayan 1998, 33)

It bears emphasizing that in this definition, Miclat-Cacayan critically intersects ecofeminism with
Indigenous spirituality, taking the latter as an edifying “guide” to the former sensibility. Such
intersection is instructive in articulating intuitions of ecofeminism in the Philippine context,
considering especially how religion has been an authoritative vector for the historical violent mar-
ginalizations of both women and the environment. As Miclat-Cacayan (1998, 11) reminds us, it is
upon the arrival of the Spanish colonizers that “our own ancestors were cowed into Christendom,
bowing to the cross as they heard sounds evincing from a god ‘far superior’ than their own,” and
eventually cultivating a “presumptuous attitude… in regard to minority religious groups.” In
time, the dominance of Christianity in the country not only fostered the chauvinism that has been
subjecting women to various modes of oppression to date, but also encouraged an abusive, if not
an outright antagonistic attitude toward the environment itself 2. As the Manobo balyan or wise
woman Macaria Oquindo explains: “The forest is now being destroyed because the ‘Kristiyanos’
[Christians] removed God from it… If one does not see God living in nature but only inside a
building, you would not hesitate to destroy nature” (Miclat-Cacayan 2004, 54)3.
While the destruction of the environment certainly affects everyone, Miclat-Cacayan (1988,
29–30) underscores how it is the Indigenous women who suffer and become “the most victim-
ized” in such devastation, for it is their abode and immediate life source that is primarily upset
by so-called “development projects” in the country. This way, it only becomes apparent that
in the Philippines, to aspire to inclusive liberation for women is to urgently aspire to justice as
well for the environment—a critical entanglement particularly tended by ecofeminism, especially
in its most activating spirit, as Sunaina Jain discusses and Nicolás Campisi demonstrates in the
South American context in Chapters 25 and 17, respectively. Furthermore, as implied thus far,
if ecofeminism is construed to be “a new term for an ancient wisdom” (Diamond and Orenstein
1990, in Mies and Shiva 2014, 13), such sensibility fleshes itself out in the Philippine context
through the grammar of Indigenous spirituality, akin to what is generally considered as “cultural
ecofeminism,” which “celebrates the relationship between women and nature through the revival
of ancient rituals” (Merchant 2002, 201–205)4. In this sense, such Philippine ecofeminism shares

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many similarities with other ecofeminist sensibilities from non-Western contexts, such as India,
as refracted in Sankaran and Pillai’s outline of Tamil literature (Chapter 7), and Sangita Patil on
Hindi literature (Chapter 8); China, as in Kit-ze’s exploration of Chinese philosophy as instruc-
tive toward Chinese ecofeminism (Chapter 2); and even Africa, as in Nicole Anae’s tessellation of
various Indigenous sensibilities from the continent (Chapter 10).
It then becomes understandable why in this Philippine rendition of ecofeminism, a figure from
the repressed history of the country is often summoned to represent the intuited intimate relation
between women and the environment: the babaylan or the shaman of precolonial times, who
is also known by other names such as the baliana, catalonan, daetan, and mumbaki (Mangahas
1999). Frequently expected to be the one to “negotiate for blessings, avert misfortunes, predict
future events, heal broken bodies and spirit, assist the dying and help usher one’s soul/spirit to the
next life” (Mangahas 2006, 23–24; cf. Evasco 1992, 10), the babaylan, especially one of the present
times, also performs relatively mundane, if not “domestic,” tasks such as planting, weaving, danc-
ing, and chanting (Miclat-Cacayan 2004, 33)5. Furthermore, while commonly taken as a female,
it is crucial to underscore that since gender was primarily recognized as “an occupation and a role
not fixed on birth sex” ( Jacobo 2021, 613; cf. Salazar 1999, 2–4), the babaylan—and by extension,
the feminine status in general—can be also embodied by people who may be sex-assigned males
yet self-presenting females. In this sense, while cultural ecofeminism is mostly known to primarily
found itself in the divine, and its notion of human nature on human biology (Merchant 2002,
202), the mediation of the figure of the babaylan in the Philippine context ideally allows a certain
queering that critically refuses the “oppression of the erotic” (Gaard 1997, 118), and thus expand-
ing the possibilities of conceiving what the “female,” among other key concepts, could possibly
mean in such ecofeminism. Therefore, the figure of the babaylan ultimately poses the possibility
toward queer hybridity that Asmae Ourkiya, in Chapter 29, nominates as a necessary orientation
if ecofeminism will be turned away from the sways of hegemonic essentialisms.
This queer erotic potency of the babaylan, however, is yet to be engaged by the prevalent
discoursing of her figuration in the Philippine critical landscape. For instance, in Fe Manga-
has’s (2006, 21) babaylanismo, described as “a form of women’s consciousness indigenous to the
Philippines,” while it is acknowledged that the babaylan can be someone who is sex-assigned
male, biologistic assumptions seem to still rest at its core6. In Flaudette May Datuin’s (2012, 64)
rearticulation of babaylanismo, with particular relation to “embodied spirituality,” as much as the
body is taken to be “an anatomical, spiritual, social and psychic space grounded on fluidity and
wholeness, instead of hierarchy and dualities,” the evocation of the babaylan is firstly caveated as
“a form of strategic essentialism,” specifically as a “signifier for women’s life-giving, nurturing
and healing powers”—in other words, for the commonly presumed biological similarities between
women and nature itself (Merchant 2002, 202)7. Despite the obvious limitations in its perceptible
biologism, in babaylanismo, the woman is ultimately regarded to be a vital part of the community,
given her particular attunement to the environment which grants her the necessary wisdom to not
only help the collective thrive, but also refuse and persist through the violence that she, as well as
her surroundings, suffer. In this sense, for Mangahas (2019), the babaylan’s continuous presence
in the Philippine history can be also gleaned in instances of revolt against colonizers and general
injustices committed against women and the environment—and in turn, implicitly including as
well to such long herstory of babaylan struggle the discursive practices by Miclat-Cacayan, Da-
tuin, and herself.
Another established discourse that encompasses the babaylan as its center is that of the Filipi-
nos in the diaspora. According to Leny Mendoza Strobel (2006, 150), a Filipino scholar based
in the United States, the babaylan is a significant figure for their community as she represents
the opportunity for an “imagined return” to their roots while still being without it. This re-
turn becomes possible through channeling the construed attentiveness of the babaylan to the

39
 Christian Jil Benitez

environment—indeed, that bodily wisdom which opens her to the world, as to initiate a certain
intimacy with things; therefore, in such “land-body connection”—“an emotional relationship
with trees, with the ocean, with the mountains, with the sky” (Strobel 2010, 15)—what is ulti-
mately activated is one’s capacity for eros, most especially with the nonhuman. In a way, there is
then perceptible parallelism between the recourse to the babaylan of Filipinos in the diaspora, es-
pecially in the United States, with the turn of Native Americans to their Indigenous sensibilities,
as discussed by Benay Blend in Chapter 19, with both instances demonstrating insistence to re-
claim, assert, and nourish their own sense of cultural identity. And yet, although this erotic virtue
of the babaylan for the Filipino in the diaspora is recognized to be rehearsable in a wide range of
practices, including literature (Tabios 2010), visual arts (Garcia 2013), and music (Perkinson 2013),
it is worth noting how this harnessing seems to engage with the environment not primarily for
the sake of its entangled liberation with the oppressed—indeed, its activist potency—but rather
merely for the aspired imagined return of the diasporic body. Here, it might be crucially telling
that environmental justice, or at least the critical attention to present environmental destructions
especially affecting the Philippines, was not mentioned among the key concepts in heeding the
call of the babaylan, as enumerated by Strobel (2010, 32–36). In this sense, such diasporic Philip-
pine ecofeminism is yet to consider the possibilities of what could be a migrant ecofeminism that
could actually tend to the mutual concerns of women in the diaspora and the environment itself,
if not particularly in the Philippines8.

Inang Bayan and Premises for Ecofeminist Philippine Literature

While Philippine ecofeminism by and large is yet to expand to intersect with sensibilities such as
posthumanism and new materialism, its predominant Indigenous spiritual premise already offers a
way through which Philippine literature can be preliminarily intuited in ecofeminist terms. Here,
a trope commonly adopted in nationalist discourses becomes invaluably instructive: that of Inang
Bayan (Motherland), which has been first deployed in the rhetoric of n ­ ineteenth-century Fili-
pino revolutionaries and eventually assimilated into the popular vocabulary (see Rodriguez-Tatel
2014). While usually understood in anticolonial sentiments—that is, the Inang Bayan as a figure
to be defended against the threat of colonization even at the cost of one’s life (see, e.g., Bonifa-
cio 1963, 72–74)—the ecofeminist potential of this trope can be explored through Grace Odal’s
(1999) articulation of the Indigenous seed idea (“diwang-binhi”) of the ba’i. As a term that si-
multaneously pertains to the bodies feminine and aquatic, which are both generally regarded as
intimating of the notion of life itself, the ba’i is construed to be the locus around which the bayan
or community is formed, thus rendering the emergence of Inang Bayan to be after Inang Tubig
(“Mothersea”) (Odal 1999, 1)9. In her valuable work toward critical Philippine ecofeminism, Lian
Sing (2019, 122) further recalibrates the ba’i to underscore that its principle must “not only per-
ceive existence as deeply rooted in the sea as mother, and mother as woman, but also mother as
active and autonomous”10.
This latter assertion of autonomy is crucial, for while the trope of Inang Bayan has been deployed
in many literary texts since the nineteenth century, such intersection of women and the environ-
ment often romanticizes them to a fault, with the “manifold of [their] sufferings… diminut[ing
them] as perpetually in need of restoration, as to regress finally to… virginity” ­( Benitez 2020, 81).
Rosario Cruz-Lucero (2007, 22–35) traces such idealization through a crucial metonymic figure:
that of Mariang Makiling (“Maria of the Makiling”), a diwata or enchanted being believed to
inhabit and protect Mt. Makiling in the Laguna province. According to Lucero (2007, 18), the
diwata—like many other surviving mythic figures of Maria in the country—only managed to
live through Philippine history, especially the nineteenth-century Catholic censorship, through
“the first sex change operation in the history of the Philippines,” namely, their sacrificing of their

40
 Philippine Literature and Ecofeminism

arguable androgyny to become a “seductive nymph,” and then earning the name “Maria” simply
appended to their place of origin. And particularly in relation to the national hero Jose Rizal’s
(1961, 104) recounting of the myth of Mariang Makiling, Lucero (2007, 31) sharply points out
that her figure was created for the purpose of a “masculinist nationalistic narratology” (see, e.g.,
Mojares 2002, 1–19). It is this narratological strategy that can be gleaned for the most part of the
canonical historicization of Philippine literature: for instance, during the American colonial pe-
riod, including the Pacific War which gave way to the Japanese occupation of the country, women
and the environment are often intersected as to become objects of nostalgia, figures that aspire to
represent a “natural” Filipino identity via the idyll, as a response to the then rapid modernization
of the country. And so, it is more than apparent that an examination of hegemonic masculinity, as
it has been particularly projected to women and the environment throughout Philippine history,
can only be necessary and long overdue (see, for instance, Lydia Rose’s Chapter 30).
While there is already a considerable body of Philippine feminist writing early on (see, for
instance, Reyes 2003; Santiago 1997), works that integrate the environment in an appreciably
ecofeminist manner mostly come from what Rosario Torres-Yu (2000, 25) deems as the third
generation of Philippine feminist writers, that is, those who were published and became known
around the 1980s11. Poets such as Myrna Peña-Reyes (1994) and Merlie M. Alunan (1993, 2010)
are noteworthy for their attention on the environment in their works, however, figured not
merely as an objective correlative for human sentiments but rather as elements that participate in
shaping these affects. Rosario Cruz-Lucero (2012), in her fiction, implicates the environment to
problematize the Philippine postcolonial condition, especially from the vantages and experiences
of women. Meanwhile, in the poems of Grace Monte de Ramos (1999) and Lina Sagaral Reyes
(1993), the environment is also intersected with their particular concerns on “re-defin[ing] the
verities of womanhood in radical terms” (Evasco 1992, 21). These are all similar to the aspirations
of the trilingual poet and fictionist Merlinda Bobis in her own works: for instance, with regards
to performing her epic “Kantada ng Babaing Mandirigma/Cantata of The Warrior Woman Da-
ragang Magayon,” a retelling of the myth of Mt. Mayon in the Bicol region, Bobis relates that
such is her attempt to “re-invent our identity…[to] never become a fixed Self,” and be “as fluid as
water” (Bobis 1994, 154)—which is, perhaps, also to say queerly hybrid (see Ourkiya, Chapter 29).
Two other significant writers in this ecofeminist literary tradition are Marjorie Evasco (1987)
and Benilda Santos (1996). Both poets and essayists, the turn to the environment appear to be an
essential strategy in their works to allow a certain liberation to eventuate for women, even in the
midst of their ordinary everyday. As Evasco (1995, 114–115) puts it, poetry is “an eccentric act of
conjuring for oneself and others something magical which makes its presence felt in the everyday,”
which is all the more crucial for women whose “daily, ordinary lives” have been trivialized by
many (Evasco 1987, 13). Similarly, for Santos (2020), the conjuring that the environment effects
in her poetry is also vital in providing the feminine subject, who has been disciplined by her var-
ious social relations, temporal emancipation even in the most constricting of urban and domestic
spaces (see Benitez 2017a)12. This way, Evasco’s and Santos’s regard to poetry ultimately resonate
with what Andrew David King, in Chapter 49, asserts of the genre in relation to ecofeminism: it
is a form capacious enough for women and the environment to rehearse themselves all at once as
agents most intimate and entangled with each other.

Conclusion
The present preliminary articulation of Philippine ecofeminism intuits a vernacular line of thought
that harnesses Indigenous spirituality in response to the mutual urgent concerns of women and
the environment. In turn, a reconsideration of Philippine literature from such sensibility makes
manifest a body of writing that consciously harnesses the environment, as to insist against the

41
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oppression of the erotic in the everyday. This then allows for a refusal against the masculinist
nationalist figuration of women intersected with the environment simply as the monolithic Inang
Bayan, asserting instead the multiplicities of the lived Philippine tropics. From here, the promise
of ecofeminist literatures in the archipelago can only be abundant. For instance, works such as
those by Genevieve Asenjo (2014, 2021) and John Iremil Teodoro (2021), while often considered
under, if not limited within, the classification of the “regional,” can be refracted as ultimately
ecofeminist and queer ecofeminist, respectively, in their own terms, and thus allowing opportu-
nities for rereadings beyond the typical framework of masculinist nationalism. Such is the case,
too, with the anthologies BKL/Bikol Bakla: Anthology of Bikolnon Gay Trans Queer Writing, edited
by Ryen Paolo Sumayao and Jaya Jacobo (2019), and Talinghaga ng Lupa: Mga Tula (Metaphors of
the Earth: Poems) (2019) published by Gantala Press, which both attend to the positionality and
materiality of the environ as to inform their particular discourses on gender and peasant struggles.
From these few recent examples, it can only be construed how ecofeminism offers a promise most
potent to Philippine literature, one that is relevant more than ever: that its future, as well as its
entire history, might be written, and written again, now with utmost consideration on Filipino
women and environment, transforming ultimately what it means to be a nation—perhaps this
time, too, in the most located of senses.

Notes
1 It is telling, for instance, how many of the chapters in the present handbook begin with—or at least
mention in—their respective discussion the French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne’s coinage of the term
“ecofeminism,” as if its recall is imperative, if not inevitable. See especially Abhik Gupta’s Chapter 9,
with its most apparent recourse to continental philosophy, in articulating the (European?) ecofeminist
in Bengali literature.
2 See for instance between the binary of tagabayan (townsmen) and tagabukid (countryside people) or
tagabundok (mountain people) in Lumbera and Lumbera (1997).
3 For the connection between forestry and the Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, see Bankoff (2004).
4 For similar conceptions of such sensibility, see Corpuz (1996), Tapia (2002), and Odal (2004).
5 Miclat-Cacayan (2004, 33) even notes the following as contemporary role of the babaylan: “Shaman
women also perform women’s traditional roles like domestic chores, including operating a sari-sari [small
retail] store.”
6 For instance, Mangahas (2006, 22) asserts that the babaylan, though “predominantly women,” can be
“men [who] had to be like women,” while Datuin (2012, 75) describes such men as those “who ‘aspired’
to be women or binabae” (emphasis added). However, as Jacobo (2021, 613, 614) underscores, such
­female-presenting sex-assigned male babaylans are already “considered as women as they conducted
themselves as such,” while the binabae has “not only subjectivity but also the agency to determine her-
self and identify as a woman”—in other words, “she is already understood to be a woman at her core.”
7 While Datuin (2012, 66) invokes “strategic essentialism” after Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, it bears not-
ing that Spivak (2008, 260) herself eventually revokes the same strategy, acknowledging the undeniable
tendency of its deployment to perpetuate mere essentialism.
8 This proposition is after Rina Garcia Chua’s (2019) conceptualization of “migrant ecocriticism,” which
intersects postcolonial ecocriticism, diaspora studies, and transnationalism.
9 It bears emphasizing that this shift from Inang Bayan to Inang Tubig crucially articulates a shift too
in the geopoetics underlying the imagination of the community, namely, from the terrestrial to the
aquatic. For an instance of such “aqueous mode of knowing” the community, see Kaaran (2018).
10 It is this autonomy, after all, that can be also gleaned at the core of bayan, that is, the community as
terrestrial; see Benitez (2017b).
11 Although in the following enumeration, only Benilda Santos is also among those included in Torres-Yu’s
(2000) anthology, the latter’s chronological categorization is still used as the temporal marker of the
essay considering that feminist literary movements in the Philippines is yet to be analyzed and classified
into discernible waves or orientations.
12 Here, it must be of interest to note too that Santos’s poetry somehow takes after that of her mentor,
Rolando Tinio, who is one of the vanguards of the Bagay (Thing) poetry, a poetic proposition from

42
 Philippine Literature and Ecofeminism

the 1960s, that is considerably new materialist with its avowal for the material world as it is, and not as
a mere metaphor for human sentimentalizations (see Benitez 2022). And so, one might even intuit from
Santos’s poetry a Philippine posthuman ecofeminism (see Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu’s Chapter 34); see, for
instance, a review of her recent poetry collection Ruta: Mga Bago at Piling Tula (Route: New and Selected
Poems) (Benitez 2021).

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 5
VIETNAMESE LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Quynh H. Vo

Introduction
Since the last troupes of Americans left Vietnam in 1975, terminating two decades of the US
military intervention in the country, Vietnam was vastly wretched and submerged in traumatic
sorrows and economic distress, especially as the Vietnamese government imposed the erroneous
policy of economic collectivism. Vietnamese literature during this postwar period (1975–1995)
represents human-nature harmony as a force to propel people forward in their collective efforts
to rebuild the country from war ruins. As the government exerted the economic straitjacket over
an already devastated country that was still grieving the dead and struggling to sustain those who
survived the war, Vietnam closed its door to the world. While writing about human affection to
the land has seeped into Vietnamese literary tradition, manifested through folklore and ancient
narratives since the medieval period (from the tenth century to the fifteenth century), postwar
literature in Vietnam turns to denouncing war and its destruction of Vietnamese people and the
ecology. During the war years from 1961 to 1971, the US military sprayed approximately 20 mil-
lion gallons of Agent Orange (lethal chemicals) on roughly 6,000 square miles of Vietnam’s for-
ests, water, soil, and air to destroy the trail where supplies were transferred from North to South
Vietnam, causing massive human and ecological damage in the country. Postwar writers like Ma
Văn Kháng, Sươ ng Nguyệt Minh, Nguyễn Quang L ập, Võ Th ị Hảo, Minh Chuyên… mostly
attend to war aftermath on human bodies and nature.
Later, when “Đổi Mớ i” or transforming literature movement was initiated in 1986 in response
to the national renovation from the planned economy to a free market—displayed in its fierce
rationality of modernization and industrialization—Vietnamese writers shift their pens to reckon
with ecological issues in the face of environment and natural resources being recklessly exploited
as a form of economic violence. Those ecologically conscious writers who capture contaminated
nature deeply in their literary works are Nguyễn Huy Thiệp with Mu ối c ủa r ừ ng or The Salt of
Woods (1983), Tr ần Duy Phiên with Trăm n ăm còn l ại or The Remaining Hundred Years (1996)
Nguyễn Minh Châu with S ống mãi vớ i cây xanh or Living Forever With Green Trees (1983) and Phiên
ch ợ Giát or Giat Market (1987).
The paucity of literary voices when humans and nature are on the verge of destruction unsettles
the Vietnamese literary critic Nguyễn Thanh Tâm who publicly asks, “When forests disappear,
mountains turn barren, rivers dry up, and human beings wither away amid a raging nature and
perilous pandemic, where is literature?” Nguyễn laments the lacuna of such pressing issues in Viet-
namese literature. Careened along accelerating forces of globalization and modernization, Nguyễn

46 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-6

 Vietnamese Literature and Ecofeminism

eloquently observes, Vietnamese people tend to pursue material desires at the expense of their en-
vironment; yet Vietnamese literature seems to represent human greed separately from nature pain.
Writing ecology, Nguyễn elucidates, is still a conception in Vietnam as writers have hesitated to
claim their commitment to “green writing.” Without a mission or an agenda highlighted in lit-
erary trajectories, ecological writing in Vietnam emerges as a transient movement, overshadowed
by other modern writing tendencies. However, Vietnamese female writers in this chapter manifest
otherwise. Their writings are dark with endless human struggles against colonial violence, imperial
war, and global capitalism that continue to loom large in modern Vietnam. These relentless forces
have unsettled Vietnamese people and the land that nurtures them. Ramifications of such military
conflicts and economic violence keep ricocheting in prominent works of Vietnamese women writers
such as Nguyễn Phan Quế mai, Nguyễn Thị Kim Hoà, and Kiều Bích Hậu that this chapter casts
light on. While these authors were born during the Vietnam War (Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and
Kiều Bích Hậu), or a decade after the war ended (Nguyễn Thị Kim Hoà), they all choose to revisit
Vietnam’s turbulent history through their ecofeminist prism that renders visible atrocities of human
violence upon other human bodies, lands, rivers, forests… These women authors’ concerns and is-
sues are predominant in what Richard Magee defines in Chapter 37 as “sentimental ecology” or “a
rhetorical trope that uses the language of home, community, and emotional connections to explore
the complex relationship between humans and their environment” and situated within postcolonial
framework that Aslı Değirmenci Altın discusses in Chapter 33. Such women’s issues and concerns
examined in this chapter also resonate with those of Third-World women in postcolonial countries
which, as Sunaina Jain observes in Chapter 25, often intersect and overlap, and their environmental
activism emerges from similar causes.

America’s Vietnam: A Country of Kiều

Vietnamese literature has been translated and popularized in the West either as literature of pow-
erless, miserable women suffering jeopardies of patriarchal oppression (the Tale of Kiều by Nguyen
Du, a celebrated Vietnamese poet since the eighteenth century) or that of ideological wars (the
Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh). This monolithic (mis)representation of Vietnam overshadows his-
torical entanglements of militarism, modernization, and global capitalism in the country, not to
mention the heterogeneity of Vietnamese people and their relationship with the land that nurtures
them. Reading Vietnamese literature in light of ecofeminism illuminates the readers’ understand-
ing of the intersectionality of racial and gendered politics that inform Vietnamese narratives.
When the US president Bill Clinton visited Vietnam in 2000, 25 years after the Vietnam War
ended (1975), he delivered a speech at a formal reception at the Presidential Palace, quoting Truyện
Kiều (The Tale of Kiều): Sen tàn cúc l ại n ở hoa / S ầu dài ngày ngắn đông đà sang xuân (“The lotus is
withering, daisies blooming / the winter of sorrows is transient, and here comes the spring”). By
using the metaphors of the “dying lotus” and “blooming daisies,” Clinton implies that the Cold
War period has dissolved, allowing for the auspicious opportunities of the Vietnam–US relation-
ship to blossom. Sixteen years later, in May 2016, at the National Convention Center in Hanoi,
Vietnam, President Barack Obama also borrowed Nguyen Du’s the Tale of Kiều verses to stimu-
late a new chapter in the history of the US–Vietnam relationship, promising a “100-year journey
together” (Obama 2016). Pursuing this same diplomatic etiquette, Vice President Joe Biden also
quoted Nguyen Du while raising his glass in a toast to the General Secretary of Vietnam, Nguyen
Phu Trong, during his official visit to the United States in July 2015: ‘Trờ i còn để có hôm nay /
Tan sương đầu ngõ vén mây giữa trờ i (“Thank heavens we are here today / to see the sun through
dissolved fog and evanesced clouds”) (Biden 2015). With his suave demeanor, Biden likened the
previous antagonism and hostility between the United States and Vietnam to “fog” and “clouds”
that have dissipated, allowing for hopes and dreams to emerge like sunshine in a clear sky.

47
 Quynh H. Vo

As the US presidents and diplomats, via their political agenda, continue to orchestrate the Tale
of Kiều—an epic from the nineteenth century that portrays a female protagonist, Thuý Kiều, who
had to trade her body as a prostitute for the economic survival of her father, saving her family from
debt, they perpetuate the master narratives about Vietnam as a broken, helpless country, like Kiều,
that needs to be saved and protected by other powerful countries. Popularizing discourse as such,
as Lydia Rose elucidates in Chapter 30, amounts to performing hegemonic masculinity, which
normalizes the domination of women and nature. Representing Vietnam in light of Kiều justifies
the American military intervention into Vietnam—the Vietnam War—which the United States
remembers as a “good war” that “liberates” and “rescues” desperate Vietnamese people from the
evil communist regime (Espiritu 2014). Losing the Vietnam War, however, the United States re-
writes the history by spotlighting a successful community of Vietnamese refugees in the media, as
scholar Mimi Thi Nguyen observes, to manifest the economic reward and “the gift of freedom”
that can only be redeemed through war and violence (Nguyen 2012).
Scholars have juxtaposed the Vietnam War with the United States flexing its masculinity as
they have highlighted the intersectionality of war, gender, identity, and global capitalism. Susan
Jeffords argues that the dominant discourse of the Vietnam war manifests the pervasiveness of
patriarchal values or “remasculinization of America.” Christina Schwenkel relates Clinton’s dip-
lomatic journey to Vietnam with his “conscientious approach” that “fell back upon more standard
American paternalist roles and moral scripts of history” (Schwenkel 2009). Analyzing Clinton’s
discourse, which emphasizes Vietnam’s cooperation in the American MIA mission as the impetus
that encouraged America to renormalize relations with Vietnam through the trade agreement,
Schwenkel contends that this normalization signifies “the gift of global capitalism and US neo-
liberalism” that the United States here sells to the socialist market of Vietnam as “the virtues of
American capitalism” (Schwenkel 3). Politically, the economic diplomacy that the United States
extends to Vietnam through the US presidents’ repetitive rhetoric of the Vietnamese ancient lit-
erary text, The Tale of Kiều, as an implicit promise of a “hundred years” togetherness, exhibits its
strategic agenda of empowerment that delegates Vietnam to the submissive position in an asym-
metrical relationship or just a logic of economic violence.
Vietnamese women writers like Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Nguyễn Th ị Kim Hoà, and Kiều Bích
Hậu trouble the dominant discourse of The White Man’s Burden, “good war,” and “liberation”
through their critical war narratives by dramatizing war atrocities and their ongoing aftermaths
(agent orange) on Vietnamese soil, human bodies, rivers, mountains, and ocean. These Vietnam-
ese women authors also write against the postwar violent economy that threatens to devastate the
ecologies of modern Vietnam.
In their literary cosmos, Vietnamese nature and women have been downtrodden and com-
mercialized in whirlwinds of military and economic violence. In her award-winning novel,
The Mountain Sings, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai takes her readers through disaster after disaster, all
manmade, that ravages her homeland and people. Nguyễn Thi ̣ Kim Hòa poignantly portrays
Vietnamese women’s bodies floating like threads of smoke through the wartime in her awarded
story Đ ỉnh Khói (The Smoke Cloud). In The Lotus Season, Kiều Bích Hậu portrays Dạ Liên—the
female protagonist who did not succumb to the government’s coercion to dispel her from the
lotus swamp that her father bequeathed to her before his death. Vietnamese women writers have
marched in solidarity with global ecofeminists in their collective efforts to denounce human vi-
olence to nature and female bodies in Vietnam and beyond. Their political engagement through
aesthetics unfurls women feeling betrayed from within or ruined by multifarious oppression.
Vietnamese women’s literature, when reading from the prism of ecofeminism renders visible how
women and nature in Vietnam have been extracted by human appetites. Their literary work is a
form of ecofeminist protest and a historical revisit of human beauty and brutality. Their esthetic
and political activism through ecofeminist writing enacts radical changes.

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 Vietnamese Literature and Ecofeminism

Ecowomanist Empowerment as a Conceptual Framework

Ecofeminism, and all ecofeminist questions, are still debatable, as scholars have wrestled to define
it from their varied positionalities. Rather than examining the embodied connection between
gender and sexuality in ecofeminism, scholars dismiss this intersectionality and politics altogether,
deploying antiessentialist rhetoric to attack this field. In her seminal article, “Ecofeminism Revis-
ited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism,”
Greta Gaard (2011) redefines ecofeminism as a critical theory that scrutinizes “the connections
among racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, speciesism, and the environment,” reminding schol-
ars to map out the field without losing sight of its complex genealogy (Gaard 26). Gaard recounts
an anecdote about her colleague who questioned the inclusiveness of ecofeminism as it marginal-
ized women of color. This colleague’s assumption about the field, as Gaard explains, stems from
the mainstream feminism that persistently posits that ecofeminism was “ethnocentric, elitist, and
essentialist—just a ‘white women’s thing’ and an irrelevant distraction from feminism’s more crit-
ical work addressing social injustices” (Gaard 41). This dominant discourse of ecofeminism results
in the jettison of ecofeminism and related institutions from the critical scholarship.
As ecofeminism was defunct from feminism and other critical theories, feminist scholars
deemed this erasure a broken antifeminist strategy, mostly instigated by privileged straight white
men who, in their ecocritical and ecophilosophical texts, “summarize ecofeminism in a couple of
paragraphs and then dismiss it as hopelessly outmoded and essentialist”. Scholars then negotiated a
communicative language that acknowledges the intersections between ecofeminism and ecocrit-
icism. Noël Sturgeon (1997) defined “‘ecofeminism’ as a term [that] indicates a double political
intervention, of environmentalism into feminism and feminism into environmentalism” (169),
naming her approach as “global feminist environmental justice”. In Alaimo and Heckman’s Mate-
rial Feminisms (2007), the editors problematize mainstream feminist theories for having pursued a
“light from nature,” persistently separating “woman” from the supposed ground of essentialism,
reductionism, and stasis” (qtd. in Gaard 42). The problem with this approach, as Alaimo and
Heckman argue, is that “the more feminist theories distance themselves from “nature,” the more
that very nature is implicitly or explicitly reconfirmed as the treacherous quicksand of misog-
yny” (qtd. in Guaard 43). Juxtaposing cultural studies with ecofeminist literature, Nicole Anae
highlights in Chapter 27 a productive trajectory that cultural ecofeminists pursue, which aims to
disrupt dominant patriarchal hegemonies and praxes that jeopardize the natural environment and
the status and conditions of women, fostering social and cultural equalities. Anae’s observation
informs my reading and conceptualization of Vietnamese literature.
This chapter scrutinizes Vietnamese literature through ecofeminist prism, theorizing ecowom-
anist empowerment as the framework for reading women of color’s ecofeminist literature. My
formulation of ecowomanist empowerment is drawn from Melanie L. Harris (2016, 5) framework
of “ecowomanism,” which “highlights the necessity for race-class-gender intersectional analysis
when examining the logic of domination, and unjust public policies that result in environmental
health disparities that historically disadvantage communities of color.” Building on her work, I
define ecowomanist empowerment as a critical engagement with incomplete, ongoing projects of
colonial imperialism and global capitalism and as an aesthetic praxis of decoloniality that attends
to the oppressed human and nonhuman geographies.
Women and nature, inevitably entangled in Kiều Bích Hậu’s The Lotus Season, Nguyễn Phan
Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing, and Nguyễn Th ị Kim Hoà’s The Smoke Cloud, endure multiple op-
pressions, not only from heteropatriarchy but also colonial ramifications, war ruins, and industrial
capitalism that exacerbate multiple inequalities in Vietnam. Through an exegesis of these literary
works using ecowomanist empowering framework, I show how the authors make a political in-
tervention into global/social injustice in their aesthetic imagination of womanist empowerment.

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 Quynh H. Vo

Rather than perpetuating the essentialist woman–nature dualism, Vietnamese women authors
orchestrate the interrelation of these entities, reimagining nature in ways that nurtures human,
more than human, or all that is ruined by the military–industrial complex and global capitalism.
Looking beyond the critical impasse of gender and the environment that takes just another form of
oppression, my reading of Vietnamese literature embraces the political force of the eco-womanism
for its inclusive and spacious potential that allows us to reimagine ecopolitical futurity beyond
multiple violence.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s debut novel in English, The Mountains Sing, has garnered remarkable
awards, including Dayton Peace Literary runner-up and been translated into more than ten lan-
guages. Born into the Vietnam War and drifted southward Vietnam after the war ended, Nguyễn
grew up in poverty and sustained herself by catching snails and selling tobacco on the streets
during her childhood. The Mountains Sing is a sweeping narrative of Vietnam through its tempes-
tuous sociohistorical twentieth century of French colonialism, the great famine, the land reform,
the Vietnam War, and all ramifications that entail. But at the heart of this historical turmoil is the
resilience of the Vietnamese people in the face of oppression and genocide. While her narrative
follows only one family, it is shaped by millions of lives enduring the same catastrophes through
the longue durée of Vietnamese history. In Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s imagination, Vietnamese
grandmothers and mothers endure double affliction, that of violent wars and the burdens of life
that bend their backs. Yet, the author reminds us of the healing power of nature, as the grand-
mother Diệu Lan tells her granddaughter, Guava, “I realized that whenever humans failed us, it
was nature who could help save us” (Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai 237). But as the novel unfurls, if
human wins, nature fails.
With Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s powerful narratives grounded in colonial Vietnam, The Moun-
tains Sing unfolds a kaleidoscopic depiction of all atrocities afflicting Vietnamese people and nature.
Those sufferings are, as “as tall as the tallest mountains” (339). In one of the main chapters of the
book, The Great Hunger (1942–1948), Diệu Lan tells her granddaughter about the most harrowing
period that claimed 2 million Vietnamese lives. The Japanese invaded their village, “taking away
everything of value: money, jewelry, furniture, pigs, cows, buffaloes, chickens. They robbed us
of all our food. They made all villagers uproot our rice and crops, to grow jute and cotton for
them” (Nguyễn 82). As these marauding Japanese colonizers continued to rampage, village after
village became barren, people starving, and dying dehydrated everywhere. Even forests couldn’t
sustain human, as Grandma Dieu Lan recalls entering deeply into a forest with her mother only
to find “grass roots” and “earth as hard as rock” without even “grasshoppers, crickets, sim berries,
and mountain guavas” that they imagined hidden somewhere inside that vastness of green. “No
insects could escape human hands. Edible plants were dug up for their trunks, leaves, and roots.
It didn’t help that a terrible drought had ravaged our whole region, sucking our fields and creeks
dry” (Nguyễn 82). Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai represents vividly and horrifically the manmade fam-
ine rife with tragic deaths:

Nearby, a rotting corpse lay face down on the dirt road, green flies buzzing around it. A bit
further on, the body of a mother embraced her baby in their death. Several corpses were scat-
tered in the basin of our dried-up village pond.
(Nguyễn 83)

The Mountains Sing portrays north Vietnam under capital colonialism through the human failure
of moral consciousness that turns Vietnamese humans and nature into ruins.

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Writing about failing nature and starving humans, who strived desperately on the brink of death,
and their tragic deaths abounding on roads right in their land, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai deliberately
unpacks the masculinist, profit-maximizing logics of colonial capitalism that delegates the Vietnam-
ese people to inferior, powerless, deprived position while turning Vietnamese soil into a desirable
commodity for exploitation. Ecofeminism, as Anna Bedford posits, is postcolonialism intertwined
with anticapitalism, offering helpful entanglements within literary theory, as well as shaping social
justice movements. In her critical article, “Ecofeminist, Post-colonial, and Anti-capitalist Possibili-
ties in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring,” Anna Bedford analyzes Brown Girl in the Ring by
­Jamaican-born female science fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson, showing how capitalist and colonial
forces devastate an immigrant community. “Colonialism,” Bedford argues, “like capitalism, is in-
vested in the acquisition of land, nature, and non-human and human Others, and in profiting from
them, in a similarly instrumentalist approach to the world”. By revisiting the historical colonialism in
Vietnam, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai gestures towards postcolonial criticism, troubling global capitalist
ambitions that continue to expand, like tentacles of an octopus, at the expense of humans and nature.
Writing against historical amnesia and deploying the eco-womanist framework, Nguyễn Phan
Quế Mai resists the masculinist, militarized agenda of colonial imperialism that is euphemized in
the logics of “good war” and “liberation.” The Mountains Sing dismantles this (im)moral rationality
of the “white man’s burden” by reminding us of millions of lives falling down like leaves in what the
world remembers as the Vietnam War which aimed to liberate Vietnamese people from the com-
munist regime while Vietnamese people could never forget it as the American War that destroyed
3 million Vietnamese people, soil, rivers, mountains… in the name of freedom. In one of the epi-
sodes about memories when grandma Diệu Lan and Hươ ng contemplate the wooden bird carved by
Huong’s father, a soldier lost his life to the brutal war, Hươ ng’s Uncle Đạt, who brought the wooden
bird back home to Huong from the battlefield, says, “Treasure this bird, Hươ ng,.. There aren’t many
left. I saw plenty of them at first. But then the bombs and the chemical sprayed by the enemy silenced
them” (Nguyễn 127). Grandma Diệu Lan then questions the chemicals that Americans sprayed in
the forests of Vietnam to clear vegetation that sheltered Vietnamese soldiers during the war because
she wonders why such a lethal poison could have “a beautiful name: Agent Orange” (Nguyễn 127).
For Vietnamese people, their lives, bodies, and souls are deeply rooted in the land that sustains them.
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai translates this human–earth connection into disposable bodies of Vietnam-
ese lives and damaged, exploited, soil to denounce injustice—the slippage from colonial imperialism
and global capitalism that has left Vietnam and Vietnamese people ravaged, barren.
The vigor to survive multiple oppressions as a result of “the white man’s burden,” and the spirit
to reclaim agency, while rising above injustice is often instilled in Vietnamese people’s souls, as
they believe in their own resilience and inner power. Vietnamese people’s conviction does not
only empower their inner courage to survive all forms of violence that consistently dehumanize
them as dirt but also gives them survival strategies to confront and conquer violence. Women in
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing interrogate the freedom that the United States and
other empires promise to the world and the painful history that Vietnamese people went through.
Those women characters like Diệu Lan and Hươ ng live on to reclaim justice for the oppressed
humans and nature. Because of the precious value of their soil that nurtures them and their peo-
ple, and the interconnection of their ancestors’ bodies to the body of their homeland, as Hươ ng
imagines her father’s return to her from death, empowers her: “My mind was alive with images:
of my father dashing through jungles under the bombs, of butterflies and birds falling in a rain
of Agent Orange, of my father crouching and chiseling the wooden bird, of his hand carving his
message to me onto the bird’s base: “Daughter, you are the warm blood in my heart” (Nguyễn
130). Huong’s rememory can be interpreted as part of a new Vietnamese generation who embraces
the sorrow of war and environmental ramifications to confront military and economic violence
from ecowomanist empowerment perspectives.

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 Quynh H. Vo

The Smoke Cloud by Nguyễn Thị Kim Hoà

Vietnamese women author like Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai write against all injustice and violence
against lives, bodies, and lands that matter deeply to the oppressed. Nguyễn Th ị Kim Hoà drama-
tizes lives in war as smoke clouds floating, dissipating. In her nationally top awarded short story
The Smoke Cloud, Nguyễn Th ị Kim Hoà (born 1984) portrays Nă m Thúy—a little girl abandoned
by her parents in a market in South Vietnam amidst the violent wartime. Nă m Thúy’s childhood
adheres to the landfill near the local airport with “sealed food cans, half-used rice bags, beer cans,
inox mugs, etc. Sometimes, as if winning a lottery, Bé Nă m finds a watch or a brand-new pair of
glasses” (Nguyễn Thi ̣ Kim Hòa 111). The author dramatizes the desperate poverty of war chil-
dren through their noses which are not only something for them to breathe but also to help filter,
though those wastelands they submerge in, what is still edible, “All kids in the neighborhood like
Bình and Bé Nă m can always tell freshly dumped trash from already old, deteriorated wastes that
reek like hell, even after they both descend far downhill, to the fork” (111). Kids like Bình and Bé
Nă m in their desperate search for food and survival in The Smoke Cloud unfolds the brutal reality
of war and violence that optimizes profits for capitalist powers that rely on the military–industrial
complex at the expense of marginalized, poor, non-Western humans and soils. These poor kids
from the Third World have drifted like dirt at trash dumps near the airport where American sol-
diers come and go, leaving local people only trash. Trash is either edible or not, but without any
value, embodies human fates tortured in the hands of colonial empires, like women’s lives during
the Vietnam War, abused, raped, financially deprived, like trash. The irony in The Smoke Cloud, of
course, is that Nă m Thuý is longing for pure love after being abused, downtrodden by man after
man in the bar where she works during wartime. Nă m Thuý is dreaming of her old flame, desiring
a humane love, given her contaminated fate, drifting like smoke, ruined like airport trash.
The wretched life turned little Nă m Thúy, a dust child into a broken, desperate prostitute.
Toiling in the darkness of a chaotic South Vietnam shattered by war while single parenting her
own son, Nă m Thúy is incessantly obsessed with her first teen lover’s hands, laced with hers, as
she continues to dream of peace or the day when Vietnam is free from bullets and artilleries, when
she will embrace her mother and brother again. Those aspirations and dreams, as misty as a smoke
cloud, have sustained and invigorated her through atrocities of war given the precarity of peace
and fragility of human fates in war.
Against the ravages of war and violence that turn nature and women into landfills and dis-
posable bodies, The Smoke Cloud also offers an ecowomanist empowerment. We see Nă m Thuý
shattered in the greedy hands of Major Tho, her patron; her body resembles the land she belongs,
devastated into ruins. Nguyễn Th ị Kim Hoà reimagines the beauty of surviving, an alternative
power that sustains humans in brutality:

Nă m Thuý twisted and struggled on the floor, whispers slithering into her steamy ear. The
whispers were accompanied by a powerful squeak.
Biting her lips to swallow a miserable cry, Nă m Thuý saw the mountain through the
window above her head. The mountain was not gloomy, not a haze in the darkness. The
mountain had grown hundreds of thousands of eyes. Each eye was a light that shined on Nă m
Thuý’s naked, helpless body as it trembled on the floor.
(Nguyễn Thị Kim Hoà 2015)

In contrast to Nă m Thuý’s embodiment of ecowomanist empowerment are the manipulation

and exploitation of the Starlight Bar’s owner, also Major Tho’s wife whose jealousy and desire for
Nă m Thuý’s body speaks to the capitalist, entertaining industry during the wartime in Vietnam
when local women’s bodies are both desired and abused by soldiers and mediums/brokers of those

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bodies. Women and children are nothing but objects of (dis)interest and neglect. Within the Star-
light, then, there are two powerful and aggressive figures. Major Tho, Nă m Thuý’s patron and his
wife, who represent the exploitation and abuse. There, in the Starlight every night,

The prostitute’s breasts became a receptacle for the sighs and tears of men who rushed into battle
like moths. The Major’s wife didn’t care about that battle. She was more interested in how many
people entered the Starlight. The more tenuous the war became, the more military men flocked
to the airport, swarming the Starlight. Her hands were always busy hoarding profits.
(Hoà 2015)

Bình, Nă m Thuý’s teenage boyfriend drifts in and out of her memory like a dream, a living
specter that embodies the ecowomanist empowerment of love and relationality, an ecological and
emotional anchorage that moors Nă m Thuý to the past temporality and the land they both belong.
While Phillips, an American soldier parachuting onto Nă m Thuý’s neighborhood, and life, one
day takes care of cu Đen, Nă m Thuý’s son every night when she is immersing in the Starlight,
offering care and affection and promises to take both mother and son to the United States one day,
Nă m Thuý only vaguely feels the connection with Phillips, as she dithers forever, squatting by the
fire in the back of her house when Phillips comes for her and cu Đen. Nă m Thuý lingers as she
can’t leave her devastated but healing homeland, or forget Binh’s arms torn by barbed wires, as he
tried to shield her and “rose to his feet, muttering, choking” (Hoà 2015).
It is perhaps powerful to imagine Nă m Thuý’s as the embodiment of ecowomanist empow-
erment as she surmounts her desire to leave the land she belongs and the man she promised to
attach since childhood. While the focus of anthropocentrism is still moot, ecowomanism, as
Harris argues, “unashamedly lifts up the lives of women of color … as a starting point to reflect
upon environmental justice”. Nă m Thuý makes her choice not to flow with the global capital-
ism that both allures and destroys human beings and land through military intervention and
social-cultural disruption. Nguyễn Th ị Kim Hoà invites the reader to imagine a viable human
sphere for the oppressed. The dream Nă m Thuý desires, however, is deeply fragmented that
one seeks to suture them together from the life she experienced with her ruptured memory and
wounded body. Nă m Thuý floats through the story as a victim as well as a power. She exerts
evocative resilience in her broken episodes of life, evoking an empowering inspiration for the
reader. Her resistance to desire and her mooring to love and her land allegorically represents a
precarious, unpredictable world that breathes with violence and wounds. Nă m Thuý’s becomes
the incarnation of womanist power, then nature’s healing song, then empowering coexistence,
of all humans on earth. The smoke cloud means many things, but our imagination sustains
our hope, quite fragile and tenacious. Nă m Thuý’s body is intimately connected with her soil;
in her soul, the reader becomes powerful and vulnerable. The prostitute mother, scarred and
wounded, rooted and unmoored through war and displacement from her land and love, troubles
patriarchal military violence, demonstrating the ecowomanist empowerment that resists to be
destroyed and oppressed.

Kiều Bích Hậu’s The Lotus Season

Unlike Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and Nguyễn Th ị Kim Hoà who capture Vietnamese women and
their devastated homeland during the wartime, Kiều Bích Hậu portrays Vietnamese female sub-
jects in the postwar violent economy in Vietnam. The story The Lotus Season (2020) tells a story of
a perversely modern Vietnam where women and nature are commodified and exploited for their
(im)purity and (il)legitimacy. While the narrative portrays the most powerful and wealthiest man
in the Moon village, Mr. Du, who trades longan and lotus seeds, as the story unfolds, Mr. Du is

53
 Quynh H. Vo

willing to trade everything for a “whore” or the moon lute artist whose “lascivious performance
and lewd beauty” hypnotize him. The whore-artist possesses everything that his wife doesn’t, so
Mr. Du squanders his profits on her body. In the patriarchal society of Vietnam, where women are
generally expected to be submissive, acquiescent, and nurturing, the artist represents illegitimate
femininity. As Elaine Showalter observes, women in such a patriarchal society “typically situated
on the side of irrationality, silence, nature and body, while men are situated on the side of reason,
discourse, culture and mind” (Elaine Showalter 1985, 3–4). Mr. Du maintains his masculinity
and power by containing and confining his wife—an icon of legitimate femininity—to her do-
mestic space while seeking his carnal pleasure with the moon lute artist—a symbol of illegitimate
femininity whose impure body is both desirable and despised. Entrapped in this heteropatriarchal
prison, women and nature are interconnected, as Moon or luna(tic) in the moon lute represents
the madness/lunatic that the women in The Lotus Season endure as they are all oppressed in mul-
tiple smothering spaces. If Mr. Du’s wife is forced to perform her role of a legitimate wife in her
domestic space, which turns her into a “monstrous woman” in her family, the moon lute artist
loses her mind, immersing herself in sentimental novels, tears, and rage while living in the dark
margin of Mr. Du’s life as his sex slave. Mr. Du’s only daughter, Dạ Liên, also suffers from what
Elaine Showalter calls “female malady” as she rebelliously rejects a prearranged marriage and lives
a lonely life with the moon lute by the lotus swamp that her father left to her in his will before he
passes away. While these women struggle in a tension between their efforts to perform femininity
and their resistance to this performance, their madness, rage, and anxiety display a form of agency
and power against multioppression.
Toward the end of The Lotus Season, we find Dạ Liên blend herself in the healing nature where
her body and the lotus swamp become a power that resists all forms of violence:

Dạ Liên soaked herself in the lotus damp, … whenever the lucid sound of the moon lute rose,
thousands of petals suddenly bloomed, and a gentle lotus scent flied throughout the space,
embalming the moonlight on the lagoon’s surface in the pure scent. Only here, on the surface
of the lotus pond, in the sound of moon lute, the moonlight has such a pure fragrance.
(Hậu 2020)

A graceful, gifted, and sensitive lady, Dạ Liên displays a broken yet powerful agency; she cele-
brates her solitude, and the sound of moon lute, and the verdant nature of the lotus swamp. Dạ
Liên doesn’t compromise the government’s coercion to dispel her from the lotus swamp so that
they would erect more commercial buildings. Dạ Liên’s daring, subversive, insane existence resists
all conventions in an urbanized life that deprives women of their living choices. In telling such
a rebellious story, Kiều Bích Hậu challenges the heteropatriarchal society of Vietnam where the
majority still deem marriage a destiny—and above all, through her character, Kiều condemns
human brutality to one another and to the nature that sustains them.
Modern society relies on economic violence and gentrification: Vietnam is supposed to adopt
such a model of relentless development; its speedy transformation is a chaotic condition while it
recklessly exploits women and nature. Abhik Gupta, when investigating the oppression of women
in juxtaposition with privatization and commoditization of nature, astutely argues in Chapter 9
that reading literature in light of ecofeminism offers new illuminations on the relation between
oppressed characters and their oppressors and nature. Gupta also shows us that in such ecofeminist
literature, nature is therapeutic as it heals characters’ torments. However, the beauty of nature is
also ravaged by patriarchal dominators. Thus, both women and nature, Gupta contends, become
partners in misery. By critiquing the perverse modernity that commodifies everything for a pa-
triarchal society and economic violence, Kiều Bích Hậu refuses to wholesale the model of the
pure, domestic, submissive female subject that supports a heteropatriarchal ideology in the story’s

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conclusion. The author gestures instead toward a rebellious, subversive, contaminated femininity
as the ecowomanist empowering alternative to the perverse modernity of Vietnam.
Forty-seven years have passed since the American War (1955–1975) ended, and Vietnamese
women no longer have to navigate bullets and bombs, yet they continue to struggle with social
upheavals and heteropatriarchal mentality that still persist. Since the United States has renormal-
ized its diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995, Vietnam has integrated forcefully into the
global economy, celebrating endless flows of commodities, knowledge, and values. More Viet-
namese women authors have been inspired by Third-World feminism and gender politics as they
venture out of their national boundaries through the internet, assessing world literature, celebrat-
ing the mobility of ideologies that has helped them to question and problematize dominant values
and traditional conventions. Kiều Bích Hậu, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, and Nguyễn Th ị Kim Hoà
are ecowomanist writers who oscillate between Vietnam and the West, living in betweenness and
negotiating values that inform their writing styles. Their stories embrace changes and transfor-
mations of Vietnamese women and nature in contemporary Vietnam. Delving into deteriorating
environment and marginalized lives in the whirlwinds of modernism, Kiều Bích Hậu, Nguyễn
Phan Quế Mai, and Nguyễn Th ị Kim Hoà write against heteropatriarchal ideology and violent
economies that delegate women to a downtrodden position or deprive them of their choices of
living. By writing green, writing women, the authors perform their subversive trajectory of mu-
liebrity, offering ecowomanist empowerment as a framework for reading Vietnamese women’s
modern literature.

References
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Brown Girl in the Ring.” In Ecofeminism in Dialogue, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey, 15–30.
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Biden, Joe. 2015. “Vice President Biden Hosts a Lunch for Vietnam’s General Secretary Trong,” July 7.
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vietnam-s-general-secretary-trong.
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Bích Hậu. Ho Chi Minh City: The Art and Culture Press.
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 6
AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Melanie Duckworth

Introduction
Harking back to Australia’s colonial past, “classic” Australian literature often celebrates the lonely
figure of a man in a landscape—conquering it, grappling with it, being consumed by it, or be-
coming one with it. This is perhaps most clearly exemplified in Patrick White’s (1957) Voss, based
partly on the story of the German explorer Leichhardt, who disappeared in the Great Sandy Des-
ert, but it is also evident in writers such as Randolph Stow and David Malouf, and in poems such
as Banjo Patterson’s (1890) “The Man from Snowy River” and Les Murray’s (2002, 3) “Noonday
Axeman.” There is, however, an Australian countertradition of female relationships with land-
scape and nature that question and revise these tropes. When, in the poem “Train Journey,” the
poet and environmentalist Judith Wright (2003) “looked and saw under the moon’s cold sheet/
your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart,” she not only alluded to the well-known
image of the “virgin” landscape, but also established a bodily connection with the landscape based
on the female experience. Val Plumwood (1993, 6), Australia’s foremost ecofeminist philosopher,
declares that

We must find ways to rework our concepts and practices of human virtue and identity as they
have been conceived since at least the time of the Greeks, as exclusive of and discontinuous
with the devalued orders of the feminine, of subsistence, of materiality and of non-human
nature.

A long counter-tradition of Australian literature, intersecting with ecofeminist viewpoints, does

exactly this.
This chapter presents an overview of ecofeminist currents in Australian literature, traversing
Katharine Susannah Prichard’s (1929) problematic but innovative Coonardoo to Indigenous writer
Evelyn Araluen’s (2021) fierce, scathing, and lyrical Drop Bear. When Araluen (2021, 13) writes
that “Straya is a man’s country/and you’re here to die lovely against the rock/to fold linenly into
horizon/and sweat beautiful blonde on the beach,” she rails against the stereotypes of “classic”
Australian literature and culture. Australian Indigenous literature rejects colonial denigrations
of gender and landscape and asserts a kinship, reciprocity, and connection with Country. Using
Plumwood and Araluen as touchstones, this chapter explores the ways in which ecofeminist writ-
ing in Australia reconfigures conceptions of the feminine and nonhuman nature in postcolonial
contexts (see also Değ irmenci Altın’s Chapter 33).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-757
 Melanie Duckworth

Australian Ecofeminist Scholarship and Indigenous Sovereignty

British sovereignty over the continent of Australia, officially declared in 1835 but assumed since
invasion in 1788, was based erroneously on the assumption of “terra nullius”—that the land was
empty and therefore available for British control. Likewise, Plumwood (1993, 5) argues that when
the natural world, Indigenous people, and women are defined as “nature,” they are

defined as a terra nullius, a resource empty of its own purposes or meanings, and hence avail-
able to be annexed for the purposes of those supposedly identified with reason or intellect,
and to be conceived and molded in relation to these purposes.

Several significant scholars of ecofeminism were either born and raised in Australia, or have strong
connections with the place, including Plumwood, Freya Matthews, Ariel Salleh, Deborah Bird
Rose, and Kate Rigby. Plumwood’s (1992) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature was instrumental in
defining the significance of a reason/nature dualism, that aligned men, reason, and culture in op-
position to women, materiality, and nature. In the nineties, Carolyn Merchant (1996, 186) wrote
that Australian ecofeminists were “leading an ecological revolution.” In their edited collection,
Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene, Lara Stevens, Peta Tait, and Denise
Varney (2018, 9) reflect upon the reasons for the strength of ecofeminism in Australia, conclud-
ing that “Australia’s colonial history combined with its high agricultural and resource extractive
capitalist economy, which has caused severe environmental degradation since settlement in 1788,
might go some way to explaining the strong ecofeminist response.” Local ecosystems, landscapes,
and environmental relationships, together with Australia’s history of colonialism, have influenced
the development of Australian ecofeminism. Conversations with Indigenous Australians have also
been important. Stevens, Tait, and Varney (2018, 9) note that

Aboriginal philosophies, stories and specialized knowledge of the Australian land have been
of great interest to the foundational [Australian] ecofeminists […] who have listened, adopted
and advocated these ideas, and woven them into their unique forms of ecofeminist thought
and activism.

The relationship between ecofeminism and Indigenous epistemologies, however, cannot be taken
for granted.
While ecofeminist thought resonates with some aspects of Aboriginal epistemologies, as they
both acknowledge the embeddedness of the natural and the cultural, and deep connections be-
tween the human and the nonhuman, it is problematic to assume they are natural allies. While
early feminist research in Australia emphasized the ways in which significant historical women
challenged damaging patriarchal approaches to both the environment and Indigenous Australians,
more recent research, spearheaded by Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton-Robertson (2000) has
focused on the complicity of white women (Kossew 2004, 22). It is true that both white women
and Aboriginal women were disenfranchised under colonialism, as was the natural world, but
Aboriginal women were more disenfranchised. Benay Blend makes a similar observation, in a
North American context, in Chapter 19. Although restricted in many ways under colonialism,
white women not only benefited from colonialism, but actively participated in it. As Ruby At-
kinson (2002, 62) explains, “[w]hite society viewed sexual violations of Indigenous women as
familiar male sporting events. White women maintained their silence in their denial of the reality
of this violence.” White colonial women embraced their role as “God’s police” (Summers 2016),
“civilizing” the country from their homesteads, and were intimately involved in enacting the
attempted cultural genocide of the “stolen generations,” when between one in ten and one in

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three Aboriginal children were removed their families between the late nineteenth century and
the 1970s (Australian Human Rights Commission 2007). For these reasons, simply aligning the
dispossession of white women, Indigenous women, and the natural world is untenable.
Palyku writer and scholar Ambelin Kwaymullina (2018, 193) argues that a productive relation-
ship between ecofeminism and Indigenous Australians can only take place on the basis of respect
for Indigenous sovereignty, meaningfully enacted partly through “a layered process of listening to
the voices of Indigenous women.” She writes:

There is the possibility of decolonizing dialogues between ecofeminists and Indigenous

women. But there is also a danger that ecofeminism will reproduce both the failures of femi-
nism to deal with intersectional oppression of Indigenous women or the complicity of settler
women in this oppression (Moreton-Robinson 2000), and the failure of the environmental
movement to recognize the value of Indigenous management of our cultured Countries.
(Kwaymullina 2018, 197)

Thus, any discussion of ecofeminism and Australian literature needs to remain alert to these pit-
falls and avoid perpetuating the injustices that ecofeminism seeks to fight. I will endeavor to do
so here. As a settler Australian with an English heritage, who grew up on the lands of the Kaurna
and Boandik people, and now reside in Norway, I am aware of my status as an outsider to Indige-
nous culture. In this overview of Australian literature and ecofeminism, I will defer to Indigenous
scholars and writers, particularly Araluen (2021, 99), who asserts that “the colonial past which
Indigenous peoples inherit is also a literary one. Our resistance, therefore, must also be literary.”

Australian Literary Tropes and Historical Fiction

As a settler colony, the nation of Australia is founded upon invasion and erasure. Australian lit-
erature in English has long been preoccupied with the need to legitimize a sense of belonging.
Geographically distant from Europe, the weather, flora, and fauna of Australia appeared strange
and inhospitable to the invaders, who imposed themselves on the land. Kay Schaffer (1990, 149)
explains that while Australian literature traditionally privileges masculinity, the absent female is
projected into the bush landscape itself:

the Australian tradition takes male identity as its theme…Woman within the tradition has
been displaced as an object which man fears and desires. The principle form of displacement
has been in terms of the landscape. The bush—variously represented as funereal, absorb-
ing, pliant, passively resistant, actively destructive, barren, cruel, wretched, a wilderness, a
­wasteland—has been the alien and alienating other against which man has struggled to form
an identity.

This trope is visible with particular clarity in the novel (Lindsay 1967) and film (Weir 1975)
versions of The Picnic at Hanging Rock, set in 1900, which told the supposedly true story of young
girls disappearing into the bush at a school picnic (Schaffer 1989). The film and novel advance
an enduring Gothic conception of the bush, pithily expressed by Marcus Clarke (1876, 190) as a
“Weird Melancholy.”
In an Australian context, historical fiction that attempts to reckon with the colonial past thus
has a significant role in interrogating and reframing attitudes toward women and the environ-
ment. Kate Grenville’s (2020) A Room Made of Leaves uses an explicitly ecofeminist approach in
order to rewrite a male-centric understanding of Australia’s colonial history, but it is in some ways
less radical than Grenville’s earlier novel, The Secret River (2005). The Secret River interrogated

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colonial guilt and uneasy “belonging” with a fictional retelling of a massacre of Aboriginal people
near the Hawkesbury River. The protagonist William Thornhill joins and facilitates the massacre,
despite personal misgivings, as he fears violence from the Aboriginals and longs to retain the land
he has claimed. His wife, Sally Thornhill, does not physically join the massacre, but is implicated
in guilt because of her silence. The guilt and complicity of colonial women are less emphasized
in A Room Made of Leaves. The novel is a fictional diary of Elizabeth Macarthur, the wife of John
Macarthur, a pioneer of the Australian wool industry. Elizabeth is depicted as a better steward
of sheep than her husband. She has an innate and sensual relationship with the natural world,
as embodied in various outdoor, vegetal spaces throughout the text: from her initial ill-advised
“romp in the grass” with Macarthur that necessitated her marriage, to a peaceful and secluded
arboreal enclosure that enables a secret affair with a gentlemanly astronomer, to another feminine,
enclosed, outdoor space toward the end of the novel where she discovers a cooking tool left by an
Aboriginal woman. These natural, enclosed, feminine “rooms made of leaves” legitimize Eliza-
beth’s connection with the new land. Elizabeth’s relationship with this land is presented as gentler
and more intuitive than her abusive husband’s, despite the fact that her place there depends upon
the displacement and murder of Aboriginal women and men.
While not strictly speaking historical fiction, Katharine Susannah Prichard’s (1929) Coonardoo
was published in the early part of the twentieth century and set in a remote location, and thus,
from a twenty-first-century perspective, describes a historical era. Deeply controversial at the
time of its publication, it is the story of doomed love between an Aboriginal woman and a white
station owner. It was the first Australian novel to have a female Aboriginal protagonist whose
name is also the title of the book. Coonardoo herself is named for a feature of the landscape, the
“well in the shadows” (Prichard 2013, 2). Her character is linked to the environment and her fate
is connected to the remote farm that depends upon the well. The opening of the novel inhabits
Coonardoo’s gaze as she sits under a tree looking out at the surrounding country: “she watched
the plains, the wide shallow pan of red earth under the ironstone pebbles which spread out before
her to the furry edge of the mulga, grey-green, under pale-blue sky” (Prichard 2013, 1). Despite
this, as Drusilla Modjeska (2013) points out, the novel really only views Coonardoo from the out-
side, and can only articulate a non-Indigenous perspective. To the white stationmaster Hughie,
crazed with grief after the death of his mother, Coonardoo seems like a vision of his own soul.
Coonardoo is romanticized and made to represent both spirit and landscape, coded “nature” in
Plumwood’s (1993) terms. Despite its failings, Coonardoo can be considered proto-ecofeminist on
a number of levels, as it exposes the degradation suffered by Indigenous women at the hands of
white settlers, and links it to the degradation of the land.
Ruby Moonlight, by Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann (2012), is a historical verse
novel set around 1880. Like Coonardoo, the novel is titled after its Aboriginal protagonist and de-
scribes a love story between an Aboriginal woman and a white man. Unlike Coonardoo, however,
Ruby Moonlight is written from an Indigenous perspective. The sole survivor of a massacre, Ruby
is fed and sheltered by the land itself, and ultimately united with an Aboriginal tribe related to her
by kinship. The verse novel illuminates connections between Indigenous peoples, women, and
the environment. As Tait (2018, 121) explains,

Ecological feminism as a field is not only concerned with the ways in which the environment
impacts women’s lives, it also traces historically and philosophically the points at which atti-
tudes towards women and attitudes towards the natural world converge with a broader set of
systemic oppressions.

These are discernible here: Ruby is referred to as a “lubra,” a derogatory term for an Aboriginal
woman, and the novel describes how trees are cut down in order to enable the settlers to observe

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the movements of Aboriginals. The massacre at the beginning of the novel occurs near a fe-
male sacred site. The rich descriptions of the Indigenous cultural landscape—Country—contrast
starkly with European-centric descriptions of the landscape as barren and strange. For Indigenous
Australians, “Country” means more than land, and more than the region that a people belong
to—it is alive, it is cultured, “it is life itself ” (Kwaymullina 2010, 9).

Women Writers, Genres, Landscapes

Despite the prevalence of the trope of the lone man battling the landscape, from early on, women
writers presented counterpointed versions of human-bush relations. Miles Franklin, whose My
Brilliant Career is a classic of Australian literature, wrote about her childhood experiences of the
bush in the posthumously published, “Wordsworthian” (Rigby 2007, 161) Childhood at Brindabella
(1967). Australia embraces a vast number of distinct ecosystems and landscapes, and women writ-
ers have engaged with many different local environments and biomes. The desert figures signifi-
cantly in masculine-centered narratives of exploration and oblivion, but as Alison Bartlett (2001)
has shown, women writers in Australia have subverted this trope for their own purposes. Eva Sal-
lis’s (1998) Hiam and Nikki Gemmel’s (1998) Cleave appropriate such tropes in narratives of female
desert exploration and self-discovery, but the lesbian relationship depicted in Susan Hawthorn’s
(1990) The Falling Woman reimagines the rounded stones in the desert landscape as not barren and
unforgiving, but as feminine and sensual (Bartlett 2001). Beverley Farmer’s autobiographical A
Body of Water (1990) and her novel Seal Woman (1992) focus on the coast and female experiences
of the liminal and the littoral through the figure of the selkie (Collet 2009).
Nature writing and (auto)biography have been significant genres for ecofeminist exploration.
Inga Simpson’s novels (2013, 2014, 2016, 2021) and eco-autobiography (2017) focus on women
and trees, and encompass the topics of land care, logging, orchards, dystopian climate fiction,
­nineteenth-century female botanists, and the unethical practices of the removal of Aboriginal sa-
cred trees. Germaine Greer is best known for her feminist text The Female Eunuch (1970), but her
autobiographical White Beech: The Rainforest Years (2013), which touches on Aboriginal land rights,
“secret women’s business,” and patriarchal, colonialist traditions governing names for places, flora,
and fauna, shows that her feminism and her ecofeminism have always been connected (Stevens
2018). Jessica White’s (2020) innovative work on ecobiography also articulates connections between
women, plants, and place. These texts embrace and inflect a supposed connection between women
and the bush, and form part of the vibrant contemporary practice of nature writing in Australia.

Ecofeminism, Animals, Climate Fiction, and the Posthuman in Recent Fiction

Contemporary writers such as Charlotte Wood (2011, 2015) and Evie Wyld (2013) combine
ecofeminism with post-humanism, troubling the binary that divides humans and animals, and in-
terrogating the role of gender in this process (see Kordecki’s Chapter 26 and Yazgünoğ lu’s Chapter
34). Plumwood (1993, 4) writes:

The category of nature is a field of multiple exclusion and control, not only of non-humans,
but of various groups of humans and aspects of human life which are cast as nature. Thus rac-
ism, colonialism and sexism have drawn their conceptual strength from casting sexual, racial
and ethnic difference as closer to the animal and the body construed as a sphere of inferiority,
as a lesser form of humanity lacking the full measure of rationality or culture.

Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015) and Animal People (2011) reflect on animal rights, gen-
dered sexual violence, and stereotypes that damage both women and the natural world (Duckworth

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2021a). In The Natural Way of Things, women are relentlessly compared with animals, and both
novels women reflect uneasily on their status as “meat,” a notion that resonates with Plumwood’s
(2012) account in The Eye of the Crocodile of experiencing herself as a crocodile’s prey. Wyld’s
(2013) ecogothic All the Birds, Singing juxtaposes gendered violence and sheep farming practices
(Ralph 2021). Other recent novels that can be read as both ecofeminist and posthumanist include
Gillian Mears’ (2012) Foals Bread and Thea Astley’s (1999) Drylands. Laura White (2013, 137) ar-
gues that although Drylands was dismissed by some critics as a depressing novel by an old and bitter
woman with nowhere to put her anger,

Astley does indeed take her anger somewhere: she delivers a stinging critique that targets
rationalist conceptions of the human as an underlying factor that connects colonial and post-
colonial exploitation of human and non-human others.

Ralph’s (2020) Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-sides provides a thorough
review of recent ecocritical, posthumanist and ecofeminist work on Australian literature, and
analyzes the representation of plants and animals in a selection of works. Her chapter on climate
fiction in this volume (Chapter 44) argues that while cli-fi tends to be masculinist in scope, fo-
cusing on male characters and ignoring connections between climate change and other injustices,
there are notable ecofeminist exceptions. She discusses an Australian novel, Alexis Wright’s (2006)
Carpentaria, and two Australian short stories as examples of ecofeminist climate fiction. There are
several other recent Australian works that could also be mentioned, including Alice Robinson’s
(2020) The Glad Shout, which centers on a mother and her infant daughter fleeing a flooded
Melbourne, Inga Simpson’s (2021) The Last Woman in the World, Lisa Jacobson’s (2012) futuristic
oceanic verse novel The Sunlit Zone, and Bren MacDibble’s (2018) middle-grade environmental
dystopia How to Bee (Duckworth 2022).
Recent novels by Indigenous writers intersect with posthumanism, animal studies, and
ecofeminism in different ways. Rigby (2013, 124) notes that Wright’s Carpentaria, with its dense,
vernacular language and complex use of myth, presents immense hermeneutical challenges to
the non-Indigenous reader, but as a “welcomed stranger” to the text, she endeavors to engage
with it through a feminist ecocritical approach informed by the poet Judith Wright and the phi-
losopher Plumwood. She argues that the novel is not just about, but emerges from Country, thus
disrupting European expectations that Country is merely background, and “invites its readers to
collaborate in crafting a genuinely post-colonial, post-patriarchal and post-anthroparchal future”
(Rigby 2013, 134). Building on Rigby’s interpretations, Ralph (Chapter 44) reads the novel as
an ecofeminist response to masculinist mining practices. Similarly, The Swan Book (Wright 2013)
is an Indigenous futurist tour de force, embracing Indigenous and European myths about swans,
and reflecting on rape, apocalypse, and Indigeneity. Melissa Lucashenko’s (2018) Too Much Lip,
which won the 2019 Miles Franklin Award, features talking birds as a matter of course in a novel
about contemporary Indigeneity, family, women, child abuse, hope, and Country. Mullumbimby
(Lucashenko 2013) focuses on horses, land claims, kinship, and a mother-daughter relationship.
Ultimately a revelation of belonging is revealed to be inscribed on the hands of the protagonist’s
teenage daughter. Here, land and the Indigenous female body are mysteriously and restoratively
entwined.

Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Ecofeminism, and Animals

Animals feature in a different way in traditional European-Australian literature for children. Anja
Höing argues in Chapter 41 that the fundamentally conservative nature of children’s literature
limits its ecofeminist potential, an observation that holds true in some ways in relation to Ethel

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Pedley’s Dot and the Kangaroo (1899). The novel, a kind of Australian Alice in Wonderland (Carroll
1865), describes a girl lost in the bush who is adopted by a kangaroo and comes to understand the
language of animals. The book is dedicated to “the Children of Australia, in the hope of enlisting
their sympathies for the many beautiful, amiable, and frolicsome creatures of this fair land, whose
extinction, through ruthless destruction, is surely being accomplished” (Pedley 1899, frontmatter).
The book’s depictions of Aboriginal people, particularly in a corroboree scene, are racist and stereo-
typical (Collins-Gearing 2006). Yet, as Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver (2020, 139) point out, this
novel promotes the view that “humans are simply one species among many in a bush ecology with
finite resources.” It can thus be read through an ecofeminist lens—it valorizes the motherhood of the
kangaroo, and condemns the patriarchal colonial tradition of kangaroo hunting. However, in cen-
tering this message in a white girl’s fantastic experience of native Australian fauna, this novel—like
so many others—still erases Aboriginal sovereignty. One t­ wentieth-century example is Fern Gully
by Diana D. Young (1992), made into a Disney film in 1992. The narrative revolves around the quest
of white-skinned fairy Chrysta to save her rainforest home. In “Fern Up Your Own Gully” Araluen
(2021, 74) vehemently opposes the white-washed sentimentality of the film, its hyperfemininity, and
its anthropomorphism, as an “unusual girl” flitters through the forest:

fern up the gully girls

go live those pastel bush dreams
while me and my ancestors sit pissed swinging on
the verandah couch
RIGHT WHERE YOU WROTE US
(Araluen 2021, 75)

Araluen declares pseudo-ecofeminist texts that erase Indigenous presence from the landscape to
be not only inane but dangerous.
In the past two decades, publishing for children and young adults in Australia has diversi-
fied considerably, assisted by Indigenous presses such as Magabala books. The books that make
up Ambelin Kwaymullina’s The Tribe trilogy (2012; 2013; 2015), for example, are young adult
post-apocalyptic/Indigenous futurist novels that center Indigenous perspectives, girls’ friendships,
and ecological communities of the human and non-human. As Michelle Deininger argues in
Chapter 42, ecofeminist currents can be detected in young adult fiction from the nuclear apoca-
lypse novels of the 1980s to the dystopian climate fiction of today. The Tribe trilogy is particularly
resonant with an ecofeminist worldview, as it is grounded in the deep and abiding friendship of
three teenage girls, who, like the other members of their tribe, have a life-affirming attunement
with the natural world, rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. As can be seen in the books’ titles,
The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012), The Disappearance of Ember Crow (2013), and The Foretelling
of Georgie Spider (2015), a nonsentimental connection with animals forms an intrinsic part of the
characters’ fight for ecological balance and community.

Poetry
As Andrew David King notes in Chapter 49, the genre of poetry affords rich ecofeminist possibil-
ities because of the way it bridges the personal and the cosmological. A mere conflation of women
and the environment, however, does not guarantee an ecofeminist perspective. In her famous pa-
triotic poem “My Country,” Dorothea Mackellar (1908, 29–32) characterizes Australia as “a will-
ful, lavish,” “opal-hearted,” “wide brown land,” a desirable yet fickle woman, who nevertheless,
despite “flood and fire and famine,” always restores fields to green in the end. Mackellar (2019, 29)
declares “I love a sunburnt country,” and portrays the exotic land of Australia as entirely receptive

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to this love, and resilient against any catastrophe. This stereotypical and romanticized depiction
of Australia as a desirable woman is energetically obliterated in Polish immigrant Ania Walwicz’s
(1981, 90) prose poem “Australia”, which presents Australia as ugly, mundane, and masculine.
Though neither of these poems could really be categorized as ecofeminist, they in turn embrace
and distort the cliché of woman as nature, specifically woman as a land ripe for exploitation. Re-
cently, West Australian poet Tracy Ryan has interrogated the trope of woman as the landscape in
a nuanced engagement with the bogs of her ancestral Ireland. Where Irish Nobel laureate Seamus
Heaney (1992) personifies the bog as a mythic queen and declares his love for her pliant surface,
Ryan (2015, 37) counters: “she does not want to be touched she does not love/the bog is only
gathering material” (Duckworth 2021b).
Any discussion of ecofeminist poetry in Australia must mention Judith Wright (1915–2000),
who was not only a significant Australian poet but also an activist for the environment and for
Indigenous land rights (Rigby 2013; Thomason 2000). Her poems display a deep love for the
Australian landscape, flora, and fauna, and an intimate depiction of women’s experiences, in-
cluding pregnancy, but also an increasing ambivalence about the legitimacy of her poetry and
her place in the landscape, as the descendent of settler Australians. Wright’s (2003, 318) poem
“Two Dreamings,” written for the Indigenous poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) indi-
cates that Noonuccal has the greater authority: “The knife’s between us. I turn it around,/the
handle to your side,/the weapon made from your country’s bones/I have no right to take it.”
Noonuccal, a poet and activist, was the first Indigenous Australian to publish a poetry collec-
tion. In “No More Boomerang” Noonuccal (Walker 1992, 56) writes “One time naked,/Who
never knew shame;/Now we put clothes on/To hide whatsaname.” Feminist Arrernte writer
Celeste Liddle (2016) argues that this poem still speaks scathingly against the colonial shaming
of Indigenous woman’s bodies.
Oodgeroo’s successors include Cobby Eckermann (2012, 2015, 2017), Araluen (2021), and El-
len van Neerven (2021). Araluan’s Drop Bear, written in a hybrid poem/essay format, interrogates
tropes of Australian literature and culture, like that of the white male explorer in the landscape,
and finds them inadequate. In “The Trope Speaks” (Araluan 2021, 32–33), she writes:

The trope wants Australia like a man wants a woman, he fairly trembles with wanting.
…
The trope doesn’t love you; the trope doesn’t even know your name.
The trope will meet you on the road. Kill him.

The collection links cultural, feminist, and ecological reform with a disavowal of myths perpet-
uated in Australian literature. van Neerven’s Throat, which won the New South Wales Premier’s
Literary Award, celebrates a bodily, queer, non-binary connection with landscape and culture.
The poem “ecopotent” voices a wariness for the labels of Western academia: “dugai asks me/
to pen poems/for ecopoetics journal//whattttt/you think words will save trees? …label your art
ecopoetic/i think it really is ecopornographic//just call me ecopessimistic/kick me out of the con-
ference” (van Neerven 2021, 49). Blood (menstrual) and water, love, and violence seep and stagger
throughout the collection, which advocates fiercely for a radical authenticity and materiality of
language, gender, ecology, community, and bodily experience: “the backbone of land/women’s
space/for love/for beginning” (van Neerven 2021, 93). To name this kind of writing “ecofem-
inist” is to press onto it a label its author would likely reject, but the collection embraces and
interrogates many of the tensions identified by ecofeminism. van Neerven’s and Araluen’s poems
intersect with ecofeminism, but also expose and challenge its discontinuities and assumptions. At
the same time, it is in awareness of these difficulties and injustices that ecofeminism can approach
dialogues in Australian and other postcolonial contexts.

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Conclusion
This chapter has given a broad (though necessarily incomplete) overview of some ways in which
writers in Australia have engaged with ecofeminist ideas through a wide range of genres from
the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The unique landscapes, Indigenous cultures, and
colonial and postcolonial histories of Australia have shaped attitudes toward and representations of
women and the environment. It is clear that Australian writers have made, and continue to make,
a vibrant contribution to literary as well as scholarly ecofeminism. Ultimately, I agree with the
authors of several other chapters in this volume (see Blend’s Chapter 19, Chan’s Chapter 31, Değ ir-
menci Altın’s Chapter 33, and King’s Chapter 49) that the most valuable ecofeminist approach to
literature is intersectional, alert to the specificities of histories, gender, and race.

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Liddle, Celeste. 2016. “Looking Past White Australia and White Feminism.” New Matilda (blog). Accessed 1 Oc-
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 7
TAMIL LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Chitra Sankaran and Gayatri Thanu Pillai

Introduction
In this chapter, we focus on ways in which gendered aspects emerge in Tamil literature through
productive realignments of the nature/culture binary, and explore ways in which human society and
other nonhuman ecosystems are in a dialectical relationship. Human–nonhuman exchanges will
be analyzed using traditional esthetic theories as well as cultural, spiritual, and material ecofeminist
perspectives to contextualize the relationship between the environmental issues and feminist con-
cerns addressed in these texts. The central premise of the study is derived from the ecofeminist per-
spective that women’s devaluation in nearly every society, and its degrees, are conceptually related to
the devaluation of the natural environment and its affiliates (Davion 1994; Plumwood 1993; Warren
2000). Representation of women and the natural environment, binaristic gender conceptualizations,
women and land rights, the portrayal of the divine feminine, and forms of women–nature confla-
tions, are some of the significant themes examined to underscore how entrenched cultural attitudes
have influenced human relationships with nature. The chapter will also identify spaces of resistance
where private and public patriarchy are challenged, elided, and eluded. A diverse corpus of Tamil
texts from multiple genres and from time periods spanning precolonial to contemporary have been
examined. Prominent literary genres of a particular time period or literary era have been spotlighted
to provide a comprehensive historical overview of how ecofeminist themes developed and evolved.
The texts discussed have also been chosen keeping in mind the importance of including voices from
prominent diasporic Tamil communities as well.

Concept of Thinai as Ecotope in Sangam Literature

Scholars place the Sangam period in Tamil literary history between 300 BC and 300 AD. The
word, “Sangam” in Tamil means an academy. Named after the Sangam academies, patronized by
the Pandya kings, that nurtured scholars and poets, “Sangam literature,” is identified as Tholkappi-
yam, Ettuthogai, Patthuppaattu, Pathinenkeezhkanakku, and the epics, Silappatik āram and Ma ṇimēka-
lai. One of the most interesting concepts that emerge from this period is thinai. It is a unifying
poetic device that combines geography with rules for prosody, operating as an organizing concept
pivotal to the execution of the genres of both Love/akam (interior) and War/puram (exterior) po-
etry in classical Tamil Sangam literature. The five thinais (ainthinai) correspond imaginatively to
five landscapes that comprised the ancient Tamilagam (Tamil lands): ku ṟ iñci (mountainous land),
mullai (forested land), marutham (agriculture land), neythal (coastal land), and pā lai (dry land).

68 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-8

 Tamil Literature and Ecofeminism

The concept of thinai can be viewed as a gestalt—a field of co-constitution in which woman,
man, land, deity, flora, and fauna occupy a nonhierarchical relationship and form a continuum,
thus promoting biocentric egalitarianism. Thinai becomes an ecotope, which as Whittaker et al.
have defined is “The species’ relation to the full range of environmental and biotic variables af-
fecting it” (1973, 321).
Furthermore, thinai is a holistic concept that goes beyond landscape, encompassing each re-
gion’s distinctive culture and the conduct of its inhabitants. Even seasons, time, deities, musical
instruments, and above all, the sentiments associated with the five regions are rigorously codified
and serve to initiate the themes of Sangam poetry. Hence, poetry in ku ṟ iñci thinai is set in moun-
tainous regions and sings of the union of lovers while mullai is set in the forest, with “waiting”
as its theme. Marutham, tied up with agricultural land, concerns itself with the altercations be-
tween the lovers (known as oodal). Neythal or coastal land is associated with pining, and, pā lai
or desert land is themed around separation. Now obsolete, the concept of thinai was foundational
to Tamil grammar and poetry, dictating its theme. In classical poetry though, it would have been
“impossible” to sing of lovers’ joy and union in desert land or pā lai thinai. This would have been
grammatically unacceptable and deemed erroneous1. Superficially, this might appear to indicate
an essentialized system that constrains and codifies the people and the land but this is far from the
case. This (pre-Aryan) system functions to accommodate shifting identities implying a symbiotic
relation between humans and land, where it is assumed that the mood and behavior of the pro-
tagonists of the poems reflect the characteristics of the landscapes, and conversely, that the land
influences the conduct of the poetic persona. With realignments in communities and people, their
identities have the potential to get reassigned to another coded thinai, reinforcing the fluid nature
of identity itself. One of the liberating aspects of thinai from the ecofeminist perspective is that it
is inclusive of both genders and does not embed only women in nature. In effect, both men and
women are necessary for thinai to function and have the identical right to claim allegiance to a
thinai. Equally, their allegiance can change once they move to another landscape or narrative
frame. Therefore, their identities are relational to the land and each other.
A distinctive feature of Sangam poetry is the enormous freedom enjoyed by women. For exam-
ple, in the poem below by the female poet, Alloor Nanmullaiyaar, the bold sexual allusion made
by the female protagonist reflects the sexual agency of women in the Sangam era. In the poem be-
ginning “Poozhkaal anna…” the movement is from the exterior landscape to the female character’s
inner emotional state, as is the form of an akam poem. It opens with two images that are connected
by their hue—a quail’s pink feet (poozhkkaal) and the pink sprouts and stalk of the uzhundu (bean
plant). The protagonist is agonized with a yearning for her lover whom she has met clandestinely
several times. He had promised to return before the uzhundu plant has flowered. But the pods are
now overripe and he has not yet arrived. The cool weather, typical to ku ṟ iñci, heightens her long-
ing for him. Clearly, the overripe beans allude to her state of yearning, the emotion associated with
kuṟ iñci. Thus, there is an organic link established between the plants and her emotions. Her descrip-
tion also includes a herd of deer that steals into the village at night to eat the uzhundu plants. The
allusion to time, makes her conscious of its passing and that it will steal her youth. Her only cure is
to feel her lover’s embrace that will abate both the seasonal chill and her yearning.
These natural features are not mere backdrops for a scene where the human drama of love and
yearning is being enacted. On the contrary, the trees, mountains, animals, flowers, and bodies
of water, be they waterfall or lake, become “actants” in the thinai universe. They are as integral
to the poem and as vital to its validity as are the emotions of the human protagonists. The term
“actant” used by Latour in his Actor-Network Theory (ANT), expands on the idea of networks
of relations between human and nonhuman actors, where both exert agency on each other. The
actants take shape by virtue of their relations with one another, positing that nothing lies outside
the network of relations. This suggests that there is no difference in the ability of technology,

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 Chitra Sankaran and Gayatri Thanu Pillai

humans, animals, or other nonhumans to act (2007, 38–40). These ideas are uncannily similar to
the ancient concept of thinai 2 .
Strong, agentic women, take the lead in the two great Sangam epics, Silappatik āram (The Tale
of the Anklet) (fifth/sixth century CE) and Ma ṇimēkalai (A Girdle of Gems) (sixth century CE). In
Silappatik āram by Ilango Adigal, Ka ṇṇ agi’s husband, Kovalan, is arrested by the Pandya king’s
guards as they mistakenly believe that Ka ṇṇ agi’s anklet is the queen’s. When Kovalan is executed
by royal decree, Ka ṇṇ agi, enraged by the wrongful accusation, proves his innocence by breaking
the anklet to reveal that it is inset with rubies, not the diamonds said to be the queen’s. The ap-
palled king and queen, shocked that they have erred in their judgment, die of shame and guilt.
Ka ṇṇ agi, her fury unabated and emerging as profoundly agentic proceeds to burn the whole city
of Madurai, until finally, the god Indra spirits her away to the heavens. As she channels her fury
into elemental fire and controls and conquers the elements (here, fire and earth) Ka ṇṇ agi dons the
role of the avenger, traditionally assigned to the male epic hero. But what is equally noteworthy
is that the enraged Kannagi flings her breast into the engulfing flames that devour the city of
Madurai. Thus, despite her agency, she is still definitely aligned to her body, and hence, from an
ecofeminist perspective, to nature.
In the epic, Ma ṇimēkalai, by Seethalai Saathanaar, there is a greater cerebral role accorded to
the female protagonist. Here, Ma ṇ imēkalai, the daughter of Kovalan and Madhavi, Kovalan’s
erstwhile lover in the prequel, Silappatik āram, follows in her mother’s footsteps as both a dancer
and a Buddhist nun (bhikuni) aligned with the Cartesian ideal of a fit body in a trained, intelligent
mind. Her physical beauty and artistic achievements attract the Chola prince, Udhayakumara, and
he pursues her. As a Buddhist nun, Ma ṇ imēkalai rejects his advances, yet finds herself drawn to
him, emotionally. Her internal tumult presented in the epic, aligns her with culture and reflec-
tion. She hides from the Prince and seeks guidance from her Buddhist teacher, Aravāna Adikal
and angels. They teach her Buddhist mantras to free herself from worldly fears. One angel helps
her magically disappear to an island and grants her powers to change forms. Once the misun-
derstandings resulting from her disguise are resolved, Ma ṇ imēkalai turns to a life of service and
converts the prison into a hospice to help the needy, teaching the king the dharma of the Buddha.
In the final five cantos of the epic, Buddhist teachers recite The Four Noble Truths, the Twelve
Nidanas, and other ideas to her and she practices severe penance to attain Nirvana. In this epic, the
female protagonist is aligned to culture, to the spirit and mind rather than to her body. Account-
ing for the pan-cultural second-class status of women Sherry Ortner postulates that by virtue of
bodily functions and traditional social roles,

women are being identified or symbolically associated with nature, as opposed to men, who
are identified with culture. Since it is always culture’s project to subsume and transcend
nature, if women were considered part of nature, then culture would find it “natural” to
subordinate, not to say oppress, them.
(1974, 73)

Though both famous Sangam epics can boast of having female protagonists, even within this pro-
foundly progressive paradigm, we can identify a shift from the agentic women’s alignment with
the body to that of the mind.

The Divine Feminine in Medieval Tamil Literature

The most notable work to emerge from the medieval period is Ram āvat āram by Kambar (1180–
1250) popularly known as Kambaramayanam. This Tamil version of the original Ramayana in
Sanskrit by Sage Valmiki is an epic of around 11,000 stanzas that retells the story of Prince Rama

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of Ayodhya and his wife, Sita. Sita is interestingly refracted as a character when viewed through
the ecofeminist lens. Right from the point of her birth, Sita becomes associated with “Mother
Earth.” In Kambar’s version, as in Valmiki’s Ramayana, Sita is discovered in a furrow when a field
is ploughed. The ethereal beauty of the baby convinces King Janaka that she is a celestial daugh-
ter of Bhooma Devi or Mother Earth. Thus, Sita’s association with the earth begins early. She is
also believed to be a reincarnation of Goddess Lakshmi, associated with prosperity and fecundity.
This association of Sita with earth and the elements is further reinforced at various points in the
epic. Sita is abducted and imprisoned by the demon king of Lanka, Ravana. Rama goes to war
with Ravana to retrieve Sita. After Ravana’s defeat, once again, Sita’s affinity to the five elements
(panchabhootas: prithvi or earth, agni or fire, jal or water, vāyu or air, and ā kā sh or space) is re-
inforced. Upon her rescue, Rama, to ensure that no blight falls on his wife’s character, demands
that she undergo a trial by fire to prove her chastity. During this test, the fire-god, Agni, appears
in front of Rama and attests to Sita’s purity, claiming that the heat of her virtue far exceeds any
elemental heat. Thus, taken both literally and metaphorically, Sita’s association with nature and
natural elements subsumes her into a space of obedience and passivity, held up as the feminine
ideal of the model wife, undermining female agency evident in the earlier Sangam era literature.
In the period between 1300 CE and 1650 CE the Tamil country was under constant invasion
by armies from the North of the Indian subcontinent, leading to the defeat of the Pandya king-
dom. Finally, Vijayanagar Empire conquered and ruled over the whole of south India heralding
the Vijayanagar and Nayak age in Tamil Literature. Though, during this period and the years
after, there was an enormous output of philosophical works, religious and literary commentaries,
epics, and devotional verses, there was very little exploration of ecofeminist themes or concerns.

Nature, Culture, and the Feminine in Colonial Tamil Literature

In the nineteenth century, with the establishment of the Madras Presidency under British rule,
the novel form gained impetus and quickly became the preferred fictional form of the new gen-
eration of English-educated writers. Caught in the interface between religious ideologies and co-
lonial modernity, the thematic preoccupations of early novelists included caste-based oppression
and ­a nti-female religious practices. Subverting traditional hierarchies to foreground subaltern
groups, legitimizing a new normative of femininity, and reinstitutionalizing the family were
deeply fraught ideological processes that redefined intra- and intergender social relations. This
involved multiple, sometimes colluding, stakeholders within the superstructures of colonialism
and patriarchy. As Lydia Rose asserts in Chapter 30, complicity in the cultural aspects of normal-
izing hegemonic masculinity is achieved by erecting patriarchy through social institutions and
industrial complexes such as family, education, government, military, prison, and medical systems
mediating ideological culture and social structures.
Many of the early Tamil novelists like A. Madhaviah wrote on the plight of women being sub-
jected to persecutory social and religious practices like sati, child marriage, ill treatment of wid-
ows, the practice of dowry, etc. in his novels like Muthumeenakshi (1903), Thillai Govindan (1903),
and Clarinda (1915). The characterization of female protagonists and the articulation of feminist
agency in female-centric novels are situated in the context of the emancipatory rhetoric of colo-
nial legislations and social reform projects. The early Tamil novels were influenced by the English
novel, particularly Victorian novels of the realist tradition, echoing “the doctrine that all truth
and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature”3 (Eliot 1856, 626) and
Indian prose traditions like the prabanda4 or charitra5. They were focused on the transformation
of spaces from rural to urban and the changing place of women within these spaces. For instance,
B. R. Rajam Iyer’s Kamalambal Charitram (1896), depicts the contrasts between Brahminic rural
life in villages and life in urban spaces that were centers of colonial power. One of the descriptions

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 Chitra Sankaran and Gayatri Thanu Pillai

of these cityscapes that stand out is the idyllic vision of Madras beach where, “with their swan-
like gait and parrot-like words, hand linked with the hands of their husbands, the English ladies
talked and walked their way, robed in their gorgeous garments” (Bangaruswami 1964, 49). While
companionate marriages and movement of women outside domestic spaces were beginning to be
normalized through European referents, deification and conflation of idealized female characters
to nature were recurrent features in these early Tamil novels, reinforcing the rigid dichotomies
that separate nature and culture.
The association of men/masculinity with culture assumes new dimensions in the context of
colonial India where English education and European culture were becoming gendered markers of
high culture. The lack of access to formal education resulted in reinforcing the conflation of Indian
women with nature and the domestic space. In Mayuram Vedanayakam Pillai’s novel Pratapa Mu-
daliar Charitram (1879), often considered the first novel to be written in Tamil, the narrator says of
his mother, “To me she is the mother of the universe and I worship her as such every day” (2005,
27). This is, as Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman points out in Chapter 23, a gynocentric/gynarchy world
view, where all life is dependent on “the mother.” The deification and portrayal of affinity to the
natural world are extended to the heroine, Gnanambal, who is the narrator’s love interest. She is
described as charitable and a protector of animals: “She protected the birds in the garden, ensuring
that none caught or troubled them. They grew in number and started a chorus of song and dance
whenever they caught sight of her” (Pillai 2005, 28). Gnanmbal’s characterization shines a light on
some salient aspects of the changes in ideas and ideals surrounding femininity. With the debates
on women’s education gaining traction in the reformist discourse in late colonial India, the novel
takes a clear stance on the issue. Described as the “goddess of wisdom” (2005, 22) and “simple and
free of conceit” (2005, 24), Gnanambal is portrayed as holding traditionalist views on the need for
formal education for women. Using nature symbols, she explains her opinion: “However much
women may study, they cannot excel men. Women are like fast-growing plants that flower quickly
only to wither away. On the other hand, men are like trees, slow of growth but providing enduring
benefits” (2005, 24). Here, a utilitarian view of “intrinsic value” is used to reinforce traditional,
patriarchal views on the ephemeral nature of women’s fertility and consequently their “usefulness”
to society. These alignments of female protagonists to their bodies and categorizing them as “that
which is mired in nature thrusts women outside the dominion of human subjectivity, rationality and
agency” (Alaimo 2000, 2). While Pillai was an ardent social reformer, who spoke and wrote widely
in favor of women’s education and the abolition of dowry, the novel plays up the fraught negotia-
tions between traditional notions on women’s rights and their role in companionate marriages. The
usefulness of women’s education was largely associated with preparing them to be more compatible
partners for a new generation of English-educated men.
If we were to extend the akam-puram paradigm to modern genres like novel and periodicals,
we see that the interiority of akam narratives are strongly represented in the early women’s mag-
azines published between 1890 and 1940. In the early decades of this period, these magazines
including Penmati Potini (Women’s Enlightenment) and Matar Manóranć ini (Brightener of Wom-
en’s Mind) largely focused on “matters of the mind and heart” through themes like household
management and child care, offering “English domesticity as a model for its readers to replicate”
(Sreenivas 2003, 13).
In colonial poetry, inspired by classical verse, we see the affinity for female deification con-
tinue, particularly in the poetry of Subramania Bharathi (1882–1921). A poet, journalist, and
social reformer, he was a champion of women’s rights and anticaste movements. In his poetry, we
see the repeated invocation of Goddess Sakti, who in the Hindu theological tradition of Shaktism,
is considered the primordial cosmic energy, and represents the dynamic forces that are thought
to move through the universe (Datta and Lowitz 2005, 111). His affinity for the divine feminine
is contextualized in his English essay, “The Place of Women” in which he asserts, “Civilization

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is the taming down of man by woman. Where woman comes, comes Art. And what is Art if not
the effort of humanity towards divinity” (Sundara Rajan “Adorer of the feminine principle”).
Interestingly, here he aligns women with both nature and culture. In his poem “Kaatru” (Wind)
excerpted below, he glorifies Sakti as the primordial cosmic energy:
Look at the tiny ant,
In it are hands, legs, mouth, belly all the organs of life, kept in place.
Who put them there? The great Goddess Sakti.
All the parts work and fit precisely.
The ant sleeps, mates, gives birth, runs, seeks, makes war, defends territory.
The source of all this is the wind.
The great goddess plays the part of life and the wind is her instrument.
(Holmstrom et al. 2009, 75)
In Chapter 8, Sangita Patil notes that in Indian theological traditions, nature has a spiritual and
divine connection with people’s lives. This is in line with Swarnalatha Rangarajan’s thesis, where
she provides a succinct explanation of how theories of nature in Indian philosophical schools of na-
ture, both theistic and nontheistic, are distinctly different from western conceptions. She observes,

Nature is widely revered as Prakriti, “the primordial vastness, the inexhaustible, the source of
abundance” (Shiva 1996:281). A vibrant definition of nature is provided by the theory of the
five elements, the Panchamahabhutas, which postulates that “Nature and the environment are
not outside us; they are not alien and hostile to us. They are an inseparable part of our exis-
tence” (Rao 2000:26). According to this the five primary elements...co-constitute all forms
of matter and are evolutes of Prakriti, the matrix of all material creation
(Garrard 2014, 529)

In his poem “Uuzhikuutthu” (In the time of the breaking of the worlds), Bharathi uses apoca-
lyptic imagery to explore the concept of prakriti and reify the divine feminine. He, once again,
invokes Sakti, who roars in animalistic fury on doomsday as she engulfs demonic forces. Invoking
this divine unity of all elements and the supremacy of feminine energy, Bharathi says in this poem,

As the five cardinal essences

Mingle and merge as one,
As this too vanishes at last
In Sakti’s measureless deeps.
(Holmstrom et al. 2009, 76)

As we see in Bharathi’s works, within Śaktism, the goddess emerges as a complex, contradictory
figure who incorporates within her, traits that are generally polarized as masculine and feminine
in mortal discourse.
Drawing connections between the domination of nature and the domination of women, both
of which have a shared history with hegemonic masculinity, Lydia Rose highlights in Chapter 30
that the dominant literary products that are quickly and easily disseminated, typically normalize
hegemonic masculinity. This is not unlike early Tamil novels. What can be deduced from these
representational works of colonial literature is that while the feminist discourse in more tradi-
tional literary forms such as verse often presented the supreme empowerment of the divine fem-
inine, newer genres such as prose fiction and writings in periodicals were focusing on recasting
the “mortal feminine,” which exists as an extension both of male vision and male discourse with,
predictably, little concomitant empowerment of the mortal female.

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Land, Nature Symbols, and Feminist Reinstation of Thinai in

Contemporary Tamil Literature
In the postindependence years, land came to be explored in diverse ways in Tamil literature to
present nationalist, feminist, and environmentalist perspectives. In Rajam Krishnan’s landmark
work Kurinji Then (1964) (When the Kurinji Blooms), the Kurinji flower (strobilanthes kunthiana)
becomes a symbol of the rootedness of tribal communities to nature. The destruction of indige-
nous landscapes for the plantation of tea and coffee, forced migration of men to urban areas and the
persecution of tribal women are some of the themes explored using three generations of characters
from the Badaga community. Their move to modern cityscapes and capitalist value systems to
earn a living is shown to have a degenerative effect on these communities that suffer the traumatic
consequences of their disconnect from their natural habitat and way of life. The works of many
feminist environmental critics (Cuomo 1998; Dalmiya 2002; Plumwood 1993; Warren 2000) have
drawn on Leopold’s land ethic that focalizes the significance of maintaining the “the integrity,
stability, and beauty of the biotic community” (1949, 224). Krishnan’s work is in line with the
ruminations of these ecofeminists who bring to the fore how the loss of ecological diversity due
to modernization projects directly and “disproportionately harms women, subsistence economies,
and the cultural communities to which women belong” (Warren 2015).
A significant development in the latter half of the twentieth century was the emergence of a
modern Dalit6 perspective. Many Tamil women writers have explored the double constraints of
casteism and sexism, and consequently the lack of land rights among Dalit women. In Sivakami’s
novel, Pazhayana Kazhidalum (The Grip of Change) (1989), the protagonist, Kathamuthu, denied
the ownership of her dead husband’s lands as she is a childless widow, presents the trauma-ridden
“connections between a Dalit woman’s body, her reproductive status, her economic situation,
and the commodification of her body in the process of survival” (Iyer 2010, 2). In Bama’s Van-
mam (2002), which is set in a fictional village Kadampatti in Tamil Nadu, caste is the primary
determinant of socioeconomic as well as physical mobility. The novel explores the privations that
Dalit women are subjected to in a place where different castes reside in segregated streets, leading
to constant and unrelenting vigilance in negotiating public and private spaces. The works C.S.
Lakshmi, a feminist writer and independent women’s studies researcher in women’s studies, who
writes under the pseudonym Ambai, are replete with nature symbolism. In many of her works,
female protagonists or feminist themes are metaphorized using animals. For instance, in her short
story, “Kaatil Oru Maan” (In a Forest, a Deer) (2000), Thangam Athai, the protagonist of the
story who suffers ostracism and derision because she is unable to menstruate, uses the story of a
deer caught alone in a forest to explain her plight to the young children in her family. In Ambai’s
short story “Anil” (Squirrel) (1992), in a dusty library where the staff are preparing to burn fem-
inist writings on government’s orders, a glue-eating squirrel, found dead “in an attitude of sur-
render” (Krishnaswamy, S. and K. Srilatha 2008, 76) serves as a transcendental link between the
past and present of women’s movements and feminist agitation. The library becomes a contentious
space that represents a culture of repression of women’s voices. In her novella Forest, two narra-
tives runs in parallel to tell the stories of Chinthiru, a woman who retreats to the forest on a quest
of self-discovery and the mythological Sita, for whom forest is a place of exile, where she suffers
the onslaught of patriarchal oppressions. The natural landscape is used to explore ways in which
“subjugated aspects of patriarchal society—women, the body, and nature—can interact with one
another” (France 2019, 39) to challenge or reinforce marginalization.
Space is also centered in “Thinaikal,” by the Singaporean writer, Kamaladevi Aravindan, a text
that brings out thinai’s capacity to accommodate fluid identities. Aravindan’s short story is an imag-
inative reworking of the concept of thinai. When the protagonist and prime aggressor Rajasekar
embarks on a brisk stroll in the Bukit Timah forest one day, he encounters a strange adventure. He

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 Tamil Literature and Ecofeminism

is immediately established as belonging to the class of human predators which presumes “rightful”
mastery over nature. Rajashekar has no compunctions about exploiting the land whether it is coastal
or pastoral, deeming all of it as commodities for his use. The landscape keeps magically trans-
forming, reflecting the five geographical thinais. It seems more part of a dreamscape, which Homi
Bhabha and Edward Soja label as Third Space or liminal space7. Here, oppressors and the oppressed
can cohabit in a space suspended between reality and dream, thus conjoining both landscape and
mindscape. The names of characters like Mullai and Maruthavelu also correspond to thinai regional
labels (mullai and marutham, respectively), making the story highly allegorical. Rajasekar is repeat-
edly counseled, assisted, and fulfilled in his needs by other characters and by nature, emphasizing his
embedment in a biospherical and ecological network. For example, while in pālai land he feels the
pull of a sudden power surrounding him and swerving around sees a gigantic form with dreadlocks
and many arms. This is a reference to the patron deity of pālai, Kottravai, syncretized as Kali in the
amalgamated Indo-Aryan and Dravidian traditions. The bemused Rajasekar realizes a moment later
that it is only a huge tree standing in his path. Here, nature, landscape, and the feminine spirit are
shown as collectively opposed to the predatory male. The story ends with Rajasekhar embracing
Mullai only to be rebuked by a slap. This becomes the symbolic embrace of the rapacious male and
nature which ends in a stinging reprimand. The narrative plays with ecofeminist value-dualisms,
identifying a primary man-Self/nature-Other binary that exists between the protagonist/antagonist
and the natural world. As Aslı Değirmenci Altın argues in Chapter 33, the combined oppression of
women and nature is built on dualisms created by patriarchal and androcentric views which are at
the center of hierarchy and inequality. Many contemporary Tamil women writers have used thinai
to create an “elsewhere” that challenges patriarchy in interesting and provocative ways, prompting
us to view them through an ecofeminist lens. These writers have worked this ancient grammatical
concept to carve out a space that is similar to the Other of Lacan’s patriarchal Symbolic (Lacan 2002),
one which is woman-centered and actively works to challenge the notion of man identified as the
archetypal conqueror of nature.
Kanagalatha, another Singaporean writer, in her poem, “Deserted Wasteland” (Yaarukkum
Illaatha Pā lai) (2014), constructs a vision of Kali, in the desert land of pā lai, “burnished by heat
and buffeted by sand storms” after she has defeated the demons (a śur ā s) in war. As this is where
she has destroyed the male a śur ā, by semantic extension, the restituted land becomes “no man’s
land.” Significantly, after she has freed the land of evil-doers she shakes her eighteen arms free of
weapons, giving up war and creating a kinship with women, who, all their lives, have been forced
to tolerate wars fought by men. Flags, symbols of nationhood, are foregrounded as active symbols
of war but Kali’s insight and wisdom override patriarchal indoctrination of patriotic fervor that
leads to “righteous” wars. The desolate pā lai is turned into a place of hope thus presenting the
poem’s mindscape as superseding geographic affiliations.

Conclusion
Poet Sakti Arulanandam’s “Maramagi” (Of Trees) (2007) encapsulates the definitive voice of
green writing in Tamil to have emerged in the past few decades:
To see a woman’s body only as body
is like seeing a tree only as tree.
Ask a traveller,
he will tell you that a tree is shade.
Ask the boy swinging on its roots, he will tell you
it is happiness.
Don’t you hear the songs of birds who consider it their home? (Translated by Swarnalatha
Rangarajan and K. Srilata from the collection, Paravaikal Purakkanitha Nagaram)
(K. Srilata and Swarnalatha Rangarajan “We have become incapable”)

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 Chitra Sankaran and Gayatri Thanu Pillai

The poem echoes the observation made by Asmae Ourkiya in Chapter 29 on gender essential-
ism that women’s subordination is interlaced and associated with a set of attributions to both
womb-bearing humans and others that falls under the category of “nature.” These attributions
range from specific anatomy, submissiveness, fertility, femininity, and the lack of autonomy. Ex-
hibiting a keen awareness of the indifference and value dualisms nature and women are subjected
to, works such as Arulanandam’s and that of myriad other Tamil writers promote material feminist
perspectives that have gained traction since the early 1990s. Basak Agin, in Chapter 32, points out
that the material ecocritics emphasize the entwined bodies and narratives of the humans and the
nonhumans. This calls attention to “a feminism that insists on examining the material conditions
under which social arrangements, including those of gender hierarchy, develop... [It] gauges the
web of social and psychic relations that make up a material, historical moment” (Wicke, 1994,
751). As Nicole Anae observes in Chapter 10, we are able to find a recognizable intersection be-
tween the materiality of texts and the materiality of culture. These works are examined on the
understanding that all kinds of material conditions, play a pivotal role “in the social production
of gender and assays the different ways in which women collaborate and participate in these pro-
ductions” (Wicke 1994, 758). Thus, we find that in Tamil literature through the millennia, the
place of the woman, her association with land, and her liberation are accrued through traditional
esthetic frameworks like thinai to form a remarkable narrative of resistance that actively contrib-
utes to current ecofeminist discourses and offers altervisions that are valuable.

Notes
1 For more details on rules of thinai, see Ilakkuvanar (1963) and Takahashi (1995).
2 See also Bennett (2010).
3 George Eliot attributes this idea to John Ruskin in her “Art and Belles Lettres: Review of Modern Paint-
ers III” published in the Westminster Review, April 1856.
4 Anecdotal prose pieces written in conversational/folkloristic style
5 Lifestory of a single character.
6 Dalit is the political term adopted by the “scheduled castes and tribes” of India.
7 See Bhabha (1994) and Soja (1996).

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 8
HINDI LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Sangita Patil

Introduction
Ecofeminism, a western theory and gained momentum in the world literary domain, is a
­praxis-orientated and pluralistic discourse with an objective to give a call to women to save the
planet (d’Eaubonne 1974). This discourse dilatorily entered Hindi literature with more ecocritical
aspects and less space for its conceptual notion. Latterly, Ecofeminism has drawn the attention of
Hindi writers with basic arguments such as development, modernization, globalization (Eaton
and Lorentzen 2003; Griffin 1980; Merchant 1980; Mies and Shiva 1993), scientific revolution
(Merchant 1980; Ruther 1975), corporate agriculture (d’Eaubonne 1974; Shiva 2010), and repro-
duction technology (Adams 1994, 2010). To this end, the chapter provides a brief catalog of Hindi
literature from the lens of ecofeminism; in addition, enquires about how the Hindi literature
receives the ecofeminist discourse – a representation of the Indian perspective. The vast array
of Hindi literature interprets nature as an integral aspect of literary narratives into the bargain
the major narratology of nature by men writers, whereas ecofeminism is a relatively recent phe-
nomenon. The perspective of ecofeminism, the connection between women and nature, takes a
backseat for two reasons: nature is an integral part of Indian culture and the degradation of nature
equally impacts men and women–natural resources, and are means of subsistence and survival for
the majority of the Indians. The analysis of the Hindi literature, longing for nature in the most
exalted sense without gendered perspective, urges us to rethink ecofeminism and proposes a new
theoretical understanding – a reciprocal relationship of human beings and nature–ecohumanism.

Hindi Literature: A Fine Narrative of Nature

The nineteenth-century Hindi literary narratives delineate a glorification of nature – an interdis-
ciplinary endeavor. Nature is not just a desolate object for Indians, but it has a spiritual and divine
connection with their lives. Major Hindi writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries depart
from the ecofeminist stance of binary/dualism (Warren 1994) and focus on the detailed descrip-
tion of nature in their writings, in a way, discursive formation of nature writing–plays, novels,
and short stories. The writers have used nature as an instrumental tool to describe place (country),
time, emotions, and characters.
First, the Hindi writers documented place, the minute, and detailed description of nature,
in other words, topophilia which shows a close cultural connection to the place. This section is
mere the tip of the iceberg of the formative period of phrasing nature writing in Hindi literature.

78 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-9

 Hindi Literature and Ecofeminism

Bhartendu Harishchanda, a well-known playwright, novelist, and poet, through his plays Shri
Chandravali (1992) and Niladevi (2003), painted a picture of the Himalayan ranges and rivers. In
a similar vein, Lala Sriniwas Das in the play Randhir Aur Premmohini also exhibits his love for a
place through the minute description of the nature, ‘In this beautiful mountain, in the cacoph-
ony of birds one cannot hear the other sound which falls on the ears, the crystal clear water of
rivulet amidst the greenery of the trees shows a new splendor by meeting with the sun rays….’
(Singhal 1991, 28) with an imperative presentation of forest and mountain (Das 2012). Jayashan-
kar Prasad, a prominent playwright, novelist, and poet, recounts the vivid beauty of the place in
Dhruvswamini, ‘In the back of the camp, the branches of the creepers clinging to the rocks near the
waterfalls which are waving in the wind, some big and small trees’ (Singhal 1991, 36). Although
there is no scope for the independent depiction of nature in the plays, talented artist such as Uday
Shankar Bhatt takes out certain opportunities to give space to the description of nature through
his plays: Vikramaditya, Dahar Athava Sindh Patan, Muktipath, Shak-vijay, and Krantikari. The nat-
ural fabric is interlaced in the plays and novels of Vrandavanlal Verma such as Hansmayur, Purva
ki Ore, ­Mangal-sutra, Lalit Vikram, Gadhkundar, Bhuvanvikram, and Mrugnayani, respectively, ‘the
sharp voice and scream of a peacock challenging the other peacock to fight’ and ‘a moon shining
through thick dark clouds’, and ‘pounding like snapping of lightning’ (Singhal 1991, 159). The
novels of Bhagavati Prasad Vajpayee Viswas Ka Bal, Patwar, Nimantran, Manushya Aur Devata, and
Gomati Ke Tat Par exemplify the role of nature in his writings,

It is the first night of the rain. It is pouring with an interval. The tiny hurried drops from the
upper rooms–pearl-like drops running on the electric wires–fancied the heart and fervently
desired the weather should remain like this always.
(Singhal 1991, 176)

The contribution of Acharya Hazariprasad Dwivedi is also very much memorable in the field of the
orientation of nature; one of the monumental works from the vantage point of the use of nature is
Banabhatta Ki Atmakatha which compiles the manifold presentations, ‘The clean water of the Ganges
was shining in the moonlight. The moon was sitting like a king in the assembly of stars in the sky and
was practicing various exercise…’ (Singhal 1991, 198). Chandi Prasad Hridayesh has elaborated on na-
ture in the form of rhetoric or the motifs, ‘Like repel of the ocean waves the masses (people) move here
and there’ (Singhal 1991, 232). At the same time, Ramkrishnadas represented the description of place
through his stories Anaakhya and Sudhanvanshu. The country-themed subjects such as hills, mountains,
and gardens are intertwined in the stories of Rahul Sankritayayan. The natural beauty of a particular
place or time is also greatly enhanced in the essay of Balamukund Gupta,

Kalakankar is a very small village. The Ganga surrounds this village from three sides and
enveloped with different wild trees which is scenic beauty. In the rainy season, the river is
brimming with water and wild trees of plum have stood on them which is deeply gazed into
the bewitching spectacle.
(Singhal 1991, 312)

The experiences of Ramchandra Shukla archived from his memories to map his native place,
‘This Stupa is on the top of a very beautiful small hill. Below is a small forest which is full of Ma-
hua trees’ (Singhal 1991, 324). Bhagavaticharan Verma novels, Ankhari Danv and Tede Mede Raste,
try to glorify nature. While exploring the stories of Chandragupta Vidyalankar, it was excavated
that the writer intricate, the natural tools to show, a subtle understanding of the place. Nature is
an inseparable part of the plot. If the paragraphs on the description of nature are removed from the
stories First Death and Two Aspects, the entire story will get disintegrated.

79
 Sangita Patil

Second, the other set of writers desired to purge their emotions with the different aspects of
nature. These writers manifest the intimate bonding of the writers and nature, and the powerful
embodiment of feelings and thoughts through the analogies. In the play, Maharana Pratap Singh,
Radhakrishna engraves naturalistic fallacy, ‘Khudaband, he flickered like lighting and tore the
army to replace Rana to sacrifice himself ’ (Singhal 1991, 33, 34). The characteristics of human
beings compared with constituents of nature in the plays of Seth Govind Das’ Kartavya, Vikas,
Garibhi Ya Aamiri, Shashi Gupta, where he explained ‘the characters as dazzling as the sun’, ‘softer
than the lotus flower’ (Singhal 1991, 60). The most popular novels and the plays of Devakinanda
Khatri are Chandrakanta and Chandrakanta Santati, Gadhkundar, and Mriganayani which portray
nature as a powerful tool to express emotions. The novels of Pandey Bechan Sharma Ugra’s
Delhi Ka Darbar, Sarkar Tumhari Ankhonme, and Ji Ji Ji give a panoramic spectrum of emotions
with great skill, ‘The end of the brother-in-law is near, Clouds were gathering in the sky. Even
if it rains, it will not be on him, there is nothing to fear’ (Ugra 2004, 5). Nature has a vibrancy
to communicate the various thoughts and feelings of human beings, especially, the moments
of separation of a lover depicted in Pandit Govindvalabh Pant’s play Varmala (1963). Ilachandra
Joshi belongs to the hilly region of Almora; she lived and breathed nature; these reminiscences
forced her to reveal nostalgic feelings through her writings. Along with the detailed description
of nature and expressions of emotions and feelings, on par, some other writers even endeavor to
engage with nature to delineate the qualities and features of characters. The tools of nature sculpt
the beauty of the characters which can be observed in the works of Balkrishan Bhatt – a seminal
playwright, novelist, and essayist. He has used the traditional natural analogies such as ‘lotus for
feet’ and ‘the snow-free sun’, in his plays Pashan, Anndhakar, and Nisha. The writers have men-
tioned the character traits through ‘chattan’, ‘saurabh’, and ‘Himalaya’ which can be seen in the
plays Goutam Anand and Pratap-Pratighy of Jaganath Prasad Milind (Singhal 1991, 60). The strong
tormenting sentiments of the lover through natural phenomenon, ‘the feeling of fear palpable
in the shadow of the dark clouds’ and ‘the swirling clouds to express the bulge of the memories’
(Singhal 1991, 85). Dr. Rajkumar Verma and Jagadish Mathur are the only representative mo-
nographers who glorified nature in their compositions named Badal Ki Mritu and Bhor ka Tara.
These writings are imbibed with the natural elements, sun, cloud, and wind to embellish the
characters. The novels of Premchand such as Nirmala, Godan, and Rangbumi highlight the certain
beautiful aspects of characters, ‘lips look like thin rose petals’ and ‘the face is always blooming’.
This cursory survey of Hindi literature proffers that nature has been used in four forms: the
physical beauty of the characters, the country, and the compilation of emotional representations.
In these Hindi literary narratives, the ecofeminist discourse takes a backseat because nature is an
integral part of their lives:

After taking a bird’s eye view of India’s past, it is known that nature had a very high place in
Vedic Indian culture. Various instruments of nature like Sun, Moon, trees, etc. were wor-
shiped in the form of deities. Nature plays very vital role in the literature of that era also. In
the Rigveda Samhita, there are many nature oriented hymns such as Kala-Nidhi, the ruler of
Gaganamandal; Tarkakhchit Vyom; Usha spreading her Arunima; and Bhaskar who illumi-
nates the whole earth.
(Singhal 1991, 5)1

The analysis of the Hindi literature allegories the cultural profile of our country. For ages
together, nature remained a part of the lives of the people. The deep observation of the literary
genre is testimony to the fact that the writers cannot remain detached from the courtyard of
nature. The canvas of Hindi literature is occupied by men writers portraying their intimacy and
bonding with nature.

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Ecocritical Narrative: Paradigm Shift

Though the Hindi writers tried to orient and glorify nature, there is a seismic shift in the literary
narratives – a twist and turn in writing culture. The writers are expressing their grief and lament
over the destruction of nature through their writings especially anthropocentric attitude which
goes with the thematic aspects of ecocriticism. This shift poses primordial questions: why is the
rhetoric shift in writing patterns? Why there is a transition in thematic aspects from glorification
to lamentation over nature? The meditation on these questions animates that nature is essentially
a part of Indian lives and the serene nature surrounding the writers projected through their nar-
rations; however, the development in the form of capitalism exploited nature and this has become
the intellectual concern in the form of grief and lamentation, “The consequences of environmen-
tal destruction are direct and very fatal for human beings” (Illath 2019: 11).
In The Eco-Criticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Glotfelty (1996, xviii) traces, ‘the
study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment’. This philosophical
deliberation can be traced to the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of
twentieth-century Hindi literature, regardless of ecofeminism, appropriates literature and the
physical environment with variegated thematic aspects. William Rueckert (1978) in his article
‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism’ proposes environmental crisis through
the literary genre. Glotfelty attests,

The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and representations wherever they appear,
to see more clearly a debate which seems to be taking place, often partly concealed, in a great
many cultural spaces. Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of
their coherence and usefulness as responses to the environmental crisis.
(Kerridge 1998, 5)

To respond to the environmental crisis, there was a significant epoch in Hindi literature which
was called Chhayavad or Swachandwad period, ‘Prasad, Nirala, Pant, and Mahadevi Verma are
representative poets of Chhayavad poetry. They can be considered the second generation of Ro-
mantic poets’ (Singh 2 2010, 143, 144). The base of Hindi Chhayavad was a cultural renaissance
the result of capitalism and the Western influence, ‘These poets liked to live amidst nature after
getting bored of the shackles of society…it is the poetry of middle class consciousness’ (Varshney3
1885, 320). The Chhayavad period was a critical response to the proliferation of industrialization
and the scientific revolution. It is substantiated in Omprakash Singhal’s Hindi Gady Saahity Mein
Prakrti Chitran:

But with the passage of time, there was a change in the Indian way of life. The old beliefs
started to fade away. The political circumstances started affecting the Indian society in such a
way that the erstwhile free life of the people got damaged gradually. Mutual divisions, foreign
invasions, and subsequent fetters of enslavement struck a chord with the nature-love feelings
of the Indian psyche. People became so infatuated with political and economic conditions
that they did not have any leisure to gaze at the unique beauty of nature. As a result of this,
gradually nature started getting less space in literature too.
(Singhal 1991, 8)

A Sheer description of nature is replaced by the narration of the environmental crisis which is
the outcome of industrialization and the Western culture. The four major iconic poets of this
period were Jayashankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Sumitranand Pant, and Mahadevi
Verma. The major anthologies of Prasad’s poems are Zarana (1927) and Chitradhara (1918), which

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 Sangita Patil

show the intricate relationship between the poet’s soul and nature through self-expression,
­‘Self-consciousness pervades the poet everywhere in nature’ (Singh 2010, 144). The poetry of
Pant is a combination of natural beauty and rustic narration. On the other hand, the major woman
poet Mahadevi Verma delved deeper into nature to express her sorrow; nature is an instrument for
her pain, ‘In Mahadevi’s mysticism, there is pain of love, and the medium of pain is nature. While
depicting nature, she has given either personality to nature or has described nature as fueled by
human emotions’ (Varshaneya 1885, 332).
The anthropocentric attitude considering human beings superior to nature introduces in the
novel Chitralekha of Bhagavaticharan Verma. He has done scathing satire on human beings’ atti-
tudes and considering nature an inferior,

Yes, nature is incomplete! Due to the incompleteness of nature, man has taken refuge in
artificiality. In autumn, beautiful places of nature going to be ugly because some places
are covered with fog and the other with blowing of cold wind by which a body starts
trembling.
(Singhal 1991, 182)

Yashpal’s novels, Divya, Manushyake Rup, Jhootha-Sach, have the reference of natural resources to
attribute to the various parts of the characters. The core motive is to show the human attitude in
the form of capitalism, globalization, development, and their intervention in the serene natural
environment. On the other hand, Phanishwarnath Renu through his novels named Maila Anchal
and Parti Pari Katha made a successful attempt to bring down the rustic life of Maithil Pradesh.
The writing in both these novels, instead of planning a systematic and well-organized story, has
brought forth very vivid pictures of different situations of the folklife of Meriganj and Paranpur.
Nature is an essential part of the rural life. Therefore, the novelist has not been able to separate
nature and its various instruments from his writings. Renu’s novels are a critique of the destructive
attitude of human beings. It must be noted that instead of just the monotonous and descriptive
style, Girijakumar Ghosh has taken the shelter of the emotional pattern, as a result of which the
shade of humanization is seen everywhere that is the domination of human beings over nature an
anthropocene attitude, ‘The sun God was at that time peeping out to see the condition of the earth
from the lower part of the sky. The peaks of the trees were beginning to sparkle with the red-red
net of rays’ (Singhal 1991, 216). On the other hand, a few writers make an effort to proclaim the
exploitation of animals. As Greta Gaard tries to (1993, 5), ‘Demonstrate the linkages between en-
vironmental degradation and the oppression of non-human animals (speciesism)’. The short stories
of Premchand The Tale of Two Bullocks and Sailor Bandar communicate the exploitation of the an-
imals on the basis of entertainment or too excessive work from them for our selfishness or greedy
appetite. On the other hand, his novel, Rangbhoomi (1924) is the protest against industrialization
and Godan (1957) relates the saga of the impact of modernization on the peasant community. The
stories of Janendra Kumar Two Birds and This Snake are stored in antipyretics for the euphemism
of their personality, but many times through them, it is desired to create a life origin. This was the
situation in these stories. The core of these stories lies in their ideology rather than in the narra-
tive technique. He focuses on life truth along with life values which mean Natural Karma (fate).
The Snake story makes us realize our behavior and attitude toward animals and nature. It insists
us to contemplate the dialog of the snake ‘so was poison my strength?’ (Singhal 1991, 273) There
is no space for separate and detailed descriptions of place and time in Guleri Ji Ki Amar Kahaniya;
however, a very picturesque description of the country without any expected detail along with a
layered acumen. The intervention of development and modernization in a serene natural environ-
ment is illustrated by the snowy mountains which can melt whereas the Lime Mountains, a marker
of development, never melt. This analogy exposits the remorse of the writer over human actions.

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Subsequently, the writer has regret over our indifference and selfish motive toward the earth and
all other living beings–human versus nature:

The peaks of the snowy mountains by seeing such mesmerizing beauty, the eyes might have
grown old and chest seemed to grow by the breath of the air, innumerable small canals emanating
and then joining the rocky bottom of the main river. All these scenes were completely different
from the brick houses and mud roads of Prayag. There was a mountain road of thirty miles. In the
distance, heaps of limes were visible, which were mountains of never melting snow.
(Singhal 1991, 227)

It highlights two aspects: one, the subtle comparison between natural and artificial such as the
flora and fauna with the roads and brick houses; two, the melting snowy mountains and the heaps
of the limes (the symbol of development). Likewise, in the story First death, the author has demon-
strated the fact that human beings in the primitive days were very close to the earth and physical
environment. Moreover, nature was an integral part of their lives and they worship it. This fun-
damental notion that the earth, dust, soil, and stones, all her particles have lives as well as they
have right to live; it had the tinge and very essence of life. The earth is regarded as the mother;
she used to be with us all the time (Singhal 1991). In the Atharvaved, the hymn Bhumisukta adds
nuances to the above perspective:

Yasyaam Samudra Uta Sindhur-AapoYasyaam-Annam KrssttayahSambabhuuvuh |Yasyaam-

Idam Jinvati Praannad-Ejat-Saa No Bhuumih Puurva-Peye Dadhaatu…

This Sanskrit hymn describes that the mother earth is always bestowed on us with water and food
by which all other living beings are getting their lives. She should be kind and generous to gift the
same thing in the future (Patil 2020). But this conceptual understanding is gradually vanishing. In
the modern era, the earth has become a lifeless object and mere a machine,

One reason the historical changes described in The Death of Nature are of interest is that we
may be experiencing a similar revolution today. The machine image that has dominated
Western culture for the past three hundred years seems to be giving way something new.
(Merchant 1980, xvii)

Vidyalankar feels that every organism is intertwined with the other one; we can sense this through
the very beautiful example that even animals also express condolences for human death,

On the next day the condition of Dev worsened even more. His body turned black and re-
laxed………. All this happened, Dev has not come out of the wave of the sleep, all friends of
the country gathered there–humans, animals, birds, and, all. Everyone’s mind was disturbed.
(Singhal 1991, 276)

Within the frame of the above discussion. It is very apt to ponder over the standpoint of Plumwood,

An examination of the literature shows many serious difficulties in the position as so far
stated, and that some forms of ecofeminism are untenable or open to serious objection. These
are the major gaps in the arguments of the position, a need to clarify many of the key concepts
and to distinguish more carefully between quite different positions which have been lumped
together under the ecofeminism label
(Plumwood 1986, 120)

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 Sangita Patil

These Hindi writers evince the indelible relationships between human beings and nature, and the
analysis is a departure from the basic concepts of ecofeminism.

Ecofeminism: Deconstruction of Nature Writing

When we turn to contemporary Hindi literature, there is a paradigm shift in the writing
culture. In the twenty-first century, a quantum leap by a few Hindi literary narratives, we
can trace the basic theoretical underpinnings of ecofeminism–scientific revolution, modern-
ization, development, capitalistic culture, etc. This period is the deconstruction of canonical
­n ature-oriented writing. Sanjeev’s Rah Gayi Dishayon Issi Paar (2011) attacks scientific revo-
lution in the form of reproduction technology such as cloning, artificial insemination, cross-
breeds, bisexual animals, gender change, tissue culture, and synthetic human beings where
nature and women are guinea pigs; all these are the outcome of neoliberal economy and
consumerist culture. In this novel, Peter is a synthetic human being by artificial insemination
from a semen bank and Atul Bijaria is a test tube baby, and Lara’s uterus is used to clone Lara’s
father, and Shahnawaz’s gender change,

You are very concerned about saving rare breed species. If I want to save my honest father’s
breed then what crime am I committing? I don’t know. I care about religion, not morality. I
am proud that I am…becoming a medium to save a rare species like the father.
(Sanjeev 2011, 138)

All these examples show natural order versus scientific inventions, which establish autocratic
power over the reproduction process – the laboratory is the place where artificial insemination
incubates. It is a mockery of the development,

People are showing their goods by placing them on their palms look this ovum, this semen,
this womb, these…all are selling themselves no need to shy away. All lines of modesty, ob-
scenity, values, and rituals have been erased. There is neither the east nor the west, neither the
north nor the south, either above or below, there no relation, no culture…
(Sanjeev 2011, 138)

This exemplifies the impact of the scientific invention on human beings’ psyche, culture, and ide-
ology, which wants to establish autocratic power over reproduction in the laboratory in the form
of artificial insemination. The seminal ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant, in her book The Death of
Nature (1980, 5), argues, ‘New commercial and technological innovations, however, can upset and
undermine an established structure’. The other novel goes in this line of thought: Alka Saraogi’s
Ek Break Ke Baad (2008) talks about consumerism through the attractive packages and modern-
ization in the guise of development through the multinational companies and industries by ex-
ploiting the natural resources and the third-world countries are providing raw materials for them,

Well, don’t shut down the factories, of course, keep releasing carbon into the air. Just buy
carbon credits like you buy iron for a steel factory. The sky of the whole earth is the same,
you spoil the air-water somewhere, but improve the air and water somewhere else. What is
a problem?
(Saraogi 2008, 15)

This ironic dialog suggests a need for anthropause. Mahu Maji’s Marang Goda Neelkanth Hua
(2012) dissects the problem of uranium radiation. She is a journalist as well as a serious researcher

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with the help of deep research, study, and survey. She penned this novel that gives a realistic pic-
ture of contemporary problems and issues in India; this novel is an outcome of her four years of
serious research; she has not left any stone to be unturned in the forest of Jharkhand. The entire
novel contextualizes two aspects: a search for uranium and the plight and struggle of tribal people.
In spite of its very serious impact on the lives of tribes, it has not become the subject of serious
discussion and solution, ‘Uranium, in the order of beginning destroyed or depleted also has some
other radioactive elements like protactinium, thorium, radium, radon, polonium, make bismuth,
and lead, even after coming in contact with which we get damaged’ (Maji 2012, 159). Placed in
this context, it is very apt to shed light on the views of Susan Griffin, ‘The atomic explosion de-
stroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only science, exact science about human nature … will deliver
man from his present gloom, and will purge him from his contemporary shame in the sphere of
inter human relationships’ (Griffin 1980, 36). Maji’s novel poses questions to humanity. The author
wants to share her personal experiences through the spokesperson; it is an example of the author’s
premature delivery. This agony she sensed in the tribal people and it is the saga of tribal people
battling radiation, pollution, and displacement. Which Vandana Shiva says maldevelopment (2010,
98), ‘Dams, mines, energy plants, military bases – these are the temples of the new religion called
“development” is a religion that provides a rationale for the altar of this religion are nature life
and people’s life’. Mridula Garg’s Kathgulab (1996) spotlights capitalistic civilization and patriarchal
domination. It is a revolutionary novel that gives an answer to the scientific revolution that women
can be self-reliant, self-sufficient, and self-respecting by having the option of a sperm bank or a test-
tube baby. It is the gender politics that the binary is based on body, existence, and creative power,

Rationalism and human/nature dualism have helped create ideals of culture and human iden-
tity that promote human distance from, control of and ruthlessness towards the sphere of
nature as the Other, while minimizing non-human claims to the earth and to elements of
mind, reason and ethical consideration.
(Plumwood 2002, 4)

In this novel, Garg asserts that women can go beyond this patriarchal domination through their
own advancement. Vipin became a guinea pig that is a human machine. Sanjeev and Garg are
against interference of the scientific revolution in the laws of nature as well as their proposition is
the Indian traditional concept Ardhanarishwara (the human body inclusive of man and woman).
Both Vipin and Smitaare, the characters, considered as Prakritirupa – Prakriti means nature and
rupa means the form, so Prakritirupa is the form of nature. This Indian philosophy indicates that
nature consists of the essence of man and woman. Therefore, both are parts of nature. The poems
of Manglesh Dabralgo pronounce the same line of thought of many contemporary issues and
problems, capitalistic culture, globalization, development, urbanization, and their impact on the
tribal and folk people. The tribal people coexist with nature; however, global warming and the
intervention of globalization and modernization in the lives of these people lead to the depletion
of natural resources. This folk culture to global culture is narrated through his poems such as
Ghatatee Huee Oxygen, Yahaan Thee Vah Nadee, Vasant, and Aadivaasee:
They are able to see just anew golden bird got buried in the ground under his feet
One day he calls out to his instruments.
His rivers, his places and his names.
Even he calls his iron, coal, and mica
He starts playing his trumpet and flute loudly the people who governs them.
Then immediately brings out gun.
(Dabral 2021, 334)

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 Sangita Patil

The ecofeminist discourse has not drawn the attention of Hindi writers till the twenty-first cen-
tury because of their deep reverence and spiritual connection to nature; but, the narratology
changed and few writers set out to narrate aspects of ecofeminism when the globalization and
modernization in the form of development has gradually started taking a toll on the livelihood,

“Broadly speaking, these conflicts have set in opposition, on the other side, social group
who have gained disproportionately from economic development whilst being insulated from
ecological degradation, (in particular, industrialists, urban consumers and rich farmers), and
on the other, poorer and relatively powerless groups such as small peasants, pastoral no-
mads, tribals and fishing communities, whose livelihoods have been seriously undermined
through a combination of resource flows biased against them growing deterioration of the
environment.”
(Gadgil and Guha 1994: 119)

The Chipko Movement was a prominent movement in the ecological degradation of India. This
movement was led by the Bishnoi with their religious principles such as ‘jeev daya paloni’ means
‘be compassionate to all living beings’ and ‘rukh lila nahi gahave’ means ‘do not cut the green
trees’. The reverence and love for nature is an inherent aspect of Indian culture; therefore, Hindi
literature departs from the philosophy and activism of ecofeminism, and deconstructs the binary
opposition by providing a broader platform for intersectionality with the proposition of new the-
oretical underpinning such as ecohumanism.

Conclusion
The analytical overview of Hindi literature from the ecofeminist perspective provides evolution-
ary phases of literary narratives, and recounts the reflection of the natural beauty, environment
crisis, and the aspect of ecofeminism. In the beginning period, it tries to put forth the aspects of
nature as a tool to express our feelings, compare and contrast the characters, glorify, and orient
nature with a detailed description of place and time. The second milestone, a creative tension, in
the evolution is the narration of the environmental crisis which has begun in the Chayyavad Kal
which means the era of Romanticism in India. The writers of this period have countered devel-
opment and modernization; they have expressed their perspectives and views through a literary
genre. In the twenty-first century, there is a paradigm shift in narratology; few Hindi writers at-
tempt to gauge the contemporary environmental crisis through the lens of ecofeminism. The ma-
jority of Hindi literature either accounts nature or degradation of nature because of human beings
action, however, very recently relate a few aspects of ecofeminisim. As the major ecofeminists ar-
gue the basic reasons for the exploitation of women and degradation of nature are modernization,
globalization, and development. Thus, the brief catalog of Hindi literature is an important site
to discuss the role of ecofeminism in Indian literature. However, the stance of ecofeminism, the
connection between women and nature, takes a backseat for two reasons: nature is an integral part
of Indian culture, and second, the degradation of nature equally impacts men and women–natural
resources, and are means of subsistence and survival for the majority of the Indians. Therefore,
the analysis of the Hindi literature urges to rethink ecofeminism and proposes a new theoretical
understanding – a reciprocal relationship of human beings and nature–ecohumanism.

Notes
1 In this chapter, the quotes are referred from Singhal Omprakash’s Hindi Gady Saahity Mein Prakrti Chi-
tran. This book is written in Hindi. I have translated the quotes into English.

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 Hindi Literature and Ecofeminism

2 Aadhunik Hindi Sahitya Ka Itihyas is in Hindi. I have translated the quotation into English.
3 Hindi Sahitya Ka Itihyas is in Hindi. I have translated the quotation into English.

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 9
BENGALI LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Abhik Gupta

Introduction
The term ecofeminism or ecoféminisme was coined by the French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne
in her book Le Féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death) published in 1974. The concept was de-
veloped more comprehensively in the 1978 publication Ecologie Féminisme: Revolution ou Mutation?
d’Eaubonne asserted that the androcentric attitudes of the patriarchal society were primarily re-
sponsible for vexed issues such as overpopulation and the destruction of the environment. The
dominating role of the males relegated women to a position of insignificance, though they de-
served equal status because of their numbers and the important role they played in reproduction.
In the same way, the environment was exploited without restraint and the devaluation of women
and desecration of nature could be linked both from historical and present perspectives (Gates
1996, 9). Beginning from these premises, ecofeminism has flourished both as a philosophy and a
movement. As a philosophy, it is a critique of the “ontology of domination”, which reduces living
beings to objects that could be exploited, oppressed, and deprived of their moral status. It also
opposes the social norms, which accord higher status to the male dominators than that given to
women, other humans as well as nonhumans (Donovan 1996, 161). Ecofeminism is also critical of
capitalism which ignores the contributions of women’s labor – such as that at home – as well as that
of natural capital and ecosystem services. These are not considered in the skewed balance sheet of
the capitalist model of development, which only highlights the “profits” of a capitalist system, but
does not reveal the “costs” of the loss of women’s rights and dignity as well as of the goods and ser-
vices of nature. Similarly, ecofeminism is against colonialism which establishes mastery over the
natural resources, and the nonhumans and the humans alike of the colonized land. In other words,
both capitalism and colonialism recognize only extrinsic or use value in nature and women, and
deny them any intrinsic value. Further, the ideals of capitalist individualism are opposed to the
ecofeminist visualizations of an inclusive self that is connected with all forms of life (Bedford
2018, 16). The ecofeminist notion of nonduality recognizes interdependence and relationships
among humans and other entities in nature. In its “radical” interpretation, it also recognizes
“the existence of unitive dimensions of being” (Spretnak 1997, 425). As “a practical movement”,
ecofeminism voices the struggle of women against the juggernaut of “maldevelopment” launched
by patriarchal societies, corporates and their associates and compradors, which not only affects the
sustenance and dignity of women, but also destroys the environment (Gaard and Murphy 1998, 2).
Though the concept of ecofeminism emerged in the 1970s, the societal anomalies that lead to
the oppression of women and cause untold sufferings in their lives, are reflected in the literary

88 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-10

 Bengali Literature and Ecofeminism

works of the earlier periods as well. The degradation and destruction of nature have been continu-
ing for long, and authors have often juxtaposed the oppression of women with the privatization
and commoditization of nature. Viewed through the lens of ecofeminism, some of the characters
in these literary works appear in a new light in relation to their oppressors and vis-à-vis nature,
because the latter – despite being itself stripped of its beauty and wealth by patriarchal dominators,
and denied the rights and respect that were once its privilege – provides succor to women and
alleviates their sufferings. A world of compassion and partnership between women and nature is
created, where the relationship is “not reduced to an ‘It’ but recognized as a ‘thou’”, and is trans-
formed into one of “dialogue, conversation and meditative attentiveness” (Donovan 1996, 161).
The concept of “It” and “Thou” visualizes the creation of “spheres in which the world of relation
arises” (Buber 1923, 13). This vision blends with that of ecofeminism because it is women who
create and nurture relationships within and outside the family, and between humans and nonhu-
mans. The ecofeminists also differ from the Deep Ecologists by affirming that it is male domina-
tion or androcentrism rather than more generalized anthropocentrism that is primarily responsible
for ecological degradation and biodiversity loss (Estévez-Saá and Lorenzo-Modia 2018, 125).
There is no simple and straightforward relationship between ecofeminism, environmen-
tal activism and literary criticism. Ecocriticism examines environmental thoughts and issues in
literature, while ecofeminism provides a critique of the patriarchal society that promotes the dom-
ination of women as well as the degradation and destruction of nature for human use (Buchanan
2010, cited in Deininger 2018, 45). Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman in Chapter 23 contends that British
and American ecofeminist literature has generally upheld the association of women with nature,
where the human mother was equated with the concept of Mother Earth or Mother Nature. This
position is contrary to the plethora of dualisms harbored in a mainstream Western worldview that
creates insurmountable barriers between mind and body, men and women, and humans and na-
ture. Taylor-Wiseman also points out the ambivalence that is often found in ecofeminist literary
works. For instance, in one of the texts, the ocean is viewed as a mother with a soft, sensuous and
intimate touch, though the woman protagonist does not accept her own motherhood. However,
this dualism between women and nature is abolished when she dies in the sea, and the author
suggests that this death is in reality a rebirth as a child of nature.
In the Indian context, Patil (2020) suggested that ecofeminist assertions are less common in
Indian novels, which look at the environmental issues “more as a general human problem than
merely as a gender problem” (Patil 2020, 6).
Among the regional Indian literature, Bengali (or Bangla) occupies a distinct position. Bengali
belongs to the easternmost branch of Indo-Iranian languages (Sen 1960, 1), and is spoken by more
than 210 million people worldwide. It is the state language of Bangladesh, and one of the recog-
nized major languages of India (Britannica 2017).
The Bengali literary works analyzed in this chapter represent literature from West Bengal in
India, and Bangladesh, which depict the exploitation and oppression of women by the same pa-
triarchal society that also exploits nature and strips it of its beauty and bounty. In many instances,
nature provides solace and support to the hapless women, while in a few others, the struggles of
the women find parallels in the degradation of the environment.

A Silent Dialogue
In his short story Subha, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) has portrayed the mingling of women’s
miseries with the silent voices of nature (Tagore 1892). Subha is a girl with a speech disability. She
is neglected by her parents – especially her mother – who considers her a liability. Perhaps because
of the internalization of her mother’s feelings, Subha also starts believing that she has a cursed
existence, and withdraws into the fold of nature. In the absence of human friends, she engages in

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silent conversations with the two cows and the other animals in her household, which also recip-
rocate the love that she showers on them. She spends a lot of her time on the bank of a small rivulet
where the sounds of water, the chirping of birds and all the other voices of nature shape her private
world. And on a blazing summer afternoon, when the whole world sleeps and even the birds stop
singing, the silent nature and a mute Subha sit facing each other in a wordless conversation. Here
nature comes alive and the girl is transformed into a part of nature. Buber (1947, 3) said that “for
a conversation no sound is necessary, not even a gesture.” In

our life with nature …… the relation sways in gloom, beneath the level of speech. Creatures
live and move over against us, but cannot come to us, and when we address them as Thou, our
words cling to the threshold of speech.
(Buber 1923, 13)

Perhaps Subha’s lack of speech enables her to enter with ease into this twilight world of conversa-
tions with silent nature. We can find an analogy in Tamil Sangam poetry of 300 BCE to 300 CE,
which has been highlighted by Chitra Sankaran and Gayatri Thanu Pillai in Chapter 7, “Tamil
Literature and Ecofeminism”. In Sangam poetry, nature no longer remains as a mere backdrop,
but becomes an “actant” in the thinai universe. Thinai in Sangam literature is conceived as space
that is equivalent to an ecotope, which has been defined by Whittaker and his associates in 1973
as the relation of the species to the entire gamut of abiotic and biotic variables affecting it (see
Sankaran and Pillai’s Chapter 7). However, in Tamil literature, thinai goes beyond the physical
domain of the ecotope to include the cultural elements of the land. In Subha’s thinai, the cows
and the other animals, the birds, the flowing water, and other elements of nature are elevated from
being mere inanimate backdrops to more active participants and partners in her life. However,
Subha’s passive withdrawal into the comforting embrace of nature is in contrast to the stand of
the protagonist Gnanambal in the Tamil novel Pratapa Mudaliar Charitram (1879) by Mayuram Ve-
danayakam Pillai. Gnanambal actively protects and defends the birds in her garden against anyone
intending to harm them. The birds in turn recognize her compassionate attitude by breaking into
song and dance whenever they see her.

Ecofeminism and Aranyak (Of the Forest)

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1894–1950) was one of the earliest Bengali writers to chronicle and
examine the relationships of humans with nature, especially forests, where he also depicted the op-
pression and exploitation of women as the victims of caste-based power games that accompanied the
destruction of nature to amass wealth, influence and social and political standing. In his well-known
work Aranyak (Of the Forest), Bibhutibhushan writes about the forests of Purnea and Bhagalpur dis-
tricts of Bihar (Bandyopadhyay 1939). The status of the forests, which were traditionally treated as
common property resources in most places, had changed with the advent of British rule. Different
legislations led to stricter government control over forests, and large tracts of forested land were
allotted to wealthy landowners to ‘reclaim’ for agriculture. Whether as state or private property for
earning revenue, the forests could no longer support the needs of the poor and the destitute (Gupta
2013, 20–21). In the backdrop of these changes, Bibhutibhushan wrote Aranyak, which has been
described as “a lyric, in prose, of the Forest” (Chatterjee 1959, 32). In this novel, Kunta – a destitute
woman – somehow ekes out a living for her and her three children by gathering the wheat residues
from the fields after harvesting, and by collecting wild Indian jujube fruits which grow abundantly
in the forest. However, since the forest land came under private ownership, she is not allowed access
to these resources, and is even harassed and beaten up by the guards of the landlord. Her life also
reflects the rampant caste prejudices. She is the beautiful daughter of a baiji (a professional singer

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and dancer), who was lured into marriage by a rich high-caste moneylender. After the death of her
husband, another powerful moneylender wanted her as his mistress, though she did not agree to this
and chose to undergo untold hardships to protect her dignity and the lives of her children. Here, the
misfortune of Kunta can be compared to the forest, which has also transformed from a state of free
existence to that of exploitation, degradation and destruction. Kunta, who was herself the wife of a
high-caste man, also transcends the caste barrier to nurse an old and equally destitute low-caste old
man to health. It is as if the forest has imparted its capacity to heal, nurture and sustain to Kunta.
Kunta’s story also presents the image of the forest as a “giving parent” commonly found among
many marginal communities of India (Bird-David 1990, 190). Though she bears her miseries silently
and stoically, Kunta represents the resilience and fortitude of Indian women against the many odds
thrown at them by the male-dominated society.
Another woman who emerges tall in Aranyak is Bhanumati, the graceful granddaughter of the
vanquished aborigine king Dobru Panna, though Panna and his family uphold their dignity, and
Bhanumati grows into a graceful and kind young lady. She is the daughter of the forest, who and
her tribe have been dispossessed by the revenue-oriented policies of the colonial masters and their
Indian minions. Their loss is not only in terms of the traditional rights that they enjoyed in the
forest, but also the dignity with which they carried on with their simple yet naturally enriched
lives. In the concluding section of the book, the author visualizes Bhanumati – the uncrowned
princess of this land – living as the guardian of the last green bastions on the hills. Thus, Aranyak
shows us that the destruction of the forest in India under colonial rule not only resulted in the
decimation of its biodiversity, but also exacerbated the oppression and exploitation of women by
the patriarchal society and the revenue-oriented colonial policies.

Durga and the Village Woods in Pather Panchali (Song of the Road)
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay also wrote Pather Panchali, which underscores the role of nature in
sustaining the downtrodden and the oppressed (Bandyopadhyay 1929). The village woods serve as a
parent for Durga, a vivacious teenage girl, who spends a large part of her waking hours in its shelter.
Durga’s father, who often has to be away to earn for his impoverished family, cannot afford to buy
her and her younger brother toys, sweets, jewelry and such things that all children covet. Instead, it
is the village woods that opens all its secret treasures to Durga, such as juicy fruits, shiny seeds for
toys, and leaves, creepers, flowers and tendrils with which she fashions ornaments to bedeck herself.
Bibhutibhushan imagines that because Durga and Apu are deprived of sweets prepared by human
hands, the goddesses of the forest fill the bosom of the wildflowers and fruits with nectar and sweet
juice. Durga’s life is not a happy one due to the scorn and humiliation meted out to her by her
wealthier neighbors, which in turn leads to frequent chastisements by her mother. Being a sensitive
girl she reacts in her own way by rarely participating in the games and fun and frolic of village chil-
dren, as she feels that she is not really welcome there because of the poverty-stricken status of her
family. In all her sorrow, her final refuge is the village woods which provides unconditional solace
in its nooks and crannies, and the comforting shade of its dense bushy recesses. Durga is a spirited
girl, though being the daughter of a poor father, she is unable to openly rebel against the system. Yet
she protests in her own unique way, by shunning the criticizing neighbors and spending most of her
time in the wood, which opens its arms to the rich and the poor alike.

The Women of the Riverine Tracts

The Bengal Delta is formed by the rivers Ganga, Padma, Jamuna (the downstream stretch of
Brahmaputra), Meghna, and their numerous tributaries and distributaries, which ultimately drain
into the Bay of Bengal. In his 1986 novel, Padmar Polidwip (The Alluvial Islands of Padma), the

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Bangladeshi novelist Abu Ishaque (1926–2003) describes the life of the communities living on
their banks and on the numerous sandbars (locally called char) which appear and disappear from
time to time at the whims of the river. The males are obsessed with taking possession of the sand-
bars as they rise from the murky waters of the Padma, and are not averse to entering into violent
conflicts. It is the women who silently suffer the loss of their near and dear ones. One such woman –
Boru bibi – laments her elder son, who was killed in a fight over a sandbar, and though averse to
exposing her younger son Fazal to a similar fate, has to let him go, because it is he who has to take
over the mantle of his father. In the same way, the lives of other women such as Zarina and Roopjan
are governed by the diktats of their male folk, and in a sense, their lives undergo upheavals similar
to that of the transient sandbars, which surface now and then to again go back into the depths of
the river, and whose ownerships change hands like that of the women. Nevertheless, life goes on,
and the novel ends when Fazal and Roopjan come together to start their life anew (Ishaque 1986).
The rivers of Bengal Delta frequently change their course, and deposits of silt and sand choke
many channels and cause their death. Syed Waliullah (1922–1971) in Kando Nodi Kando (Cry River
Cry) tries to fathom the underlying reasons for the wails of a dying river (Waliullah 1968). Does
the river cry because of its impending obliteration or does it also empathize with the plight of the
people – especially women – living on its banks? It is Sakina Khatun who first hears the sound of a
woman crying and believes that actually it is the river that is getting choked with silt, which cries.
Sakina is a frail young woman of no beauty, who spends her time teaching in a primary school,
and doing numerous household chores. Does she hear the river cry because her own future appears
bogged down like that of the silted river? Gradually, more people – both women and men – of
the riverside town think they can also hear the sound of crying. It looks as though the river not
only cries for itself, it also cries for the people of the town on its banks, empathizing with their
sorrow. The dull and drab life of Sakina is symbolic of the fate of the town, which is also in its
death throes along with the river.
Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (The Name of the River is Titas) is the saga of a river, which sustains the
Malo community that earns its living by fishing (Mallabarman 1956). The writer of this posthu-
mously published novel – Adwaita Mallabarman (1914–1951) – traces the life of the Malos, which
is intricately linked with that of the river. They are, therefore, devastated when like many rivers
of Bengal, the Titas dries up with its vast sandbars converted to agricultural land. While the Malos
themselves are the victims of the landlords and moneylenders, their women are exploited both by
the larger patriarchal society around them as well as by the Malo men themselves. They hardly
have any identity of their own, being known by the names of their husbands and sons, and enjoy
few rights. And yet, despite these privations and oppressions, the Malo women care for their loved
ones, and shower affections on their children. They feel concerned when on stormy nights their
men go out to fish in the river, but feel a bit assured because Titas to them is like a loving mother,
who can never do them any harm. Therefore, as the river gradually dries up to die a slow death, an
old woman – Subal’s wife – who has seen the river in its full splendor, dies too, dreaming of a river
full of water and silvery hordes of fish. Era (2017) has traced the women–nature interconnections
in the film made on this novel by Ritwik Ghatak in 1973. She quotes an old man, who compares
Bashonti – a young woman – with the young Titas, and makes a prophetic observation that both
of them will grow old and undergo decay in the course of time. Bashonti’s husband dies the day
after their marriage, and yet she lives the life of a widow without any reproductive or sexual rights.
She craves for a child, and yet the male-controlled Malo society does not allow her to remarry
and have children of her own. Another young woman, who was abducted by dacoits just after her
marriage, but was already pregnant, is rescued by some villagers and is later known as Ananter Ma
(Ananta’s mother). She cannot find her husband and the father of her child because she does not
know his name or address. When she later meets him, he has gone mad with grief, and she cannot
reveal her identity and unite with him. Thus, Titas Ekti Nadir Naam is not only the story of the

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life and death of a river and the Malo fisherfolk, it is also the tragic saga of Malo women, who are
destined to meet the same fate as that of the river.
The novel Ganga by Samaresh Basu (1924–1988) gives a vivid account of the hardships and
dangers faced by the fishers of River Ganga (The Ganges), who ride up and down the length of
this river right up to its confluence with the sea (Basu 1957). The fisherfolk have to face multiple
challenges that include the whims of the river which sometimes does not yield any substantial
catch, the cyclones driving down from the sea, the river bandits, the man-eating tigers in the
mangroves of the delta, and the moneylenders who are no less formidable and ruthless than the
animal predator. Nevertheless, it is their women who can seldom have a peaceful night’s sleep.
When in the monsoon, their men go out fishing, they spend sleepless nights, praying for the safety
and the success of the efforts made by the menfolk. Then in the autumn, when the men return,
they again have no sleep because they have to tend to the torn nets, and satisfy the pent-up desire
of the men to bear them sons, who would grow up to accompany their fathers to the river. In the
winter, the fishers go downstream to the mouth of the river where it meets the sea, and the women
again have no sleep because of the many dangers that lurk there. In the lean season that follows,
the river does not yield fish, the ponds and pools dry up, and the fisherwomen cannot sleep be-
cause they are penniless and have to suffer hunger pangs. It is the usual practice of the women
to keep the meager food for their husbands and sons, and go starving themselves. The frustrated
men often abuse their women to make them spend tortured, sleepless nights. They are possessed
by evil spirits, which in reality are the outpourings of their own distorted, tormented minds and
abused bodies, their privations and frustrations. It is a curse for a woman to be young and beautiful
because then she is also the object of sexual exploitation by the moneylenders, to whom she has
to go for sustaining her family.
Most of the aforesaid works were written between 1920s and 1960s, before the term ecofemi-
nism was coined, and the tenets of ecofeminist philosophy took shape. The women in these novels
do not protest or defy the code of conduct set for them by the males. One exception is Kapila
of Padma Nadir Majhi (The Boatmen of Padma) by Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908–1956). Kapila is
an attractive married woman who loves her brother-in-law Kuber – a poor boatman of Padma.
Hossein Mia is an enigmatic character, who has earned his riches through various shady deals. He
owns Mainadweep – a newly emerged island at the mouth of the river – and induces people to go
and settle there. When Kuber gets falsely implicated in a theft case, Hossein Mia gives him an offer
to go to Mainadwip to avoid arrest by the police. Kapila decides to go with Kuber in her quest for
a better life and to realize her love. She stands up in protest against the strictures of a patriarchal
society that dominates and exploits the river, its biodiversity, and the women alike (Bandyopad-
hyay 1936). However, it is not clear whether by escaping to Mainadweep, Kapila will be able to
enjoy a life free from the oppression of the male system, or it will be subjugation in a new form,
especially because Hossein Mia represents the overbearing male lust for power and riches at the
expense of both men and women under its subjugation. However, Padma Nadir Majhi is not only
the story of Kapila and Kuber, it is also that of Mala – the comely wife of Kuber – who is afflicted
by a congenital disability in one of her legs. Having severe constraints on her movement, Mala’s
world is a small one, comprising of her home where she lives with Kuber and has borne him two
children. She is possibly the most exploited of the women characters of this novel, being betrayed
by her husband and sister (Kapila), and silently bearing the apathy of a society that is insensitive to
all forms of disability and views it as a curse. Contrary to this societal attitude, Nicole A. Jacobs
in Chapter 28 quotes Rosemary Garland-Thomson to advocate that like femaleness, disability
does not denote any inferiority or even misfortune. Instead, it is a cultural attribute, and it is the
responsibility of society to provide equitable treatment to people affected by disability. However,
the fisher society, which is characterized by its poverty, lack of education, prevalence of supersti-
tious beliefs and absence of women’s rights, can hardly be expected to treat Mala with respect and

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empathy. The plight of Mala is somewhat different and may be said to be more acute than that of
Rabindranath Tagore’s Subha – the girl with a speech disability – who could at least turn to nature
to alleviate her sufferings to some extent, and is able to engage with it in a “silent dialogue”. In the
case of Mala, the very nature of her disability stands as a barrier between her and the surrounding
nature. Nicole A. Jacobs in Chapter 28 has also talked about the notion of body-mind and the
concepts of desire and pain in disability studies (Price 2015, 268). In a materialist feminist view,
body and mind imbricate or overlap with each other and do not remain as a mere combination
of the two (Price 2015, 270). Mala desperately longs for getting her disability cured, because it is
the direct cause of her mental as well as physical pain – mental because her disability drives Kuber
toward Kapila, and physical because she has to crawl and drag her body along.

“Mahesh”
The eponymous central character of the short story Mahesh by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay
(1876–1938) is a bull that is owned by Gafur Jola, an impoverished farmer of rural Bengal. A
widower, Gafur’s household comprises himself, Amina – his ten-year-old daughter – and Ma-
hesh the bull. Though he addresses Mahesh as his son, Gafur can neither feed him nor Amina
properly, and is often subject to admonishment and penalties by the local zamindar (landlord).
Still he is not ready to sell old Mahesh to the cattle traders, and mortgages his utensils time
and again to pay for releasing the bull from the cattle pen. The village faces acute drought,
and Amina finds it difficult to collect water because of scarcity as well as religious discrimi-
nation. The events precipitate when a thirsty Mahesh knocks down Amina to drink the water
that she had brought for her father. In a fit of rage, Gafur hits Mahesh so hard that the bull
succumbs to its injuries. Gafur now faces the wrath of the landlord for killing the bull which
is held sacred by the Hindus. A dumbstruck Gafur decides to leave the village along with his
daughter to find work at the jute mill, a decision he had never agreed to take earlier despite his
abject privations – because the honor of Amina was at the risk of being violated in such places.
He also leaves behind his meager properties as a penance for killing Mahesh (Chattopadhyay
1922). Apparently a simple story of human empathy toward an animal, Mahesh exposes the
nexus between the colonial regime and the feudal landlords, which together suck the land dry
for extracting revenue, at the expense of the farmers. The Permanent Settlement of Bengal
(1793) vested land rights to the zamindars, ignoring the rights of the actual tillers such as
Gafur. In their desperation to meet the exorbitant revenue fixed by the colonial government,
the landlords take recourse to all possible means including coercion of the farmers (Bandyop-
adhyay 1993). Mahesh the bull cannot get food because it no longer enjoys the traditional
access to the village grazing ground, which has been leased out by the landlord. Amina and
Gafur go hungry and cannot feed Mahesh because of the exploitation by the landlord, which
is supported by the colonial policy. She and Gafur also face the coercion of the brahminical
patriarchy that is especially severe on people from a different religion and a ‘lower’ caste. The
fate of Mahesh and Amina are, therefore, ruled by the same forces of colonialism, feudalism
and patriarchy, and here they merge into each other. Lesley Kordecki in Chapter 26 has argued
that the frameworks of “feminism and animalism”, though distinct from each other, can at
times provide perspectives that are strikingly similar. The oppression of females by males and
animals by humans can thus be viewed as parts of the same spectrum of exploitation and injus-
tice. Further, the relationship between the subjugation of women and animals can be seen in
the story of Mahesh, where an impoverished Gafur can neither feed the bull, whom he regards
as his son, nor Amina, who is his daughter, especially dear to him because she had lost her
mother at a tender age. Here, Mahesh – an animal – is accorded intrinsic value by Gafur, and
enjoys a status that is the same as that of Amina.

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Ecofeminist Thought in Short Stories by Women Writers

In Unnayan o Gharer Lakkhi (Development and the Homemaker), Jaya Mitra (1950–) tells the story
of Ushalata, a village woman who is evicted from her house that is razed by bulldozers to build
a highway. She migrates to a new place where she starts working as a housemaid to support her
six children and her husband Subal, who was a skilled agricultural worker, but is now reduced to
a useless tottering alcoholic in a new environment where he feels totally lost. Even in the midst
of untold hardships, these project-evicted persons cannot forget their agricultural past and plant
paddy in a strip of land adjoining the highway. Their dreams are, however, shattered, when gov-
ernment officials dump stone chips on the ripening paddy and deny them any right to the produce.
A crest-fallen Ushalata wonders where people will produce food if they cover every piece of land
with roads and buildings (Mitra 1962).
In a more recent work, Janmodin (The Birthday), Leena Gangopadhyay (1970–) writes about
Anandi, a woman who lives in a house with a sprawling compound full of trees on the bank of the
Ganges (Gangopadhyay 2004). On her 38th birthday, Anandi grows nostalgic and goes to pick the
red flowers of a Krishnachura (Royal Poinciana) tree planted on one of her birthdays by her elder
brother, who was later killed in a political feud. Also betrayed by her lover, she embraces the tree
to be released into deep and eternal freedom. Perhaps the author – a woman herself – wanted to
depict the sublime resistance of Anandi, whom she portrayed as an introspective individual akin
to a sensitive touch-me-not plant.
In Peara Gachh (The Guava Tree), Sanjukta Bandyopadhyay tells about the experiences of Moni,
an adolescent girl, who grows attached to a guava tree growing in the backyard of her neighbor
(Bandyopadhyay 2013). She loves to climb it every day and swing from a crooked branch. She
spends her leisure hours reading storybooks perched on its smooth, white branches, watches the
ants marching in a single file along its trunk, and gazes at the dark, bushy canopy swaying in wind.
She is also moved by the plight of the unhappy young bride who attempted suicide because she
was given off in marriage to the much elderly son of the neighbor lady. To the imaginative mind
of Moni, the crooked branch of the tree looks like the injured and deformed arm of the woman,
who is branded as insane and wants to fly away like a bird and build her nest on the guava tree in
order to escape the violence internalized by her mother-in-law. She gives birth to a male child
who dies at a tender age because of which she is banished to her parent’s house by her mother-in-
law. As Moni grows up, she resolves never to turn into a bird, like the hapless woman. Meanwhile,
she attains puberty and is forbidden by her mother to climb trees anymore. She misses her tree and
pays a visit in order to caress it once again, but is shocked to find the elderly bridegroom hanging
from the crooked branch that resembles the deformed arm of his estranged, insane wife. Shocked
to her deepest core, Moni feels as if she is growing wings to fly to the top of the guava tree. In
this tragic story in the narrative of a young girl, the guava tree is a mute witness to the taboos,
oppression and frustrations in the life of most women in a society where other women act as agents
of patriarchal tyranny and exploitation, and abuse their own kind.
In Gopa Sen’s Pakhir Basha (The Bird Nest), a young woman learns to empathize with the spar-
row couple which has built a nest – with the female bird laying three warm, shiny eggs in its soft
fold – on the top of her wardrobe (Sen 2005). About to sweep away the nest to clean her rooms,
the sight of the nest with eggs reminds her of her dream to have two bonny children and a happy
nook with her husband – a dream that was never realized. She restores the nest and feels happy to
imagine the three young birds flying out from the nest to a happy, unfettered life.
Selina Hossain’s (1947–) “Notun Joler Shobdo” (“The Sound of New Water”) revolves around the
conflict over chardhumani – a newly emerged sandbar on river Neelakshi – and the harvest of
paddy grown on its fertile bosom. The life of Jamila, who has lost her mother at a young age, is
closely attached to the flowing water of the river, the small playful fishes in its water, the elusive

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dolphin, the flitting dragonflies and birds, and the moist reeds raising their head above the flow
(Hossain 2005). Maqbool Qatari – her father – toils hard to produce the harvest and defend it for
the landlord Alimuddin against other contenders. Jamila is torn between her love for Kalam – the
son of her father’s chief adversary – and her devotion to her father. When in the fight over the
paddy, Kalam strikes down her father, Jamila sets fire to the piles of harvested paddy, and tries to
nurse her father whose blood feels cold and carries the fragrance of the freshets of water in the
river. Here, Jamila can be said to move from passive resistance to activism, when she destroys the
object of all conflict and returns to the role of women as caregivers for both humans and nature.
Activism is also evident in Bhije Matir Golpo (Tale of the Moist Earth) by Nivedita Ghosh (Sarkar),
where the river Bharai (literally means full) is the childhood companion to Tiyas – a young girl,
who has vivid and fond memories of fun and games on its dry bed in winter, and home with suf-
ficient food and a family, located on its bank (Ghosh (Sarkar) 1963). But the Bharai, which dries
up in winter – leaving vast sand beds – swept away in a sudden monsoon rage everything Tiyas
had – their house, land, crops, and even her father and her younger sister. Hunger and privation
forced her mother to offer her to the old landlord. Tiyas has to forget her love for young Faruq and
bear the child of the landlord. Her body becomes full like the Bharai in full monsoon. Meanwhile,
a famine ensues, and when a hungry mob attacks the landlord to loot the hoarded rice and kill
him, it also attempts to kill the pregnant Tiyas. Both Faruq and the landlord try to save her by
claiming to be the father of the child in the name of their respective Gods. However, Tiyas claims
her child belongs only to her and to the land. Meanwhile, the river overflows its banks in a mad
rush to inundate everything.

Ecofeminist Philosophy in Bengali Poetry

In the melancholy poetry-world of Jibanananda Das (1899–1954), frail, anemically white women
emerge from or blend into the rural landscape of Bengal with its ponds full of aquatic weeds,
swamp trees like Hijal (Barringtonia acutangula), mango, Indian blackberry and jackfruit trees,
wildflowers, rivers, the vast shimmering plain, and the gray evening mist. Their sad lives often
come to a premature end to burn on pyres. These images appear recurrently in different contexts
in many poems. Perhaps Jibanananda was among the first few poets who have imagined despairing
women so much as a part of nature, and felt their sorrow and deprivations reflected in the images
of nature (Das 2011, 2012).
Many of Kabita Sinha’s (1931–1999) poems demonstrate her unflinching faith in nature (Sinha
1957). For example, in her poem Briksha (The Tree), Sinha reposes her faith in the tree only,
which comes back to her again and again, for her conviction to recline against its branches. The
beckoning of the tree is implicit in her birth, as she grows from the seed to the bones and sinews,
eyes and ears, and the tree grows outward into the leaves, flowers and petals. Then her seeds soar
in the wind and fly in different directions like her longings. Yet she comes back to her lone self
like the tree, and learns from the tree to live within herself. In Brishti Amake Ghire Thako (Keep
Me Enveloped, Rain), the poet wants raindrops mingled with darkness to soak her, penetrate her
blood and its corpuscles, and protect her in the womb to move along the veins. The taste of rain
in the myriad cells of her body enables her to emerge as the child of rain. Here, she not only be-
comes one with the elements of nature to live an enchanted life, but also expresses her love for
and faith in nature. Such personification of and blending into nature is an integral part of nature
and ecofeminist writing. For example, the poetry of Mary Oliver (1935–2019) – an American
poet – is steeped in ecocentric recognition of souls in humans as well as in other creatures and
even inanimate entities. Oliver also describes nature as a loving mother, and she is in communion
with nature, where she is able to redeem herself. Oliver’s poems are also marked by the person-
ification of nature such as leaves, and herself turns into a leaf, or into various animals such as the

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fox, the bear, the fish, and the snake. She is able to hear the whispers of water. Thus, she extends
her own existence into that of the natural world and blends into it (Shehab, 2010). Kabita Sinha
also has a fascination for water, perhaps because the watery world holds the promise of freedom
and fluidity in the otherwise fettered existence of women. For her, the lonesome water at midday –
quivering with a single damselfly hovering over it – and the melancholy sun sending its rays in a
downward, refracted movement through its depths, brings back flashes of the past and past lives
(Eka Jol (Lonesome Water)). In Joler Putul (The Mermaid), Sinha exhorts women to be courageous to
go into the depths of a vast spread of water. Her hair floats askew like strands of algae, her green
skin is adorned with flowers, with colorful shells dangling from her neck. Fish hovers unafraid
around her. And women can get back their freedom which was originally theirs, and go gliding
like the fish and revel in the realization that once they were free like a water nymph. Sinha also
pleads with women to have enough conviction to lead their own lives. In Prakrita Biplab (Natural
Revolution), she asks women to allow the crumbling (relations) to crumble, build those that want
to grow up, and open the door for those who want to leave, only embracing the ones who love
them. She asks women to nurture an indifferent love within them. The poet cites examples from
nature where the winged seeds of the gurjan tree (Dipterocarpus turbinatus) float to give rise to the
next generation and the numerous earthworms silently render the soil fertile, while humans fight
and kill each other. However, we might also say that the poem goes beyond ecofeminism with
broader concerns for all lonesome and betrayed people. Nature has an irresistible attraction for
her, and the poet ponders over whether she has come to the forest or the charmed forest has called
her in an inexplicable beckoning. She contemplates the destiny of a forest full of leaves that keep
falling with the coming of autumn. The piles of fallen leaves on the forest floor signal the sad end
of the fullness of life. The encrusting algae and mold on the roots and barks signal the declining
days of the forest, which also reflects the very essence of the fate of all life (Aranye Eshechhi Ami
(I Have Come to the Forest)). In her poems, Kabita Sinha often takes into her fold nature, women
and the oppressed humanity (the “others”) as a whole. Thus, her poetry justifies the existence and
flourishing of nature independent of human existence, thereby conforming to the Deep Ecology
platform principle that affirms that nature has a value in itself, or in other words, inherent or
intrinsic value. In Nisarga (Nature), she affirms that nature does not care for human appreciation
and need. It manifests itself in the joy of creation. The Nishinda (Vitex negundo) bush throws its
branches skyward in abandon; the Jhiri river leaves traces of moonlight on the sparkling sand; the
silk cotton bowl bursts open; the winged seeds of the gurjan tree fly in air; the bark of the Arjun
(Terminalia arjuna) tree gets soaking wet with sap trickling down; and flowers are never wanting
in their petals and intricate designs. As opposed to this, the human society abounds in degraded,
defiled and insincere humans (Sinha 1957). Yet, beyond these philosophical musings, Sinha can
rise in anger and disdain, when she accuses the patriarchs of converting their living rooms into
dead, petrified forests adorned with lifeless, stuffed birds. She reminds them that these timbers
were once living woods that used to burst into flowers, and predicts that the curse of the forest
will one day rob them of their own affluence and fertility (Shap (The Curse)).
In many of her poems, Nabanita Deb Sen (1938–2019) often portrays nature as a receptacle
or refuge for women betrayed by the guile of the male dominators (Deb Sen 1959). In her poem
Adi-anto (From the Beginning till the End), she has the blue sky, the emerald-green paddy, the turbid
river, the banyan tree on the river bank, the golden deer, the storm, the ashoka kanan (garden),
and beyond that the black earth on which her lover waits for her. Besides resting her faith in the
myriad entities of nature, Deb Sen alludes to the story of the ‘swarnamriga’ (the golden deer) of
the Indian epic Ramayana. The mythical deer was used by the demon king Ravana for luring Sita
to abduct her and confine her in the ashoka kanan (a garden of Saraca asoka trees). However, the
vast black earth faithfully waits where she can find her love, establishing the everlasting bond of
women with the earth, and nature. In Ekdin Patihansher Moto (One day … like a Domestic Duck),

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 Abhik Gupta

she would like to float like a duck in domestic waters at the end of a bitter and harsh sojourn; and
in Abar Chorui (To be a Sparrow Again), she wants to be just a sparrow, being afraid to become a
fairy in the stark moonlight (Deb Sen 1959). Faith in the power of nature to provide solace, and
to serve as a safe haven is a recurrent theme in the nature poetry of many women writers. The
American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), has portrayed nature – the earth, the forest and the
hills – as a loving mother who cares for her children and showers boundless affection on them.
She never abandons her children, and has concern for all creatures, however small or insignificant
they may be. In another poem, Dickinson compares nature to heaven and harmony, and points
out that human knowledge and wisdom are nothing compared to the simple yet diverse elements
of nature (Abdel Mageed, 2017). As in the poetry of Kabita Sinha, water and its mysterious depths
often appear in Nabanita Deb Sen’s poems as well. In Jalakeli (Frolicking in Water), watching her
familiar boat sink in a storm, she longs to dive into the blue depths and cling to its skeleton like
an alga – to renew, perpetuate and bring to life the fun and frolic of an underwater rendezvous. In
Joler Onek Niche (Deep Down in Water), she would like to playfully wander in water – deep down
and bereft of any obligation and social niceties – alone among the aquatic weeds stooping with
their loads of colorful flowers, to play hide-and-seek with fishes. She also feels assured because
this game is played alone, without conditions and embedded deep inside her – the bubbles are
too short-lived to betray the secret of her love games. Nabanita’s women – though betrayed and
abused – are resilient to emerge strong. They are like the chestnut tree that was once resplendent
in its colorful blossom, getting shorn of its embellishments in a sudden storm. She asks the tree if
it is envious of bees humming in a distant garden. The tree suddenly brings to us a whiff of the
sadness of a betrayed woman, who has nevertheless taken the resolve to start afresh (Toru – Neville’s
Court’s Chestnut (The Tree: The Chestnut of Neville’s Court)). She also throws a challenge to the male
dominators in Dhanya (Paddy), where she finds their arrows, raining down on her, turning into
the blooming spikelets of the paddy plant, within the succulent grains of which she thrives with
the milk welling up within her. In these poems, Nabanita Deb Sen shows the resilience of women
that they owe to their innate ability to procreate and rejuvenate, drawing their strength from na-
ture, from the earth’s fertile bosom. In Indian tradition, women are often termed as ‘sarbangsaha’
or all-enduring. It also denotes the earth. There is also a hint of resistance and activism, when in
Amloki Shimul (The Gooseberry and the Silk Cotton) she speaks of a tussle between two realities –
one represented by the white gooseberry and the other by the rebellious blood-red flowers of the
silk-cotton tree. In Dickinson’s poetry also, nature teaches women to overcome the ravages of
life, the fading away of happiness, and take heart from the brighter sides of things. As one forest is
degraded, another emerges in its green splendor, and while darkness prevails in one place, the sun
shines bright elsewhere. Thus, she hails the resilience of women against all odds (Abdel Mageed,
2017).
In Je Jakey Dhorey Rakhey (Holding Each Other), Debarati Mitra (1946–) uses metaphors from
nature to show the importance of relationships and the support each provides to the other (Mitra
2012). The lotus-tank in her neighborhood, which was a safe haven for fishes running along with
the image of the starlit night sky reflected in its waters, has dried up. The raindrops now do not
linger here, but trickle down to the watery depths of the Mother Earth, because only water can
hold more water, and nothing else can. The dry tank is like the burnt body of a young girl who
is the victim of domestic violence, but there is nobody to hold her, and only humans can hold
another human in their fold.
Yashodhara Ray Chaudhuri (1965–) visualizes the Panchmari Hill as an abused woman lying
on her stomach with her huge heaps jutting out, her heavy thighs splayed flat, and her gray, blood-
smeared brains scattered all around. Her tears flow through a stream flowing through the village.
The tourists have thrown coke bottles all around and their ravenous hunger devours the beauty
of nature. And then the stout, muscular Panchmari wakes up to emerge from the depths of the

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earth. Here, women and nature stand up against the oppression and abuse meted out to them in
a bold, strong protest (Panchmari Pahar (The Panchmari Hill)). In Brishti Namey (It Starts Raining),
Yasodhara asserts that women can stand alone without any support from their companions. When
the rain starts to soak the earth and her body, there is no need to have a companion to care, as it
is good enough to love one’s own body, to take the raindrops inside, and revel within one’s own
self (Ray Chaudhuri 2022).

Conclusion
Bengali literature is among the richest of the Indian regional literatures, and its writers have pro-
duced many remarkable and unforgettable female characters. They have also written about the
overexploitation and degradation of forests, rivers and other elements of nature. However, the
juxtaposition of women’s miseries and the destruction of nature have come up in relatively few
creations, some of which have been highlighted in this article. The women characters have found
solace and support in nature, which has opened its arms to the deprived and oppressed women,
acting as a loving parent and a friend. Several characters in the novels and short stories personify
the desperate yet brave – and mostly silent – struggle of women against androcentric tyranny. If
we think of ecofeminism as comprising philosophy and activism, it is the former which has been
predominantly reflected in the novels, stories and poetry of the writers of Bengali literature, who
hail both from India and Bangladesh.

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 10
AFRICAN LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Nicole Anae

Introduction
Africa is the continent upon which human prehistory begins. Many scientists believe that the evo-
lution of the species from a forest-dwelling frugivore to a savanna-subsisting carnivore could only
ever have occurred in Africa (Owen-Smith 2021). Not only is the evolution of human life ascribed
to Africa, but it is in Africa where discoveries of the earliest periods of human activity are evident
(Phillipson 1996, 12), with a location near the province of Limpogo, near Zimbabwe, identified as
the oldest known site of human-made structures (Asante 2019). The oral art forms of Africa that
have developed throughout the epochs are characteristically and highly varied, ­culturally-valued
and traditionally-tied to both geographical and regional contexts, as much as to the perceptions
and preconceptions of the historical anthropological work documenting, or not, these various
and widely-spread forms. This may account for the fact that “we have a vast number of [African]
proverbs, riddles, and stories but relative neglect of poetry or oratory” (Finnegan 2021, 77). The
poetry of Africa includes, but is not limited to, forms as diverse as Zulu or Sotho praise poetry,
utendi, a form of narrative poetry in Swahili, Irèmòjé chants, “a potpourri of incantations, pan-
egyrics, lineage chronicles, and biographical accounts accompanied by music” (Adekoya 2013,
274), and Rwandan military narrative poetry, “ibitekerezo, songs preserved by the court bards and
taught to military recruits” (909), as well as iiata (Yoruba hunting poems), Ambo hunting poetry
(lyrical poetry) and the “nonritual praise songs of the Hausa itinerant singers, which are relatable
to the ritual kirāri, a sung proverb, traditionally performed as court poetry” (Harries 1974, 910).
Other forms include traditional patterns of narrative poetry, such as the Lianja and Mwindo epics,
“incorporating most of the local literary forms in both poetry and prose” (Harries 1974, 910),
as well as the love poetry from the Zulu women of South Africa and the Luo women of Kenya
(Harries 1974, 910).
Even in the contemporary contexts, however, although it is apparent that the poetry and perfor-
mance of African women have strong traditional cultural significance, poetry by African women
appears conspicuously absent from twentieth-century collections of poetry in a trend generally rec-
ognized “as an imbalance in Southern African literary and historical anthologies and accounts, given
that male writers and performers have been more widely published than women, and that historical
agency is generally taken to be male” (Chipasula and Chipasula 1995, 1). More and more, emergent
scholarship asserts that the profound involvement of women in shaping the landscape of African
poetic forms cannot be overstated. According to Obioma Nnaemeka (1994, 138):

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-11101
 Nicole Anae

Women played a prominent role in panygeric poetry (for example, the oriki among the
Yoruba) as well as in elegiac poetry (for example, the ziten-gulo among the Tonga of Zam-
bia). Women also excelled in other forms of poetic expression such as lullabies, dirges, songs,
and love poems (for example, the oigo among the Luo of Kenya). Women performers played
an important role in areas which require special skills, like the impango among the Tonga of
Zambia, and funeral dirges among the Akan of southern Ghana.

Ruth Finnegan (2012, 99) suggests not only that women either delivered or sang specific forms
of poetry (especially laments, cradlesongs, sardonic verses and songs associated with women’s
work or ceremonial occasions), but that “each culture is likely to have certain genres considered
especially suitable for women.” For instance, with respect to funerals, mourning and memorial
ceremonies, Finnegan (2012, 146) claims that the fact that certain forms—

‘Yoruba women performing lament at funeral feasts (Ellis 1894, 157f.), Akan dirges are
chanted by women soloists (Nketia 1955, 8 and passim) and the zitengulo songs of Zambia are
sung by women mourners ( Jones 1943, 15)’—often involve wailing, sobbing, and weeping
makes them particularly suitable for women—in Africa as elsewhere such activities are con-
sidered typically female.

Here, in the context of mourning, certain cultural traditions ascribe that “women may weep pub-
licly about someone’s death, while men must not do so” (Riesman 1977, 202). Placing these poetic
forms within the provenance of women may, on the one hand, reinforce certain gender binaries,
while on the other emphasize the capacity of women to engage in public forms of more personal
expression. As, for example, certain poetic forms associated with mourning can assimilate topical
themes such as sorrow and death without direct connection to bereavement and burials (Finnegan
2021, 149), the utility of such themes—loss, grief, distress, existence—outside conventional forms
add particular complexity to the nature, scope and symbolic currencies evident in poetry by
African women, particularly with respect to ecofeminist readings. Of particular interest in this
discussion is the assertion that “traditional African literature has … been sensitive to nature and
environment in many ways” and “there has been some form of eco-criticism in African scholar-
ship long before it became vogue in the Western academy” (Ojaide 2013, vii).
This chapter has a number of separate but interrelated aims: (1) to respond to what is largely
recognized as a dearth of scholarship on African women’s writing ( Jones, Eubanks and Smith
2014, 143; West 2011), particularly, African women’s poetry; (2) to bring more recent and less
contemporary African women’s poetry into the fold of both ecofeminist and African ecofeminist
thinking and; (3) to map the intersection of ecofeminist branches within the development of Af-
rican women’s poetry more broadly. The intention here is to present an introductory outline of
what might be identified as an African ecofeminist oratory tradition.
For a general, yet descriptive discussion on ecofeminism and poetry, see Andrew David King’s
Chapter 49, Poetry and Ecofeminism. In their chapter, King presents an example-based case for
the endurance of ecofeminist thought in the poetries of various eras, contexts and communities,
arguing that ecofeminist poetics is not a contemporary phenomenon. King’s chapter is useful to
read alongside the current chapter on African literature and ecofeminism in that it contextualizes
the ways in which the evolution of poetry contains illustrated evidence of what might be termed
“proto-ecofeminism” or “crypto-ecofeminism,” where poetry writers, for discretionary pur-
poses, sometimes refrain from following to conclusion the ecofeminist implications of their verse.
Rather than attempting to mediate the ongoing questions about the principles and theories
underlying ecofeminist poetics—or, indeed the debates about “antiracist” rhetorical as it pertains
to ecofeminism (Griffin 1997)—this chapter considers only a small sample of the iterations of

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ecofeminism in the various articulations of selected African women poets and the resonance of
ecofeminism in their oratory practices. Additionally, this position does not presume that these
women identify as ecofeminists, but rather attends to the aim of developing a critical analysis of
their literary work from an ecofeminist standpoint. The working definition of African ecofemi-
nism utilized is one blending “a commitment to the environment and an awareness of the asso-
ciations made between women and nature” (Mwangi 2020, 203), while “highlighted the close
relationship between African feminism and African ecological activism, which challenge both the
patriarchal and neo-colonial structures undermining the continent” (Tarchi 2021). However, at
this point in the chapter, before proceeding with an examination into how selected African wom-
en’s poetry might occupy ecofeminist positions in responding to the environmental, political,
and economic conditions contextualizing the lives of African women, it is important to provide
definitions of several distinct, but interrelated, central concepts.

African
For the purposes of this chapter, the definition of “African,” adopted by the founding editor of the
African Poetry Book Fund—which promotes, develops and advances the poetic arts of Africa (Afri-
can Poetry Book Fund 2021)—Matthew Shenoda, in his article Verse Africa: The Malleable Poetics
of Some Contemporary African Poets (2017), is used to identify “those born in Africa, those who are
a national or resident of an African country, or those whose parent(s) are African” (2017). This is
an important distinction to make in outlining the interests of this chapter, although it does ac-
knowledge that alternative definitions of “African” exist beyond its horizon, taking into account,
for instance, those not born in Africa, but who is a national or resident of an African country
and either one or both parents are African, or, those born in Africa, but who is not a national or
resident of an African country and either one or both parents are African, or some other mix of
heritage and country of residence.
While for the purposes of this chapter, the definition used identifies African women poets “born
in Africa, those who are a national or resident of an African country, or those whose parent(s) are
African” (2017), it must be noted that studies on women poets of the African ­Diaspora—defined
by the African Union (AU) as “consisting of people of African origin living outside the continent,
irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the devel-
opment of the continent and the building of the African Union” (2011, 3)—is, while beyond the
scope of this chapter, deserved of continued critical attention. Ecofeminist readings of literary
work focusing on the African Diaspora would consider the prose and poetic works of women
Anglophone, Francophone, Afro-Italian and Lusophone writers.

African Literature
According to the renowned Nigerian poet, Ben Okri (Book O’clock Review 2020), African
literature

is a literature of the native lands, but it is also a literature of sensibility, of exile, of migration,
of travel, of home-leaving, home-staying, homecoming. It is a literature that can no longer
be contained in a continent, or by a school, or a name, or a homogeneity. It is a literature of
all schools, of new schools without a name, a re-invention of the past, a transmutation of the
storytelling earth.

One way to approach the rich diversity of African literature is from the perspective of world liter-
atures, or, as Neumann (2020, 142) puts it:

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 Nicole Anae

Proceeding from concepts of the world that emphasis its underlying histories of exchange, dis-
crepant connections and irreducible alterities, one might define world literatures as imagina-
tive configurations of transcultural contact and transfer, particularly in the form of migration.

There is the possibility of concern in adopting a view of world literatures in examining the rich
diversity of African literature, primarily the caution to avoid replicating imperial and/or colonial
bias with respect to ideas regarding conceptions of “world” and “literature” as much as applying
to these terms, partial critical frameworks and/or Western discursive practices. This also includes
systems of translation; defined on the one hand as “the dynamic process of ‘bringing across’ a text
(in its oral or written form) from a source language towards a target language, but also as a process
of shuttling between languages, as in translingual practices” (Hartmann and Hélot 2020, 96),
and on the other as “a colonial device producing a hierarchy of languages” (Guidin 2016, 85). As
Aamir R. Mufti (2016, 16) has asserted,

any account of literary relations on a world scale—that is, any account of world literature as
such—must thus actively confront and attend to this functioning of English as vanishing me-
diator, rather than treat it passively as neutral or transparent medium, both as world language
of literary expression and as undisputed language of global capitalism.

African Poetry
While the concept of poetry as literature is accepted—for instance, Wimsatt (1954, xv) defines
poetry as “literature in its most intensive instances”—determining a definition for African poetry
is complex and subject to ongoing debate (Egudu 1978; Ojaide 1996; Okunoye 2004). Therefore,
for the purposes of this chapter, African poetry is defined as “a body of poetic works written
by Africans, for the African audience and which handles the African experience using African
aesthetics” (Orhero 2017, 167). By African aesthetics, the term gestures towards ideological, ped-
agogical and material realms. According to Ben Okri (Wilkinson 1992, 87–88), conceptually the
African aesthetic

is not something that is bound only to place, it’s bound to a way of looking at the world. It’s
bound to a way of looking at the world in more than three dimensions. It’s the aesthetics of
possibilities, labyrinths, of riddles—we love riddles—of paradoxes.

Studies in African Aesthetics is intimately tied to “Africana Studies,” a branch of inquiry having
as its focus; (a) the study of the history and culture of African peoples; and (b) examining the dif-
ficulties and concerns of Blacks in Africa and the African Diaspora, the latter defined by the AU
as “Consisting of the people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their
citizenship and nationality” (African Union 2021).
“Africana aesthetics” according to Melanie Bratcher (2010, 230)

grounds and highlight the intimate and intricate relationship between African cultural expe-
riences and creative expressions. The former has always been the core from which the latter
surfaced. Likewise, the latter has always contained mysteries that help to unlock the former.

One of the underlying aesthetic features of African poetry as literature in this chapter is the con-
cept of nommo: “the power of language to create that which it names and to endow an individual
with control over her/his life” (George-Graves 2010, 33). In situating the linkages between poetry
and ecofeminism, I draw on the following definition of poetry by the poet Jayne Cortez (DeVeaux

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1978, 79): “poetry is a manipulation of language, the putting together of thoughts and ideas. The
relationship of word to word. A combination of phrases … what the Africans call nommo.”

Nommo
Gordan (2003, 167) contends that nommo (“the word”)

represents the people’s manipulation of their symbols for the definitions of self and role, as
well as their rooted place in the divine order of things. Thus, the resilience and resource-
fulness of the Africana people can be understood through the lens of that telescopes to the
African cultural conceptual underpinnings of the maat-ian (Egyptian) thought. It is the maat,
which has endured from the time of the ancients to the present, that provides both black men
and women with a point of departure, for actualization as males and females.

The significance of nommo to any discussion of African literature and ecofeminism is clearly
apparent in the potential of nommo to intersect with a variety of ecofeminist interests, including,
but not limited to, naming the impact of colonialism on African women and its implications to
women’s ecological knowledge, evoking women’s right to land, articulating Afrocentric perspec-
tives of the relationship between the environment and African women, and in speaking “a critique
of patriarchal science, a concern with the degradation of ‘nature’/the environment and the making
of links between these two and the oppression of women” (Molyneux and Steinberg 1995).
Nommo—the reproductive power of the spoken word to produce what is spoken—is a power
not limited to the spoken word. It is not only a power embracing all communication contexts,
but its traditional understanding as a spiritual force, known as Ma’at (Mbiti 1970), as an “appeal to
create an improved life for all members of society” (Hamlet 1998, 91) offers rich perspectives in
ecofeminist thinking with respect to liberation and healing.
It is important to note here that while there is some contention around the term feminist
with respect to nommo—the claim that “‘feminism’ itself is firmly etched in the ideology or
theoretical concept, carrying the common root meaning, which replicates a dominant Euro-
centric perspective” (Hudson-Weems 2020, 11)—the terms “womanism, “ecowomanism,” and
“Africana womanism” aim to name conceptual movements the agendas of which seek to address
key concerns specific to those positions. This chapter includes among these “African ecofemi-
nism” as a naming practice; an augury to actuating a conceptual paradigm specific to stressing
the unique and complex relationship between African women’s cultural experiences, their con-
nections to the natural world, and the aesthetic qualities of their creative oratory with respect to
geographical, ecological, and spiritual contacts with the natural environment. Through nommo
as an aesthetic of African poetry, social concerns are revealed through the speaker’s individual
experience and addressed to responders, thus recalibrating private challenges as public concerns
shared by the community.

Ecocriticism
Ecocritical literary theory is not strictly analogous to ecofeminist literary theory, but rather shares,
specifies, and extends on several of its central concerns. Murphy (2010, 6) defines ecocriticism as

the study of literary works with special attention to the representation of relationships among
human beings and the rest of the ‘more-than-human’ world [which] has always been con-
cerned with the agency of human beings and the need for rethinking social behaviors and
actions.

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Ecocriticism is invariably rooted in cultural studies in that it is, as Gersdorf and Mayer (2006, 10)
argue,

a methodology that re-examines the history of ideologically, aesthetically, and ethically mo-
tivated conceptualisations of nature, of the function of its constructions and metaphorisations
in literary and other cultural practices, and of the potential effect these discursive, imagina-
tive constructions have on our bodies as well as our natural and cultural environments.

If, as Anthony Vital (2008, 88) argues, “Ecocriticism, if it is to pose African questions and find
African answers, will need to be rooted in local (regional, national) concern for social life and its
natural environment,” then it follows that ecofeminist criticism must in part be attentive to not
only the social life of African women, the nature of their writing, and what these relationships
to the natural environment reveal about the past, present and future, but to the questions—and
­a nswers—African women writers pose in responding to the intersections of ecology and femi-
nism, the twin critical perspectives of ecofeminist concerns.

Ecofeminism
In claiming, according to ecofeminists, “nature is a feminist issue,” Karen J. Warren (1997, 4)
proposes a succinct definition of ecofeminism as a “philosophy [which] extends familiar femi-
nist critiques of social isms of domination (e.g., sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, ageism,
anti-Semitism) to nature.” Yet while Carolyn Merchant (1996, 207) identified a richly varied
typology of the distinctive modes of ecofeminism in the mid-1990s—Aboriginal ecofeminism,
developing world ecofeminism, cultural ecofeminism, ecological ecofeminism, deep-ecology
ecofeminism, liberal ecofeminism, radical ecofeminism, social ecofeminism, socialist ecofem-
inism, and transformative ecofeminism—the “isms” have since flourished to encompass other
ecofeminist forms: material ecofeminism, postcolonial ecofeminism, and Romantic ecofeminism,
among others.
Aslı Değ irmenci Altın examines the opportunities and challenges of ecofeminist approaches
to postcolonial literature through an analysis of selected African and South Asian literatures in
Chapter 33, Postcolonial Literature and Ecofeminism. For a broader discussion of cultural studies and
ecofeminist literature, see Chapter 27. This present chapter will add and discuss a number of
additional “isms” with reference to African literature and ecofeminism, among them, African
ecofeminism and ecowomanism.

African Ecofeminism
According to Kaunda (2016, f34 187), “something”—a concept, a methodology, a theoretical
perspective, etc.—“can only be regarded as African if it expresses the originality and essence of
African worldview in its diverse manifestations as tradition and contemporary.” Various sources
recognize the theoretical and practical work of Wangari Maathai as one of the greatest contrib-
utors to African ecofeminism (Graness 2018; Muthuki 2006; Stuhlhofer 2021). She was the first
African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Kenyan woman to earn a doctoral degree,
and although highly regarded as a heroine of the ecofeminist movement, in her own country her
legacy has fallen victim:

of both the casual misogyny and the political schizophrenia that characterises Kenya’s public
sphere. Like all other female politicians, when substantive policy critiques failed, her pri-
vate life was laid bare for public consumption, particularly during her divorce. These stories

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would be replayed everywhere throughout her political career as a cautionary tale for women
choosing to enter into politics—a reminder that only those with near virginal moral standing
should be considered eligible to venture into mainstream politics. In Kenya, we want women
to be strong and opinionated, but not too strong and not too opinionated—not like Maathai.
(Nyabola 2015)

Maathai herself, as much as her Green Belt Movement, visibly personify for many ( Joseph and
Bari 2013) the spirit of African ecofeminism and the cooperative action that defines it in “high-
light(ing) the close relationship between African feminism and African ecological activism, which
challenge both the patriarchal and neo-colonial structures undermining the continent” (Tarchi
2021). Maathai’s conception of African ecofeminism provides a productive view from which to
examine ecofeminist sensibilities in the poetry of African women considering the following top-
ical themes:

– recognizing the experiences of the impact of colonialism on African women

– identifying women’s ecological knowledge (including traditional roles in food production)
– recognizing the impact of colonial policies on women’s right to land
– discerning the marginalizing impact of commercialization and commodity production on
African women
– perceiving the gender perspective in interpreting the relationship between African women
and their environment
– critically examining deep-rooted gender ideologies on the assumed roles for African women
and men
– recognizing the traditional roles of women linking women to environment management
– acknowledging sufficient distinctions between “urban” and “rural” when examining wom-
en’s relationship with the environment
– adopting a definition of “environment” that is not primarily or necessarily ecologically-based,
to diminish rural bias while acknowledging the issues of urban areas, such as the conditions of
African women living in urban slums
– interrogating the social/cultural/environmental conditions impacting women’s access to
economic, social and other needs when considering the emancipation of women and the
environment.
(Adapted from Joseph and Bari 2013)

Cheelo (2014) conceptualizes distinctive African ecofeminism by drawing on Karen J. Warren’s

(1995, 106) conception of ecofeminism, while making additional caveats to better align ecofem-
inism with an African ecofeminist paradigm. Warren’s use of the term ecofeminism is based on
the following claims:

i there are important connections between the oppression of women and the oppression of
nature (domination or subordination of nonhuman nature by humans)
ii understanding the nature of these connections is necessary to any adequate understanding of
the oppression of women and the oppression of nature
iii feminist theory and practice must include an ecological perspective
iv solutions to ecological problems must include a feminist perspective.

Cheelo (2014, 144) adds to these claims two interrelated assertions; (1) that “ecological Indig-
enous knowledge which is hidden in rituals has a significant contribution to make in the field
of women’s sexual and reproductive rights” and; (2) “there is a need for a continued dialogue

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between eco-theology and spirituality” in light of Northcott’s argument (1996, 177) that “the
spirituality of indigenous Africans give full value to creation as a dynamic and highly inte-
grated web of life. It exudes life-giving values from the sacredness of the land to reverence to
all creatures.”
In Chapter 36, Race and Ecofeminist Literature, Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman confronts the ques-
tion and representation of race in arguing that Indigenous women and women of African de-
scent have occupied positions at the vanguard of speculative and attentive discourses about race,
women and the natural environment, asserting that their notional and creative texts, together
with their activism, offer critical contributions to ecofeminist thinking. Taylor-Wiseman’s chapter
is also useful to read alongside this current chapter on African literature and ecofeminism in that
­Taylor-Wiseman presents discussions on the critical and creative works of select African American
women in both representing the Black experience of the natural world, as much as situating the
importance of their contributions to both shaping and extending the implications of ecofeminist
thinking in the future.

Ecowomanism
First coined by scholars Pamela Smith and Shamara Riley (Harris 2016, 29), Melanie Harris (2017,
1) proposes that ecowomanism is a characteristic of religious dialog associated to an environmental
integrity thesis. Ecowomanism encapsulates a paradigm highlighting

the necessity for race-class-gender intersectional analysis when examining the logic of dom-
ination, and unjust policies that result in environmental health disparities that historically
impact communities of color more negatively. As an aspect of third wave womanist religious
thought, ecowomanism is also shaped by the religious practices and spiritual beliefs that up-
hold a moral imperative for earth justice within women’s own faith practices.

As the central concept of “womanism”—first coined by Alice Walker (1983) in In Search of Our
Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose—spans various theoretical paradigms, it should be noted here that
the defining feature of Africana womanism is its emphasis on both Black women’s ­self-naming and
self-definition as the twin keystones for the Africana womanism paradigm for definitive human
survival (Davidson and Davidson 2010). Here, “agency is rooted in the Afrocentric process of
self-naming or nommo … Womanist theory sees agency as the individual telling her own story
and being independent” (Davidson and Davidson 2010, 259).
As a specific form of womanism,

Ecowomanism is a critical reflection and contemplation on environmental justice from the

perspectives of women of African descent and other women of colour. The approach links a
social justice agenda with earth justice recognizing the similar logic of domination at work in
parallel oppressions suffered by women and the earth
(Harris 2017, 4)

According to Karon (2020)

By adopting an environmental paradigm inspired by the spiritual theology of ecowomanism,

which acknowledges the connection between oppression and violence against communities
of color, especially women, to the violence and domination of the environment, a more
inclusive and effective methodology can be used to solve the problems of social and earth
injustices.

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A number of the theorists conceptually link ecowomanism to African ecofeminist activism.

For Rico (2017), for instance, ecowomanism “is a theoretically-based Afrocentric adaptation of
ecofeminism.” From this perspective, adopting an ecowomanist approach to the reading of Afri-
can women’s poetry would entail establishing linkages

between social justice with earth justice by recognizing the overlapping and intersecting
modes of oppression at work between both women of color—specifically black women—and
the environment. It is also a useful term for conceptualizing paradoxical and problematic
connections between black women and the earth.
(Rico 2017)

For a discussion of ecowomanism with respect to fiction, see Quynh H. Vo’s Chapter 5, Viet-
namese Literature and Ecofeminism. Vo’s reading of Kiều Bích H ậu’s The Lotus Season (2020),
Ng’s The Smoke Cloud (2015) and Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountain Sings (2020), offers
informative insight into the literary ways in which ecowomanist perspectives inform fictional
narratives as much as present a mode of commentary and resistance. For references to activism
in Africa, see Sunaina Jain’s Chapter 25, Activism and Ecofeminist Literature. Jain’s chapter is also
useful to read alongside this current chapter on African literature and ecofeminism in that Jain
presents discussions on the activism initiatives of women such as Alice Walker and Vandana
Shiva, both of whom have spearheaded humanitarian work in Africa, as well as collaborating
with grassroots aid organizations across Africa, in each case presenting forms of transnational
engagement reinforcing the theory that the concerns of women, Indigenous peoples and nature
are not mutually exclusive.

Négritude
In Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms, Fiona Moolla
(2016, 14) asks, “Does the idea of mother earth in many African ethnically based religions,
which morphs into the idea of Mother Africa, especially in Négritude poetry, translate into
African ecofeminism?” The principal argument Moolla (2016, vii) makes draws not only on
the insistence that any definition of African ecocriticism must be realized and informed by the
unique social and cultural conditions on the continent, but also a consideration of the ways in
which “the natural world and animals have been active agents in African cultural forms … [and]
fundamentally constitutive of the worldviews and lifeways that have created cultural ‘texts.’”
Négritude is defined as:

A theory of the uniquely valuable potential of black African peoples and cultures and was,
for a period after the Second World War, very influential amongst black intellectuals, artists,
activists and politicians who were conducting anti-colonial or anti-racist struggles … Put
simply, the discourse of négritude celebrates what European colonial discourses of race had
identified with Africa and Africans only in terms of a lack. Africans lacked civilization and
culture; they lacked intelligence; they lacked sensibility and so on. At the heart of négritude
is, therefore, a concern with ‘race’, but its distinctiveness lay in the ways in which this racial
foundation was extended and developed to encompass an entire ‘way of life’ – intellectual,
cultural, emotional, physical – that all black peoples shared.
(Mondal 2006, 154)

At this point, therefore, it is important to contextualize some of the beliefs about the natural
environment and the human and non-human animal informing African (religious) perspectives.

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Renown Kenyan theologian, John S. Mbiti (1975, 16) attributes the evolution of African religion
to natural and ecological factors

the geographical environment – mountains, rivers, deserts and forests – the change of the
seasons, the powers of natures (such as earthquakes, thunderstorms and volcanoes), calamities,
epidemics, diseases, birth and death, and major historical events like wars, locust invasions,
famines, migrations and so on.

It was the human responses to such phenomena that precipitated the rich diversity of religious
philosophies, rituals, and customs evolving across different parts of the continent. Some African
communities regard the earth as a living being, named utilizing a variety of terms: “Mother
Earth” and “Mother Africa” among others.
In Chapter 19, Native America and First Nations Literature and Ecofeminism, Benay Blend presents
an over-view of the conception of the earth as a mother figure in other Indigenous communities,
which evidence similarities and differences between the cosmological concepts of mother earth
and the interconnectedness of all living things. This acknowledgement of the earth/mother/
mother/earth principle is also referred to by Nicolás Campisi in Chapter 17, South American Liter-
ature and Ecofeminism. Campisi establishes linkages between patriarchal and colonial hegemonies
as evident throughout the Andean region, where corporatist and capitalist policies have assisted
in the impingement of Indigenous territories by oil and mining concerns. This, he argues, is
analogous to negligence with respect to the rights of Pachamama (sometimes Mama Pacha), the
name given to “Mother Earth” by the Quechua and Aymara—the highest divinity of the Andean
people. An additional cultural perspective of the mother earth philosophy is also referred to by
Sangita Patil in Chapter 8, Hindi Literature and Ecofeminism. In mapping Hindi literature, Patil
identifies how the earth is conceived via the mother motif using as an example Atharvaveda, the
hymn Bhumisukta. Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman’s Chapter 23, English Literature and Ecofeminism, also
traces how American and British writers have integrated conceptions of Mother Nature/Mother
Earth long-established within the sacred and secular traditions which explicitly aligned and per-
sonified the women and nature nexus.

“Mother Earth” and “Mother Africa”

This apparent feminization of Africa and the Earth appears based on various essentialist views
of femininity and nurturing. The traditional Akan community of Ghana, for instance, ascribes
motherhood to the Earth, referring to Earth as Asaase Yaa, with the implication of “Mother” indi-
cating a consideration for Earth as a spiritual power, fertile and the source of all life (Boaten 1998,
45). An accepted transference of the intersection of Earth as (gendered) being is also apparent with
respect to the concept of Africa. In African Traditional Religion: A Definition, for instance, theolo-
gian E. Bolaji Idowu (1975, 77) argues that:

Where she (Africa) behaves herself according to prescription and accepts an inferior position,
benevolence, which becomes her ‘poverty’, is assured, and for this she shows herself deeply and
humbly grateful. If for any reason she takes it into her head to be self-assertive and claim a footing
of equality, then she brings upon herself a frown, she is called names; she is persecuted openly or
by indirect means; she is helped to be divided against herself … a victim who somehow is devel-
oping unexpected power and resilience which might be a threat to the erstwhile strong.

However, whereas the concept of “Mother Africa” also ascribes, for some, that “the common
ancestor of all people of African descent irrespective of their physical characteristics and current

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location on this planet” (Osabu-Kle 2021), the concept of “Mother Earth” and the mutual re-
sponsibilities of stewardship in and across communities has in recent years attracted ecofeminist
interest through the concept of Ubuntu:

an African ethic where everything is interdependent, none is existing in isolation … As much

as humans and other creation depend on Mother Earth for food, shelter, warmth, oxygen
(life) and all other important components of life, so is the Earth dependent on humans and
other creations for her survival. There is no hierarchy in this stewardship; all have a respon-
sibility towards life. (Adedoyin 2021, 153)

Ubantu
I argue that it is precisely because Ubantu is not “conventionally recognised as an eco-philosophy”
( Jicklin et al., 2021, 133) that shapes its utility as a viable perspective that moves beyond the oft-
cited limitations of “ecofeminism” as a Western concept (Archambault 1993; Moore 2008; Sydee
and Beder 2001), together with the contention that “African ecofeminism” has sometimes proven
too narrow (Byrne 2018). The concept of Ubantu has intersected with various strands of ecofem-
inist thinking in recent years, broadening the scope toward finding a conceptual middle ground
between the shortcomings of a Western concept of “ecofeminism” and the limited focus of “Af-
rican ecofeminism.” For instance, while Konik (2018) defines Ubantu “an ethical framework
common among sub-Saharan African communities, in which care for others and the environment
is considered key to the development of personhood and esteem,” she establishes linkages with
materialist ecofeminism, arguing that,

Materialist ecofeminism is a version of ecological feminism premised on the assumption that

the material conditions of life – economic and environmental ones – shape power relations,
economic and cultural practices, skills and ideas. The resonances between the two traditions
[Ubantu and materialist ecofeminism] are unsurprising, considering similar forms of ex-
ploitation historically experienced by women and indigenes.
(Konik 2018, 271)

African Women’s Poetry and Ecofeminism

According to Mwale (2021, 147), Siwila (2014) has argued that “if ecofeminism was to be effec-
tive in responding to issues on ecology, discourses around African women’s embedded ecological
spirituality needed to be retrieved and transformed for the liberation of both women and nature.”
Chitando (2020, 65) asserts that

Fundamental to African womanist ecocriticism, is the belief that the Earth is the Mother and
African women have a sacred responsibility to tend to it. When analyzing creative works,
ecocriticism applies this perspective in order to bring out the extent to which women writers
are expressing the relationship between African women and ecology.

The textual ecofeminist resonance of African women poets can be found in the vanguard writ-
ings of Zulu prose writer of the nineteenth century, Lydia Umkasetemba, and twentieth-century
Xhosa poet Nontsizi Mgqwetto, whose many poems appeared in the newspaper Umteteli was
Bantu in the period 1920–1929 (Opland 1995, 162). Indeed, while Umkasetemba’s writing is oft
attributed to the dawn of modern Zulu literature, it is through Nontsizi Mgqwetto’s verse forms
that literary modernism is brought to South Africa through poetry (Masilela 2013, 511).

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With respect to the ecofeminist readings of African women’s poetry, an examination of Ad-
elaide Tantsi Dube’s poem Africa: My Native Land (1913) is a fruitful place to begin. Born at
Engcobo in the Eastern Cape, Adelaide Tantsi was the daughter of J. Z. Tantsi, founder of the
Ethiopian church in South Africa (Driver and Sbongile 2003, 161). While informed by the po-
etic conventions of the English tradition, her poem Africa: My Native Land (1913) was markedly a
political polemic speaking to the 1913 Natives Land Act which, once passed, not only restricted/
prohibited land ownership, leasing or purchase, but exiled to reserves thousands of displaced Black
South African farming families. According to Feinberg:
Most Africans condemned the bill and the new law because it attacked a key aspect of the
African way of life, land, and allowed ownership rights in only seven percent (until 1936) of
the country. The long term results were worse than anyone anticipated. Rapid population
growth among Africans and soil erosion in the reserves (partly due to over-grazing) seriously
undermined African agriculture. And, after 1948, the reserves became the cornerstone of a
key part of the apartheid system, the homelands.
(Feinberg 1993, 70)
It was perhaps conceivably strategic to publish the poem on October 31, 1913, the day the king of
the Zulu Nation, Dinizulu kaCetshwayo, was buried, as both a tribute to Africa and a lament to
its subjugated freedom.
Africa: My Native Land
How beautiful are thy hills and thy dales!
I love thy very atmosphere so sweet,
Thy trees adorn the landscape rough and steep
No other country in the whole world
could with thee compare.
It is here where our noble ancestors,
Experienced joys of dear ones and of home;
Where great and glorious kingdoms rose and fell
Where blood was shed to save thee, thou
dearest Land ever known;
But, Alas! their efforts, were all in vain,
For to-day others claim thee as their own;
No longer can their off-spring cherish thee
No land to call their own—but outcasts
in their own country!
Despair of thee I never, never will,
Struggle I must for freedom—God’s great gift—
Till every drop of blood within my veins
Shall dry upon my troubled bones, oh
thou Dearest Native Land!
(Dube 1913/2003, 162)
In what might be read as a political polemic, the poem’s “I” subjectivity lauds the geographi-
cal wonder of the continent’s natural environment and the ancestral history that fought for her
preservation and survival—“where our noble ancestors,/Experienced joys of dear ones and of
home”—while both recognizing and lamenting the imperialist encroachment on civil liberties
and freedom, of the regulation of land; its acquisition as a metaphor for suppression and lost
liberty. Africans no longer of and belonging to their native Land, “but outcasts/in their own
country!” This “I” subjectivity claims its position as standing as a descendant to those “noble
ancestors,” clearly indicating an expressly African identity and intonating an impassioned lament
shifting to the third person perspective to enforce its thematic interests: “Where blood was shed

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to save thee, thou/dearest Land ever known.” Techniques of exaggeration emphasize the expressly per-
sonal embodiment of human flesh with the embodiment of Dearest Native Land: “Till every drop of
blood within my veins/Shall dry upon my troubled bones.” But in that last line of the final stanza there
is that stance of defiance, of anticipating the struggle for freedom “God’s great gift,” with the allusion
that if freedom does truly come from God, then surely the struggle is in the gift worth fighting for.
In tracing the ecofeminist threads of Adelaide Tantsi Dube’s poem to more contemporary per-
spectives, take as an example Joyce Chigiya’s remarkable poem The Returnees published in 2013, a
century after the publication of Africa: My Native Land (1913).

The Returnees
Early December sees parts of South Africa
homing, relocating northwards to Zimbabwe
going further inland into Zambia and beyond.
Like swallows, they change location across
rivers for the mere reason of season.
Past Beitbridge Border Post, the injiva* *injiva (Ndebele) migrant workers
who had ‘fallen’ into the Limpopo River
on their way over, return via the legal route.
Mat South’s heat is on the fleet of cars
trailing luggage for festivities
their own sizes doubled. They are dung-
beetles taking home finds. Omalaitsha1 tumble
down the Danger; carrier becoming the carried.
In the haste, many are now late, dead on time
in the tide of Gauteng Province rising.

(Chigiya 2013)
Joyce Chigiya’s The Returnees tracks the intersection between nature and migration, with an un-
dercurrent speaking to land dispossession and alienation. The lyric quality of the poem, the appli-
cation of technical qualities—enjambment, simile (likening Ndebele migrant workers to birdlife),
metaphor (figuring Ndebele migrant workers as insects feeding on faeces), repetition (amplifica-
tion), juxtaposition (in alluding to the movement of Omalaitsha, Ndebele people in the delivery
business between Zimbabwe and her neighbours), referencing to isiNdebele language (spoken by
the Ndebele, a Nguni ethnic group native to South Africa), slant rhyme, ambiguity (in an expres-
sion referencing time meaning both punctual, or, deceased) and word play—combined with the
vivid imagery and a disparate sense of place resonate in an ode to the diaspora: the dispersion of
migrant workers and the configurations of migration.
The poem ends with an allusion to the Gauteng Province. While South Africa’s smallest Prov-
ince, Gauteng—in the Sotho-Tswana languages means “place of gold”—is the country’s eco-
nomic hub “attracting international migrants as well as domestic migrants from rural provinces
such as Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape” (Statistics South Africa 2018), it is an eco-
nomic powerhouse “dependent on immigration to supply its labour requirements, a phenomenon
deeply rooted in the province’s early economic history and the development of mining and heavy
industry” (Oosthuizen and Naidoo 2004).
With the linkages between ecofeminist perspectives and the writing of Black women across
prose and fiction forms attracting more and more critical attention, scholarship paying atten-
dant focus on the ecofeminist readings of African women poets is still an emergent field. Little
exists with respect to ecofeminist readings of African women’s poetry, and it is to this dearth
in scholarship that this chapter aims to contribute. Aside from a comparatively small selection
of critical ecofeminist readings of selected African poets, such as Durban poet and playwright
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Malika Ndlovu (Boswell 2011; Byrne 2018), the works of award-winning South African poet and
storyteller Sindiwe Magona (Shober 2017), and the Guyanese poet Grace Nichols (Brand āo 2013,
2018), scholarship is the field is deserved of much closer attention.

Lyrics as Poetry
In broadening the breadth of critical scholarship on African women’s poetry, this chapter will
also incorporate a discussion of song lyrics by African women performers as a form of verse
poetry. Here, the section will discuss two African performers in particular: Dorothy Masuka, a
­Zimbabwean-born South African jazz singer and African Hip-Hop artist L-ness. The aim here
is to bring the unique lyricism of two very different African artists, from two very different his-
torical backgrounds and geographical contexts, into a discussion of how these oral forms open
opportunities to examine questions of African aesthetics alongside concepts of African ecofem-
inist thinking. Further, as both jazz and rap represent forms of orature—in the former, sung, in
the latter, interlocution—each form draws both artists into a long tradition of vocal performance
ascribed to women generally. But both forms open to women opportunities to express and deter-
mine their own standpoint on the issues embedded within the musical performance as much as
to contribute a unique style in shaping the voice of women. Further, jazz has its origins in Africa.
“The ancient tribal music of West Africa has many similarities to jazz. Traditional African music
features a strong drumbeat, improvised licks, vocals that imitate instruments, and the use of short,
repeated phrases of melody [known as ‘riffs’]” (Kallen 2012, 13).
Rap too has its roots in Africa.

These roots can be traced back more specifically to two West African geographical and
cultural zones: the coastal forest belt cultures like the Ga, Ewe, Fon, and Yoruba of modern
Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria; and the Sahelian cultures of the Manding, Wolof, and Peul
of modern Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso.
(2001, 285)

What is especially significant in the case of women such as Dorothy Masuka and L-ness, as well as
other female African jazz and rap performances, is that in engaging in forms of the spoken word
traditionally tied to complex oral traditions, these women also evoke the force of nommo: the
power to evoke that which is being spoken.
Dorothy Masuka, a Zimbabwean-born South African jazz singer, was among “the first black
female recording artists to achieve stardom across southern and eastern Africa,” and “became a
dogged advocate of the struggle against apartheid” (Russonello 2019). Masuka’s Nolishwa (1956)
as song lyric is considered poetry, precisely because reading song lyrics as poetry “invites cog-
nitive dissonance” (Bradley 2017, 14). In Nolishwa Masuka explores the dissonance between the
public performance of femininity and the politics of this performance: the social implications of
Nolishwa’s performances of gender embedded within the socio-environmental presumptions of
transgressive African femininity.
The dialogic quality of the poem pits two speakers in conversation with one another about
a woman, Nolishwa. This was a song performed by Zimbabwe-born South African jazz singer
Dorothy Masuka in her prolific career as “first black female recording artists to achieve star-
dom across southern and eastern Africa” (Russonello 2019). Read from an ecofeminist stand-
point, Masuka, in a compelling mixture of polyphonic (or dialogic) text and lyric, embodies
in the figure of Nolishwa the courage of a gendered subject to challenge conventional norms
of feminine conduct as she navigates the oppressions of a patriarchal world. It is in the way
that assonance forces the reader to meditate on the conflicting interests which place Nolishwa

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between opposing and indifferent historical forces which ultimately fail to destroy her. We see
in Nolishwa the notion of performativity in a truly Butlerean sense; the analysis of “the power
of discourse to produce that which it names” (Butler 1993, 225) through repetition and recita-
tion. Performativity in Masuka’s Nolishwa contests the very notion of the essentialist view of
femininity in that it—gender—is the effect rather than the cause. Nolishwa is a construction
susceptible to exterior pressures and concerns over which she/it exercises no control. Thus
linked with the question of performativity, the performativity of Nolishwa “is one domain in
which power acts as discourse” (Butler 1993, 225).
While apparent in Nolishwa is “the power of discourse to produce that which it names” (­ Butler
1993, 225), from a more focused African ecofeminist perspective, the resonance of nommo is
richly realized. Here nommo represents “the power of the Word—spoken or gesticulated—which
activates all forces from their frozen state in a manner that establishes concreteness of ­expression …
by fusing the material with the spiritual” (Carter Harrison 1972, xx).
The concept of performativity from the perspective of African ecofeminism can be taken one
step further in an examination Kenya Nchi Yetu (Kenya Our Country) by African Hip-Hop artist
L-ness. “L-ness” is the pseudonym used by Kenyan-born Lydia Owano Akwabi, who raps in a
vernacular language known as Sheng, an acronym for “Swahili-English slang” (Mazrui 1995, 171).
Kenya Nchi Yetu (Kenya Our Country)
Peace, love na unity, Peace, love and unity,
Hip hop mentality, Hip hop mentality,
Amid all the prejudice, Amid all the prejudice,
Kuna vitu mob ziko positive, There are many things that are positive,
Uliza Lupita na wakimbiaji Ask Lupita and athletes
vile ikikam to kutoka teke, how when it comes to marathons,
Ni matrophy na mamedali it is trophies and gold medals
za ugoro kuzinyongolo, on our necks,
Na Oliech? Katika futa, And Oliech, when it comes to football,
tunawachobo, we make the ball pass between the goal keeper’s legs,
Ni watu wetu wanasay katika fame, when it comes to fame, it is our people who have the say,
Kwenye games ka rugby, especially in games like Rugby,
Kutoka kwa single party state from a single party state
hadi multy-party state, to a multi-party state,
Sasa tuna new constitution, now we have a new constitution
Cole mob ni maCampo na maUni most colleges are campuses and universities now,
yani ma higher learning institutions, meaning institutions of higher learning,
katika devolution, wamatha na during devolution, mothers and
mayutman, wana representation, the youth, have representation,
utawapenda utawahate love them or hate them
but huwezi kuwanegate, you can not negate them,
itabaki umepraco positive you have to practice a positive
Kenyanization of the mind. Kenyanization of the mind.
(Kenya Nchi Yetu translated by L-ness 2015)

The two characteristic inflections of Sheng—slang and “code-switching”—inform this vernacular

with specific linguistic elements conducive to ecofeminist readings. Slang, in this context for instance,
is both a distinctive patois spoken by an alternative sub-culture serving to differentiate between other
sub-cultures, while also playing a socio-psychological role in encouraging a feeling of collective co-
hesion (Mazrui 1995, 172). In promoting a “Kenyanization of the mind” (L-ness 2015), L-ness does
not rap in Swahili or English, the two official languages of Kenya, but in Sheng, a hybrid language
that developed in the slums of Nairobi and gradually became the lingua franca of its Underground.

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The art of L-ness, well summed up as ‘Gal Power’, impresses with the directness and sheer energy
and force of her delivery. For her, Hip Hop is an “international culture of consciousness” which
possesses the unique power to bring together people of very different origins and education.
(Lyrik-line 2021)

What is apparent in Kenya Our Country (2015) is again, “the power of discourse to produce that
which it names” (Butler 1993, 225). In this case—from the perspective of nommo—L-ness is ap-
pealing to a strong almost strident sense of nationalism, of being Kenyan, of adopting, or perhaps
even envisioning a “Kenyanization of the mind.”
We see an iteration of this conceptualization of nommo underpinning distinctive African
ecofeminism in the first two stanzas of award-winning poet and playwright Napo Masheane’s
SAMBURU ‘My People’ (2008). She was born in Soweto and grew up in the South African Free
State of Qwaqwa. Masheane’s aesthetic of nommo is emboldened with symbols of identity and
place, of ancestral lineages and of appealing to the generative forces. She draws from a distinctly
personal experience in evoking this ancestry drawing on the five traditional dynamics of Afri-
can oratory identified by Knowles-Borishade (1991, 490); caller-plus-chorus, spiritual entities,
nommo, responders and spiritual harmony. It is these spiritual entities, these responders—called
Bakganka—that vocalize and reply to the caller’s implicit refrains. It is the caller that encircles their
appellations in poetic canto. It is the caller’s appeal to nommo that gives agency to the discursive,
to evoke the generations of the semi-nomadic Samburu Tribe, also known as the Butterfly People
(Collins 1995, 298; Prince 2017) of Northern Kenya. Here is an ecofeminist example of nommo as
ecofeminist reflection. Pulsing through each word of each line comprising this poem “is Nommo,
a physical–spiritual life force. These African insights echo a primary image of ecofeminist reflection:
the web of life which affirms that all of creation is interconnected” (Rakoczy 2020, 536).
Further examples of the power of nommo as an African ecofeminist aesthetic appear in the
poetry of Olajumoke Verissimo, a Nigerian poet residing in Lagos. Verissimo utilizes a variety
of Yoruban oral devices. Take as an example the introduction to her poem Retrospection (2008).

Intro:
I know brokers of diamond dreams, who
copulate in mines when mates are in fetters.
I know IMF;
International Misery Fellows, whose
kindness borders on wretchedness.
I know desire that flowered trauma,
tales of protection that weaves destruction,
stories of UN-desirable aid-givers
and World Bank of unmeasured miseries.
I am the memory of waters where anger
shushes voices, into a stem of bitterness, into
a tree: two stems; with three branches,
the knower, the-knowing and the know-not.
I am Diaspora, the fresh ire, of
erring sires who flipped destiny.
I am the memory of ancestors
who embraced figments of hope, but
found discord rooted in posterity.
I am the memory
of Sierra Leone

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serial loan of enchanted bitterness

of Liberia
lying burials of ailing serenity
of Sudan
sudating hunger and impaired righteousness.
I am the memory of places
where death is an appraisal of hope,
I know the home of familial disconnect
where ties of belonging are soups of blood,
and happiness farms anticipation; harvests sorrow.
I know of fathers who are
heedless fighters of kindred enmity.
I know everything that means nothing.
(Verissimo 2008)
The first-person viewpoint casts the reader immediately into a dark underworld of blood diamonds
and world trade politics, of subjugation and environmental havoc, where metaphor and resistance
intertwine to create an underlying motif of melancholy and memory. A deep sense of protest
exists in the architecture of her poetry as much as in the striking utterances of its ­fi rst-person nar-
rator. This speaking subject expresses a worldview loaded with geographical reference points and
topographical locations mirroring what might be read as calling upon the poet’s own ecological,
historical and socio-cultural contacts. Here is a vivid example of the power of nommo as an Afri-
can ecofeminist paradigm. Verissimo illustrates how a person [poet] “who possesses the ability to
articulate the name that exactly suits this one object and no other, to find its nommo, can access the
inherent potency of speech and activate a political presence” (Ryan 2010, 84). Take as another ex-
ample this refrain following the introduction to Olajumoke Verissimo’s poem Retrospection (2008):
*
I know non-travellers voyaging into waters of amnesia,
slipping into the eternity of jumbled history,
stalling yesterday’s possibilities in shipwrecks,
overboard burying, plantation rapes, skin abuse.
I am the memory of ships;
Mercy, Jesus, Ann, Desire…
where humans evolved into
rotting meat sighing for death.
I know Royal African Company;
makers of Royalty Alienated
companionship, traders of serfdom.
I am the next-of-kin of plantation workers,
next-of-skin to worldly neglect,
I am a story, I am the memory.
(Verissimo 2008)

Through nommo as an aesthetic of African poetry, Verissimo’s social concerns are revealed
through the “I” speaker’s individual experience and addressed to responders, thus recalibrating
private challenges as public concerns shared by the community. Consider the powerful presence
of nommo in the literary structures of the poem. Nommo is summoned in the repetitive claims
of this “I” subjective that begin each stanza “I know,” “I am,” “I know,” “I am.” This speaker is
a witness “naming” truths. This attestant bears testimony to a systematic subjugation of a people
in challenging the implicit amnesia denying, forgetting, or openly obfuscating a brutal history

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of atrocities. “I know non-travellers voyaging into waters of amnesia, slipping into the eternity
of jumbled history,/stalling yesterday’s possibilities in shipwrecks,/overboard burying, plantation
rapes, skin abuse.” This witness knows “The Royal African Company,” the company founded
in 1672 and granted a monopoly in the slave trade, transporting an average of 5,000 slaves a year
between 1680 and 1686 (PBS 1998). This witness is “the memory of ships;/Mercy, Jesus, Ann,
Desire…” the latter of which, the Desire, built in Marblehead in 1636, “is commonly believe to
be one of the first ships to bring enslaved People of Color into the Massachusetts Bay Colony”
(Marblehead Museum 2021). What is the poem Retrospection (2008) if not a singularly emblematic
work signifying the poet’s appeal to the power of the African cosmological force, that force which
empowers all inanimate forces and gives spiritual and physical life to the memory, and by exten-
sion the reality, of this subjugated history in the interests of social justice?
An ecofeminist reading of African women’s oratory and verse forms examines the techniques
the poet might employ in revealing how words take on different meanings when concealed con-
nections and distinctions are revealed (Griffin 1997, 224). In appealing to nommo, not only is
the poet naming, but also opening to the community that which is named. From an ecofeminist
standpoint, the reflection by a female poet on the construction and naming of femininity rep-
resents an important iteration of self-naming and self-definition. With this in mind, an examina-
tion of selected poetry by Ijeoma Umebinyuo offers an invaluable opportunity to examine the
aesthetic possibilities of nommo to name identity and subjectivity from ecofeminist perspectives of
­self-definition, freedom and autonomy. Born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, Ijeoma Umebinyuo is
an Igbo woman poet identifying as both a womanist and a feminist (Witt 2017). She is recognized
as one of the best modern poets of Sub-Saharan Africa (Boakye 2018).
Take, for example, an untitled poem from Umebinyuo’s Questions for Ada (2015) which in a
short refrain considers the nature of women’s bodies as spectacles of curiosity and voyeurism (@
AfricanWomenOnTheRise). What appears deceptively simple masks the poem’s intricate com-
plexity. The metaphor of Black woman’s bodies—as tragic objects of novelty—opens to the re-
ceiver an infinitely graphic and ironic image of burden, of the ideological cargo placed on women
more broadly: as if it is the destiny of women to haul oceanic waters without inundation.
The allusion to women as an objectified entity, stripped of individualism, somehow expected
to appeal to Imperialist conceptions of beauty, is also potently named in another (un-named) poem
from Umebinyuo’s Questions for Ada (@Ntombidluli, April 2018). In this case too, what appears as
a plainly austere three-line poem disguises its figurative power as nommo. From an ecofeminist
perspective, what is Umebinyuo naming here if not how race converges with issues of gender?
What is Umebinyuo naming here if not how race interlinks with post-coloniality? Nommo as a
rhetorical device is also evident in Umebinyuo’s poem entitled Survival, from Things We Lost In
The Fire (Umebinyuo 2019, 36). In this example, Umebinyuo contemplates the nature of survival,
localizing women’s bodies as sites of brutal fecundity drawing on environmental allegories.
Umebinyuo conceives writing as a political act, and asserts that the individual voice, once
discovered, should be unwrapped and used (Witt 2017). The word “Ada” is also highly signifi-
cant in terms of matriarchal ties. Umebinyuo’s grandmother was an “Ada”—“the first daughter
in her house”—as was her mother ( Joy 2016), so the intertwining of female generational lin-
eages is a reoccurring and significant motif in the poetry of the collection. What is also notable
about the collection is that although none of the poems in the collection are formerly named,
the footprints of nommo are imprinted throughout. The very aesthetic of Umebinyuo’s poetic
structures—commonly fragments, a rhetorical idea captured succinctly and evocatively in a
meticulously crafted single sentence—extends the naming principles of nommo to encapsulate
the evocation of an idea into existence. What is the poetic refrain, “do not apologize for own-
ing every piece of you they could not take,/break, and claim as theirs” (Umebinyuo 2021), if
not an act of naming resistance?

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The conception of nommo as an African ecofeminist literary device also appears in Thelminah
Nobantu Ndlazulwana’s 1986 poem Ubufazi (Womanhood) (Ndlazulwana 1986, 27 quoted in
Mtuze 1990, 129–130). According to Daymond et al (2003, 70),

Ndlazulwana’s poem was published at a time when the demands for a visible black solidarity
between women and men no longer held so firm a dominion over women’s voices, but in any
event its publication in Xhosa meant that it would not have been seen as available to English
speakers wishing to identify fracture in black South African solidarity.

What is perhaps most striking about Ndlazulwana’s poem is the “I” subjectivity’s resistance to
essentialist views of femininity while also lamenting the inequality of the status of women and
women’s rights. Again, from the perspective of nommo as an African ecofeminist aesthetic, Ndla-
zulwana deploys “the generative and productive power of the spoken word to construct a dis-
cursive reality by speaking a name into existence and drawing upon the expressive, powerful
nature of a word” (Asante 1987, 17). Nommo in Ndlazulwana’s poem is a rhetorical device raising
awareness of “the world of women” through ecological metaphors that align women specifically
with signatures of the natural environment. The rhetoric of her nommo as an African ecofeminist
aesthetic asks, after all, whether this “I” subject should swing dangerously over a precipice or be
the grated ground.

Conclusion
The African woman poets examined here exemplify how poetic oration preserves and transforms
the power of nommo to name the conditions and hopes for the social and ecological betterment
of nature and women. These poets, in naming places, identity, ancestral traditions, social realities,
historical aftermaths and the contemporary cultural contexts in which women intersect with the
natural world—the human and the non-human—bring to the fore the power of oration to exer-
cise control of that which is named. Further, with a philosophy of harmony as a unifying principle
in the force of nommo, the apparent intersection of the ecological and cosmological principles
of nommo with ecofeminist aims is both vividly and compelling clear. An examination of the
selected poetry of Adelaide Tantsi Dube, Joyce Chigiya, Napo Masheane, Olajumoke Verissimo,
Ijeoma Umebinyuo and Nobantu Ndlazulwana, as well as the jazz lyrics of Dorothy Masuka
and the rap lyrics of Lydia Owano Akwabi (L-ness), underscore the ways in which the thematic
interests of the African women’s orature resonates markedly with the studies of the content and
form evidencing the African oral tradition. Their work reveals not only the centrality of women
as subjects, but like the oral traditions of the Yoruba and the Nguni, a tradition peopled with
heroines (Nnaemeka 1994, 138). Additionally, in conceivably creating an African ecofeminist
aesthetic by applying nommo as a literary device, these women not only invest immense currency
and utility in the power of the word to “name,” and in “naming” create reality, but illustrate that
creating a collective voice is fundamentally a powerful act of resistance. This is a resistance to the
subjugation of women along racial/geographical lines voiced in oratory form which realizes an
African ecofeminist perspective. It is through nommo that these women poets summon through
oratory “the physical-spiritual life force which awakens all ‘sleeping’ forces and gives physical and
spiritual life” ( Jahn 1961, 105).
Read alongside Karen J. Warren’s conception of ecofeminism (1996), with the additional caveats
of Cheelo (2014), to better align ecofeminism with an African ecofeminist paradigm, the ecofem-
inist leanings of African writers such as Adelaide Tantsi Dube, Joyce Chigiya, Napo Masheane,
Olajumoke Verissimo, Ijeoma Umebinyuo and Nobantu Ndlazulwana, as well as the jazz lyrics of
Dorothy Masuka and the rap librettos of Lydia Owano Akwabi (L-ness), become very clear. The

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selected poetries of these women variously focus attention on the important connections between
the oppression of women and the oppression of nature (including domination or subordination of
nonhuman nature by humans), on understanding that the nature of these connections is neces-
sary to any adequate understanding of the oppression of women and the oppression of nature, on
asserting that an African ecofeminist aesthetic privileges ecological perspectives, and on claiming
that African ecofeminist perspectives present solutions to ecological problems. Of particular rel-
evance is Cheelo’s (2014, 144) assertion that “there is a need for a continued dialogue between
eco-theology and spirituality” in light of Northcott’s argument (1996, 177) that “the spirituality
of indigenous Africans give full value to creation as a dynamic and highly integrated web of life.
It exudes life-giving values from the sacredness of the land to reverence to all creatures.”
This chapter offers only a limited sample of ecofeminist readings examining how specific
strategies deployed in the oratory practices of select African women might inform envisioning
an African ecofeminist literary aesthetic. While for its purposes, the concept of African women
poets narrows the focus to those “born in Africa, those who are a national or resident of an Af-
rican country, or those whose parent(s) are African” (2017), it urges for further critical attention
on studies on women poets of the African Diaspora—defined by the AU as “consisting of people
of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality
and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the
African Union” (2011, 3). Critical attention of this kind would examine ecofeminist readings of
literary work focusing on the African Diaspora and would consider the prose and poetic works
of women Anglophone, Francophone, Afro-Italian and Lusophone writers. Such work would
contribute to what is largely recognized as a dearth in scholarship on African women’s writing,
particularly African women’s poetry, as well as bring more recent and less contemporary African
women’s poetry into the fold of both ecofeminist and African ecofeminist thinking, thus assisting
in mapping the intersections of ecofeminist branches within the development of African women’s
poetry more broadly.

Note
1 Omalaitsha (Ndebele) people in the delivery business between Zimbabwe and her neighbors.

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 11
ARABIC LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Pervine Elrefaei

Introduction
The intersection of the woman–nature patriarchal paradigm and the Western imperial exploita-
tion of the natural resources of the Arab world as a gendered “geopolitical periphery” (Salleh
2017, 53) is a major discourse in Arabic literature. Hence, this chapter argues for the need to re-
visit Arabic literature from a postcolonial ecofeminist approach for an insightful rereading of its
environmental politics. The chapter presents a cross generic survey of this archival discourse that
highlights the Arab world’s sociopolitical, cultural transformations across colonial/postcolonial/
neocolonial times.
Rooted in ecological concerns, ecofeminism sprang from the study of the dualism inherent in
the interconnectedness between gender roles and the environment (Vakoch and Mickey 2018).
Consequently, it developed to seek “bioregional autonomy, common land rights, and people’s
sovereignty over land, food, water and energy”, hoping for “regenerative eco-sufficiency” (Salleh
2017, 55). Ironically, the dualistic myth of progress disseminated by colonialism/imperialism to
justify domination is reproduced by capitalists, ruling elites, and multinational corporations, pro-
moting strategic gentrification and “environmental classism”/“racism” at the expense of “sacrifice
zones” (Gaard 2001, 157). Accordingly, as Degirmenci Altin’s argues in Chapter 33, the intersect-
ing goals of both ecofeminism and postcolonialism cannot be missed as both converge on the need
to dismantle power structures anchored in hierarchical dualisms. The Chipko movement in India,
for example, was first examined by postcolonial critics as a resistance movement. Taking place in
the third world before the emergence of ecofeminism, the movement represented the activism of
rural, ethnic women against the exploitation of nature, foregrounding their voice, centrality, and
visibility.
Characterized by ambivalence, Arabic literature’s patriarchal discourse depicts woman as
Motherland who is nationally idolized, protected, and associated with the concept of honor,
domesticity, and essentialist meanings of femininity and masculinity. Conversely, patriarchy sees
women as bodies/lands/nature to be possessed and violated; hence, representations of subjugated
women and environmental governance/degradation are inextricably interwoven. Contrastingly,
rivers, as water sources of irrigation, and concomitantly dams, as the product of the “masculine
realms of economy, technology and science” (Foster 2021, 192), are masculinized. These dual-
isms concur with the “legacy” of Western “master identity” (Plumwood 1993, 190), which is
often destabilized in literature through water discourse. Following the literary trajectory of such
discourses from early and mid-twentieth century to the present, the chapter also highlights the

126 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-12

 Arabic Literature and Ecofeminism

“feminine principle” (Shiva 2014, 24) as a counter-hegemonic discourse that is promulgated by

writers, acting as “ecological agents” (Foster 2021, 202) of sustainability.

Colonialism and the Woman–Nature Paradigm

The Western colonial discourse of the “hunting narratives”, anchored in the culture of “hege-
monic masculinity” (see Rose’s Chapter 30), finds resonance in Arabic literature. Bedouin/rural/
urban women as representations of Arab countries, cities, villages, and landscapes on whose bodies
dualistic thinking is inscribed proliferate in Arabic literature that swarms with images of a hunted
woman–nature and hunter man-culture, as exemplified by novels like Sun‘aalah Ibrahim’s Zaat
(1992), Ahlem Mosteghanemi’s The Bridges of Constantine (2013), and Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial
Bodies (2018).
In his exemplary 1907 poems, Memory of Dinshwai and Farewell to Lord Cromer (Shawqi 2017,
205, 293), Ahmed Shawqi (1870–1932) crystalizes gendered colonial relations that collectively sac-
rifice humans and nonhumans, or “earthothers” (Gaard 2017, xvii). In contrast to Hafez Ibrahim,
known as the poet of the Nile and the people, Shawqi was known as the poet of the Royal Palace.
Hence, his dismantling of the colonial myth of progress is attributed to its destructive impact
on Muhammad ‘Ali and Khedive Ism‘ail’s prosperous achievements, its oppression of Egyptians,
and abuse of nature. The British soldiers’ journey to the Egyptian village ( June 14, 1906) for
pigeon-shooting culminated in accidentally setting fire to the peasants’ stored wheat and killing
a woman. The public execution of four farmers and the flogging of eight others in punishment
for the English soldier who died while attempting to escape (Shaw 1907) led to the resignation of
Lord Cromer in 1907. The massacre was rooted in colonial “illusions of safety even in the presence
of material danger” (Gaard 2017, 16).
Utilizing a rebellious masculine tone, extended metaphors, and a plethora of visual images of
Egypt’s landscape, Shawqi depicts Dinshwai as a bereaved woman possessed by “ecological mem-
ory” (Craps 2018, 500). The “shadow place” (Gaard 2017, 17) becomes an ecofeminist visible place
where the soil smells of dead bodies and the air is filled with the mournful cooing of pigeons. The
scene geographically expands to depict Egypt as a sick woman in dire need of convalescence, sig-
nifying “ecosickness” (Houser 2014). Hence, as growing seeds, the scenes expand horizontally and
vertically to homogeneously encompass women, men, water resources, pigeons, pigeons’ towers,
scattered lands, and finally the ailing female body. Contrastingly, Lord Cromer is represented as
the “disease” (Shawqi 2017, 205) that threatens Egypt’s environmental well-being, exploiting and
depleting its natural resources. Moreover, in his 1923 classical poem Beladi, Beladi (My Homeland),
chosen in 1979 by former President Sadat as Egypt’s national anthem, Mohammad Younis al-Qadi
(1888–1969) similarly valorizes Egypt as the historical Motherland of abundance. The nationalist
tone consolidates a masculinist discourse of protection against threatening imperial powers that
have always exploited its resources.
Despite the “Nahda” movement led by a number of Western educated, secular intellectuals,
like Taha Hussein (1889–1973) and Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987), the patriarchal discourse was
pervasive. ‘Abbas Mahmoud al-‘Aqqad (1889–1964) exemplifies the essentialist writer par excel-
lence. His 1945 book Hathihi Eshagara (This Tree) is entrenched in a gendered, religious discourse
of biological determinism and the misinterpreted myth of the fall that associates woman with
primitive nature, taking her as the source of all evil and “the Devil’s Gateway” (Griffin 1980, 7).
Departing from Quranic and Biblical texts, he foregrounds that the tree is the eternal symbol of
woman’s unchangeable seductive nature (al-‘Aqad 2012, 8). Woman in this respect is metaphori-
cally responsible for uprootedness and environmental deterioration. Drawing on the pre-Islamic
poetry of Tofail al-Ghanawi, he demonstrates that women are subordinated because they are
weak, and the subordinate is adamantly nostalgic for rebellion and disobedience. Al-‘Aqqad’s

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seductive/repulsive woman who occupies wild nature runs parallel to the tamed, domestic woman
whose main role is to procreate.
Contrastingly, I argue, Taha Hussein’s 1934 novel Du‘a’a al-Karawan (The Call of the Curlew)
represents the proto-type of “anti-dualist ecological feminism” (Plumwood 1993, 40) through the
female protagonist’s ecofeminist intelligence and Scheherazade-like tactics. The novel depicts the
commodification of migrant Bedouin girls by the city’s “market economy” (Shiva 1988, 8). Ex-
ercising environmental governance, the irrigation engineer rapes his Bedouin servant, leading to
her “sacrifice” at the hands of her uncle in an act of honor killing. Ironically, the masculine myth
of development is cast in light of “maldevelopment” (Shiva 1988, 9) and patriarchal land grabbing.
Subversively, seeking vengeance, the raped woman’s sister politicizes her body through reason
by appropriating the myth of the seductive woman to tame the master’s wild nature and subvert
the hunter–hunted relation. The female’s fluid identity is highlighted through water discourse.
Exchanging roles, she assumes the metaphorical role of the irrigation engineer, exercising what
I argue as environmental counter governance. Subverting environmental classism, crystalized
by the man’s residence as a place of subordination, the female body’s agency is depicted in light
of a land that defies appropriation/penetration. Water, air, land, and fire are thus depicted as the
energizing forces she harnesses. Gaard’s (2017, 22) words are illuminating in this respect: “A
reinvigorated sustainability will reject concepts of ‘environment’ that reify self-other dualisms,
replacing them with relational earth identities”. Hence, the novel’s title comes to bear as humans
and nonhumans are finally inextricably interwoven in “sustainable dialogues” (Gaard 2017, 22),
crystalized by the melancholic, yet hopeful, call of the curlew for “transitioning away from mod-
ernist patriarchal illusions of control” (Salleh 2017, 55).

Forensic Ecofeminism
Rape thus is an ongoing patriarchal, colonial legacy. As Lesley Kordecki argues in Chapter 26, in
Metamorphoses, Ovid delineates the blurred boundaries between the human and the non-human
through his inspirational stories on the woman/animal/bird fluid identity. Medusa’s and Philo-
mela’s exemplary stories of rape by cannibalistic males, together with Philomela’s metamorphoses
into a bird, amongst others, depict both women and animals as derogatory objects of oppression.
Similarly, in Arabic literature, Haifa Zangana’s 2014 City of Widows on rape cases by American
troops during the invasion of Iraq, besides Dunya Mikhail’s 2017 Arabic poems on the rape of
Iraqi, Yazidi girls by ISIS’ terrorists in The Beekeeper of Sinjar: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq,
and Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail, are exemplary texts that pertinently lend themselves to
ecofeminist readings.
Shibli’s novel is exemplary of the intersection of animal studies, ecofeminism, and vegetarian-
ism where the rights of women, animals, and vegetation are collectively violated (see Kordecki’s
Chapter 26). The novel depicts the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinians due to the “militarized
violence” (Pugliese 2020, 1) of settler colonialism in light of the August 12, 1949, historic story of
the “gang rape” (Shibli 2020, 99) of a Palestinian Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers. Documented in
an old newspaper by “an Israeli journalist”, the story is rooted in the “archives of the Israeli mili-
tary and Zionist movements from the period” (Shibli 2020, 102). The narrator describes colonial
master identity penetrating Palestinian space as gendered, scorched earth where humans, animals,
and “more-than-human entities –trees, water, soil…” (Pugliese 2020, 8) are targeted in such an
ecological death zone:

…he headed toward the vegetation, penetrating the branches which quickly yielded to reveal
a band of Arabs standing motionless by the spring. His eyes met their wide eyes and the eyes
of the startled camels…Then came the sound of heavy gunfire. The dog’s howling finally

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stopped…Now the only sound was the muffled weeping of a girl who had curled up inside
her black clothes like a beetle…he walked around the camels lying on the ground…There
were six of them…they were dead and the sand was languidly sucking their blood into its
depths, a few of their limbs still gave off slight movements.
(Shibli 2020, 34–36)

In the midst of water scarcity and “desiccated plants” (Shibli 2020, 47), the narrator minutely
describes the shocking cleansing scene of the Palestinian girl’s body in preparation for her rape.
The whole scene of gender-based violence is represented as a horrific ritual of ethnic cleansing
(See Pappe 2010) and environmental racism. Brutal absurdity is enhanced through the officer’s
hygiene rituals as he splashes the girl’s body with abundant “water” and “soap” (Shibli 2020,
45–46), and uses pollutants. Carefully wearing “a pair of gloves” “to sterilize and cut her hair” to
“prevent lice” (Shibli 2020, 48), “the medic” pours “gasoline over the girl’s hair until it (is) com-
pletely soaked” and “rub(s) her scalp” (Shibli 2020, 49; see also Zangana 2015). Another soldier
is depicted rubbing “gasoline” “into (a dog’s) light yellow fur” (Shibli 2020, 49–50). The scene
is ironically enveloped by the mythical discourses of the environmentally brutal, negated Other,
the “civilizing mission”, and “a land without a people for a people without a land” to justify the
woman-land rape. Normalizing anthropocentrism, the officer foregrounds,

Bedouins only uproot, they do not plant things, and their livestock devour every bit of vege-
tation that lies before them, reducing day by day, the very few green areas that do exist. We,
however, will do everything in our power to give these vast stretches the chance to bloom
and become habitable, instead of leaving them as they are desolate and empty of people. …it
is here in particular that our creativity and innovation be tested, once we succeed in turning
the Negev into a flourishing civilized region and a thriving center of development and cul-
ture…In this desolate and uninhabited place, …, we are fulfilling not a military mission but
a national one. We must not let the Negev remain a barren desert, prey to neglect and misuse
by Arabs and their animals.
(Shibli 2020, 55–56)

As Mies (2014) writes,

What modern machine-man does to the earth will eventually be felt by all; everything is
connected. ‘Unlimited Progress’ is a dangerous myth because it suggests that we can rape and
destroy living nature, of which we are an integral part, without ourselves suffering the effects.
(Shiva and Mies 2014, 93)

The woman–nature paradigm is thus consolidated by the contemporary Palestinian protagonist in

the novel’s second plot. Identifying both herself and the raped girl with nature, she states:

When a clutch of grass is pulled out by the roots, and you think you’ve got rid of it entirely,
only for grass of the exact same species to grow back in the same spot a quarter of a century
later.
(Shibli 2020, 100)

Her archival journey in quest of the story’s authenticity excavates sites like the “big dump site”,
“the Wall”, “checkpoints”, “garbage”, demarcated “zones”, “borders” (Shibli 2020, 110), “the nar-
row metal bars” (Shibli 2020, 114), “Ofer Prison” (Shibli 2020, 119), and the “settlements” (Shibli
2020, 121), to mention but a few. Occupying an interstitial position between nature and culture,

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the girl, guided by Israeli “maps” (Shibli 2020, 134), penetrates the Israeli museum to inspect the
“displayed” “firearms”, “guns” “bullets”, “military vehicles”, the “1918” “US-made submachine
gun…widely used during the second world war” and “in the War of 1948”, “…in the Korean War,
the Vietnam War, and many others” (Shibli 2020, 132–133).
The journey into anthropocentric space culminates in the narrative voice of the Israeli re-
searcher in the settlement, authenticating the “history” (Shibli 2020, 143) of settler colonialism,
followed by the scene of smoke and bombardment of Rafah. Anchored in the above metaphor of
uprootedness, the girl similarly meets her death by “gunshots”, piercing her “hand” and “chest”
(Shibli 2020, 181). Arabic literature of forensic ecofeminism thus attempts to bring to light “the
criminal violence that transpired in those sites of destruction”, and hence, render the human and
“more-than-human entities as worthy of legal consideration” (Pugliese 2020, 2). Sinan Antoon’s
2017 novel The Baghdad Eucharist, for example, depicts the palm tree as a character. As he puts it
(Antoon 2017), “The fate of the palm tree is akin to the fate of Iraqis. The destruction brought
about by wars and climate change has killed and uprooted so many. Others are still standing and
resisting”.

Decolonization and the New Woman–Nature Paradigm

Decolonization witnessed the development of the woman–nature discourse, the deconstruction
of the Western hegemonic myth, and the reconstruction of a counter myth of progress. Egypt,
for example, witnessed the agrarian land reform, the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the
nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, and all capitalist corporations, leading to the 1956
Anglo-French-Israeli Tripartite aggression. Nonetheless, the High Dam culminated in Nubian
displacement and the production of Nubian literature that is rooted in ecological memory, and the
impact of the migration of masculinities to urban centers on women and children. As an archive
of resistance, Egyptian Nubian literature oscillates between the nostalgia for Nubia as the lost
paradise and the call for environmental justice for the displaced Nubians.
Nonetheless, in her 1960 novel Al-Bab al-Maftouh (The Open Door 2017), Latifa-al-Zayyat
(1923–1996) delineates Egypt’s struggle over sovereignty, crystalized by woman’s journey toward
agency, body sovereignty, and deconstruction of hierarchical dualisms. The imperial attempt to
control Egypt’s natural resources thus synchronizes with the attempts of the authoritarian father
and domineering elite to confine the female protagonist to biological determinism. The gradual
journey of al-Zayyat’s 11-year-old, middle-class, urban student from oppressive domesticity to
energizing exteriority is traced through the novel’s ecological and water discourses, culminating
in the final scene of the national struggle over Egypt’s water, air and land sovereignty. In ecofemi-
nist terms, “The material process by which human bodies take matter–energy from nature, digest,
and give back in return is known as the humanity–nature metabolism” (Salleh 2017, 50).
Setting the tone for the introduction of Egypt’s ecofeminist identity anchored in nationalism,
its climate, flourishing environment, and “ecosystem energies” (Salleh 2017, 51) are foregrounded:
“FEBRUARY 21, 1946. SEVEN O’CLOCK in the evening: the tranquil sky bore a pleasant
coolness, and there was a clean purity to the air as if the heavens had poured down rain and washed
the earth” (al-Zayyat 2017, 1). Fire soon follows through the mass demonstrations against the Brit-
ish who “bring out five armored cars to plow into it!” (al-Zayyat 2017, 1). Dehumanizing colonial
relations are fleshed out: “You know when you slaughter a hen and the blood runs out…and the
hen goes on moving, just for a moment, and then falls down, boom, and that’s it?”…“People died,
lots of people—and that’s exactly how they died” (al-Zayyat 2017, 9–10).
Though deprived of joining the demonstrations on gender grounds, the female protagonist
assumes the role of the storyteller of anticolonial masculine activism to her school teachers and
classmates. Storytelling, I argue, constitutes a process of ecofeminist fermentation that generates

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ecofeminist identities, exhibited by the protagonist and her schoolmates in later demonstrations.
The protagonist’s emancipatory tendencies associate her with “a flitting bird, streaking through
the sky far above the flock, diving to its nest with anxious love for its tiny baby birdies, encircling
them with its wings to keep them warm” (al-Zayyat 2017,16). Ambivalently intertwined with the
traditional mother image, the protagonist consequently deconstructs dualisms and escapes body
politics. Flowing with the grassroots as the local flora and fauna flourishing in Egyptian soil, she
finally joins the national struggle against the ecological destruction caused by the imperial air-
strikes on Egypt’s borders and waterways. Plumwood’s (1993, 1) words beautifully epitomize the
protagonist’s journey toward sovereignty: “When four tectonic plates of liberation theory—those
concerned with the oppressions of gender, race, class and nature—finally come together, the re-
sulting tremors could shake the conceptual structures of oppression to their foundations”.

Aquapolitics: Water Hegemony/Scarcity

Aquapolitics and body politics are thus intertwined discourses in Arabic literature. Shayie’ Mina
al-Khawf (1960; A Sense of Fear) by Tharwat Abaza (1927–2002), and Tharthara Fawqa al-Nil (1966;
Adrift on the Nile) by Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) are two exemplary novels that depict the vio-
lence exercised on the people, their land, and resources through water hegemony. While Abaza’s
novel depicts the fall of the myth of development and agrarian reform in the Nasserite period,
Mahfouz’s novel predicts the 1967 defeat by delineating Egypt as a wasteland.
Abaza’s rebellious, dignified female protagonist, Fou’ada/Egypt, is associated with the land,
water, and soil through her slightly brunette skin and the local green dress, gallabiah, she con-
stantly wears. The novel portrays the oppression to which both woman and nature are exposed at
the hands of the authoritarian regime represented by ‘Atris/Nasser. The climax depicts Fou’da in
rebellion against aquapolitics that caused the land’s desiccation as a punishment for her rejection
of the dictator’s love/rule. Images of dead animals, dry land, and dry breasts of women holding
crying famished babies are soon countered by the ecological agency of the female who, in de-
fiance, reclaims water sovereignty by turning the wheel to irrigate the land and save its people.
Though the scene is symbolic of the socio-political historical conditions, it is interesting to read
the novel in light of the ongoing water wars and threats to which Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria
are exposed due to Israeli, Ethiopian, and Turkish attempts at hegemonizing water resources (see
Pugliese 2020).

Ecosickness and Ecofeminist Memory

Ecosickness is another discourse that is associated with authoritarianism and environmental im-
perialism. Mahfouz’ novel contrastingly depicts ecosickness through the houseboat as a pivotal
setting and the Nile as a central eyewitness to a morally decadent group of middle-class urban
men and women of different ages, and from different walks of life, as the product of authoritarian
history, culminating in Nasser’s regime.
The opening sets the tone for ecosickness through climate change, depicted through April as
the month of dust and lies. Ironically, the suffocating hierarchical environment of the Ministry of
Health is delineated as a wasteland. The interior room the antagonist occupies is stuffed with files
on shelves, likened to dead bodies that are covered with ants, cockroaches, and a spider. In this
atmosphere that is enveloped by oppressive cigarette smoke and dust (Mahfouz 2019, 9), the mar-
ginalized, indignant drug-addict employee, Anis Afandi, is described as the eternally sick (Mah-
fouz 2019, 9). The absurd world that culminated in the death of his diseased wife and daughter 20
years earlier, reminds him of hunted women and men in Mamluk times (Mahfouz 2019, 11). In
contrast to Shawqi’s pigeons, Hussein’s curlew, and al-Zayat’s birds, the lost group is overlooked by

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a bat flying by the window like a bullet, epitomizing the police state and foreshadowing a dismal
end (Mahfouz 2019, 40).
Overshadowed by the Vietnam War (Mahfouz 2019, 12), the unstable times are reinforced
through water discourse, represented by the houseboats occupying the river banks, the polluted
Nile water, and dry mud. As a character puts it, “We live on water that shakes under any foot-
step” (Mahfouz 2019, 70). Environmental degradation is embodied by the migrant peasant who
exchanges identity for the gatekeeper of debauchery (Mahfouz 2019, 19), blindly boasting that he
is the houseboat; he is the ropes and the buoys (Mahfouz 2019, 15). The novel culminates in the
unaccountable killing of a peasant by a reckless group member in a car accident, ironically, taking
place in the proximity of rural nature and the pyramids.
Ecosickness proliferates in the literature of “oil colonialism” (Gaard 2017, 15), anchored in
Western economic, military violence which caused “environmental pollution, spread of chemi-
cals” (Gaard 2017, 13) and environmental destruction. ‘Abdulrahman Munif ’s (1987) exemplary
petrofiction novel, Cities of Salt, not only exemplifies the failure of the myth of progress but is a
proleptic work that anticipates the ecosickness characteristic of the post 9/11war zone literature
and life writing as a genre that flourished pre and post the Arab Uprisings.
Body politics and environmental politics/health are thus intricately intertwined. As K. M.
Ferbee in Chapter 48 argues, the genre of the “material memoir” manifests a pivotal ecofeminist
discourse that delineates sick societies in dire need of rehabilitation. As cancer and other diseases
spread, contaminated bodies are depicted as extensions of polluted, exploited environments. In
her exemplary 2013 autobiography, Athqal min Radwa (Heavier than Radwa), Radwa Ashour intri-
cately interweaves her journey of struggle with chronic sickness and brain cancer with the Arab
world’s struggle with colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial powers. Memory/ecomemory and story-
telling are thus imperative acts. As she puts it,

Sometimes I have the illusion that I fall ill for psychological reasons. In 1991, after the bom-
bardment of Iraq, I got a liver infection and I was, and still am convinced, that this was bound
to happen. In October when they conferred in Madrid, I was very ill; I couldn’t get out of
bed.

The hospital thus features as an intrinsic space in her autobiography (see Elrefaei 2017).
Moreover, in Samar Yazbek’s novel Planet of Clay (2021), war-torn Syria is delineated through
the eyes/memory of a multiply oppressed, poor, disabled young girl. As Nicole A. Jacobs highlights
in Chapter 28, the intersectional oppression from which the disabled suffers is first attributed to the
social model of disability, intertwined with environmental degradation escalated by war and hege-
monic imperialism. Consequently, temporal non-linearity is the disabled’s resistant tactic. Witness-
ing the death of her mother at the hands of Syrian soldiers, the girl, whose shoulder is penetrated by
a bullet, is taken to a prison hospital where she depicts traumatic scenes of collective intersectional
oppression of injured men and sick women, all handcuffed to hospital beds. As the personal is politi-
cal, the girl’s medical condition runs parallel to the devastated land. Being a compulsive walker who
is incapable of talking, the girl has to be always tied by a rope first by her mother and later by her
brother for her own safety. Tied to the iron bars of a high window of a cellar in Ghouta, the fertile
land that has been cementified, the girl recalls the excruciating pain and deaths of women, men,
and children who were brutally exposed to chemical attacks by the regime and Russia. Hence, the
social/political oppression to which women/land are exposed is metaphorically represented by the
protagonist’s mental condition and her constant struggle to liberate herself.
Ecofeminist memory as a resistant, interrogative tactic is also implemented by the cancerous
female narrator in N‘emat al-Beheiri’s 2006 autobiographical work, Diary of a Radiating Woman.
Documenting her painful experience in the Nasser Oncology Center, in her introduction,

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al-Beheiri highlights how cancer is the product of patriarchal oppression and socio-political cor-
ruption. Tracing the journey of suffering, the narrative interrogatively culminates in holding
corrupt leading officials in the Ministry of Agriculture responsible for importing carcinogenic
fertilizers and pesticides, hence, spreading disease.
Ecofeminist memory as a counter-hegemonic discourse of agency and deliberate remembering
that seeks therapeutic empowerment similarly permeates the literature of men writers. Mohamed
al- Mansi Qandil’s 1988 novel Inkesar al-Rouh (The Subjection of the Soul), delves deep into the cul-
tural, political, and environmental history of Egypt, focusing on the city of Almahalla as a periph-
eral industrial city of resistance that epitomizes mnemonic agency through the struggles, strikes,
and incarceration of its factory workers by a carceral state. Exposing environmental deterioration/
injustice, the narrative depicts the contaminated city where clouds turn black (Qandil 2013, 24) by
tear gas, multiply oppressed poor women turn servants, children are frustrated with nightmarish
reality, and animals are brutally exploited. Ironically, the narrative unfolds to recollect the 1967
defeat and the rootedness of despotism through masculinized, politicized nature, and President
Nasser as a mythological figure. Unaffected by any siege, Nasser is depicted as the one and only
tree, standing erect amongst the masses with his strong, military body. Raising his hands up like
sacred Egyptian trees drawn on temple walls, and manifesting a mesmerizing, strong voice, he
fluidly oscillates between a raging wild pharaoh and a humble peasant who frugally lives on bread
crumbs (Qandil 2013, 183).

Sustainability
Nonetheless, counter-narratives of sustainability struggle to reclaim expropriated lands and lib-
erate subjugated selves. Mahmoud Darwish’s exemplary poem “al-Ard”, “Land”, inspired by the
real photo of a Palestinian female tree hugger, resisting expropriation, documents Palestinian
women’s resistance and agency. Moreover, “Zajal”, as a genre of Arabic performance poetry, is
ecologically-oriented. According to al-Ma‘ani dictionary, “Zajal” is originally associated with
carrier pigeons and the sound of thunder caused by rain and clouds, besides the sound of plants
moving with the wind. Hence, Zajal is a perfect medium for representing the resistant voices of
the masses. In his vernacular poem Baheya , Ahmed Fou’ad Negm depicts Egypt as a rural woman
who possesses sustainable energies that defy and defeat all oppressive historical powers. Similarly,
reinforcing the land’s historical centrality, identity, and, ecological agency, the persona in Fou’ad
Haddad’s vernacular poem al-Ard (The Land) grants the Arab land collective voice, harnessing its
ecoenergies. The deliberately recollected language, religion, “dawn”, “water”, “mud”, “root”,
“branches”, and “sunlight” reenergize farmers/fighters, transforming them into a “sweeping tor-
rent”. The mobilizing rhythm and beat, besides the visual and auditory images, map the land,
people, and ongoing history of resistance to colonial powers.
Moreover, anchored in environmental concerns, Mohamed Makhzangi’s outstanding travel lit-
erature and newspaper articles cultivate awareness of the need for ecosystem restoration, taking
the natural world and life of birds, animals, and plants he minutely explores as literary activism.
Makhzangi’s literature can be read as part of the ecofeminist “transnational activism” (see Sunaina
Jain’s Chapter 25), represented by “eco-friendly masculinities” (see Lydia Rose’s Chapter 30). His
extensive, insightful writings on the life and nature of animals are thought-provoking, motivated by
the ontological need for understanding ourselves and the environment (see Kordecki’s Chapter 26).
Remarkably, a whole cultural production of polyphonic storytelling that resists violent mas-
culinities has emerged, anchored in the feminine principle and the Scheherazade-Shahryar de-
stabilized dualisms, as exemplified by the works of Fatima Mernissi, Salwa Bakr, Radwa Ashour,
Alifa Refaat, Sahar Tawfiq, Sahar Khalifeh, Dunya Mikhail, Mansoura Ezz Eldin, and Hanan
al-Shaykh, to mention but a few. Deracinated olive, fig, orange, and palm trees documented in

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Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi literature are countered by decentralized spatial politics and ecofem-
inist economics generated by women’s resilience. Kitchens, gardens, and refugee camps, in liter-
ature as in life, have become ecological spaces of sustainability, breeding hope, despite oppressive
hierarchies, through cooking, embroidery, recycling, besides gardening and farming as the love
of the land (see Elrefaei 2021).
The parallelism between Mother Nature, Mother Earth, and women as creative forces of agency
is a global discourse that acquires a historical dimension. In Chapter 36, Rebekah T­ aylor-Wiseman
refers to myth in Greek and Appalachian literature, amongst other cultures across time and space,
highlighting the evolving discourse that associates the rape of women with that of the earth,
culminating in the twenty-first century’s discourse which reclaims the female self and nature.
In Chapter 26, Kordecki highlights myth and the interrelation between women, animals, and
the Muse as a creative power. In a similar vein, rejecting dualities, in her Arabic poems, Dunya
Mikhail (2014, 29) resorts to myths, birds, and legends, foregrounding the image of the em-
powered female who rebels against the discourse of motherhood. Describing collective female
resilience, fluidity, and regenerative ecoenergies, Mikhail (2014, 37) beautifully likens women to
clouds that freely cross borders, impregnated with rain, an accent, and memories of other places.
Thus, in an age where environmental destruction and drastic climate change synchronize
with threats of cultural erasure, ecofeminist memory, the creative power of art/narrative, and
imagination become in themselves acts of sustainability, as previously exemplified by Radwa
‘Ashour’s autobiography and Samar Yazbek’s disabled protagonist. Though surrounded by “no
trees”, “a burning sun”, “hot wind”, “dust-colored walls” (Yazbek 2021, 153), thunder of
bombs, and mutilated dead bodies, nonetheless, Yazbek’s disabled protagonist draws upon her
ecological imagination by creating a world of “secret planets” as an emancipatory act that de-
taches her from anthropocentric reality and energizes her to recreate through her paintings the
flora and fauna of Syria, “fish” (Yazbek 2021, 171), “a garden”, Eucalyptus trees, and “a huge
forest” (Yazbek 2021, 172).
Women as ecological agents of sustainability are also represented in Tamara al-Refai’s literary
newspaper articles on devastated Syria where women substitute roots and trees:

Today, like my mother, I choose to cling to some rituals. Distant from our roots, we both
choose to plant ourselves where we are… Today, I pick up flowers from a distant life and
plant them in my present one. I think I can arrange the colors the way I like, and weave my
country’s stories the way I choose, utilizing some rituals I inherited from my mother and
grandmother, the rituals of clinging to life.
(al-Refai 2021; my translation)

Reminiscing and imagination in such works anticipate a future in which hegemonic masculinities
are dethroned through real and metaphorical acts of female agency. As Dunya Mikhail (2014, 10)
puts it, woman possesses the magic plant that Gilgamesh has for so long been searching for. Em-
barking on a journey with Tammuz, woman, as light, will roam the whole world to cure and free
all those who smell the fragrance of that magic plant.

Conclusion
Reading Arabic literature from a postcolonial ecofeminist perspective constitutes an ecological
archive that comprises the tumultuous transformations that have enveloped the Arab world, un-
masking its environmental politics. Rooted in power structures, gendered, dualistic hierarchies
are either perpetuated or interrogatively dismantled. As ecological agents, women harness their
ecoenergies, transforming the woman–nature paradigm into an empowering discourse. Hence,

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contemporary literary discourses of endangered, exploited ecosystems, and exilic nomadism run
alongside counter-discourses that resist environmental imperialism, foregrounding sustainability,
despite deracination, and demanding sovereignty and environmental justice.

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 12
TURKISH LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Hatice Övgü Tüzün

Introduction
As an increasingly impactful movement with far-reaching sociopolitical implications, ecofem-
inism brings together the key concerns and arguments of ecocriticism and feminism by high-
lighting and interrogating the intrinsic connections between gender inequality/oppression and
environmental degradation. In the words of Adams and Gruen (2014, 1), ecofeminist theory

exposes and opposes intersecting forces of oppression, showing how problematic it is when
these issues are considered separate from one another… [It] helps us imagine healthier rela-
tionships; stresses the need to attend to context over universal judgements; and argues for the
importance of care as well as justice, emotion as well as rationality, in working to undo the
logic of domination and its material and practical implications.

The undoing of the logic of domination also entails the dismantling of power hierarchies, chal-
lenging dualities and various forms of oppression such as imperialism, racism and militarism. In
this respect, ecofeminism offers better ways to navigate our relationship not only with the envi-
ronment but also with ourselves and others.
Ecofeminism as a broad field entails several subcategories, yet scholars working in this field
agree on the premise that forging better relations with nature and the environment will also bring
about positive change regarding the treatment of women. Although the roots of ecofeminism go
back to the 1970s, ecofeminist ideas were mainly taken up and promoted by Turkish intellectuals
and writers only after the 1980s. An important development during this era was undoubtedly
the rise of right-wing political agendas and the implementation of neoliberal policies that often
bypassed environmentalist concerns. This trend was perhaps more acute in developing countries
such as Turkey where rapid and unregulated urbanization brought about by an influx of an ever
larger number of people migrating from the country to big cities gradually led to environmental
problems that were to escalate in the decades that followed.
Historically speaking, Turkey does not have a strong and deeply rooted ecofeminist move-
ment (Seçkin 2016, 1) and the first theoretical works on ecofeminism available in Turkish were
translations from mainly English language sources (Seçkin 2016, 7). Scholarly work in Turkish
on ecofeminism started to appear in the 1990s, with an increasing number of such works getting
published following the turn of the millennium.1 This chapter does not claim to offer an exhaus-
tive survey of all the names who can be considered within the broad spectrum of ecofeminism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-13137
 Hatice Övgü Tüzün

in Turkish literature, but it rather aims to present a selection of representative works by some of
the leading writers who draw on ecofeminist themes and tropes in their work. Buket Uzuner and
Latife Tekin – two of the most influential contemporary Turkish writers – stand out as pioneering
names in Turkish ecofeminist literature as they have adopted an environmentalist and later an
ecofeminist perspective that has been increasingly foregrounded in their novels. Writers whose
novels contain ecofeminist themes and elements include Ayla Kutlu, Feyza Hepçilingirler, Müge
İplikçi and Gamze Arslan whose novels and stories critically examine a wide range of topics at the
intersection of ecocriticism and feminism.

Turkish Ecofeminist Writers: Buket Uzuner and Latife Tekin

A prolific and bestselling writer of novels, short stories, travelogues and essays that have been
translated into eight languages, Buket Uzuner (1955–) studied biology and environmental science
at university and has shown an abiding interest in environmental issues from the early days of her
career as a writer. Her first novel Two Green Otters, Mothers, Fathers, Lovers and All the Others (1991)
revolved around power plants, increasing environmental pollution and ecological degradation as
well as species extinction. In The Sound of Fishsteps (1993), she explored the feminine character-
istics of trees through her depiction of “The Golden Tree” which bears witness to the changing
world around her. The integral relationship between humans and nature was once again explored
in the Mediterranean Waltz (1998).
Originally intended to be a four-part series (corresponding to the four elements in nature), the
three published novels of The Adventures of The Misfit Defne Kaman are written from a strongly
ecofeminist perspective and seek to raise awareness about a range of ecofeminist issues including
current social and environmental problems and interdependent systems of oppression. Uzuner
remarked that her main inspiration behind writing these novels was “our perennial shamanic
traditions that have infused the daily practices of all cultures living in Anatolia as well as Central
Asian and Siberian mythologies” (Apaydın 2019, 217). In all of the three novels that have been
published so far, the writer foregrounds the nature-centered unity consciousness of shamanism,
which emphasizes the interpenetration and mutual relatedness of all things. According to Batur
and Özdağ (2019, 327), Uzuner

strives to be an eco-shaman who will lead the reader into a maze of spiritual associations, to
take them on a journey to foster a new way of seeing the present, and a new way of envision-
ing an alternative future, to save the Earth.

Drawing on the Shamanic belief that water is the origin of life, the series begins with the novel
titled “Water.” Widely considered to be the first ecofeminist Turkish novel (Palabıyık 2019, 53),
The Adventures of Misfit Defne Kaman: Water (2012) explores ecological problems by placing them
within the wider framework of women’s issues, animal rights and patriarchal oppression. Observ-
ing the close connection between the othering of humans on the basis of race, gender or class, and
the mistreatment of nature, Uzuner urges us to explore new avenues of thinking beyond social
and cultural binaries.
The novel draws heavily on the pre-Islamic Shamanic culture of Turks and offers a power-
ful critique of hegemonic patriarchal forces that oppress women, nature and animals. The book
begins with the sudden disappearance of Defne Kaman,2 a journalist/activist who writes mainly
about environmental issues and violence against women. We are told that Kaman “had devoted
herself to the life of animals, plants, people – in essence to the lives of others – for humanitarian
reasons alone” (Uzuner 2012, 35). Defne’s powerful dedication to raising awareness about envi-
ronmental and women’s issues – often at the risk of putting herself in danger – makes her anxious

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family members see her as a “misfit.” As a courageous investigative journalist, Defne Kaman
pursues a wide range of stories from child brides and women murders to species extinction and
ecological issues. Although Defne is presented as the main spokesperson for ecofeminist ideas,
several other characters – including Defne’s grandmother Umay Bayülgen3 and the secondhand
bookseller Semahat – also uphold the ideals of ecofeminism.
Although the novel takes place in Turkey and is rooted in Turkish culture, many of the issues
and problems it deals with are also of global relevance. In this sense, Uzuner connects her ‘local’
story that is set in her native country and culture with global events and trends, mainly the global
ecological crisis. Early in the novel, Uzuner addresses the reader in her own voice writing that “…
our world is a living hell and that human beings can be their own greatest enemy” (56). There are
also numerous allusions to climate change in the novel: the events of the novel take place during
“the cruel reign of an especially merciless summer” (15), which is frequently referred to as “the
hottest summer summer of the 21st century” (64) throughout the narrative. Auður Aðalsteinsdóttir
(Chapter 20) observes that ecofeminist emphases are more important than ever at this point in world
history since the existential threat posed by global warming forces us to consider the planetary con-
text while working on sustainable solutions. In Chapter 44, Iris Ralph offers deeper insights into
ecofeminist perspectives on climate change through her analysis of three contemporary cli-fi novels.
Water addresses a range of ecofeminist issues including climate change, forms of violence
against nature, animals and women, and draws attention to the anthropocentric and patriarchal
underpinnings that seem to lie at the heart of these problems. The novel frequently evokes the
ancient cultural heritage of Turks and describes their ancestors as people who “respected Mother
Nature’s creatures” (39). The ancient Turkish tradition of shamanism was a belief system that was
rooted in the belief that all living and nonliving things are endowed with a soul and thus are of
equal value. Throughout the narrative, Uzuner repeatedly stresses the point that the conservative
patriarchal culture that has increasingly shaped Turkish culture and politics following the conver-
sion to Islam is not aligned with the main tenets of shamanism. By juxtaposing and highlighting
the differences between the two remarkably different belief systems, the writer also aims to show
how cultural and religious systems strongly influence attitudes toward nature and women.
In the second book of the series titled Earth (2018), Uzuner elaborates on many of the themes
and plotlines that were already presented in the first book and further highlights the strong con-
nections and parallels between shamanism and ecofeminism. This novel is dedicated to the women
farmers of Anatolia “who have passionately protected heirloom, organic seeds in their personal
treasure chests for generations despite legal measures preventing the trade of local seeds” (Uzuner
2018, 1). Uzuner praises these women farmers who try to protect the land, the trees, the water
and the air of Anatolia against the hazardous power plant projects despite serious pressures, adding
that these women must be the great granddaughters of Umay – the Mother Nature Goddess of
ancient Turkish shamans.
The events of the novel take place in the heart of Anatolia, in Çorum, also known as the capital
of the Hittite Empire and revolve around historical artifact smuggling. The central message of the
book is that

Earth is a community of living beings. Every living thing has its own right to life and its own
ethic. Nothing living on this planet can survive independently from other living things. The
essence and sustainability of existence lies in this cycle of life and responsibility. This is called
the ‘Constitution of Life’. When the Constitution is breached, life ends.
(2018, 321)

According to Irene Sanz Alonso (Chapter 16), this interdependence of all life forms is one of the
core ideas of ecofeminism, because it implies acknowledging the agency of all the entities living

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with us on the planet. Alonso also remarks on the impossibility of imagining a more sustainable
future without a careful consideration of this connection and interdependence given the fact that
all forms of life are interconnected. The interdependence between all life forms and the entangled
systems of intra-actions have also been critically examined in numerous works of ecofeminist
science fiction, as Deirdre C. Byrne stipulates in Chapter 45. Drawing on a wide range of novels
written in this genre across the centuries, Byrne asserts that considering different ways of inter-
acting and intra-acting with nonhuman nature has become more important than ever within the
current context of deepening ecological disaster. The urgency of this message is further elucidated
in Chapter 42, where Michelle Deininger offers a broad overview of ecofeminist young adult
fiction. Haunted by a profound sense of impending doom, the novels examined in this chapter
speculate on the catastrophic consequences our planet and its inhabitants might be faced with if
humans do not abandon their anthropocentric outlook and take action toward dismantling deeply
rooted structures of domination/oppression. In a similar vein, Uzuner strongly emphasizes the
critical importance of human agency in the face of looming ecological collapse, yet she also asserts
that we can find creative solutions to seemingly insolvable problems as we begin to relate to and
care about the intelligence of the natural world.
In the most recently published third book of the series Air (2020), Uzuner mainly focuses on
the hardships and injustices that a female journalist who writes on environmental issues, women’s
and animal rights, and energy politics is subjected to in Turkey. The protagonist Defne Kaman,
travels to Kayseri – a city in central Anatolia that used to be known as “the City of Scholars” – to
attend the hearings of a lawsuit against her for her article “Why not Nuclear Energy?”. As was
the case with the previous two books, Uzuner devotes long sections of this novel to informing
the reader about the history of the region, focusing especially on the figure of Gevser Nesibe
Sultan who was a visionary “lady sultan” of the Seljuks in the twelfth century. Nesibe Sultan – in
whose honor Anatolia’s First Medical School was founded – was renowned throughout Anatolia
as a strong, far-sighted and compassionate woman who “was most likely a descendant of the Kam
tradition” (Uzuner 2020, 43). Through the fascinating story of this remarkable figure, Uzuner
draws attention to the contributions of empowered women in Turkish history while also celebrat-
ing the ancient Shamanic tradition, which “always teaches moderation against greed, becoming
producers as well as consumers and most important of all, modesty to remind us that we are not
the masters of Nature” (157).
The Adventures of the Misfit Defne Kaman as a whole is informed by the strong conviction that
“there can be no liberation for [women] and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society
whose fundamental model of relationships continues to be one of domination” and that “[women]
must unite the demands of the women’s movement with those of the ecological movement to
envision a radical reshaping of the basic socioeconomic relations and the underlying values of
this society” (Ruether 1975, 204). Offering highly critical views about contemporary Turkish
society and politics – especially with regard to the ways in which nature, women and animals are
objectified and subjugated – Uzuner not only looks back at the shamanistic past with longing and
nostalgia but also offers its worldview as an antidote to present-day issues and problems.
In this context, the ideas Uzuner promotes throughout The Adventures of the Misfit Defne Ka-
man resonate strongly with the agenda of cultural ecofeminists who “resist patriarchal language,
religion, and culture for the sake of planetary survival” (Carlassare 2000, 95) and “focus more on
affecting social change through changes in culture and consciousness” (Carlassare 2000, 95). The
writer also shows affinity with ecofeminist spiritualists who “emphasize the values of intercon-
nectedness and biological and cultural diversity [and] conceive of the earth as a living organism
and humans as part of the community of life on earth” (Carlassare 2000, 94).
One of the most influential writers of post-1980 Turkish literature, Latife Tekin (1957–) is cel-
ebrated for her masterful use of magical realism in novels that depict the trials and tribulations of

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large-scale societal change from the perspective of the downtrodden. In the words of Meliz Ergin
(2020, 53–54), the writer “combines a political reading of ecological problems with an ecological
reading of social issues, and moves away from the socialist realism of both the political novel and
village literature toward poetic and metaphorical narratives.” Latife Tekin has remained dedicated
to pursuing environmental, class and gender issues from the early days of her career as a novelist.
She has also repeatedly expressed her affinity with groups and people who share a similar sensi-
bility (Balık 2013, 6):

I feel that the world is alive –really alive– and that it breathes. When bombs explode, I feel
bad not only because human beings die but also because the mountains, the rocks, and the
meadows groan and suffer. So I only feel close to eco-anarchists and eco-feminists.

In her first novel, Dear Shameless Death (1983), Tekin wrote about the animist connection we
might cultivate with nature through the central female character Dirmit who communicates with
the wind, the birds and the plants. Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills (1984) deals with envi-
ronmental degradation and tells the story of people who have been forced to leave their villages
for economic reasons, only to find themselves struggling even more in the rotting shantytowns of
Istanbul. An important turning point in Latife Tekin’s life was her decision to move to Gümüşlük
where she founded the “The House of Literature” project in 1998. The effects of this move can be
clearly observed in Tekin’s later works such as There Is No Death in the Forest (2001) and The Garden
of Forgetting (2004) where ecocritical themes and ideas are more rigorously explored.
In Muinar (2006), Latife Tekin offers an even more radical and emotionally charged critique of
oppositional and hierarchical thinking that is often used to justify the subjugation of both women
and nature. The novel, which does not include any male voice, comprises of dialogues between
two female characters – Elime and Muinar – who rail against the oppression of women and the
environment under the yoke of patriarchy. The novel is deeply influenced by ecofeminism, which
holds men responsible for the loss of ecological balance and by ecosocialism, which challenges the
capitalist order that damages nature in the name of economic production and industrialization
(Balık 2013, 13). As Benay Blend asserts in Chapter 19, the association of women with the natu-
ral world has historically led to the exploitation of both. In Muinar, Tekin explores the complex
web of sociocultural dynamics behind this history of exploitation by especially scrutinizing ways
in which misogyny, hegemonic masculinity and the destruction of nature have been intimately
connected throughout the centuries. In Chapter 30, Lydia Rose also points out the shared history
of hegemonic masculinity with the domination of women and the domination of nature. As Rose
remarks, ecofeminism does not perceive oppressive structures such as hegemonic masculinity as
isolated entities, but it rather seeks to dismantle them by considering the whole of s­ocial-ecological
systems. Latife Tekin’s ecofeminist activism as manifest in this novel is shaped by this perspective
that situates interlocking structures of oppression within a wider systemic framework and stresses
the importance of cultivating a holistic perspective.
Strongly challenging the false assumption that we are separate from nature, Muinar also ex-
plores how the living earth can only be known through participatory processes. Muinar repeat-
edly mentions the perils of anthropocentric thinking which places the human agent in the center
and considers other beings with whom we share this planet to be inferior. The book contains
numerous references to historical events that illustrate how this model of hierarchical classification
has historically been used by men to justify their hegemonic rule over nature. In stark contrast,
Muinar considers everything – the stars, the rocks, the waters – to be alive and feels herself to be
an intrinsic part of nature. The tortured heroine of Rudi Šeligo’s play The Witch of Upper Davča
(1978), described as a quintessential woman filled with mystical energy and pagan spirituality by
Katja Plemenitas in her discussion of Slovene literature and ecofeminism (Chapter 13) bears a

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strong resemblance to Muinar whose radical nonconformism is imbued with a distinctly mystical
and spiritual vibe. Indeed, the strong appeal of a complex female character who can be extraordi-
narily assertive in the face of injustice without losing her feminine sensibility adds a unique flavor
to the ecofeminist ideals presented in the narrative. Considering the novel as a classic example of
ecofeminist literature and criticism, Öçal (2011, 128) writes:

Muinar portrays how the patriarchal capitalist system has a hegemonic hold over women and
nature, how nature is exploited and looted in the hands of the free market and how human-
ity is rapidly moving towards its own demise. The novel treats ecological problems with
feminine sensibility and criticizes man’s perception of the world and nature as his realm of
domination.

In Manves City (2019), Latife Tekin once again depicts the harsh conditions in the lives of people who
are particularly vulnerable to predatory modernity and capitalism through the h ­ eart-wrenching
story of the fictional Erice, a small rural village in Anatolia. As Bilal Kas (2019, 67) points out,
Manves City is not only an environmentalist novel that draws attention to the frightening scale of
environmental degradation, but it also entails a strong critique of the objectification of women,
the cruelty of hegemonic patriarchal forces that rule over the land and people as well as the intol-
erable conditions working-class people are subjected to. Offering a panorama of modern-day Tur-
key with representatives from various segments of Turkish society, the novel upholds a staunchly
feminist and socialist attitude that advocates the preservation of ecological balance.
As a socialist ecofeminist, Latife Tekin has repeatedly turned her scrutinizing gaze towards
the conjoined forces of patriarchy and capitalism which wreak havoc in human lives and the en-
vironment alike. In the words of Carlassare (2000, 90), ecofeminists “call for social changes that
foster egalitarian social relations and believe that such changes are a prerequisite for an ecologically
healthy society.” Latife Tekin’s ecofeminism is explicitly anti-capitalist and materialist in orienta-
tion and links “the capitalist mode of production with the environmental crises of the late twen-
tieth century as well as with the oppression of women” (Carlassare 2000, 90). However, Tekin
also acknowledges that some cultural practices, beliefs and traditions might actually contribute
to the project of building a more egalitarian and environmentalist society. Through references to
­Turkish folklore, mythology and shamanism, Tekin frequently evokes and celebrates what Star-
hawk (1990, 74) calls “an earth-based spirituality, which recognizes that the Earth is alive, that we
are interconnected, as well as a community.”

Ecofeminism in Turkish Literature

Ayla Kutlu’s Woman’s Epic (1994) is a revisionary rewriting of the famous epic Gilgamesh from
the perspective of a harlot priestess named Liyotani in Ishtar’s temple. This counter-hegemonic
move of substituting the renowned king with a “disreputable” woman allows Kutlu to explore
the female perspective that has been historically silenced and suppressed (Uzundemir 2005, 120).
Throughout the narrative, the illustrious Gilgamesh is depicted as a tyrannical man whose inher-
ent brutality is very much apparent in the way he treats nature and women. Women are doomed
to suffer in a society where Gilgamesh’s reckless attitude is also mirrored by the majority of men.
Kutlu’s main objective in this book is to unearth woman’s history and promote a ­woman-centered
perspective while also highlighting the connections between misogyny and anti-ecological atti-
tudes. Similar to cultural feminists, Kutlu perceives “ecological destruction as stemming from the
dominance of characteristics associated with men over those associated with women” and cele-
brates “qualities, such as intuition, care, nurture, emotions, and the body, for example, that have
been associated culturally and historically with women” (Carlassare 2000, 94).

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Another contemporary Turkish writer who draws on mythological sources – especially the
matriarchal nature myths of Anatolia – is Feyza Hepçilinger (1948–) who tells the story of three
modern-day Turkish women who are in love with the same men in Godwoman (2002). The novel
as a whole is rooted in the premise that every woman is somehow also a goddess not simply be-
cause she has the power to give life but also because she is nurturing and creative in many areas
of life. These women, who try to cope with the vicissitudes of life without losing their feminine
sensibility, are strongly identified with nature – particularly with the earth element – and the cult
of the earth goddess. Hepçilingirler writes (2012, 26): “Humans lost love because they are discon-
nected from the earth. Love is the natural connection between us and the earth; we get it from
the soil and multiply it amongst us.”
Written by Müge İplikçi (1966–) who has explored women’s issues in her stories as well as
novels, Cemre (2008) contains several ecofeminist ideas and elements. Spanning four decades from
the 1960s until the 2000s, the plot revolves around upheavals in the lives of female characters
who are severely impacted by the transformations taking place in Turkish society during this
turbulent period. These sad, disillusioned and world-weary women are also closely identified
with an environmentalist consciousness and end their lives in water in order to flee from male
violence and oppression (Balık and Tekben 2014, 351). In Chapter 9, Abhik Gupta examines
Bengali novels, stories and poems that focus on the suffering of women who are suffocating under
a ­m ale-dominant system that suppresses their desires and aspirations. Like the female characters
in Cemre, these hapless women often find solace in nature and their struggles are often reflected
in the exploitation and degradation of the environment. Likewise, in Chapter 22, Kuznetski and
Tüür show how representative works from Estonian literature depict women’s intimate connec-
tion with the forces of nature as well as their material-discursive enmeshment with environmen-
tal, corporeal, historical, political and personal processes.
Kanayak (2019), the young Turkish writer Gamze Arslan’s (1986–) second published book of
stories, is the most recent example of ecofeminist literature in Turkish. Pervaded by a distinctly
dark and serious tone, the 13 stories in this collection depict many challenges women in modern
Turkish society are faced with. Covering a wide range of issues from mother–daughter relations
and romantic passion to existential discomfort and violence against women, these stories also give
voice to the nonhuman agency as the earth, the birds and the flowers also speak, and express their
frustration in a rapidly deteriorating environment. Endowed with purpose, meaning and intel-
ligence, nature is depicted as a living, organic entity constantly interacting with human bodies.
On a more hopeful note, these stories also suggest that the modern individual who is estranged
from herself and disconnected from the earth can recover a sense of wholeness and unity by
returning to nature. This assumption is supported by the writer’s conviction that humans can
only find peace when they recover their inner sense of connection with something larger than
themselves. As Yüksek (2020, 95) remarks, Kanayak is an ecofeminist work as the stories in this
collection uphold a pluralist perspective that firmly rejects binaries such as culture/nature, man/
woman and highlight the creative potential inherent in a more multifaceted and deeper engage-
ment with the world around us. The deconstruction of dualities between humans, animals and
other subjectivities can also be observed in the poetry of the younger generation of Slovene female
poets, as Katja Plemenitaš stipulates in Chapter 13.

Conclusion
Literary works discussed in this chapter strongly suggest that the more we are attuned to the cy-
cles, rhythms and forms of the natural world, the more we will be aligned with our innermost
being and find peace, which would then be reflected in the world around us. Drawing on the
premise that our actions in the outer world are largely defined by our inner states and convictions,

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the writers of these ecofeminist works all emphasize the necessity of changing our collective
attitude to the natural world and call for a restoration of empathy with all living creatures. The
writers and intellectuals discussed by Nicolás Campisi in Chapter 17 uphold a similar perspective
in that they conceive their work as a generative practice and search for new points of view and
affective bonds that would expand our understanding so that we may perceive bodies as part of
wider entanglements of human and nonhuman forces.
In the words of Dechar and Fox (2020, 13)

we turn to the ancient myths, symbols, tools, and practices of alchemy to recover lost parts of
ourselves. We seek to reawaken dormant ways of seeing, knowing, and imagining that will
help us change the stories we tell. In this way, we hope not only to help ourselves and others
but also to heal our world and create a future we want to be a part of.

Turkish ecofeminist writers, who frequently evoke ancient myths, traditions and symbols in their
literary works, seek to inspire the onset of a similar alchemical process in the reader. Taking our
cue from the tradition of alchemy, which emphasizes synthesis and integration, we could perhaps
read these works of literature that highlight the necessity of forging closer connections with na-
ture as roadmaps that might guide us towards the most potent expression of our true nature. In
this sense, literary works might effectively become a force of negative entropy by helping people
cultivate an integral awareness that recognizes the intersections and interweaving of all things.
Representative texts from Native American and First Nations Literature, examined by Benay
Blend in Chapter 19, also foreground this way of seeing the animate/inanimate world as close
relations by highlighting the interdependence and connectedness of all living things. Integrality
demands that we abandon the dualistic, linear logic that unfortunately dominates much of mod-
ern culture and politics. Alternatively, we can never truly acknowledge our moral responsibility
toward nature and one another without first relinquishing dualistic thinking and instrumental
rationality.
Clarissa Pinkola-Estes (1992, 2) remarks that when human beings relate to the world in ­self-centered,
parasitical and exploitative ways they create ongoing cycles of suffering. In her words,

Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt.
For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands […] It’s not by
accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own
inner wild natures fades.

As Turkish ecofeminist writers argue convincingly, environmental issues and issues of social justice
converge and it is thus impossible to restore ecological harmony and equilibrium without also ad-
dressing relationships of domination and subordination. In the words of Ufuk Özdağ (2002, 44):

the growing environmental crisis is, ultimately, a crisis of Western thought—of perceiving
man as privileged, and of perceiving nature in the service of man. This image of nature as
commodity, constructed by various philosophical, religious, and scientific attitudes over the
centuries, is embedded in us so deeply that we are rarely aware of its falsity.

The literary works I have examined in this chapter often suggest that men ‘act upon’ nature
whereas women – being relational and intuitive by nature – are a part of it. Readers cannot help
but be moved by the passionate pleas and soulfulness of these women who seem to embody a
deeper sense of inner knowing and grounded presence while trying to cope with various forms
of adversity. In his discussion of sentimental literature and ecofeminism (Chapter 37), Richard

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 Turkish Literature and Ecofeminism

Magee proposes that appeals to emotions are powerful rhetorical tools that can be effectively
employed in the service of raising ecological awareness and promoting social change. Although
it would be far fetched to label their work as sentimental, ecofeminist writers included in this
chapter also appeal to the emotional affiliations of readers by occasionally utilizing sentimental
language.
Turkish ecofeminist novels reveal how power relations are reflected in cultural practices and
products that are themselves complex/dynamic forms that both impact and are shaped by the world
they inhabit. Drawing on the key principles of cultural studies, Nicole Anae (Chapter 27) sug-
gests that ecofeminist literature is a critical creative practice that is influenced by s­ ocio-historical
backdrops and conditions as much as it is a way of reading. Anae also refers to the dual function
of ecofeminist literature, which often presents a radical line of political action, as both the object
of study and the location of political criticism. Novels discussed in this chapter, which were the
object of my intellectual scrutiny, also perform a practical function since they all carry a powerful
call to action. Drawing on the sociocultural, political and economic dynamics of Turkey, these
works emphasize how the destructive process in the environment is exacerbated when the culture
endorses destructive attitudes toward women, minorities, workers and nonhuman animals. In do-
ing that, they not only encourage us to acknowledge our responsibilities for the nonhuman world
but also inspire us to take an active stand against the interior and cultural forces that weaken and
subjugate women.

Notes
1 Prof. Serpil Oppermann and Prof. Ufuk Özdağ, known for their pioneering and visionary academic
works on ecocriticism and ecofeminism, are leading scholars in the field of environmental humanities in
Turkey. For a detailed survey of theoretical works on ecocriticism, ecofeminism as well as ecofeminist
novels published in Turkish, see Palabıyık 2019.
2 The name of the protagonist immediately connects her with nature and shamanism. The Turkish word
“Defne” means daphne and “Kaman” is the Turkish word for shaman.
3 In the myths of Central Asia, Umay is the symbol of life, protector of women and the hearth.

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 13
SLOVENE LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Katja Plemenitaš

Introduction
In Slovene literary criticism, readings through an ecofeminist lens are mainly subsumed in the
general conceptual framework of ecocriticism. Although many studies examine the representa-
tions and role of nature in Slovene literary works, explicit mentions of ecofeminism in literature
studies are few and far between. Even ecocriticism remains a diverse field of individual studies
and has yet to be developed into an established theory with a unified conceptual framework. The
first comprehensive work in Slovene literary theory dedicated to ecocriticism was published in a
monograph by Jožica Čeh Steger in 2015. Even before Čeh Steger’s monograph, there were several
separate examinations of Slovene literature employing an ecocritical approach to the study of in-
dividual works by Slovene authors (e.g., Golež Kaučič 2011; Kernev Štrajn 2007). As ecofeminism
is steadily gaining ground in Slovene literary criticism, the studies using ecocritical approaches
also offer new opportunities for ecofeminist readings and reinterpretations of literary works in
the Slovene language from the beginnings of Slovene literature to contemporary literary trends.
The cross-fertilization of perspectives gained from ecocriticism and feminist literary criticism
can be seen as advantageous. The openness of both disciplines to expand their views has provided
the possibility for the formation of a hybrid discipline called ecofeminist literary criticism (Vakoch
2012). The ecofeminist analysis of conceptual connections between the manipulation of women
and the nonhuman world can provide a more profound recognition of the complexities of the
representations of the environment in literature and their dependence on the cultural zeitgeist,
especially when it comes to dualities of men vs. women and nature vs. humans, as well as parallels
between women and nature. Mickey (2017, ix–xxi) notes that ecofeminism has evolved so that

(A)s ecofeminist understandings of women and nature have changed, new designations
have emerged for studying complex connections between gender, body, and environment.
Ecofeminism is thus closely connected with areas of study such as feminist ecocriticism, queer
ecology, and new feminist materialism.

This chapter attempts to consider the changing notion of ecofeminism by weaving together sev-
eral strands of Slovene literature from different periods and styles through the thematization of
nature concerning gender and species hierarchies. However, it has to be noted that this is not
an attempt to provide an exhaustive discussion of ecofeminist elements in Slovene literature but
rather a glance into the potential for ecofeminist interpretations of works from different periods
and genres.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-14147
 Katja Plemenitaš

Slovene Literary Criticism and Ecofeminism

Although not part of a coherent system, ecocritical approaches to Slovene literature have produced
several studies of Slovene literature within the framework of feminism, gender studies, postcolo-
nial studies, poststructuralism, natural sciences, economics, theology, and others. These studies
are connected by focusing on the aesthetics of nature and perspectives of anthropocentrism, bio-
centrism, and ecocentrism. They examine literary texts from crucial periods and styles of Slovene
literary history: from nineteenth-century romanticism and realism to early twentieth-century
modernism and social realism, from post–World War II writing to early twenty-first-century
poetry. Under the general term of ecocriticism or cultural ecology, these studies often reveal an
ecofeminist slant in their analysis and interpretation. Basak Ag ĭ n notes in Chapter 32 that eco-
critical readings that foreground the othering of women and animals particularly resonate with
contemporary ecofeminisms.
Jožica Čeh Steger was one of the first Slovene scholars who explicitly mentioned ecofeminism
as a part of ecocriticism. Her article on short stories by Prežihov Voranc, a social realist from the
first half of the twentieth century, was among the first studies of Slovene literature using an eco-
critical approach (Čeh Steger 2010). Čeh Steger’s analysis revealed ecofeminist elements in Voranc’s
short stories about the struggle of small farmers at the mercy of natural forces. These stories depict
a world in which children born out of wedlock are given animal names and likened to self-sown
seeds. At the same time, their long-suffering mothers develop superhuman strength in fighting for
their children’s everyday survival. Čeh Steger’s later work also focuses on the theoretical tenets of
ecocriticism, themes, and genres of ecocriticism, and the ecological functions of literature (2012,
2015). Her ecocritical theory is mainly rooted in the approaches developed within the American
academic tradition (e.g., Glotfelty and Fromm, 1996).
In her monograph, Čeh Steger (2015, 83–84) devotes a short chapter to ecofeminism, con-
trasting spiritual ecofeminism with social ecofeminism to express her criticism of the essentialist
nature of spiritual ecofeminism. Vičar observes

that the criticism of essentialist spirituality within ecofeminism is significant as it confirms

that poststructuralist and other third wave feminisms wrongly presented all ecofeminism as
an essentialist equation between women and nature, /…/, thereby deflecting attention from
connections between environmental degradation and the oppression of women.
(Vičar 2015, 85)

In Chapter 29, Asmae Ourkiya observes that based on the similarities of attributions ranging
from specific anatomy, that is, having a womb or a vagina, submissiveness, fertility, femininity,
reproduction, and the lack of autonomy, ecofeminists initially provided a solid argument for why
women and nature are both victims to the patriarchal capitalist exploitative system that dominates
nonmale nonwhite nonheterosexual beings. At the same time, Asmae Ourkiya (Chapter 29) notes
that this “umbrella” of attributions led to essentialized notions of the female gender, associating
women with given a set of characteristics while dismissing other women who do not fall under
the mainstream definition of a woman: transgender women, nonbinary people assigned female at
birth, lesbians and nonheterosexual women, as well as women who have no desire to reproduce.
Čeh Steger observes the social nature of connections between women and nature through the
system of gendered connotations of nature, metaphors used for women and nature, hierarchic du-
alisms, and the notions of self (2015, 84–85). She applies this ecofeminist framework in analyzing
seminatural spaces inhabited by heroines of Slovene pastoral literature from the second half of
the nineteenth century. Another critical study that focuses on ecofeminist elements in literature
is Marjetka Golež Kaučič’s (2011) examination of folklore and animal imagery in the poetry of

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Svetlana Makarovič, a modernist poet from the second half of the twentieth century. Golež Kaučič
highlights the ecological sensitivity of Makarovič’s poems in which animals have an equal status to
humans and nature is depicted as a place of cruelty because it is a place where hunters kill animal
children. In Chapter 26, Lesley Kordecki explains why animals are an essential element of eco-
critical and ecofeminist thought. They constitute the segments of nature with which we humans
identify most profoundly and make us question our human identity and superiority.
In a similar vein, the feminist literary scholar Jelka Kernev Štrajn (2007) interrogates literary
thematizations of “unhuman subjectivity” concerning the hierarchic duality of humans vs. non-
human nature. Other works employing an ecocritical lens to the readings of Slovene literature
include Janez Vre čko’s (1991) interpretation of the prose poems by Sre čko Kosovel, an expres-
sionist and constructivist poet from the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to the
ecological readings of sexism and classism, ecocritical approaches also examine connections of
ecology to postcolonialism ( Jurša 2013) and speciesism (Vičar 2020). These studies interrogate
the presumptions of Western-centrism and anthropocentrism. Branislava Vičar, in particular,
presents an original and bold critique of anthropocentrism through an examination of the sub-
jectivity of animals and the significance of animal death. She draws parallels between the mis-
treatment of animals and the oppression of women and the dispossessed workers. She combines
her scholarly work with activism in Slovenia’s movement for animal rights and veganism. She
is the editor of the monograph entitled Conceptualizations of Animal Death: Anthropocentrism and
(I’m)possible Subjectivities (2020). Although, as Lesley Kordecki notes in Chapter 26, the compari-
son of the female human to animals can be seen by many as a derogation of the female, assuming
an ethical position toward animals and their individuality shows positive connections between
female humans and animals. This moral position toward animals permeates the work of Jelka
Kernev Štrajn and Branislava Vičar, who treat animalism and feminism in the same conceptual
framework.
Despite this highly productive scholarly output under the umbrella of ecocriticism, Slovene
theory has yet to produce a comprehensive work dedicated solely to the topic of ecofeminism.
Here it lags behind the ecofeminist theory developed in neighboring Croatia, which has already
published a monograph on ecofeminism entitled Ecofeminism: Between Green Studies and Women’s
Studies (2020) and numerous other ecofeminist studies. In Slovenia, however, there is a growing
body of literature on ecofeminism in research projects, conferences, and graduation theses (e.g.,
Berlič Ferlinc 2016; Podlipnik 2016). These works present a fertile breeding ground for growing
even more systematic and comprehensive ecofeminist studies of Slovene literature.

The Development of Slovene Literature from an Ecofeminist Perspective

Viewed through an ecofeminist lens, the history of Slovene literature echoes the complexities of
the changing role of women in society as well as transformations in social attitude to the environ-
ment. An important aspect is the unique role of both literature and nature in forming Slovene na-
tional identity and struggle for independence. This role of literature is typical of smaller European
countries in geopolitical and historical crosswinds. As Julia Kuznetski and Kadri Tüür explain in
Chapter 22, literature in Estonia has a similar role in preserving the core national identity. This
role gives Estonian literature a certain duality: on the one hand, it is rooted in ancient traditions
of folklore and closeness to nature; on the other hand, it is also influenced by the western cultural
canon. This duality is also inherent in Slovene literature. Slovenia only became an independent
state in 1991, and literature was an essential part of its long struggle for independence and democ-
racy. The significance of literature was raised into Slovene consciousness already in the nineteenth
century. The Slovenes were a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and did not possess sovereign
state institutions. According to Slovene literary historians,

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this lack was compensated for by literature, which beside its aesthetic function equally ful-
filled its function of preserving or constituting the nation. These two functions were involved
in a mutual interaction, so that the nation-constituting function influenced the forming of
typical literary constants (e.g. lyricism, the passive, yearning heroes of novels, etc.) of Slovene
literature, which were considered to hold true for its entire development.
(Sicris 2020)

Throughout history, Slovene women mainly resided on the margins of public life, restricted
to private or semiprivate spaces. In the romanticism of the nineteenth century, they were seen
through the male gaze as beautiful objects of affection and a source of heartbreak and suffering. As
Kaitlin Mondello points out in Chapter 39, Romanticism retained the tendency to objectify both
women and feminized nature as muses of male writing.
The social visibility of women increased with their participation in the national awakening
movement in the second half of the nineteenth century. Even here, women were often seen
through the prism of their traditional role as a housewife, good mother, and wife. In the poem
Toast (1848), the seventh stanza of which now constitutes the lyrics of the Slovene national hymn,
the Slovene national poet France Prešeren dedicated one stanza to young Slovene women, prais-
ing their beauty and (in the original Slovene version) describing them as beautiful, noble dainty
flowers. In Prešeren’s vision the charming Slovene maidens, the graceful beautiful flowers, are not
only beautiful but also powerful. Their power lies in their ability to bear sons who will be the fear
of the Slovene people’s enemies everywhere.
The softening of traditional patriarchy began in the second half of the nineteenth century
through international liberal influences on the emerging urban intellectual elites. These develop-
ments also affected the rural patriarchy, although both the city and the countryside shared a tradi-
tional value system originating in the countryside (Šafarič 2016). Throughout most of its history,
Slovenia was a country of peasants and laborers who lived in close contact with nature, depending
on their cattle and crops for survival. Slovene intellectuals were also influenced by Rousseau’s ideas
about the harmful influence of wealth inequality and urban civilization, which found resonance in
realism writers such as Josip Stritar (1954), who was committed to social humanism and simple life
connected to animals and nature. In this period, nature still represented romantic ideals of purity
and innocence, but through the lens of fragility, decay, and mortality in the endless cycle of life
and death. These two views of nature are mirrored in the male gaze from the story by Ivan Tavčar
called Blossoms in Autumn (1917), reflecting the problematic link between women and nature in the
canon of male Romantic writers, as pointed out by Kaitlin Mondello in Chapter 39. The two main
characters of Tavčar’s story become involved in a May–December romance: an older lawyer from
the city finds refuge in the simple pleasures and tranquility of the mountainous countryside, where
he falls in love with Meta, a very young peasant girl. After rediscovering his sensuality and zest for
life through his love of Meta, he proposes to her. But his proposal causes so much excitement in her
that she dies from heart failure. The male gaze of the story presents the feminine as pure, sensual,
fragile, and wrought with mortality, a kind of proto manic pixie dream girl with a tragic ending.
The view of the feminine and nature in that period of Slovene literature was, of course, pre-
dominantly male. Still, there also existed literature by female writers providing a direct glimpse
into the intimate world of girls and women. While Kaitlin Mondello observes in Chapter 39
that the first wave of feminist Romantic scholarship was mainly focused on the problematic link
between women and nature in the canon of male Romantic writers, it has more recently brought
attention to ignored female voices. In a similar development, Slovene literary scholarship has
recently brought some relatively unknown Slovene female writers from that period out of obscu-
rity. A case in point is the author Paulina Pajk, a writer of sentimental stories from the nineteenth
century.

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Paulina Pajk wrote pastorale and sentimental prose about girls and young women of the pro-
vincial bourgeoisie (Čeh Steger 2015, 137–151). In his definition of sentimental literature in Chap-
ter 37, Richard Magee observes that the defining features of works of sentimental literature are
that they focus on the lives of girls and women and devote particular attention to the details of
their everyday existence. The primary complications in the story are related to family and per-
sonal relationships. Paulina Pajk’s sentimental prose similarly focuses on girls’ and young women’s
everyday lives and aspirations. In addition to home and hearth, she also explores the home’s private
natural spaces, such as parks and orchards. Her novel Arabela (1885), for example, provides an in-
sight into the intimate emotional lives of cultured young women of that time. These women were
restricted by social rules and constrained to private spaces, residing only on the margins of public
life. An essential way of opening up these heroines’ lives was provided by the natural places outside
their homes, such as gardens, orchards, clearings, and groves. These semiprivate spaces gave young
women certain freedom of movement and communication, extending their motion compared to
their impenetrable bedrooms. At the same time, these spaces were curated enclosures that marked
boundaries not to be crossed, including the limitations guarding them against the metaphorical
wilderness of public spaces. Due to their dual nature, Čeh Steger (2015, 137) calls the seminatural
expanses of gardens, orchards, forest clearings, etc., heterotopias – substitute worlds representing
freedom and illusion of space.
In her stories, Paulina Pajk thus provides a rare insight into women’s physical and mental spaces
of that time from the female perspective. In the romanticism of the nineteenth century and the
transition between romanticism and realism, women and nature were often associated through
flower metaphors to emphasize their beauty and grace (e.g., Prešeren) and their fragility and
youthful transience bloom. Pajk, for example, follows the tradition of comparing women to flow-
ers, but rather than using flowers as metaphors for feminine beauty or grace, she focuses on the
fragility of a girl’s emotions and the transient nature of a girl’s youth (Čeh Steger 2015, 149–150).
The beginning of the twentieth century saw the emergence of early Slovene modernism,
which gave rise to the great Slovene writer Ivan Cankar. Cankar used symbolism and elevated
prose to criticize social injustices and show the suffering of the poor. His writing often focused
on female characters, including his self-sacrificing mother. In some of his work, he uses animal
symbolism, in particular animal death, to talk about human nature. His novel The Ward of our
Lady of Mercy (1904) is set in a hospital ward, all of whose patients are girls between the ages of 10
and 16. The disabled and diseased girls still have yearnings even though they have mostly accepted
their condition: Death was in all their words, in all their gestures, and death was with them in the room.
They all knew it (1976, transl. by Henry Leeming). Although a place of death, the ward is a place
of protection for the girls, most of whom have been abused in some way in the outside world.
The novel received negative reviews because of the detailed depictions of the girls’ suffering and
abuse. Some critics accused it of romanticizing or eroticizing the girls’ disabled bodies (Zupan
Sosič 2020). Superficially there is a connection to the eroticization of the consumptive beauty
of women during the Victorian period, that is, the idealized appearance of Victorian women as
frail, almost childlike, with the need for caretakers and supervision, in a period when “a thin,
fragile birdlike woman was the ideal” (Trista 2018). Girls in the hospital ward could be seen as
the reflection of a male gaze that medicalized its attitude to the female body, seeing it, as Nicole
C. Dittmer explains in Chapter 40, as a force of contradictions and instability. Nicole C. Dittmer
notes that because nature was historically perceived as nurturing and destructive, women were
cast into passive virgins or aggressive witches. According to Nicole C. Dittmer (Chapter 40), such
attitudes to femininity were prevalent in both Victorian fiction and institutional (social, medical,
and scientific) literature of the period.
However, the medicalized gaze oriented at the girls’ broken bodies serves a different purpose
in Cankar’s story. Cankar’s notion of disability is not a medical model but a social one. As Nicole

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A. Jacobs explains in Chapter 28, the social model of disability is not based on the notion of an
individual’s failure or inability but rather on society’s inability to offer different forms of equity
to people with disabilities. In Cankar’s prose, the girls’ bodies, ravaged by disease and marked by
abuse, become symbols of society’s treatment of the meek and humble. Cankar is primarily inter-
ested in the soulful transcendence of the body, using birds as a symbol of both the fragility of the
girls’ bodies and their yearning souls. The first bird is a canary brought to the ward to lighten the
girls’ mood. The bright yellow bird feels at ease in the hospital ward but dies after being startled by
the uncouth father of one of the girls. The second bird is a grey ruffled sparrow that cannot adapt
to the confinement of the ward and dies after trying to escape. While the main focus of Cankar’s
animal symbolism is human behavior, the suffering of animals provoked by human behavior is
given significance in itself, described with empathy and detail.
The literary period of social realism that followed early modernism threw light on classism
and social injustices befalling the small, dispossessed people. Ecofeminist themes in social realist
writing resided mainly in interweaving the struggles and hardships befalling women, animals,
and plants. For example, in the writing of Prežihov Voranc, nature is viewed as an unforgiving
antagonistic force in the lives of the dispossessed, and his descriptions of the soil sometimes evoke
the struggling of birthing female bodies (Čeh Steger 2015, 265). Unmarried mothers and their
offspring are likened to plants trying to take root and survive in uncultivated soil. Voranc’s short
story The Self-Sown (1937) narrates a forbidden love between a young laborer and the son of a
wealthy farmer. They were not allowed to marry but had an extramarital relationship, resulting in
nine children. The story depicts the tortured heroine as a fierce force of nature – at first timid and
vulnerable, and at last wild, strong, and fearless, like a hard-die plant springing from arid soil to
sow wild seeds. Comparing her offspring to weeds sprung from self-sown seeds, she tries to instill
a sense of justice in them. She pictures their lives as an integral part of uncontrollable nature: the
outcast children, the dispossessed, are an essential part of nature and, consequently, its truthful
owners.
Women’s intimate lives, especially their sacrifice and oppression through patriarchy and capi-
talism, were also the central themes in the prose of Zof ka Kveder, one of the few Slovene female
authors from the early twentieth century who gained official recognition from traditional literary
criticism. In her work, such as the collection of short stories The Mystery of a Woman (1900) and
the novel Her Life (1914), she provided insight into the suffering of women constrained by their
work and care for the family. Golež Kaučič (2020, 116) observes, however, that Kveder’s attitude
to domestic animals was characteristic of her time: Kveder describes animals in her family with
little empathy as inferior beings, mere material possessions. However, in her work The Mystery
of a Woman, she puts the suffering of animals in a new perspective – through the gaze of female
characters who become aware of similarities between women and cattle. Similar to the heroine of
The Butcher’s Wife mentioned by Peter I-min Huang in Chapter 3, Kveder’s heroines make a crit-
ical connection between the human and nonhuman subjugated animals. In one of the vignettes,
an old woman factory worker travels to a hospital in a streetcar drawn by a horse. Suddenly the
horse collapses due to exhaustion, and the old woman steps out of the car only to see the horse
being flogged in the last moments of its life, unable to get up. She suddenly has a realization: “(H)
er toothless mouth murmured bluntly: ‘Like this horse….like this horse…’” (Kveder 1995, 35). By
connecting the old woman’s suffering to the animal’s suffering, Zof ka Kveder replaces her posi-
tion of speciesism with a newfound recognition of animal subjectivity. In the end, the only allies
remaining in the lives of Prežihov Voranc’s and Zof ka Kveder’s heroines are the lowest beings,
animals, and plants. Lydia Rose notes in Chapter 30 that hegemonic masculinity is based on com-
plicity achieved through ideological culture and societies’ institutions, such as family, education,
prison, industry, and medical systems. The men at the top of the hierarchies are supported by
nonalpha males and women in achieving the normalization of hegemonic masculinity.

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Ecofeminist Perspectives in the Second Half of the Twentieth

Century and the Early Twenty-First Century
Postwar Slovene literature went through a period of socialist realism, which was followed in the
1960s by the rise of new romanticism and intimate poetry. The 1970s saw modernism’s emer-
gence, followed by postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s.
During socialism, women’s emancipation and sex equality were proclaimed as official goals
of society. However, there was a significant discrepancy between proclamations and reality. The
emerging feminist movement of that time began to draw attention to the contrast between the
socialist ideals and the reality of women’s everyday lives ( Jogan 2001). This was also the time of
increasing environmental concerns and fear of the atomic war, which found their expression in
Slovene poetry of the 1960s. The poem A Wanderer in the Atom Age by Matej Bor, published in
1954, expresses the alienation of humans from the natural world. Bor, who was also one of the
early environmentalists, is considered to be a precursor of ecological movements in Slovenia.
Rudi Šeligo, a modernist playwright and novelist of the second half of the twentieth century,
tapped into this feeling of alienation and interpreted it through the voice of suppressed femininity.
In Šeligo’s play The Witch of Upper Davča (1978), the tortured heroine is objectified and repressed
by the male world of consumerism and industrialization. The play’s heroine, a quintessential
woman, is shown as a nonconformist, irrational being filled with mystical energy and pagan spir-
ituality. In her struggle, she embodies emotionality and intuition. Mal-adjusted and pulled apart
by different forces, she is at the center of a confrontation between two unreconcilable worlds: the
material world of Slovene spiritual numbness and ruthless consumerism and the magical world of
id, sexual power, individualism, and intimacy with nature (Kolar 2016). Although sympathetic
to women’s plight, Šeligo’s work presents a typical male gaze based on essentialist assumptions of
female uncontrollable and mysterious nature.
In the 1970s, another poetic position critical of attitude to women emerged in the modernist po-
etry of Svetlana Makarovič. Svetlana Makarovič, also noted for her dramas, chansons, and children’s
literature devoted her poetry to marginalized women, hunted animals, and even unloved plants. In
Chapter 49, Andrew David King points out that poetry is a genre that is particularly suitable for the
contemporary discourse of ecofeminism and resistance as it incorporates techniques of other genres
and is not limited by realism. Makarovič was one of the first Slovene artists publicly active in animal
activism, proclaiming her deep love and appreciation of animals. Her poetry combines animal and
plant imagery in folklore-inspired incantations. The poetic world she conjures is a kind of antipas-
torale (e.g., Wolf Berries 1972, The Woodworm Woman 1974). The women herbalists inhabiting this
world are both healers and poisoners who plot revenge for being shunned as outcasts. They embrace
what Asmae Ourkiya in Chapter 29 refers to as the wilderness of nature that is considered irrational
and in need of control and use it to make themselves feared and dangerous. Like witches, they are
hunted by a society that is jealous and suspicious of their knowledge of nature. Their affinity is to
animals similarly feared and marginalized by human society, especially snakes. The poem The Wood-
warm Woman is about the loneliness that befalls these women, and ultimately every human being,
visualized through the metaphors of the snake field and wormwood (1974, 10–11).
In Makarovič’s poetry, women inhabit a bleak world as victims of persecutions. Their victim-
ization, however, is also the source of their strength, turning them into cruel avengers and cold-
blooded poisoners. They are quintessentially feminine in their reliance on intuition and sensory
sensations such as taste and the touch of bare skin and show a lack of maternal instinct. In the poem
Mother from the collection The Wormwood Woman (1974), Makarovič gives a voice to an unmarried
mother who wishes away the existence of her illegitimate child but also feels guilty when the child
gazes at her. The woman chastises her own desire for betraying her, making last year’s lust into a
lifelong commitment.

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 Katja Plemenitaš

Balžalorsky Antić (2020, 168) observes that Svetlana Makarovič was more radical in her de-
construction of motherhood and wifehood than her younger peers in the 1970s. However, the
younger poets brought some essential new topics into poetry, such as different sexual orientations
and the effect of trauma experienced by girls and women. Balžalorsky Antić (2020, 169, 170) men-
tions the phallocentric nature of the Slovene literary system, in which female authors, with few
exceptions, have been marginalized and read-only through the lens of eroticism or motherhood or
contrasted with the nation-forming identity of male literary production. However, as Balžalorsky
Antić (2020, 169) notes, this treatment of female poetry is undergoing a radical transformation as
the new generations of female poets arrive on the scene.
Svetlana Makarovič was an inspiration for many of these younger poets with her ecofeminist
deconstructions of the animals and women as the Other. A clear spiritual connection leads from
her work to the work of Barbara Korun, a contemporary poet who is also an activist and a hu-
manitarian. Feminist activism and humanitarianism are associated with what Iris Ralph refers to
as feminist action in Chapter 44. According to Ralph, this form of action embraces cooperation,
conversation, and preservation rather than competition, removal or displacement, compromise
rather than attack. It strives for receptivity and is nonconfrontational, but at the same time firmly
in favor of coexistence as opposed to mono-existence and presents a courageous challenge to
absolute power. Barbara Korun is a typical representative of the younger generation of poets
who live by those principles and combine writing poetry with activism. As Sunaina Jain notes in
Chapter 25, such activism takes an intersectional and holistic approach to counter different kinds
of structural hierarchies. Korun thus actively participates in the feminist movement and works
as a volunteer in immigration centers. Her poetry contains animal imagery that explores female
sexuality, subconsciousness, and sensual pleasure (e.g., the collection of poems Inbetween 2016).
Thus, Barbara Korun uses animal imagery to accept her own sexuality and overcome the animal’s
perception as the Other and embrace her animalistic side and reconcile it with rationality. Only
through the balance between creation and destruction can the individual unleash her full creativ-
ity and form a functional whole (Podlipnik 2016).
Alenka Rebula (1983) is another female poet with a thematic connection to the animal imag-
ery of Svetlana Makarovič. Rebula uses animal themes to underscore and interrogate the duality
inherent in anthropocentrism: linear vs. cyclical; human vs. nature (Podlipnik 2016).
For Taja Kramberger (e.g., Opus quinqe dierum 2009), on the other hand, the poetic field be-
comes a terrain for uncovering and criticizing “the symbolic domination of violence over all the
oppressed, annihilated, women, animals, the silenced, the marginalized of all kinds” (Balžalorsky
Antić 2020, 175). The juxtaposition of human and nonhuman animals has a transformative effect
on these poets. As Lesley Kordecki notes in Chapter 26, acknowledging similarities between fe-
male humans in a gender context and nonhuman animals in a human context gives rise to new
perspectives, sympathies, antagonisms, and insights. The interrogation and deconstruction of du-
alities between humans, animals, and other subjectivities in the poetry of the younger generation
of Slovene female poets also show a spiritual connection to the writing of Olga Tokarczuk. To-
karczuk was awarded the highest international Slovene literary prize, Vilenica, seven years before
she was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, and has undoubtedly influenced Slovene poets of
the younger generation.

Conclusion
Although Slovene literary theory has yet to produce a coherent framework for discussing ecofem-
inism in Slovene literature, ecofeminist readings of selected works can be a useful starting point
for such an endeavor. More attention on ecofeminist readings might encourage readers who are
not familiar with Slovene literature to discover the richness of Slovene literary traditions and

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introduce them to the artistic explorations of the younger generations. The young authors use the
transformative power of literature to deconstruct the deterministic views of women’s connection
to nature and break the boundaries between human subjectivity and the subjectivity of the Other
in the changing natural and cultural landscape of the modern time.

References
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Antić. Ljubljana: Studia Litteraria.
Berlič Ferlinc, Margit. 2016. “Feminist Heroines in the Selected Science Fiction (in English and Slovene)
and Movies.” MA thesis, University of Maribor.
Bor, Matej. 1970. Šel je popotnik skozi atomski vek. A Wanderer in the Atom Age. Translated by Janko Lavrin and
Nora Lavrin. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije.
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Golež Kaučič, Marjetka. 2011. “Folklorni in živalski slovar v ustvarjalnem opusu Svetlane Makarovič”
(‘Folklore and Animal Dictionary in the Poetic Opus of Svetlana Makarovič’). Jezik in slovstvo 56, no.
1–2: 32–48.
———. 2020. Zoopoetika smrti živali v izbranih foklornih in literarnih besedilih (‘Zoopoetics of the Death
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možne subjektivitete, edited by Branislava Vičar. 103–127. Koper: Annales ZRS.
Jogan, Maca. 2001. Seksizem v vsakdanjem življenju (‘Sexism in Everyday Life’). Ljubljana: FDV.
Jurša, Barbara. 2013. “Presečišča med ekokritiko in postkolonialnimi študijami” (‘Intersections between
Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Studies’). Primerjalna književnost 36, no. 1: 179–198.
Kernev Štrajn, Jelka. 2007. “O možnosti ekokritiškega pogleda na tematizacijo ‘ne- človeške subjektivnosti’
v literaturi” (‘On the Potential of an Ecocritical View of the Thematization of ‘un-human subjectivity’).
Primerjalna književnost 30, no. 1: 39–54.
Kolar, Damjana. 2016. ‘Poetično-absurdna drama Rudija Šelige” (‘Poetic Absurdist Drama by Rudi Šeligo’).
Mladina, January 17, 2016. https://www.mladina.si/172168/poeticno-absurdna-drama-rudija-selige.
Korun, Barbara. 2016. Vmes (‘Inbetween’). Ljubljana: Center za slovensko književnost.
Kramberger, Taja. 2009. Opus quinqe dierum. Ljubljana: Center za slovensko književnost.
Kveder, Zof ka. [1900] 1995. Misterij žene (‘Mystery of a Woman’). Ljubljana: Založba Karantanija.
———. [1914] 2013. Njeno življenje (‘Her Life’). Ljubljana: Beletrina. Epub.
Makarovič, Svetlana. 1972. Vol čje jagode (‘Wolf Berries’). Maribor: Obzorja.
———. 1974. Pelin žena (‘The Wormwood Woman’). Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga.
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the Poetry of Slovene Female Poets of Three Generations’). BA Thesis. University of Ljubljana.
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Državna založba Slovenije.
Rebula Tuta, Alenka. 1983. Mavri čni ščit (‘The Rainbow Shield’). Trst: Založništvo tržaškega tiska.
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Stritar, Josip. 1954. “Svetinova Metka”. Collected Works. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije.
Šafarič, Aleš. 2016. “Začetki ženske emancipacije na Slovenskem” (‘The Beginnings of Women’s Eman-
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zacetki-emancipacije-zensk-na-slovenskem/.
Šeligo, Rudi. 1978. Čarovnica iz Gornje Davče (‘The Witch of Upper-Davča’). Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga.
Tavčar, Ivan. [1917] 2003. Cvetje v jeseni (‘Blossoms in Autumn’). Ljubljana: Založba mladinska knjiga.
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Vičar, Branislava. 2016. “Jožica Čeh Steger: Ekokritika in literarne upodobitve narave” (‘Jožica Čeh Steger:
Ecocriticism and Literary Representations of Nature’). Slavia Centralis 9, no. 1: 83–88.
———, ed. 2020. Pojmovanja živalskih smrti: antropocentrizem in (ne)možne subjektivitete (‘Conceptualizations of
Animal Death: Anthropocentrism and (Im)possible Subjectivities’). Koper: Annales ZRS.
Vrečko, Janez. 1991. “Kosovelove pesmi v prozi” (‘Kosovel’s Prose Poems’). In Srečko Kosovel: Pesmi v prozi,
119–167. Maribor: Založba Obzorja.
Zupan Sosič, Alojzija. 2020. “Pripovedna empatija ter Cankarjeva romana Hiša Marije Pomočnice in Križ
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the Mountain’). Primerjalna književnost 43, no. 1: 223–243.

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 14
LATIN LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Artemis Archontogeorgi and Charilaos N. Michalopoulos

Introduction
Although the fruits of ecocritical research to date are extremely rich (judging from the multitude
of the ever-growing literature) the interest of researchers has focused mainly (if not exclusively) on
postmedieval literary production, leaving thus classical literature aside. Ecocriticism and classics
is a fairly new discipline, which, nonetheless, spreads its roots as back as the nineteenth century
and the work of Alexander von Humboldt (Kosmos – Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, vols.
5, 1845–1862). Having said that, one should not overlook the fact that important work has been
carried out in this area, especially since the 1990s (e.g., Gifford 1999; Glacken 1976; Hughes 1994;
Thommen 2012). Fairly recently Christopher Schliephake (2020, 12) discussing the great potential
of ancient environmental humanities has drawn attention to a certain “ecological turn” in classical
studies which is currently underway. In the field of Latin literature engagement with ecocriticism so
far has been rather limited, although significant steps have already been taken. Schliephake’s edited
volume on Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity (2017) not only brought ecocriticism and
classical tradition into dialogue, but managed to do so by including a great number of texts from
Latin literature. Vergil’s “green” poems (i.e., the Eclogues/Bucolics and the Georgics) became perfect
case studies for incisive historicized investigations of the human-nature interactions in Roman an-
tiquity (Apostol 2015; Armstrong 2019; Rozzoni 2021; Saunders 2008).
The study of gender in classical antiquity has come a long way and with polymorphous changes,
since its original focus on literary representations of ancient Greco-Roman women.1 The initial
interest in the realities (literary, historical and social) of feminine experience has broadened so
much as to comprise more inclusive investigations of sexual behavior, even masculinity.2 Latin
literature has been and still is a fertile ground for this kind of readings, since, as Joseph Farrell
(2001, 73) nicely puts it, Latin language “constructs itself as masculine speech by simply denying
and silencing the feminine voice.”3 Hence, gender provides a useful tool for the literary critique
of a strictly “phallogocentric” discourse produced entirely by male writers and addressed to an
audience with a strict patriarchal structure. The interest in ecofeminism as an interpretative tool
for the study of Latin literature has only very recently started to be picking up, and so far, the
impression given is that a bright future lies ahead.
This chapter hopes to offer only a very brief outline of issues and questions of ecofeminist
criticism in Latin literature. By focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on the poetry of the Au-
gustan age (c. 27 BCE–14 CE), one of the most important (historically, politically, artistically)
times of Roman history, this chapter explores what new can an ecofeminist reading bring to our

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-15157
 Artemis Archontogeorgi and Charilaos N. Michalopoulos

appreciation of Latin literature in terms of its literary, social and political output. Moreover, it is
hoped that our survey will help to make the Romans’ environmental concerns more visible at least
to the extent to which they are intrinsically related to their preoccupation with gender issues. In
view of the surviving evidence, we will limit our discussion only to a series of motifs of ecofem-
inist value that have a consistent presence in the literature under examination. Our intention is
not to be exhaustive but rather to stimulate scholarly interest in the critical reappraisal of Latin
literature through the lens of ecofeminism.

Construction of Gender Identities

Ancient Rome was a conservative, patriarchal society, in which women were thought of as being
most valuable and most vulnerable at the same time. Restrictions and limitations were imposed
in order to secure female morality. Women in ancient Rome were primarily, if not exclusively,
considered as members of their families rather than as autonomous individuals. It is surely not
coincidental that even their names were nothing more than a feminine variant of their father’s
name. Women were always under the supervision of a male relative; they consented to prear-
ranged marriages and most importantly they had no control of their bodies. A woman’s virginity
belonged only one-third to herself, while the rest belonged to her parents, who could dispose it
as they pleased.4 The patriarchal restrictions and limitations of Roman society became even more
rigorous during the Augustan period (27 BC–14 AD), when Augustus tried to impose his pro-
gram of moral reform, creating thus an oppressive conceptual framework reflected in the literary
production of the time.
Literary discourse constitutes a privileged field for the construction and solidification of gender
identities, as Asmae Ourkiya aptly points out in Chapter 29, where they discuss the shaping of en-
vironmental identities through gender, with a focus on queer ecofeminism. The interdependence
of gender and language is mirrored in the stereotypical association of women with nature. It is
surprising that the poets of the Augustan era, who hardly ever strayed from the urban environ-
ment of Rome and knew little (if anything at all) about the cultivation of the land and the habits of
animals, employ natural imagery and similes which naturalize and animalize women and reflect
male dominance over women, animals and nature. Such strategies become more visible in poetic
genres such as epic and elegy. Through the conventional application of flora and/or fauna imagery
to women their fragility is being paralleled with the most delicate and tender aspects of the natural
environment. Hence, the virtue and innocence of a young girl are likened to an unripe fruit or a
flower blooming in a well-protected garden.5 As Sara Varadharajulu (2020) observes commenting
on Horace’s Ode 2.5, in which the poet compares the young and sexually inexperienced Lalage
with Chloris, another girl: “while the seasons continually cycle, both Chlo[ris] and Lalage can
only mature; they cannot retreat back to their innocence, even if they wanted to.” Women, like
flowers and fruit, are being cultivated until they become ripe for marriage. And then the bride-
groom comes to plow the field 6 or reap the fruit or pluck with his fingernail the flower of his
bride’s virginity and destroy it.7 Nonetheless, the bonds of marriage (another metaphor for slavery)
are not always destructive. Marriage is also identified with ivy leaning on the bark of an elm tree,
without which it would be impossible to bear fruit;8 an image taken from the viticulture industry
of Italy. The union of the grapevine with the tree most eloquently depicts the physical and emo-
tional bond of the couple which leads to procreation. At the same time, it transforms a woman
from a human being into some kind of hybrid, a strange entity between plant and human, destined
to bear fruit; this kind of plant transformation is echoing the hierarchies and gender prescribed
imperatives of Roman society.
The parallel of women with domestic animals subordinate to male control or with wild animals
incarnating the wild and uncontrollable power of nature offers justification on a symbolic level for

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the subjugation of woman to man. In addition, zoological similes, such as a peacock showing off
its feathers, or racehorses that love to be groomed, or a wolf attacking a herd allude to vanity and
female propensity for flattery.9 Female sexual desire is depicted as unbridled and uncontrollable.
Accordingly, woman is likened to a cow or a mare in estrus, and her erotic submission to man is
given in terms of a stubborn ox put on a yoke and/or a horse struggling to get used to the bridle.10
As a result, woman loses her individuality and becomes an asset, a domesticated animal driven by
nature and men’s will (Varadharajulu 2020). Sexual practice, however, brings an interesting twist
to the horse imagery causing an unexpected reversal in the male/female power game. The sexual
position of woman on top, often paralleled to riding,11 effectively puts women in power, since they
become riders who have control over men and nature alike. As Oliensis (2009, 132–133) observes:
“these insolent riders ride roughshod over the decorous hierarchies of Roman sovereignty (Ro-
man over barbarian, man atop woman) and over the virginal Roman earth.”
For Lucretius (De rerum natura 5.1350–1360) woman is incapable of inventing anything, as op-
posed to a man who is the sole creator of civilization (Nugent 1994, 201–202). In this light, hunt-
ing reconnects women to a pre-cultural/ancestral environment, a space untouched and unchanged
by male intervention. Women hunters live in the forests and enjoy the wildness of nature that
liberates them from the norms of patriarchal society.12 The mythical race of the fearless Amazons,
women warriors and hunters, provides us with another telling embodiment of the reversal of the
patriarchal paradigm in Greek society. These liminal (both literally and metaphorically) female
figures live in the woods, coexist with nature, hunt animals, and reject marriage and procreation.13
Another stereotypical female type of Latin literature whose presence is constant throughout
time and genres is that of the witch who is often involved in erotic mess-ups and quarrels.14 Either
as a pimp in elegy15 or as a practitioner of magic16 or as a foreign and potentially lethal lover, like
notorious Medea in Ovid’s Heroides 12, these women pose a real threat to the male order. They
have access and control over nature, they know how to change the course of the sun and moon,
and they can even transform humans into animals and birds. Their omnipotence ultimately makes
them uncontrollable and dangerous. As Patrick Murphy (2018, 3) aptly observes: “women are
rendered as demons when they respond to patriarchal and colonizing abuse.” In the end, however,
these seemingly powerful women ultimately succumb (willingly or not) to the patriarchal order,
by putting their powers at the service of men or by paying the price for their dissent. As it most
often happens, men manipulate the supernatural forces of these women in order to achieve their
own goals, and then abandon them.

Body Images
The polymorphism and multiplicity of the female body are reflected in the body of Earth, as de-
scribed by Lucretius (De Rerum Natura 2.589–599). Earth’s reproductive capacity is followed by a
period of lactation, only to end up weakened and drained, which essentially is not very different
from a woman at menopause.17 As Earth goes through all the stages of the female body, from
juvenile fertility to mature infertility “[it] is … tamed, like a properly socialized wife, no longer
capable of polymorphous productivity” (Nugent 1994, 184).
The fertility of the female body is conventionally described through metaphors of nature which
relate impregnation to the exploitation of natural wealth. In Ovid’s Ars Amatoria the association of
female eroticism with the plowing of the field and the seed that grows in a fertile field “suggest[s]
an analogy between seduction and the common skills and practices by which man extends his
dominion over nature” (Winsor Leach 1964, 149).18 Women are referred to as crops, grapes, fish
and birds.19 They appear to flock to public spectacles like working ants and bees buzzing around
flowers.20 Abundance ensures the success of the game of love. The female body acquires a utili-
tarian function, since it is offered to exploitation (bodily, cultural, symbolic) which nevertheless

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 Artemis Archontogeorgi and Charilaos N. Michalopoulos

causes its (ultimate) devaluation in the end. Like farmers and hunters, women employ their skills
and knowledge to tame nature, while their male lovers in turn attempt to subjugate their female
body through a systemic conception of love that validates male supremacy and control over nature
(Winsor Leach 1964).
The fluidity between human and non-human is captured (perhaps most eloquently) in narra-
tives of transformation, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the idea of the transformation of the
female body into other forms (animate or inanimate) opens up a space for a wide range of associa-
tions regarding the complexities in the relationship between women and nature.21 The process of
metamorphosis from a human being to a tree with its gradualness brings to the fore the numerous
and close correspondences between the female body and the physiology of a tree. This can be seen
most vividly in Ovid’s account of Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree.22 The great number
of anthropomorphic and arboreal transformations is proof of the absorption of the female body
by the natural environment. This is what Stacy Alaimo refers to as “transcorporeality,” that is,
a concept that focuses on the interconnections between all sorts of bodies (human, nonhuman,
ecological systems, etc.) and the ways in which these bodily entities interface with each other.23
Literature often resorts to nature to draw models for the description of female beauty; models
which are tailored in such a way as to conform to social stereotypes and prevailing male aesthetic
prejudices.24 Silk, cobwebs, cedarwood, sheep’s fleece and saffron are evoked to underline the
beauty of women’s hair.25 But such associations ultimately transform the female body into a dec-
orative object, which comes under the control of the dominant male gaze. In Latin erotic poetry,
especially Roman love elegy, scopophilia and voyeurism largely characterize the attitude of the
poet-lover toward his beloved, the object of his desire.26 Eventually, the internalization of these
stereotypes by women themselves leads to body shame; a feeling which is often facilitated by the
intervention of nature, when natural lighting provides the perfect setting for a woman’s appear-
ance before the eyes of a man.27 The opposite also takes place, when elements from the animal
kingdom are used to attack the female body, especially the body of an elder woman which has lost
its vigor and sexual appeal.28
Mitten and D’ Amore (2018, 109) aptly point out that

as women relate to the natural area, they often appreciate and feel drawn to the natural world
and therefore do not objectify it. They see many examples of vegetation in nature not able to
control its appearance and the women see beauty in these trees and plants. This experience
counters basic beliefs in objectified body consciousness that appearances can be controlled
and that one’s self-worth and worth to others is determined by how we look.

Hence, in nature, we come across women’s communities that enjoy the protection of both the
natural landscape and symbiosis. A noncompetitive atmosphere, emotional support, physical ac-
tivity, periods of isolation and contact with nature help the members of these communities break
free from stereotypical imperatives and foster a positive body image (Mitten and D’ Amore 2018).
In book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (3.138–252), for instance, goddess Diana leads her followers
to a cool grove with a spring; she praises the beauty of the place and urges the nymphs to bathe
with her exposing their naked bodies. In the same work (Met. 8.725–878), when Erisychthon
attempts to cut down the sacred oak tree in Demeter’s grove, the forest nymphs circle around the
giant tree-trunk in the same way in which Diana’s followers flocked around the goddess in order
to protect her from Actaeon’s profane eyes. The female body is thus equated with a tree, which
inhabited by the nymphs “emphasize[s] the affinity between the feminine and the natural universe
(defined as everything that man has not modified) and … stigmatize[s] the selfish and utilitarian
behavior of men” (Valera 2018, 13).

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Motherhood
Fertility, childbearing and selflessness find their prime expression in motherhood (Teodorescu
2018). For Greeks and Romans, it is through fertility and procreation that Earth (Γαῖα) raises to
the status of the Mother. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, personified Earth complains not only about the
environmental destruction as a result of Phaethon’s uncontrollable ride, but also about the over-
exploitation she suffers from humans.29 Cultivated, plowed and harvested by men, Earth becomes
easily associated with metaphors and/or imagery of erotic violence. The rhetorical eloquence with
which personified Earth protests to Jupiter recalls strategies of persuasion employed by a Roman
mother within the context of a patriarchal society (Martin 2017). In the end (as it happens in
life) order is restored by Jupiter (the active male), while Earth remains unchanged in her role as a
passive agent.
Alison Keith (2000, 36–64) in her study of women in Roman epics offers an insightful explo-
ration of the cultural association of the female body and motherhood with earth. Starting with
Ennius, the most important poet of the Roman Republic (often considered as “the father of Ro-
man poetry”), the primitive landscape of Rome is identified with the productive body of Ilia (=
Rhea Silvia), the mother of Remus and Romulus (the two mythical founders of Rome). After her
death, we read, nature assumes the role of the mother for her twins, who are being nourished by
the milk of a fig tree.30 Very similar in tone regarding the assimilation of woman to land and the
image of a nourishing mother is the story of Dryope in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (9.324–393). Dryope
was wandering by a lake, suckling her baby Amphissus, when she saw the bright red flowers of the
lotus tree. When she picked a flower to offer it to her son, the tree started to bleed and tremble,
since it was the nymph Lotis who had been earlier changed into this tree. While Dryope is being
transformed into a tree, she holds her baby son in her bosom and keeps him in her shade. Here the
child’s dependence on his mother underscores most effectively the dependence of man on nature
and the need to return to the mother’s body. This need is particularly emphasized in Vergil’s Ae-
neid, where the territorial conquest of Latium by Aeneas and his companions is identified with the
return to the maternal body.31
In patriarchal societies, motherhood for a woman is not a choice, but an obligation.32 Adriana
Teodorescu’s (2018, 78) observation that “envisioning nature in a positive light entails not only
a naturalistic, but also an idealized construction of motherhood” underpins the association of
woman with “the good mother” paradigm. The idealized representation of motherhood in the
animal kingdom supports such a conception of motherhood imposed by social patriarchy. Domes-
tic animals (such as the cow), but also wild animals (such as the lion or the tiger) offer examples
of maternal affection.33 Nevertheless, in the same context, we also come across cases in which the
strong maternal instinct of an animal is juxtaposed to that of a woman committing infanticide or
trying to control their reproductive capacity through practices like abortion.34

Possession, Abuse, and Sexual Violence

According to Patrick Murphy (1988, 87) “patriarchal conceptions of nature and women have jus-
tified a two-pronged rape and domination of the earth and the women who live on it.” The erotic
hunt, where a woman most often appears as prey, is a most widespread motif in Latin poetry. The
beloved in pursuit is often likened to a hare, a lamb or a deer, while the pursuing lover, depicted
in the role of the hunter, is likened with a wolf, a lion or an eagle.35 The intensity and brutality
of the sexual pursuit are reflected in the predator’s attempt to capture their prey and, correspond-
ingly, in the prey’s agony to escape the predator. Hunting imagery underscores and reproduces
hegemonic masculinity as Lydia Rose discusses in Chapter 30. In the relatively few cases where

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a woman becomes an erotic predator, the gender reversal ultimately backfires with the emphasis
being laid largely on her excessive lust.36
Fear and terror accompany women in Latin literature especially when they become victims of
male sexual aggression. A whole series of similes from the animal kingdom are employed to visu-
alize their dread: the ewe at the howling of a wolf, the hare seeing the hounds, the dove scarcely
escaping the eagle’s claws vividly depict the traumatic anxiety of rape.37 The mental turmoil and
terror of a young girl after her lover’s unprovoked attack is captured on her pale face and her trem-
bling limbs, which shake like the tops of poplars or like thin reeds in the wind, while her tears
run like melted snow.38 The violence of the father is also experienced by the young daughter who
dares to challenge or even violate her socially prescribed role of a virtuous and submissive family
member.39 As Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan (1995, 80) point out:

when a man hits a woman, he has not lost control − he achieves and maintains control: it is
not so much what is done but what is accomplished. Not only is he achieving and maintaining
control, but he is reminding the woman of her subordinate status in the world.

As we have already discussed, the parallel between the conquest of enemy territory and the pene-
tration of the female body is repeated as a motif in epic poetry. In the words of Jacqueline Clarke
(2012, 368): “the male mastery of a feminized landscape represents male assertion of social or
political control and subordination of the female.” For Ennius, as we read in Cicero, the rape of
Ilia (= Rhea Silvia) by Mars foreshadows her sons’ political dominance of the geographical area of
Italy and the founding of Rome.40 In Vergil’s Aeneid Lavinia’s body becomes a metaphor for her
father’s territorial dominion; hence, her marriage to Aeneas means that the hero receives both the
body of his bride and the land of Latium.41 Propertius, one of Rome’s great elegists, also seems to
be toying with the epic motif of the possession of land through the possession of the female body.
Cynthia, his beloved, goes away and her beauty can only be matched with the natural beauty of
the faraway holiday resort of Baiae.42 Propertius fails to keep Cynthia within Rome; he can only
pin her down on a deserted shore or near the waters of a lake in the mental landscape of his poetry.

Conclusion
Ecofeminism is not merely yet another theoretical tool in the study of Latin literature. The close
association and interdependence between nature and women open up a whole new field for a more
thorough and methodologically up-to-date appreciation of Rome’s literary and cultural contribu-
tion. As Karen Warren (1993, 268) suggests:

the language that so feminizes nature and naturalizes women describes, reflects and perpetu-
ates the domination and inferiorization of both by failing to see the extent to which the twin
dominations of women and nature (including animals) are, in fact, culturally (and not merely
figuratively) analogous,

a point also made by Nicole Anae (Chapter 27) in her discussion of cultural ecofeminism. The
interconnection of the female with nature offers a unique, often kaleidoscopic, perspective on
Roman politics, aesthetics and erotics. One of the primary goals of this chapter was to reveal the
multiple ways in which nature with all its elements becomes inextricably related to issues of ut-
most importance for Latin literature and thought, namely the construction of gendered identities,
the representation of erotic desire, the struggle for control (political, sexual), the oppression of
women. Animal and plant imagery permeate the whole Latin literature from its very early begin-
nings. But nature with all its elements is not evoked merely for reasons of poetic embellishment

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or simply for ornate descriptions. On the very contrary, nature with its persistent presence in the
works of Latin writers becomes a valuable new tool for a gender-informed critical reappraisal of
classical literature. We are at a very early stage and surely more work is needed; however, the very
first fruits of ecofeminist readings of Latin literature pave the way for what seems to be a thriving
research field in classics in the years to come.

Notes
1 From the vast relevant bibliography we note only a small selection of the most influential works: the
1972 issue of the journal Arethusa devoted to women in antiquity; Hallett & Skinner 1997; Hawley &
Levick 1995; Hubbard 2014; James and Dillon 2012; Masterson et al. 2015; Pomeroy 1975; Rabinowitz
and Richlin 1993; Skinner 2005. For an overview of gender studies in Latin literature, see Corbeill
(2010, 220–234) with bibliography.
2 See, e.g., Foxhall and Salmon 1998a and 1998b; Gleason 1995; McDonnell 2006; Rosen and Sluiter
2003.
3 Useful bibliography can also be found in the following dedicated websites: (a) Diotima: Materials for the
Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World (www.stoa.org/diotima. Accessed January 12, 2022) and
(b) EuGeStA: European network on Gender Studies in Antiquity (https://eugesta-recherche.univ-lille.fr/
publications-1/publications-du-reseau. Accessed January 12, 2022).
4 Cf. Catullus 62.62–64 virginitas non tota tua est, ex parte parentum est,/tertia pars patris est, pars est data tertia
matri,/tertia sola tua est (= your virginity is not all your own, but partly your parents;/one third belongs to
your father, a third is given to your mother,/you yourself only have a third share; translation by Godwin
1995).
5 Cf. Catullus 62.39 ut flos in saeptis secrectus nascitur hortis (= just as a flower grows hidden away in an en-
closed garden); 61.21–22; 61.91–93 talis in vario solet/divitis domini hortulo/stare flos hyacinthus (= this is hoe
in the many-coloured/garden of a rich master/the hyacinth flower tends to stand; translation by Godwin
1995); Horace, Carmina 2.5.9–12; Ovid, Heroides 4.29–30 est aliquid, plenis pomaria carpere ramis,/et tenui
primam deligere ungue rosam (= it is something to pluck fruit from the orchard with full-hanging branch, to
cull with delicate nail the first rose; translation by Showerman-Goold 1977); Ars amatoria 2.179; 3.79–80.
6 Cf. Catullus 11.21–24 nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,/qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati/ultimi flos, prae-
tereunte postquam/tactus aratro est (= and let her not look back as she once did to my love/which has fallen
thanks to her badness like a flower/at the edge of the meadow, after it has been touched/by the passing
plough; translation by Godwin 1999). For a detailed discussion of the body/earth metaphor, see DuBois
1988, 39–64.
7 Cf. Catullus 62.43 idem cum tenui carptus defloruit ungui (= the same flower, when it has shed its petal,
plucked by a slender fingernail; translation by Godwin 1995); Horace, Carmina 3.6.23–24; Propertius
1.20.39; Ovid, Ars amatoria 2.667–668. The virginity as flower metaphor ultimately looks back to the
Greek lyric poet Sappho (fr. 105a; 105c).
8 Cf. Catullus 62.54–55. For a list of nature similes in Catullus, see Howe (1911).
9 Cf. Ovid, Ars amatoria 1.626–630 (peacock, horses); Amores 1.8.55–58 (wolf attacking a flock).
10 Cf. Horace, Odes 2.5.1–48; Ovid, Heroides 4.21–23 scilicet ut teneros laedunt iuga prima iuvencos,/frenaque vix
patitur de grege captus equus,/sic male vixque subit primos rude pectus amores (= at the first bearing of the yoke
galls the tender steer,/and as the rein is scarce endured by the colt fresh taken from the drove,/so does
my untried heart rebel; translation by Showerman-Goold 1977); Ars amatoria 1.277–278; 1.471–472.
11 This is the so-called equus position; so Ovid, Ars amatoria 3.777–778 parva vehatur equo: quod erat longis-
sima, numquam/Thebais Hectoreo nupta resedit equo (= who’s short should ride a-cockhorse: Hector’s bride/
was far too tall to sit her horse astride; translation by Melville 1990).
12 Programmatic in this respect is the figure of the naiad Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the young
maiden who, like goddess Diana, enjoyed her virginity as a hunter in the woods, before being chased
and ultimately erotically subdued to Apollo (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.474–483).
13 For a most comprehensive study of the Amazons which brings together material from various fields (e.g.,
literature, philosophy, art, and history) see DuBois 1991.
14 Horace, Satires 1; Epodes 5 and 17; Vergil, Aeneid 7.10–24; Propertius 1.1.19–20; Ovid, Amores 1.8.5–18,
2.1.23–26; Metamorphoses 7.152–155; 7.199–214; 7.224–233; 7.264–278; 7.280–281; 7.406–419.
15 Tibullus 1.2.47–66; Propertius 4.5; Ovid, Amores 1.8.
16 Propertius 1.1.19–20.
17 Lucretius 2.1150–1152; 5.807–808; 5.811–815; 5.826–827.

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18 Ovid, Ars amatoria 1.359–360 (harvest); 1.756–757 (crops); 2.667–668.

19 Ovid, Ars amatoria 1.55–59 tot tibi tamque dabit formosas Roma puellas,/“Haec habet” ut dicas “quicquid in orbe
fuit.”/Gargara quot segetes, quot habet Methymna racemos,/aequore quot pisces, fronde teguntur aves,/quot caelum
stellas, tot habet tua Roma puellas:/mater in Aeneae constitit urbe sui (= In Rome of lovely women there’s no
dearth;/here shall you find the pick of all the earth./Thick as Methymna’s grapes or Gargara’s crops/
or fish in seas or birds in greenwood tops,/thick as the stars the fair abound in Rome;/in her sons’ city
Venus makes her home; translation by Melville 1990).
20 Ovid, Ars amatoria 1.93–98 ut redit itque frequens longum formica per agmen,/granifero solitum cum vehit ore
cibum,/aut ut apes saltusque suos et olentia nactae/pascua per flores et thyma summa volant,/sic ruit ad celebres
cultissima femina ludos:/copia iudicium saepe morata meum est (= As ants that to and fro in endless train/haste
to bring home their wonted load of grain,/as mid their favorite glades and scented leas/o’er flowers and
thyme-tops flit the swarming bees,/so to the play the well-dressed bevies throng,/such wealth of choice
as keeps one doubting long; translation by Melville 1990).
21 For examples of female animalization in Ovid’s Metamorphoses see Kordecki in Chapter 26 in this book.
22 Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.548–556. Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia (e.g., 16.72; 17.37) also draws
attention to the close physiological resemblance between the human body and a tree trunk.
23 Alaimo 2010, 212.
24 For more see Mitten and D’Amore 2018.
25 Ovid, Amores 1.14.6–12; 1.14.21–23; 2.4.41–43.
26 The question of erotic gaze in Latin poetry has been of particular interest in research, especially during
the last 20 years, with extremely interesting results, cf., e.g., Ancona and Greene 2011, 113–242; Fred-
rick 2002; Raucci 2011.
27 Ovid, Amores 1.5.1–8.
28 Cf. e.g. Horace, Epodes 8 and 12; Petronius, Satyricon 134–138; Martial 9.37, 10.90; Corpus Priapeorum
12, 57. This is the so-called Vetulaskoptik motif, on which see Richlin 1992, 105–116.
29 Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.272–303.
30 Ennius, Annales 1.65–68.
31 See Keith 2000, 46–48. Cf. also Vergil, Georgics 2.173–174; Aeneid 3.94–96; Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.678
(where the land of Italy is described as the Trojans’ “ancient mother,” antiquam matrem). Cowan 2021
discusses thoroughly examples of the feminization of land, crops, and livestock in Vergil’s Georgics.
32 For two most recent and comprehensive investigations of motherhood in Latin poetry, see Augoustakis
2010 and McAuley 2016.
33 Lucretius 2.355–366; Statius, Thebaid 4.315–316,10.820–826; Silvae 2.1.8–9.
34 Ovid, Amores 2.14.35–36.
35 Horace, Carmina 1.23; Vergil, Aeneid 4.68–73; Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.533–539. For hunting imagery in
Ovid, see Green 1996.
36 Cf. Horace, Epodes 12.25–26. In Horace’s Epodes 3, 5 και 17 the name of the woman is Canidia (< canis
= dog); Oliensis (2009, 111) rightly draws attention to the fact that “dogs form part of a misogynistic
depictions of female powers and desires.” For more, see Meyer 2014.
37 Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.527–530.
38 Ovid, Amores 1.7.51–58.
39 Ovid, Heroides 11.76–82.
40 Cicero, De divinatione 1.40–44 with Keith 2000, 42–43.
41 Vergil, Aeneid 7.52, 7.229 with Keith 2000, 49–50.
42 Propertius 1.11. For a more detailed discussion, see Clarke 2012, 366–368.

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 15
FRANCOPHONE LITERATURE
AND ECOFEMINISM
Giulia Champion

Introduction
According to the latest synthesis report of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie pub-
lished in 2018, the French language is the official language of 32 “States and government” and
is spoken by 300 million people around the world, making it the fifth most spoken language in
the world (2018, 4).1 The concept of francophonie has a complex and difficult history given the
cultural and linguistic entanglements of the French language with colonialism and oppression.
Like all European languages that were imposed during centuries of colonization and imperialism
globally, francophone languages remain fluid and ever-evolving reminders of the French mission
civilisatrice and, more broadly, of the French and Belgian violent colonial endeavors and practices.
And while another French-speaking country in Europe, Switzerland, may not have had a formal
empire like these two countries, it nonetheless profited from and participated in European co-
lonial and imperial expansion and, as most European countries, continues to profit from wealth
and power accumulated during that period (Purtschert and Fischer-Tiné 2015; Tognina 2020;
Zangger 2020). Thus, today francophonie or francophone culture cannot be understood without
accounting for the necrotic dynamics of colonialism and (neo-)imperialism—and especially when
taking an ecofeminist approach.
Throughout this handbook, several thought-provoking and insightful chapters grapple with
the challenge of (attempting to) define what ecofeminism may be in terms of a specific literary
tradition or genre. Though this chapter’s focus is on francophone literatures in a broader sense,
due to limitations it cannot provide a full overview of such different and varied (socio-)linguistic
and geographic productions across the globe. Hence, given the chapter’s word limit, I aim to
provide a nonexhaustive overview, but with a focus on decolonial and postcolonial texts given
the importance these have and the fact that they are seldom put centerstage in current work on
francophone ecocriticism and ecofeminism. In the case of this chapter, I must emphasize an ad-
ditional limitation: the fact that I am a white European woman born in Switzerland, raised with
a certain privilege and in a dual-national and bilingual household. I thus recognize my expected
inability to fully translate the depths of some of the works analyzed here, and hope not to do them
an injustice. For this reason, I also do not consider any of the conceptualizations or definitions I
explore here as set in stone, but rather written in sand, where they can be washed away by waves,
waves of discussions and research, and like messages in a bottle, spread across an ocean of franco-
phone speakers and researchers. Hence, this chapter will follow a journey of ecofeminist global
francophone literature considering different uses of the “terre mère” trope: the first examples

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-16167
 Giulia Champion

investigated are based on an essentialist approach to gender, while the latter core ones decolonize
this essentialist approach. Chapter 29, authored by Asmae Ourkiya, provides an in-depth and in-
sightful exploration of essentialism in relation to ecofeminist literature. The theoretical path in my
chapter is supported by the claim that conceptions of francophonie and global francophone literature
are based on the need to make, unmake and re-make kinships. In other words, the imposition
of French in colonial times, effectively unmade kinships between peoples, between peoples and
their cultures, between peoples and their lands—though lands and cultures are deeply entangled
both conceptually and materially. The subsequent adoption and evolution of the French language
in formerly colonized countries—some of which continue to have uneven and neoimperial rela-
tions to France in their status as “DROM-COM” (overseas according to whom?)—is a movement
that attempts to re-make these dissolved kinships. Especially because what is defined as “French”
varies radically across all these countries and lives in (dis-)harmony with other languages, either
predating the arrival of that language or being born following colonialism.
Colonial relationality is concerned with unmaking kin and making unkin through its ex-
ploitation of places and peoples it colonizes and oppresses.2 This relationality is based on forced
displacement, enslavement, murder, rape, theft, and many other forms of death unbinding kinship
and undoing lives. This understanding of colonialism makes the concept of the “terre mère” a
“reproductive” one to explore ecofeminism in global francophone literature because it permits the
identification of gendered and colonized reproductive labor and the essentialists pitfalls of rhetoric
feminizing the land and naturalizing women—this type of discourse being central to colonial
practices. This chapter does this by providing a brief overview of where this trope comes from in
theoretical works on ecofeminism in the francophone global north, then focusing on four works
from formerly colonized spaces that unsettle this trope, before returning to the métropole by focus-
ing on a musical case study highlighting structural racism in the hexagon itself. While the division
of the world in the binary of “global north” vs “global south” can be unhelpful, it is necessary
when considering the continued, structural and systemic inequalities that continue to divide the
world after colonialism. Hence, the chapter’s focus on global francophone connections across
Oceania, the African continent and the Caribbean, exploring how four texts emerging from
spaces formerly colonized by France conceptualize the exploitation of people and land through
an ecofeminist lens. These are Chantal Spitz’s L’île des rêves écrasés (1991, L’île), Maryse Condé’s Le
cœur à rire et à pleurer (1999, Le cœur), Sandrine Bessora’s Petroleum (2004) and Déwé Gorodé and
Imasango’s Se donner le pays. Paroles jumelles (2016, Se donner). In analyzing these different texts,
this chapter considers the multiple evolution and iterations of the “terre mère” trope, presented
in each work within a different context of exploitation undertaken through different extractive
practices. It thus questions different ecofeminist practices of writing and reading and the crucial
role of intersectionality within ecofeminist practices. Finally, this chapter concludes by returning
to France to identify how connections can be made to marginalized communities within the
métropole by considering the rap group La Rumeur’s song “L’éternel goût du sang dans la bouche”
(2009, “L’éternel”).

Terre mère’s Reproductive Labor

How the “terre mère” trope is used varies across the works investigated and in connection to colo-
nial practices foregrounded in issues concerning the feminization of the land and of its “rape” that
occurs in the exploration-turned-exploitation of colonialism. The aim to commodify peoples and
lands to better exploit them is based on the impulse of primitive accumulation, defined by Karl
Marx in Capital (1867). However, this definition needs to be supplemented by the focus on gender
provided by Silvia Federici in her seminal work Caliban and the Witch which considers “the de-
velopment of a new sexual division of labor subjugating women’s labor and women’s reproductive

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function to the reproduction of the work-force” (2014, 12). Federici situates her analysis with
reference to the

witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, arguing that the persecution of the witches, in
Europe as in the New World, was as important as colonization and the expropriation of the
European peasantry from its land were for the development of capitalism.
(12)

This shows the entanglement between the institutionalization of colonial practices and control
over women’s bodies and reproduction, issues Federici explores in-depth. Both institutionaliza-
tions are based on an objectification and “cheapening” of life: the land, women and any laborer are
worth less than the wealth that can be generated from overworking them, as articulated by Jason
Moore’s definition of “cheapening” (2017, 600). Devaluing and cheapening human and extrahu-
man lives runs the risk of their depletion through overexploitation, and colonial practices and our
neoliberal economic system are based on these preconceptions.
This overexploitation was made possible by categorizing land and peoples, subjecting them
physically and psychologically, through forced displacement, labor, naming and cartographical
practices. Re-naming undoes kinship through epistemological violence, imposing a new iden-
tity on peoples and lands whose lives are already being devaluated and slowly extinguished.
Naming also encompasses a broad range of conceptual constructions including territorializa-
tion and mapping. This naming and territorialization, as Édouard Glissant notes, is essential
to conquest: “Le territoire est une base pour la conquête. Le territoire exige qu’on y plante et
légitime la filiation” (1990, 166). This quote draws attention to the relation between land and
reproduction through the connection made between filiation and land. The land is not only
legitimatized through filiation and filiation through land, but also filiation permits ownership
of new (or old) lands.
My conceptualization of making kin also encompasses Glissant’s concept of Relation, which
proposes new ways to see identity construction. He sees the plantation—where extractive ag-
riculture takes place—as one of the main spaces in and from which the Relation is developed:
“la Plantation est un des lieux focaux où se sont élaborés quelques-uns des modes actuels de la
Relation” (79). It is a space in which relations are sown and cultivated across time and provides a
means of connecting cultures, languages, works and authors and reflecting critically on postco-
lonial cultures (86). Without minimizing the cruelty, violence and suffering that unfolded in this
space, Glissant notes that the plantation can be identified as a node central to Relation ­k in-making
(89). The plantation is the space of shared history from which new relations develop that are
multilinguistic and multicultural. It is also a space created by colonial relationality and viewed
by Glissant as a stomach (89). This image echoes the beginning of Glissant’s work, which opens
within a discussion about the boat’s “stomach” (18). Here there is an invitation to reconsider the
phenomenological nature of the boat; one might not think that a boat has a stomach; however,
some do—specifically the ships transporting abducted and enslaved peoples during the Middle
Passage. The boat becomes a womb-matrix in which a new life is developed and the plantation
continues this elaboration after the arrival of the ship. The continued issue of the imagery of
“womb” and “stomach” further foreground ideas of reproductive labor as deeply entangled with
colonial practices.
Bearing this in mind, I will now briefly show how the trope of “terre mère” is developed in
Françoise d’Eaubonne’s Le féminisme ou la mort (1974, Le féminisme), a crucial ecofeminist franco-
phone text. Thus far, I have moved between the words “Literature” and “Culture” as these are
intersecting categories as I conceive them here. Though this chapter is on literary rather than
cultural studies, both spheres are related and so I consider types of work as literature which other

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 Giulia Champion

scholars might argue pertain solely to the realm of cultural studies. Throughout, I define litera-
ture as any form of the fictionalized written word, including music lyrics, while culture includes
non-fictional texts including scholarly essays pertaining to the fields of philosophy or politics,
including d’Eaubonne’s essay. In this long essay, d’Eaubonne is one of the first thinkers to coin the
concept of ecofeminism when she originally writes it in 1974 (2020, 129). Author and civil rights
activists, d’Eaubonne described in this work the crucial relation between feminism and ecology
and their intertwined domination under patriarchy. In Chapter 25, Sunaina Jain notes the crucial
relation between activism and ecofeminism emphasizing how the term’s popularity has grown
through social movements. D’Eaubonne’s essay title highlights radical feminism as the only option
available, both conceptually, but also physically given her understanding of the necrotic impulse
of patriarchal overexploitation of women and land:

Tout le monde, pratiquement, sait qu’aujourd’hui les deux menaces de mort les plus immédi-
ates sont la surpopulation et la destruction des ressources; un peu moins connaissent l’entière
responsabilité du Système mâle (et non capitaliste ou socialiste), dans ces deux périls; mais très
peu encore ont découvert que chacune des deux menaces est l’aboutissement logique d’une
des deux découvertes parallèles qui ont donné le pouvoir aux hommes voici cinquante siècles:
leur possibilité d’ensemencer la terre comme les femmes.
(282)

She considers here how the fertility of both the soil and women have been effectively put to work
to serve what she calls the “male System”, a form of patriarchy, but one she does not, however,
associate with the capitalist economic system, nor with colonialism. Her approach and argument,
though still relevant today in parts, and ahead of its time, fail to consider these issues in an intersec-
tional manner. Myriam Bahaffou and Julie Gorecki, in their preface to the most recent r­ e-edition
of the essay, note the problematic absence of colonization in d’Eaubonne’s work ­(21–23) and argue
that “un écoféminisme decolonial permettrait donc de lier colonisation de la nature, des peuples,
des femmes et de tous les corps marginalisés” (25). This gap and pitfall in d’Eaubonne’s work, I
believe is at the core of essentialist uses of the “terre mère”. In Chapter 31, in particular, Chan
Kit-sze Amy further explores intersectionality and ecofeminist literature, an issue also raised by
Benay Blend in Chapter 19, Native American and First Nations Literature and Ecofeminism.

(Lack of) Intersectionnalitude

Because Le féminisme demonstrates a lack of intersectionality—and even borderline racism in its
condescending judgment concerning overpopulation in some countries—it is a work clearly de-
veloping from a Franco-European tradition of feminism, one grounded on ideas of essentialism,
that begins in the late 1940s with the work of French Swiss author Alice Rivaz and French phi-
losopher Simone de Beauvoir and culminates with 1970s second-wave feminism (Gandon 2009).
Chapter 22, Estonian Literature and Ecofeminism by Julia Kuznetski and Kadri Tüür, also engages
with French feminism, Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine and its relation to Estonian cultural pro-
ductions inside and outside the country. This type of essentialism often re-encloses women in the
same binaries that feminist writing attempts to undo. This type of writing on which d’Eaubonne
builds an understanding of the twinned exploitation of women and land through their fertility,
as noted in her quote above, is where an essentialist version of “terre mère” trope begins to take
shape. However, in the past two decades, research has been, and continues to be, undertaken to
bridge the gap between feminism, ecofeminism and decolonial studies in French and Franco-
phone studies and, in particular, to identify a tradition of ecofeminist writing, as well as envi-
ronmental writing more broadly (Bahaffou 2020; Blanc et al. 2008; Bouvet and Posthumus 2016;

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Ferdinand 2019; Finch-Race 2021; Finch-Race and Gosetti 2019; Finch-Race and Posthumus
2017; Finch-Race and Weber 2017; Frengs 2020; Gaard 2014; Maillot 2019; Margrave 2018, 2019;
Thériault 2021; Vergès 2019). Aligning itself with these endeavors, this chapter wishes to focus
mostly on works from five women writers, with the aim of putting them at the forefront of global
francophone literature, a literature that is both postcolonial and decolonial (as much as one can
be postcolonial in our current global system). In Chapter 33, Aslı Değ irmenci Altın provides an
in-depth investigation of the important relation between postcolonial literature and ecofeminism.
The four works analyzed below unsettle the essentialist trope of “terre mère” in different ways,
notably in relation to the French colonial and (neo-)imperial past and present. They also represent
important steppingstones in the path to decolonizing and “ecofeminizing” Francophone litera-
ture. Spitz’s L’île, for example, is one of the first novels written by an Indigenous French Polyne-
sian author, and it is thus a work of great significance both in its depiction of Mā’ohi people and
traditions and of French colonialism in the Pacific. Moreover, the different genres explored by
the authors across these four texts challenge ideas of canonicity and literary nomenclature estab-
lished by external, rigid French literary traditions. Opening new ways to register the extractive
practices. I argue that these texts provide one avenue through which the essentialism of the “terre
mère” trope can be challenged. That is done through the depiction of different types of extractive
practices and their impact on land and people alike: the extraction of people and theft of their land
for nuclear testing in L’île, the historical and material consequences of plantation agriculture in
Guadeloupe in Condé’s Le cœur, petrol-extractivism in Gabon in Bessora’s Petroleum and nickel ex-
traction in Gorodé’s and Imasango’s Se donner. All these works register extractivism as a violation
of the land, identifying how colonial discourses feminize the land and naturalize women, making
the “terre mère” a trope that allows us to identify colonial and (neo-)imperial exploitation. This
depiction, however, is unsettled by an ecosystemic relationality that understands the generative
role of the land and identifies motherhood and filiation as a manner to connect people and their
land. Effectively, these works decolonize the understanding of “terre mère” as an essentialist trope
and identify ecosystemic relations as familial ones, wherein the land and the sea are mothers, but
also sisters, sometimes brothers and fathers. This sorority is expanded to global populations, con-
necting trans-Indigenous and trans-racial struggles across the globe. See Chapter 23 by Rebekah
Taylor-Wiseman to learn how the trope of mother earth is not constructed as one grounded in
essentialism in English literature and especially Nicolás Campisi’s Chapter 17, South American Lit-
erature and Ecofeminism, which considers nonessentialist conceptions of mother earth as Pachamama,
perversion of these depictions and the many crucial struggles surrounding extractivism in this
region. Additionally, Lenka Filipova’s Chapter 47, Travel Writing and Ecofeminism, also investigates
depictions tying motherhood and nature and the colonial history of this genre.
Spitz’s novel follows four generations of a family that begins on the fictitious island of Maeva.
Halfway through the novel, the family, along with the whole community on that island are
displaced to make space for a nuclear testing facility set up by the French government. This sec-
tion of the novel illustrates the events that took place in July 1962 when the French government
moved the Centre d’experimentation du Pacifique (CEP) from the Algerian Sahara to French Polyne-
sia. The novel depicts the struggles against this imposition and the changes in the islanders’ lives
after the facility is installed and work begins. The land is described as violated by these actions,
“Terre violée” (Spitz 1991, 113), and the nuclear missiles base as “greffes monstrueuses implantées
après le viol sauvage de la Terre” (123), describing the CEP workers as “étrangers qui violent [la]
Terre” (135). When the time comes for the missiles’ trial launch, following which the facility will
be operational, Terri, the first-born grandson of the protagonist family attempts to repress the
memory of this launch: “repoussant au plus profond de sa mémoire l’image des missiles fusant du
ventre de sa Terre, de leur Ventre” (171). The connection between the land and his people made
by the identification of the womb of the earth as their womb in this quote shows the decolonized

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ecosystemic relationality that unsettles the essentialist trope of the “terre mère”, allowing a male
character to see his own body as that of the land. Assimilating his stomach/womb with that of
the land from where the missiles will burst foreshadows the physical impact of nuclear fallout:
such as catastrophic cancer rates and environmental degradation in French Polynesia. Focus on
environmental decay in some of the texts explored in this chapter aligns them with what one
can describe as “climate fiction”. In Chapter 44, Iris Ralph discusses this topic in further detail,
though my claim here is that many postcolonial texts have in fact always been climate fiction due
to their continued engagement with and custodianship toward their environment, one that has
been further exploited during the colonial period precipitating and exacerbating anthropogenic
climate crisis in these spaces.
Though Gabon is not part of the DROM-TOM like the other francophone countries investi-
gated here, the feminization of natural resources in Petroleum participates in the conception of ex-
tractivism as continuing the colonial relation between the African country and France, which first
occupied it in 1885.3 The essentialist “terre mère” trope in Bessora’s novel can be seen through
the repeated comparison between drilling for oil and a violent sexual encounter; a violation of
the earth. The author often supplements this with descriptions of Gabonese workers: “D’abord,
les muscles indigènes ont téléguidé un énorme tube creux du plancher de forage à la croûte conti-
nentale. Il y a eu pénétration. Elle était vierge” (2004, 11). The reduction of Indigenous laborers’
characters to their physical strength hints at the fact that petro-extractivism represents a contin-
uation of the exploitation that began during the Triangular trade, connecting the oil ship in the
novel to those transporting abducted African peoples to be enslaved on the American continent.
Past violent practices of enslavement and uneven relations persist in Bessora’s novel, where oil is
extracted from the Gabonese sea to benefit France and the other European countries owning the
oil company. Oil extraction by the “Ocean Liberator” ship is continuously compared to childbirth,
strengthening the idea of feminization of the land. The name of the oil ship “Ocean Liberator”
echoes the neo-imperial rhetoric of “liberating” natural resources through extractivism practices,
something emphasized in the first line of the novel in which the company’s “prophecy” is the
mission the ship workers must fulfil: “Après un long périple, l’Or noir rencontrera la faille… Le
Libérateur le délivrera des entrailles de la terre” (2004, 7, see also 80, 218).
The “Or noir” in Bessora’s novel connects it to Imasango and Gorodé’s collaborative poetry
collection in their consideration of nickel extraction in Kanaky/Nouvelle Calédonie; in one poem
Imasango describes the mineral as “l’or vert” (2016, 99). The description of different miner-
als crucial to our economy as “types” of gold, connects extractive practices to the conquistadores
search for the mythic El Dorado during the colonization of the Americas, emphasizing crucial
­t rans-Indigenous connections. This gives another meaning to the subtitle of Gorodé’s and Ima-
sango’s poetry collection: “Paroles jumelles”. Not only are the poems in the collection twin words
between Gorodé and Imasango, but they are also twins to Spitz’s, Condé’s and Bessora’s words, as
well as other oppressed Indigenous communities across the globe; an intersectional approach that
is at the core of ecofeminism as understood in this chapter. This is evident in the poems specifi-
cally addressed to Quechua population in South America entitled “Quechua” and “Les rhizomes
d’espérance” (2016, 26–27). In their poetry, Gorodé and Imasango unsettle the “terre mère” trope
by decommodifying it as an earth not to be exploited, but one that is life-giving in a manner that
transcends anthropocentric understandings of motherhood, a broader conception based on an
ecosystemic relationality. Julia Frengs identifies the authors’ “paroles jumelles” as grounded on an
articulation of filiation to the land: “the authors frequently refer to motherhood, to the womb (le
ventre), and to ‘Mother Earth’ (la terre mère); twins share a womb, and they have, at least through
the gestational period, a similar if not identical intrauterine experience” (2020, 297). Not a co-
lonial filiation for territorial ownership, as described by Glissant above, but one that encourages
practices of familial care and custodianship. This filiation is also expanded to the sea, noting the

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entanglements of people and land at an ecosystemic level, figured through ideas of community
and family in a manner that undoes the kind of colonial relationality which imposes France as the
“mère patrie”, to extract work and life.
The understanding of France as the “mère patrie” appears in all of these works at different
levels. In Spitz’s L’île, the word appears repeatedly in the first part of the novel when the French
government enlists Mā’ohi young men to fight in WWII. The irony of enlisting formerly col-
onized peoples to fight for France is registered in the contradictory formulation of one of these
instances: “la mère patrie étrangère” (1991, 79). If it is the motherland, how can it be foreign?
This contradiction is echoed in Condé’s work, where she notes the alienation of her parents, as
described by her brother (1999, 15), which can be seen through their adoration of and loyalty to
the métropole: “Pour eux, la France n’était nullement le siège du pouvoir colonial. C’était vérita-
blement la mère patrie” (1999, 11). When on holiday in Paris a waiter compliments Condé’s family
for their excellent French, this racist remark is accepted with a smile by her parents and once the
waiter leaves them they exclaim “- Pourtant, nous somme aussi français qu’eux, soupirait mon
père. - Plus français, renchérissait ma mère avec violence” (1999, 13). Condé’s mother’s “violent”
insistence associated from the beginning of this autobiography with French identity, merges her
mother with the Motherland. Moreover, the Condés’ desire to have their Frenchness recognized
and respected speaks to the imposition of a colonial education that erases the histories of colonized
peoples “civilizing” them as French, but never fully accepting them as French. This racist and
racialized contradiction present in colonial education and perpetuated in the neo-imperial reality
of French departmentalization creates a schizophrenic and alienating break between the formerly
colonized, their lands and cultures. As she grows up, Condé notes “J’étais « peau noire, masque
blanc » et c’est pour moi que Frantz Fanon allait écrire” (1999, 120).
This imposed colonial education, described best in Aimé Césaire’s (in)famous sentence when
describing his education in Martinique teaching him about his “ancêtres les gaulois” (2005, 51),
is identified, deconstructed and challenged in a number of ways across the four texts investigated
in this chapter as it continues to pervade former colonies belonging to France’s “overseas” com-
munities. Condé’s work is subtitled “Contes vrais de mon enfance”, the oxymoronic construction
of “real tales” emphasizes the inexistent differentiation between “Story” and “History” in the
Francophone term histoire. Spitz’s characters also identify with this erased history and focus on the
need to recuperate it by re-writing it: “On en arrive presque à croire qu’on est vraiment comme
ils nous décrivent, alors que tu sais bien qu’ils n’ont rien compris. Un veritable lavage de cerveau.
Il est temps d’écrire notre histoire vue par nous-mêmes” (1991, 162). The novel is itself a prod-
uct of this attempt, as by the end the reader can note that the character of Teriare, one of Terri’s
younger sisters, who decides to write to remedy this erasure, can be associated with Spitz herself.
When Teriare finishes her manuscript, she informs the reader that it is dedicated to her grand-
mother Toofa and her mother Emere (198); Spitz’s novel is likewise dedicated to her grandmother
and mother, also named Toofa and Emere (9). This metatextual act of writing, which the readers
encounter at the novel’s close reinforces the reality of the version of history read in this “fictional”
piece of work. L’île thus becomes a repository of erased colonial history and ends on Terri’s words,
also the title of the novel, that indicate how colonial and neoimperial practices have made Maeva
L’île des rêves écrasés.

Conclusion
This notion of shattered dreams is found throughout Spitz’s novel, as characters’ hopes are con-
tinually broken by the colonial government which continues to exploit the people and the land.
Halfway through the novel, when Terri’s father, Tematua—the first character to mention the
notion of “rêves écrasés” and who went to war for France—hears about the plans for the CEP,

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 Giulia Champion

he describes this reaction as visceral: “il a dans la bouche un goût de sang. Le goût du sang de ses
frères morts autrefois pour cette glorieuse mère patrie. Le goût de sa Terre profanée par les engins
monstrueux d’hommes venus d’ailleurs” (1991, 98). The metaphorical taste of blood in the mouth
illustrating the pain and bitterness of finding out about the CEP, merges with the actual bloodshed
by Mā’ohi people as they died by his side fighting for France during WWII—along with other
soldiers enlisted in French colonies across the world—but also with the metaphorical bloodshed
by the exploited land. A similar conceptualization can be seen in La Rumeur’s song “L’éternel”,
allowing this chapter to return to the context of the métropole and to see connections between
formerly colonized spaces and the structural and systemic racism within France itself. The song
begins with sounds of whipping and shouts, immediately associating the song and its title with the
brutality of slavery. The fact that the taste of blood is described as eternal in the title and the song’s
chorus hints at the continued and structural racism of France. The song depicts the erasure of
colonized people’s history as well as colonial history itself in a number of its lyrics; for instance, at
the end of the first verse, the group signals that this history of violence will not be forgotten, par-
ticularly given the continued marginalization and discrimination of racialized people in France:
“Quoi, qu’est-ce tu crois, qu’on allait oublier?/Il y a quatre cents putain d’années dans l’sablier/Et
aujourd’hui ça recommence/Sarkozy et sa fabrique de sarcophages font des performances” (2009).
Associating the necropolitics of colonization with the contemporary necropolitics of a deeply
racist France, supported by a violent police force, which leads to the criminalization of minorities.
The last lines of the chorus tell the listener that “J’veux pas mourir sans connaître mon histoire/Je
marche que sur les chemins où rien ne repousse/J’ai l’éternel goût du sang dans la bouche” (2009).
These words invoke the refusal to continue to accept the erasure of colonial and precolonial histo-
ries; though they may continue to be kept out of schoolbooks and public discourse, their material
impacts cannot be that easily hidden. It can be seen in systemic inequalities and in the barren land
the song describes. These barren paths can be interpreted in several ways, one interpretation that
connects the song to the previous works investigated here is the lands that became sterile follow-
ing excessive and unsustainable exploitation through monocrop agriculture in the Caribbean and
through petroleum and nickel extraction in Gabon and New Caledonia or that was destroyed and
poisoned by nuclear fallout in French Polynesia
This is particularly emphasized in the second verse, which concludes: “Bref, trop de cadavres
dans les placards/Au pays du cocorico et des buveurs de Ricard” (2009). Naomi Waltham-Smith
notes that the “four rappers firmly reject the commercialization of hip hop as the soundtrack to
an ideological advertisement for cultural integration, insisting instead on the genre’s countercul-
tural aims” and asks “but what kind of listening is required to resist such colonial appropriation
of difference?” (2021). Waltham-Smith advocates for an “ecological listening” inspired by and
grounded in the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs in her recent work Undrowned: Black Feminist
Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020). Reminding us of the valuable insights to be gained from an
ecofeminist approach. One that moves away from essentialism and, instead, opens a space for iden-
tifying how our lives are part of ecosystemic cycles. A lesson that can be learned from a wide range
of ecofeminist literature and the works investigated here. I hope that their collective association
emphasizes the complex and multifaceted horizon of global ecofeminist Francophone literature.

Notes
1 All translations are mine unless specified otherwise.
2 See also Sharpe (2016b) and the unmaking of kin with ecosystems described by Whyte (2018, 226).
3 See Chapter 10, African Literature and Ecofeminism, by Nicole Anae and Chapter 11, Arabic Literature and
Ecofeminism, by Pervine Elrefaei for additional surveys and investigations of literatures emerging from
the African continent.

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Ferdinand, Malcom. 2019. Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen. Paris: Seuil.
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Finch-Race, Daniel A., and Julien Weber. 2017. “Éditorial: L’écocritique française.” L’Esprit Créateur 57,
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Gorodé, Déwé, and Imasango. 2016. Se donner le pays. Paroles jumelles. Paris: Éditions Bruno Doucey.
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 16
SPANISH LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM1
Irene Sanz Alonso

Introduction
Ecofeminism is still a relatively unknown movement in Spain, although feminist and environmen-
talist movements are becoming gradually more important, especially during leftish governments
like the current one. During a large part of the twentieth century the socio-political problems
of the country, the periods of instability and the 40-years dictatorship, made environmental and
feminist concerns irrelevant, although the Second Spanish Republic had achieved important mea-
sures regarding women’s rights.2 At the end of the twentieth century Spain seemed to follow the
worldwide trend of feminist and environmentalist movements that sought to improve women’s
conditions and their role in society and the defence of more sustainable practices to prevent cli-
mate change; however, especially in the case of environmentalism, “the humanities and arts in
Spain were largely disconnected from this trend” (Flys Junquera 2018b, 140). Therefore, whereas
ecofeminism is a recognized movement in the United States and in European countries such as
Germany and the United Kingdom, in Spain ecofeminism still occupies a marginal position in the
curriculum. In recent years, ecofeminist activism has gradually gained more importance in envi-
ronmental associations like Ecologistas en acción [Ecologists in action], but academically, it seems to
be “still relegated to small academic circles and philosophy departments” (Flys Junquera 2018b,
140).3 For example, Alicia Puleo is one of the most important ecofeminist figures in the field of
philosophy, with works such as Ecofeminismo para otro mundo possible [Ecofeminism for another
possible world] (2011). In 2015, she published the edited book Ecología y género en diálogo interdisci-
plinar [Ecology and gender in interdisciplinary dialogue] in which, as the title evokes, we can find
chapters on different approaches to ecofeminism, including philosophy, plastic arts and literature.
Among other ecofeminist-related works published in Spain in the last decade, we can find for
example the special number of the journal Feminismo/s on Ecofeminismo/s: Mujeres y Naturaleza
[Ecofeminismo/s: Women and Nature] published in 2013 by the University of Alicante. This issue
featured articles in English and Spanish including a bilingual version of an interview with ecofem-
inist philosopher Alicia Puleo (Kerslake and Gifford). More recently, we can find Yayo Herrero,
Marta Pascual and María González Reyes’ La vida en el centro: voces y relatos ecofeministas (2018),
which includes both a theoretical framework and short stories, with illustrations by Emma Gascó.
Therefore, as we can see, ecofeminism in Spain is still mostly restricted to the fields of philoso-
phy and activism, and those Spanish scholars working on ecofeminist literary criticism are usually
focused on texts in other languages such as English or French.4 Therefore, one would wonder if
the reason for this is the absence of Spanish texts with an ecofeminist bias, and the answer may be

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-17177
 Irene Sanz Alonso

partially an affirmative one. I do not presume to be familiar with all the works published by Span-
ish authors which may include ideas related to ecofeminism, and there may probably exist many
other Spanish literary works which address some of the issues ecofeminism is concerned about.
The purpose of this chapter is then to offer a brief overview of Spanish literary works that may
be considered ecofeminist, focusing especially on two authors: Rosa Montero and Laura Gallego.

Ecofeminism and Spanish Literature

As it was previously mentioned, although talking about ecofeminist literature in Spain is com-
plex because ecofeminism is still quite unknown in the country from a literary point of view, we
can find several authors who, mostly unconsciously, have some works that could be labelled as
ecofeminist because they include elements that correspond to ecofeminist concerns. In the book
Literature and Ecofeminism (2018), Carmen Flys Junquera devotes the chapter “Wolves, singing
trees, and replicants: Ecofeminist readings of contemporary Spanish novels” to the ecofeminist
analysis of works by three Spanish women writers—Concha López Llamas, Laura Gallego and
Rosa ­Montero—using mainly Karen Warren’s and Val Plumwood’s ideas. Although she focuses
on these three authors, she also mentions Juan Cobos Wilkins’ El corazón de la tierra [The heart of
the earth] (2001) as an “early precursor” of ecofeminist literature since his novel addresses issues
of environmental justice as well as “how to improve our relationship with earth others” (Flys
Junquera 2018b, 141). Concha López Llamas’ novel Beatriz y la loba [Beatriz and the she-wolf ]
(2015) deals with the “parallel violence and oppression of women, wolves, and rural lifestyles”
(Flys Junquera 2018b, 141), thus following one of the premises of ecofeminism, which is that the
oppression of nature, women, non-human animals as well as other others is related and should be
abolished all together at the same time. Flys Junquera’s (2020, 44) analysis of Beatriz y la loba, further
detailed in “She Is Not Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf: Concha López Llamas’s Loving Eye for Wolves”,
highlights that this work does not only criticize the patterns of domination towards women and
non-human animals by creating a parallelism between the human and the she-wolf protagonists,
but she also comments on how the emphatic communication between them, positioning them
both as active subjects, puts an end to their subjugation. This way, as Lesley Kordecki comments
in Chapter 26, despite their differences we also perceive their similar motivations, establishing a
bond that offers readers new challenging frameworks of thought that invite them to reconsider
the boundaries between human and non-human animals. Following the basis established in Flys
Junquera’s “Wolves, singing trees, and replicants”, my analysis of Spanish ecofeminist literature
will then focus on some of the works of Rosa Montero and Laura Gallego.

Rosa Montero: Bruna Husky Series

Rosa Montero is an acclaimed Spanish writer and journalist whose works have received a vast
number of awards. Among her many publications, we can find a trilogy that has attracted the at-
tention of ecofeminist literary critics, the Bruna Husky series. The series started in 2011 with the
novel Lágrimas en la lluvia (Tears in Rain, 2012) and the second novel, El peso del corazón (Weight of the
Heart, 2016) in 2015. The trilogy was completed—at least so far—with Los tiempos del odio (2018),
which has not been yet translated into English. The three novels are very popular and have been
acclaimed by both readers and critics, the last one being the recipient of the award Prix Violeta
Negra Occitanie 2020 from the Festival Toulouse Polars du Sud in France. The trilogy focuses on
the experiences of a retired combat android called Bruna Husky. Montero uses the term techno-
human to refer to this kind of creatures, whose physical structure is completely organic since they
are cloned individuals gestated in 14 months thanks to an accelerated growing process (Montero
2018, 23). Therefore, technohumans’ appearance is that of a human—although some attributes

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are enhanced depending on the model—but for a distinctive characteristic: their vertical pupils
similar to those of reptiles or felines (2018, 25). Bruna Husky is then a technohuman who decides
to become a private detective and through the cases she investigates, and the situations she goes
through while doing so, we get to know her and empathize with her.
Inspired by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and by the novel on which the film was based,
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Montero’s novels also present the an-
droids with an expiration date, although in her novels all technohumans are aware of the ten-years
lifetime they have since they are born. Just as with some replicants in Scott’s and Dick’s works,
Bruna Husky becomes obsessed with her expiration date to the extent that throughout the trilogy
we find continuous references to the time she has left. This limited lifetime together with the pain
she went through when her former technohuman lover died shape her character so that she tries
to avoid establishing deep loving relationships with other creatures, which presents her as a selfish
and sometimes even cruel character. However, once we get to know her better, we realize that
her obsession with death comes from her unique personality as she is the only technohuman who
carries real memories—those of her memoirist—instead of artificial ones. This humanizes her and
although she sometimes interprets this as a weakness, we identify with her feelings and her confu-
sion. In the end, we see how Bruna lets her shield down with her relationships with other human
and non-human creatures, even adopting a pet and then a young girl.
The novels are set at the beginning of the twenty-second century and although they are a
mixture of detective fiction and science fiction, they explore many different topics which are
interesting from an ecofeminist approach. The intersection of detective fiction and science fiction
offers new paths for ecofeminist analysis because oppressive behaviours towards the other can be ap-
proached from an outsider’s point of view. In relation to this, Casey A. Cothran explores in Chapter
43 how detective fiction can portray examples of “slow violence” against otherness—­represented
in science fiction through figures such as the alien or the android—which otherwise may have be-
come invisible and intrinsic to the system. Otherness is an essential concept in the trilogy since the
civilization portrayed by Montero includes aliens, technohumans, sentient ­non-human animals,
or mutants, among others. Despite this wide diversity, this t­ wenty-second-century world is still
highly hierarchical, with social differences increased by technological advances and environmen-
tal degradation. In the first place, we can see in several episodes in the novel how being healthy
is directly related to the social status of a person and their economic resources. Artificial implants
of all sorts are common, and although some respond to merely aesthetical reasons, others result
necessary for the wellbeing of the person. An example of this is found in the endorphin pump
that the archivist Yiannis, a friend of Bruna’s, has had inserted in his brain to stop the collapse
of his psychic balance because of depression (Montero 2018, 42). Another example would be the
expensive medical treatment Bruna pays for Gabi, the girl she asks Yiannis to adopt because she is
sick as a result of her exposure to radioactivity since her social status did not allow her to inhabit
an area free of pollution. This treatment is unaffordable to those who most need it, thus perpet-
uating class distinctions based on wealth, but adding the environmental element. In the second
place, the environmental degradation has turned basic rights such as fresh air and clean water into
a commodity and since not everyone has access to them, those with lower incomes are doomed to
inhabit areas with polluted air.
Although many of the issues portrayed in the novels can be associated with ecofeminism—­
oppression towards the other, hierarchical thinking, or the perpetuation of the logic of domination
of women, nature and earth others—the writer does not like to label her work as feminist nor as
environmentalist:

[…] el hecho de considerarte feminista no implica que tus novelas lo sean. Detesto la narrativa
utilitaria y militante, las novelas feministas, ecologistas, pacifistas o cualquier otro -ista que

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pensarse pueda [the fact that you consider yourself a feminist does not imply that your ­novels
are. I hate the utilitarian and militant faction, feminist, environmentalist, pacifist or any
other -ist that may be thought of ].

Despite her rejection of the environmentalist label, the Bruna Husky series address the climate cri-
sis we face nowadays by offering a warning about the situation readers may have to face in the not-
so-distant future. Being asked about her personal concerns regarding the climate crisis, Montero
highlights that she is worried about the current situation since, although she rejects catastrophism,
the problem is “much more serious than we admit” (Cibreiro 2016, 54).5 Thus, despite avoiding
the use of feminist or environmentalist to refer to the Bruna Husky novels, the trilogy portrays
ecofeminist concerns in different ways.
The climate crisis is an essential element in the background of the novels and its consequences
are constantly mentioned in the trilogy—in fact, Iris Ralph in Chapter 44 includes The Wight of
the Heart as an example of climate fiction. Extreme climate events that are currently seen as some-
thing exceptional despite the experts’ warnings become ordinary in Montero’s Earth:

Global warming had not only made the temperature of the planet increase several degrees,
melting the Poles, flooding thousands of kilometres of shores and turning into deserts what
used to be fertile lands, but it had also originated all sorts of climatic instabilities, among them
a thermic inversion of the so called Arctic oscillation, a phenomenon incomprehensible for the
rep but that caused from time to time some unusual and brief waves of extreme cold, one or
two days of copious snow and vertical drops of the thermometers, which in Madrid could
easily reach minus twenty degrees Celsius.
(Montero 2018, 300; emphasis in original) 6

This is just an example of the effects of climate change in the novels, at least some of the ones that
affect all the creatures inhabiting the Earth. The portrayal of the environmental degradation as
a result of human action—or lack of action—on the environment is very present in much of the
science fiction and fantasy written nowadays, as Deirdre C. Byrne points out in Chapter 45.
As we can imagine, the consequences of climate change were more devastating for other spe-
cies since they could not adapt to the disappearance of their natural habitats, as in the case of polar
bears:

A half century had passed since polar bears had become extinct through drowning as the Arc-
tic ice cap melted. A slow and agonizing death for animals capable of swimming desperately
for more than three hundred miles before succumbing to exhaustion.
(Tears 158)

This is an example of how non-human animals are present in the novel, despite the mass extinc-
tion they have been subjected to because of climate change, through metaphors, symbols and
virtual recreations of how the world was once.7
In the novels, we find many examples of how Bruna compares herself to non-human animals,
at some points she identifies herself with a predator, with a lonely bear, or even with a tiger. We
have already mentioned how she does not strictly fit into the category of technohuman because of
her unique memories and for this reason, her status as the other makes these novels so interesting
from an ecofeminist point of view. In relation to the treatment of the other and the portrayal of the
cyborg as a challenge to dualistic thinking, critics have approached this work from different but
somehow related perspectives. For example, Iana Konstantinova’s article “Posthumanism in Rosa
Montero’s Lágrimas en la lluvia and El peso del corazón” highlights the importance of cyborg natures

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and the use of technology in ecocritical studies using the first two novels as an example. Another
perspective is the one offered by Pilar Martínez Quiroga, who focuses on the feminist element
in Montero’s latest novels, including the first two of the Bruna Husky trilogy. In particular, this
work explores the concept of the cyborg as an essential figure in transfeminism because of its
ability to defy established boundaries and categories, an analysis interesting from an ecofeminist
perspective.
Analysing the implications of being the other in such a devastating environment we can point
out Maryanne L. Leone’s “Trans-species Collaborations in Response to Social, Economic, and
Environmental Violence in Rosa Montero’s Lágrimas en la lluvia and El peso del corazón”, which
focuses on how environmental degradation affects more seriously those situated in the lower
levels of the strict hierarchical system portrayed by Montero. Also commenting on this issue, as
well as adding a more complete ecofeminist analysis we find Carmen Flys Junquera’s “Ecofem-
inist Replicants and Aliens: Future Elysiums through an Ethics of Care”, in which she uses an
ecofeminist approach based mainly on Karen Warren’s and Val Plumwood’s ideas to analyse the
first two novels of Montero’s trilogy as well as Joan Sloczewski’s A Door into Ocean and Daughter
of Elysium. In this chapter—which expands some of the ideas from “Wolves, singing trees, and
replicants: Ecofeminist readings of contemporary Spanish novels”—Flys Junquera (2018a, 234)
explores Montero’s novels and how they respond to ecofeminist values by questioning otherness
and the idea of what it means to be human. She also includes a reference to environmental justice
when commenting on the relationship in the novels between wealth and environmental degra-
dation, and how poor people live perpetually condemned since they cannot afford to move to
less-polluted areas nor access expensive medical treatments. Therefore, as we can see, Montero’s
novels offer an interesting example of ecofeminist Spanish literature despite the author’s reticence
about labelling her work. Her portrayal of otherness, of creatures that challenge what is human
or non-human, and her vindication of otherness make the Bruna Husky trilogy a really interesting
piece of work for those who explore how ecofeminist concerns are represented in literature. These
novels exemplify some of the conclusions presented by Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu in Chapter 34 as
the idea that posthuman ecofeminist stories show how all systems are entangled and form an in-
terdependent network in which boundaries between self and others are blurred or even inexistent.

Laura Gallego: Ecofeminist Fantasy?

Whereas Rosa Montero cannot be strictly categorized as a science fiction writer because just a
few of her latest works belong to this genre, if there is one name that Spanish readers associate
with Spanish fantasy—especially four young adult audiences—that is Laura Gallego’s. Gallego
started writing when she was 11 years old, but it was with the fourteenth book that she reached
success and was able to publish her first work when Finis Mundi won the “Barco de Vapor” Prize in
1999. In 2012, she won the National Prize for Children and Young Adult Literature for her novel
Donde los árboles cantan, which will comment on later. She has published more than 20 books and
tales, including her well-known trilogy Memorias de Idhun [The Idhun Chronicles] (2004–2006),
and her most recent trilogy Guardianes de la Ciudadela [Guardians of the Citadel] (2018–2019).
Her works usually portray fantastic worlds with magical creatures and with teenagers or young
adults as protagonists (Laura Gallego 2021). Many of her works have been translated into several
languages, and in 2020 Netflix released the first season of an animated series based on Memorias
de Idhun, which gives an idea of the relevance of her writings. Since her literature usually deals
with magical creatures and worlds, or with young people who suddenly discover their potential,
the treatment of otherness is a frequent theme in her works. I have decided to include her as an
author whose work could be considered interesting from an ecofeminist point of view because
of her novels Las hijas de Tara [Tara’s daughters] (2002)8 and Donde los árboles cantan [Where the trees

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sing] (2011) both present female protagonists whose willingness to become familiar with the other
and with their surroundings will make alternative futures possible. Just as some of the works that
Michelle Deininger analyses in Chapter 42, these two novels deal with women’s roles in a world
whose natural resources are exploited without considering the consequences, while offering some
hope in alternative and more sustainable frameworks of thought.
Las hijas de Tara, which was originally conceived as a script for a 3D animated film that was
never developed (Las hijas de Tara). The novel portrays a future world, Tara, in which nature
and technology are completely polarized, and the humans supporting each side are permanently
confronted. In this dualistic civilization, the reader accompanies the protagonists, the urbanite
Kim and the defender of Tara Keyko, two women coming from opposing societies who will see
their prejudices challenged by their joint efforts to survive and learn the truth about the artificial
intelligence that tries to dominate the world. One of the most interesting aspects of this novel is
that despite the similarities between the planet Tara and the concept of the Earth as Gaia,9 we find
a planet that is not a passive entity but a living creature that fights back after humans “destroyed the
earth, poisoned the air, polluted the sea” (2002, 37; emphasis in original; my translation).10 It is then
when Tara became Mannawinard, an immense jungle that had devoured cities with its wilderness
causing humans a hatred towards nature and its power (2002, 37). This transformation of a passive
nature into an active and vengeful one echoes the concept of Pachamama that Nicolás Campisi
explores in Chapter 17 because this entity may be able to strike back in damaging ways when it is
ignored and not respected, as described in the novel.
Another relevant aspect of the novel from an ecofeminist approach is the presence of the third
protagonist, the biobot AD-23674-M—significantly renamed later as Adam. This artificial being,
magically infused with a soul, trespasses the boundary natural/artificial, thus challenging the be-
liefs the human protagonists had been educated with since childhood and making them reflect on
the porosity of certain boundaries and the need for empathy.
The last, and more significant, element in the novel that can be related to ecofeminism is the
idea of the interconnectedness of life. For the humans who support the natural world, Tara—and
its alter ego Mannawinard—is something more than a planet, it is the energy they can use in the
form of magic. They see Tara as an interconnected web that encompasses all forms of life, an idea
that makes the urbanite Kim wonder how Tara had thus been able to kill so many humans. Keyko
tells her then that the problem was that “humans had forgotten that sacred bond that links us all
to Mother Earth” (Gallego García 2002, 109; my translation).11 At the end of the novel, even the
urbanite Kim, so suspicious of anything that was natural, realizes the power of Tara for those who
are willing to listen to her voice: “Now everyone will be able to listen to Tara’s voice in their
hearts. Now we can all together look for a new way of coexistence between human beings and
Tara, the Earth, the world they live in” (Gallego García 2002, 267; my translation).12 This inter-
dependence of all life forms and the need to envision it to make more sustainable futures possible
is one of the basic ideas of ecofeminism, because it implies acknowledging the agency of all the
entities we share the planet with.
Donde los árboles cantan [Where the trees sing] also portrays some of the ideas presented in the other
novel. Instead of using a futuristic Earth as a setting, Gallego presents a medieval fantasy in which
the young noblewoman Viana is forced to escape an unwanted marriage because as a woman she
has no other choice. In the forest where she hides, she goes through different adventures that show
the reader her boldness and her determination to change the situation of her country. The active
role of nature that is so present in Las hijas de Tara is represented here in the male protagonist, Uri,
who transforms himself temporarily from a tree into a human in order to help save the forest. This
way nature is given a voice, even if it is an anthropomorphic one, and it becomes an active subject
in its own story. In this novel, we also find a female protagonist who has to fight against a hierar-
chical system in which she is forced to escape an unwanted marriage. Therefore, in this work, we

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see again a strong female protagonist whose principles are challenged by the need to survive. As
in Las hijas de Tara, the protagonist is willing to embrace otherness and she does so by learning to
understand the needs of the forest, echoed through Uri: “Despite realizing the fact that her lover is
a tree, she doesn’t reject him. She has learned about the complexity of earth others, their sentience
and intentionality, and she accepts it” (Flys Junquera, 2018b, 145). Actually, when Uri returns to
its original form as a tree, their relationship does not end, since the tree is planted where she lives,
so she can go to him when she wishes to and when she dies, she does so next to the tree, where
she is buried. This relationship in which the dichotomy human/no human is completely erased
shows the potential of fantasy to imagine worlds in which alternative social, cultural and political
systems can be presented as an alternative to our reality (see Waller’s Chapter 46).

Conclusion
As we have seen, in Spain ecofeminism seems to be still limited to philosophy and environmen-
tal activism, but as it becomes progressively better known by society in general, we can expect
to find more ecofeminist literature in the future. Literature is a powerful tool to promote social
changes and authors such as Concha López Llamas, Rosa Montero and Laura Gallego exemplify
this with their works. Thanks to López Llamas readers have become more familiar with the wolf,
a controversial creature because its existence is threatened while at the same time its existence
threatens some cattle breeders. In her work, we can see that only through mutual understanding
and dialogue we can reach a peaceful coexistence, an idea that may be applied to human and
non-human others. This same understanding of how all lives are connected is present in the works
by Rosa Montero and Laura Gallego which have been referred to in this chapter. In the case of
Montero, it is interesting to see how such a renowned writer has chosen a somehow marginal
genre as science fiction to explore issues of otherness, environmental degradation, gender and
environmental justice. Through the character of Bruna Husky, who represents otherness by being
a female technohuman different from other technohumans thanks to her real memories, readers
can appreciate how the culturally established boundaries between human and non-human, nat-
ural and artificial, are blurred through dialogues that continuously force us to rethink what it
means to be human. Laura Gallego’s works also contemplate how the boundaries between human
and non-human are not static but rather in a continuous dialogue that forces us to rephrase our
conception of the world.
The works analysed in this chapter may not be labelled as ecofeminist as such, but they do con-
tain some elements that make them really interesting from an ecofeminist approach. Rosa Mon-
tero’s and Laura Gallego’s novels criticize in different ways the patterns of oppression underlying
our thinking, they make us reflect on the dangers of patriarchal systems, on how our estrangement
from the natural world has turned us oblivious to its needs, and on how the way we dehumanize
others also dehumanizes us. However, the most relevant feature of these works from an ecofeminist
point of view is how they portray that only by understanding the other and by joining forces with
them we can envision an alternative. In this sense, Flys Junquera (2018b 147) points out:

… the parallel dominations of women, poor, and nature are not the most interesting ecofem-
inist aspects of these novels, in my opinion, rather the multiple examples of ethics of care
and the literary strategies these writers employ to endow earth others with respect and moral
consideration.)

In Gallego’s works, we see that only by listening to others’ voices, and thus understating their
concerns, things can be changed. Ecofeminist values defend precisely this idea that since all forms
of life are interconnected, it is only by acknowledging this connection and this interdependence

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that we can start to imagine a more sustainable civilization in which the needs of all its members
are cared for.
This same message is the one we can find in Rosa Montero’s novels, in which all sorts of othered
creatures are presented, from aliens and mutilated humans to technohumans. As Maryanne L.
Leone (2017, 76) highlights in her analysis of the novels, which also presents an analysis of econ-
omy, only by working together with the other we can put an end—or at least try to—to all forms
of domination, whether we talk about sexism, racism or speciesism: “Environmental and social
violence weighs most heavily on individuals and species without economic power. Yet, by com-
ing together, these beings achieve better circumstances for each other”. The power of literature
is exemplified in this works, that whether we talk about androids, trees that turn into humans,
aliens, or cloned organisms, the message that reaches readers is basically the same, that we need
to reflect, that we need to understand that we are only a piece within a larger mechanism, a cell
within an organism, and that only by acknowledging our role in the functioning of our planet we
can envision an alternative and more sustainable futures like the ones literature imagines.

Notes
1 The research for this chapter is part of the project “Proyecto Aglaya “Estrategias de Innovación en
Mitocrítica Cultural”, cofunded by the Autonomous Community of Madrid and the European Social
Fund, Ref: H2019/HUM­5714 (CAM/FSE).
2 It is worth mentioning her the article “Los inicios del ecofeminismo en España” by Ana I. Simón Alegre
on how some Geography women teachers during the Second Spanish Republic included some ecofem-
inist ideas in their teaching even before the concept had been coined.
3 To learn more about the relationship between activism and literature in other countries with a longer
tradition in ecofeminism, see Chapter 25 by Sunaina Jain.
4 For example, the Spanish research group GIECO works on literary works—as well as other cultural
products—from an ecocritical and/or ecofeminist perspective, usually applying these theories to texts
written in English or in French. Some of its members have also worked with Spanish literature, and their
works will be referred to in this chapter.
5 “… una situación mucho más grave de lo que reconocemos.”
6 El calentamiento global no sólo había hecho aumentar la temperatura del planeta varios grados, derretido
los Polos, inundado miles de kilómetros de costas y desertizado tierras antes feraces, sino que además
había originado todo tipo de inestabilidades climáticas, entre ellas una inversión térmica de la llamada
oscilación ártica, un fenómeno incompresible para la rep pero que originaba de cuando en cuando unas
inusitadas y breves olas de intensísimo frío, un día o dos de nieves copiosas y caída a plomo de los ter-
mómetros, que en Madrid podían llegar fácilmente a veinte grados bajo cero.
7 See Irene Sanz’s “Human and Nonhuman Intersections in Rosa Montero’s BRUNA HUSKY Novels”.
8 A second edition of the novel with some changes was published by Minotauro in 2018.
9 See Irene Sanz Alonso, “New Worlds Beyond Reality: Imagined Futures in Laura Gallego’s Las hijas de
Tara
10 “destruía la tierra, envenenaba el aire, contaminaba el mar”.
11 “los hombres han olvidado ese sagrado vínculo que nos une a todos con la Madre Tierra”.
12 “Ahora todos podrán escuchar la voz de Tara en sus corazones. Ahora podemos buscar juntos un nuevo
modo de convivencia entre el ser humano y Tara, la Tierra, el mundo en el que vive”.

References
Cibreiro, Estrella. 2016. “Entrevistas a María Reimóndez, Rosa Montero y Julia Otxoa: El arte de la escrit-
ura y el activismo.” Romance Studies 34, no. 1: 43–63
Flys Junquera, Carmen. 2018a. “Ecofeminist Replicants and Aliens: Future Elysiums through an Ethics of
Care.” Women’s Studies 47, no. 2: 232–250. doi:10.1080/00497878.2018.1430415
———. 2018b. “Wolves, Singing Trees, and Replicants: Ecofeminist Readings of Contemporary Spanish
Novels.” In Literature and Ecofeminism: Intersectional and International Voices, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch
and Sam Mickey, 140–157. New York: Routledge.

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———. 2020. “She Is Not Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf: Concha López Llamas’s Loving Eye for Wolves.” In
Spanish Thinking about Animals, edited by Margarita Carretero-González, 33–48. East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press.
Gallego García, Laura. 2011. Donde los árboles cantan. Madrid: Ediciones SM.
———. 2014. Las hijas de Tara. Madrid: Ediciones SM, 2002.
Herrero, Yayo, Marta Pascual and María González Reyes. 2018. La vida en el centro: voces y relatos ecofeministas.
Madrid: Libros en acción.
Kerslake, Lorraine and Terry Gifford, coord. 2013. Feminismo/s. Ecofeminismo/s: mujeres y naturaleza 22.
Konstantinova, Iana. 2017. “Posthumanism in Rosa Montero’s Lágrimas en la lluvia and El peso del corazón.”
Letras Hispanas 13: 184–192.
Laura Gallego. 2021. “Las hijas de Tara.” Accessed September 8, 2021. https://www.lauragallego.com/
libros/las-hijas-de-tara/curiosidades/
Leone, Maryanne L. 2017. “Trans-species Collaborations in Response to Social, Economic, and Environ-
mental Violence in Rosa Montero’s Lágrimas en la lluvia and El peso del corazón.” Ecozon@ 8, no. 1: 61–78.
doi:10.37536/ECOZONA.2017.8.1
Martínez-Quiroga, Pilar. 2018. “La detective Bruna Husky de Rosa Montero: Feminismo, distopía y con-
ciencia cyborg.” Hispania 101, no. 2 ( June): 306–317.
Montero, Rosa. 2012. Tears in Rain. Translated by Lilit Žekulin Thwaites. Seattle: Amazon Crossing.
———. 2016. Weight of the Heart. Translated by Lilit Žekulin Thwaites. Seattle: Amazon Crossing.
———. 2018. Los tiempos del odio. Madrid: Editorial Planeta.
Puleo, Alicia. 2011. Ecofeminismo para otro mundo posible. Barcelona: Cátedra.
———. 2015. Ecología y género en diálogo interdisciplinar. Madrid: Plaza y Valdés.
Sanz, Irene. 2017. “Human and Nonhuman Intersections in Rosa Montero’s BRUNA HUSKY Novels.”
Science Fiction Studies 44, no. 2: 326–333.
———. 2021. “New Worlds Beyond Reality: Imagined Futures in Laura Gallego’s Las hijas de Tara.” In
Imaginative Ecologies: Inspiring Change through the Humanities, edited by Diana Villanueva-Romero, Lor-
raine Kerslake, and Carmen Flys-Junquera. Leiden: Brill.
Simón Alegre, Ana I. 2013. “Los inicios del ecofeminismo en España.” El Ecologista 76: 54–57.

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 17
SOUTH AMERICAN LITERATURE
AND ECOFEMINISM
Nicolás Campisi

Introduction
“Ecology is a form of revolution,” writes Peruvian theorist and novelist Patricia de Souza (2018,
115; my translation) in her landmark book Ecofeminismo decolonial y crisis del patriarcado. “Through
ecology we women are at the center and not the periphery, we are leading a Copernican revolu-
tion that will bring about another sense of the common, another language, and other modes of
representation” (de Souza 2018, 115–116; my translation). Writing the book in France, the country
where she spent the last years of her life, de Souza reminisces about her childhood in rural Peru,
where she felt that tradition and modernity, pre- and late-capitalism coalesce as part of a baroque
mixture. Citing the work of Ecuadorian theorist Bolívar Echeverría about the Baroque ethos of
Andean societies, de Souza refers to this coexistence of opposite timelines and this social miscege-
nation to relate her belief in the continuity between nature and culture and her early inclination
toward an ecofeminist worldview. It is not a coincidence that the leading activists in the struggle
against mining, hydroelectric, and other large-scale extractive projects are all Indigenous and
Afro-descendent women. As members of the communities that are most affected by the expan-
sion of extractive industries, they are the peoples who are espousing a critical and revolutionary
consciousness by re-writing the original myth that women were created in the image and likeness
of men (see Jain’s Chapter 25). At the heart of de Souza’s theory of ecofeminism is the creation
of a new mode of representation that will feminize language, rescue the voice of the voiceless,
and assume a collective discourse that will break away from the neoliberal exaltation of the first
person singular.
As de Souza issued her call to elaborate on a feminist and decolonial history of the present, an
activist collective by the name of Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) was tearing apart the patriarchal
structures that make up Argentine society. On June 3, 2015, Ni Una Menos organized a march
against the murder of a pregnant 14-year-old girl that drew thousands of women in front of the
Argentine Congress and across 80 cities nationwide. In her book La potencia feminista, Verónica
Gago—cofounder of the movement—brought to light the mechanisms of exploitation and ex-
traction that take the form of a “war in and against the body of women” (2019, 61; my translation).
In addition to the structural forms of violence that women experience at home, at work, and in
public, Gago highlights the inseparability between the domestic subordination of the female body
and the colonial exploitation of communal lands under late-stage capitalism. She coins the cate-
gory “bodies-territories” to refer to the colonial and sexual division of labor that inaugurated the
subjection of women, nature, and colonies as the integral motto of Western civilization. Through

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 South American Literature and Ecofeminism

the expropriation and exploitation of communal lands—urban, rural, Indigenous, and Afro-­
descendent—transnational corporations are abusing the life of each member of the community,
to the extent that it is impossible to differentiate between the individual and the collective body
(Gago 2019, 90). The term also points to the fact that bodies are not experienced individually,
but in a network of affects and possibilities that extend beyond the self and into other members
of the community, both human beings and nonhuman actants. As opposed to the logic of private
property, the concept of bodies-territories calls for other forms of representation that displace
the human as the main victim of dispossession and acknowledge the existence of larger natural
forces that are suffering the consequences of the extractive paradigm. By recognizing the non-­
anthropocentric epistemologies of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities, the notion of
bodies-territories is at the forefront of ecofeminist struggles for land rights across South America.
Embracing de Souza’s and Gago’s invitation to search for feminist modes of representation of
the current ecological crisis, this chapter will trace recent cultural and theoretical production by
South American writers and intellectuals that lays bare the relationship between the female body
and the communal land as fields of the battle against the onslaught of extractive activities. The first
part of the chapter will provide an overview of the work of Indigenous and Afro-South Ameri-
can writers and activists who have deployed ancestral knowledges about ecology and defense of
the land to disassemble the binary oppositions of Western epistemologies. The second part of the
chapter sheds light on novels by South American writers that belong to an aesthetic category that
I call ecohorror: the representation of end-of-the-world imaginaries around pesticides, slaughter-
houses, garbage disposal, and global pandemics that seek to affectively move readers and compel
them to take a political stance. The last section will examine ecofeminist activism in the wake of
the Ni Una Menos movement, which spread rapidly across the Americas and gave new force to
sociopolitical struggles that had been silenced after the full embrace of neoliberalism in the region.
The writers and intellectuals that I discuss here conceive their work as a generative practice: a
search for new points of view and affective bonds that expand our understanding of what it means
to inhabit a body, a territory, and a nature-culture in the face of climate disaster.

Indigeneity, Afro-Latinidad, and Land Rights in the Andes and the Amazon
The Indigenous and Afro-descendent women who are leading the struggles against extractive
industries refer to themselves as defenders of life. Yet many of these women are not considered
legitimate political actors by the leaders of transnational corporations, who only speak to male
union organizers when a political decision needs to be made (Gago 2019, 100). This connection
between colonial and patriarchal social structures is evident throughout the Andean region, where
neoliberal policies have enabled the encroachment of mining and oil corporations in Indigenous
territories and neglected the rights of Pachamama, the name given to “Mother Earth” in the
Quechua language—the earthly forces found in nature and more-than-human beings. As Miriam
Tola (2019, 196–197) has shown in her exhaustive history of the concept, early European explor-
ers equated the Indigenous notion of Pachamama with the Catholic virtues of the Virgin Mary,
taking part in an exercise of colonial translation that sought to explain an Indigenous concept
through Western dichotomies of male/female, nature/culture, and life/death. Moreover, as K. M.
Ferebee points out in Chapter 48, the trope of nature as a fertile woman reproduces the stereotype
of heteronormative and reproductive female bodies as symbols of health and purity. According
to this type of environmental narrative, fleeing to nature amounts to cleansing oneself of a sick
body and soul (see Ferebee’s Chapter 48). For Indigenous communities, however, Pachamama is
neither a gendered notion nor a benign force or a symbol of fertility. Instead, the earthly powers
of Pachamama can be damaging when communities fail to treat it as a living entity and respect its
inherent rights. When the women leaders of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities of the

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Andes are silenced by the heads of transnational corporations, they are victims of acts of violence
in which gender, extractivism, and colonial rule are inseparable entities.
The work of Marisol de la Cadena on the “earth-beings” of Andean politics provides a point of
entry into a discussion about the hybrid role of Indigenous leaders as both labor union organizers
and mediators between humans and other-than-human beings such as mountains and lakes. De
la Cadena (2010, 338) illuminates the cosmopolitics or the pluriversal politics of Indigenous com-
munities that consider more-than-human entities as sentient beings whose existence needs to be
considered in political decision-making. She argues that a pluriversal politics acknowledges that a
conflict involves two different worlds, human and nonhuman, and that this distinction forces us to
redefine the role of politics and the scope of political issues. De la Cadena’s claims parallel the work
of a number of material ecocritics who are reclaiming earthly beings such as mountains as subjects
of law that are endowed with their own rights and agencies. In Chapter 32, Basak Ağ ın draws
our attention to the nonlinear temporality of earthly beings, which stands against the supposed
neutrality and objectivity of male-centered narratives of nature. This ecofeminist stance questions
the dualist divisions between mind/body and reason/nature to open a relational paradigm that
remains attentive to Indigenous cosmogonies.
The Aymara/Bolivian theorist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui argues that a moment of planetary
crisis such as this one offers us the possibility to amend our path to self-destruction. Through the
notion of chi’xi—an Aymara word that designates a gray tonality—she refers to entities that in-
habit an in-between space, neither black nor white, neither male nor female, which includes natu-
ral forces but also the indeterminate place that Indigenous peoples and mestizos occupy in Andean
societies. Rivera Cusicanqui (2018, 81) argues that a chi’xi epistemology of a planetary nature can
help Indigenous communities to connect with their ancestral knowledges and local territories.
She proposes an intercultural ecology—an economy of barter and craftwork as opposed to the
passive consuming of new and globalized products—as a mode of caring for the world that sur-
rounds us. According to Rivera Cusicanqui (2018, 51–52), only the emergence of communities
inspired by feminist, ecological, and Indigenous values will allow us to find organic and healthy
ways to do things on and with the planet. By considering nature as a polyphonic canvas filled with
feminist stories and values, an ecofeminist vision that enters in conversation with Ağ ın’s notion
of “mattertextuality,” Rivera Cusicanqui posits walking as the medium that allows people to re-
connect with the suffering of the pacha, or earth, and ensures the survival of the human and the
healing of the planet (see Ağ ın’s chapter 32). This is because in Aymara Indigenous epistemologies
the past is in front of us and the future on our back—a dialectical image that brings to the present
knowledges and practices that were considered long extinct and obsolete.
Contemporary Indigenous and mestiza poets are laying bare the multiple forms of violence
that women’s bodies and ancestral territories are suffering under the reign of global capitalism.
A collection of poems by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, PALABRARmas (1984), links the act of
writing with the task of plowing the earth. The title proposes a play on the words palabrar (to
talk), armas (weapons), and labrar (to cultivate or to plow the earth). Literature is cast as a cultural
technology that Indigenous peoples can now turn against their oppressors, considering that alpha-
betization was used by the Latin American elites to erase the cultural traditions of native peoples
and shape them into citizens of modern republics. Based on a Quechua children’s game that sought
to increase the fertility of mountains and natural forces, the PALABRARmas poems are riddles
that explore the hidden meanings of Spanish words. Vicuña thinks of the poems as examples of
Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed,” texts that disassemble the language of the oppressor
and resist the passive consumption of globalized products promoted by neoliberal societies. Else-
where, Vicuña’s body of work engages with the detritus of late capitalism, such as in the so-called
basuritas or “little garbage”—assemblages made from the discarded materials that she gathered on
Concón beach, an ecosystem that is under threat by the presence of oil refineries and industrial

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fishing. In rescuing foundational stories by the Guarani, Mapuche, and Maya Quiché peoples,
the PALABRARmas poems are ancestral forms of caring for the earth and weapons against the
endangerment of Indigenous languages.
The work of Mapuche poet Daniela Catrileo illustrates the intersectional nature of South
American ecofeminism by articulating the relationship between colonialism, extractivism, rac-
ism, and gender violence. Her poetry collection Río herido (2016) represents the injustices of the
neoliberal present through the erased history of Wallmapu, the historical territory inhabited by
the Mapuche peoples. The poetic voices explore the displacement of the Mapuche in a suburban
setting that appears to be Santiago. The present of the Mapuche is one fraught with loss, violence,
and forgetfulness. The book chronicles the search for Indigenous origins in a city that has dam-
aged its natural landscape: the “wounded river” could be said to be the Mapocho, where the bod-
ies of political dissidents were dumped by the military during the Pinochet dictatorship. Catrileo
foregrounds how instruments of modernization such as the railroads and the electric grid came at
the expense of the extinction of Indigenous lives and knowledges. As opposed to the temporality
of the wires as technologies of modern capitalism, the poet uses the figure of the umbilical cord to
propose the spiraled timeline of Indigenous epistemologies. Reminiscent of the ecofeminist forms
of action that Iris Ralph examines in Chapter 44, Catrileo’s poetic voices fight against the occu-
pation of Mapuche ancestral territories by the timber industry. The simultaneous violence against
the earth, mapudungún (the Mapuche language), and the female body is only repaired through the
act of listening to the stories of others: the making of a coming community.
As exemplified by the 2019 wildfires that ravaged more than 900 hectares of land, the Amazon
rainforest is one of the ecosystems most forcefully impacted by large-scale extractive industries.
Indigenous poet Márcia Wayna Kambeba of the Omágua/Kambeba people has outlined the oc-
cupation and disappearance of her native territories in Brazil’s Amazon Basin. In O tempo do clima
(The Time of Climate), Wayna Kambeba (2019, 70) observes with a melancholic gaze the destruc-
tion of her home and the extinction of its native species as the forest is transformed by multina-
tional companies into a semiarid backcountry. She narrates the continuities between ecological
devastation caused by a hydroelectric dam and wildcat goldminers and the erasure of Indigenous
cultural traditions such as the fishing of the pirabutão—a type of Amazonian fish that is quickly
disappearing—or the cultivation of the cassava. As a solution to the constant attacks of human
reason, where human and reason come to be associated with white urban modernity, Wayna
Kambeba (2019, 70) dwells on the circular temporality of her Indigenous community as embodied
by the tribe’s ancient elder. Considering that in Portuguese the word “tempo” designates both
time and weather, Wayna Kambeba’s poetry connects the end of times with the end of nature as
we know it. “The Time of Climate” is a call to attend to the nonlinear and layered rhythms of
nature as an alternative to the Amazon’s dystopian present.
A key figure to think about the violence of coloniality in the Global South is Afro-Ecuadorian
writer Luz Argentina Chiriboga, whose work ponders the meaning of Blackness in the face of
global catastrophe. A native of Esmeraldas, a coastal city whose mangrove ecosystem has suffered
from recurrent deforestation by lumber companies, Chiriboga’s poetry puts together a liquid
world in which Afro-Hispanic cultural memory acts as a source of consolation and solace to the
violence of the extractive view. In Las huellas de la lluvia (The Traces of the Rain), Chiriboga explores
the language of water during a storm that damages the precarious dwelling of an Afro-descendent
woman who prays to Yemayá, the Yoruba water spirit, to come rescue her from her precarious
present (2013, 7–8). Her Manual de ecología para niños (1992) introduces the young public to our
planet’s diversity of species and ecosystems, but also paints a grim portrait of ecological destruction
through the disappearance of marine life and industrial pollution.
Motherhood, political violence, and the liquid worlds of Afro-Colombian communities fea-
ture prominently in Lorena Salazar Masso’s Esta herida llena de peces (2021). The novel follows a

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white mother and her Black foster child as they travel by canoe through Colombia’s Atrato River
in search of the child’s biological mother. Although the mother-narrator expresses her feeling of
illegitimacy for raising somebody else’s child, an Afro-Colombian woman whom she befriends
during the trip convinces her that “children belong more to the river than to their mother” (Sala-
zar Masso 2021, 121; my translation). This statement underscores the novel’s ecofeminist stance,
which brings to the fore the ancestral rituals of Afro-Colombian riverside communities in the
face of ecological and political violence: the wildfires that ravage the region’s forests, the toxic
pollution of the Atrato River because of gold and platinum mining, and Colombia’s decades-long
armed conflict. In fact, the Atrato River is the first body of water in Latin America to have been
recognized as a subject of law (Svampa and Viale 2021, 212). The novel’s denouement is based
on the 2002 Bojayá massacre, in which the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
murdered half of a town’s population in order to take control of the Chocó Department region.
“The Atrato River is a Black woman feeding her children” (Salazar Masso 2021, 124; my transla-
tion) says the narrator by the end of the novel, highlighting the struggles and sustainable practices
of Afro-descendent women against a backdrop of drug-related violence and the appropriation of
rivers and territories for the development of extractive megaprojects.
The struggles of Afro-descendent environmental activists appear in Juan Cárdenas’ novel
Elástico de sombra (2019), which chronicles the search for a centuries-old Afro-Colombian mar-
tial arts technique called “juegos de sombra” or “shadow games.” The novel registers the oral
tradition of Afro-Colombian macheteros (martial artists) of the Cauca region as two of them,
Don Sando and Miguel, go after the erased origins of this ancestral dance. A defense mechanism
that allows the macheteros to blend in with the dark and attack their opponent by surprise, the
shadow games were appropriated by the nation-state when it recruited Afro-Colombians to fight
against Peru on the Leticia Incident or Colombia-Peru War of 1932. As they travel to the depths
of the forest in search of the pre-Republican past, the macheteros encounter an Indigenous and
Afro-Colombian minga (a Quechua word that refers to a collective effort for the common good)
led by the human rights and environmental activist Francia Márquez, who engages them in the
conflicts of our neoliberal present. A recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018,
Márquez became an activist when mining and hydroelectric companies appropriated the ancestral
lands of her community in La Toma, Cauca, and has since survived multiple attempts against her
life. In consonance with the work of pioneer ecofeminist activists such as Wangari Maathai and
Alice Walker, which Sunaina Jain examines in Chapter 25, Márquez delivers a speech denounc-
ing “the global machine of death” that is controlled nowadays by the descendants of the people
who enslaved her Afro-Colombian ancestors (Cárdenas 2019, 65; my translation). What Márquez
claims is that the work of their Indigenous and Afro-Colombian ancestors earned them the right
to inhabit these territories, as Afro-Colombians are, not the owners, but “the caregivers, the
guardians of these lands” (Cárdenas 2019, 65; my translation). At this moment of unprecedented
crisis, the words of Indigenous and Afro-descendent women such as Francia Márquez remind us
of the connections between extractive capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, and invite us to
conceive other ways of living together.

Fictions of Ecohorror in the Southern Cone and Brazil

South American literature is also bridging the boundaries between ethics and aesthetics through
novels of ecohorror and planetary damage. By building parallels between somatic illness and en-
vironmental decay, contemporary writers are drawing attention to key ecofeminist debates of our
present such as the effects of industrial pesticides on women’s bodies or the imbrication between
patriarchal and ecological violence in the South American meat-packing industry. As Heather
Houser argues (2014, 7), dystopian novels use negative affects such as fear and disgust to conduct

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readers from ecological awareness to ethical action. Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (Fe-
ver Dream, 2014) reproduces the effects of synthetic pesticides on the human body through the
dizzying dialogue between David, a child who has been poisoned six years prior to the start of
the plot, and Amanda, a suburban mother who has fled the city with her daughter Nina to seek
refuge in the countryside. Instead of finding the idyllic landscape that she was searching for—a
reproduction of the fantasies of endless wealth that Argentine politicians have projected onto the
country’s agricultural and cattle industries since the dawn of the nation—Amanda encounters the
toxic space of a soy plantation that is controlled by the invisible hand of an extractive corporation.
The dialogue between David and Amanda takes place in the darkroom of a rural hospital where
no doctor is to be found, next to a “waiting room” where the poisoned children are taken in lieu
of a school. Most of the children are unable to read or write because of the somatic complications
caused by their exposure to pesticides. The only caregivers are women who have received no
formal training nor support from state institutions. Motherhood turns out to be impossible in
this town that lies outside of the democratic networks of the nation. By depicting the impossible
task of raising children in landscapes of neocolonial extraction, Distancia de rescate puts together an
ecofeminist critique of the modern nation-state that is run by male politicians from their urban
headquarters at the expense of the vulnerable bodies of women-nurses.
The links between somatic and ecological illness are also depicted in Lina Meruane’s Fruta
podrida (2007), a novel about the precarious working conditions of the temporeras (female part-
time workers) of the Chilean fruit industry. The novel follows the lives of María and Zoila, two
sisters who work picking fruit without either a fixed contract or proper equipment to protect
them from toxic pollutants. María is a chemist who is charged with producing perfect fruit for
the agricultural company, though the hazardous conditions of working in the field prompt her
to boycott her bosses by poisoning a shipment of fruit. Zoila, on the other hand, suffers from a
degenerative illness caused by her daily exposure to pesticides. As her body deteriorates like “a
recently fumigated bug” (Meruane 2007, 15; my translation), Zoila bears witness to the dispos-
session of contemporary capitalism as the bodies of the temporeras are sentenced to a slow and
painful death. Like Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate, Fruta podrida unfolds in the feverish temporality
of pesticide poisoning, which the narrator calls “the disturbing present of the plague” (Meruane
2007, 75; my translation). The formal elements of the novel assimilate this precarious condition
by incorporating a “Notebook of decomposition,” a series of poems that Zoila writes in order to
make sense of the “saturated waiting time” that her life has become after she is unable to continue
working for the company (Meruane 2007, 55; my translation). When Zoila decides to travel to
the north to get medical treatment, she clashes with a system that considers her an undocumented
citizen and is not able to treat her even though it consumes the very products of her daily labor.
Through the horror incited by the rotten body of the Chilean fruit workers, Fruta podrida calls our
attention to the inequities of the global commodities market and asks us to explore other forms of
social organizing based on reciprocity and redistribution of the common.
Pesticide fictions such as Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate and Meruane’s Fruta podrida build
bridges between literature and activism by using the horror genre to lay bare the silent and invis-
ible nature of agrochemical poisoning. One of the world’s most renowned ecofeminist activists,
Vandana Shiva, has spoken out against Monsanto’s installation of a plant for transgenic corn in
Córdoba, Argentina, and supported this region’s struggle in the seed freedom movement. As Su-
naina Jain shows in Chapter 25, Shiva’s fight against GMO crops and biopiracy has underscored
the need to move from an agribusiness-based model to agroecological ways of farming and secur-
ing food sovereignty. By writing open-ended novels that convey anxieties over people’s exposure
to pesticide drift, authors like Schweblin and Meruane emphasize human enmeshment with the
more-than-human world in order to conduct readers to an awareness of this silent epidemic,
whose effects include cancer, miscarriages, breathing problems, and malformations. Both novels

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could be referred to as “material autobiographies,” a concept that K. M. Ferebee uses in Chapter

48 to describe literary works that build parallels between the human body and the earth and pres-
ent personal journeys that seek to unveil the origins of the protagonists’ illness. Through novels
that show the effects of agrochemical poisoning without explicitly mentioning words like pesti-
cides or glyphosate, Schweblin and Meruane make use of a procedure that Ferebee describes as
the material autobiography’s crisis of interpretation. Unable to provide answers about the origins
of the protagonists’ somatic illness, both novels bridge the gap between literature and activism by
inviting readers to continue searching for its causes on their own.
Works of ecohorror written by South American women writers tend to privilege the actions of
male characters to show that modern nation-building has produced frightening scenarios of colo-
nial violence, climate denialism, and patriarchal oppression. As Iris Ralph contends in ­Chapter 44,
climate fiction associates feminist action with collective modes of caring, cooperation, and con-
servation, while equating masculinist behavior with passivity and the reproduction of the status
quo. Ralph argues that ecofeminist cli-fi tends to focus on the nonhuman beings that have fallen
prey to the colonial and masculine logic of domination, in which women are less valuable than
men and nature is inferior to humans. Ecohorror fictions that center around the slaughterhouse
and meatpacking industries reveal the inextricable relationship between the capitalist and femi-
cide machine of modern South American republics, which have combined ecological abuse and
gender violence as part of their power mechanisms. Moreover, these ecohorror fictions reveal that
sustainable ecological practices are doomed to fail if the reproductive labor of women continues to
be undervalued and rendered invisible by the patriarchal dynamics of neoliberal capital.
Whereas the fathers of the Argentine nation imagined that agriculture and cattle farming
would bring progress and prosperity, Agustina Bazterrica’s Cadáver exquisito (Tender is the Flesh,
2017) shows that these patriarchal fantasies have created highly unequal societies in which the
bulk of the population, and especially women, are seen as nothing more than bodies to be ex-
ploited. After a highly infectious epidemic kills all the nation’s cattle, the novel’s unnamed society
goes through a so-called Transition that allows cattle ranchers to raise “special meat,” a euphe-
mism that refers to low-income people who are put in cages and slaughtered for their consumption
by the upper classes. Whereas the rich have access to high-quality meat, which in this context
designates the bodies of young and healthy women, the immigrants and the country’s poor are left
to eat the drug-infused bodies of old people and are referred to as “Scavengers” or carroñeros in
the original Spanish version of the novel—a word that recalls the cartoneros or litter pickers that
emerged in Argentina following the 2001 socioeconomic collapse. Just as Distancia de rescate and
Fruta podrida create an eerie atmosphere by avoiding the explicit mention of the word pesticides,
Cadáver exquisito derives its gothic qualities from the government’s measure to forbid words like
human or cannibalism. The novel’s protagonist, Marcos Tejo, works at a meat processing plant
and steals a young woman that he uses to fulfill his frustrated fantasies of becoming a father, only
to kill her after she gives birth.
Almost no women feature in the short novels of Afro-Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia, whose
body of work revolves around the brutal jobs of her country’s precariat. This deliberate lack of
female characters emphasizes the marginal status that women occupy in Brazil’s labor economy.
De gados e homens (2013) follows a week in the life of Edgar Wilson, who has survived a mining
explosion and is now in charge of performing the most abject part of the slaughter process: exe-
cuting the cows with a blow on the head. Slaughterhouse workers such as Edgar Wilson are unable
to eat the very meat that they help to produce, either because they are disgusted by it—like the
protagonist of Bazterrica’s novel—or because they cannot afford to buy it on grocery stores. In
O trabalho sujo dos outros (The Dirty Work of Others, 2009), we encounter Erasmo Wagner, a waste
collector who points out that the richer the neighborhood, the more trash he is bound to collect.
The drama of this short novel ensues when the waste collectors go on strike in protest of their low

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wages and the streets of Rio de Janeiro become infested with rats and contagious diseases. The
advent of this apocalyptic scenario underscores the vital importance of the work of waste pickers,
which is perceived by the rest of society as an indecent job that turns a human being into a beast.
Maia’s museum of horrors puts together an ecofeminist imaginary that is in line with the other
fictions of environmental decay written by South American female authors. These fictions of eco-
horror lay bare the patriarchal structures that continue to treat the land and the body of women
as sites of extraction and sacrifice.

#NiUnaMenos and Ecofeminist Activism

Following the mass protests of the Ni Una Menos movement against femicides in Argentina, the
feminist strike became a transnational tool for connecting the various forms of violence suffered
by women—economic, domestic, public—with the logic of the extractive gaze and its occupation
of Indigenous and Afro-South American territories. In October 2019, the mass demonstrations in
Chile against privatization and economic inequality, now known by the name of estallido social
or social outburst, made international headlines through a photo of the Chilean flag that soared
alongside the symbol of the Mapuche Nation. This powerful moment of popular, Indigenous, and
antineoliberal struggle conjured the unfinished task of reclaiming the ancestral territories that
began to be seized after the arrival of Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia. Moreover, the root
cause of the protest as well as the militarized response by the Chilean government brought to light
the open wounds of a nation that is still haunted today by the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship.
The fight of the Chilean youth against the exploitation of bodies and the extraction of territories
became inextricably tied with the decades-old search for the remains of the disappeared by the
Mujeres de Calama (Women of Calama) in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The use of the desert as a
dumping ground for the bodies of the disappeared reflects the continuities between the violence
against dissident bodies and the systematic expropriation of communal lands.
Written in the wake of the Ni Una Menos movement, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s novel Las
aventuras de la China Iron (The Adventures of China Iron, 2017) takes up its call to revisit national
histories of gender violence and exclusion by rewriting the foundational epic poem of Argentine
literature: El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) by José Hernández. Whereas the poem follows the title
character—a Gaucho or skilled horseman—as he is drafted to fight in the army against the Indige-
nous populations of the Pampas, Cabezón Cámara’s queer and feminist retelling shifts its attention
to Fierro’s wife China, who falls for a Scottish settler named Liz. By focusing on China’s and Liz’s
journey through the flora, fauna, and skeletal remains of the Argentine desert—which the narra-
tor (Cabezón Cámara 2020, 49) describes as “a land of botanical adventure; the most important
thing that happens there happens to the seed, it happens unseen and unheard”—The Adventures
of China Iron employs writing strategies that are espoused by material ecofeminist scholars. I am
thinking of Ağ ın’s notion of “mattertext,” which she defines in Chapter 32 as the entanglement
between nonhuman matter, the human body, and women’s writing. The enmeshment between
inanimate ­m atter and storytelling becomes evident in the novel’s criticism of Great Britain’s
­fossil-fuel ­empire, which the narrator likens to a “mouth where everything becomes fuel for its
own insatiable speed” (Cabezón Cámara 2020, 40). As opposed to the conception of the female
body as dispensable that lies behind the proliferation of femicides in the region (López 2020, 8),
Cabezón Cámara puts together a free-flowing and vitalist writing style that opens itself up to the
enmeshment of the female body with the land, echoing the ecofeminist slogan “our bodies, our
territories.” Moreover, in line with Ağ ın’s contention that contemporary ecofeminists have reval-
ued the mythological figure of Medusa by casting it as an emblem of social and earthly justice, The
Adventures of China Iron debunks the foundational myth of the Argentine republic that associates
progress with the actions of white, European, and heteronormative men.

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 Nicolás Campisi

Conclusion
Even though the ecofeminist battles led by Indigenous and Afro-descendent women have helped
us to conceive bodies and territories as more than private property, South America continues to be
one of the most dangerous regions in the world for environmental activists. In fact, Latin Amer-
ica is the continent with the most murders of environmental and human rights activists, who are
victims of the presence of large-scale corporate actors that are usually endorsed by the region’s
low-intensity democracies (Svampa 2019, 35). The work of Colombian artist and activist Carolina
Caycedo might serve as a conclusion to the broad overview of South American ecofeminist litera-
ture that I provided in this book chapter. In an ongoing project entitled “Be Dammed,” Caycedo
approaches the privatization of bodies of water by large-scale hydroelectric companies such as the
Quimbo dam in southern Colombia. Her work combines satellite imagery of the waterways that
have been intervened and redirected by extractive companies, found objects such as fishing instru-
ments that she collected from the fishermen whose livelihoods were affected by the construction
of the dams, and performance pieces that she calls “geochoreographies”—collaborative gestures
and actions between the members of the communities that lie on the banks of the river using the
body as an instrument of political dissent. Caycedo’s work brings to the fore the valuable concept
of bodies-territories that is embraced by South American ecofeminist writers. By reminding us
that natural landscapes are part of embodied experience, ecofeminist authors tell us that our bodies
are never singular but part of wider entanglements of human and nonhuman forces that we can
no longer afford to ignore.

References
Cabezón Cámara, Gabriela. 2020. The Adventures of China Iron. Translated by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona
Macintyre. Edinburgh: Charco Press.
Cárdenas, Juan. 2019. Elástico de sombra. Madrid: Sexto Piso.
Catrileo, Daniela. 2016. Río herido. Santiago: Edicola.
Chiriboga, Luz Argentina. 2013. Multiplica las llamas. Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana Benjamín
Carrión.
de la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond
‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2: 334–370.
Gago, Verónica. 2019. La potencia feminista: o el deseo de cambiarlo todo. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón.
Houser, Heather. 2014. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect. New York: Columbia
University Press.
López, María Pia. 2020. Not One Less: Mourning, Disobedience and Desire. Translated by Frances Riddle.
Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Meruane, Lina. 2007. Fruta podrida. Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2018. Un mundo ch’ixi es possible: Ensayos desde un presente en crisis. Buenos Aires:
Tinta Limón.
Salazar Masso, Lorena. 2021. Esta herida llena de peces. Madrid: Editorial Tránsito.
de Souza, Patricia. 2018. Ecofeminismo decolonial y crisis del patriarcado. Santiago: Los Libros de la Mujer Rota.
Svampa, Maristella. 2019. “Antropoceno, perspectivas críticas y alternativas desde el Sur global.” In Futuro
presente: perspectivas desde el arte y la política sobre la crisis ecológica y el mundo digital, edited by Graciela Sper-
anza, 19–36. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.
–—— and Enrique Viale. 2021. El colapso ecológico ya llegó: una brújula para salir del (mal)desarrollo. Buenos Aires:
Siglo XXI.
Tola, Miriam. 2019. “Pachamama.” In An Ecotopian Lexicon, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and
Brent Ryan Bellamy, 194–203. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wayna Kambeba, Márcia. 2019. “The Time of Climate.” Translated by Tiffany Higgins. World Literature
Today 93, no. 3: 70.

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 18
BRAZILIAN LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Izabel F. O. Brandão

Introduction
The first known document written in the Portuguese, language about Brazil—The Letter of Pero
Vaz de Caminha—dates back to the sixteenth century and is a historical chronicle (Bosi 1999,
13). Yet, such a document sent to the Portuguese king, D. Manuel, unveils the newly discovered
land in all its splendor, and the first impressions of nature along with its naked inhabitants, the
Indigenous people. This letter can be considered as “the first attempt to produce through the
written word an image and a value judgment of the men [sic], and the region” (Roncari 2002,
20).1 Moreover, it is “the first contact Brazil had, as an object, with the written word, therefore,
with literature” (Roncari 2002, 20).
This context helps explaining my choice to write about Brazilian literature and Ecofeminism
in that it took nearly four centuries for Brazil to become independent from Portugal. Although
the countries share the same language, it is a different language. As it is also different in the Afri-
can countries that speak Portuguese.2 For we all have different and conflicting cultural contexts,
which means diverse literatures, all seeking the definition of a voice of our own, as well as the
need for legitimizing a sense of belonging, as argued by Melanie Duckworth, in relation to Aus-
tralian literature, in Chapter 6.3 Paulina Chiziane, from Mozambique, won the 2021 Literature
Nobel Prize. This fact shows that the consolidation of the voice of the literature of her country is
underway. Ours in Brazil also needs to follow a similar path.
Hence, this chapter aims to provide an overview of Brazilian literature focusing on women
writers, and more directly on contemporary poets—Beatriz Brandão, Ana Maria Marques, Luciene
Nascimento, Lucinda Nogueira Persona, Ana Elisa Ribeiro, and Luíza Romão—and a selected
sample of green themes at work for them so as to cooperate in turning them into “seen” and “read”
referents for an international audience outside the borders of Brazil. I shall approach them with the
help of ecofeminism, for it may open a path for an understanding of these women poets from an
ethical perspective that does not deny them, but also connects them with the nonhuman world, and
the need for liberation from oppression, as argued by Andrew David King in Chapter 49.

Brazilian Women Writers: A Cultural Absent Referent

Brazilian academy more often than not has left women writers out of the national literary canon
with the occasional exception of writers like Rachel de Queiroz (1910–2003), the first woman
writer to become a member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras (ABL, or Brazilian Academy of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-19195
 Izabel F. O. Brandão

Letters), in 1977, or Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), whose literature has been introduced to the
world by the French critic Hélène Cixous, or Cecília Meireles (1901–1954), one of the national
poets, well known in the country.4 Very little was known of what women wrote in Brazil or if
they wrote in the nineteenth century (or before), known for its relevance to literature throughout
the world (Muzart 1999).
Constância Lima Duarte (2019) claims the use of the term “memoricídio” (memoricide) for the
invisibility of women writers in the Brazilian literary canon. The absent referent, a concept de-
vised by Carol Adams (2010), refers primarily to violence against nonhuman animals. As a cultural
metaphor, it may be seen in association with the oppression of women as well. For Adams (2010,
68), “in descriptions of cultural violence women are also the absent referent.” There is clearly a
connection between Adams’s absent referent and Duarte’s use of memoricide, for both refer to
violence and oppression, either physical or symbolic.
My aim at beginning this chapter with such a general view of what Brazilian literature by
women is like is to reinforce the idea that some of the writers of the past were interested in nature,
perhaps in a pastoral way (Gifford 1999), but with the understanding that this was what they could
write at that time, sometimes even disrupting the order, which was (still is) patriarchal in Brazil,
a country whose lush rainforest was still preserved, and seen as almost a sanctuary for those who
owned the land alongside the humans under their possession.5

Seeing Voices: Green Themes at Work

If one could only half open/the door, face the minute/flower, bird, well inventory/that nature ostentates/
in such an unmeasurable luxury/and so unaware!/But by any chance is there a door?/asks Drummond.
—Marly de Oliveira

Women’s writing in Brazil is connected to the history of feminism in the country (Duarte 2003;
Muzart 1999, 2000), and, as noted in a previous publication (Brandão 2017), from the four mo-
ments that define this, two refer to the nineteenth century, and the others to the twentieth.
The study of such writing has its starting point from the late 1970s through to the 1980s. The
­t wenty-first century sees that the literature produced by Brazilian women writers—either fiction
or poetry—is established both in terms of maturity and quality, which indicates that the search
for a voice is well underway.6
The poets chosen for this chapter have published their works in the twenty-first century. Yet,
their poems find an echo in what King describes in Chapter 49 as an international propagation of
“ecofeminist poetry and poetics” during the twentieth century. Some are very young, others are
older, but their poems share a “movement across bodies” that reveals interchanges and intercon-
nections that reweave, and dislocate images in a trans-corporeal way (Stacy Alaimo 2008). They
belong to a “human-sensitive environmentalism” (Sreejith; Rangarajan 2018, 168) connected to
a language of emotion, perhaps with a different ethic from that originally present in Keralan life
narratives, but they are all the same, in relationships that reveal a continuity between human and
nonhuman (or more-than-human [Alaimo 2008]), as also argued by Sangita Patil in Chapter 8.
In their many publications (either solo or in collections with other poets), they convey images
that reveal a fight against the injustice that is present in our understanding of how ecology and
the environment are realized (Sherilynn MacGregor 2017). Here, my focus is just on a few green
themes for, in more than one way, the poets deal with the destructive power of humanity.
I would like to start with the poem “Morte” (Death) by Ana Elisa Ribeiro (1975–), a prolific
poet from Minas Gerais, the Brazilian Southeast highlands. The poem is in the collection Di-
cionário de Imprecisões (Dictionary of Imprecisions), first published in 2019. The word “death” is

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defined as a dictionary entry and suggests a direct connection with women: “Female noun, common
to all, but more to women due to futile reason” (original italics). In Portuguese, the words are marked by
gender, and death, as Ribeiro, a linguist herself, writes, is female. The entry maintains an ironic
resonance as the poet deconstructs the word by displaying its multifarious meanings: “death,
passing, or decease.” This lead anticipates a poetical discussion about the result of a Chinese space
experiment with cotton seeds that failed on January 17, 2019. The cotton flower died, says the
poet. It becomes a lunar flower that passed away “under extreme cold.” The low temperatures of
the dark side of the moon killed it (in Portuguese, the word “flower” is gendered female). The
event is called differently depending on who voices the word: newspapers call it “death”, the poet
calls it “fenecimento” [‘withering’], using a very delicate word that euphemistically connects
death to something beyond the bare fact. Despite the tinge of irony, it is possible to understand
the poem as a metonymy for something much bigger than a mere lunar experiment. This flower
may be understood as a representative of a trans-corporeal being whose body is put to die in a hos-
tile environment. What humans destroy on Earth is not enough. They have to overstretch their
arms to outer space and conduct experiments that imply the destruction of a fragile ecosystem as
represented by the withered cotton flower. Offstage, a political stance is on the fore: colonization
of outer space. In this sense, it is possible to ask whether the poem suggests a concern for what
humans are taking outside the scope of the Earth. The language of emotion alongside a dislocated
trans-corporeal movement seems clear in the construction of this poetic entry.
The second poet, Lucinda Nogueira Persona (1947–), from Paraná, south of Brazil, is also a
biologist, and most likely resorts to her experience to write about nature. She brings a similar
concern about death, but this time the prospects are seen in the criminal fires (queimadas) that
raid the area of Pantanal, an extremely rich biome now devastated by the climate changes (called
“bloqueio meteorológico” or metereological block) that the region is prone to every year.7 The
poem “Taturanas” (Caterpillars) is part of Sopa Escaldante (Scalding Soup), (Nogueira, 2001), and
awarded the Prêmio Cecília Meireles, from the União Brasileira de Escritores (Brazilian Union of
Writers), as pointed out by Marly Walker (2021). The poet is quite attentive to details, and creates
unusual uses for ordinary words (Walker 2021). “Taturanas,” a poem among many that deals with
the idea of destruction in the Brazilian Pantanal region, illustrates such care. The poem is 20 years
old but anyone in Brazil is familiar with what happened there, in 2020, for the fires amount to the
previous six years of burning and destruction, the result is the biggest one since the region started
being surveilled back in 1999 (Clima Info 2020). Little was done officially to solve the problem,
and many animals were killed or suffered severe burning.8
Persona’s poem is a powerful metaphor for such destruction. The verses long and short are like
the flames in and out burning the dry land: “the fire was sudden,” and while the poet blames the
drought that affects the region, one can never discard the cattle grazing that has been destroying
the biome. The poem’s four stanzas connect the fire with hell, and the fleeing of the “animal king-
dom”—air and earth creatures—that “ran away”: “Seriemas and lizards (followed by flames)/asked
life for a license.” The caterpillars are named in the last stanza, but are referred to in the previous
one, for they form a line “Along a road,” going “in despair,” “in a single direction.” The presence
of the escaping caterpillars is ironic for they are associated with fire and burning, now they are
the ones in danger fleeing, “with their accordion-like bodies/in an unbearable effort to come/out
of themselves.” These small animals have no chance of survival. How to understand that in two
decades things have grown out of control, and that the agro-business has the power of exploiting
this rich region whose nonhuman lives are dying so as to make space for alien vegetation (pasture
grass), and that there is no environmental justice to the wild lives—big and small—that still live
there?9
Alaimo (2008) refers to nature’s agency as it reacts whenever “provoked”: the drought (crim-
inal or in response to climate changes) results in fires. This outcome is an agential movement on

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 Izabel F. O. Brandão

behalf of nature. The animals attempting to flee are also a counter response. The poet as a keen
observer exposes a language that informs and transforms the readers’ perception because of the
minute details exploring the human being in her/his animal corporeal burning garment. The
caterpillars that try to get out of themselves may well stand for us humans who misunderstand
our habitat and are subject to both nature’s agency (the fires due to high temperatures started in
response to the drought), as well as to the criminal fires set in their/our habitat. The caterpillar is a
fire creature, and its agency for self-defense is to burn. Up to what extent are we like this creature?
Thus, the poem brings to a minute scale this horrendous situation, which is far from being solved.
The poet has anticipated a long-term unfinished story.
Luiza Romão (1992–) is a performance poet from São Paulo. She belongs to a cultural move-
ment called “slam poetry,” that Daniela da Silva Freitas (2020, 2) calls “batalha de poesia” (po-
etry competition). The slammers—the competitors—use their bodies and voices to perform their
poems. The poem “Coração de frango” (Chicken heart) is a perfect example of Adams’ (2010,
13) absent referent, and its “interweaving of the oppression of women and animals.” This poem
is possibly one of the most politically directed of this chapter, for “Through the structure of the
absent referent, patriarchal values become institutionalized” (Adams 2010, 67). The poem unveils
the social distress of those in need, and the fact that both the chicken wings, and the girl’s heart
are worthless. Here, it is possible to derive the extent of the oppressive values for those—human
and nonhuman—lives figured in the poem.
“Coração de frango” already points to death since the title, for in Brazil chicken heart is
an extremely appreciated delicacy by meat-eaters who enjoy drinking and eating appetizers,
oblivious of the violence implied in their choice. The girl who offers her heart to the butcher in
exchange for a steak is famished: “what about the heart,/how much does it weigh?/she asked/
skinny girl/of exposed ribs.” The ironical discourse is not for laughing, and she is not alone
in her offer to the butcher. His answer—“‘depends’/beef or chicken?”—points to his misun-
derstanding, and her worth as a person: “she knew it wasn’t worth much,/it was weak meat/
anemic blood/that beat more due to inertia/than for duty.” Her body—“weak meat”— echoes
Duckworth’s point about contemporary novels in Australia, for in those she examines, women
also seen in such a status, as “meat,” something that brings Plumwood’s account of an experience
of herself as a crocodile’s prey, and that she manages to escape (see Chapter 6). Romão’s poem
presents no escape. In it, the verses disclose how impoverished people (women and men alike, ei-
ther unemployed, or those in similar conditions) have to face the hardship of a social reality that
is apparently unsolvable, which is not true. Here, it is more a question of the social oppression
that hits hard in Brazil. How much is a person’s dignity (her heart) worth? She wants to trade it
“for a chunk of steak” (“picanha” in Portuguese, a noble beef cut, also extremely appreciated by
meat eaters). Her heart is a “useless product,” and while the man’s compassion is shown—“for
pity or charity sake”—for he offers “two chicken wings” whose worth “was a lot more/when
compared to her size,” it also shows her passport to death. Having accepted the wings, she eats
them ravenously, “and smeared herself with someone else’s wings/for she was an earthling/and
knew nothing of such audacity.” The “privilege” of eating, or being free, as the wings imply,
leads to hallucination, and thus she becomes like the chicken she ate, now a “carcass of the two
wings/one in each hand/she believed herself a bird,” and “from the windowsill/she stuffed her
external breast/in a stroke”:

the flight was short

the soft flesh
minced on the pavement
seemed to question
and my body
how much does it cost?

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The girl’s “freedom” means death. She is now a dead animal, her skinny body minced meat.
A horrendous metaphor that can be transposed to the reality of the economic crisis the country is
undergoing because of the pandemics, and such reality is overlooked by the present government.
The “wretched” of the country—families mostly led by women10 —are slowly being transformed
into beggars mendicating for their own lives, sometimes having to look for animal bones instead
of beef, cheaper to buy and subsist (Vieceli, Rezende, and Renato 2021). For Conceição Evaristo
(2021, 14) “the word may be converted into an instrument of individual and collective struggle.”
This sort of activism is one of the aims of slam poetry. The poet’s skinny girl dies, it is true, but
her death serves as a protest that uncovers the thin line that separates humans and nonhuman
lives, and their inhumane condition. Cary Wolfe’s idea that “the animal [is to be seen] not just
‘out there,’ in the environment but also ‘in here,’ in the human,” as argued by Greta Gaard (2017,
120) is illustrated in the poem.
The next group of poets deals with the problem of pollution, or the idea of the toxicity that is
present in human culture throughout the times. Ana Martins Marques (1977–) is another prolific
poet from Minas Gerais, who has already had her poems translated into other languages including
English. Mythology is among the themes worked by her, in her desire to dissolve anguish, and
reweave it into something different, capable of transforming the poet’s identity (Pereira 2019).
“Icarus,” a poem from the collection O livro das Semelhanças (“The Book of Likeness,” 2015), where
the poet deals with the issue of metalanguage so as to reflect on the craft of poetry (Pereira 2019).
In “Icarus,” the poet revisits the traditional myth providing a different answer for the mythical
hero: instead of death, Daedalus’ son finds love. The poem departs from Icarus’s fall from the sky
into the sea where a mermaid finds him, and “loved in him/the bird/that loved in her/the fish”;
the poet phenomenologically draws continuity between the fish and the bird (Bachelard 1943). Air
and water meet in this mythical love encounter. However, as Pereira (2019, 29) notes, the poem
goes on to show “the toxic side of the human being—dirty and cruel—who seeks power over
nature without any concern with the devastation caused,” following Alaimo (2008, 260) in her
claim that all of us are in some measure toxic: “all bodies, human and otherwise, are... toxic at this
point in history. Even those humans and animals who reside far from the most polluted zones still
harbor a chemical stew in their blood and their tissues.” In “Icarus,” as Pereira (2019) argues, the
fall includes side effects beyond the mythical paradise, as its last stanza shows: “the remains of his
undone/wings/reached the shore/among/plastic/packaging condoms/empty bottles beer/cans.”
The poem unravels “the problematic notion of hierarchy of culture over nature, and moreover, in
a very contemporary context, in that the discussions about the excessive production of residues by
humans are happening in an urgent and necessary way” (Pereira 2019, 29). A final question might
be posed here. With Icarus’ wings melted by the sun, the waste —ancient and new—washed
ashore, makes us wonder about the idea that not even the myth is preserved anymore, for it is left
among plastic packaging, condoms that supposedly prevent pregnancy and disease; bottles and
cans that might hurt human and nonhuman animals. What is “preserved” after all? Waste, and
disease. This result shows how toxic we have become in history. Mythology included.
Best known as an actress and a teacher of Brazilian literature Beatriz Brandão (1955–), from
Alagoas, Northeast of Brazil, is also a poet.11 Her poem A Lagoa Pranteou (The Lagoon Wailed) is
from 1999, but was only published years later in a collection of poets from Alagoas (see Lima and
Bomfim 2007), and is very brief:
The lagoon went silver
The lagoon darkened12
Dead fish
Lifeless
Brightless
Nothingness
The lagoon wailed.

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 Izabel F. O. Brandão

The poem came about after the poet saw tons of dead and floating fish on the Lagoa Mundaú,
as a result of the toxic waste released by one of the sugar cane plants near the area where she
was with her two young children.13 The apparently beautiful and silvery lagoon disclosed by the
poem is in fact poisoned. Its color merely shows the dead fishes afloat. Such brightness is thus
equivalent to death, and the proximity of life extinction of the lagoon’s biome. Brandão’s concise
language exposes the raw nerve of polluted areas in Alagoas, a quasi-dystopic reality that presents
no alternatives to escape. A sense of impotence is also conveyed, for how to understand that the
trans-corporeal body of the lagoon with her (again the word is gendered female in Portuguese,)
plentiful life is now dead(ly), and her interconnected lives toxified? What kind of agency nature
can provide here? The poet is unable to present an answer. Hers is the same impotence of all of us
readers in the face of this criminal offense denounced in her poem. The wailing is hers and ours.
“A Lagoa Pranteou,” thus, uncovers more than the deep and sad grief of those who take their
subsistence from the lagoon with the wealth from its dark waters.

Conclusion
How to conclude this chapter without considering questioning about the extent of the wound
posed by these Brazilian women poets about the power of destruction of us humans as regards not
only Earth, as posed by Ribeiro’s poem on the Chinese experiment in outer space? The examined
poems do not seem to present an alternative of escape or solution. It may be possible to say that
all of them are still in a moment of denouncing the devastation caused by fires or by pollution,
as Persona and Brandão’s poems disclose. Humans destroy nature, but does it follow that this fact
means more than a mere association of humans with hazard? We are, as Alaimo (2008) claims,
toxic in a certain measure. And I do not believe that our closeness to nonhuman animals qualifies
us for forgiveness, as Romão and Martins’ poems convey, for neither do nonhuman animals kill
nor destroy anything by using the same kind of consciousness present in humans. Their sentience
is different and must be respected.
A young poet from Rio de Janeiro, Luciene Nascimento (1995–) shows a different agency by
resorting to spirituality in order to protest against patriarchy.14 One of her poems shall suffice to
illustrate Gaard’s claims of the human body “as a site of cultural construction and potential coloni-
zation” (1998, 239), and how a way out is possible. The foreword to her first book, Tudo nela é de se
amar (Everything in her is for love, 2021) defines Nascimento as “an explosion in the form of poetry...
[for] Luciene harvests the loose words she finds, and re-signifies them, explaining, in a soft but
striking way, all of an existence” (Lázaro Ramos, Foreword, 9). The poem “Oração das Três Ma-
rias ou Ladainha da Senhora de Si” (Prayer of the Three Marys or Litany of Our Lady of Her Own
Self ) has four stanzas. A prayer in homage to the ordinary Black Marias who inhabit the impover-
ished homes of the Black population in Brazil. Nascimento’s language of emotion means that she
takes every word from her guts in order to point to the building up of the identity of Black women,
a generation defined as “tombamento” (to turn something over) in the title poem.15 The poem is in
reverence of Black women’s identity (but not only, I hasten to say), and here, I would like to men-
tion the agency that is asked of these Marys in response to all the suffering they have been through
in life. Such a call for agency can be understood along the lines King refers to in Chapter 49:
women must not be passive spectators of what happens in their lives. Ecofeminist thought encour-
ages such empowerment, for everyone must be an agent interconnected collectively. So, the verbs
in the poem call for the action of the single mothers—Marias—for they are like Jesus’s Mother, but
they cannot be submissive to their earthly role, for the fathers left them pregnant, and vanished.
The poem calls these Marias to “raise” their faces, “act with [their] voice,” “incite the insult, shake
the womb,/seduce,/abandon” their fears and “ghosts/and offenders.” The domestic experience tra-
ditionally associated with women—cooking especially—serves as a vindication for action: “season

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this dough,/fill it with your taste,/recipe is innate with the women,” not in order to forget but to
transform it into solidarity, something that women seem to know best, for their “cross” is shared,
and their empowerment may come from this locus of oppression. The known solidarity between
women—used to sharing affection, suffering, and food in the same plate—becomes clear as the
lyrical voice invokes tenderness: “Calm yourself, Mary, hasty you, walk with us/the lunchbox is
big enough to put many spoons,/ally yourself with those who understand the weight of your cross/
so many Marys with the same mistakes,/with the same charges and loves/in life trying to keep
the posture.” So the idea is the sharing of collective experiences that women have with the sacred
Mother, but before we quickly understand the poem as blasphemy, we hear that the fight is against
an Earth “father/Gone/and his empirical tears,/Amen.” Thus, the poem claims closeness to the
sacred Mother, for she knows everything about the place of women in an oppressive society. Such
a clever and incredibly poignant poem reclaims agency from the women so as to find strength and
power in themselves collectively, such a bond is corporeal and spiritual, an emotional response of
reconnection and reweaving love despite the cruelty of oppression. This is a hopeful light for the
future coming from a young poet, aware of her transforming role in the world.

Notes
1 All translations in this chapter, unless otherwise stated, are mine. I am deeply grateful to Letícia Ro-
mariz, a Doctoral student at UFMG, and member of my research group Mare&sal Estudos e Pesquisas
Interdisciplinares at my university, who helped me with the translation of the poems.
2 Nine countries outside Portugal have Portuguese as their official language: Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde,
East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe.
3 I am indebted to my colleague and friend, Professor Roberto Sarmento (Federal University of Alagoas),
who kindly shared his thoughts on the subject of Brazilian, Portuguese and postcolonial African litera-
tures in Portuguese.
4 The ABL is still far from accepting women writers as members of this highly selective literary society.
As recent as August 2021, one of the most celebrated Black women writers of Brazil, Conceição Evaristo
(see Brandão 2017, 2019), had her name rejected by ABL. In her stead other white intellectuals and artists
became members, one of them Fernanda Montenegro, the only Brazilian actor to be nominated to an
Oscar. To illuminate the issue, the two women were not placed one against the other. But the artist who
is 92 was unanimously accepted as a member whereas the Black writer was not. See Ana Celina Dias
(2021) for more information on the ABL rejection of Evaristo.
5 A pioneer, Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825–1917), possibly the first Black novelist in Brazil, wrote an abo-
litionist novel, Úrsula (1859), as argued by Muzart (1999). Nature is an important reference in the novel,
perhaps in the same way as argued by Sangita Patil in Chapter 8 in relation to the profound connection
between Indian people and nature.
6 The path might not be the same when intersectionality is called into the fore and Black women writers
are considered, with the possible exception of Conceição Evaristo, one the most relevant writers of
Brazil nowadays (see Brandão 2017 and 2019). Their voice is gradually becoming stronger. If ecology,
environment, and ecofeminism are contemplated, the most important feature of this writing is related
to the body, violence, and the disruption of gender stereotypes (see Cristiane Sobral, Ryane Leão, and
Odalita Alves), among others. For this chapter, my choice included younger Black poets (Luciene Na-
scimento and Luiza Romão), despite the fact that many others were considered.
7 The region is subject to flooding and drought but now a combination of natural phenomena (lack of
rain, high temperatures + low humidity of the air) associated with cattle farmers burning of the land for
grazing, have increased the incidence of fires in the region. See G1 MT (2021).
8 Bolsonaro’s far right wing government—elected for a four year mandate, 2019–2022— is not interested
in solving environmental problems nor others that involve education for freedom or sustainability. On
the contrary, every time anything is related to climate change, protection of the forests, and regions
devastated by problems that could be solved with environmentally friendly policies, he evades the issues,
and plays his destructive role for the country as a whole. His politics is one of destruction and his actions
deaf to oppressed minorities.
9 Last year’s fire burned many animals to death, but one has survived, and deserves to be mentioned here:
the onça (a Brazilian spotted panther) Jou Jou had her—the word is female in Portuguese—four legs

201
 Izabel F. O. Brandão

severely burned, and became a symbol of the ecological tragedy, for 30% of the Pantanal was destroyed
by the fires. Jou Jou was named by the biologists, and other professionals who voluntarily tended her
till she was released back to her habitat some ten months ago. See Leal (2020) for voluntary work in the
Pantanal.
10 According to IBGE (Brazilian official institution for research geography and data) Brazilian homes are
led by over 45% of women. See Marina Barbosa and André Phelipe (2020).
11 Beatriz Brandão. Interviewed by Izabel F. O. Brandão, Maceió-AL, Brazil, December 3, 2021.
12 This was a difficult translation, for in Portuguese the noun “prata” (silver) can also be a verb: “pratear.”
In English the play with the words is lost. The choice for “darkened” was used because when silver is
dirty it becomes dark. The context of lifelessness is therefore present.
13 Brandão, interview.
14 See Brandão and Silva (2019) for an analysis of the issue of spirituality in Brazilian contemporary poets.
15 The concept is used advisedly and means those who belong to the militancy of the Black movement
for the sake of resistance and empowerment. This movement defends the dismantling of stereotypes,
and the raising of self-esteem—“new black aesthetics, Afro curly hair, turbans, colorful garments etc.”
(Antônio S. A. Guimarães, Flávia Rios, Edilza Sotero 2020, 321)—among the members of a specific
community. See also Solon Neto (2017) for more information on this issue.

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 19
NATIVE AMERICAN AND FIRST
NATIONS LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Benay Blend

Introduction
“To understand the direction of a society,” explains Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), “one must look toward
the women who are birthing and raising the next generation” (1997, 21). Her words touch on
several of the topics in this chapter. For example, it highlights the part that stories play in the
resistance and resurgence of Native people. According to Stephanie Fitzgerald (Cree), land nar-
ratives are enmeshed with Native languages and cultures. Accordingly, Harjo writes that “our
knowledge is based on the origin stories of land, genealogy, and ancestors” (Washing My Mother’s
Body, 2019b, 55). “If you know the branches of the true relationship between tribal class and fam-
ily members” (Washing My Mother’s Body, 2019b, 55), she continues, then you know your place in
the world. Similarly, Fitzgerald adds that “stories are not only tied to certain land formations and
places, but they form a part of the land” (2015, 39).
This chapter conceptualizes an Indigenous ecofeminism that crosses national and disciplinary
boundaries as well as between academia and the larger community. It examines themes of resil-
ience, resistance and multispecies relationships that undergird Indigenous movements and wom-
en’s ways of looking at the world. “To be a woman,” writes poet Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), “and
be a minority woman in this country is like a double-whammy” (1990, 80). Similarly, in her study
of Australian literature, Melanie Duckworth observes that both white women and Aboriginal
women were disenfranchised under colonialism, but Aboriginal women suffered more under the
system. While ecofeminism shares some aspects of Aboriginal thought, as Duckworth notes in
Chapter 6, for example, they both reflect on interconnectedness with the natural world, Duck-
worth explains that, because white women participated in and benefitted from colonialism, it does
not follow all women share similar goals and values.
Although Hogan, too, she feels that her duty as “custodian of the planet” (1990, 79) necessitates
certain kinds of activism, she does not view the mainstream women’s movement as an option.
Indigenous women, she explains, have different kinds of priorities, so she advocates not one but
many women’s movements that focus on all the needs (1990, 80). By recognizing the strained
relationship between Indigenous women and mainstream feminism, the authors address a series
of interrelated questions: What are the advantages of conceptualizing Indigenous feminism? How
do feminist endeavors relate to tribal concerns centered on land and sovereignty? How should
Indigenous women confront violence and marginalization? Is it possible to recover the precontact
agency of Indigenous women, and, if so, how does any of this happen while writing in what Harjo
calls “the enemies’ language?”

204 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-20

 American and First Nations Ecofeminism

Harjo’s poems, as do others, focus on an identity that is at once personal and political, an effort
to engage in a collective, public and political struggle. “Writing helped me give voice,” she claims,
“to turn around a terrible silence that was killing me” (1990, 58). On a larger level, she hopes that
her work encourages other women to break their silence, because otherwise, she fears, “we will
disappear” (1990, 58). Her writing is both “woman-identified” and “land-based,” language that
captures the “spirit of place” (1990, 59, 63). However, it is not feminist in the conventional sense.
“‘Feminism’ doesn’t carry over to the tribal world,” she contends, but there is a “concept mirror-
ing similar meanings” (1990, 60) that guides her in the struggle. Indeed, as Sunaina Jain concludes
in Chapter 25, ecofeminism has evolved as an overall term signifying the ways that women and
nature are conflated and thus similarly exploited.
Harjo’s role as a subjective witness of destruction also plays a part in her resistance. In “Exile
of Memory,” she returns to visit those who remained in the original homeland of her tribe, those
who did not go on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. Her final words are a personal “leaving song,”
a lament at leaving that “beloved place” (2019a, 7) behind. Her song, she vows, to sing until “the
day [she] dies,” but she leaves it too, for the “guardian trees, this beloved earth” (2019a, 19), and
those why stay behind to keep the memory alive. Her words, then are shared as part of a larger
collective instructed with ensuring the survival of the tribe.

Ecofeminism and Indigenous Studies: It’s Often Fraught but Overlapping History
Over the years, ecofeminism and Indigenous studies have developed around a diverse, interna-
tional group of scholars as reflected by the authors in this collection. The texts included here are
not only a reclaiming of cultural identity and history, but also voices calling out environmental
injustice resulting in the destruction of the land. Writing of her return to the tribe’s original
homeland, Harjo describes the “singing tree” which sings a song of militarist and materialist aspi-
rations, both sites of misplaced power. Nevertheless, the last verse will always belong to the trees
(Exile of Memory, 2019a, 13), for nature remains when everything else is gone. In this way, Harjo
challenges prevailing views by placing human beings alongside all other life on earth.
As Melanie Duckworth explains in Chapter 6, Australian Indigenous literature also rejects
colonial abuse of gender and landscape. Instead, it asserts mutuality between the inanimate and
non-human animate world. In her edited collection, Resisting Canada: An Anthology of New Poetry,
Nyla Matuk phrases this another way. Reversing the effects of colonization, she declares, “requires
art forms that reorient a settler society to bear witness to the standpoint of the colonized” (2019,
16.) By shifting the focus of “colonized meaning and knowledge from margin to center” (2019,
16), as Matuk suggests to do, literature becomes a tool aimed at decolonizing settler-colonial
states. “Things that were stolen can be taken back,” writes Mohawk poet Alicia Elliott (2020,
16), thereby attesting to the belief that literature can be a “discourse of disruption” (2019, 25), as
Matuk puts it, a practice that can confront environmental degradation and reverse it.
According to Fitzgerald (2015, 3), Native American literature has influenced ecocriticism’s
recent shift to include the work of global Indigenous communities in what was previously a
­Western-centered field. In Australia, too, continues Duckworth, certain ecosystems and environ-
mental interactions, along with Australia’s history of colonialism that it shares with the United
States and Canada, have affected the development of ecofeminism. “We wanted to see how well
we had survived the onset of destruction” (1997, 21), writes Harjo. In this introduction to an early
poetry collection, Harjo notes a theme inherent in the study of ecofeminism. As Danelle Dreese
explains, nature and women, by Western standards, are considered both “dangerous and unpre-
dictable” 2002, 9); thus women, because they are deemed too close to nature, are thought ripe for
exploitation. According to Alicia Elliott, the process is ongoing because gentrification continues to
displace entire groups of people (2002, 57). Separation from family members, homelands, cultural

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 Benay Blend

identities and languages are just a few of the ruptures that are a consequence of s­ ettler-colonial
policies. In Resisting Canada, Matuk reiterates that to resist the state means assuming without a
doubt that the official apparatus is a “settler-colonial endeavor” (2019, 15). Created atop Indige-
nous territories that were once thriving, populous lands, colonizers believed, continues Matuk,
that the original inhabitants were subhuman, thus they were able to justify removal, assimilation
or elimination, whatever served their purposes at the time (2019, 15).
Writing about her experience as an Indigenous feminist woman, Kim Anderson (Cree/Métis)
adds another layer to the piece. “Living as we currently do in a violent and militarized world,”
she says, it’s important to acknowledge that, given such systems based on hierarchy, “women and
children suffer disproportionate levels of poverty and abuse” (2010, 82). As Rebekah Taylor Wise-
man explains in Chapter 23, most ecofeminist practitioners reject hierarchical binaries that view
women as inferior. However, she continues, literary renditions of Mother Earth are not so clear
cut, especially when viewed through a non-Western lens. Indeed, Hogan looks to traditional ways
created by her ancestors for guides to heal the alignment of women with the exploitation of na-
ture and Native tribes. Accordingly, Donelle Dreese explains that Hogan challenges the woman/
nature constructs by employing “ecofeminist activism” (2002, 73) to expose the close association
of women with the natural world that leads to the exploitation of both. It is important to note
here, though, that Hogan does not view herself as a mainstream feminist. In The Book of Medicines,
Dreese (2002, 73) claims, Hogan accomplishes this challenge by reconciling the past with her
present location away from tribal land. Chronicling in poetic verse The History of Red, as the color
relates to birth, death, and land, Hogan explains that “first/there was some other order of things”
(1993, 9), a system that respected the original mother, earth. It wasn’t long, though, before that
original wildness was tamed by “a country of hunters/with iron, flint and fire” (1993, 9). Without
a system of checks and balances considered necessary for life, “this yielding land/turned inside
out” (1993, 9). In its place arose a new land “stolen and burned beyond recognition” (1993, 9) and
wearing the color red.
As Hogan proves, however, the conflation of women and Mother Earth does not always sig-
nify oppression. For example, in the The Fallen, another poem in this collection, Hogan refers to
the Great Wolf, who, according to traditional knowledge, lived in the sky. As the “mother of all
women” (1993, 42), she was respected by the tribe. However, the invaders slaughtered indiscrim-
inately everything they came to fear. They killed not only the wolf who they equated with the
devil, but they also “knew they could kill the earth,” even if it meant killing off “each other” (1993,
43) in the end. In this poem, Hogan encapsulates what Anderson deems the “foundational principle”
of Indigenous tribes—“the profound reverence for all life” (2010, 82). She links this sentiment to
Indigenous feminism in that, women, in tribal life, are honored for sustaining life-giving processes
that allow the people to go on. In this way, too, Hogan recalls the question that poet Leanne How
(Choctaw) asks her readers: “Have you forgotten about [what] Grandmother said” (2018, 203)? In
answer to her own question, she points out that “the women of my family” are like plants, in partic-
ular “everlastings” (2018, 203) that go on no matter what the situation.
At the core of ecofeminism, continues Taylor-Wiseman, there is the notion that essentialist
definitions of women should be challenged. Writers in this volume, she asserts, carry out this
message by furthering more inclusive ecofeminism, in particular one that is intent on disrupting
canonical language and mainstream systems that previously defined them. Indigenous feminism,
however, exists in a rubric of its own. According to Cheryl Suzack and Shari Huhndorf, the
mainstream women’s movement has proven “irrelevant to the concerns of Indigenous communi-
ties” (2010, 2). Since the 1980s and 1990s, they continue, trends in feminist theory and practice
have pointed toward a recognition that nationality, race, class, sexuality and ethnicity all inter-
sect with gender, thereby resulting in differentiation between various groups of women. In his
examination of Bengali literature, Abhik Gupta notes that ecofeminism has many ways of being.

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His own focus in Chapter 9, however, appears to be the ways in which ecofeminist practitioners
should seek “common grounds” in their quest for transnational alliances. While he highlights the
diversity that characterizes the activists in his study, he promotes ignoring differences and foster-
ing relationships within the field in order to successfully address the global crisis. Nevertheless,
as Suzack and Huhndorf explain, Indigenous women and their issues have not found a place in
contemporary feminist theory (2010, 1). Because of their exclusion, Indigenous women activists
remain skeptical of feminist theories and practices as the discipline relates to them. As Suzack and
Huhndorf note, feminism, as a political movement and academic practice, originated to meet the
needs of the white middle class. In some ways, they conclude, feminism, in both the academic and
political realms, remains “white centered” (2010, 2), despite the growing involvement of other
groups of women.
In Hindi literature, too, ecofeminism does not play a large role, writes Sangita Patil in Chapter
8, because nature is an important part of all Indian lives—male and female. Defined by Patil as a
call specifically to women to heal the world, ecofeminism as such is a Western theory, she con-
tinues, that does not include those cultures that reject binary/dualism in favor of interconnected-
ness with the environment for all people. Like Native American and First Nations people, Hindi
writers employ the environment, writes Patil, as a way to describe human emotions connected to
that specific place. Much like Leslie Marmon Silko, who writes about the importance of place in
Pueblo life, Hindi authors view the animate/inanimate world in a distinctive way. As their key
places were increasingly destroyed, Hindi writers began to shift their focus to the environmental
crisis. While they agree with ecofeminists regarding causes, Patil explains—capitalism, global-
ization and development—these writers part ways on the ideology of ecofeminism, in particular
the connection between women and nature. As an explanation, she lists two reasons: to repeat,
nature is revered by all Hindi writers, male and female; the degradation of nature impacts both
men and women, though, as Fitzgerald notes (2015, 19), displacement usually affects women, the
very young, and elderly more than men.

Indigenous Feminism: A Realm of Its Own

In Affirmations of an Indigenous Feminist, Kim Anderson (2010, 82) explores further why it is that
Native women find Western feminism unsuited to their needs. While there is no universal defini-
tion of Indigenous feminism, write Suzack and Huhndorf (2010, 2), tribal communities share the
impact of colonial history, an agenda that impacted women in particular by replacing traditional
gender roles with Western notions of femininity. As Anderson (2010, 82) notes, however, there
is the sentiment that feminism excludes men from the struggle against colonialism and exploita-
tion, an agenda that includes all people albeit not always on an equal basis. In their examination
of gender essentialism and ecofeminism, Asmae Ourkiya agrees. In Chapter 29 they note that the
masculine can be exploited just as its feminine counterparts. Moreover, they believe, the desire to
take care of others is not limited to either gender.
Accordingly, in her memoir Alicia Elliott (2020, 26) compares colonialism with depression,
two traumas that afflict all members of the tribe, including both her and her husband. She strug-
gles against the illness in the same way that she fights the political battle: by “refusing the colonial
narratives that try to keep [her] alienated from [her] community” (2020, 26), she consequently
decolonizes her mind. While she refuses to exclude men from the movement for liberation, Elliott
recognizes that women have a special responsibility in caring for a new life, an obligation that
Anderson (2010, 83) writes gave women a particular place in the life cycle of traditional societies.
“My responsibility as a Haudenosaunee woman,” declares Elliott, is to “raise my kid to love being
Haudenosaunee” (2020, 26). In this way, she carries out a foundational principle of Indigenous
society that is also at the core of ecofeminism—a profound reverence for all life.

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Individualism vs. Cooperation in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks

This respect for women’s role in Indigenous societies does not overlap with Western notions of
what Iris Ralph terms in Chapter 44 the major differences between masculinist and feminist ac-
tions. Explaining that the majority of texts in climate change fiction serve what she calls masculine
ideals—heroic conquests; scientific solutions as opposed to going back to a natural way of life—
Ralph’s analysis does not take into account non-Western modes of thinking. For example, cooper-
ation, which she attributes to the feminine, was actually a tribal notion before it was shattered by
the Allotment Act, a process explained in Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks, described elsewhere in this
chapter. Moreover, those actions allocated to women in Indigenous cultures are both necessary and
respected by men and women alike, a process that Ralph says is not part of masculinist thought.
Nevertheless, according to Fitzgerald (2015, 29), dispossession usually impacts women, the
very young, and the elderly more than it does men. In South America, writes Nicolás Campisi in
Chapter 17, it appears that the leaders in the struggle against large-scale extractive projects are pre-
dominantly Indigenous and Afro-descendant women. Because they belong to communities most
impacted by these projects, these women are at the forefront of environmental movements. This
gender disparity shows quite clearly in the body of Louise Erdrich’s work, multilayered narratives
that hold Anishaabe land at its center. For example, in Tracks (1988), part of a series loosely based
on Erdrich’s family history (Little No Horse: Love Medicine [1986], Tracks [1955], The Beet Queen
[1986], The Bingo Palace [1994], The Last report of the Miracles at Little No Horse [2001], and Four Souls
[2004]), the General Allotment Act of 1987 (Dawes Act) plays a role in breaking up communal
land into individual allotments that could be more easily picked off by lumber companies and
white farmers greedy for a piece of Native land.
As Giulia Champion explains in Chapter 15, colonial regimes not only shatter kinship patterns
among people, but this process also destroys ties between Indigenous people, their cultures and
their land, partly because land and culture are so deeply enmeshed that one does not exist without
the other. At the novel’s center is Fleur Pillager, the only member of her family to survive a wave
of “consumption” that swept over the tribe during the winter of 1912. In her struggle to retain the
land, Fleur illustrates not only the impact of allotment in severalty in terms of land loss and envi-
ronmental degradation; she also mirrors themes that are at the center of Indigenous ecofeminism.
Specifically, as Fleur takes on the burdens of her tribe solely on her shoulders, she demonstrates the
ways that the allotment act broke up communal cultures, a change that placed more responsibility
on individual women, like Fleur, who now found themselves fighting for the tribe rather than as
part of a communal struggle to retain tenure of the land.
Along with two other secondary characters, Pauline, a young mixed-blood Chippewa who
desires to be white, and Nanapush, the tribal elder who teaches his adoptive daughter Fleur
traditional ways of being, the novel’s main participant illustrates how aspects of daily life would
change under new Federal Indian laws that sought to assimilate tribal people while at the same
time it severed them from their land. The three characters—Fleur, Pauline and Nanapush—react
in different ways, thereby demonstrating various aspects of Indigenous ecofeminist activism that
would struggle against the dominant culture or give in.
The novel opens as Nanapush describes the “spotted sickness from the South,” most likely small-
pox that coincided with another trauma, the tribe’s migration from the East to their present home-
lands in the Great Lakes Area and the Northern Plains of North Dakota and Montana. After their
arrival, explains Nanapush, a new sickness, tuberculosis, afflicted the remaining tribal members.
“Our tribe unraveled like a course rope,” Nanapush recalled, “frayed at either end as the old and new
among us were taken” (1997, 2). This analogy is important. It recalls the interconnection of all life, a
central tenet of ecofeminism, that is broken now, frayed, as Nanapush describes it, due to the tribe’s
removal from their homeland coupled with an illness that disrupted kinship systems and family ties.

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“I saved the last Pillager” (1988, 8), claims the tribal elder, as he adopts the remaining Fleur as
his own. From the beginning, Fleur signals that she would act alone. After returning to Matchi-
monito, she stayed by herself in a cabin that “even fire did not want” (1988, 8), an action consid-
ered unsuitable for a young girl. “The next thing we heard,” Nanapush explained, “she was living
in the woods and eating roots, gambling with ghosts” (1988, 8), all actions that Fleur preferred to
giving up her allotments when she lacked the money to pay the fees.
“Land is the only thing that lasts life to life,” declares Nanapush. “Money burns like tinder, flows
off like water” (1988, 33), a perspective that places him clearly within the realm of ecofeminism,
a worldview that values nature over profit that could be had from its destruction. In that regard,
Erdrich makes it clear that ecofeminism is not solely a woman’s issue. Its values belong equally to In-
digenous men and women who hold the land as sacred, not a possession that can easily be sold away.
Nanapush, too, like Fleur, suffers from the impact of individualism on the tribe. “Before the
boundaries were set,” breaking up the communal land, “before the sickness scattered the clans like
gambling sticks,” Nanapush laments, “an old man never had to live alone and cook for himself,
never had to braid his own hair, or listen in silence” (1988, 32). Before, the elderly had relatives
to do these things, a family to carry on the name, “especially if the name was an important one
like Nanapush” (1988, 32).
Nanapush’s name had a special power, given to him by his father because of its association
with “trickery and living in the bush” (1988, 33). A trickster who teaches by doing the opposite
of what’s expected, bound to the land by the same knowledge that binds the community together,
Nanapush is a holdout much the same as Fleur. In addition to the symbolism of his name, it is also
a signifier that loses power each time that he writes it down to store in a government file. In this
way, he resists dispossession by refusing to tarnish his tribal name by adding it to a government
list designed to steal much more.
In opposition to both Nanapush and Fleur sits Pauline, a young mixed-race woman who leaves
the reservation for Argus. Whereas Nanapush and Fleur resist assimilation, Pauline embraces it.
Perhaps because she has internalized the racism of colonizers who view her people as less-than
in every way, Pauline embraces the culture that despises her. “I want to be like my grandfather,”
she declares, “pure Canadian” (1988, 14). Viewing herself through the eyes of her beholders, she
believed what others saw. “Even as a child,” she claims, Pauline understood that to “hang back
was to perish” (1988, 14). In other words, to be part of nature rather than to join the culture that
destroyed it was to turn her back on what the colonial invaders called progress, a fate she did not
want. “I saw through the eyes of the world outside of us” (1988, 14), Pauline said, a vision that
required denying half of her identity in the process.
While Nanapush managed to save his name and his Anishaabe identity, Pauline gladly gave up
both. Eventually, she changed her name to Leopolda and took on a new identity as a Catholic nun
(1988, 136). Her new mission was to “name and baptize” members of her tribe, thereby saving
them from the “devil in the land” (1988, 141) that she now believed was responsible for what she
saw as darkness among her former tribe. In the end, Nanapush and Fleur are Indigenous ecofemi-
nist practitioners who treat the land as a relative, with all the honor required of such a relationship.
Pauline, on the other hand, has no respect for her lineage or the land as she takes on the values
of those who are responsible for oppressing both. By internalizing what others think of her, thus
transferring that prejudice to demean all who stay true to their beliefs, Pauline eventually goes
mad. Her visions and consequent behavior become more and more bizarre, self-flagellation and
denial of any of the smallest pleasures. In this way, she hopes to tear all that she considers dark—or
Indian—from her soul.
In the end, Pauline does not become a model white person nor do Nanapush and Fleur man-
age to escape the impact of settler colonialism on their people. Fleur in her fight to keep the land
and Nanapush in the daily struggles of an old man—each is left to manage without community

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support. After their removal to the tribe’s present location, the people suffered from disorientation
and disease, thereby causing them to break personal bonds with the land and with each other. It
started with Fleur’s husband, Eli, breaking their period of starvation. By accepting government
commodities, an act, Nanapush related, that staved off hunger but “in this,” he said, “there was
something lost” (1988, 176). Reliance on the state severed their relations with the animals who
had always fed them, thereby disrupting the natural order of things by making them dependent
on their oppressors. Moreover, Fleur took on the burden of everyone else solely on her shoulders,
thus going against the communal nature of her culture. “Power dies,” warns Nanapush, when
you try to possess it. “Forget that it ever existed,” though, “and it returns” (1988, 176), a lesson
that Fleur never learned.
Nanapush never believed that he “owned [his] own strength, that was [his] secret,” he said, so
that he was “never alone in [his] failures” (1988, 187). As the lone surviving Pillager, Fleur took
on everyone else’s problems as her own. “In [her] mind,” Nanapush explained, “she was huge, she
was endless. There was no room for the failures of anyone else” (1988, 187). After Fleur left, the
tribe succumbed to government bureaucracy, “a “tribe of chicken-scratch,” Nanapush concluded,
“that can be scattered by a wind,” and like the forest destroyed by loggers, “diminished to ashes
by one struck match” (1988, 225).

Reinventing in the Enemy’s Language: What It Means to Decolonize

the Field of Literature
“To write is often still suspect in our tribal communities,” claims Harjo, because it was writing
in the “colonizer’s languages” (1997, 20) that enabled the loss of land and stolen children. Nev-
ertheless, Harjo and co-editor Gloria Bird (Spokane) present Reinventing in the Enemy’s Language:
Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America (1997), a collection of Native women’s
work in the “colonizer’s tongue” (1997, 20), an effort, she says, to decolonize the field of litera-
ture. Similarly, Champion explains in Chapter 15 that the re-making of the French language in
previously colonized countries is also a means to heal kinships that had been broken. By creating
new versions of the language that had formerly caused harm, newly liberated people define their
own identities by reinventing the language of the oppressor. Moreover, by moving Native Amer-
ican work from the periphery to the center of the study of literature, the editors go a long way
toward decolonization of this field, which has traditionally been gendered white and male and
constructed over Indigenous land and bodies.
In his foreword to The Diné Reader, Sherwin Bitsui (2021, xvi) explains that Diné bizzad (lan-
guage) was not spoken partly because it was forcibly repressed at boarding schools. Consequently,
that generation, traumatized by abuse, refused to teach their children to speak Diné. Now, Bitsui
claims, a new generation of writers are discovering their people’s history and worldview within
the written words. “These stories restore memory and reconnect a people” (2021, xvi), writes
Bitsui, no matter where they live. “These stories are the doorways opening inward,” he concludes,
“back into the world that is always home” (2021, xvi). In this way, Diné writers, and others, too,
are “reweaving the world,” to borrow the title of an early ecofeminist book (1990), by reconnect-
ing a far-flung people with each other and their land.
In works of creative imagination, claim Adamson and Monani, there is a means to reclaim a
suppressed history that, in turn “unsettle[s] settler space” (2017, 10). In doing so, Harjo says, writ-
ers recoup the “power of [tribal] language to heal, to recuperate, and to create” (1997, 22) on their
terms. “Reinventing in the colonizer’s tongue” (1997, 22), adds co-editor Gloria Bird, is a way
to force the colonizer’s gaze toward the image of the colonized, but mirroring it not through the
colonizer’s lens. Such a role reversal, concludes Bird, implies that “something is happening, some-
thing is emerging” (1997, 22), a transformation that brings Indigenous ecofeminism into focus.

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In particular, reinventing the English language entails dismantling terms that imply domination,
such as minority/dominant culture, thereby challenging the power structures that have served to
subordinate Indigenous cultures.

Conclusion
What survives after centuries of genocide and degradation is a particular way of seeing the ani-
mate/inanimate world as close relations. In her seminal essay Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The
Pueblo Migration Stories, Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) explains how the Ancient Pueblo
people described the earth as “the Mother Creator of all things in this world,” a concept that
assumes “all beings share in the spirit of the Creator” (1996, 27). A key difference from Western
views, her people do not see themselves as “outside or separate from the territory he or she sur-
veys” (1996, 27). Instead, humans are just as much a part of the landscape as the earth they stand
on, and are linked with “all elements of creation” (1996, 27) through their particular clan. Sur-
vival, then, depended on being in cooperation with all things, both animate and inanimate; being
out of harmony bodes disaster.
As poet/scholar Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) explains, “Take the case of the earth, our mother.
She gave us our lives and provides for our care” (2017, xiv). A perspective that mirrors ecofem-
inism, Ortiz promotes a view that teaches the interdependence and connectedness of all living
things. The sun, moon, stars, earth and water are all relations within kinship structures, collabo-
ration and stewardship, the very opposite of Western forms based on capitalism and commodifi-
cation. Joy Harjo describes it as “a knowing of the landscape, as something alive with personality.
Alive with names, alive with events, nonlinear,” she continues, very different from the Western
view of “wilderness” as “something to be afraid of, and conquered because of fear” (1990, 64).
In Lee Maracle’s poem Blind Justice, the poet speaks of a world that includes reverence for all life,
a “new equality” (2019, 108) she writes, that requires the inclusion of all beings—a new kind of
system of justice.
By focusing on gendered aspects of resilience, resistance and resurgence, this chapter is in-
tended to be a step toward defining the relationship between an Indigenous ecofeminist and
environmental literary practice. In all of these works, there is perhaps an awareness similar to that
which Christian Jil Benitez discusses in his analysis of Philippine literature. Looking back at the
history of ecofeminist thought in the Philippines, he explains in Chapter 4, is to find that there are
many ecofeminisms that might not be asserted as such, yet still share belief systems that are gener-
ally attributed to the field. In this way, Philippine ecofeminism, and Indigenous knowledge, too,
has the potential, as Benitez notes, of transforming ecofeminism into a more inclusive discipline.
Exploring the place of ecofeminist literature in Spain, Irene Sanz Alonso notes in Chapter 16
that ecofeminism plays a role only in small academic circles. Nevertheless, Sanz Alonso examines
several authors who she believes can be labeled ecofeminists because they unconsciously incorpo-
rate its tenets in their work. As for Indigenous and First Nations writers, whose work sometimes
overlaps with core tenets of ecofeminism, placing such a label on them does not work, for those
activists have rejected what they consider the close relationship between white feminism and
ecofeminism. According to Adamson and Monani, resilience represents ongoing Indigenous re-
sponses to centuries of state-sponsored “extermination, assimilation, and manipulation” (2017) by
Western culture. Though it often falls within the larger framework of women of color feminism,
Indigenous ecofeminism serves as an “important site of gender struggle,” write Huhndorf and
Suzack, because it intersects “critical issues of cultural identity, nationalism, and decolonization”
(2010, 1), a matrix that also engages Indigenous women’s relationship with the landscape.
Resilience, then, encapsulates survivance, daily responses that ensure cultural and physical sur-
vival. Resistance speaks to specific struggles against cultural and environmental degradation. In

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addition to activist movements, such as the recent victory over the Line 3 pipeline cutting across
the Indigenous territory, writing can also be an Indigenous feminist endeavor. Looking to the
earth for guidance, Lee Maracle draws inspiration from nature. “A tsunami cleanses the earth,”
she observes, while “a hurricane rearranges rivers” and an “earthquake is an objection” (2019, 108)
to the status quo. By pursuing an ecofeminist agenda that involves healing the nature/culture rift,
Maracle ensures the resurgence of Indigenous knowledge systems devoted to bridging that divide.
Speaking as a Native but also ecofeminist practitioner, Harjo believes that Indigenous women
have a special role in “turn[ing] the process of colonization around” (1997, 25). Moreover, as
“mothers, leaders and writers,” she explains, women are the “caregivers” (1997, 25) who will
pass this knowledge on. Indeed, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language was conceived by Harjo and her
friends sitting around a kitchen table. “Many revolutions, ideas, songs and stories,” she contends,
have been “born around the table” (1997, 19) where the conversation is exchanged. By “actively
listen[ing] through the membrane of the womb wall” (1997, 19), Harjo claims, the family drama
becomes transformed into blueprints for a more just, connected world.

References
Anderson, Kim. 2010. “Affirmations of an Indigenous Feminist.” In Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics,
Activism, Culture, edited by Cheryl Suzack, Shari Huhndorf, Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman, 81–92.
Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Bitsui, Sherwin. 2021. “Foreward.” In The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, edited by Esther
G. Belin, Jeff Berhlund, Connie A. Jacobs, and Anthony K Webster, xv–xvii. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press.
Dreese, Donelle. 2002. Ecocriticism: Creating Self and Place in Environmental and American Indian Literatures.
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Elliot, Alicia. 2020. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.
Erdrich, Louise. 1998. Tracks. New York: Harper and Rowe.
Fitzgerald, Stephanie. 2015. Native Women and Land: Narratives of Dispossession and Resurgence. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press.
Harjo, Joy. 1990. “Interview by Laura Coltelli.” In Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, edited by
Laura Coltelli, 55–71. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
———. 2019a. “Exile of Memory.” In American Sunrise: Poems, edited by Joy Harjo, 6–20, New York: W.W.
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———. 2019b. “Washing My Mother’s Body.” In American Sunrise: Poems, edited by Joy Harjo, 30–34. New
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Women’s Writings of North America, edited by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, 19–33. New York, W. W. Norton
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Hogan, Linda. 1990. “Interview by Laura Coltelli,” In Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, edited
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———. 1993. The Book of Medicines. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press.
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Native Nations, edited by Heid E. Erdrich, 208. Minneapolis, MN: Gray Wolf Press.
Maracle, Lee. 2019. “Blind Justice.” In Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry, edited by Nyla Matuk,
106–107. Montreal: Véhicule Press.
Matuk, Nyla. 2019. “Introduction: The Poet as Political Agent.” In Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry,
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25–48. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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 20
ICELANDIC LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Auður Aðalsteinsdóttir

Introduction
In Iceland, modern literature was shaped by the country’s claims for independence from Denmark
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The gendered ideas behind those demands
played an important role. Inga Dóra Björnsdóttir (1994, 69) has pointed out that the recreation of
the national self was built on four feminized factors—nature, history, language, and culture—and
that it was seen as essential for Icelandic men to gain power over those factors while women were
identified with them. Women started publishing books in the late nineteenth century, challenging
this notion, and the receptions of their works show attempts to put them in their right place again
(Aðalsteinsdóttir 2021, 251–252). The romantic poet Hulda was, for example, identified with
nature in the reception of her contemporaries and often likened to a bird or a flower, as Guðni
Elísson (1987) and Ragnhildur Richter (1985) have demonstrated. Even the realist author Ólöf
Sigurðardóttir á Hlöðum, whose verses express a strong longing for independence, social justice,
and gender equality, had her poems likened to the “lilting twittering of a golden plover on a
spring day” (Guðmundsson 1914, 141–142, my translation). Women authors sought empowerment
both by utilizing and challenging this identification with nature. Ecofeminist emphases can be
discerned as a part of that effort in Icelandic literature, from the 1970s to the twenty-first cen-
tury, and ideas on patriarchy’s theft and appropriation of goddess power are still being processed
although with a more recent emphasis on queerness and a posthuman world view where global
warming is the main concern.

Objectification and Alienation

In 1974, signs of ecofeminist thought emerged interspersed with Marxist ideas on objectification
and alienation in the novel Lifandi vatnið - - - by Jakobína Sigurðardóttir. Lifandi vatnið - - - draws a
dystopian picture of mechanical modern society in the Icelandic capital, Reykjavík. Its modernist
form (cf. Benediktsdóttir 2012) underlines the message; the text is fragmented and broken up with
dashes. The protagonist, Pétur Pétursson, is literally lost in a world of artificial goods that serve
artificial needs. First, we are presented with an advertisement for him from his wife, in the lost-
and-found section of a newspaper. Later, the reader follows his escape from his alienating life in
the city in search of his origins, the remote place in the countryside where he grew up near a river
he has always sensed as “living water”. He ends up, however, in a shop selling artificial flowers,
surrounded by artificial nature that robs him of his last vestiges of sanity. He is locked away after

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-21213
 Auður Aðalsteinsdóttir

being injected with sedatives, and in general drugs keep the characters of this novel mechanically
functioning in the strange, meaningless reality of surface values that modern man has created for
himself.
Pétur’s alienation stems from not only losing touch with nature but also from his disconnec-
tion from women. His mother, his first and closest connection to other people, has died, and
even though “he understands that it is good to have a companion” (Sigurðardóttir 1974, 164), he
has failed at establishing a real connection with his wife; not treated her as an equal. Instead, he
has mechanically entered the oppressive mechanism of patriarchy and taken for granted her role
as a housewife as well as her objectification as a sexual object. As his wife thinks to herself, she
has suffered “silence—this confinement—or, no—and then I was good enough—in bed—silent
like—every other object available for its—use. […] Sometimes as I—was not—human—not alive”
(Sigurðardóttir 1974, 184, my translation). The key factor in Pétur’s betrayal against his wife is that
he is not interested in conversing with her so that her only role is to listen while he talks to other
men, or even just himself: “Not to me—no—not a word—to me—me—” (Sigurðardóttir 1974,
184, my translation). As a result, the couple becomes each other’s prisoners, performing empty
artificial gender roles in the empty artificial world of consumer society.
The ecofeminism that emerges in Sigurðardóttir’s work is anticapitalistic, upholding the view
“that the oppression of women and ecological degradation are connected” (Carlassare 2000, 90)
in “a society whose fundamental model of relationships continues to be one of domination” (Ru-
ether 1975, 204). This continues to be the underlying premise of ecofeminist social criticism in
Icelandic literature in the following decades, although most writers approach it in a more symbolic
fashion, often by making use of goddess imagery.

Óðinn’s Lust
Ever since they first started publishing books, in the nineteenth century, women writers in Iceland
fought an uphill battle to be taken seriously (see Kress 2001) and in the 1960s their books suffered
the fate of being grouped together and “wittily” referred to in the media as “old wives’ tales.”
(Kress 1978). As the second wave of feminism strengthened in the 1970s, women more openly
demanded respect as authors, challenging the male-oriented literary tradition in various ways, not
least by reinterpreting Norse mythology, which, along with the Sagas, was considered the base of
Icelandic literature. In a country that had supported its claims for independence from Denmark by
upholding its status as both the birthing and guarding place of original Nordic culture, references
to that heritage signaled serious literature. Classical associations between divinity and poesy had
their own Nordic manifestation in the story of how Óðinn, the one-eyed king of Norse gods,
obtained access to the Mead of Poetry by seducing its guardian, the giantess Gunnlöð. Vilborg
Dagbjartsdóttir’s (1977) prose poem on meeting Óðinn is an example of a feminist reinterpreta-
tion of this heritage.
The poem describes a dream where the female poet meets a man in a grey coat with a dark hat
covering one eye. As she passes him, she realizes who he is and turns around as she feels she has
many things to say to him. The eye that looks back, however, is burning with lust, making her
realize that even Óðinn has only one business with women. Such focus on the sexist and sexually
abusive nature of Norse mythology has regularly reappeared in Icelandic literature, and over three
decades later one can mark a literary upbeat to the Me Too-movement’s focus on the viewpoint of
victims of sexual abuse and misogyny, in Gerður Kristný Guðjónsdóttir’s narrative poem Blóðhóf-
nir which won her the Icelandic Literary Prize in 2010 and was translated into English under
the title Bloodhoof in 2012. The poem moves the perspective away from the longings and power
games of male gods and men to focus on the traumatic experiences of the giantess Gerður who is
abducted so that the god Freyr can have her (see also Katarina Leppänen’s Chapter 21).

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The final lines of Dagbjartsdóttir’s (1977) poem on Óðinn can be read as a response to the
condescending attitude toward female authors described above, as the narrator describes how she
burns with anger when thinking about her scorned ideas about herself being a poet. In the 1970s,
feminist authors as well as scholars had realized that (even obsolete) religions

centered on the worship of a male god [...] keep women in a state of psychological dependence
on men and male authority, while at the same time legitimating the political and social author-
ity of fathers and sons in the institutions of society.
(Christ 1979, 275)

In the 1980s and 1990s, literary scholar Helga Kress (1993) reinterpreted Nordic mythology and
many of the Edda poems as revolving around the theme of founding a society by conquering un-
tamed and wild nature, not least through language and the process of naming, describing man’s
victory over nature, wisdom, and women. Kress sees Gunnlöð, the keeper of the mead of poetry,
as a woman symbolically at the edge of society, handing the mead over to a literary establishment
that is taking on form. The medieval poem Völuspá, she interprets as depicting not only the end
of the world, or the heathen world, as it is sometimes read, but also the end of heathen women’s
culture, with the transformation of nature into weapons as a central theme but also a final vision
of a new and better world.
Although Norse mythology was no longer a prevailing religion, the cultural importance be-
stowed on it in Iceland meant that it was important to defy its male orientation. In such a feminist
revision, “[u]ncovering the history of goddess worship is extremely important” (Gaard 1993, 306),
as the “Goddess symbol […] reminds women that our legitimate history has been buried” (Oren-
stein 1990, 14). Authors such as Vilborg Davíðsdóttir have engaged in that project; she has since
1993 written historical fiction where she studies the time of the settlement and the late middle ages
from the viewpoint of women and the lowest classes of society. Her trilogy (Davíðsdóttir 2009;
2012; 2017) about the settler Auður the Deep-Minded is, for example, partly based on thorough
research of Nordic goddess worship which she tries to recreate by imaginatively filling in the
blanks of rather scant sources and evidence, mostly by linking it with nature worship.

The Power of the Earth Goddess

Ecofeminist emphases became thoroughly intertangled with reworkings of Nordic mythology,
most notably in Svava Jakobsdóttir’s novel Gunnlaðar saga from 1987, which was nominated to the
Nordic Council Literature Prize and translated into English in 2011 under the title Gunnlöth’s
Tale. In that story, an Icelandic woman recounts the uncanny explanation given by her teenage
daughter, Dís, after being arrested for attempting to steal an ancient golden beaker at the National
Museum of Denmark. Dís claims that in the museum she experienced a blurring of time and
space so that she merged with Gunnlöð, here presented as an ancient priestess and incarnation of
an earth goddess, and that she was reclaiming this symbolic and holy artifact, stolen from her by
Óðinn, to prevent further disastrous consequences for the earth.
Being a scholar of literature, the author wrote an article in addition to her novel where she
explained her theories on the medieval text in Hávamál which tells the story of Gunnlöð. She
argues that it contains a remnant of an ancient and international literary motif that describes the
inauguration of a king where an earth goddess, incarnated and represented by her priestess, grants
him authority to reign the land with a ceremony of libation and intercourse or “holy embrace”.
In such stories, it is the goddess, through her representative, that takes the initiative, controls the
action, and decides whether a king is worthy ( Jakobsdóttir 1988, 215, 235). In Gunnlöth’s Tale,
the inauguration ceremony involves a symbolic death and rebirth ritual and a “sip from the draught

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of immortality” ( Jakobsdóttir 2011, 153). Svava Jakobsdóttir rejects the interpretation of the myth
in the medieval manuscript Snorra-Edda, where Óðinn seduces Gunnlöð. Instead, she depicts
Gunnlöð, the representative of the goddess, as the one in power, inviting Óðinn to drink and
demanding “impregnation … powerful and cruel and completely consumed by her unwavering
demand for creation and re-creation” ( Jakobsdóttir 2011, 178).
The book’s descriptions of the goddess’s power are full of ellipses, like the text in Jakobína
Sigurðardóttir’s book, mentioned above. The stylistic ruptures underline the novels’ ruptures with
patriarchal ideology, our daily reality, by breaking up the linear temporality of the texts. As such,
they are part of attempts that Julia Kristeva (1981, 24–25) describes as aimed against the prevailing
“sociosymbolic contract” which assigns women an unsatisfying sacrificial role; they attempt “to
break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions,
to the unnameable repressed”. The novels’ ideological and stylistic ruptures are, therefore, a part
of “a revolt [women] see as a resurrection but […] society as a whole understands as murder”, and
can in fact evolve into terrorism, Kristeva (1981, 28–29) says. In Gunnlöth’s Tale, this is underlined
with Dís being accused of not only vandalism but even terrorism after she ruptures the patriarchal
reality to enter the world of the goddess.
Leading Icelandic feminist literary scholars wrote extensive analyses of the novel (see e.g. Bir-
gisdóttir 2005). Dagný Kristjánsdóttir (1988) pointed out a connection to Kristeva’s (1981, 27–28)
discussion of gendered temporality where female subjectivity is traditionally linked with cyclical
and monumental (mythical) temporality whereas linear (historical) temporality is labeled as mas-
culine. Time certainly is a central theme in Gunnlöth’s Tale, where (masculine) historical time is
repeatedly described by the narrator (the mother) as “fake”, after daughter and then mother move
into mythical time, which at first might seem utopian with its emphasis on harmony with nature
and its rhythms. This is in line with popular theories of the time, that:

When patriarchy revolted against ancient matriarchy, all mythology on women’s power was
rejected and reinterpreted. The supernatural was reorganized and the power of creation
moved from women’s wombs to men’s brains.
(Kristjánsdóttir 1988, 107, my translation)

The feminist utopia of reclaimed matriarchy and goddesses engenders, however, its own prob-
lematics, as it draws on and potentially maintains gender essentialism (see Asmae Ourkiya’s Chap-
ter 29).

[…] usually this state is seen as a beleaguered one, surviving against the hostile intent of
men, who control a world of power and inequality, of military and technological might and
screaming poverty, where power is the game and power means domination of both nature
and people. Feminist vision often draws the contrasts starkly—it is life versus death, Gaia
versus Mars, mysterious forest versus technological desert, women versus men.
(Plumwood 1993, 7)

Gunnlöth’s Tale might at first seem to present this view, depicting how Óðinn brings “an unearthly
object”, a weapon of iron, “metal made from premature stone, ripped from the earth’s belly”, into
the goddess’s holy dwelling, stealing the beaker and using the power he gains from it to incite
“people to war and conquest”, leaving the exploited earth “gaping with wounds” while he himself
“can find no peace and trust no-one” ( Jakobsdóttir 2011, 205, 211, 212). The transformation of na-
ture/giving life into weapons/bringing death is, like in the ancient Völuspá, a central theme. The
novel does not, however, simply reverse the hierarchy of feminine and masculine traits by pointing
to a special interconnection of women and nature as an answer to male violence. Such an inversion

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[…] attributes to women a range of different but related virtues, those of empathy, nurtur-
ance, cooperativeness and connectedness to others and to nature […]. It replaces the ‘angel
in the house’ version of women by the ‘angel in the ecosystem’ version […] and again fails to
recognise the dynamic of power.
(Plumwood 1993, 9)

The narrator of Gunnlöth’s Tale, Dís’s mother, resists such simple binary thinking. Dagný Krist-
jánsdóttir (1988, 109, my translation) claims that a “mother’s law” “is not the book’s hope or fu-
turistic vision” but instead the beaker gains new meaning in the mother’s telling of the story and
“becomes a symbol for searching, revolt, new thinking that acknowledges both sexes”. Creativity
and poetry turn out to be key subjects and the narrating mother is certainly a more ambiguous
character and voice in the story than Dís, who merges with the representative of the Goddess. In
fact, the mother is not only in the same position as the prophetess narrator of Völuspá, sometimes
mediating her visions in a similar way—“I see lifeless stones […] I see a destiny heavier than a
thousand hearts”—but even comes to the conclusion that she is “the guiltiest of all” ( Jakobsdóttir
2011, 204, 215). The crime she finds herself guilty of might be interpreted as not being against the
law of the father or the law of the mother, but against poetry; she forgot how to speak the language
of “poetic invention” and has since then “been living in […] a land of guilt. And from there, no-
one can hear your voice. Not even yourself ” ( Jakobsdóttir 2011, 203, 202). Therefore, the mother
finally reveals, she ended up stealing the beaker herself.
The beaker becomes a symbol of the autonomous self. In the role of Gunnlöð, Dís resists the
traditional feminine role (as a mother/lover), stating that letting it interfere with her duties to the
Goddess would leave her as a “broken beaker” ( Jakobsdóttir 2011, 184). The mother, however,
has let her role as a lover and mother shadow her duties as a poet that needs to constantly reach out
for further poetic liberties, no matter the cost. Stealing—or retrieving—the beaker is the moth-
er’s attempt to acquit herself and at the same time a defense of poets, whose duty is transgression.
This is the reason why she does not simply want to replace linear time (the father’s law) with the
repetitions of cyclical temporality (the mother’s law): “Again and again the whirling wheel. […]
Do you want to go on? No” ( Jakobsdóttir 2011, 197). In Nordic ecofeminist literature, Katarina
Leppänen explains in Chapter 21, interlaced timescapes are often linked with inter-generational
themes, with a focus on matrilineage. The interconnection of past, present, and future genera-
tions of women is certainly a central theme in Gunnlöth’s Tale. However, I would argue that the
function of time in the novel cannot fully be understood without taking into account the book’s
references to a then-recent environmental disaster; the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986. The
radioactive cloud that people in Gunnlöth’s Tale suddenly realize they have been immersed in for
a while is a “hyperobject” in the sense of Timothy Morton (2013), shaking time and space and
changing people’s relations with the world. “Time has vanished”, the mother declares, describing
how radioactivity strangely keeps people waiting for the effects after the event has taken place,
“because everything had now happened and hadn’t yet happened”, as well as making her feel like
“a cell in a big body” ( Jakobsdóttir 2011, 192, 198, 196). This experience is the key to the novel’s
bending of time and space as well as pointing forward to a posthuman version of ecofeminism,
with its acknowledgment of the flux of organic and inorganic bodies (see Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu’s
Chapter 34).

Islandness and the Search for Solutions

With its focus on gendered relationships with nature, ecofeminism includes a thorough criticism
of the world’s power systems, revealing how oppressive systems such as racism, gender inequal-
ity, and exploitation of nature, are intertwined and support each other. Ecofeminist emphases

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may actually never have been more important, for global warming demands that we consider
the larger, planetary context, and solutions that touch on every aspect of our existence. This
can be seen in the novels of Oddný Eir Ævarsdóttir. The narrator of Jarðnæði, a book from 2011
which received the European Union Prize for Literature and was in 2016 translated into English
as Land of Love and Ruins, declares that she “ jumble[s] too many different things together” be-
cause “this is the way problems have to be discussed sometimes” (Ævarsdóttir 2016, 100). In the
narrator’s mind, the Icelandic economic collapse in 2008 has confirmed that social injustices are
interconnected with environmental injustices and the narrator speaks of businessmen who “live
in tax havens and tax-free clouds. As garbage and pollution rain over the rest of us” (Ævarsdóttir
2016, 42).
The novel is set up as a diary, which suits the author’s search for solutions; the form is open
enough to accommodate almost any genre of writing and instead of demanding unity it allows
loose associations and fragmentary reflections. The outcome is a mixture of the realist novel,
fantasy, autobiographical references, and social criticism, a hybrid that conforms with her envi-
ronmental ideals, offering a “literary diversity in the spirit of biodiversity” (Ævarsdóttir 2016,
126). Andri Snær Magnason (2020, 10) has speculated that the only way to write about climate
change, which “is bigger than all our former experience, bigger than language and most meta-
phors we use to understand reality”, is “to approach it from behind, from the side, go back and
forth in time, be personal and scientific and use the language of mythology”. All of this can be
seen in contemporary literature and often with ecofeminist undertones. In the poems of the
book Dimmumót (2019), Steinunn Sigurðardóttir interweaves nostalgic recollections of her passed
childhood with nostalgic descriptions of the disappearing Vatnajökull glacier, and in one of the
poems, called “Matricide”, the earth is shown as a prosperous and generous woman breastfeeding
the children of men—who in turn kill her so that she sinks into the waters, like the earth in the
medieval poem Völuspá. The mythical imagery of Ragnarök thus continues to reappear in the
new context of climate change, and authors like Ævarsdóttir continue to counteract the feeling
of impending doom by seeking to reclaim lost goddesses, hoping for example that the “time of
the heathen fertility goddess Freyja has come” (Ævarsdóttir 2017, 140, my translation). Using the
imagery of island goddesses, Ævarsdóttir expresses the hope that Icelanders can also draw on their
experiences as islanders in this new reality.

I really want to find a kind of feminine solution within the whirlpool of our male-centered
culture. […] How was it with you, Persephone, the old Greek island goddess? Does the sound
of your name hint at the frolicsome tranquility and revelation that we desire in our day? Can
I trust my ears; is this a guiding sound, a leitmotif from the islands?
(Ævarsdóttir 2016, 87)

Islandness becomes a central motif in Land of Love and Ruins. The concept of the island is, of
course, closely connected with our ideas of Utopia—as well as our worries about a dystopian fu-
ture (see Eysteinsson 2019, 149, 176). And in a world where climate change is a threat, the concept
of the island gains a new dimension.

Every island is a small world and also informs us that the world is limited—and now we know
that not only applies to the world we, each one of us, get to know in our lifetime, but to the
world as a human habitat.
(Eysteinsson 2019, 178, my translation)

The aim of Land of Love and Ruins is to find alternatives to oppressive capitalism, but the narra-
tor connects that project with her personal destiny as a lover and author, that is, her search for a

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fulfilling romantic partnership that also gives her privacy to write. Here, she seeks role models in
a feminine, rather than masculine literary tradition.

Strindberg’s little hut is on an island, in a forest, and his desk is still in it, all by itself […].
Somehow, I feel as though the privacy that Strindberg had sought was empty or negative, pri-
vacy in a kind of nowhere, because he derived his creative power from solitude and self-pity.
(Ævarsdóttir 2016, 45)

Female artists seem to give a more positive, more social, example to follow, as it is claimed that
Anaïs Nin “sought privacy that was loaded with life and memories, because she seems to have
derived her strength from interaction with others” (Ævarsdóttir 2016, 45). And the negative pri-
vacy of Strindberg marks a stark contrast with the triple “yes” that follows another description of
a female author’s stay on an island:

Yes yes, and Tove Jansson lived out on Klovharu Island off the coast of Finland and spent all her
summers writing there. With her partner, another female artist. Yes, lovers, islands, and ink.
(Ævarsdóttir 2016, 37)

In Undirferli, published in 2017, Oddný Eir Ævarsdóttir delves deeper into islandness, and the role
of islands as “laboratories” in the search for a more just and sustainable society. The two main
characters move from Iceland’s mainland to work at a laboratory in the Westman Islands archipel-
ago, near the south coast of Iceland, where scientists study microorganism on the island Surtsey,
which was formed in a submarine eruption in 1963–1967.
The new, tiny and closed-off Surtsey is presented as an opportunity to “better understand the
evolvement of organic life and its relations with the environment. And with death and destruction”
(Ævarsdóttir 2017, 17, my translation). Both Land of Love and Ruins and Undirferli thus allude to
the idea that future societies could learn from islanders’ cohabitation with nature. But just like the
feminist utopia of goddess-ruled matriarchy, islandness, not least a postcolonial one, also brings
its own problematics. The idea of the paradisiac island was exploited in colonialism, with Iceland
among the countries presented as a “primitive utopia” and Icelanders seen as the opposite of moral
degeneration and excess, far removed from the racket of the world (Ísleifsson 2015, 48, 230). In
Ævarsdóttir’s works, one detects the idea, which Sumarliði Ísleifsson (2015, 232–233) traces back to
the nineteenth century, that Iceland could again become the ideal society it once was. Ann-­Sofie
Nielsen Gremaud (2014) has discussed how Iceland’s fight for independence and later the coun-
try’s postcolonial status has shaped nationalistic presentation of its landscape in the arts. In Land of
Love and Ruins, Ævarsdóttir tries to justify her national emphasis when discussing environmental
issues that reach across all borders, wanting to differentiate between negative nationalism and pos-
itive patriotism. This might be one of the reasons the characters in Undirferli move from Iceland’s
mainland to smaller, newer, and more isolated islands offshore; it facilitates the utilization of the
­laboratory-island concept without Iceland’s complicated history of foreign rule and nationalistic
struggle for independence getting in the way. Other recent novels, mostly historical ones, follow
a trend that Leppänen, in Chapter 21, notices in contemporary Nordic literature, where ecofemi-
nist themes are in various ways combined with postcolonial perspectives. As Aslı Değirmenci Al-
tın points out in Chapter 33, the culture/nature binary is linked to other dualisms such as male/
female, mind/body, master/slave, civilized/primitive, human/animal, reason/emotions as well as
dualisms based on race, religion, and ethnicity. In Iceland, this can for example be seen in the novel
Lifandilífslækur (2018) by Bergsveinn Birgisson, which takes place in the late eighteenth century
and where connections are made between the oppression of Icelanders by Danes, the oppression of
non-human nature by humans and the oppression of women by men (Aðalsteinsdóttir 2022).

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Symbol of Possibilities
In Undirferli, Surtsey becomes a symbolic place of warring forces; on one hand, life-threatening
volcanic activity, and on the other hand, new growth that awakens to life. The male protagonist,
Smári, tries to build a mechanism to help him distinguish between fertile and destructive life
forces but as Icelanders well know, volcanic activity is not just ruinous but creates a fruitful soil
for new growth. The female protagonist, Íris, points out how interconnected these forces are but
a new virus that is found on this “mysterious black desert island” becomes a symbol of the forces
that “utilise the life force of others” (Ævarsdóttir 2017, 17, 16, my translation) and can be seen to
represent the exploitive role mankind has taken on in an otherwise natural cycle of fertilization and
ruin. This role is characterized by violence and the main characters in Undirferli try to escape from
all kinds of vicious cycles; not just of bodily but also psychological violence, and not just in their
personal relationships but also on a planetary basis. The fertility goddess Freyja is called to the res-
cue and Ævarsdóttir (2017, 163) refers, like Svava Jakobsdóttir in 1987, to the idea that the world’s
degradation can be traced to male forces having stolen natural wisdom and power from goddesses.
In fact, the ecofeminism of the 1980s and 1990s seems to conform surprisingly well with recent
posthuman emphases of ecocriticism, with its “questioning of the entrenched notion of the hu-
man, as well as the blurred boundaries between inorganic and organic matter” (Oppermann 2016,
273). In Chapter 34, Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu comes to a similar conclusion, mentioning ecofemi-
nists such as Carolyn Merchant, Noël Sturgeon, Catriona Sandilands, and Greta Gaard, that have
drawn our attention to injustices based on gender, race, class, and species. In Iceland, Auður Ava
Ólafsdóttir recognizes the importance of the foundation laid by such women for the younger gen-
erations’ understanding of our relationship with our environment. In her novel Dýralíf from 2020,
the protagonist’s newly deceased aunt has left papers and manuscripts full of environmentalism
and speculations on our role among other species for a new generation to consider, evaluate and
choose from. Of course, the focus of ecocritical thought is constantly shifting and evolving. As
Serpil Oppermann says, feminist ecocriticism now

debunks the objectification of the natural world, women, matter, bodily natures, and non-
human species, and opens new eco-vistas into exploring the dynamic co-extensivity and
permeability of human and nonhuman bodies and natures.
(Oppermann 2013, 68)

This kind of posthuman ecofeminism acknowledges that all planetary bodies and systems are in
a perpetual process of natural and cultural change and transformation, Yazgünoğ lu explains in
Chapter 34, illuminating the interdependency of nature and culture as well as the porous bound-
aries between the human world and the more-than-human world. Even though Ævarsdóttir fo-
cuses on humanity in her environmental fiction, the Surtsey virus, which is not an organic being,
reminds us that life is built on and in constant flux with inorganic matter which permeates our
bodies and our existence—just like the radioactive cloud in Gunnlöth’s Tale.
Furthermore, Ævarsdóttir reminds us of the unclear boundaries of gender. Undirferli is thereby
one of only a few contemporary Nordic novels, according to Leppänen in Chapter 21, that depict
gender transgression as part of the change in the natural world, parallel to other transformations on
a planetary level. A minor character in Undirferli, Eddi, suddenly turns into the trans woman Edda
and takes on a guiding role. Such emphases contribute to a trend that Asmae Ourkiya in Chapter 29
calls a queering of ecofeminism because they not only destabilize the gender binary but also defy
the belief that human bodies are meant to be static. The integration of queer theory, Ourkiya states,
was necessary for freeing ecofeminism from the harmful essentialized view of gender and sexuality
that it has adopted ever since its genesis, excluding transgender, non-binary, agender, gender-fluid,

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and intersex people. Instead, Ourkiya advocates postgenderism and dismantling binary under-
standings of gender and sexuality. Ecofeminism should, Ourkiya says, move toward fluid identities
in an attempt to ensure the inclusion of all humans and non-humans in environmental research.
The last chapters of Ævarsdóttir’s novel reflect this change in focus. Concurringly, the narrative
becomes more surreal and in the final scene, at the island Surtsey, we are plunged into pure fantasy
where the prophetess Edda starts to speak with birds in the language of wisdom and Íris and Smári
grow feathers. This is in line with Rhian Waller’s main point in Chapter 46, that the framework
and tropes of fantasy, such as the one of women gaining power as sorceresses (like Edda) and
scientists (like Íris), provide unique chances for ecofeminist investigation as they offer fruitful
alternatives to restricting structures like patriarchy, capitalism and increasingly, as it seems, binary
gender identities. Although even here, we might find a correlation by re-reading Gunnlöth’s Tale
with a queer eye, for there a feminine Loki is reminded that he can also represent the goddess.
In both works, solutions are sought in fluidity; at the blurring of boundaries; in a conversation
between past and present; and in reconciling different methods. The island becomes a symbol of
possibilities and can become either a utopia, a dystopia, or both at once.

Conclusion
Icelandic literature is a part of the Nordic literary space Leppänen investigates in Chapter 21,
where she points out that questions about nature, gender, and race have been an ever-present
undercurrent in Nordic feminist theory and literature. The trends described above conform with
recurring ecofeminist themes Leppänen has detected in that larger literary context, such as inter-
generational responsibility, alternatives to prevailing power dynamics, and new ecological sensi-
bilities. At the same time, Iceland’s struggle for independence and later its postcolonial status, with
a consequent emphasis on the heritage of Nordic mythology and medieval literature, shaped the
engagement of Icelandic writers with ecofeminism, for example, by making goddesses and island-
ness central themes. Since the 1980s, ecofeminism has been an empowering factor in Icelandic
women’s writing and goddesses continue to affirm “female power, the female body, the female
will, and women’s bonds and heritage” (Christ 1979, 276). One example is Elísabet Kristín Jökuls-
dóttir’s use of Baubo, a Greek goddess “of the stomach, humor, dirty jokes, laughter, buffoonery,
sex and first and foremost never ashamed of herself ” ( Jökulsdóttir 2007, 156, my translation), as
a liberating guiding light in her works (see Birgisdóttir 2019, 228). In recent years, the relevance
of ecofeminism, with a new focus on queerness, postgender, and the posthuman, has also been
acknowledged in Icelandic literature in this time of resistance to traditional anthropocentrism due
to the threat of climate change.

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Ruether, R.R. 1975. New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. New York: Seabury Press.
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 21
NORDIC LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Katarina Leppänen

Ecofeminist Theory and Nordic Classics

The Nordic countries share many elements of cultural history and there is a lively cross-­fertilization
between the relatively small nations. Cultural cooperation is institutionalized by funding agencies
and Nordic literary and cultural prizes. However, the relationships have not always been amicable
or equal – Danish colonial relations with Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland, Sweden’s colo-
nial domination over Finland, and the Indigenous Sámi people’s continuing struggle in the north-
ern territory, all echo in contemporary culture and literature (Hermansson and Lohfert Jørgensen
2020). Ecofeminist theories focus on multiple forms of domination and it is therefore interesting
to investigate how ecofeminist themes emerge in contemporary Nordic writing across borders
(Henning et al. 2018). There is, of course, not one clearly identifiable definition of ecofeminism
that can be adhered to when investigating literature over time and languages. Ecofeminist writing
from the early twentieth century until today often transgresses genres. Literature, poetry, letters,
and journalism were available to women to a much greater extent than theoretical genres, such as
philosophy or theology. Feminist critique of civilization has often taken a radical system-changing
perspective in which the relationship between humans, nature, and animals has been reformulated.
Ecofeminist theory identifies the logic of domination shared by anthropocentrism and androcen-
trism, where the disregard for nonhuman being is combined with a devaluation of women and the
feminine (Plumwood 1993; Warren 1994). The numerous discussions within, and outside, fem-
inist theory regarding possible essentializing tendencies in ecofeminism are not addressed in this
article. Rather, I apply a generous definition of ecofeminism in literature as texts that renegotiate
the human/non-human relationship for the benefit of increased awareness of their interconnected-
ness and emphasize gender, understood as cultural, social, biological, and historical, as crucial for
fighting disempowerment. An understanding of environmental justice as part of the struggle for
other social justices such as sexism, racism, or poverty means that ecological issues always address
relations of power (King 1989, Gaard 2015). By reading across genres and over time it becomes
obvious that questions about nature, gender, and race have been an ever-present undercurrent in
Nordic feminist theory and literature (Leppänen and Svensson 2016).
The Swedish author Elin Wägner’s ecofeminist manifesto Väckarklocka (1941, Alarm Clock)
and the Finnish author Aino Kallas’s novel Suden morsian (1928, The Wolf’s Bride 1930) are Nordic
proto-ecofeminist classics in which topics of contemporary ecofeminist concerns emerge. These
questions concern three themes that will guide the following analysis: intergenerational responsi-
bility, alternatives to prevailing power dynamics, and new ecological sensibilities.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-22223
 Katarina Leppänen

Both Kallas and Wägner have become central points of reference in Nordic feminist literary
history, not least due to their early combination of ecological and feminist issues. Wägner in-
troduced an explicitly theoretical analysis of the exploitation of women and natural resources,
furthermore, drawing attention to how the same logic was used in racist and colonial discourse.
She emphasized intergenerational responsibility, which is evident in the importance attached to
history in understanding women’s roles and propelling the future in a new direction (Leppänen
2008). She writes, “Our motto is not and must not be: we have to go back. And not: we have to
stop progress where it is today, which would be worst of all. Our motto must be: getting through”
(Wägner 1941, 267, my translation). Wägner sought inspiration for ecofeminist resistance in his-
tory, anthropology, in contemporary feminist debates and activism in Europe, in the transnation-
alism of the League of Nations, in experimenting with new kinds of land leases (as opposed to land
ownership) and ecological farming, and in drawing theoretical equivalences between struggles for
gender, race, and ecological equality. She was a founding member of a radical international group
called The Women’s Organization for World Order.
Kallas’s ecofeminist exploration of the woman/animal connection offers another world with
different hierarchies and ways of experiencing the world. Through mythical and magical relations
between nature and the feminine, she opens for new ways of thinking. Kallas lived and worked
largely in Estonia, and she followed a trend in the Estonian literary scene of reactivating old
chronicles, and the human/wolf transformation is of course a recurring theme in literary history.
The Wolf’s Bride tells the tale of the forest ranger’s wife, Aalo, who runs with the wolves at night.
The animal form gives Aalo freedom to experience sensuality, erotic, and sexual pleasure, while
avoiding subordination to patriarchal society, married life, and unwanted sexual advances (Lönn-
gren 2015). Yet Aalo’s shifting between the human and the animal makes her subject to violence
from the frightened villagers, and she is eventually killed. Kallas’s writing in the context of femi-
ninity and sexuality is part of the feminist ecological ideas developing in the Nordic countries in
the interwar years that explored alternatives to the prevailing political and social orders and were
part of a larger critique of civilization (Melkas 2006, 2011). The theme of the female werewolf in
Estonian literature and folklore is further discussed in Chapter 22, where Kutznetski and Tüür
analyze August Kitzberg’s play Libahunt (1912, Werewolf ) in terms of the incomprehensibility of
transcorporality that inevitably leads to the she-werewolf ’s being shot. The wolf in ecofeminist
literature has lately reemerged in the Castilian novel Beatriz y la loba (2014) by Concha López
Llamas ( Juncuera 2018).
When Wägner’s Alarm Clock was republished in 1979, it caused a heated debate in the Swed-
ish national press, among feminist literary authors and feminist scholars, focusing on the radical
anti-patriarchal potential of women’s role in the political, pacifist, and ecological movements.
Simultaneously a growing academic and theoretical interest in ecofeminism was developing in
conjunction with Carolyn Merchant’s guest research period at Umeå University in Sweden, which
influenced both public intellectual debate and scholarly research directions (Sörlin 2018). In Nor-
way, the development of ecophilosophy and deep ecology by Arne Næss had a great national and
international impact. In the field of literature, the ecofeminist legacy was carried on by many
authors, as in Inger Christensen’s nature-oriented system poetry of the 1980s and 1990s where
she explored the fundamental conditions of gender, the body, our consciousness of nature, and
the cosmos (Wedell Pape 2012). And in Sweden Kerstin Ekman explored the human/nature
relationship in numerous novels depicting the breaking point between the urban and the rural
in the northern landscape, especially the large forest (Andersdotter 1999). Nordic ecofeminist
literature must, I believe, be read in the context of both women’s social and political movements
and scholarly theoretical developments. The historical examples are not only a backdrop to more
current literary trends but bear witness to the close interdependence between literary explorations
of women/nature connections and the development of ecofeminist theory.

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Intergenerational Responsibilities: Global Causes and Local Effects

Intergenerational responsibility has been on the climate agenda at least since the 1987 publication
of the United Nations report Our Common Future. The Norwegian Writer’s Climate Campaign
(2021), an online resource of climate writing and ecocriticism, refers to §12 in the Norwegian
Constitution which gives everyone the right to a healthy and diverse environment that is sustain-
able for future generations – the overheating of the planet is termed a “crime against humanity”.
Similar questions of care and responsibility have been central to ecofeminist thought from the very
beginning (see, e.g., King 1989; Wägner 1941). Interlaced timescapes that cover generational per-
spectives are a recurring narrative device in Nordic ecofeminist literature today and are frequently
utilized by Norway’s most successful climate fiction author, Maja Lunde (Hennig 2020). In Bienes
historia (2015, The History of Bees 2017), she traces a fictive genealogy of beekeepers followed through
three families – a nineteenth-century natural scientist in England, early twenty-first-century com-
mercial bee farmers in the US, and finally a family in the future China (2098) where all insects have
died. Their lives are woven together across time through kinship, global migration, and science. The
transfer of knowledge between generations is intricate as nineteenth-century science is imported to
the United States in the form of a new kind of beehive and the twenty-first-century beekeeper’s son
realizes the importance of documenting the death of bees, documentation that ends up in the hands
of a Chinese mother who realizes that the bees are returning.
In Blå (2017, The End of the Ocean 2019), Lunde works with two timescapes of a Norwegian
coastal village in 2017 and the export of ice, and a parched, burning Europe of 2041. The adven-
turous solo-sailor Signe sabotages the commodification of the glacial water resources for sale on
the European market. Ecofeminist elements in the book come, as in Bienes historie, from women’s
foresight, knowledge, and actions that defy the shortsighted and exploitive lifestyles and values
of their times. Signe dumps the ice from a freighter ship into the sea but rescues some of it and
transports it to Europe. Years later a father and daughter flee their burning home and find a ref-
ugee camp. They escape the dreary days and constant hunger and thirst by exploring the camp’s
surroundings and they find Signe’s stranded old boat to play fantasy games in. They decide to
stay near the boat and accidentally discover Signe’s hidden glacial water. Thus, a deposit made
by Signe in the past is the lifeline of future generations. The inter-generational and ecofeminist
themes return in Lunde’s Przewalskis hest (2019, The Last Wild Horse 2022). We follow the journey
of the Mongolian wild horse from a recovery project in a zoological garden in St. Petersburg in the
1880s, through twenty-first-century relocation projects where horses are moved from European
zoos back to Mongolia, and into a future of mass extinction of species. The future of the horse lies
largely, but not solely, in the hands of women.
Rosarium (2021), by the Danish novelist Charlotte Weitze, follows the life narrative of the bot-
anist Johannes/Johanna covering five generations. It is a detailed, rich, and magical story of meta-
morphosis among, and between, humans, and plants. The young male botanist Johannes changes
from male to female identity and a new hybrid species emerges combining human and rosehip.
In short, two orphaned children grow up in the woods in the borderland of tsarist Russia during
the First World War and have a child. The pregnant mother eats rosehip of a special plant that can
react to human voices, and she turns into a human/rosehip hybrid that can disseminate nutri-
ents to the poor villagers. She gives birth to Esther who years later meets Johannes/Johanna in
the woods as he/she is on a botanical quest for the mythical rose (and hiding from the Nazis).
Esther is the only female-like being that Johannes/Johanna has ever been attracted to and they
have twins. Esther is unable to adapt to life in society and Johanna, who now passes as the twin’s
mother, is forced to leave the children to foster care while attending to Esther. Johanna lives to
be 100 years old and can see that her grandchild Fine (from Josefine) shares the unusual DNA
of the once beloved Esther. The book ends in a twist with Fine’s dream-world predictions of a

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future where rosebushes emit poison that kills humans – a world where Esther’s and Fine’s hy-
brid kind and kin have taken over the world. In this magical story of multiple metamorphoses,
“nature” is not benevolent as it is not humans and our poisons that kill other species, it is rather
plants that kill us.
Lunde’s and Weitze’s novels raise many ecofeminist questions. Firstly, women are in all in-
stances the actants, activists, and protagonists, while the male characters do not display the heroic
characteristics of protectors (see also Hennig 2020; Raipola 2019). Instead, men take on caring and
nurturing roles and represent, at least the possibility of, increased gender equality. Rosarium is also
one of few novels that depict gender transgression as part of the change in the natural world, and
Johannes’/Johanna’s transformation can be understood as parallel to many other transformations
on a planetary level. Secondly, inter-generational links are created by following creatures and ob-
jects such as insects, water, horses, and humans for long periods. There are intertextual references
between the novels’ characters, both within each novel and in Lunde’s case between the novels,
which create a global and historical web of stories, peoples, times, and places. Thirdly, both Lunde
and Weitze meticulously register years, geographic locations, flora, and fauna (even if they may be
fictitious), which reveals the consequences of global phenomena in local contexts. Weitze’s charac-
ters give detailed mini-lectures in the sciences and all the books relate to botanical and zoological
gardens. Lunde’s Chinese mother in 2098 even breaks into a library to find “ancient” knowledge
of bee stings to understand her son’s illness and death. These female protagonists are attuned to
changes in their environments and take the responsibility for creating new knowledge, as well as
preserving traditional knowledge, to a much larger extent than their societies in general do. How-
ever, the inclination to act in a way beneficial to the environment is not altogether spontaneous or
natural for the protagonists. They rather come to realize that they need more knowledge and that
they need to disseminate existing knowledge to further the planet’s survival.

Skewed Power Dynamics: Young Women and the Crises of the Future
In the Nordic countries, contact with nature is regarded as an educational ideal, as is gender equal-
ity, and therefore playing and learning in outdoor environments is encouraged for all children,
which is reflected in literature (Goga et al. 2018). The focus on maturation is a unique chance to
rethink humanity’s possibility to develop ways of interacting with the environment (Seelinger
Trites 2018, 61). Michelle Deininger argues in Chapter 42 that YA fiction offers a liminal position
beyond the limitations of children’s literature because it is unbound by the narrative expectations
and limits of adult fiction. The focus on developmental processes combined with greater freedom
in narrative form gives the protagonists the freedom to challenge the prevailing social order as
well as any imagined future order. As Alice Curry has shown, young adults can resist “oppressive
ideologies [that] preclude or delimit social and environmental change” as personal change can be
combined with political change – “personal transformation as a preliminary to political engage-
ment” (Curry 2013, 193, 17 respectively). Youth also offers a different perspective on intergen-
eration responsibility, namely, the ability (or inability) of the young to amend the harm caused
by previous generations. It is therefore interesting from an ecofeminist’s perspective that young
women protagonists have become a common feature in contemporary Nordic young adult dysto-
pias (Laakso et al. 2019, 201).
In two novels from Finland, Emmi Itäranta’s Finnish-language Teemestarin kirja (2012, The
Memory of Water 2014) and the Finland’s-Swedish author Annika Luther’s De hemlösas stad (2011,
The City of the Homeless) young women struggle with the consequences of climate disaster. No-
ria, in The Memory of Water, lives in a future Scandinavia that has been severely hit by drought. The
world order as we know it has collapsed and a Chinese superpower dominates the Eurasian conti-
nent. Noria’s mother is a scientist with an extensive library and her father is a tea master upholding

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the ancient tradition. The family is privileged because of the father’s role which is appreciated by
those in power. However, he can keep up his tea ceremonies only if he can retain access to a secret
underground well of freshwater. Noria is encouraged by her father to break the gendered expecta-
tions by becoming a woman tea master. Events take unexpected turns and Noria loses her family as
well as the protection of the local military. She and her friend Sanja start planning for an expedition
to look for freshwater as they believe that it is possible that the water shortage could be alleviated.
They base this on a discovery of CD recordings found in the plastic graveyard and extensive studies
by Noria of her mother’s scientific texts and her father’s diaries. Simultaneously Noria cannot resist
helping her fellow villagers even though she risks revealing the well. It is not commented on explic-
itly, but women are apparently in charge of water in the future too, making them disproportionately
affected by environmental change (Leppänen 2020). Noria’s quest for knowledge, her perseverance,
and integrity, propel the young women into challenging the dystopic future.
In the City of the Homeless, the protagonist is the 15-year-old Lilja whose family was evacuated
from Helsinki, the capital on the southern coast of Finland, when a worldwide sea-level rise was
caused by melting ice caps in Greenland. The new capital city is in mid-Finland, Jyväskylä, where
survivors have created a monolingual and homogenous Finnish culture. The circumscribed, con-
trolled, and monitored life in Jyväskylä only offered the protagonist a “half-life” but she wants
to live a “full life” and Lilja runs away to find her biological mother who stayed in the flooded
Helsinki to continue her scientific research as a marine biologist; gathering knowledge is deci-
sive for global survival after the flood. After an exciting and dangerous journey, Lilja arrives in
her native Helsinki, which has become a thriving multicultural city populated by refugees from
other flooded “hellish coasts” (Luther 2011, 12). The family who gave Lilja a home in the new
Helsinki is run by an Indian matriarch who was once educated in Oxford and is now running
an English girls’ school. Events take an unexpected turn as Jyväskylä’s nuclear powerplant has a
meltdown and the population flees even further north. Lilja’s family decides to head south to their
old hometown, their adopted daughter, and the potential dangers of the forbidden zone. The
book plays with the current political situation in Finland, as elsewhere, with growing protec-
tionist and nationalist movements, and conflict between the urban multicultural south and rural
imaginary-authentic-Finnish north, and effectively puts the brave young woman in a productive
liminal position from where she can expose the risks of taking an isolated nationalist position,
often identified as masculinist and traditionalist, in the face of global catastrophe.
Murphy (2013, 208) identifies a subsistence perspective as “an ecofeminist call to consciousness
[and] to renegotiate the global inequalities highlighted by the international environmental justice
movement”. This is, I argue, very much the focus of both the YA fiction narratives dealt with
here. Subsistence is connected to knowledge and the way to address environmental crises of water,
drought, or flood caused by humans. The Memory of Water and The City of the Homeless are very
different books, not least because they target different age groups. The former is aimed at older
readers and even adults, while the latter is clearly a youth novel. This affects the range of activity
that can reasonably be expected from the protagonists, given the developmental theme of much
YA fiction. Yet both protagonists manage to question (un-)legitimate power hierarchies as the
repressive states halt the young women’s development into full maturity and self-­determination.
Lilja’s and Noria’s actions highlight a change from naïve acceptance of things as they are, to con-
scious action for change. To accept and adapt is not an option.

New Ecological Sensibilities: Eroticism and Violence

It may seem odd to consider sensibility, eroticism, and violence under a unified heading. Yet,
more-than-human sensibilities or human/animal eroticism, or shape-shifting that gives humans
new ways of experiencing the world, are often met with violence. Violence stems from patriarchal

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fear of the animal within and of the knowledge that can be gained through otherworldly experi-
ences (Lönngren 2015).
The history of Sápmi is one of colonialism and colonial experiences, and they are major themes
in contemporary literature and art (Heith 2020; Hirvonen 1999).1 The Sámi author Rawdna Car-
ita Eira (b. 1970) describes an eroticized relationship between a woman and a reindeer, introduc-
ing intimacy and sensuality to more traditional imagery of masculine strength in reindeer herding
(Ahvenjärvi 2015, 104). Ecofeminist themes are often combined with postcolonial and Indigenous
perspectives in an intricate weave of interspecies connections. New relationships, especially to the
reindeer which are traditionally and solely herded by certain groups of Sámi peoples, are a way
of connecting to the Indigenous ontology that questions the majority society’s understanding of
animal/nature/human relations. In her bilingual Norwegian and Sámi collection of poetry ruohta
muzetbeallji ruohta – løp svartøre løp (2011, Run Black-Ear Run) Eira’s protagonist vacillates be-
tween the domination of her reindeer (e.g., in the violent marking of ownership by cutting a mark
in the reindeer’s ear) and the reindeer’s reciprocity with the woman. The reindeer is given the
perspective of a male gaze with an erotic undertone (Ahvenjärvi 2015, 110). The female-human
character of the poem thus transgresses the expected gender roles of the reindeer-keeping Sámi, as
very few women are active keepers, while allowing the relationship to the one specific animal
to become central. Eira’s poetry is simultaneously non-romanticizing as she addresses aspects
of Sámi life such as pollution, overriding economic interests, and the global networks that
Sámi traditions are interwoven with. She thus avoids giving a one-sided image of the Sámi as
intrinsically attuned to nature. The dilemma of lost language identity, another topical theme
in Sápmi literature, is addressed in Hege Siri’s poetry that looks back at the older generation
of mothers in awe as they still have access to the Sámi language. Language loss is connected
to historical violence against the Indigenous as the Nordic states forcefully tried to integrate
Sámi into the majority population, for example, by forbidding them to speak their language.
Eira and Siri refer to the most famous male Sámi authors and suggest that ancestry is important
on an individual level as well as on an intertextual level, but their approach reflects a renewed
awareness of gendered orders as well as breaking with expected gender roles (see also Eikjok
2007; Kuokkanen 2007).
Lost or hidden tradition is also the theme of ecofeminist interpretations of Norse mythol-
ogy and the Icelandic Sagas. Oral tradition is collected in the Edda (ca. 1270), which contains
dialogue and tales about women (Kress 2006, 509–510) while the sagas are overtly mascu-
line and include only a few female characters who play minor parts, if they are named at all
(Lavender, forthcoming). As Aðalsteinsdóttir argues in Chapter 20 on Icelandic literature,
contemporary authors seek inspiration, while also developing, the old Sagas in a feminist
and ecofeminist direction. In Gerður Kristný’s long poem Blóðhófnir (2010, Bloodhoof 2012)
ecofeminist voice is given to Gerðr in the Skírnismál poem by turning the tale from the orig-
inal perspective of a ruling man-god to the perspective of the subjugated woman-giant. The
original saga ends with male conquest, while the modern tale continues into the violence
that Gerðr endures at the hands of her husband. She ends up beaten, displaced, and pregnant,
longing for her own natural habitat and kin. The violence that meets women of a different
kind alludes to the idea of power and domination of one species or sex over the other. In
other words, the logic of male power over women in contemporary society is mirrored in the
ancient tales of gods and giantesses.
A heightened awareness of an impending violent catastrophe makes itself felt in linguistic in-
novation in Nanna Storr-Hansen’s poetry in the collection Mimosa (2018). Storr-Hansen mixes
Danish and English in her poetry about a chaotic and impenetrable world (Bøgh Thomsen 2018).
The female body is intertwined with the story of climate change and suggests an analogy be-
tween two ways of creating energy, breast milk, and nuclear power, by evoking the nuclear breast

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plant [atombrystværket] (Storr-Hansen 2018, 44). She uses the same vocabulary when describing
traditionally valued natural scenery and when viewing desolate landscapes because beauty and
catastrophe are not mutually exclusive categories (Storr-Hansen 2018, 47). A similar dark ecology
is evident in the Swedish author Sara Stridsberg’s novel Darling River (2018). Stridsberg excels in
ambivalent and ironic explorations of women’s subjugated role in patriarchy, yet a combination
of beauty and cruelty offers a multitude of perspectives. Her language exposes the structural vio-
lence against women, nature, and animals, yet it leaves openings for exposing the mechanism of
violence by abandoning ideas of nature vs. culture or pure vs. contaminated.
The poetry of the Swedish Anna Axfors and the Norwegian Sara Solberg very concretely point
to new ways of sensing the environment through bodily exposure and especially through hearing.
In “I hate nature” (2019) Axfors describes the yearning to perform the impossible task of trying
to listen to the pulse of the earth. In Solberg’s poetry, the ear is pressed to the ground to listen for
organisms, bacteria, and microbial processes. What becomes evident, though, is that human senses
are inadequate to really hear, no matter how keenly we try to listen.
Fear of transgression and the violence facing those who transgress binary understandings of the
human/animal/nature divides captures the dilemma of ecofeminism and ecocritical thinking in
general. Suggesting that anything may be wrong with the course of the current civilization is met
with a torrent of verbal and physical violence that reflects the fear we feel when our lifestyles are
questioned. Attempts to rethink are considered irrational. But as the poetry discussed here sug-
gests, there is always an inescapable element of violence in human attempts to create new relations
as we are embedded in inevitable webs of inequalities and destruction. The Swedish author Helena
Granström has pointed to the risks involved in emotional engagement with the non-human in
an industrial capitalist society. There is always a risk that someone will reduce the forest you love
to a heap of twigs and pine needles. Trained as a physicist she often combines sustainability with
scientific observation and lets her fictive characters discuss natural sciences. In the short story
Skördebrev (2011, Harvest letter) the protagonist oscillates between woman and cow, between flesh
and earth on the one hand, and on the other hand language and letters as symbols that cannot
be interpreted – the alphabet as war. In Granström this is not a painless symbiosis between the
human and nonhuman, rather, her text conveys a loathing of the woman’s body with its cow-like
constant chewing, fluids, milk, and the complacency of a domesticated female animal, especially
in the presence of a man.

Conclusion
In some way we always own the land and animals we would want to connect to reciprocally, or we
have destroyed the nature we would like to explore for rejuvenation. We may indeed be left with
a dark ecology or a beautiful catastrophe. But we “thoughtful human beings must use the fullness
of our sensibility and intelligence to push ourselves intentionally to another stage of evolution”
informed by many different ways of knowing (King 1990, 120–121). The quotation summarizes
the two main lines of analysis in this article – new sensibilities to our environment and a way of
dealing with it through knowledge production.
The article has focused on ecofeminism and literature, casting a wide web over the Nordic
countries to catch the timeliest topics in the genre. It has been suggested that the current climate
fiction aesthetics in the Nordic countries represent a continuation of the late nineteenth-century
aesthetics of decadence and decay, and that this could be a specifically northern phenomena that
is known in popular culture as Nordic Noir (Furuseth et al. 2020). My assessment regarding Nor-
dic climate fiction and ecofeminism is that they follow reasonably well the international trends
in the genres. Given the acuteness of the current climate crisis, it is almost impossible to grasp
what a “bright” utopian ecofeminist novel would look like. That said, climate change fiction

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and ecofeminism are not a perfect match as much climate fiction is masculinist and tech-science
oriented in its solutions, as discussed by Iris Ralph in Chapter 44. Technology, when understood
as the only or best possible solution to the environmental crisis, tends to disregard possible al-
ternatives, especially if the alternatives are based on feminine or feminist values. In Nordic lit-
erature, ecofeminist themes are seldom at the center of a story. This is possibly a conclusion that
is dependent on the choice of books mainly from the genre of near-future fiction, which by its
closeness to our own time often needs to work with smaller shifts in perspective to remain credi-
ble, for example in criticizing norms and values, than for example science fiction needs to. Yet, it
is evident that ecofeminism plays an important role in both the themes of many novels and in the
scholarly analysis of novels. By highlighting generation, knowledge, gender roles, and sensibility,
the concept of ecofeminism in literature is brought into contact with central issues not only of
literature but of feminist theoretical concerns generally. These aspects merit more investigation as
the creative combination of fiction and feminism can be powerful in both critically investigating
and depicting the world around us.

***

This chapter could not have been written without the help of numerous Nordic scholars and their
generous advice, especially Ekoseminariet at Gothenburg University. None mentioned, none for-
gotten. All omissions and generalizations are my own.

Note
1 The terms Sápmi and Sámi have replaced the colonial, and sometimes derogatory, terms Lapland and
Lapp. The Sámi speak several languages and live in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, with a total
population of approximately 100,000 (see, e.g., Kortekangas 2021).

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 22
ESTONIAN LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Julia Kuznetski and Kadri Tüür

Introduction
Scholars have pointed out a multidirectionality in ecocriticism and ecofeminism: its intersections
of gender and the environment which, in Greta Gaard’s (2011) words, had had the potential to
represent the third wave of feminism, as well as the emphasis on environmental justice, inspiring
“cosmovisions” of the earth as a living being with whom “all other persons have an indivisible and
interdependent meaningful relationship” (Adamson and Monani 2017, 4). This multidirectionality
is observed on many levels: while ecofeminism and environmental justice have been moving from
local to global in the past 30 years (Sze 2016), Timothy Clark (2019, 137) observes that ecocriti-
cism nowadays has turned into a global academic phenomenon, studying a variety of literary texts
from a wide array of regions and thus representing decolonization and “de-­A mericanization” of
the canonical, western-romantic forms of “nature” and “human”. Interestingly, Clark raises the
problem of literary genre in this “de-Americanization”: while the texts and their studies may
come from diverse regions from Norway to Peru, the focus is still on the western canonical, “new
global” genre of the novel (2019, 137). In the same way, according to Greta Gaard (2010), local
peculiarities and the local context are instrumental in the study of ecofeminist literature, as the
main concerns of ecofeminism—a focus on the body, physical relationship with the environment,
critique of various forms of injustice and inegalitarianism, bringing to light such “backgrounded”
(in Val Plumwood’s terms, 2002) activities as motherhood and caring, or relationship with animals
may be recognized on the global scale, yet have an intense local hue and it is that local palette that
makes for the uniqueness of Estonian literature.

The Role of Nature on Estonian Literature

Born in geographical, geopolitical and historical crosswinds, literature in Estonia occupies a
unique position. It is strongly rooted in folklore and ancient traditions of closeness to nature, as a
way to preserve the core national identity in a land being passed between foreign powers (Dan-
ish, German, Swedish, Russian, Baltic-German, Soviet) for centuries. On the other hand, it is
shaped by the formalities of the western cultural canon, hailing from Christianity and German
culture. As a result, “the modern-day Estonian walks around in the forests with Skype or iPhone
in one hand and a little mushrooming knife in the other” (Mikita, n.d.). But what of an Estonian
woman? While the theory of ecofeminism has been imported from the west, the literary texts
emerging since the late nineteenth century combine a local idiosyncrasy with general ecofeminist

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-23233
 Julia Kuznetski and Kadri Tüür

characteristics (Kirss 2011). In this chapter, we explore these idiosyncrasies as well as their origins,
as manifested in selected literary texts qualifying as ecofeminist even if not necessarily written by
women and work on the margins of the canon, beyond the global domination of the novel. In this
volume, Nicole Anae (Chapter 27) questions conventional genre limitations of the literary canon,
while making a case for ecofeminist literature as various forms of writing that move beyond these
limitations, which is what our analysis will also demonstrate.
In Estonian folklore, which is the basis for our literature today, Christian and pagan motifs
intertwine, creating a spiritual world in which “it is necessary to get on well with both” (Estonica).
Forest and water were central to the beliefs of ancient Estonians, both the sea and different bodies
of water, such as rivers and lakes. However, as stressed by Estonian writer and semiotician Valdur
Mikita, it is due to the forest that Christianization could never completely erase Estonians’ affinity
for nature and paganism:

The forest has kept us safe from conquests, plagues, as well as full Christianization. It was
simply impossible to convert the thickly wooded land and its people so easily: people’s way of
thinking remained stubbornly animist, in spite of it all.
(n.d.)

The motif of a life-giving body is especially strong in the depiction of water, which Corne-
lius Hasselblatt compares to the North-American tradition of seeing the sea as a mother giving
birth to fish (58). This is also reflected in the name of one of Estonia’s biggest rivers, Emajõgi
(­Mother-river), and in the myth that the world was created from the eggs of a water bird. Land
affinity, birth metaphor and the native imagination as well as writing as a way of foregrounding
suppressed history in the literature of first nations are the focus of Chapter 19 in this volume. In
the Estonian case, intersections of east and west, paganism, Christianity and nature can be seen
in interesting subversions that come to light when applying the ecofeminist method of analysis.

The Werewolf: An Animal, a Woman, or a Human

One of the most interesting earlier texts is August Kitzberg’s 19121 play Libahunt (Werewolf ). Al-
though written by a male writer and discussed from various other angles by several critics, it pro-
vides rich material for ecofeminist analysis, as also argued by Talivee and Tüür (2013). The plot
and the created world of the play allow us to see nature and the female as a driving force, which is
the conflict of the tragedy. It recounts 15 years in the life of the Tammarus, a peasant family in the
South-Western Estonian countryside, who adopt an orphaned girl Tiina. In contrast to their own
son Margus and another adopted daughter, Mari, both blond and blue-eyed, as all the Tammaru
people have been for generations, Tiina, is “of a different blood”: dark, fiery, passionate and re-
bellious. A love triangle develops between her, Margus and the pious, church-indoctrinated Mari,
who spreads the rumor of Tiina being a werewolf, which leads to her ostracism and eventually a
tragic end (Margus shoots her in the chest on a stormy winter night, thinking he is aiming at a
wolf ). Viewed from an ecofeminist perspective, Tiina’s character acquires a new dimension, and
her predicament may be explained as the nature/culture, reason/feeling, church/paganism and
other hegemonic dualisms theorized by Plumwood as denialist and dangerous (2002), as pointed
out in several chapters in this volume. Tiina’s fate is already decided by her descent: father, a free
peasant who died when escaping from landlords, and a mother who used to help people in vari-
ous ways, including healing from a deadly snake bite (16), which leads to her trial and execution
for witchcraft. Tammaru Granny points to the Christian dualism in judging “witches and wise
people who know more than others” (14): for the “new faith”, Christianity, all this is undifferen-
tiated witchcraft, while ancient beliefs could tell a difference “between evil and evil” (14). In this

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dualist worldview, everything that is not associated with the village, church and common sense, is
witchcraft. Tiina contends that she feels safe in the woods (76), adorns herself with flowers because
“forest and land are also all in festive decorations” (28), talks to a squirrel while feeding her nuts
(giving and caring) instead of gathering berries (taking from nature), and does not feel like want-
ing to be human anymore, as she presses her body to the moss on the ground and cries (76), which
labels her a witch or a werewolf. Another accusation and “proof ” of her beastly affinity is that she
had “bewitched” Margus, “made” him love her (76). Here, we can recognize the archetype of
the femme fatale, widely spread in the fin-de-siécle western literature, often represented by various
liminal creatures, such as sirens and mermaids, and also the Cartesian dualist archetype of likening
women to nature and all its “evils” going against Christian morality and common sense. Karen
Barad (2017, 114) observes how in a culture built on static notions of human control, transforma-
tions, which are a natural part of the world’s materiality, are linked to anxiety about alchemical
transmutations, “hitched to fantasies of human control over life and death”, resulting in the whole
history of persecution of witches. One big blasphemy is Tiina’s proposition to Margus to abandon
the village together and live in a cave in the forest, drinking from a stream and being married by
God (78). Which god, she does not specify, but in her worldview, a wolf, a werewolf and herself
alike are “God’s creatures” (79), just as the snake she had previously refused to kill (28). The fami-
ly’s rhetoric in forbidding Margus to marry Tiina is that he “can only take a human for a wife, one
who will not run away into the forest” (73) reminds, on the one hand, of the big Butlerian “who
counts as human”, whose lives are livable and breathable and, on the other hand, of Plumwood’s
warning that there is danger in the reductionist practice of linking women to nature as opposed
to culture. Stacy Alaimo proposes to overcome this divide by observing in Undomesticated Ground
(2000) that in various feminist texts from the nineteenth century onward, it is a culture that is
seen as “static and confining, in terms of strict gender roles, and nature was a liberatory space that
allowed for critique of or escape from rigid cultural constructions” (Kuznetski and Alaimo 2020,
142), eventually leading to Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality (2010, passim), or a reciprocal
relationship of the human body and the physicality of nature, in which the hierarchy of body/
mind is dissolved into mutual transformation and fluidity. This way, the forest is a very liberatory
place for Tiina, who proclaims: “If I am a wolf, my place is with the wolves, there’s more justice
and compassion in their company!” (Kitzberg 2018, 79). The narrative is framed by the snowstorm
and the howling of the wolves that Tiina emerges from as an eight-year-old orphan in Act I, and
again as a wounded wolf-woman in Act V. How else could she have survived five harsh Estonian
winters but inside a wolf ’s pelt? It is also remarkable that the werewolf, often presented as male
in European folklore, is made female by Kitzberg, implying a double tricksterism whereby the
character does not only shift shapes but also genders (see Metsvahi 2015). This way of depiction
will be continued in several other versions, for example, Hundimõrsja (Est. Bride of a Wolf ) by
Finnish-Estonian women writer Aino Kallas (1928) and a recent young adult book Maarius, maagia
ja libahunt Liisi (Est. Maarius, Magic and Werewolf Liisi) by Reeli Reinaus (2017). Other parallels
from Estonian literature that discuss women “running with wolves” include Nõia tütar (Daughter
of a Witch, 1893) by one of our earliest professional writers, Juhan Liiv, Vedaja (Goblin 1908) by
Jakob Mändmets, and Helga Nõu’s story Hundi silmas (In the Eye of a Wolf 1999). This way, the
initial folklore-based story of a supernatural metamorphosis transforms in a modernized society
into stories foregrounding the questions of individual freedom, and the wolf becomes a symbol of
a real wild animal in the woods. This highlights the idea of animals as agents posing a challenge
to human superiority, the subject of currently proliferating animal studies, as discussed by Lesley
Kordecki in Chapter 26.
Both Kallas and Reinaus contrast the blood-thirsty human world of hunters with the sympa-
thetic wolves. In Libahunt Liisi, a twenty-first-century girl is ostracized at school, and reveals to
Maarius, a new boy she befriends, that she is a werewolf or in fact a multiple shape-shifter, and can

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turn into a cat or another animal. It is due to her that the boy discovers the magic of the forest, its
ways, and its precarity, which Liisi protects together with her Granny, also a shape-shifter, from
both evil spirits and human hunters. In the forest, Maarius learns to distinguish evil from evil
(which the pious villagers of the earlier Libahunt were unable to do), thus overcoming the con-
straints of homogenizing and stereotyping, described by Plumwood as the consequences of cen-
trisms. Like Tiina, Liisi is fatally wounded by a human hunter while in a wolf ’s shape, but is healed
by Maarius cooperating with forest fairies and applying spells from Liisi’s book of witchcraft. If the
snowstorm in the 1912 Libahunt brings to the village house a dying Tiina, rejected by her human
family and the village society, then Libahunt Liisi of 2017 ends with a thick fog spreading over the
woods and the field, with a happy future lying before the young protagonists (Reinaus 2017, 221),
who believe in the forest and its magic.

A Benevolent Witch or a Guardian of Nature: The Case of Kunksmoor

In Chapter 41 of this volume, Anja Höing argues that ecofeminism in children’s literature has
been a late-comer and the integration of the two rather remains a vision of the future. How-
ever, in Estonian literature, the case is exactly the opposite: as progressive ideas were dangerous
to express under Soviet regime due to censureship, it was children’s literature that provided a
secret avenue for them. The most famous case of blending feminism with ecological concerns is
the enormously popular book Kunksmoor 2 (1975)3 by beloved writer Aino Pervik (1932–), who is
internationally known for her children’s books, and included in the IBBY4 honor list. The titular
character Kunksmoor is an older woman living on a small island in the middle of the sea. Her
name combines well-forgotten loan words from Swedish to denote a crone (Est. moor) who knows
crafts (kunks), in the old Nordic meaning of skill, power, knowledge, wisdom and resourcefulness,
which includes reaction capacity in unexpected situations and resilience.
Kunksmoor’s main aid are plants, which she collects throughout the year, on her own island
as well as the mainland, to make healing infusions, vapors, tinctures, compresses, etc. She also
uses spells, but only in extreme cases when the power of plants cannot beat the magnitude of the
catastrophe that needs to be evaded or fixed. One such catastrophe is an oil spill caused by a tanker
shipwrecked on the shallows (due to the combination of the ignorance of the crew and their mis-
use of some plants snatched from Kunksmoor). The irresponsible crew abandons the ship after the
disaster, and the oil starts to cover the sea around Kunksmoor’s island. The birds are coated with
oil and cannot fly anymore, so Kunksmoor picks them up one by one, blows on each feather to-
gether while saying a spell created for that specific occasion. Her special affinity for birds manifests
itself in her bird-like appearance and in the absence of mammal characters except humans. She is
light, bony, with hair “just like a big magpie nest” (Pervik 2001, 5), feeds on berries, mushrooms
and occasionally fish, and likes to fly. Having no wings, she has made a big yellow balloon for
flying, which resembles a full moon, thus connecting her to female cyclicality and an intuitive
“lunacy” as opposed to common sense.
While visiting a nearby city to heal Captain Trumm, her future spouse, she gets carried away
by a shopping spree, but is awoken from the consumerist delirium by the premonition of a ca-
tastrophe involving birds. As they arrive at an airport, Kunksmoor rushes to the runway just in
time to stop the airplanes from a collision with a huge flock of migrating fieldfares. “You just saved
two planes and three hundred people from certain death!” the head of the airport exclaims. “Do
not forget the birds would have died, too”, Kunksmoor replies (Pervik 2001, 39).
Birds, especially waterfowl, have a special significance in Finno-Ugric mythology.5 Kunksmoor
is thus a remake of the mythological archetype of the waterbird that Finno-Ugrians believe has
laid three eggs that created the world. Her actions are also implicitly guided by ancient runic songs
(up to 2,000 years old). Having cleaned the birds after the tanker disaster, Kunksmoor faces the

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challenge of skimming oil off of the sea itself. She carefully picks suitable tree species and assem-
bles a rake with teeth made of mythologically significant items: a tooth of a pike and one from a
wild boar, a bone from the wing of a grouse, a silver brooch and a nail from an old ship to lead the
oil back to where it came from—under the crust of the Earth. The description of Kunksmoor’s
rake matches exactly the runic description of the making of the world. The power of songs and
stories in healing the world cannot be overestimated. In Kalevala,6 raking is an essential part of
creating a harmonious universe, which is what Kunksmoor does, eventually bringing bees to the
island as a gift for her beloved Captain Trumm, so that they both could work in planting more
blossoming plants in order to serve the bees and ensure the continuation of life, in which humans
are merely assistants, while plants and bees are true agents, which also makes this book an early
example of animal studies literature (Chapter 26).

Motherhood: Material and Economic Enmeshment

The second part of our analysis is devoted to contemporary Estonian poetry, which shows strong
ecofeminist features. As argued in Chapter 49 of this volume, poetry appears as the most natural
vehicle for expressing ecofeminist agendas, even in proto- and crypto-forms, from the very an-
cient times across literatures of the world. Notably, the collection of maternity poems titled Maa-
ilma avastamine (Discovery of the World, 2021) by Estonian poetess Eda Ahi (1990) was inspired by
her personal experience of motherhood. While the tradition of maternity lyrics is long-standing
in Estonian literature, Ahi’s motherhood is not sentimental or heroic, retouched from all the tire-
some daily toil, but contains all the material details of maternity, including the mother’s fatigue,
confusion and desperate moments. The value of her poems lies in her refusal to hide the messy,
physical underside of motherhood, presenting it with a comic, sometimes (self-)ironic twist, thus
making it easier for the reader to relate to the small everyday episodes of a first-time mother. The
poems are not merely an expression of personal despair, but instructive ways of looking at one’s
life from a distance, reevaluating the sometimes absurd moments of baby care. This is a valuable
lesson for everyone dedicated to resource management in the prevention of their depletion.
Ahi (2021: 32) asks:
I tidy, bungle, and haul
(I should keep my cup full)
I slog, plod and toil
(how should I lift myself up
If I don’t know where is my cup)?7
It is not enough to create supporting systems for the young mother as mere slogans. In Estonia,
maternity leave and child care systems8 are relatively advanced in comparison to the rest of the
world and even in comparison to other EU countries. However, Ahi relates an instance where
another essential kind of support fails: in the poem titled Pitiful excuse, the father leaves home in the
evening because he needs a change, but the mother is left behind with the baby. Not that I would
not want to go any more, not that I would have no strength to go, not that I would not look as stunning as
before—I just have changed my style to a more refined take, she writes (Ahi 2021, 26). In state-provided
child care, the possibility of young mothers participating in the “labor market” is brought to the
fore as the main goal of developing such systems. However, the emotional well-being of a mother
that could be enhanced by an evening out, for example, is not covered by state systems and, as we
can see, not always with support from family members either. This issue has been raised already
by Val Plumwood in her theorizing of “backgrounding”, “instrumentalism” and denial, dictated
by the “perceptual politics of what is worth noticing”, that is, the “real achievements”, which are
foregrounded and rewarded as contrasted to what is deemed inessential, such as women’s tradi-
tional chores in the house, which are thus reduced to their purely instrumental value (Plumwood

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2002, 104–105). The paradox consists in the immediate shift from equal participation in the la-
bor market toward the traditional role once the woman becomes a mother. This hidden agenda
became particularly obvious during the coronavirus crisis, when women suddenly had to accept
multiple roles, caring simultaneously for the economy, children, the elderly and society. Layla
Branicki points out this reproduction of care obligations during the pandemic as a twist of the
notion of “an ethic of care” effectively turned against women, whereby “care as liability, resource
and solution” (Kuznetski and Pellicer-Ortín 2022) became an unjust expectation of “who is doing
the caring” (Branicki 2020, 877). Stacy Alaimo has drawn attention to the problem by stressing
that in environmental terms, sustainability is above all a labor issue (Kuznetski and Alaimo 2020).
In the same way, Ahi’s poetry reveals how a woman as an economic resource is valued over a
woman as a sensitive being.
Turning to the phenomenon of galactostasis, or postnatal overproduction of milk, which may
cause milk fever if not removed mechanically, Ahi yet again employs economic terms: the price of
a milk barrel suddenly settles to negative, and there is only one tiny tanker (the baby) that cannot
take in all the bounty. What had been longed for as “white gold”, is all of the sudden in excess, too
much to handle. This is a really rare situation—that a scarce resource naturally turns overwhelm-
ingly, even threateningly abundant. As allusions to oil have been made already from the outset of
the poem, the last three verses draw a clear parallel:

It felt clear, on my own stretching skin,

that wherever there is a lot of fuel,
there is the danger of explosion.
(Ahi 2021, 18)

This way, presenting the bodily, nature-linked side of motherhood is also densely related to the
affective and even economic side of the matter, thus becoming dense with material-discursive
connections. This thickness will be further explored from the point of view of transcorporeality
and intra-action.

Transcorporeality and Material-Discursive Intra-Action

Poetess Kristiina Ehin (1977–) is one of the most remarkable Estonian poets of the present genera-
tion (Hasseblatt 2016, 678). Daughter of literates growing up in the late Soviet period but coming
of a poetic age in the early 2000s, she is extremely sensitive to the intersections of history, nation,
memory, place and individual intra-action with these. In a recent prose-poetry collection Janu on
kõikidel üks (Thirst is the Same for Everyone, 2020), presented during the COVID lockdown in spring
2020, she recounts the Chernobyl catastrophe as one of her childhood memories, thus rendering
her girl’s/woman’s body as floating between large-scale disastrous events, which are material, but
also political.

I pull the first rhubarb stems9 from the Rapla garden bed, peel their skins with my nails, dip
them into sugar and chew on them. I am eight years old, and in the evening, Finnish TV says
that a reactor has exploded in the Chernobyl nuclear plant10 and that radiation in Finland is
ten times the norm. My mom puts drops of iodine into water and orders us all to drink it. She
locks the door so that we wouldn’t go out, and locks herself inside the bathroom and cries. I’m
sitting behind the bathroom door and exclaim, ‘Mother, why are you crying?’—‘I’m crying
because my mom is dead, and I don’t know what will become of us.’
(Ehin 2020, 43:51–45:30)11

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Karen Barad (2017, 111) has spoken on intra-action of entities, space and time as naturecultural phe-
nomena, whereby nature and culture are entangled and inseparable and representations of history,
spacetime and timescapes are thick with simultaneous happenings. Here, the little girl’s psyche is
loaded with the sense of the local and seasonal (the physical sensation of the freshness of rhubarb
juice, an announcer of spring) and the global (it is roughly 1,000 km between the tiny provin-
cial Rapla and Chernobyl), as well as political, the “evergreen censorship” (Hasselblatt 2016,
537) silencing a catastrophe that will have lasting consequences on the health of Baltic people of
Ehin’s generation, on both sides of the Iron curtain, and being present as a material memory in
the middle-aged poetess still trying to grasp how man could be proclaimed “the measure of all
things” and “faith and science are like two sons of a cuckoo, who cannot live without each other”
(Ehin 2020, 45:20). Barad states that all these phenomena are material-discursive: “This is not
a mere matter of things being connected across scales. Superimposition of all possible histories
constituting each bit. The very stuff of the world is a matter of politics” (2017, 117). A binding
device for Ehin’s poetry is her extreme sensitivity to the world of nature, reflected in the titles
of her collections: Kaitseala (Protected Area, 2005), Luigeluulinn (Swanbone City, 2003), The Drums
of Silence (2007), The Scent of Your Shadow (2010), Emapuhkus (Maternity Leave, 2009) and in the
special music of her poetry, which does not follow classical rules of versification but often depends
on the arrangement of lines in the middle of the page, as if flowing one into the other in loops,
representing rhythms of nature:
youth flows slowly out of the lakes of my eyes
will you make it in time to drink from them
the leaves are already falling from this summer’s
trees
…
and I wide awake
ever the loser and scorcher of new wings
(Ehin 2007, 35)

We can observe here many markers of l’écriture feminine: the free flow of syntax; absence of punc-
tuation marks; sentences do not have beginnings (no capitalization to signify it) or endings (no
full stop). She does exactly what Hélène Cixous has called for in “The Laugh of the Medusa”
(1975): to “write the body”, “write her self ”, “sweeping away syntax”, “flying in language and
making it fly” (2035–2056). What is more, the female body is simultaneously the body of nature,
and its aging is linked to the annual arrival of autumn, thus, is a natural part of a cycle in which
there is no death (hence, no end to the sentence). There are also strong associations with Alaimo’s
transcorporeality, particularly her insistence on the material connection between the human body
and the oceans, where life originated from. Interestingly, if for Alaimo (2010, 188) the marine
origins are embodied in the symbolism of human blood retaining the brininess of the original
salty seawater, Ehin chooses lake water as the liquid of her eyes. There is thus a reference to the
numerous lakes comprising Estonian landscape, the likeness in the round shape of the lakes, as well
as their profundity, and the calm blue of the lake water standing for the very particular eyes of the
poetess herself, which are of a very intense blue. The image of the wings at the end of the poem
combines the Christian symbolism of an angel and an ancient classical one of Icarus, as well as that
of a fallen woman, femme fatale or a female fairy, flying Kunksmoor or a bird, who is as free as the
poet “flying in language” and her body, thus truly “writing her self ”.
Ehin is very sensitive to actual ecological problems, recounting in the poem “After the Storm”
(2007, 118–119) the experience of gathering from the shore all that the storm has brought out of
the sea, the attributes of profane consumerism, whereby trash represents a crisscrossing of cultures,

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 Julia Kuznetski and Kadri Tüür

economies and cuisines on the tiny spot of land, none of which originally Estonian: “slivers of
broken bottles voidex containers/vodka vera bottles/jars still sloshing and smelling/of the marinade of shashlik
long since devoured…”. Like witch Kunksmoor discussed above, she is cleaning with her bare hands
what is polluting the Baltic Sea—one of the most vulnerable in the world because locked inland
and exploited by an array of countries, not all of which have developed ecological regulations, and
certainly none existed under the Soviet regime. The history of decades ago (“hands and feet of dolls
from soviet times/.../a Russian border guard’s hat so small?/was he still a child?”) mixes with present-day
unhealthy indulgences (an inflatable rubber woman/…breasts aimlessly drooping/toothless mouth unable to
scream invitingly open). In her characteristic manner, she intertwines and superimposes so much at
once by rushing together words and images in unpunctuated lines:
what sort of man
cuddled you and used you
before the storm
brought you here in its embrace
The drooping sex toy with air out may stand for real women, powerless against an abuser or simply
one who “cuddled and used”, and then discarded when no longer useful. There is a superimpo-
sition of plastic pollution, silencing women, and the agency of nature that consoles a hurt one, or
brings a silenced story to light, over a decade before #MeToo.
Agency and empowerment in merging with nature are rendered in Ehin’s poem My limbs meta-
morphose (2007, 53), which creates the image of the poetess turning into a wolf.
fur grows on my beautiful body
in my mouth I feel teeth like clear death…
in the distance I hear the howling of my grey kin…
The fantasy of a female werewolf, or a beast-woman not backgrounded but liberated because of her
animism, which recurs in the literary texts discussed above, is particularly effective in the poetic
form of experiment, due to the natural rhythms embedded in the verses and the animal imagery.
Ehin’s most recent contribution to the ecofeminist agenda in Estonia is the song What world
will be left us?12 written together with the band Naised köögis (Women in the kitchen). The song ex-
presses women’s concern about the perilous natural resource management that threatens to leave
the Earth void for future generations. In the video, male characters stand for industrial greed, set
in contrast with the singing women and children, the backgrounded voices now gaining agency
through song.

Empowering Pandemic
The poetic diary by Estonian storyteller Ena Mets (1981–) titled Ülestähendusi Montmartre’i mäelt.
Elu ja imede pandeemia/Les Carnets de Montmartre. La pandémie de la vie et des miracles, published in
autumn 2020, shortly after the first lockdown, is an experimental impressionist book with parallel
texts in Estonian and French, accompanied by a lush selection of photographs taken during the
sunrises on Montmartre in Paris.13
Mets’s observations of the changed quality of air, turning the “city of pollution” into a “city
of light”, though eerily empty of people (Mets 2020: 17). This way, Mets, who worked as a tour
guide in Paris, finds a source of empowerment while viewing the pandemic as not a symbol of
disease and fear, but of light and hope for renewal, according to the idea of cycles of death and
rebirth, corresponding to cosmic cycles of nature.
In the diary entry of May 9, 2020, outright ecofeminist ideas are foregrounded by Mets’s
meditation on the attraction of the wild, as women running with wolves (Mets 2020, 90). Strong,
radiant women (such as Tiina in Kitzberg’s play discussed above) should be a blessing for the whole

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world, the environment and humankind. Who in history started the vicious circle of degrading
women, and for which reasons, Mets asks.
The entry is accompanied by several photographs of graffiti on Montmartre depicting the
clitoris, the trigger of female sexual energy, which Mets relates to her own aspirations to become
familiar with her body, using it in most meaningful and pleasurable ways. This echoes the trend of
linking the personal and public by a liberating presence of female bodies in urban environments,
addressed by feminist geographers (e.g., Massey 1994), who problematized fear, and searched for
strategies of overcoming the fear that women often have while being in socially inappropriate
places at socially inappropriate times in a socially inappropriate condition. The pandemic lock-
down radically narrowed everyone’s chances to be outdoors in public spaces, but paradoxically it
has also made the gender-biased production of public space more equal. Everyone’s presence in
public spaces is restricted regardless of their gender and this eventually contributes to the democ-
ratization of public space.
Importantly, Mets lists the benefits she discovered during her morning pilgrimages to greet the
Sun at Montmartre: the assertion of healing powers of nature, being grateful to the Sun, relearn-
ing to appreciate the cyclical nature of life, especially as she concludes her book at the summer
solstice, which is of particular significance to Estonians, who still live according to these cycles
of the Sun, featuring strongly in national mythology and folklore. Despite her currently being in
a different geographical context, the Sun is a planetary phenomenon, and thus a new, mythically
loaded turning point in time opens up new, positive perspectives for the storyteller as well as the
reader. The book concludes on a positive note, suggesting that the power received from the Sun,
the light, the cyclical processes of nature, helps us overcome the gravest and loneliest periods of
isolation—even more, it brings humans together for tête-à-têtes encounters and appreciation of
each other.

Conclusion
As it has hopefully transpired from this brief overview, Estonian ecocriticism reflects the com-
plicated nature of Estonian history and culture, in addition to the hybrid nature of ecofeminism
itself, which combines the legacy of feminism and the more recent developments of new mate-
rialism, environmental justice and postcolonial movements. In the words of Timothy Morton
(2021), feminism is not just global but planetary, built on sensitivity to various forms of injustice
and a strong intertwining of environmental, social and political concerns on both local and plan-
etary levels. We have examined a selection of representative literary texts from various periods of
Estonian literature that demonstrate, as we argue, such ecofeminist features as tensions of power,
stereotyping and backgrounding hailing from Cartesian and Christian dualisms, which were his-
torically imposed on the Estonian mentality, an intimate connection with the forces of nature,
particularly water, the forest and the Sun, deeply rooted in the local geography and folklore, and
material-discursive enmeshment with environmental, corporeal, historical, political and personal
processes. None of these texts belongs to the globally dominating genre of the novel. Ranging
from drama and modern poetry to children’s and young adult fiction and poetic diary, all these
texts demonstrate the complexity of these empowering material connections, which need to be
explored further than this cursory introduction to Estonian ecofeminism.

Funding
Kadri Tüür’s contribution has been supported by the Estonian Research Council grant
PRG908 “Estonian Environmentalism in the 20th century: ideology, discourses, practices”
(1.01.2020−31.12.2024).

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 Julia Kuznetski and Kadri Tüür

Notes
1 References here are to the 2018 edition of the text, translated by JT.
2 Triin Lees defended her MA thesis on ecofeminist analysis of this book in University of Tartu in 2015.
3 References here are to the 2001 edition, translated by KT.
4 International Board on Books for Young People.
5 Pervik specialized in Finno-Ugric philology at the University of Tartu.
6 The Finnic epic, one of cornerstones of Finno-Ugric cultural identity.
7 Translations of the poem excerpts by KT.
8 See in detail: https://www.sm.ee/en/parental-leave.
9 Rhubarb grows in every garden in Estonia and is the first to come out from the soil after the long winter.
It was not possible to get fresh imported fruit during the Soviet time, so rhubarb was considered an im-
portant source of vitamins, especially for children, who also enjoyed its sour taste combined with sugar
it was dipped into.
10 The Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in 1986 was silenced at the outset across the Soviet Union, but it be-
came quickly known in Estonia, because in the North region (Tallinn and Harju county) it was possible
to tune into the Finnish TV.
11 translation JK.
12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r3F6Md-lgU, with subtitles in 14 languages.
13 Ruta Reispass defended her BA thesis on ecofeminist analysis of this book in University of Tartu in
2021.

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 23
ENGLISH LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman

Introduction
Ecofeminism’s careful interrogation of ideological dualisms and language binaries are key to the de-
velopment of an ecofeminist literary theory and its applications to English literature, which for the
purposes of this chapter indicates canonical British and American literary texts. The writers men-
tioned in this chapter represent the variety and complexity of ecofeminist criticism, as their texts
resist and challenge the very frameworks they help to establish. To resist categorization is, in essence,
ecofeminist, if we take a guiding principle to be that nature (and woman) must “no longer serve as the
ground of essentialism” (Alaimo 2008, 302). Although an ecofeminist lens can meaningfully illumi-
nate the correlating treatment of nature and woman depicted in any cultural artifact, for this chapter, I
have concentrated on representative authors and texts from Romanticism through the twentieth cen-
tury, when capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization accelerated questions of gender roles in the
Western world and literary figures responded with complex answers to the woman/nature question.

Gaia and the Earth Mother

Without exception, British and American writers have inherited religious and secular myths and
archetypes that associate women with nature, whether subtly or explicitly, through the conceptual
framework of Mother Earth or Mother Nature. The pervasive presence of Mother Earth ideology
is slightly different than the problem of binaries that more commonly defines ecofeminist criti-
cism. For example, in the inaugural critical reader of ecocriticism, The Ecocriticism Reader (1996,
xxiv), Cheryl Glotfelty explains that ecofeminism “questions the dualisms prevalent in Western
thought, dualisms that separate meaning from atter, sever mind from body, divide men from
women, and wrench humanity from nature.” Glotfelty continues by identifying the “theme”
of ecofeminism as the “link between the oppression of women and the domination of nature”
(xxiv). This is still true of ecofeminism and a productive mode of critique, but I would argue that
the woman/nature question runs much deeper than Enlightenment ideals, where scholars like
Glotfelty typically locate these dualisms.1 It is no surprise that most canonical authors, especially
modernists and beyond, would resist science/nature, mind/body, male/female binaries (see Karen
Ya-Chu Yang’s Chapter 35 on postmodernism for more about the ways postmodern critiques of
humanism converge and diverge from those of ecofeminism). But literary responses to Mother
Earth are far more ambivalent and persist in postmodern and contemporary texts, and this offers a
rich paradox where ecofeminist literary theory finds productive ground.

244 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-24

 English Literature and Ecofeminism

For instance, in Kate Chopin’s 1899 text, The Awakening (1994) nature (by way of the ocean) is
depicted as a mother whose touch is “sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (109)
at the very same time that the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, resists her own maternity—she was
not a “mother-woman” (9), the narrator makes clear—and ultimately gives up her life (or is this a
“rebirth”?) to the “womb” of the sea. Much of the existing ecofeminist scholarship on literature
in English suggests that constructions of nature as mother (female) are perpetuated in order to
control, conquer, or objectify nature, and by extension, women who are traditionally associated
with nature in the binary opposition. Further, ecofeminists posit that constructions of nature as
female “are essential to the maintenance of hierarchical ways of thinking that justify the oppres-
sion of various ‘others’ in patriarchal culture by ranking them ‘closer to nature’ or by declaring
their practices ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’” (Legler 1997, 228). This is a very limited, oversimplified
assessment of the literary responses to Mother Nature, however. Edna Pontellier is empowered as
she enters the seductive sea, arguably the catalyst of her “awakening.” After Chopin, major authors
such as Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath would explore the generative and destructive potential of
water, figuring the sea as a distinctly feminine space heavy with the possibility and responsibility
of time and experience.
Furthermore, it is important to note that the association of earth and woman—especially
through Mother Earth and Mother Nature ideologies—is not new nor exclusively Western. Most
scholars agree that the idea of Mother Earth or Mother Nature was most positive in preindustrial
prescientific revolution societies. For some, the Gaia hypothesis, which imagines the earth as a
unitary, self-regulating living organism is helpful for bonding ecology to ethics (Lovelock 1979).
While references to Gaia can risk romanticization of the past or sentimentalism, many writers and
critics evoke the feminine pronoun, “her,” to refer to the earth, in order to assign both nature and
women creative power and agency. For Westerners, Gaia was inherited from the ancient Greeks,
such as the poet Hesiod’s account of the cosmogenesis where the earth was a female entity, Gaia,
spawned from Chaos along with Tartaros (underworld) and Eros (love) (Naddaf 2005, 48). Hesiod
describes Gaia as giving birth to the starry sky, mountains, and the sea (50). For the Greeks and
throughout antiquity, the earth was most often thought of as a living, breathing organism and
was respected as such (Rose 1991, 77). Generally, the idea that the earth is alive and primordial—­
having existed before any mortal human and even before the Olympians—evokes a certain rever-
ence. Nicole C. Dittmer’s Chapter 40 on Victorian literature in this collection further explores the
impact of these ideologies—so aptly charted by Merchant— on women’s roles with a particular
focus on cultural ideas about reproductivity and domesticity made evident in medical discourse
and penny literature of the Victorian period. Dittmer also identifies the competing responses to
mother earth conceptual metaphors, noting that some have advocated a total departure from na-
ture to reject patriarchal systems (i.e., Mitchell 1966) while others affirm a material world that is
independent of human discourse and activity.
Prior to the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant argues in Death of Nature (1980), the

image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing mother had served as a cultural con-
straint restricting the actions of human beings. One does not readily slay a mother, dig into
her entrails for gold or mutilate her body[…] as long as the earth was considered to be alive
and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical behavior to carry out destruc-
tive acts against it.
(3)

This is not to negate the ways that “Mother Nature” ideologies were used to denigrate women
even prior to the seventeenth century. The absolute insistence on the Earth Mother paradigm
fails to account for inherent characteristics of nature such as wildness, randomness, and variety.

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Historical categorization of an “unruly” woman as a “witch” is a vivid example of the conse-

quences of essentialism. As Merchant puts it,

woman was both virgin and witch: the Renaissance courtly lover placed her on a pedestal; the
inquisitor burned her at the stake. The witch, symbol of the violence of nature, raised storms,
caused illness, destroyed crops, obstructed generation, and killed infants. Disorderly woman,
like chaotic nature, needed to be controlled.
(127)

In Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature, Stacy Alaimo (2008) offers the follow-
ing definition of wildness: “nature’s ongoing, material-semiotic intra-actions—actions that may
well surprise, annoy, terrify, or baffle humans, but that nonetheless are valued by environmental-
ists as the very stuff of life itself ” (249). As ecofeminist inquiry challenges essential definitions of
woman, and ecocriticism more generally opens and expands our understanding of so-called Na-
ture, our writers make clear that woman and nature continually disrupt the categorical language
and social systems insistent on defining them.
The contemporary poet from the Muscogee (Creek) nation, Joy Harjo, hardly rejects a concep-
tual and literal Mother Nature when she writes that she is a continuance of the sky in her poem
“Fire” (lines 14–17). Certainly, there are “mutually constituting discourses that gender nature to
denigrate it and naturalize ‘woman’ to debase her” (Alaimo 2008, 301), but a survey of English
literature does not find that associating woman with nature is always perceived as a means of op-
pression. Ecofeminist activists and critics (particularly white, Western ones) have to be careful not
to suggest as much and further alienate or omit voices that tell us otherwise—as Benay Blend writes
in Chapter 19 of this collection on Native American and First Nations literature, writers such as
Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, and Louise Erdrich emphasize connections with the “Earth Mother” as a
form of resistance and resilience. Far from denouncing any correlation between woman and nature,
an Appalachian writer of Cherokee descent, Marilou Awiakta (1937–), celebrates Mother Earth in
her book Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom (1993), where the poem When Earth Becomes an ‘It’
captures another view of the evolving attitudes toward Mother Earth evident in literature written
in English. It is precisely the moving away from a gendered nature—from a “her” to an “it”—that
is the source of environmental degradation and human suffering in Awiakta’s poem. Only by call-
ing her mother and treating her with the love and reverence due to a mother will she heal, the poet
warns (Awiakta 1993, 6). This example also illustrates the inevitable metaphors of violence against
women’s bodies, and specifically correlates the “rape of the earth” with the exploitation of female
bodies, which some ecofeminists argue is a byproduct of these Mother Earth paradigms.2

The Role of Creation Myths

An Indigenous scholar and novelist, Thomas King (1943–), reminds us of Native creation myths
that feature a female creator, often referred to as Sky Woman, and a universe governed by coop-
eration, equality, and balance, whereas, in his view, the Judeo-Christian account of creation from
the book of Genesis suggests a universe “governed by a series of hierarchies—God, man, animals,
plants—that celebrate law, order, and good government” (King 2003, 23). King is not the only
critic to associate attitudes of domination with the Judeo-Christian worldview, as Jacques Der-
rida (2008) points to the naming of the animals as a moment that establishes dominance over the
“beasts,” which include, by extension women and children (The Animal That Therefore I Am 104).3
John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1667) exemplifies a literary retelling of the creation and the fall,
throwing into relief cultural attitudes about women’s creative ability (or passivity) especially as it
relates to their “naturalness,” all of which is predetermined by a higher power.4

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By the time of Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978), feminist philos-
ophers and writers offer scathing critiques and revisions to the patriarchal origin stories to expose
the illogical ideologies justified and perpetuated by misappropriations of the Christian Bible.
Griffin and Awiakta represent the two most common responses to Mother Earth ideologies, which
largely depend on the creation myth that guides their interpretative framework. For Griffin, “it
was decided” at the beginning of time that “women are closer to the earth” and “the demon re-
sides in the earth” (7); therefore, “women act as the devil’s agent and use flesh as bait” (8). While
Griffin disdains the patriarchal hierarchy established through Christian creation myths, Awiakta
laments the departure from a formerly gynocentric worldview where all life is dependent on “the
mother.” Certainly, ecofeminists are ambivalent about whether Mother Nature/Mother Earth
ideologies are oppressive or empowering (or some combination of both), and rightfully so. As the
author of Chapter 33 in this volume, Aslı Değ irmenci Altın, reminds us, a more inclusive, global
approach to literature provides just as many examples of women who are not in a deep connection
with nature, and perhaps that is because non-Western writers have not inherited the same reli-
gious and sociolinguistic limitations of women and nature, and it is crucial that these limitations
must not be imposed on texts by the critic or academy as well.
Naturally, feminist writers have offered alternative narratives to challenge the patriarchal no-
tions Griffins critiques. For example, in “She Unnames Them” first published in The New Yorker
American science fiction writer, Ursula Le Guin (1985, 27) imagines Eve freeing the nonhuman
animals of their names that had “trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans
tied to a tail.” In the absence of names, Eve tells us, “[t]hey seemed far closer than when their
names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier,” and without names “the hunter
could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.” This “undoing” of patriarchal
systems, beginning but not ending with language, is indicative of science fiction and fantasy writ-
ers such as LeGuin and the British writers Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson who have done
much to offer alternative myths and revise existing ones to restore ecological and gender balance
in canonical English literature, as Rhian Waller notes in Chapter 46, Fantasy and Ecofeminism. In
addition to the authors Waller includes in her chapter, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood in-
corporates apocalyptic themes and undertones in her popular revisions of myth to raise awareness
of environmental issues.

Romanticism and Origins of Materialism

The Romantic impulse was a turning point for British and American literature, and while the
Victorian period represents a temporary return to traditional gender roles, the World Wars of
the twentieth century, along with urbanization and industrialization, permanently disrupted tra-
ditional categories of thought, which inspired a variety of formal literary experimentation to
capture “new realities.” In Chapter 39, Kaitlin Mondello summarizes the response of feminist
and ecofeminist critics to Romantic depictions of nature, suggesting that accounts of Romantic
literature such as Edmund Burke’s foundational text, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), perpetuated the gender divide by relegating certain char-
acteristics, occupations, and perspectives to the feminine while reifying a male-dominated canon
that perpetuates limited constructions of nature (as nurse, mother, or lover, for example).
In addition to Mondello’s focus on voices resurrected by the “second wave” of ecocriticism, if
we follow Elaine Showalter’s wave model, it’s important to note that Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–
1855) insisted on an unmediated representation of the literal, and by doing so she disrupts construc-
tions of nature to emphasize the material qualities of the nonhuman world around her. Certainly,
as William Wordsworth’s sister, she is an important figure at the intersection of ecofeminism and
English literature because she represents those voices and experiences that have been subsumed by

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dominant modes of critique that traditionally celebrate male practitioners—her brother perhaps
the most famous nature poet of all time while her journals and poetry have only recently been of
interest. We now know that Dorothy’s journals inspired many of William’s poems, including the
famous Ode Intimations of Immortality. Collette Clark’s edited volume, Home at Grasmere (1960),
illustrates the synchronicity, and often intertextuality, of the pair’s work, as she places William’s
poems inside of Dorothy’s journals, illustrating the “unity between them” (7) and the “unique
‘oneness’ of the Wordsworths in their writings and in their lives” (8). Clark makes a strong case that
there would be no Wordsworth “The Nature Poet” without Dorothy, saying, “Wordsworth de-
pended on [Dorothy] to preserve his own freshness of vision and daily contact with Nature” (Clark
1986, 9). Still, too often, Dorothy was studied only for insight on the “real poet,” Wordsworth,
though Clark provocatively asks, “Was it Dorothy or William who first spoke the phrases which
seem so spontaneous in the Journal and reappear in the poems?” (10). Ultimately, Clark concludes,
“The vision seems Dorothy’s while the memorializing at the end…is typically William” (10).
Through her journals and poetry, Dorothy challenges the constructions of nature—as nurse,
guardian, teacher—that permeate her brother’s verse. In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the
Orange, Josephine Donovan (1996) joins Margaret Homans (1986) in contrasting Dorothy’s ap-
proach to the natural world with Williams in an important ecofeminist trope: while William,
as indicative of canonical Western literature, “impose[s] a symbolic order upon the literal, the
natural” “kill[s] it in order to exploit it for the signifying purposes of the author” (Donovan 78),
Dorothy “validates the ontological status of ” those things she observes (79). This is a critical move
for writers in the twenty-first century who reclaim the self and nature from patriarchal narratives,
and in recognizing this, ecofeminist literary theory also challenges the “mentality of domination
enacted in literature and literary criticism” (Donovan 1996, 164).
Not surprisingly, it was Virginia Woolf (1932 The Second Common Reader) who first and most
astutely celebrated Dorothy Wordsworth’s commitment to the truth because, Woolf notes, to
“falsify the look of the stir of the breeze on the lake is to tamper with the spirit that inspires ap-
pearances” (167). As Woolf admires Dorothy Wordsworth’s “powers of observation” and “literal
accuracy” (167), she anticipates one of the central threads in ecofeminist literary theory, which
insists on, to use Woolf ’s words, “the thing itself ” (Moments of Being 72). Perhaps, it is Dorothy
who inspired Woolf to carve tunnels into her characters’ consciousness through which the reader
comes in intimate contact with the material world; Woolf describes Dorothy’s journals saying,

It is only gradually that the difference between this rough notebook and others discloses itself;
only by degrees that the brief notes unfurl in the mind and open a whole landscape before us,
that the plain statement proves to be aimed so directly at the object that if we look exactly
along the line that it points we shall see precisely what she saw.
(166–167)

Woolf articulates her own artistic method as much as Dorothy’s here, and this author would not
be overshadowed by a male counterpart. In her essay Modern Fiction, Woolf (1967, 110) described
the experience as an “incessant shower of innumerable atoms” and advocated for a new type of
expression that would bring the “varying and unknown” into the world of the text with “courage
and sincerity,” writing that, “everything is the proper stuff of fiction.” I would argue that Woolf ’s
inclusivity of content and experimentation with form did more to challenge traditional Western
(patriarchal) representations of nature than any other author writing in English; yet, while there
are several articles that offer a preliminary ecofeminist reading of a Woolf novel or two, her
oeuvre has yet to yield the kind of focused attention it necessitates. Woolf scholar Bonnie Kime
Scott outlines the challenges and possibilities of ecofeminism for Woolf studies in a special issue
of Virginia Woolf Miscellany entitled “Eco-Woolf ” (2012).

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As Dorothy Wordsworth struggled with domestic duties and battled addiction and illness in
the Lake District, a teenage Mary Shelley, one of the next generation of Romantics, effectively
invented the genre of science fiction on a dare with her masterpiece, Frankenstein (1818). Despite
its obvious themes of unchecked mastery and domination over the natural world, ecofeminist
critics have had surprisingly little to say about this novel that challenges preconceived notions of
what it means to be human and draws a reader’s attention to the ugly, unpredictable, and mon-
strous in nature. If ecofeminist literary criticism is to escape the charges that this mode of critique
reinforces problematic binaries, we must include texts that are not traditional “nature writing”
and insist on openness and contradiction. Timothy Morton’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion
to Frankenstein, “Frankenstein and Ecocriticism” lays a strong foundation for further ecofeminist
inquiry. Indeed, Morton makes ecofeminist moves when he writes,

Frankenstein is in a way a deconstructive work of art, because it does not get rid of categories.
Instead, it tests these categories to breaking point so that they start to speak their paradoxes
and absurdities, absurdities that themselves might be seen as monstrous. Perhaps the very idea
that there is a Nature and that this means ‘not monstrous’ is precisely the monstrous idea,
responsible for all kinds of phenomena such as racism or homophobia.
(147)

Shelley’s Frankenstein encourages compassion for the “other” while challenging male-dominated
science’s illusions of absolute mastery over nature. It’s no coincidence that the creature’s con-
sciousness is largely shaped by Milton’s Paradise Lost and it’s precisely the absence of a woman that
drives the creature—a type of Adam— to destroy (Shelley 1818).
To reiterate, the main methodological target of ecofeminism is, as Margarita Estévez-Saá and
María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia (2018) remind us in The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-caring: Contempo-
rary Debates on Ecofeminism(s)

the questioning and deconstruction of those traditional oppositions historically found in the
Western binary system of thought and that established hierarchical distinctions between pairs
such as culture versus nature, men versus women, human versus non-human, reason versus
emotion, or theory versus practice.
(126)

With this as its operating framework, an ecofeminist overview of English literature could not
overlook Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who possibly used the “Romantic impulse” that animated
British writers like Mary Shelley to most effectively advance American literature’s treatment of
the human and the natural world. Against the Puritanism of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864),
whose idealized female characters are predictably mirrored by nature that is either wholly beauti-
ful and virginal or, because of the presence of sin and evil, entirely threatening, Whitman shifted
the landscape through his democratic catalogs that inspired countless writers after him, such as
the American contemporary poet, Mary Oliver, to celebrate humans as a part of, not apart from,
nature. When Oliver embraces societal expectations in favor of the body’s natural responses in
her poem Wild Geese, a reader hears Whitman’s bold celebration of the body in poems like Song
of Myself. Yet, moments like this in Whitman—“The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than
prayer”—can’t be taken without the paradoxical dissolution of the body into a cosmic self that is
intimately interwoven with a variety of others, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs
to you” (Song of Myself, line 3), he insists. At times, he even suggests the possibility that nonhumans
can possess a soul, pushing aside exclusionary Enlightenment ideas and opening paths for future
explorations of the nonhuman. Whitman concludes his poem I Sing the Body Electric with a 36-line

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catalog that treats body parts with the same “truthfulness” as Dorothy Wordsworth described the
scenes around her:
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body,
male or female,
The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-
perturbations and risings,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming
(lines 147–154)

While the body is a contested site for ecofeminists, Whitman’s attention to real, living bodies,
and not just discourses about the body, anticipates current moves from material feminists whose
renewed attention to things like toxicity, pleasure, death, and pain attempt to reconcile aesthetic
and activist ecofeminisms (Alaimo and Heckman 2008).5 In some ways, then, the body is a foil to
this problem of binaries and dualisms that drives much of ecofeminist inquiry; like the tree-shaped
scar etched in Sethe’s back in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987, 20) that “grows there still,” literary
texts can disrupt the very systems of language that comprise and describe them.

Naturalism and Realism

Perhaps no text has received more attention in ecofeminist literary scholarship than Sarah Orne Jewett’s
A White Heron (1886). Jewett’s short story is an easy target, as the young protagonist, Sylvia, rejects the
prototypical hunter of rare birds and his (very phallic) gun and preserves all of the secrets of nature (and
her virginity). The clashing of country and city, local knowledge and science, nature and technology
that drives Jewett’s story dominates the literature of the late 1800s and early 1900s, particularly evident
in literature categorized as realism and naturalism. However, Jewett’s sentimentalism is contrasted
sharply with a stronger impulse in naturalistic or realistic literary texts to expose problems of women’s
labor alongside competing for traditional ideas about a woman’s role in the family and expectations of
a woman’s body to remain pure, nurturing, uncontaminated like the Earth Mother. Rebecca Harding
Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861) is representative who are products of iron and cotton mills: “the vast
machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed, that goes on unceasingly from
year to year.” While both Jewett and Davis present their texts as “realism,” Davis’s narrator moves
us more effectively toward a more inclusive, science-based concept of nature that considers not only
pristine trees and forests but also economic and social systems. As Davis’s narrator beckons us—“there
is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real
thing to you”—she anticipates Rachel Carson’s landmark text Silent Spring (1962), which Buell (2005,
41) calls a “new type of nature writing” that rejects the idea that nature is somehow separate from the
social. As Carson exposes the dangers of herbicides and pesticides, and likens human environmental
impact to the atomic bomb, her body became a testimony to the risks of toxins as she succumbed to
breast cancer. K. M. Ferebee’s Chapter 48, Autobiography and Ecofeminism, in this collection examines
an important thread in English literature, the material memoir, in which writers like Annie Dillard
and Terry Tempest Williams use their life experiences to explore increasingly evident environmental
degradation and the correlated risks to human and nonhuman bodies. Rachel Carson’s foundational
illustration that the personal is political is evident in many of the projects Ferebee introduces.

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Additionally, through realism and naturalism, ecofeminist literary criticism might engage
more directly and thoroughly with the history and structure of specific economic systems, such
as capitalism, to more effectively consider the ways literary production can help us to understand
cultural attitudes about women’s work and the effects of labor practices on the body. Male British
authors Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) and D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) and Americans Frank Nor-
ris (1870–1902), Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), and Stephen Crane
(1871–1900) require more attention from ecofeminist literary scholars, as they capture the import-
ant cultural attitudes (that were then explicit and now more latent) about the expectations of both
nature and women to nurture and self-sacrifice regardless of the additional physical and emotional
demands due to global capitalism. As naturalist writers who view nature as indifferent and deter-
ministic, these authors expose the misogyny inherent in economic and social systems that indus-
trialization magnifies profoundly. Norris’s McTeague (1899) features a miner-turned-dentist whose
treatment of his wife, Trina, disturbingly mimics drilling machines. Despite the abuse, both Trina
and Mother Nature are expected to behave according to pre-industrial tropes. Of the desert where
McTeague comes to a dramatic conclusion, Norris writes that the

entire region was untamed. In some places east of the Mississippi nature is cozy, intimate,
small, and homelike, like a good-natured housewife. In Placer County, California, she is a
vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch, savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent
to man.
(298–299)

Moments like this one invite a more complex ecofeminist framework that considers historical and
material conditions alongside the existing scholarship that focuses too exclusively on discourses
and representations.
In the decades following the American Civil War, the romantic and transcendentalist rever-
ence for nature was replaced by a culture of consumerism as the population shifted from rural to
urban; the Gilded Age—a period “of the most rapid, thorough and tumultuous urbanization the
country had yet experienced” (Trachtenberg 1992, 102)—affected the American attitude toward
nature and much more. The landscape itself was altered to support astounding growth rates of the
urban population until, concurrent with the emergence of naturalism, “what used to be a sym-
biotic relationship between city and countryside has broken down; the city feeds off the land and
depletes without restoring” (Lehan 1995, 63). During this time of rapid change, industrialization
increased the divide between country and city and complicated the separate sphere ideology6
which had previously defined male and female roles, and naturalistic works often exhibit tension
surrounding this disruption of gender roles and the blurring of the separate spheres. Urbanization
brought about change to the family dynamic and complicated the expectation for a woman to be a
“good-natured housewife.” As industrialization replaced manual labor, women were just as capa-
ble workers as men, but “working women and children seemed at odds with middle-class ideas of
home and school” (Trachtenberg 87). In addition, “with the rise of food and clothing industries,
domestic labor came to consist chiefly of budgeting and shopping rather than making. From place
of labor for self-support, the home had become the place of consumption” (Trachtenberg 131). As
women went into the city to shop, they not only bent the public/private distinction but also were
granted control of the family’s finances—a source of unease for the patriarchal figures. It is no
accident that male characters in both McTeague and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie are troubled
by the fact that money (power) is often in the hands of the woman, and both Norris and Dreiser
portray the woman as being manipulative and dishonest with her purchases. Take for example,
Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth who must negotiate social and economic systems
(including marriage), and failing to properly commodify herself, has to work in a hat factory,

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which depletes her body and results in her death. Of equal concern to ecofeminists must be Upton
Sinclair’s 1906 expose of the meat-packing industry and immigrant wage labor, The Jungle, where
he writes of Elzbieta learning “how the sausage gets made”:

It was stupefying, brutalizing work; it left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She
was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine
was doomed to be crushed out of existence.
(133)

Stacy Alaimo’s work on the body7 and material feminisms is a great place to start, but ecofeminist
approaches to English literature need to account more comprehensively for the economic dispar-
ity, poverty, immigration and wage inequality, and so on if the field claims to be intersectional
and inclusive.

Modernism
To date, ecofeminist scholars have had surprisingly little to say about literary modernism, most
likely due to the persistent associations of modernity with urbanity and dissociation of aesthetic
or avant garde from the concerns of material reality. For some, the inseparability of modernity and
coloniality (see Walter Mignolo’s work, for example) makes modernist studies counterintuitive
to ecofeminism’s interest in deconstructing and dismantling oppressive power structures. With
recent moves in material feminisms, which seeks a method that “accomplish[es] the deconstruc-
tion of the material/ discursive dichotomy that retains both elements without privileging either”
(Alaimo and Hekman 2006, 8), modernist texts that wrestle with precisely these questions—of the
relationship between text and world—should come into clearer focus.
Bonnie Kime Scott has perhaps been the most productive scholar to explicitly bring the fields
together in her work on Virginia Woolf—In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Mod-
ernist Uses of Nature (2012)—and James Joyce—“Joyce, Ecofeminism and the River as Woman”
(2014)—as well as editions such as The Gender of Modernism (1990). Rita Felski’s The Gender of
Modernity (1995, 1) represents a crucial move toward the reassessment of the “gendering of history”
and “historicity of gender” as Felski puts it. Felski notes problematic, long-standing associations
of masculinity with the public sphere, for example, and ecofeminist scholarship must carefully
challenge such assumptions of previous theorists on modernity because the “view of the essentially
masculine nature of modernity effectively writes women out of history by ignoring their active
and varied negotiations with difference aspects of their social environment” (Felski 1995, 17–18).
Literary modernism not only captures important tensions between body and discourse that are
currently central to ecofeminist theory, but also significant historical intersections of gender and
economy, ideologies, and power structures, as Felski notes (1995, 21–22):

To be sure, women’s lives have been radically transformed by such quintessentially modern
phenomena as industrialization, urbanization, the advent of the nuclear family, new forms of
time-space regulation, and the development of the mass media. In this sense, there can be no
separate sphere of women’s history outside the prevailing structures and logics of modernity.
At the same time, women have experienced these changes in gender-specific ways that have
been further fractured, not only by the oft-cited hierarchies of class, race, and sexuality but by
their various and overlapping identities and practices as consumers, mothers, workers, artists,
lovers, activists, readers, and so on. It is these distinctively feminine encounters with the var-
ious facets of the modern that have been largely ignored by cultural and social meta-theories
oblivious to the gendering of historical processes.

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In her expansive, global analysis Felski’s includes examples from German and French texts, but
canonical texts in English such as Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Sol-
dier, Katherine Mansfield’s short fiction, Gertrude Stein’s poetry, or really any of Virginia Woolf ’s
novels could also illustrate the ambivalent relationship with modernity inherent in women’s ex-
periences that Felski describes. D.H. Lawrence belongs in this list too, for his critiques of moder-
nity’s effect on relationships and explorations into the origins of human sexuality and subjectivity
often lead him to consider, in his own words, “what the woman is—what she is—inhumanly,
physiologically, materially” (qtd. In Butler 65).
In all of the examples mentioned above, authors capture the growing disenchantment with
and skepticism of modernity, often signified by mourning that follows the War, and point to
a material, nonhuman world that is both entangled with and independent of human systems.
Briefly, an ecofeminist reading of West’s novel not only raises questions about the way that social
class informs a woman’s experiences with nature through the contrast of the “radiant” Kitty and
animalistic Margaret, but it also interrogates systems of language and thought that interfere with
one’s access to the so-called truth and beauty of the “real” world. As Chris Baldry returns from
World War I with symptoms of shell shock, his withdrawal into the “essential self ” (West 1995,
79) allows him to “atta[in] to something saner than sanity. His very loss of memory was a triumph
over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements
about their spiritual relationships” (West 1995, 65). Woolf makes a similar move in Mrs. Dalloway
with the veteran Septimus Smith’s hyperawareness of the world around him, which leads him to
discover the “secret”:

first that trees are alive; next there is no crime; next love, universal love, he muttered, gasping,
trembling, painfully drawing out these profound truths which needed, so deep were they, so
difficult, an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them forever.
(Woolf 1990, 67)

For West and Woolf, the experience of the WWI veteran encapsulates the modernist experience,
and in these examples, the authors hint at the need for new subjectivities and formal experi-
mentation to construct a feminine linguistic space separate from dominant forms of so-called
“masculine realism” (Rodrigues and Garratt 2015, 109). Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel, Nightwood, is
overdue for ecofeminist inquiry as it challenges humanist binaries through a modernist form that
is experimental, entangled, and shifting, as the boundary between self and other is much more po-
rous than we’d imagined and things come in and out of the characters’ and readers’ consciousness
at a dizzying pace. This novel also introduces lesbian, queer, and trans experience as an explicit
disruption of inherited dualisms.

Conclusion
As this volume illustrates, ecofeminism of the third wave (see Slovic) and the twenty-first century
is far from monocultural. Aslı Değ irmenci Altın’s excellent Chapter 33, Postcolonial Literature and
Ecofeminism, offers a foundational analysis for understanding the significant ways writers across the
globe can challenge homogenized views of women and nature. Sunaina Jain’s Chapter 26, Activism
and Ecofeminist Literature, compliments Değ irmenci Altin’s to suggest that American authors such
as Alice Walker be taken alongside writers such as Wangari Maathai (African) and Arundhati Roy
(Indian) to form an intersectional approach that addresses the many ways woman and earth have
been affected by white supremacist capitalist patriarchal systems (see hooks 1997). If ecofeminism
is, as Timothy Clark (2011) claims, “perhaps the most sophisticated and intellectually developed
branch of environmental criticism” (111) it is precisely because of the careful attention to language

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and challenges to the Western, male, white, canon. However, Glinys Carr (2000) as well as Tim-
othy Clark have pointed out that “while ecofeminist philosophy and politics are relatively well
developed, ecofeminist literary theory and criticism are not,” a discrepancy that arguably applies
to ecocriticism generally (Clark 111). While many thinkers have been careful to distinguish be-
tween political or activist ecofeminism versus literary theory and criticism, the guiding principles
must be the same. English literature should be taken with all of its contradictions and hypocrisies,
iterations, and evolutions, into the net of lived experiences and expressions of the human entan-
glement with the natural world.

Notes
1 Descartes is often credited with coining the mind/body dualism in Western thought. Many feminists
(and ecofeminists) disapprove of binaries such as this, because one part is inevitably considered lesser
than the other. They argue against the essentialism inherent in this type of dogma and claim this type
of thinking can be (and has been) used to justify oppression and domination. Noel Sturgeon elaborates
on this in Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (1997).
2 See Berman, Tzeporah. 1994. “The Rape of Mother Nature? Women in the Language of Environmen-
tal Discourse” in The Trumpeter 11, no. 4, 173–178.
3 This debate is sometimes referred to as technodominationism while Derrida coins the term carnophallogo-
centrism to emphasize the centrality of the carnivorous male in Western society.
4 See “Ecofeminist Eve” in Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity https://link.springer.com/chapter/
10.1057/9781137001900_4
5 See also Terri Field, “Is the Body Essential for Ecofeminism?” (2000) Organization and Environment 13,
no. 1: 39–60.
6 For a discussion on the validity of this idea as it contributes to the understanding of 19th c. culture see
“Golden Age to Separate Spheres?: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s
History” by Amanda Vickery in The Feminist History Reader (2006).
7 See “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature” in Material Feminisms (2008).

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Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal that Therefore I am. New York: Fordham University Press.
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Felski, Rita. 1995. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Transcript.pdf
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Derek Gladwin, 59–69. Cork: Cork University Press.
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 24
WELSH LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Michelle Deininger

Introduction
In 2021, Welsh imprint Seren published a landmark poetry collection, 100 Poems to Save the
Earth. As with many anthologies of current writing with an environmental agenda, 100 Poems
lays out its political and environmental argument explicitly from the very first pages, underlining
the time-critical nature of its aims. As the editors explain, “the title of this anthology is provoc-
atively posed, not to make any grand claims, but to emphasize that the earth is on the brink of
catastrophic change” (2021, 9). While the Seren anthology, discussed in more depth below, hits
home the dire circumstances in which we find ourselves, it is a message that has been repeatedly
evoked, imagined and explored in the work of Welsh writers, often from a perspective that can
be linked closely to an ecofeminist critique. There has long been a strong relationship between
environmental critique in Wales that is closely linked to political critique, though its significance
has perhaps not been fully recognized until recently.
Ecofeminism is often seen as being concerned with the intersection between environmen-
tal degradation and collapse (at its most extreme) and the parallels between the way women’s
lives, identities and bodies are disempowered and beaten down by patriarchal structures. As
Greta Gaard has argued, “ecofeminism emerged in the 1980s as a perspective and political move-
ment that first brought together the gendered intersections of both human–human injustices and
­­human–­environment exploitations” (2018, 286). In an article on ecofeminism and climate change,
Gaard has noted the difficulties inherent in “The focus on women rather than gender” which “con-
struct[ed] women as victims of environmental degradation in need of rescue” (2015, 21). Focusing
on how the treatment of gender and the environment intertwine in texts, rather than thinking
more narrowly about women in the role of victim, enables ecofeminism to free itself from the
charge of essentialism, but also encourages a broader perspective that can embrace intersectional-
ity. This means that in Wales’ literary history, the stories of the dispossessed, the marginalized and
the poor, for example, can be explored through an ecofeminist lens. However, at the same time, it
is often women who bear the brunt of environmental crises, from bodies ravaged by the pollutants
of industrial waste to the children killed by mining accidents, such as the infamous 1966 Aber-
fan tragedy where a slag heap slid down the mountainside, crushing and suffocating 116 school
children in their classrooms. This chapter does not consider women in the role of victimhood,
but rather looks to unravel the complex ways in which literature tells both their stories and the
stories of the land. There is a strong relationship between environmental concerns in Wales and its
literature, and texts with both implicit and explicit ecofeminist underpinnings can be widely seen

256 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-25

 Welsh Literature and Ecofeminism

from the late nineteenth century onward. There are several different yet interconnected reasons
for this, including the role of industrialization (coal and slate mining, in particular) and its effect
on the natural world (dust, slag heaps, dangerous working conditions and disease). British govern-
ment policies have long impacted the land, from deforestation to deliberate afforestation, villages
drowned to provide water for English towns (such as Tryweryn, a village that was abandoned to
provide water for the residents of Liverpool), and laissez-faire approaches to disease control, such
as the rampant spread of Dutch Elm disease in Wales in the 1970s.1
While the land bears scars, so too does the literature of Wales, marked by what can be described
as an almost colonialist endeavor to crush the Welsh language.2 Wales was a mainly monoglot
country in the nineteenth century and there was a clear political push to force the use of English
in all aspects of Welsh society. That loss of connection with the “mother tongue” refracts through
the stories, novels and poetry of Wales. The drive toward educating Welsh people in the English
language, rather than Welsh, was made explicit in the Reports of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the
State of Education in Wales (1847, known as the Blue Books Reports), where monoglot English speak-
ing commissioners surveyed the Welsh population and found it lacking, which was unsurprising
given the impossibilities of communication. This drive toward English as a “civilizing” force
meant that writers in the twentieth century, who had grown up in Welsh-speaking homes, were
educated in English and so alienated from their own culture. The Reports also crystallized negative
perceptions of gender, which affected women in particular, stigmatizing long-standing courtship
traditions as wanton and licentious behavior. These negative depictions have been repeatedly chal-
lenged and reimagined in the literatures of Wales. It should come as no surprise, given the violence
done to the environmental landscapes of Wales and the way its people have been subjected over
the centuries to imperialist policies, that literary texts should probe the relationship between the
oppression of the most marginalized and the natural world in many different forms.
Before venturing any further, it must be noted that the literatures of Wales are two distinct
though interrelated traditions, Welsh language literature and English language literature (re­
ferred to as “Welsh Writing in English” in the academy and beyond). The use of the phrase
“the literatures of Wales” is deliberate, in order to emphasize the two traditions. Welsh-language
literature is a rich tradition in itself, buoyed in more recent years by the re-formalization of the
Welsh language in legislation via the Welsh Language Act (1967, 1993), as well as the rise in Welsh
medium education in primary and secondary schools (and increasing opportunities for adults
to learn and improve.) The naming of Welsh Writing in English marks a distinction between
­t wentieth-century labels such as “Anglo-Welsh” literature, with its colonial overtones, ensuring
that Welsh identity, albeit through the medium of English, is foregrounded. While this chapter
will primarily explore examples of Welsh Writing in English, it will still draw on the rich heritage
of Welsh language literature, whilst acknowledging that only a small snippet can be explored.
If we turn momentarily to the literary tradition known as “ecopoetry,” a genre defined as “po-
etry that addresses, or can be read in ways that address, the current conditions of our environmen-
tal crisis” (Walton 2018, 393), there are some fruitful comparisons to be made. Walton argues that
“Ecopoetry can…be divided into two categories: that which is consciously written as ‘ecopoetry’,
and that which has been claimed or reclaimed as such” (Walton 2018, 393). In the broadest terms,
the literatures of Wales which speak to the thematic and political concerns of ecofeminism can
also be divided into two main types—writing that can be read through an ecofeminist lens and
writing that that consciously and explicitly engages with an ecofeminist agenda (usually found
from the 1970s onward). Texts in the former category might explore the relationship, for example,
between women’s agency in relation to environmental degradation, exploitation, or overindustri-
alization, while texts in the latter category are often more radical in outlook, specifically explor-
ing a particular political moment or action (or lack of it). This is not to polarize Welsh writing,
and in many ways, it could be argued that Welsh writing falls on more of a spectrum of political

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engagement. However, for the purposes of this chapter, in which broad brushstrokes are required,
it can be helpful to draw some distinctions.

Canon-making and Ecofeminism

Before we can delve into the interrelationships between the environment, gender and power,
we first need to consider what exactly can be read, who can publish and what is available to the
reader. In short, in the United Kingdom more broadly, Welsh writing often does not receive
the recognition equivalent to Irish or Scottish counterparts and women writers even less so. In
1986, historian Deirdre Beddoe argued convincingly that “Welsh women are culturally invisible”
(1986, 227) and in many ways, the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the next
has been about rewriting that story, especially within Welsh publishing. Important writers who
contribute much to the debate about Welsh writing and ecofeminism have been seldom read or
discussed outside of Welsh university departments specializing in Welsh Writing in English (such
as Swansea University’s Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales).
The last 20 years or so have seen a huge increase in the availability of women’s writing, from
poetry to novels, political writing to memoirs. This has been driven, in part, by the tireless work
of presses such as Honno, and their Honno Classics and Clasuron Honno series (English and Welsh
language respectively), which have brought back into print texts long consigned to second-hand,
hard-to-obtain lists. Writers such as Allen Raine (1836–1908), Amy Dillwyn (1845–1935), Hilda
Vaughan (1892–1985) and Margiad Evans (1909–1958), to name a select few, have come back to
the fore, resituated as important writers in the history of Welsh Writing in English. Similarly,
Welsh publishers have commissioned new translations of key Welsh language writers, including
Kate Roberts (1891–1985).
While the interplay between gender and the environment can often be found in the work
of women writers, the relationship between the land, its industrial past, and the working poor
often features in male writers’ work, especially of the twentieth century. The focus of this chap-
ter is predominantly on women writers from Wales given that their work often has the clearest
alignment with ecofeminist concerns. However, it should be noted that there is a wealth of
material, both in print or republished in important series such as the Library of Wales, as well
much of it hidden in journals, magazines and out-of-print editions, by male writers that share
similar concerns. Queer writer Rhys Davies (1901–1978), for example, wrote poignantly about
the relationship between women’s bodies and the damage caused by industrial environments in
stories such as “The Nightgown,” in which a working-class woman scrimps and saves to buy a
beautiful nightgown, only to be buried in it after sacrificing herself to her family’s needs. Alun
Lewis (1915–1944), war poet and short story writer, imagines the impact of hunger and poverty
on the women in working-class families in stories such as “The Housekeeper.”3 Even the work
of Caradoc Evans can be read through an ecofeminist lens, especially his most well-known
short story “Be This Her Memorial,” from his infamous 1915 collection, My People, in which
impoverished Nanni survives on roasted rats, spending her modest income on a vanity edition
of the Bible, sold to her by a traveling salesman, as a farewell gift to the local minister before he
leaves for a new appointment in a different town. Nanni’s labor is seen as “the property of the
community” (2003, 111) as that community pays to support her, rather than send her to the poor
house. When she abandons her work to attend chapels to listen to the minister, she lets herself
go, and her hovel emits “an abominable smell such as might have come from the boiler of the
witch who one time lived on the moor” (Evans 2003, 111). Again, the availability of these kinds
of texts for a modern audience is important, as all three of these writers have been republished
in recent years, by Welsh publishers.

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A bigger question to raise is how can the impact of ecofeminism be evaluated in a Welsh
context if feminist criticism itself has been established in the academy later than in other areas of
Britain? Feminist recovery work in its broadest sense has only, arguably, been fully developed in
the last two decades in the field of Welsh Writing in English. For example, two key survey text-
books were only published in 2007, namely, Katie Gramich’s Twentieth-century Women’s Writing
in Wales: Land, Gender, Belonging and Jane Aaron’s Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales:
Nation, Gender, Identity. There is still not a book-length study of the short story to compare with,
for example, Elke D’hoker’s Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story (2016), though there
has been doctoral work done in this field.4 This is clearly not to say that feminist literary criticism
was not happening in Wales. However, it could be argued that a systematic approach to feminist
criticism, of the kind emphasized in Welsh universities, is still relatively young in the broader
history of literary studies in Britain. It may come as no surprise that ecofeminist approaches to the
literatures of Wales are still in their earliest stages, and still in the process of identifying texts and
authors that are important in ecofeminist studies.

From Rural to Urban: Wales and Industrialization

Rural landscapes feature almost as a character in their own right in fictions across the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries in Wales. One of the most important and influential One of the most
important texts to be published by Honno is A View Across the Valley (1999), a collection of short
stories by women from Wales that explores the many facets of mostly rural life from a variety
of perspectives (though often middle class, in terms of the writers themselves). The title is taken
from a story of the same name, by Dilys Rowe, and throughout the collection, women are often
found looking out onto a landscape in which they may not fully belong. A View Across the Valley
is a reflection on the changing geographical and emotional spaces that women inhabit but also a
reflection on the changing nature of women’s publishing in Wales, giving space to voices that have
long been overlooked or forgotten.
In terms of Welsh language writers who, amongst other things, explore rural communities,
Kate Roberts is one of “the most important Welsh female novelist and short story writer of the
twentieth century” (Gramich 2011, vii). One of her most important and well-known novels,
Traed mewn Cyffion (1936), translated as Feet in Chains, explores the lives of several generations of
the Gruffydds family. The novel examines the ways in which rural environments are impacted
by modernity, and how, in turn, women’s lives are crushed by the onslaught of industry and war.
The early chapters of the novel explore the experiences of newly-wed outsider Jane Gruffydd, who
comes to Snowdonia from the northern Llyn peninsula, to marry Ifan, a slate quarrier:

Jane turned her gaze back all the time towards the Eifl, and she felt a pang of homesickness as
she thought of her old home beyond those peaks. The landscape around her was utterly alien.
She did not come from a place of explosions and rubble tips… And here she was…among
strangers, in a land where the houses were much closer together but less welcoming.
(17–18)

The alienation experienced by Jane is something that is explored in a much more practical sense
in an earlier text by Allen Raine, published in her posthumous (and little-studied) short story col-
lection All in a Month (1908). In “Flow on, Thou Shining River”, the second story of the collec-
tion, women experience a physical and emotional eviction from childhood homes because of the
impact of industrialization on the environment. The elderly Hughes sisters return to Carny-coed
to live at 10, Glenarth Road, which had originally been “a little sleepy country town, nestling in

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the trees, and surrounded by sunny meadows, where the soft-flowing river made continual music”
(1908, 74). Everything changes with the discovery of coal, a “rich vein of ore that lay under the
sylvan glades” (1908, 74). After this,

furnaces roared, steam-engines puffed, and the throb of machinery filled the air. New streets
were built, fortunes were made, and the little rural town that had once been a “thing of
beauty” became a smoky blot upon the fair landscape.
(1908, 74)

The combination of “the smoke of tall chimneys and the throb of machinery” makes the sisters’
existence in their childhood home of “Lanafon” “unbearable” (1908, 75), after which they escape
to London. When they decide to return to Carny-coed to live out their final days, they cannot go
back to their old house because it is now a warehouse and they have to instead move to the other
end of town.5
Perhaps one of the most obvious literary traditions to explore from an ecofeminist perspective
is that of industrial (and later, post-industrial) fiction. So many novels and short stories from the
late nineteenth century onward explore the relationship between women and an increasingly
industrialized and often polluted environment. However, there is a class dimension to this type
of writing as Bohata and Jones argue, noting how “middle-class female novelists begin to make
sense of their industrial regions.” This is an important step in itself–“to map the continuities be-
tween rural and industrial Wales” (2019, 113). Who has the power to speak about the industrial
experience is an important factor to consider here—it is the (relatively) wealthy, the literate, rather
than those who experience industrial work directly. Later texts would also imagine the impact of
industrial work on not only the environment but also the most marginalized in Welsh society, and
from a far broader class perspective. Menna Gallie’s The Small Mine (1962), for example, is often
considered one of the most important accounts of the impact of coal mining in South Wales from
the mid-twentieth century. Gallie’s prose is lyrical and playful, even when depicting the horrors
of the work done underground by miners, in a labyrinthine structure of darkness. She describes
the re-emergence from the pits by the central character, Joe Jenkins, as he rises from the depths
to the autumnal world above in terms that evoke myth and tragedy (with echoes of the language
of Shakespeare’s Macbeth):

But before the autumn and the first cigarettes came the pithead baths: the comfort, the sooth-
ing of hot water streaming away the dirt, showering some of the weariness; rough towels,
cleans clothes, humanity restored, the depravity of darkness put away, in the locker till to-
morrow and tomorrow.
(Gallie 1963, 12)

Gallie’s work has some parallels with that of Ron Berry (1920–1997), through the lens of both
industrialization and deindustrialization. Set in “a Wales after the Aberfan disaster” (Berry 2012,
iii), Berry’s Flame and Slag (1968) explores industrial disasters, an evocative appreciation for the en-
vironment, and an understanding of some of the changing gender roles of the 1960s. Sarah Morse’s
overview (2020) of Berry’s environmental writing, which also encompasses autobiography and
short nonfiction, is a key critical place to start, especially in relation to his environmental focus.
In more recent years, post-industrial fiction has become a key part of the Welsh publishing
landscape, most notably through the work of writer Rachel Trezise, including autobiographical
novel In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl (2000), short story collection Fresh Apples (2005) and more
recent work such as Easy Meat (2021). Similarly, texts such as Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place
(2000) explore the ways in which the industrial past is ravaging the present, where mangled

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landscapes intertwine with broken bodies in Cardiff’s docklands. Leonora Brito’s dat’s love (1995)
short story collection has some similar themes, especially in “Digging for Victory.”

Short Fiction: From Travel Writing to Dystopia

The history of the short story in Wales is tied closely to the representation of landscape and
Welsh culture as the very title of A View Across the Valley has already shown. There is a direct
correlation between travel writing and the short story as models for writing fiction, especially in
­English-medium stories, which can often be traced back to a participant-observer narrator figure.
Travel writing, as a genre, seeps into and shapes various aspects of short fiction, blurring the line
between the episodic sketch, autobiography, the ethnographic account and the auto-ethnographic
reflection. Travel narratives about Wales were extremely popular in the nineteenth century, as
a destination for the “home tour” (as opposed to the Grand Tour of Europe) and a place to find
sublime ­( William Gilpin) or “wild” landscapes (such as George Borrow’s idiosyncratic and prob-
lematic Wild Wales, 1862). Much as Melanie Duckworth notes in Chapter 6, there is often a male
viewer, alone in a landscape, which closely follows Pratt’s concept of “monarch-of-all-I-survey.”
Women writers would demonstrate elements of this observer figure, such as in Anne Beale’s Vale
of the Towey; or, Sketches in South Wales (1844), which draws on some of these colonialist tropes as
she gazes across the landscapes, and into the domestic spaces, of poor women.
Later women writers would defiantly subvert the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” trope. Kathleen
Freeman’s short story, “The Valley”, is a case in point. An academic in classics at the University of
South Wales and Monmouthshire, Freeman (1897–1959) wrote both in her own name and under
the pseudonym of Mary Fitt as a prolific detective fiction author. Writing as Freeman, one of her
first publications was a collection of short stories entitled The Intruder, and other stories (1926).6 The
title of this text, and its connotations of intruding in spaces that were not traditionally open to
women, sums up much of what Freeman’s writing aimed for. In “The Valley”, Freeman imagines
a heterosexual couple visiting a valley which is described in very similar terms to Pratt’s “mon-
arch” figure. The unnamed man in the story looks at the landscape in the presence of his female
companion and “thr[ows] back his head proudly, as if he had done it all, and she were praising
his handiwork” (Freeman 1926, 137). Their whole relationship is built on seeing a natural phe-
nomenon of a rainbow appearing after the wind raises spray from the pool at the valley’s floor.
This is something the couple believes only they have seen and is a sign of the uniqueness of their
relationship. The moment they leave, the rainbows appear again and again, undermining the male
character’s certainty while also mocking the entire tradition of the male observer. As Filipova
argues in Chapter 47, there is a fundamental link between vision and possession.
Welsh magazines have played a particularly important role in bringing new voices to the read-
ing public, especially when it comes to the apocalyptic, the speculative and the dystopian, through
publications such as Planet: The Welsh Internationalist and New Welsh Review. Planet’s publication of
Elizabeth Baines’ “Boiling the Potatoes” (1978) is a case in point. Verging on the apocalyptic in
its vision, it is a tour de force, bringing together in the space of just two pages a scathing political
critique of British treatment of the Dutch Elm disease crisis (which wiped out huge swathes of
Welsh hedgerow), the pollutants released by power plants and their impact on disease in women’s
bodies (likened to the decayed trunks of the elms), and all linked to an underlying fear of the
consequences of nuclear fallout.7 Shirley Toulson’s “Playground of England” (1973) which was
also published in Planet, is somewhere between satire and speculative fiction, in which Toulson
imagines a future where Wales has been annexed as a literal playground for England, a kind
of high-adrenaline, high-risk theme park where the English own extortionately-priced second
homes and women, such as retired school teacher Meghan, are at risk of eviction. Discussed at
length elsewhere (Deininger 2015), the story can be viewed, along with Baines’ “Boling the

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Potatoes” as examples of the first wave of women’s writing, in the post-Silent Spring era, that
provocatively engaged directly with environmental issues in a highly political manner while also
raising awareness of the direct impact on women’s lives.
The annexation of Wales is echoed in Cardiff-born J L George’s The Word (2021), a novella
that again highlights the importance of Welsh magazines in ecofeminist accounts of Welsh liter-
ature. The Word was originally named as the winner of a dystopian writing competition, com-
missioned by New Welsh Review in 2019, and later extended and published under the magazine’s
Rarebyte publishing arm. The novella imagines a dystopian, post-Brexit future in which a small
number of children are discovered to have the power, known as “The Word,” to command oth-
ers through speech and are weaponized by the insular, paranoid government of ‘fortress island’
Britain (George 2021, 16). Subjected to cruel and violent state control (in a manner reminiscent
of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, a comparison noted in many of the no-
vella’s reviews), these children live in a world where the government has manipulated truths about
the past to the point that they have become either almost unbelievable tall stories or alternative,
twisted facts. Transporting fruit around the world via plane out of season, to meet consumer
demand, seems ‘far-fetched’ (George 2021, 16), rather than an indicator of a world where flying
exacerbates climate change, while wi-fi and phone signals are feared as sources of cancer-causing
radiation (2021, 111) so that communication with the outside world (especially mainland Europe)
is cut off. The most vulnerable bear the brunt of this twisted reality, especially the children who
are born with The Word. About halfway through the novella, escapee sisters Sioned and Nerys
marvel at the difference between the representation of Britain on a Euro coin and what they have
seen in their school maps, which depict Britain looking “like something violently dismembered,
Ireland and Scotland colored in warning, traitorous red” (George 2021, 118). The map is a symbol
of a broader act of violence-political and physical violence enacted not just on the land, but on its
most vulnerable inhabitants. As with the shift in perspective between map and coin, dystopian
literature has the power to transform the way we see the world we currently live in, much like the
way climate fiction can change perspectives on impending global catastrophes, and to encourage
us to take action. If we see a bleak future imagined for us, perhaps we can also see the solutions
that might prevent that future from happening in the first place.

Environmental Poetry in Wales

It is perhaps in poetry that an ecofeminist voice can be heard most clearly in modern Wales. The
intertwining of poetry and environment has been carefully explored in Matt Jarvis’ Welsh Envi-
ronments in Contemporary Poetry where Jarvis notes that “each act of writing the environment is,
at its core, an argument about how the world should be seen: it is nothing less than an invitation
to understand, to approach the world in a particular way” (2008, 11). Readers curious to know
more about the history of environmental poetry in Wales will find Jarvis’ book a treasure trove
of thoughtful readings. Since the publication of Welsh Environments, contemporary poetry has
expanded an environmental—and specifically ecofeminist—agenda even further.
In 2021, Taylor Edmonds was appointed as Poet in Residence for the Future Generations Com-
missioner for Wales in order to articulate Wales’ Well-being of the Future Generations Act (2015). This
Act, unique to Wales, “requires public bodies in Wales to think about the long-term impact of
their decisions, to work better with people, communities and each other, and to prevent persistent
problems such as poverty, health inequalities and climate change.” It offers the “opportunity
to make a long-lasting, positive change to current and future generations” (Future Generations
Commissioner for Wales 2015). Edmonds featured in Everything Change, a “series of discussions
and events exploring the roles creativity, adaptive thinking and storytelling can play in overcom-
ing the challenges of climate and ecological crises” (Taliesin Arts Centre 2021). The name of

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the Everything Change project comes directly from a quotation from Margaret Atwood, herself a
speaker at the event: “I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the
everything change” (Atwood 2015). Edmonds was born and grew up in Barry, a seaside Welsh
town a few miles from the capital city of Cardiff. The rationale behind the poem Edmonds wrote
for Everything Change, “My Magnolia Tree”, relates to family and place, and to imagine what the
climate crisis might look like in the future. In an interview with Literature Wales, Edmonds says:

I was lucky to know some of my great-grandparents, who came from Wales, Scotland and
Barbados, and I’ve been able to hear their stories, grow familiar with some of the places that
were special to them. I started to think about how I’d feel if I wasn’t able to visit those pre-
cious places in the future–what if all we had left were stories? Poetry and art have the power
to humanize stories and provoke empathy in ways reports and statistics don’t. Poetry grabs
you, makes you listen, gives ideas depth and makes you see yourself and your stake in things.
(Literature Wales 2021)

“My Magnolia Tree” imagines a world where rising water levels have left Cardiff as an “under-
water city…a skeleton, a shipwreck” (2021). The speaker’s great-grandmother haunts the poem
through the letters she has written, begun before the speaker has even been born. The letters
describe the water levels rising as a form of warning, with rivers “bloat[ed]…with plastic bags
and Stella cans.” Reminiscent of the plastic that washes up on the beaches of Porthcawl-inspired
“The Caib” in Robert Minhinick’s Sea Holly novel series, as an emblem of consumer waste and
environmental vandalism, Edmonds’ poem draws attention to the everyday discarding of waste
that pollutes the planet and incrementally contributes to environmental disaster. The letters are
part warning, in that they outline the dangers as they begin to become increasingly evident,
while remaining hopeful that the speaker “might grow into something good” (Edmonds 2021).
The central image of the magnolia tree is one of laying down roots, the tree planted in the
great-grandmother’s first council house. Tree coverage is something that often marks a distinct
difference between poorer areas, as Natural Resources Wales (2016) note: “Whilst variation
exists across Wales, 63% of more affluent wards have cover greater than 15% compared to 23%
for less well-off wards.” In this sense, planting the tree suggests a desire for change in itself, un-
derlined by the Welsh Government’s announcement (2021) that every household in Wales will
be given a free tree to plant as part of an initiative to combat climate change (Wales was, after
all, the first country in the United Kingdom to declare a climate emergency in 2019). There
is strong political critique embedded in the poem, with both the general public and its leaders
likened to dogs, inert in the face of repeated warnings (Edmonds 2021). The poem ends as it
begins, with the speaker protecting a house with sandbags in the same way their great-grand-
mother did as the waters were first rising (Edmonds 2021). As Matt Jarvis notes, while com-
menting on Lawrence Buell’s idea that literary imaginings can affect how we care about the
physical world, “a poem cannot wrestle its reader to the ground to stop him or her driving a car
when walking would do just as well” ( Jarvis 2008, 10). While this may well be true, noticing
the everyday destruction that we all take part in (not being careful to recycle, not making in-
cremental changes to our lifestyles) can make a difference. “My Magnolia Tree” emphasizes the
fragility of the beauty in the everyday—the quiet magnificence of a magnolia in bloom, amidst
Cardiff ’s gray pebble-dashed or redbrick terraced council houses.
Finally, this chapter will consider 100 Poems to Save the Earth. While Edmonds’ poem tackles
climate change and its likely impact, 100 Poems considers a host of environmental catastrophes,
from the end of the world (Ross Cogan’s “Ragnarök”) to the everyday death of nature at hu-
manity’s hands (Paula Meehan’s “Death of a Field”). It must be noted that it is almost impossible
to paraphrase the rich language of the poetry discussed without direct quotation (due to the

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inflexibilities surrounding academic publishing and copyright permissions); the poems discussed,
and the collection as a whole, deserve to be read in full. Set in Ireland, Meehan’s poem imagines
the destruction of a field, which is lost at the very moment the language shifts and it becomes
designated as a site for housing, planted not with trees but with units of housing (Meehan 2021,
86). Each plant, herb and weed is supplanted by harsh household cleaning products (which are
also pollutants): dandelions become household chemicals, teazel becomes washing powder, thistle
becomes tumble dryer fragrance. The list of plants is noticeable on the page as a more uniform
block of text, the beginning of each line repeated, foreshadowing the uniformity of the rows of
houses that will destroy the field. There are significant parallels with the deathless longevity of
Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam (Reilly 2009, 9), discussed in King’s Chapter 49, though in Meehan’s
poem, each of these chemicals is another word for the death of nature itself. Each chemical is
a brand name, signaling an invasive form of capitalism and, like Reilly’s poem, encroaching,
­death-bringing consumerism. In Meehan’s poem, each product becomes a metonym for a particu-
lar domestic chore, a washing brand such as Persil (2021, 86) standing in for the process of washing
clothes with a polluting detergent. Each of the products listed brings with it a host of associations,
including microplastics, carcinogens, and death-inducing solvents. The surfactants found in com-
mon cleaning products (indicated by UK brands Flash, Oxyaction, and Ariel) have the potential
to strip the life from water, destroying the surface of the skin, whether fish or frog.
The poem also highlights the relationship between language and power: those who have the
power to name things are those who have control. Right at the end, the speaker talks about the way
the memory of the field will be archived in an architect’s computer (Meehan 2021, 87). It is that pro-
cess, of turning supposedly “empty,” undeveloped space into a mapped, named place, that kills the
essence (and the flora) of the land. Related to the thistle, teazel is a very tall plant with a large flower
head that opens up to seed and attracts birds; transformed metaphorically into Ariel washing pow-
der, it is figured as a poison. The field, as a space of natural growth, becomes a source of poisons. The
poem highlights the shift in the language, the tension between space-as-place described in positive
terms: a development, a site to build on, a place for families to build their lives. And a place of death.
Another powerful ecofeminist poem is Kathleen Jamie’s “The Creel,” the first in the collec-
tion. The poem opens with the beginning of the world, which is figured as a woman wrapped
in a shawl, stooping under a large wicker basket (the “creel” of the title). The reader is invited to
recognize this woman, someone that may be familiar from dreams, suggesting a Mother Earth
archetype. The poem ends with the female figure’s fear that if she ever put her burden down, the
world would blink out of existence, like a light being switched off ( Jamie 2021, 11). The images
in this poem take us back to the words of Greta Gaard: “Around the world, women are on the
frontlines of climate justice crises as well as climate justice solutions” (Gaard 2018, 289). If humans
do not take up this burden, all across the world and not just in those places already affected directly
by climate change, the catastrophe that 100 Poems predicts may well come true.

Conclusion
Looking ahead to the future of ecofeminist literary research, where do we go next in Welsh
Studies? In a strange way, the future—in an academic and literary, if not literal sense—is positive,
regenerative even; there are so many different unexplored avenues of study becoming available
and so much scholarship yet to be done, from recovery work to new readings of more well-known
texts, let alone responding to new writing (Parthian’s 2022 climate change anthology, Gorwelion:
Shared Horizons, is a case in point). There are so many gaps that this chapter could not even begin
to fill, especially regarding pre-nineteenth century writing and Welsh language writing more
broadly. Similar gaps remain concerning the work of writers of color and queer writers from
Wales, which demand full studies of their own.

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One area with huge potential scope for scholarly work is the crossover between ecofeminism,
nature writing and literature (including creative nonfiction). The little-known writer Lilian Bow-
en-Rowlands, for instance, wrote several popular but now mainly forgotten novels, including
The Piteousness of Passing Things (1900), which is part rural romance, part detailed portrait of small
communities, and part love letter to the Pembrokeshire countryside and coastlines. In a way,
her work could be considered climate stories. A local newspaper described the exact area that
Bowen-Rowlands writes about (the tiny hamlets of Broad Haven and Little Haven) as having
“charm” and “virgin rusticity” because the “sea front and surroundings are largely as they have
been fashioned by Nature” (Pembroke County Guardian, 1906).8 Bowen-Rowlands’ depiction is
more complex than the “woody dells and sylvan glades” (1906) that the Pembroke County Guardian
propounds, but the language deployed here is significant, mirroring that of Allen Raine’s “Flow
on, Thou Shining River” discussed earlier. To what extent do Welsh texts undermine this view
of Wales as a new Eden, a paradise untouched by industry and civilization? As we’ve already seen,
so many writers have explored the damage done to the land by industrial expansion, as well as the
post-industrial world of broken lives that are left behind. What writers such as ­Bowen-Rowlands
do is emphasize the dangers lurking in these idyls (especially the shipwrecks and drownings that
repeatedly appear across Bowen-Rowlands’ fictions)–dangers that mirror and highlight the dan-
gers women, the poor, and the marginalized face in an environment where only the wealthy
experience a sense of safety. At the same time, it documents a natural world now either lost or in
danger of being swept away by rising seas.
This chapter began with 100 Poems to Save the Earth, as it accessibly, poignantly, and thought-
fully offers the reader an invitation to become part of a broader conversation surrounding change.9
As Jarvis notes, “whether or not a reader will accept that invitation is … always moot” (2008, 11).
What we need, then, is to recognize that the individual alone is not enough—as J L George writes:

If there is something that fiction can offer in terms of talking about the real world, perhaps
it’s a sense of the importance of connection, collaboration, and community. That’s something
we can explore in detail by looking at the networks of relationships in which characters exist,
and it reminds us that we need more than individual brilliance.10

Finally, as Taylor Edmonds stresses in “My Magnolia Tree,” “There are lessons here” and it is up
to us to heed them (Edmonds 2021). Perhaps one of those lessons is that one woman alone cannot
prevent the world from going out like a light, but that together, collectively, we can begin to work
for change.

Notes
1 For readers unfamiliar with the politics of Wales within Britain, it should be emphasized that Wales is
a devolved nation; following the successful 1997 referendum and subsequent Government of Wales Act
(1998), Wales has had the power to control some aspects of its own legislation. An earlier referendum on
devolution was held in 1979, but was rejected.
2 For a full discussion of postcolonial approaches to the literatures of Wales, see Kirsti Bohata. 2009. Post-
colonialism Revisited: Writing Wales in English. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
3 See Deininger, Michelle. 2019. “The Short Story in the Twentieth Century.” In the Cambridge History
of Welsh Literature, edited by Geraint Williams and Helen Fulton, 428–445 for a fuller exploration of the
wealth of material written.
4 See Deininger, Michelle. 2013. “Short fiction by women from Wales: a neglected tradition.” PhD diss.,
Cardiff University.
5 For a fuller discussion of this story, see Deininger, Michelle. 2019. “The Short Story in the Twentieth
Century.” In the Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, edited by Geraint Williams and Helen Fulton,
428–445. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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6 Some of Freeman’s long forgotten stories are republished in Queer Square Mile (Parthian, 2022), an an-
thology which draws together Wales’ rich history of queer writing.
7 For a fuller discussion of Baines’ story, see Deininger, Michelle. 2017. “Pylons, Playgrounds and Power
Stations: Ecofeminism and Landscape in 1970s Women’s Short Fiction from Wales’. Ecofeminism in Dia-
logue, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey, 45–60. Lanham: Lexington.
8 The Havens was also the area where Welsh writer Joanne Meek set her short story “Jellyfish”, which
was shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award (2014) and explores the interplay between character and
landscape.
9 Zoë Brigley, one of the editors of 100 Poems, was appointed joint Poetry Editor with Rhian Edwards,
of Seren in 2022. Having such a passionate advocate for both feminist and environmental poetry bodes
well for the future of ecofeminist publishing (and by extension, scholarship) in Wales.
10 Collaborative support helped to ensure that this chapter covered as much academic ground (and books) as
possible, and includes heartfelt thanks to Alexis Alders, Kirsti Bohata, Mick Felton, Bethan M. Jenkins,
Joanne Meek, Sarah Morse and Ieuan Rees for matters ranging from the ideological to the biological.

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 PART II

Core Issues and Topics

 25
ACTIVISM AND ECOFEMINIST
LITERATURE
Sunaina Jain

Introduction
Ecofeminism, as a social, political and cultural movement, emerged in the 1970s out of a series
of conferences and workshops held in the United States to deliberate on the intersection between
feminism and environmentalism, and to raise awareness about the sacredness of the earth and all
its life forms. Different scholars from diverse backgrounds and cultural contexts have tried to the-
orize and define the term ecofeminism, and practise it within their own ideological framework,
so much so that it may qualify as an umbrella term as it draws confluence and parallels between
the exploitation of earth and oppression of its varied life forms. Many grassroots movements such
as “community groups, NGOs, ecology movements and women’s movements” aimed at the “re-
versal of environmental degradation” (Mies and Shiva 2010, 87) are rooted in simultaneous and
ubiquitous concerns about the rights of women/Indigenous peoples and sustainable ecological
practices. Despite the coinage of the term “Ecofeminism” by Francoise d’Eaubonne in the 1970s,
Mies and Shiva (2010, 13) assert that “it became popular only in the context of numerous pro-
tests and activities against environmental destruction, sparked-off initially by recurring ecological
disasters”.
There have been many attempts in the direction of maintaining ecological balance and ad-
dressing the problem of race, ethnicity, species, gender or class but these disjointed attempts
cannot challenge and address different forms of oppression in their entirety. The multi-pronged
nature of the wrongs done towards women and earth calls for an intersectional and holistic ap-
proach to counter the hegemonic apparatuses and structural hierarchies. This becomes pertinent
in the light of the fact how the concerns of the postcolonial world would differ from the post-
colonial nations or how women cannot be homogenized or clubbed as one category, or how the
ecofeminist approach now cuts across other disciplines such as Disability Studies, Animal Rights,
Queer Studies and so on.
A postcolonial focus and understanding in the field of ecofeminist activism would require a
different critical lens vis-à-vis ecofeminist response emerging from the activists belonging to the
First World. Melanie Duckworth in Chapter 6 makes insightful comments about the colonial
history of Australia and the role of Aboriginals in developing an ecofeminist ethic based on their
expert knowledge of the Australian Land. Aslı Değ irmenci Altın in Chapter 33 analyses the defi-
nitions of postcolonialism given by different critics and concludes that a postcolonial ecofeminist
lens critiques not just the exploitation of humans but also the devaluation of the environment and
natural world of the postcolonial geographies. Many noted critics from or beyond the postcolonial

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-27271
 Sunaina Jain

locations such as Robert Young and Pablo Mukherjee consider structures of oppression and dom-
ination to be rooted in “corporate capitalism” and western and local elitism. Eminent scholar-­
activists from the postcolonial world like Vandana Shiva, Arundhati Roy and Wangari Maathai
have impugned and brandished the Western imperialist culture of corporate globalization and mil-
itarization. Having said this, the meaty contribution of the First World activists such as Starhawk,
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Alice Walker etc. cannot be discounted in favour of postcolonial
ecofeminism as these women have actively engaged and participated in national and transnational
anti-war, anti-nuclear protests, peace marches and other revolutionary campaigns. Another moot
point that stems from this discussion is the role, function and stance of feminists/ecofeminists who
are positionalized within the so-called minority cultures thriving in the United States. Are lived
experiences, grassroots activism or concerns the same for all women? The answer is an obvious
“No”. The unequal and varied experiential living on the part of ethnic minorities and Indige-
nous women necessitates different routes and mediums for activism which obviously fall out of
the ambit of the white feminist thought. Benay Blend in Chapter 19 attests to this differentiation
in the prioritization of concerns among Native American and First Nations women by citing the
examples of Indigenous writers like Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) and Steph-
anie Fitzgerald (Cree). Their writings capture the spirit and essence of Indigenous women, and
reflect their multifarious concerns. Linda Hogan, Blend adds, advocates not one but many wom-
en’s movements that address the multi-layered issues and needs of Indigenous women. This calls
for the conceptualization of Indigenous feminism which Blend grapples with when she raises these
questions about the intersection of feminist and tribal concerns hinged on land sovereignty, and
about the activist role of Indigenous women in response to violence and marginalization.
For Starhawk and many other ecofeminists, ecofeminism, apart from the interconnection be-
tween the exploitation of women and nature, is “also based on the recognition that these two forms
of domination are bound up with class exploitation, racism, colonialism, and neo-­colonialism”
(qtd. in Gaard and Murphy 1998, 3). Ruether’s vision allies itself on twin operation – one is to use
“public protest and communication media to delegitimize the present system” and the second is to
“shape alternatives” for social justice and equality in local communities (2005, 97). Whether hail-
ing from the First World or postcolonial nations, the question arises whether these ecofeminists sit
in their theoretical ivory towers and act as mere purveyors or offer a concrete practical paradigm
and engage in a direct line of action in order to battle the forces of oppression. Can we trace an
intersectional approach that cuts across the lines of race, colour, class or sex in the writings and
activism of these ecofeminists?
It is evident from the above discussion that ecofeminism is not a unified and coherent term
rather different strands of discourse and practices have branched out from it, including liberal
ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism and material ecofeminism, as has been explicated
by Asmae Ourkiya in Chapter 29. Whereas some ecofeminists find a close connection between
women and nature due to their biological function to be uplifting for activist movements in this
field, there are others who find this association to be regressive and disabling for women as it
relegates them solely to the realm of nurturance and reproductive abilities, and they consider this
relation to be a socially constructed concept. Ourkiya also highlights how male and female roles
and traits came to be essentialized (masculinity became synonymous with control, order, domin-
ion, hubris, heterosexuality; femininity came to be associated with docility, submissiveness, irra-
tionality and so on). This polarization between essentialism and constructionism was responsible
for the emergence of various sub-categories of ecofeminist scholars and activists, labelling them as
cultural ecofeminists, socialist ecofeminists or radical ecofeminists.
Rosemary Radford Ruether belongs to the liberal reformist camp of ecofeminism; Miriam
Starhawk (a Wiccan priestess) fuses her witchcraft practice and writings with protests against
nuclear wars; writings and activism of Vandana Shiva and Wangari Maathai stem from the

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criss-crossing of postcolonial, cultural and material ecofeminism (nevertheless rooted in expe-

riential knowing and actual lived realities of life of the Indigenous peoples). The chapter will
examine whether the postcolonial and First World scholar-activists work along common grounds
to override the apparent differences in economies, cultures, value systems and beliefs, and create
cross-border and transnational links within feminist and environmentalist movements. However,
instead of the linear approach of bifurcating my chapter to discuss two neat categories of First
World and postcolonial ecofeminists, I have chosen to examine them according to the thematic
and conceptual framework of activism and activist-writings.

Ecofeminism, Cross-cultural Connections, and Inclusivity

Much before the movement formalized itself as Ecofeminism in the 1970s in the Western societies,
many countries in Africa, and South Asia already witnessed a rapid progression of environmental
activism and movements. In India, the academic and scholarly rigour corroborated the already
active grassroots movements; helped in defining the role of women and nature and gaining vis-
ibility as a structured social movement for empowerment. A similar idea has been endorsed by
Değ irmenci Altın in Chapter 33 in her analysis of the intersection and confluence between post-
colonialism and ecofeminism. Değ irmenci Altın cites Robert Young’s chapter on “postcolonial
feminism” and other theorists such as Karen Warren and Greta Gaard whose works underscore the
role of Chipko movement and other environmental issues taken up by women from postcolonial
geographies.
In the First-World countries, the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) alerted
people to the adverse impact of indiscriminate use of synthetic pesticides and became a turning
point in the history of environmental activism. In 1978 in New York, mother and environmental-
ist Lois Gibbs started the Love Canal Movement, after discovering that their residential area was
built on a toxic dumping site, which resulted in the rising cases of illnesses and reproductive issues
including birth defects. In 1980 and 1981, women like ecofeminist Ynestra King marched at the
Pentagon as part of Women’s Pentagon Actions against the militaristic policies of the Government
and exploitation of marginalized people and nature.
What emerges from the above examples is the ubiquity of social and environmental justice
movements across the globe and these struggles should ideally be structured around the founda-
tional principle of inclusivity. Many ecofeminists such as Starhawk, Walker, and Ruether have
vouched for an inclusive paradigm – “inclusive of both genders, inclusive of all social groups and
races” (Ruether 1983, 16). I am interested in examining whether such pluralistic practices are
followed by the selected ecofeminists or not. Hence, the chapter discusses the writings, vision and
activism of a few selected ecofeminists individually as well as in relation to one another, and to
humanity in general.

Alice Walker: Struggles, Movements and Cross-Cultural Concerns

Alice Walker (born February 9, 1944), a leading African-American feminist, environmentalist,
and author, has been at the forefront of many revolutionary struggles including Civil Rights
Movement in the United States since her college days. While writing about the fusion of writing
and activism, Walker (1997, xxiv) asserts, “Now I know that, as with the best journalists, activism
is often my muse. And that it is organic”. Her books like Horses Make the Landscape More Beautiful
(1985), Anything We Love Can Be Changed (1997), and We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For
(2006) are deeply rooted in reverence for the earth. Walker (1988, 147) warns: “While the Earth
is poisoned, everything it supports is poisoned. While the Earth is enslaved, none of us is free…
While it is ‘treated like dirt,’ so are we.” In her non-fiction book In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens

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(1983), Walker explores diverse topics including the theory and praxis of “womanism” (a term she
coined for Black feminism), and rallies against the nuclear power industry and the lethal poison it
can inject into our habitats. Her powerful articles on protests against America’s participation in the
Vietnam war; association with Cuban leader Fidel Castro; her tributes to Bob Moses, Bob Mar-
ley and other artists and activists; her visit to Gaza in 2008 and continued support for the rights
of Palestinians are all exemplary of a life devoted to social causes.1 Walker’s anti-war stance and
protests against male or ethnic dominance in collaboration with the group Women for Women
International are covered in her 2010 book Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror
in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel.
Walker’s collaboration with Pratibha Parmar on the documentary Warrior Marks, a politically
polemical film adapted into book form Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual
Blinding of Women (1993),2 brings to light her inclusive “womanist”3 approach as it includes in-
terviews with women from Senegal, Gambia and other African countries, the United States and
England who are concerned with and affected by genital mutilation. Her humanitarian work with
AIDS victims in Africa as well as her protests to end violence in the Middle East is covered in a
documentary on her life Beauty in Truth (2013) (Farmer 2014). It also unfolds how she promotes
literary activism and creativity of others through her enterprise in the form of the feminist pub-
lishing company, Wild Trees Press, established in 1984. According to Rudolph P. Byrd, Walker’s
activism for peace and justice has “encompassed other revolutionary struggles, including the ab-
olition of apartheid in South Africa; the native American movement; the lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and trans-gendered movement; the human rights movement; and the animal rights movement”
(Walker and Byrd 2010, 31).

Intersection of Ecofeminism and Agriculture/Forestry

Whereas Walker has largely worked for the upliftment of the oppressed classes including ani-
mals and has rallied against the forces of militarism, activists such as Vandana Shiva (India) and
Starhawk (United States) have worked, albeit in different geographical and social contexts, in
the direction of creating subsistence economies using agriculture and farming as the vehicles for
self-sufficiency and food sovereignty. Numerous writers, such as Sabine O’Hara, have broached
this topic using different terms, such as “eco-sufficiency” or “provisioning”, perhaps avoiding the
term “subsistence” (Murphy 2013, 209). Abhik Gupta in Chapter 9 examines the Bengali writer
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel Aranyak, which portrays the struggles of a woman for sur-
vival and raises questions about the forest land and resources being controlled by private owner-
ship which become inaccessible to the rural/Indigenous people. Peter I-min Huang in Chapter 3
cites novelist Yao-ming Gan’s novel Pangcah Woman (2015), which projects the recent postcolonial
ecofeminist trajectory in Taiwanese Literature. In the novel, Gu Axia is the “Pangcah” woman,
Pangcah being the largest aboriginal group in Taiwan. Pajilu, the male protagonist, named after
the local word for the breadfruit trees, a native plant of Hualian grandfather, is connected to his
roots so much so that he understands well the language of plants and trees. However, compelled by
circumstances and love for Gu Axia, he sells off the forest to an international lumbar conglomerate
run by Japanese and other foreign interests. The novel ends tragically as Pajilu is crushed under
the weight of the tree he had been trying to chop off. I-min Huang, while analysing the novel
from an ecofeminist perspective, highlights the history of ecocide in Taiwan during the Japanese
and Chinese invasion and challenges the nature/culture dualism perpetuated by the dominant
masculinist power.
At this juncture, one might feel compelled to ask why we need to situate the feminist con-
cerns within the framework of agricultural as well as forestry policies like land ownership, seed
sovereignty, crop selection, land redistribution, access to forest resources and deforestation, and

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how farming is related to the issues of class, gender and ethnicity. It is crucial to understand that
many ecofeminists (whether labelled or not) like Carolyn Merchant have traced the roots of the
deliberate transition of the image of earth and nature from an organic entity to a machine (Mer-
chant 1983, xxii) and ideological misrepresentation of women and nature as culturally passive
and inferior, which licensed the taming and excavation of nature with impunity and allowed the
advocates of capitalism and patriarchy to gain control over the resources of the land. Shiva calls it
“maldevelopment” (death of the ecological principle) (2010, 4) and “reductionist” science (2010,
22). Such a reductionist view calls for serious attention as food production which was once so-
cially organized turned into a commercial money-minting enterprise through the promotion of
industrial agriculture by the multinational companies. The ideological systemic shift in outlook
towards women and nature resulting from the neoliberal policies of Governments has been cri-
tiqued by many scholars. Nicolás Campisi in Chapter 17 foregrounds the role of Verónica Gago –
co-founder of the movement “Ni una menos” which in English may roughly be translated to
“Not one [woman] less.” Campisi further states that Gago finds parallels between the taming of
and control over the female body and the rapacious colonial exploitation of communal lands un-
der late-stage capitalism, and lashes out against the transnational corporations which appropriate,
colonize and exploit communal lands, and this ruthless encroachment turns many First World and
Indigenous women into a tormented category. The reason behind their suffering is that in Asia,
Africa and Indigenous cultures of Australia and Native Americans, rural and Indigenous women
have been the food providers and gatherers as well as primary caretakers of the family, but their
sustenance rights have often been abused by the dominant capitalist classes.

Vandana Shiva: Creating Local and Sustainable Communities

Vandana Shiva, who was a forerunner during the women-led Chipko Movement along with Sun-
der Bahuguna in the 1970s, has a long career spanning almost five decades spent advocating the
rights of rural women and Indigenous people, upholding traditional practices and natural healing
processes, and rallying against the threats posed by GMOs, biopiracy, and the patenting of our
biodiversity.
Shiva’s struggles to protect agricultural biodiversity and to foreground the parallel struggles of
women and nature are manifest in her books Ecofeminism (1993), co-authored with Maria Mies,
Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (1997), Staying Alive (2010), Earth Democracy (2006)
and Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom (2018). Her wide-ranging corpus en-
compasses contemporary issues ranging from widespread poverty and malnutrition, an alarming
refugee crisis, economic polarization, toxic colonialism of MNCs to genetic food engineering,
biopiracy, natural resource privatization, and depletion and exploitation of planetary resources.
Broadly speaking, Shiva finds solutions to all the ills in equitable distribution of earth’s resources
and her activism primarily rests on securing the rights of all the oppressed classes including nature.
Shiva founded Navdanya in 1991 as a movement rooted in food sovereignty. The movement
thrives on organic farming and riddance from chemicals and poisons. Navdanya’s Seeds of Hope
project4 is exemplary of the efficacy of the work at the local level in a decentralized manner. Her
persistent efforts in carrying forward Navdanya have proved immensely useful in the midst of the
deadly COVID-19 pandemic as the millet produce provided food and nutrition for the families
and communities in spite of lockdown. Shiva asserts, “And while we are overwhelmed by disease
and death, a living food culture can show the light to the path of life”.5
Vandana Shiva’s grassroots struggles on the streets of Seattle as part of the International Forum
on Globalization in November 1999,6 and in farms, and her founding of Bija Vidyapeeth, or the
School of the Seed in 2004 (to teach organic farming techniques and natural insecticides) are based
on the principles of community, interconnectedness, inclusion, nonviolence and equitable sharing

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of the resources of the earth. Shiva has worked with grassroots organizations across Africa, Asia,
Latin America and Europe and her transnational activism reinforces the point that concerns of
women, Indigenous peoples and nature have more commonalities than differences. In Chapter 19,
Blend also addresses the issues of indigenous peoples, their connection with land, other species and
resources, and brings out their resilience, resistance and rebellion against the exploitative forces
which undergird their activism.
One such example is of women of the Kizibi community of Uganda who created a seed bank
in 2008 to preserve local biodiversity in the face of the commercialization of seeds by corporate
multinationals (Nankya et al. 2017). Activists like Mariama Sonko in Senegal continue to lead
on agroecological farming initiatives for localized and sustainable food production. A campaign
“We Are the Solution” for food sovereignty in Africa in 2011 “became a rural women’s move-
ment in 2014” (Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa 2018). Interestingly, the argument of the
paper is even more substantiated when we observe how Alice Walker’s activist spirit cuts across
the boundaries of space, race or ethnicity as she allies herself with the interests of the farmers in
India and across the world. Her advocacy of the Farmers’ Protest in India against the Farm Bills
mirrors her concerns for all the oppressed people of the world. In one of her poems, she shows
her support for the farmers of India as she writes that though Indian farmers were oppressed for
centuries by the British rule, now they are equipped to assert their rights and dignity, and also to
protest vehemently against their victimization and to fight the greed of the heads of state” 7 (Alice
Walker: The Official Website 2021).

Wangari Maathai: A Pioneering African Eco-Warrior

The concerns and issues of women in postcolonial countries often intersect and overlap, and many
environmental movements stem from similar causes. What the women-led Chipko movement in
India achieved in the 1970s has parallels in The Green Belt Movement (GBM) led by Wangari
Maathai (1940–2011), the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
The Green Belt Movement, initiated in 1977, was conceived as a practical way to address the
needs that rural women were facing, specifically for clean drinking water, nutritious food, fire-
wood and fodder, and to prevent deforestation, desertification and soil loss (Maathai 2008, 24).
The Movement gained immense popularity and was the subject of a documentary film, Taking
Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai in 2008. As the first woman in East and Central Africa to
earn a doctorate degree, Professor Maathai was internationally acknowledged for her struggle for
democracy, human rights and environmental conservation. Her book The Green Belt Movement:
Sharing the Approach and the Experience (1985) encapsulates her struggles, bottlenecks and triumphs
in the journey of assisting women in planting a million trees, fighting against deforestation and
desertification, and promoting conservation model, despite vilification from the Government.
Her books including The Challenge for Africa (2009) and Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values
for Healing Ourselves and the World (2010) advance the cause of ecofeminism as these foreground
Maathai’s love for the traditional spiritual values and commitment to service; underscore her
efforts in empowering women through grassroots activism, and carry impassioned pleas to heal
the wounds of nature. Her memoir The Unbowed (2006) unravels the intersectional nature of
tribalism, gender, politics, poverty and corruption, and upholds the belief that no fight against a
singular force will yield results unless all are addressed together.
Maathai was also instrumental in founding an NGO Mottinai in Japan following her visit in
2005. The concept of Mottinai encompasses the idea of respecting resources and not wasting them,
and this way of life galvanizes people to look beyond consumerism and “value each item inde-
pendently, adding the fourth ‘R’ of ‘respect’ to the well-known mantra of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’”
(Crossley-Baxter 2020). Mottinai revitalized by Maathai, whether propounded openly by Alice

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Walker or not, is certainly rooted in Walker’s doctrine of living, she being an ardent follower of
Buddhist concepts and practices. Coincidentally, the musical version of “We Have a Beautiful
Mother” was adapted for Maathai’s memorial ceremony in New York City, in November 2011
(Mihoko and Rowe 2017), and such interconnections among activists across the globe reinforce
their cross-cultural solidarity as a veritable well-spring of strength and resilience. Walker also
wrote an election-year poem, “Democratic Womanism,” dedicated to Maathai, who, as Walker
says, remembered the beautiful bountifulness of her land before colonization and resolved to bring
it back by planting trees (Walker 2012).

Arundhati Roy: An Indian Scholar-Activist

Another scholar-activist from postcolonial India is Arundhati Roy, a Booker prize winner, who
has voiced her dissent to protect the rights of the marginalized tribal classes on the verge of dis-
placement due to the construction of dams in the Narmada valley. Vandana Shiva, in her book
Staying Alive, considers the damming of rivers as nothing short of sacralization and maintains that
such reckless construction of dams resulting in the displacement of people from Narmada valley
or Tehri whose “resistance is against the destruction of entire civilizations and ways of life” (2010,
189). Shiva (2010, 185) called these dams as “temples of modern India, dedicated to capitalist
farmers and industrialists”.
In Chapter 11, Pervine Elrefaei documents ecofeminist literature from the Arabic countries,
and explores path-breaking novels like Al-Bab al-Maftouh (1960; The Open Door 2017), penned by
Latifa-al-Zayyat (1923–1996) which portrays similar struggles of people around the issues of water
and land sovereignty. The novel draws strong parallels between Egypt’s struggle for land and water
sovereignty and the female protagonist Layla’s struggle for body sovereignty, and in fighting bio-
logical determinism, hierarchical dualisms, and claustrophobic gendered social codes for women.
Layla, despite the masculinist control over her actions, turns into an activist as she finally joins the
national struggle against the ecological destruction caused by the yoke of imperialist rule. Such
strong fictional characters enthuse people to join liberation struggles, and their efforts foreground
the intersection of activism and literature.
Besides being a vocal critic of the constructions of dams, Roy also denounced the paramilitary
attacks on the tribal peoples of central India, whose land, rich in minerals, the government wanted
to grab. Many of her life-long concerns permeate the fabric of her fiction and non-fiction – the
Man Booker Prize Winner The God of Small Things (1997), The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017)
and My Seditious Heart (2019) (her collected non-fiction). Her work may not classify as purely
ecofeminist literature, nevertheless, these are allied with environmentalism and the interests of
the oppressed people.

Starhawk: Ecofeminism in Witchcraft and Permaculture

While we have discussed Shiva, Walker, Roy and Maathai, a North American contemporary
witch Starhawk belongs to another end of the spectrum as the one who creates a confluence of
witchcraft, magic, healing and permaculture8 in her writings as well as activism. She has authored
many books on Goddess religion, earth-based spirituality, and activism, including The Spiral
Dance (1999); her picture book for young children, The Last Wild Witch (2009) and The Earth Path
(2013), a sequel to the Spiral Dance which weaves together permaculture and spirituality.
Starhawk (1999, 19) believes that spirituality and politics both involve changing consciousness.
Her Wiccan practice embodies not only her love for earth-based pagan spiritualism especially
Goddess religion but also non-violent direct political engagement by protesting against “testing
of nuclear weapons, to counter military interference in Central America, and to preserve the

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environment” (Starhawk 1999, 18). Like Alice Walker, she was also drawn to the problems of Nic-
aragua and worked towards building alliances with people of colour and the native peoples who
have faced centuries of oppression (Starhawk 1999, 18). Her Goddess religion is centred around
three basic principles – immanence, interconnection and community and also advances the idea
that “growth and transformation come through intimate interactions and common struggles”
(Starhawk 1999, 22). Therefore, Starhawk’s spiritual inclination is not divested of politics and need
for urgent social and environmental change. Her spirituality is not of the separatist bandwagon as
her group ‘Reclaiming’ honours both God and Goddess, and works with male and female images
of divinity. Her ongoing Live Ritual Course for 2021 which focuses on three themes – vision,
healing and strategy – is an attempt to “hone the magical skills to divine, to discern, and to envi-
sion what is needed and what we desire, for ourselves and for the world” (Starhawk 2021).
Starhawk has written two speculative design novels including The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) and
City of Refuge (2016) in which “characters learn permaculture principles” (Hamraie 2020). Unlike
other ecofeminists taken for the study who spread awareness about farming practices mainly in the
rural areas, Starhawk spreads permaculture work and sustainable ecosystem in the urban settings
and her book The Earth Path (2004) and her design school (Earth Activist Training) are efforts
steered in the same direction. Starhawk (Gadoua 2016) praises the Black Lives Matter movement
for drawing attention to the interconnected issues of people and envisions a world of justice and
diversity, “where women have power and agency; where we come back into balance with the
natural world” (qtd. in Lilly 2016).

Rosemary Radford Ruether: Intersection of Religion, Ecology, and Feminism

While Starhawk works within the spiritual/cultural wing of ecofeminism, Rosemary Radford
Ruether, an influential American feminist scholar and theologian (born in 1936) belongs to the
liberal reformist camp. In truth, her feminist theology is grounded in her civil rights work in the
Mississippi Delta in the mid-1960s and in the Latin American tradition of liberation theology to
which she was introduced in the early 1970s (Scholp 2017, 1).
Ruether’s belief in forging “real connections between theory and practice” is exemplified well
in her scholarly and grassroots activism (2005, xi). In her book, Integrating Ecofeminism, Global-
ization and World Religions (2005), Ruether believes in the power of interfaith theology and the
greening of world religions as a solution to the global ecological crisis and oppression of women.
As a feminist theologian, Ruether does not confine herself to arm-chair intellectualism, rather
she works in the direction of real-time solutions, blending her erudition with hands-on practices
in communities of resistance and solidarity in order to combat the twin oppression of women and
nature. She recalls in her autobiography My Quests for Hope and Meaning:

I sought to connect ecology and feminism, both in recognition of the way the domination
of the earth is metaphorically interconnected with the domination of women in patriarchal
ideology, and also to reveal how women’s use and abuse in society interfaces with the abuse
of nature
(Ruether 2013, 27)

Though mainly known for work in the field of liberation theology and feminist theology, Ru-
ether’s activism aligns itself with the interests and concerns of other ecofeminists. In tune with
Vandana Shiva’s stance, Ruether is critical of corporate globalization and its deleterious effects,
and liaisons among globalization, Bretton woods institutions and poverty. Like Shiva and Walker,
Ruether raises concerns about the growing industrial agribusiness in the United States, which
relies hugely on hybrid seeds, pesticides, and is inserting poison into the ecological systems of

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soil, plants, water and air, and also the inherent problems in genetically engineered seeds and its
product “terminator seeds” (Ruether 2005, 19). For Ruether, today’s “globalization” is “simply
the latest stage of Western colonialist imperialism” (2005, 1).
Ruether’s collaboration with feminist colleagues from Latin America, Asia and Africa in compil-
ing an edited book Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism and Religion (1996)
brings out connections and intersections among ecology, feminism and religion. Such cross-cultural
connections whether in theory or practice strengthen the solidarity that First World and postcolo-
nial ecofeminists develop with one another, and with the human and non-human world at large.

Conclusion
After studying multiple points of contact and cross-pollinated interests among ecofeminists hail-
ing from multiple backgrounds, the chapter examined ways and systems to promote meaningful
diversity and not mere tokenism, whereby empowered women are making joint real-time efforts
by erasing their differences, and building alliances needed to ameliorate the aching world and
recreate it on a basis of justice. I argue that if all the ecofeminists form a consortium for addressing
social and environmental causes (through writings and direct action), it may lead to a major para-
digmatic and fundamental shift in the way of bringing an end to all forms of oppression. The se-
lected ecofeminists, despite their divergent routes and detours, still meet at a common platform – a
junction created to redress the global ecological crisis and oppression of the marginalized classes.
I would conclude my chapter by aligning my thought with that of Lydia Rose who in Chapter
30 proposes that activism is a major element of ecofeminism – that is, to be part of the process
to make life on our planet “less violent” and “more just” not just for women, but for all species.

Notes
1 For further details about Alice Walker’s endorsements, write-ups, and linkages with people and causes,
visit https://alicewalkersgarden.com/.
2 Warrior Marks, a documentary written and produced by Pratibha Parmar and Alice Walker; directed by
Pratibha Parmar in 1993.
  The review written by Stanlie James is published in The American Historical Review 102, no. 2 (April
1997): 595–596, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/102.2.595.
3 In her book In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), Alice Walker theorized the term “Womanism”
to refer to Black feminism. Womanism, both in theory and practice, stemmed from the exclusionary
practices of Western feminism which overlooked the concerns and issues of Black women, women from
other ethnic minorities and also the Third World women. For detailed understanding of the term, refer
to Patricia Hill Collins’ research paper titled “WHAT’S IN A NAME? Womanism, Black Feminism,
and Beyond” published in The Black Scholar.
4 The detailed report of Navdanya’s Seeds of Hope, Seeds of Resilience published in 2017 attests to the
claim I have made in this study. For further reading, please visit http://www.navdanya.org/site/attach-
ments/article/617/Seeds-of-Hope-Report-Download.pdf.
5 The Seeds of Vandana Shiva. 2021. “Food and culture are the currency of life,” says Vandana Shiva,
“And while we are overwhelmed by disease and death, a living food culture can show the light to
the path of life.” Facebook. July 14, 2021. https://www.facebook.com/vandanashivamovie/posts/
2021572824656703.
6 Seattle WTO protests of 1999 were a series of marches, direct actions, and protests carried out from No-
vember 28 through December 3, 1999, that disrupted the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial
Conference in Seattle, Washington and are often viewed as the inauguration of the antiglobalization move-
ment. For further reading, visit https://www.britannica.com/event/Seattle-WTO-protests-of-1999.
7 Visit https://alicewalkersgarden.com/2021/03/meghan-and-harry/ for the original poem posted by Al-
ice Walker on her website.
• For information regarding the ongoing protests by farmers in India, visit https://www.reuters.com/
world/india/how-indian-farmers-protest-turned-into-country-wide-movement-2021–09-09/

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 Sunaina Jain

• https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/20/india-farmers-a-year-of-farm-laws-agriculture
• https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/farmers-big-concern-and-what-govt-could-­
negotiate-7073291/
8 Permaculture is a system of ecological design that looks to nature as our model. It originated in the
1970s with Australian ecologists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who were looking to create a “per-
manent agriculture.” The focus of permaculture is to design and create social structures which “favor
beneficial patterns of human behavior” (Starhawk, “Social Permaculture—What Is It?” 2016). Available
at: https://www.ic.org/social-permaculture-what-is-it/

References
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2021. https://alicewalkersgarden.com/2021/03/meghan-and-harry/
Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa. 2018. “Mariama Sonko: Our Health Depends on our Food.”
Grassroots International, August 23. Accessed July 22, 2021. https://grassrootsonline.org/in-the-news/
mariama-sonko-health-depends-on-food/.
Crossley-Baxter, Lily. 2020. “Japan’s Ancient Way to Save the Planet.” March 10. Accessed August 20, 2021.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200308-japans-ancient-way-to-save-the-planet.
Farmer, Ashley. 2014. “Film Showcases Alice Walker’s Lifelong Fight against Injustice.” Stanford: The Clay-
man Institute for Gender Research. February 13. Accessed September 23, 2021. https://gender.stanford.edu/
news-publications/gender-news/film-showcases-alice-walker-s-lifelong-fight-against-injustice.
Gaard, Greta, and Patrick D. Murphy. 1998. “Introduction.” In Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpre-
tation, Pedagogy, edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, 1–13. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Gadoua, Renée K. 2016. “Starhawk’s Vision Quest for Climate Change.” February 17. Accessed July 18,
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Hamraie, Aimi. 2020. “Alterlivability: Speculative Design Fiction and the Urban Good Life in Starhawk’s
The Fifth Sacred Thing and City of Refuge.” Environmental Humanities 12, no.2 (November 2020). Accessed
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Lilly, Maya. 2016. “What Does Transformation Look Like: A Dialogue with Starhawk.” October 24. Accessed June
21, 2021. https://realitysandwich.com/what-does-transformation-look-like-a-dialogue-with-starhawk/.
Maathai, Wangari. 2007. The Unbowed. New York: Anchor Press.
———. 2008. “An Unbreakable Link Peace, Environment, and Democracy.” Harvard International Review
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Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. 2010. Ecofeminism. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.
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ing the World Premiere of and the Hummingbird Says ….” Accessed June 2, 2021. https://fore.yale.edu/
files/cafs_program.pdf.
Murphy, Patrick D. 2013. “The Ecofeminist Subsistence Perspective Revisited in an Age of Land Grabs and
its Representations in Contemporary Literature.” Feminismo/s 22: 205–224. December. Accessed July 2,
2021. https://www.academia.edu/60582778/The_ecofeminist_subsistence_perspective_revisited_in_
an_age_of_land_grabs_and_its_representations_in_contemporary_literature
Nankya, Rose, John W. Mulumba, Isabel Lopez, and Devra I. Jarvis. 2017. “Community Seed Banking for
Improving the Resilience of Farmers; The Case of Kiziba (Kabwohe) Seed Bank in Uganda.” Bioversity
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load/Community_Nankya.pdf.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1983. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston, MA: Beacon
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———. 1995. New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. New ed. Boston, MA: Beacon
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———. 1996. Women Healing Earth: Third-World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion. New York: Orbis
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Scholp, Phyllis Howser. 2017. “The Personal is the Theological: Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Practical
Theology as Social Critique.” PhD diss., University of Dayton, Ohio. December. Accessed
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88562213958&disposition=inline.
Shiva, Vandana. 2010. Staying Alive. New York: South End Press.
———. 2021. “Vandana Shiva on Why the Food We Eat Matters.” January 28. Accessed August 30, 2021.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210127-vandana-shiva-on-why-the-food-we-eat-matters.
Starhawk, Miriam. 1999. The Spiral Dance. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
———. 2021. “Magical Activism Series 2021.” Starhawk.org. Accessed September 25, 2021.
Walker, Alice. 1988. Living by the Word. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
———. 1997. Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism. New York: The Ballantine Publishing
Group.
———. 2010. Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/
Israel. New York: Seven Stories Press.
———. 2012. “Alice Walker Talks Race, Women and Power.” Interview with Moni Basu. CNN. October
12. Accessed September 9, 2021. http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/12/alice-walker-talks-race-
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Walker, A., and R. Byrd. 2010. The World has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. New York: The New
Press.

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 26
ANIMAL STUDIES AND
ECOFEMINIST LITERATURE
Lesley Kordecki

Introduction
Critical animal studies, a collection of diverse scholarly inquiries challenging variously flawed
assessments of our fellow animals and various claims of human exceptionalism, encompasses broad
categories of knowledge in scientific and cultural arenas. Its overlap with ecofeminism provides us
with a stimulating interpretive instrument for a ready body of texts that either hint at or overtly
process the dual oppression and/or mutual distinctiveness of women and animals in stories of
earlier ages and today.
Animals, after all, arguably constitute the segments of nature with which we humans, for
better or worse, identify most profoundly. The not-quite-human qualities of creatures instill us
with questions of human identity and superiority. Literature that highlights animals as clear agents
evokes a wealth of associations and ontological puzzlement, especially if the desired end of reading
is to understand ourselves, not others in our environment. The female human in a gender context
and the nonhuman animal in a human context may well bring a certain frisson to a storyline. The
mixture of feminism and animalism, two frameworks seemingly at variance, ignites a compan-
ionship of perspectives, sympathies, antagonisms, and insights. Acknowledging the similar forces,
but not necessarily the sameness, that defines both the animal and the human female can startle
the reader into whole new schemas of thought. The paradigm of female/male correlating with
animal/human often, but not always, leads to assertions about the oppression of the female and
the animal, and correspondingly, the powerfulness of the male and the human. Many ecofeminist
tales can present animals in this pattern.
Although the comparison of the female human to animals can be seen by many as a derogation
of women—consider the verbal crossovers of the English word “bitch”—a deeper assessment of
the uniqueness of animals can produce very different and at times positive connections between
female humans and animals. Collections of theory on women and animals are now available (Ad-
ams and Donovan 1995), as well as anthologies of literature involving this relationship (Hogan,
Metzger, and Peterson 1998). The opposition to ecofeminism, in general, will be addressed in
other entries of this Handbook. Among others, Greta Gaard (2011) discusses the history and the-
ory of the movement’s struggles and its overlap with animal studies through the last decades. The
relationship between the subjugation of women and the subjugation of animals, however, troubled
at times, remains a distinctive and potent creative inspiration.
This parallel is not surprising; we know more about nonhumans today. Recent technology,
especially advances in photographic and auditory devices, has revealed hitherto undiscovered

282 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-28

 Animal Studies & Ecofeminist Literature

aspects of nonhuman animals on our planet, facts that contribute greatly to the amendment of
some of our most speciesist assumptions. We now see and hear animals in wholly new ways.
Among other advancements, cameras installed on animals trace surprising features of nonhuman
lifestyles.
These developments also reveal connections between animals and women. Take, for example,
some of the signature animal studies of our time about mammals closest to human animals, that
is, primates, notably the research thereof by Louis Leakey’s “trimates” or “Leakey’s Angels.” The
term refers to the three women primatologists who worked on or are still working on under-
standing the great apes. Jane Goodall’s research on chimps, Dian Fossey’s on gorillas, and Birute
Galdikas’ on orangutans all recall ecofeminism’s association of women with animals. The at-times
radical success of these studies may well have something to do with the female scientist observ-
ing and interpreting subjects with whom women for whatever reasons have been aligned. Here,
we see a positive effect of that association, one that has perhaps influenced some of today’s major
zoological discoveries.
Women in science have also reassessed long-held beliefs that help perpetuate a patriarchal
foundation for knowledge, as some literature suggests. Donna Haraway (1989), for instance, has
challenged many conclusions of the narrative, often the fiction, not fact, of accepted anthropol-
ogy. Working the myriad cultural biases interspersed within primatology, she deconstructs how
apes validate human behavior:
The two major axes structuring the potent scientific stories of primatology…are defined
by the interacting dualisms, sex/gender and nature/culture. Sex and the west are axiomatic in
biology and anthropology. Under the guiding logic of these complex dualisms, western pri-
matology is simian orientalism.
(Haraway 1989, 10)

Here, she implies that the bias of the human interpreter skews the observations, making the ani-
mal the “other” as the term “orientalism” reveals. She names a chapter in Primate Visions “Wom-
en’s Place is in the Jungle” and writes that “Suspicion and irony are basic to feminist reinscriptions
of nature’s text” (Haraway 1989, 280). After all, we now know that bonobos and their matriarchal
communities deflate the gendered dominance theories of the past.
Further, animal studies have also propagated or been propagated by new debates in the field of
philosophy. Literary critics often cite the “becoming-animal” assertions of Gilles Deleuze and Fe-
lix Guattari (2011, 232–309) which have stimulated deliberation on animal/human essences (see
also Chan Kit-sze Amy’s Chapter 2). In addition, the question of the animal has been vigorously
interrogated after Jacques Derrida’s (2008) provocatively named lecture/seminar, The Animal That
Therefore I Am, a tantalizingly influential adaptation of poststructuralism. He followed up these
musings on the gaze of his cat with “And Say the Animal Responded,” a phenomenon we often
experience in the literature highlighting animals who communicate, thus spawning a newly ac-
knowledged kinship of species.
Ecofeminism’s philosophic tenets have often been traced in differing ways. We note that Val
Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), a careful defense of what we now call
ecofeminism, is suffused with references to animals, especially in the perceptions and mispercep-
tions of philosophers through the ages, principally when binaries are rigidly upheld.
Now forming a fertile field of criticism, our new appraisals of nonhumans can and do influence
sometimes fundamental characterizations in literature. From ancient myths of diverse cultures to
postmodern texts across the globe, the changed perception of animal life contributes to and alters
irrevocably our stories. But the animal’s presence or trace through language’s metaphor has been
with us from the beginning as we looked into the other’s eyes. This trend can cause a far-reaching

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limitation in our assessment of nonhumans for many reduce our critical sense of animality to the
perennial animal metaphors that literature employs to refer to humans. Thus, it is once again all
about us. Recently, we more readily perceive the strength of the animal other as an essence of its
own.
To some, ecofeminism is seen as primarily a political inquiry—a righting of two social wrongs,
derogation of both nature and the human female. But now, as we examine nature in its forms most
vibrantly similar to us, that is, animals, what is the political force of nonhumans? Animal rights
activism is not new to many cultures, and the story often reflects these cultural assessments. From
Peter Singer’s groundbreaking work (Singer 2009) to those with more feminist and ecofeminist
leanings (Adams and Gruen 2014; Donovan 1990), the arguments for animal rights, often con-
troversial, still underpin the literary analysis of selected texts. This distinct political thrust and its
accompanying gender and species controversies demonstrate how timely the intersection between
animal studies, ecofeminism, and even vegetarianism has become today (Adams 1994).

Stories with Animals: Ecofeminist Readings

Turning to literature itself, we have learned that treating animals as real and not necessarily met-
aphorical allusions to humans is a major premise of critical animal studies, a differentiation that
gets us closer to the profundity of our encounters with nonhumans. The use of animals as symbols
for people can lead to a deepening of the issues at hand, but inevitably propels a diminution of
the creature itself, an instrumentalizing, as Plumwood (1993, 141–164) would call it. The potency
of the animal in the story as in life relies on seeing a nonhuman part of nature as another face,
forcing that slippery ontological recognition that can upset many deep-seated contentions about
ourselves. A similar phenomenon has been argued by ecofeminists whose critiques compel the
male to perceive the female as the lessened other in the picture.
I would like to offer a few examples drawn from the tradition of mostly English texts to illus-
trate how we might attempt possible ecofeminist readings of stories with animals. These interpre-
tations of fictional moments are suggestions, not full arguments about the texts at hand, and my
selection of works is by no means complete. Nor do the following summaries probe the devices of
the texts used to enhance the animality of characterization. Here, I confine myself to pinpoint-
ing overt plotlines for the purpose of revealing the usefulness of combining animal studies with
ecofeminism.
As early as the Roman era, Ovid’s first-century Latin Metamorphoses (2004) displays a star-
tlingly thin divide between human and animal in this highly influential account of Greek and
Roman mythology. Pivotal writers like William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer often turned
to Ovid for ancient storylines, and these legends inspire and permeate later accounts in many
languages. Known for its sundry tales from myth, the poem recalls countless men and women,
as well as gods and goddesses, shifting into various animals. Famous are the tales of deities, espe-
cially Jove, morphing into animals to seduce/raping women and sometimes men, a plotline that
surely elicits troubling questions, but we also find mortal women themselves converted into birds,
mammals, and even insects. Often, these characters end their stories in this new form, perhaps
exhibiting the reincarnation theme that Ovid asserts at the completion of his long poem (Ovid
2004, 15.150–475).
Of Ovid’s narratives of women transformed into animals, we see that, for example, Alcyone
becomes a bird (Ovid 2004, 11.731–733), Ocyrhoe a mare (Ovid 2004, 2.658–675), and Calisto a
bear (Ovid 2004, 2.477–484). These stories are offered fluidly in this poem with one story flowing
into another much like the blurring of species, but notable tales often slow the pacing down and
more deeply involve the reader’s emotion in the action. One such tale, the famous story of Philo-
mela and Procne (Ovid 2004, 6.441–669), painfully reveals the oppression of women as Philomela

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is ruthlessly raped and maimed by Tereus, her sister Procne’s husband. This story of viciousness,
paralleling a wronged woman turned bird has inspired writers through the ages.
Ovid’s storyline, filled with pathos, violence, hideous revenge, and sisterly loyalty, not to men-
tion cannibalism (the rapist Tereus is served up his son as his wife’s revenge on his violation of her
sister), encompasses some of the major stakes involved in women’s lot. The raped woman, tem-
porarily silenced, cleverly communicates nonverbally in a tapestry and effects the bloody justice
that terminates with an enraged Tereus pursuing his wife and her sister. All three are transformed
into birds, Philomela, as most tradition has it, to a nightingale, Procne to a sparrow, and Tereus
to a plover. The bird form saves the women as the sisters escape brutal misogyny by plunging into
nonhuman nature. And the nightingale, who will be so beloved in verse for centuries after, lives
to personify, for example, in John Keats’ famous Ode to a Nightingale (1967, 290–293) both an en-
viable “happy lot” of freedom but also the “plaintive anthem” of all poetry, not the vengeance or
victimhood of the myth. Other allusions are clearly less positive, but the merging of woman and
bird in a sense rights a patriarchal wrong, inviting this association. Ecofeminism helps us see the
part that the animal, and thereby nature, plays in this message.
One of Ovid’s best stories of woman’s anguish is that of Io (Ovid 2004, 1.585–688, 725–743), a
rape victim of Jove who is turned by him into a cow to hide her from a jealous Juno. The tale of Io
becomes strangely centered on the woman and her life post-rape. Like Philomela and indeed like
most animals, Io cannot speak, but eventually communicates her identity to her father. For our
purposes, the narration takes a revelatory turn as she is shifted back into a human. The destructive
but now trivialized and shallow domestic spat of Juno and Jove dissolves, and Io, the beautiful and
pitiful heifer, reassumes her human shape. As an animal combined with a woman, she represents
the shattered life of the victim and the forces she must contend with, as such much like nature,
specifically its nonhuman creatures, who must suffer at the hands of insensitive humanity.
Also notable is Ovid’s version of the Arachne story (Ovid 2004, 6.5–145) that brings in issues
of woman’s creative storytelling, as we noted in Philomela’s tapestry, while it emphasizes the
connection between women and nonhumans. Here, a goddess, Pallas Athene, is the agent of
transformation. In a contest of weaving, Arachne portrays numerous stories of change, mostly un-
derscoring the deceitful “seduction” of women by Jove, Neptune, Apollo, and Saturn when they
take the form of animals (bull, eagle, swan, snake, ram, horse, bird, dolphin, hawk, and lion). Ro-
man mythology’s sheer number of such incidents exposes this insistent and disturbing trope. The
animal transformations are used by the male gods to violate women. But here, the female Athene,
jealous of Arachne’s weaving prowess, punishes the artist’s successful revelation of divine injustice
by almost killing her and then by transfiguring her into a spider. An ecofeminist reading of all
this conversion may concentrate on the truth exposed in woman’s artistry about the opportunistic
use of animality by masculine privilege. As such, the eventual combination of woman and spider
emerges as a symbol of what we may truly call narrative weaving.
Perhaps most significant for subsequent literature is Ovid’s story of the myth of Medusa
(Ovid 2004, 4.616–804). Raped by Neptune in Minerva’s temple, she is punished for her inno-
cent victimhood by the goddess who replaces her beautiful hair with snakes. Now a composite
creature of great power, one who turns men who gaze on her into stone, Medusa becomes a
legend adopted by feminists as well as others for centuries. The serpentine part of her life after
transformation brings her infamy. Although Ovid seems to be more interested in the heroism of
Perseus in defeating Medusa rather than relating her suffering, her decapitation does not dim her
efficacy. The serpent-haired head continues in further myths as a weapon. Further, she begets
magical nonhumans, not only the three-headed dog of the Underworld, Cerberus (10.20–22),
but also the flying horse, Pegasus, whose hoof initiated the spring of the Muses themselves
(5.256–259). Here, women and animals are genetically intertwined and associated with the
Muse who creates a story.

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Medusa’s multifaceted story reveals formidable ecofeminist strains. As a hybrid creature of the
serpent (with all its connotations) and woman, Medusa carries for some the most perilous threat of
feminism. Notwithstanding the Freudian interpretation of the phallic serpents on her head, Me-
dusa can serve as an emblem of resistance to masculinist gender politics, as Helene Cixous in 1975
argues in her classic essay, The Laugh of the Medusa: “You only have to look at the Medusa straight
on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (Garber and Vickers 2003,
133). This Ovidian story of the thwarted woman artist comes down to us in multiple intonations
and interpretations, but the combined woman and animal becomes the emblem to ward off the
repressive patriarchal interpretation of the world. Ecofeminists can profitably explore this and
other musings on the Medusa myth found in countless subsequent poems and stories.
We can use these scenes from Ovid’s text to show that animal studies may help tease out
ecofeminist nuances. It seems that even ancient myth exhibits the interplay between the female
and the nonhuman, a parallel state that resists or reveals the hegemonies of western culture.
Another early instance of how animal characterization in literature interacts with ecofeminist
concerns can be seen many centuries later in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. An avid fan of Ovid
in many of his works, Chaucer (1987) provides another way for us to configure ecofeminism
involving animal characters. Perhaps most significant for our purposes is his Parliament of Fowls
(Chaucer 1987, 383–394), a fourteenth-century Middle English allegory of birds that initially
appears to be a medieval look at human legislation, but ultimately demonstrates how avian nature
can unexpectedly usurp conventional assumptions. The poem is a dream vision about birds mat-
ing in the springtime overseen by a personification of Nature, a “woman” judge who is to decide
which male eagle will be granted the right to mate with a preeminent female eagle, much like a
princess vied for by aristocratic suitors. But Chaucer makes the debate far more proletarian with
the inclusion of birds of “lesser” degree than the eagles, such as the lowly ducks and geese of the
backyard.
Curiously, but realistically in a human scenario, only 2 of the 12 arguing birds are female, the
gabby goose and the romantic turtledove, and both are told to hold their tongues as the male birds,
arranged hierarchically with eagles on top and worm-eating fowl on the bottom, try to decide
the fate of the female eagle in question. The dialog is a perfect Chaucerian parody of human male
political dealings, complete with lower-class jargon, but the outcome is strangely indecisive. The
judge, Nature, ends the contest by allowing the female to choose her own mate, as actual female
eagles, not male, do in the wild, and the female eagle is permitted in this narrative flight of fancy
to put off her selection for a year. All the other birds can then proceed to find their mates with
loud singing, imitating actual birds in the spring.
Allegories often personify abstractions like Nature, and the individuals therein, here talking
birds, are seen to be easily identified humans. In this way, the genre appears to reinforce the simple
use of animal metaphor, frustrating the reader who may see animals as significant in their own
right. But this odd allegory is by the experimental Chaucer, who later voices concern about writ-
ing women justly, and who was criticized, as he says, about his representation of women, compel-
ling him to compose a special Legend of Good Women (Chaucer 1987, 587–630) as compensation
for his stories. Here, with the birds, Chaucer presents a thinly veiled power struggle among men
that is upended by assertive females and resolved with a nonhuman female authorized by Nature
to make up her own mind. Radical ecofeminism may be afoot in this unlikely place.
In these ways, animals can help illuminate the intricacies of females in the patriarchy. Frequently
what is not readily visible in human society and human females may become more strikingly re-
vealed in another “other” like the animal. This specific narrative endows birds with the individual
characteristics of their species, at least those easily apparent to a medieval reader. The gabby goose
is just that, highlighted by a goose’s distinctive voice. Also glossed as watchful, the goose turns out
to be the one who advocates that no problem exists, that the female eagle should simply choose

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whichever suitor she loves most, articulating a clearly feminist stance (Kordecki 2011). Chaucer
includes these traditional sentiments about the differing species, with the goose as perceptive and
the loving turtledove as faithful, and they certainly are that in their speeches. Avian characteristics
are brought forth but worked in a cleverly subversive way. These animals are not simply icons or
symbols; they are part of the observable world. And the discernable world gets messy, resulting in
an ending that does not accomplish its goal of distributing the most desirable woman to the right
male. Aligning the marginalization of animals and women in a text can then provide a distinctive
rhetorical prominence to many social issues, as this trafficking of birds shows.
Those who write about the environment often include our closest neighbors, animals, in their
musings on the human position through the ages. For example, Shakespeare works his magic in
this arena, as others have argued (Boehrer 2002). In later eras, like the Romantic (see Kaitlin
Mondello’s Chapter 39) with its concentration on a verse about nature, we find particular atten-
tion to animals. In Victorian years, the divide between humans and animals still pervaded (see Ni-
cole C. Dittmer’s Chapter 40). And the postmodern era had its representative ectopian novels (see
Karen Ya-Chu Yang’s Chapter 35) where we can find evidence of women and animals merging.
From more recent texts, a brilliant instance of this crossover between the politics of the en-
vironment, animals, and gender is found in Barbara Kingsolver’s story of a mother and her four
daughters in the 1950s Congo. The Poisonwood Bible (1998) overtly excoriates colonial arrogance
from these five women’s various perspectives. The novel mentions a number of animals, includ-
ing a pet bird whose sad demise is revealed with bloody plumes strewn about. Her daughter who
discovers these remains recalls Emily Dickinson’s startling and prophetic line, “Hope is the thing
with feathers” (Kingsolver 1998, 185), and implies with the bird’s feathers the death of this hope
in its present African context. But another moment is even more revelatory. This account of a
disastrous trip of one family to the alien jungle has a preface by the mother, who remembers a
stunningly iconic scene (Kingsolver 1998, 5–8) in the bush when she is face-to-face with the
semimythical okapi, a creature seemingly designed to debunk our notion of animal species, since
it possesses parts of a giraffe, a zebra, and a deer. The woman and the animal-that-represents-­
many-animals presage the story to follow: the environment and the female similarly aligned and
overcome in a deadly struggle with western masculinist domination.
Another example comes from the genre of science fiction (see also Deirdre C. Byrne’s Chapter
45). The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (1996) is a novel about Jesuit missionaries in the near fu-
ture who travel to another planet seeking to bring into the fold alien children of God. Although
the title refers to a fallen priest, the book interrogates the question of the animal with a far more
profound method. The planet’s two cognizant species are speaking mammals whom the travelers
befriend over a period of years. The first species embodies many of the qualities of the human
female, as well as those of passive herd animals. The second, the dominant species that form the
urban civilization on the planet, possesses arrogant, ruthless, and more generally masculine qual-
ities. This stark summary may misrepresent how the novel successfully portrays the gendering of
the two species with great subtlety and tenderness (Kordecki 2021). The humans fail to recognize
until too late that the latter species is a carnivorous one who regularly feeds on the kindly herbiv-
orous first group. The story poignantly stresses the bonding of the humans with loving “people”
who possess distinctly animal characteristics. Here, gender and species intertwine in a power
struggle that depends on the very resources of the land. Human ignorance and unintentional
interference bring the imbalance that the planet’s cultural strictures of cannibalism have kept in
place. The story of “female” resistance is coupled with nonhuman qualities that unsettle both the
humans in the story and those of us who read it.
Cloud Cuckoo Land, a 2021 novel by Anthony Doerr, devastatingly exposes readers to the har-
rowing outcome of our natural world after more than a millennium of human exploitation. The
ambitious story wraps around characters separated by centuries, but united by a vision expressed in

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an ironically “lost” book from antiquity, lost but preserved heroically by various characters. This
book is a Greek prose novel; its plot is heavily dependent on a known story much retold in the
Middle Ages. It tells of a man who travels the world and spends a year as a donkey, a year as a sea
bass and a year as a crow. Among its many themes, Doerr’s novel rigorously and skillfully returns
to the overwhelmingly precious and fading fauna and flora of Earth. The animals in the novel,
many more than the titular cuckoo, and even the multispecies perspective of the lost book’s nar-
rator, contribute substantially and poetically to the pathos of the story. In a Russian doll narrative
structure, readers witness the relentless foolhardiness of the dual oppressions of the natural world
and human women, a comprehensive and compelling ecofeminist undercurrent.
With the publication of far more ecological readings, we can trace literary ecofeminism in many
domains that feature the nonhuman animal. For example, stories of native Americans regularly
include the animal: note the presence of the coyote and other animal spirits (see also Chan Kit-sze
Amy’s Chapter 2 on the coyote and Benay Blend’s Chapter 19 about the literature of many tribal
nations). Welsh literature as well as other medieval cultures dabble in the political sway of centuries
of heraldic animals, like the omnipresent dragon and various monsters, used to assert nonhuman
power for aspiring families and governments (see also Michelle Deininger’s Chapter 24).
A revealing first step of the inquiry is the emerging definitions of the posthuman, as we see in
Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu’s Chapter 34. Here, we follow the recent theoretic development in the
radical restructuring of humans and nonhumans. Species itself is under dispute, and literature will
in the future as it has in the past provocatively reflect this.
Even though some texts may not challenge our predominant taxonomies, stories of diverse
cultures include provocative animal references as symbols and perspectives that combine ecofem-
inism with animal studies. We note the pertinent literary use of animals in Slovene texts dis-
cussed by Katja Plemenitaš (Chapter 13). In this handbook alone, cultural reviews of ecofeminism
demonstrate this inclusion of animal references, such as Melanie Duckworth’s account of Aus-
tralian literature (Chapter 6), Abhik Gupta’s on Bengali texts (Chapter 9), Izabel F. O. Brandão’s
on Brazilian (Chapter 18), Chan Kit-sze Amy’s on Chinese (Chapter 2), Sangita Patil’s on Hindi
(Chapter 8), Nicolás Campisi’s on South American (Chapter 17), Irene Sanz Alonso’s on Spanish
(Chapter 16), Peter I-min Huang’s on Taiwanese (Chapter 3), and Hatice Ő vgü Tüzün’s on Turk-
ish (Chapter 12). It seems that the literary heritage of many cultures involves ecofeminist tales
with suggestive animals.
Also valuable is the literary collection found in disability studies that combines the female with
the nonhuman, at least metaphorically, as we see in Nicole A. Jacobs’ contribution here (Chapter
28). To be represented as “less than human,” that is, animal, for better, and usually for worse, is
repeatedly at stake in texts that highlight the disabled.
Especially pertinent for animal characters in tales with an ecofeminist subtext is children’s fic-
tion, with its frequent talking animals (see Anja Hőing’s Chapter 41). In this often-didactic genre,
the opportunistic use of binaries like human/animal regularly replicates age-old ideologies of
human exceptionalism that combine with gender politics. Overlapping is the category of fantasy
literature, for both adults and children. Rhian Waller reviews texts that link ecofeminism with
animal characters, revealing the subtle meaning of shapeshifting, for example (Chapter 46).
Not surprisingly, the study of climate involving the land- and seascape will almost inevitably
include animal inhabitants. Iris Ralph outlines examples in literature that feature the fate of an-
imals as the world’s natural elements tragically weaken (see Chapter 44). And the prodigality of
animals in the wider category of poetry shows that ecofeminist verse habitually employs nonhu-
mans to carry its message (see Andrew David King’s Chapter 49). After all, Emily Dickinson’s po-
etry without bird imagery is almost unimaginable. Observe how the nonhuman asserts its special
potency in the line, “Hope is the thing with feathers – / That perches in the soul –” (Dickinson
1890, 254, ll. 1–2). This extraordinary woman poet reminds us that the transcendently subtle

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nuances of human hope become the flying fellow animal we see, often with yearning, soaring
above us. Nonhumans lend us their exquisite essence, enabling us to articulate the poetry of our
existence.

Conclusion
This brief introduction to critical animal studies and ecofeminism surveys a few texts in which the
plotlines suggest the intermingling of topics. Beyond plot, however, further work on the literary
styles of these affecting stories can also show how the animal other can poignantly and disturb-
ingly shake us from speciesist assessments of our place in the world. Hence, the ethical strength of
ecofeminist readings has one more formidable dimension, that of the nonhuman, to help convey
its crucial and emerging truth.

References
Adams, Carol J. [1994] 1995. Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. New York:
Continuum.
Adams, Carol J., and Josephine Donovan, editors. 1995. Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Adams, Carol J., and Lorie Gruen, editors. [2014] 2022. Ecofeminism, Second Edition: Feminist Intersections with
Other Animals and the Earth. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Boehrer, Bruce. 2002. Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England.
New York: Palgrave.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1987. The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed. Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. [1987] 2011. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans-
lated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. Translated by Da-
vid Wills. New York: Fordham University Press.
Dickinson, Emily. [1890] 1961. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Bos-
ton, MA: Little, Brown and Company.
Doerr, Anthony. 2021. Cloud Cuckoo Land. New York: Scribner.
Donovan, Josephine. 1990. “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 15, no. 2: 350–375.
Gaard, Greta. 2011. “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material
Feminist Environmentalism.” Feminist Formations 23, no. 2 (Summer): 26–53.
Garber, Marjorie, and Nancy J. Vickers, editors. 2003. The Medusa Reader. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York:
Routledge.
Hogan, Linda, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson, editors. 1998. Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women
and Animals. New York: Ballantine.
Keats, John. [1951] 1967. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of Keats. Edited by Harold Edgar Briggs. New
York: Modern Library.
Kingsolver, Barbara. 1998. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins.
Kordecki, Lesley. 2011. Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2021. “The Runa and Female Otherness in Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow.” In Ecofeminist Science
Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch. 24–34.
New York: Routledge.
Ovid. 2004. Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation. Translated by David Raeburn. London: Penguin.
Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge.
Russell, Mary Doria. [1996] 2016. The Sparrow. New York: Ballantine.
Singer, Peter. [1975] 2009. Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement. New York: Harper.

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 27
CULTURAL STUDIES AND
ECOFEMINIST LITERATURE
Nicole Anae

Introduction
What is cultural studies? What is ecofeminism? Is ecofeminist literature principally the applica-
tion of concepts of oppression—of women and the environment—to critical studies of literature
and culture? Is the concept of ecofeminist literature a literary and cultural force focusing on the
tangible and imaginary interconnectedness between nature and culture illustrating environmental
existence in geographical, ecological and textual forms? In this chapter, I consider these questions
in presenting an overview of the central themes that have informed, and continue to inform, crit-
ical perspectives of ecofeminist literature from various cultural, disciplinary and methodological
viewpoints.

What Is Cultural Studies?

Gilbert B. Rodman argues that while cultural studies is not a research method, one of its central
characteristics is “its relentless self-reflexivity about the nature of its own practice … [and] Done
properly, cultural studies tries not to take anything for granted, including its own parameters”
(2017, 1). Despite not being characterized as a research method in itself, Ziauddin Sardar, in In-
troducing Cultural Studies (2010, 9) identifies five characteristics of cultural studies in arguing that
certain practices have emerged in the evolution of cultural studies historically. These practices are:

1 Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their
relation to power. Its constant goal is to expose power relationships and examine how these
relationships influence and shape cultural practices.
2 Cultural studies is not simply the study of culture as though it was a discrete entity divorced
from its social or political context. Its objective is to understand the culture in all its complex
forms and to analyse the social and political context within which it manifests itself.
3 Culture in cultural studies always performs two functions: it is both the object of study and
the location of political criticism and action. Cultural studies aims to be both an intellectual
and a pragmatic enterprise.
4 Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the
split between tacit (i.e., intuitive knowledge based on local cultures) and objective (so-called
universal) forms of knowledge. It assumes a common identity and common interest between
the knower and the known, between the observer and what is being observed.

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 Cultural Studies and Ecofeminist Literature

5 Cultural studies is committed to a moral evaluation of modern society and a radical line of
political action. The tradition of cultural studies is not one of value-free scholarship but one
committed to social reconstruction by critical political involvement. Thus cultural studies
aims to understand and change the structures of dominance everywhere, but in industrial
capitalist societies in particular.

Sardar’s typology clearly identifies a set of historically located practices, as firmly tied to the
movement of postmodernism—following on from the tendencies of the modernist era—as it is
to movements in literary criticism. As the interests in literary theory began developing a variety
of theoretical and philosophical lenses from which to understand and theorize about culture—­
Poststructuralism, New Historicism, and Postcolonialism, among others—“feminist work in cul-
tural studies sought to understand the ‘structure, culture, biography’ dynamic in relation to the
unseen, domestic worlds of women” (Gray 2003, 43).

What Is Ecofeminism?
Ecofeminism has emerged from this feminist cultural interest in apprehending the “‘structure,
culture, biography’ dynamic in relation to the unseen, domestic worlds of women” (Gray 2003,
43) as an important paradigm. First introduced by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne in her
book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974), “ecofeminism” is an evolving interdisciplinary paradigm
within literary and cultural studies originating from varying critical methodologies. Some argue
ecofeminism arose from the linkage of ecological concerns with questions and perspectives of
gender studies (Zapf 2006, 52). Others suggest ecofeminism evolved from the cultural, liberal,
socialist and poststructural traditions in Western feminist frameworks that modulated ecofeminist
principles (Salleh 2014).
In terms of a distinctive discourse in literary form, ecofeminism is conspicuous as “an amalgam
of feminism and environmentalism constructed in different times and places in different ways”
(Buckingham 2004, 146). Ecofeminism is thematically characteristic: “a critique of patriarchal
science, a concern with the degradation of ‘nature’/the environment and the making of links
between these two and the oppression of women” (Molyneux and Steinberg 1995). These themes
unite ecofeminists in the conviction that there exist crucial linkages between the oppression, ex-
ploitation and subjugation of both women and the natural environment.

What Is Ecofeminist Literature?

Inherent within the perspectives and convictions of ecofeminism—and by extension, ecofem-
inist literature—is an analytic undercurrent interrogating the cultural movements exercising
an influence on, and giving rise to, alternative perspectives of the world, that is, approaches to
viewing methods or epistemologies which emphasize the importance of “critique,” or, as John-
son argues:

Critique in the fullest sense … procedures by which other traditions are approached both
for what they may yield and for what they inhibit. Critique involves stealing away the more
useful elements and rejecting the rest. From this point of view cultural studies is a process, a
kind of alchemy for producing useful knowledge; codify it and you might halt its reactions.
(1986/87, 38)

Intersections between ecofeminist literature and the importance of “critique,” in the Johnso-
nian sense, fundamentally exist, not just because in the history of cultural studies, the earliest

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encounters were with literary criticism ( Johnson 1986/1987, 38), but because ecofeminist liter-
ature presents rich possibilities “to effect social, political, and environmental changes that reach
beyond the boundaries of geography, gender, or genre” (Flanagan 2009, 45).
Before proceeding with investigating the interests of this chapter, it is important to define
what is meant by the term “literature” in order to contextualize an examination of texts, cultural
studies, and ecofeminist literature.

What Is Literature?
While notoriously difficult to define, the word “literature” comes from the Latin litterāt ūra, mean-
ing writing or incorporated knowledge (Thomsen et al. 2017, 6). While oft cited, Robert Frost’s
poetic description of literature as “performance in words” (Barnet et al. 1963) effectively charac-
terizes that the problem of attempting to define literature invariably raises more questions than it
does answers. A generally accepted view, however, is the idea that defining what literature is, and
is not, is irrevocably tied to reading, or, as Castle argues:

For in the end, the nature of literature and the literary has to do with how we read, and how
we read is fundamentally tied to the social, cultural, and political institutions of a given so-
ciety at a given time. That some ways of reading have remained constant is less a function of
historical continuity than of institutional memory.
(2007, 9)

In my approach to literature, I will present a discussion of cultural studies and ecofeminist litera-
ture in which the term “literature” accords with the basic definition argued by Laurence Perrine
as “the principal forms of fiction, poetry, and drama” (Perrine 1993, v). But in terms of genre
identification, I approach “literature” from Saidu Bangura’s expansion of Perrine’s basic definition
to include further detail. Bangura draws on Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (1993)
to delineate Perrine’s phrase, “the principal forms of fiction,” as “literature in the form of prose,
especially short stories and novels, that describes imaginary events and people”; Perrine’s concept
of poetry as “literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and
ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm),” and Perrine’s term drama as “a play for theater,
radio, or television” (Bangura 2021, 43). But of course, there are many other genres and subge-
nres of “literature” that reasonably fall under “the principal forms of fiction, poetry, and drama”
(Perrine 1993, v).
However, if we consider the breadth of genre and subgenres included in the present work
itself (i.e., The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature), it very quickly becomes appar-
ent that there exist richly various possibilities within and beyond conventional understandings
of “the principal forms of fiction, poetry, and drama” (Perrine 1993, v). Among these are the
nonfictional literary forms. Take for example, K. M. Ferebee’s Chapter 48, Autobiography and
Ecofeminism, which in fact moves beyond autobiographical genre forms generally, and envi-
ronmental autobiography and memoir in particular, towards examining how alternative modes
might dismantle the dualities underlying constructions of the self and explore the possibilities
for subjectivity posed by a new subgenre of life writing termed “material memoir.” Indeed, the
intersection of the material memoir as a literary form and the theory of cultural materialism
clearly connects genre forms assumed under the term “ecofeminist literature” with cultural stud-
ies (a point I argue further below in the subsection entitled “cultural materialism and ecofeminist
literature”).

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Cultural Studies and Ecofeminist Literature

Ecofeminist literary theory is not strictly analogous to ecocritical literary theory, but rather shares,
specifies and extends on several of its central concerns. In the case of the latter, Murphy defines
ecocriticism as

the study of literary works with special attention to the representation of relationships among
human beings and the rest of the ‘more-than-human’ world [which] has always been con-
cerned with the agency of human beings and the need for rethinking social behaviors and
actions.
(2010, 6)

Ecocriticism is invariably rooted in cultural studies in that it is, as Gersdorf and Mayer argue,

a methodology that re-examines the history of ideologically, aesthetically, and ethically mo-
tivated conceptualisations of nature, of the function of its constructions and metaphorisations
in literary and other cultural practices, and of the potential effect these discursive, imagina-
tive constructions have on our bodies as well as our natural and cultural environments.
(2006, 10)

If we adapt the five characteristics of cultural studies Ziauddin Sardar identifies in Introducing
Cultural Studies (2010, 9) towards approaches to examining literature from an ecofeminist lens,
a useful characterization of these practices informed by cultural studies principles might be sug-
gested as follows:

1 Ecofeminist literature explores and exposes “its subject matter in terms of cultural practices
and their relation to power” in order to “expose power relationships and examine how these
relationships influence and shape” environmental and cultural practices.
2 Ecofeminist literature seeks not simply to study culture “as though it was a discrete entity
divorced from its social or political context” but rather “understand the culture in all its
complex forms and to analyse the social and political context” structuring and influencing
relations between women and environment.
3 Ecofeminist literature, like “[c]ulture in cultural studies always performs two functions: it is
both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action.” Ecofeminist liter-
ature draws together “both an intellectual and a pragmatic enterprise.”
4 Ecofeminist literature attempts to represent, contest and interrogate “the division of knowl-
edge, to overcome the split between tacit (i.e., intuitive knowledge about women’s experi-
ence/conditions and the natural environment based on local cultures) and objective (so-called
universal) forms of knowledge.” Some ecofeminist literature assumes “a common identity
and common interest between the knower and the known, between the observer and what is
being observed.”
5 Ecofeminist literature often presents a “radical line of political action,” and thus aims to rec-
ognize and transform extant and autochthonal structures of authority, both ubiquitously and
across industrial capitalist societies specifically.

Thus, ecofeminist literature is both a way of reading, akin to a literary theory of interpretation
of select literary works in the interests of an ecofeminist critical aim, as much as a critical creative

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practice the nature and functions of which appear contextualized against socio-historical back-
drops and conditions. On the one hand, ecofeminist literary theory relies on nonfiction for its
literary examples, whereas ecofeminist literature can reveal itself in fictional, poetic, dramatic and
creative nonfictional modes.
Having now situated ecofeminist literature within (and beyond) cultural studies, my aim in
this chapter is to examine some of the key ecofeminist themes celebrated in ecofeminist literary
work utilizing the methodologies characterizing a number of theories aligned with cultural stud-
ies, specifically Cultural Materialism, and its intersectional relationships with material feminism,
cultural feminism, cultural ecofeminism and postcolonial ecofeminism.

Cultural Materialism and Ecofeminist Literature

From the perspective of ecofeminism, much literature falling under the category of ecofeminist is
materialist in its orientation, that is “in the sense that changes in relations of production and social
and biological reproduction are seen as the basis for social change” (Carlassare 2000, 90).
As noted earlier, the concept of various forms of “materialism” in ecofeminist literatures estab-
lishes an ill-defined but nonetheless recognizable intersection between the materiality of texts and
the materiality of culture. First developed by Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, rather than
regarding it as what Dollimore describes as “an abstract unalterable theory,” (Dollimore 2019,
706), cultural materialism (hereafter CM):

… was an evolving critical perspective at once political, historical and philosophical. We

were both writing about Shakespeare, but the last thing we wanted to be were professional
Shakespeareans, most of whose writing seemed intellectually and creatively embarrassing and
often reactionary. CM was, for us, a way of escaping the Shakespeare industry, of connecting
Shakespeare more interestingly with the early modern period, and both with things outside
of them … It wasn’t just the limiting confines of the Shakespeare establishment we wanted to
escape. The narrow experiential reference of the academy itself was also part of the problem
… We wanted to connect with discourses and cultures outside of the academy.
(Dollimore 2019, 706–707)

Central to the concept of cultural materialism—and New Historicism for that matter; “a mode of
critical interpretation which privileges power relations as the most important context for texts of
all kinds” (Brannigan 1998, 6)—is, as Christopher Marlow argues, the

conviction that a text cannot be properly understood if it is thought to be divorced from its
contexts of production, and no matter how much they strive for objectivity, neither can the
critic claim to be divorced from the culture within which they receive it.
(2019, 42)

In terms of ecofeminist analysis, Bickford argues not only that those investigations tend to “gravitate
to two main areas: the cultural-symbolic, and the materialist/socio-economic,” but that “[w]hile
cultural ecofeminists problematically focus on individual consciousness and personal spiritual
­identity, scholars like Carolyn Merchant have sought radical structural change, insisting upon mate-
rialism and collective action as the most effective force for social change” (Bickford 2021, 80).
Interestingly, Ba şak Ağ ın’s Chapter 32, Material Ecocriticism and Ecofeminist Literature, offers not
only an investigation of the evolving nature of “materialisms”—material agencies (Cohen 2015,
36), material ecofeminism, material ecocriticism—but exposes a startling interpretation under-
scoring just how various and multifaceted these materialisms have become: from new materialism

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and new materialist philosophy (Geerts and Carstens 2019), to Deleuzoguattarian new material-
ists (Braidotti 2013; Grosz 2017), as well as new feminist materialisms (Benavente et al. 2020),
and variations on a materialism based on the theoretical writings of Serpil Opperman, Donna
Harraway and Karen Barad: “material feminist ecocritics,” “Harawayan material-semiotic nodes”
and “Baradian material-discursive practices” respectively. Indeed, Sunaina Jain’s Chapter 25, Ac-
tivism and Ecofeminist Literature, also makes references to material ecofeminism, a feminist variant
of material ecocriticism.
Macgregor identifies not only connections between women and environmental health as a
theme in ecofeminist literature, but a theme which itself is related to material rhetoric:

Much is made in ecofeminist literature of the impacts of toxic pollution on women’s repro-
ductivity, such as dioxin in breast milk, miscarriages, birth defects, and infertility. There is
also concern over increases in environmentally related illnesses that require women to spend
more time caring for their children: asthma, food allergies, [and] chemical sensitivities.
(2006, 47)

Certainly, the emergence of new subgenres with a materialist pitch has made possible writing
forms bringing together personal encounters of female experience and the issue of environmental
health in nonfictional literary forms. K. M. Ferebee’s Chapter 48, Autobiography and Ecofeminism,
for instance, brings the new subgenre of life writing termed “material memoir” in specific con-
tact with women’s health, arguing that not only does this subgenre concern itself with the effects
of environmental illness on women but also with investigating and attributing ill-health envi-
ronmental suffering to causal links, commonly to environmental toxification. Further, Nicolás
Campisi’s analysis of Samanta Schweblin’s dystopian novel entitled Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream,
2014) in Chapter 17 presents a compelling example of not only the connections between women
and environmental health as a notable theme in ecofeminist literature, but the ways in which
ecofeminist literature opens to criticism the representation of women’s earth-care and mothering
responsibilities as inherently constructed along patriarchally-determined gender lines.
In terms of care, and caregiving, Macgregor posits a problematized view of women’s caring in
ecofeminist literature, one that, on the one hand, invests “grassroots women”—country-dwellers,
poor, rural—as possessors of more genuine knowledges, while at the same time romanticizing a
subsistence lifestyle and the ways women’s ethic of natural/environmental care are constructed
without scrutinizing the intricacies, settings and difficulties of women’s labour (2006, 65). From
this standpoint, Benay Blend’s Chapter 19, Native American and First Nations Literature and Ecofem-
inism, is especially significant in charting the ways in which the land narratives by Indigenous
and Native American women writers often both circumscribe and contest conventional feminist
perspectives in characterizing a novel rubric of Indigenous ecofeminist literature. Indeed Julia
Kuznetski and Kadri Tüür’s Chapter 22, Estonian Literature and Ecofeminism, presents an atten-
tive examination of both the changes in conditions of women’s caregiving in Estonia during
the COVID-19 pandemic, as narrative in the maternity poetry of Eda Ahi’s collection entitled
Maailma avastamine (Discovery of the World) in 2021, while situating the discussion of Ahi’s poetry
within both a broader socio-political critique of contemporary Estonian culture and the historical,
geographical, and geopolitical evolution and position of Estonian literature.

Cultural Ecofeminism
Over two decades ago, theorists identified cultural ecofeminism, alongside socialist ecofeminism,
as one of the two prevailing perspectives of ecofeminism (Carlassare 2000, 89). Cultural ecofem-
inism aims towards “the promotion of equality, nonviolence, cultural diversity, and participatory,

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noncompetitive, and nonhierarchical forms of organization and decision making” (Birkeland

1993, 20). Accordingly, cultural ecofeminists view the dismantling of prevailing patriarchal struc-
tures and practices threatening the natural environment and the status and conditions of women
as fundamental in inhibiting social and cultural inequalities. Thus, cultural ecofeminists “seek to
deemphasize the nature-woman connection, which they see as imposed by a socially constructed
patriarchal order and degrading” (Stephens 2013, 6). Here, contesting the socially constructed
dualisms—women/man, nature/culture, etc.—appear fundamental to the topical interests and
themes of cultural ecofeminist literatures. Philosopher Val Plumwood’s work is influential to the
development and evolution of cultural ecofeminism, particularly her linkages between dualisms
and systems of domination. “Forms of oppression from both the present and the past have left their
traces in western culture as a network of dualisms, and the logical structure of dualism forms a
major basis for the connection between forms of oppression” (Plumwood 1993, 2).
Many of the chapters in this present collection refer to Plumwood’s influential work in offering
(re)readings of various works of literature from ecofeminist literary perspectives. For instance,
Pervine Elrefaei’s examination of Taha Hussein’s novel Du‘a’a al-Karawan (The Call of the Curlew)
(1934) in Chapter 11 argues the female protagonist’s ecofeminist acumen embodies the architype
of “anti-dualist ecological feminism” (Plumwood 1993, 40). Melanie Duckworth’s Chapter 6,
Australian Literature and Ecofeminism, applies Plumwood’s terms to an analysis of Katharine Susan-
nah Prichard’s novel Coonardoo (1929) to investigate the ways in which Australian ecofeminist
writing reconstructs conceptions of the feminine and non-human nature against a postcolonial
backdrop. Additionally, Auður Aðalsteinsdóttir’s Chapter 20, Icelandic Literature and Ecofeminism,
also adopts Plumwood’s theories in scrutinizing women/nature binary systems in Jakobína Sig-
urðardóttir’s novel Gunnlöth’s Tale (2011). Anja Höing too, in her Chapter 41, Children’s Fiction and
Ecofeminism, applies select Plumwoodian concepts in her examination of nature/culture dualisms
and dualist structures in Victorian children’s fiction, as does Rhian Waller (Chapter 46) in her
discussion of Terry Pratchett’s comic YA fantasy novel Equal Rites (1987). Finally, Anja Höing
also applies Plumwoodian theories of binary in her examination of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto (1764) in her “Gothic Fiction and Ecofeminism” (Chapter 38).
Some cultural ecofeminist forms of writing include a highly personalized and stylized use of lan-
guage and discourse designed to challenge the incorporeal practices characterizing customary scien-
tific and academic communication. Within this idiosyncratic discourse, the application of personal
pronouns—I, me, my—clearly situates subjectivity “inside” the text. Other interests of cultural
ecofeminism include, in relation to literature specifically, deploying cultural ecofeminist perspec-
tives in “re-reading” canonical English literatures. Mohammadi and Kalantari, for instance, apply
cultural ecofeminist principles in an examination of Alexander Poe’s The Rape of the Lock (1719) “to
illustrate the formation and also interrelatedness of two main long-held cultural dichotomies: the
sexist orientated privilege of male over female and the anthropocentric privilege of human over
nonhuman in the microcosmic literary scope of the 18th-century English literature” (2019, 9).
So alongside cultural feminist perspectives, we can see from Melanie Duckworth’s Chapter
6, Australian Literature and Ecofeminism, among other chapters which I detail in the next section,
that additional practices of interrogating texts from an ecofeminist lens include those drawing on
cultural theories of postcolonialism. From the perspective of cultural studies, postcolonialism—
indebted to Edward W. Said’s work in Orientalism: Western Representation of the Orient (1978)—was
a term emerging in the 1990s “that represents perspectives critical of or resistant to colonialism
or colonial attitudes” (Young 2020, 3), that is, colonialism as “that phase of imperialism in which
the expansion of the accumulative capacities of capitalism was realised through the conquest and
possession of other people’s land and labour in the service of the metropolitan core” ( Jacobs 2002,
16). Postcolonial ecofeminist thinking, therefore, operates on applying to literary analysis the
critical theories underlying postcolonial thought.

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Postcolonial Ecofeminism
Postcolonial ecofeminism, while not completely divorced from mainstream ecofeminism, facili-
tates a reconsideration of the concept of embodiment as it relates to forms of oppression generally,
and of women and nature specifically.

Postcolonial perspectives on ecofeminism help us understand the fact that women’s oppres-
sion is not only because of internalized patriarchal ideology that devalues women because of
their bodies. Women’s and men’s lived experiences and their material conditions in postco-
lonial societies are additionally perpetrators of oppression that ironically use the oppressed to
continue oppression.
( Jabeen 2020, 1099)

As it relates to postcolonialism, “culture” is a critical term in both defining postcolonialism as

a literary theory—in that it looks to literary texts in examining how colonized individuals and
communities interact with, and are constructed by, the cultural conditions of colonization—while
distinguish postcolonialism from other theories within cultural studies that examine the “Oth-
er”/“Westerner” and “civilized”/“uncivilized” dichotomies from alternative perspectives. These
theories include: Orientalism—“a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological
distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (Said 1978, 10);
Sinologism—“a system of knowledge produced about China, but in its problematic epistemology
and methodology, it turns into sinologization, which is essentially a special type of colonization’
(Gu 2013, 59); and colonialism—“a broad concept that refers to the project of European political
domination from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries that ended with the national liberation
movements of the 1960s” (Kohn and Reddy 2017).
A number of chapters in this present collection adopt postcolonial perspectives in contributing
(re)readings of various works of literature from ecofeminist literary perspectives. See, for instance,
Pervine Elrefaei’s examination of select Arabic literature from a postcolonial ecofeminist perspec-
tive in Chapter 11, Arabic Literature and Ecofeminism; the postcolonial perceptions of Alexis Wright’s
Carpentaria (2006) and Thea Astley’s Drylands (1999) adopted by Melanie Duckworth in Chapter
6, Australian Literature and Ecofeminism; and Giulia Champion’s Chapter 15, Francophone Literature
and Ecofeminism, which draws on postcolonial theories. Also refer to Christian Jil Benitez’s position
that the fiction of Rosario Cruz-Lucero involves the environment as a means to complicate the
condition of Philippine postcolonialism (Chapter 4), Peter I-min Huang’s discussion of the post-
colonial ecocritical qualities of Yao-ming Gan’s Pangcah Woman (2015) in Chapter 3, and Quynh
H. Vo’s argument in Chapter 5 that by revisiting the historical colonialism in Vietnam, Nguyễn
Phan Quế Mai’s novel The Mountain Sings (2020) inclines towards postcolonial criticism. Addi-
tionally, Sunaina Jain’s Chapter 25, Activism and Ecofeminist Literature, observes the intersection of
topical issues of Third World women in postcolonial countries and the environmental movements
stemming from analogous concerns.

Future Trends: Feminist New Materialism and Ecofeminist Literature

Feminist New Materialism is a radical theoretical methodology that is, according to Tanja Kubes,
“relational, claiming that subjects and objects, ideas and matter, representation and things are
not inhabiting clearly separable ontological sphere” (2020, 97). Feminist New Materialism as a
position has “successfully argued that what a thing ultimately ‘is,’ is how it evolves from con-
crete intra-actions” (Kubes 2020, 102). New theoretical positions are beginning to appear ex-
ploring “how a new materialist-inspired sensitivity to onto-epistemological entanglements …

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can contribute to our understanding of the changing relations of socio-material (re-)production

and care and how it can help us address socio-material relations more effectively” (Allhutter et
al. 2020, 405). More and more, New Materialist scholars are looking to literature and the literary
in efforts to reconsider postanthropocentric conceptualizations of materiality. Macarena García-
González and Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak’s interests, for example, lie “in the significance of con-
cepts emerging from new materialist thinking for research with children’s and YA literature – the
with here stresses how it is not research about anymore” (García-González and Deszcz-Tryhubczak
2020, 46). Feminist New Materialism is thus contributing to renewed interest in readings of
ecofeminist literary forms. Indeed, Kailin Mondello’s Chapter 39, Romantic Literature and Ecofem-
inism, identifies Feminist New Materialism as representing a future trend in Romantic ecofemi-
nism generally, and by extension, Romantic ecofeminist literature specifically. While ecocritical
and ecofeminist disciplines approach

the non-human agency of nature, technology, and corporeality as their respective points of
departure, they all utilize literature as a speculative site of figur(at)ing out what a world of vi-
brant matter, trans-corporal flows, intra-active entanglements, and in-corporeal materialities
might look and feel like.
(Skiveren 2018)

Feminist New Materialism presents a rich potential for furthering ecofeminist literary theories
and developing new trends in creative modes of ecofeminist literature. Tobias Skiveren, one of
the leading scholars in the field of turning attention to the creative literary possibilities for new
materialism contends that:

Throughout the last decade, calls for a return to materiality have reverberated within the
humanities and social sciences. Few, however, have noticed that this return has also entailed a
return to fiction, as the new theoretical writings on matter regularly include elements of sto-
rytelling, fabulation or other genres of invention. This article asks why this alliance between
new materialism and fiction has come about: Why do scholars united by a common interest
in “getting real” consistently utilize a type of discourse defined precisely by not committing
itself to reality?
(Skiveren 2020)

As well as providing a survey of the more contemporary contributions to the field of literary appli-
cations of new (feminist) materialist theory—Jane Bennett’s Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt
Whitman (2020), which extends on her former work, Vibrant Matter (2010), in contributing greater
significance to “making matter matter” (Skiveren 2021, 3)—Skiveren’s theoretical questions seem
poised to inform a new breed of ecofeminist creative writers with unique insight into the notion
of subjectivity (within and beyond the natural and environmental), as much as present, perhaps,
ecofeminist literary scholars with new methodological options in reading subjectivity within and
beyond the natural and environmental.

Conclusion
This chapter has presented an overview of the central themes that have informed, and continue
to inform, critical perspectives of ecofeminist literature from various cultural, disciplinary and
methodological viewpoints in responding to the questions, What is cultural studies? What is
ecofeminism? Is ecofeminist literature principally the application of concepts of oppression to
critical studies of literature and culture? And Is the concept of ecofeminist literature a literary and

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cultural force focusing on the tangible and imaginary interconnectedness between nature and
culture illustrating environmental existence in geographical, ecological and textual forms? It has
argued that defining “literature” in this context is crucial given that while ecofeminist literary
theory predominantly relies on nonfiction for its literary examples, ecofeminist literature reveals
itself in fictional, poetic, dramatic and creative nonfictional modes. In examining some of the key
ecofeminist themes celebrated in ecofeminist literary work utilizing the methodologies character-
izing a number of theories aligned with cultural studies—specifically cultural materialism, ma-
terial feminism, cultural feminism, cultural ecofeminism and postcolonial ecofeminism—I have
also cast the net wider, to offer an overview of future trends which might inform both cultural
studies and ecofeminist literary theory and practice alike.

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DISABILITY AND ECOFEMINIST
LITERATURE
Nicole A. Jacobs

Introduction
Prominent disability studies scholar and activist Alison Kafer (2005, 145) has issued a call to the
field: “Ecofeminisms can serve as a powerful resource in forging … coalitions” around health
care, access, chronic illness, and environmental degradation, “providing theoretical and political
visions of a more fully embodied relationship to human and nonhuman nature alike. But such
visions cannot be predicated on the absence of disability.” In other words, there is an untapped
potential inherent in ecofeminism for addressing the issues of disability from intersectional and
interdisciplinary approaches, particularly within the realms of environmental racism, queer ecol-
ogy, and speciesism. Indeed, ecofeminists have long acknowledged ableism’s role in the continued
subordination of human and nonhuman beings. Greta Gaard (1993, 1), for instance, argues that
“ecofeminism’s basic premise is that the ideology which authorizes oppressions such as those based
on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanc-
tions the oppression of nature.” Contemporary ecofeminist literature undoubtedly benefits from
centering key tenets of disability studies. For instance, discussions of disabled temporalities—pace
of life or crip time—offer ecofeminism a paradigm for considering new configurations of time
within the discussions of labor and care.
The pragmatic and material realities of disability and ecofeminism are, in part, guided by
the ways in which industrial and corporate practices, toxicity, and public policy both cause and
accelerate the disabling of bodies and minds, both human and nonhuman. Defining humans’ re-
lationship with nature through an acknowledgment of differential living and working conditions
based upon race, accessibility, gender, class, and location, ecofeminism has much to contribute to
the realm of disability theory and activism. For instance, precarious workers of the Global South
contribute least to environmental degradation, but they experience disproportionate effects of
global warming and “natural” disasters that, in themselves, can cause or contribute to disability.
So, too, do those living with disabilities bear higher risks within environmental crises, often not
accommodated or accounted for in evacuation, shelter, vaccination, and emergency management
considerations. There are several generative interconnections that unite ecofeminist literature and
theory with disability studies, rights, and justice.
This chapter demonstrates how depictions of disability in ecofeminist literature offer import-
ant correctives to dominant narratives while recentering the representations of people of color,
low-income workers, and other marginalized groups. From early modern insights on religious and
scientific notions of corporeality to readings of contemporary fantasy, the representative works

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-30301
 Nicole A. Jacobs

examined in this essay reimagine disability by focusing on differing narratives of what Margaret
Price (2015) calls the “bodymind.”1 It examines the teratological—the “wonderous” or hybrid
humanoid birth—and connections to animals and nonhuman nature in order to center disability
within ecofeminist literature.

Nature and the Environment in Feminist of Color Disability Studies

Extended scholarly engagements between both ecofeminism and disability studies are far from
commonplace, and yet the multiple points of contact between these areas warrant further explo-
ration. Both disability studies and feminist disability studies have begun considering the essential
role of the environment to the body, particularly as it relates to issues of water contamination,
hazardous waste, and the debility wreaked by both war and settler colonialism. On the permeable
and complex boundaries between animate and inanimate life/objects as they relate to disability
and the environment, Mel Y. Chen (2012, 11) notes that “‘inanimate life’ imbues the discourses
around environmental illness and toxicity,” particularly in instances of pollutants and contami-
nants. The disabling effects of toxins and hazards within the environment, especially for exploited
workers of the Global South, feature prominently in transnational feminist disability scholarship.
Nirmala Erevelles (2008, 119) questions what it means to claim a disabled identity under such
oppressions: “What happens when human variation (e.g. race) is deployed in the construction
of disabled identities for purely oppressive purposes (e.g. slavery, colonialism, and immigration
law)?” Furthering the legibility of disability in nationalist contexts, Jasbir K. Puar (2017) draws
upon Lauren Berlant’s (2007, 754) concept of “slow death”—characterized as a point where “the
physical wearing out of a population … is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and
historical existence”—in order to explore how racism, homophobia, and transphobia all create
the conditions for the debility upon which the nation-state hinges. Rob Nixon (2013), moreover,
focuses on the “slow violence” of war, noting the various casualties and disabilities not of imme-
diate battles and bullets, but the long-term deleterious effects of depleted uranium, landmines,
and damage to infrastructure, health care, and community resources in sites of Western military
action across the globe. The concepts of slow death and slow violence are both prominent features
in multiple genres of ecofeminist literature. As Casey A. Cothran notes in Chapter 43, these con-
cepts are explored in mystery and detective fiction that engage with the natural world and social
living conditions. In particular, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) and Agatha Christie’s Miss
Marple series, which was initiated with Murder at the Vicarage (1930), Cothran notes, highlight the
socially accepted “attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2013,
2) through the varied responses in the novels to characters whose disability is represented through
bodily difference and advanced age. The outgrowth of detective fiction in film noir and comic
books largely frames disability as a defining characteristic of villains and social outcasts, with ex-
amples ranging from the film The Blue Dahlia (1946), which depicts a murderer as suffering from
wartime disability and posttraumatic stress disorder, to the gallery of physically and intellectually
disabled antagonists in Dick Tracy (1931) and Detective Comics (1937).
The discussion of slow death and violence is facilitated by disability studies’ emphasis on pace
of life. Particularly relevant is Ellen Samuels’ (2017) characterization of the multiple ways in which
disabled people approach time in nonlinear, disjointed, and potentially liberatory ways that help
to illuminate the lived reality of the individual, but also hold great potential for considering larger
social systems.
Feminist disability studies, as a discipline, was inaugurated with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s
(2002, 4) foundational essay, Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory, where she eschews
earlier models of essentialism to build upon a constructionist view of the body and mind: “the in-
forming premise of feminist disability theory is that disability, like femaleness, is not a natural state

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of corporeal inferiority, inadequacy, excess, or a stroke of misfortune. Rather, disability is a cul-

turally fabricated narrative of the body.” In making this argument, Garland-­Thomson calls upon
the social rather than the medical model of disability, a notion emerging from twentieth-century
activism that disability is created not by individual impairments but rather by society’s inability or
unwillingness to offer equitable access to transportation, housing, public services, employment,
and education.
In the nearly two decades since Garland’s essay, many critics have invigorated the intersectional
study of race, class, and disability. Erevelles and Andrea Minear (2013) examine both historical
and contemporary examples of institutionalization and the school-to-prison pipeline in order to
demonstrate the compounding effects of race and gender in the disability community. Recently,
Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim (2020, 37) have proposed a feminist of color disability studies:

We argue that for feminist disability studies to effectively improve our understanding of in-
tersecting and mutually constitutive oppressions, it must take up feminist-of-color writing,
activism, and theory, which have long engaged issues of the body, illness, health, medicine,
and disability in ways too often excluded by the field to date.

In undertaking this important corrective, Schalk and Kim identify four domains of inquiry to
propel feminist of color disability studies scholars: discourse, state violence, health/care, and ac-
tivism, all of which examine the centrality of race, citizenship, and other forms of identity to
disability experience.2 An example of this form of feminist of color disability studies in action is
Therí Alyce Pickens’ (2019, 4) Black Madness: Mad Blackness, which spans the domains of discourse
and health/care in an important examination of contemporary Black speculative fiction.
The unifying of disability studies with aspects of the natural world has been framed more
frequently within environmental justice movements than within ecofeminism, despite the latter’s
greater potential for productive cross-pollination. Valerie Ann Johnson (2017, 83) cautions envi-
ronmental justice advocates: “We need to ask ourselves what it means for disabled persons when
we use the fear of possible disability in confronting environmental injustice and advocating for
changes in policy regarding the environment” given that overemphasis on “environmental causes
of disability [potentially] render those who are disabled passive recipients of harm.” Put differ-
ently, the environmental justice movement’s promotion of the specter of the disabled bodymind
as a pitiable side effect of climate change and industrial practice serves to alienate the disability
justice community.
Indeed, as many environmental justice advocates acknowledge, contemporary platforms for
mainstream environmentalism grew out of the conservationist efforts of the Progressive Era,
where many founding members were deeply implicated in eugenics projects that targeted people
of color and those with disabilities (Ray 2013). Among Native American, First Nation, and Indig-
enous communities across the globe, many environmentalist groups have been viewed as perpet-
uating and upholding the system of settler colonialism. For instance, Palyku legal scholar Ambelin
Kwaymullina (2018, 197) critiques “the failure of the environmental movement to recognize the
value of Indigenous management of our cultured Countries”; by contrast, she argues that ecofem-
inism is tasked with addressing not only the “intersectional oppression of Indigenous women, [but
also] the complicity of settler women in this oppression.” To Kwaymullina, this acknowledgment
of white women’s complicity includes interrogating not just their historical participation in op-
pressive practices, but also a focus on the ways that contemporary ecofeminists continue to live
and work within the structures of a settler government on Native lands.
Ecofeminism’s task is to reject the concerns of White Ecology, a system that focuses primarily
on esthetics of the environment and a Not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) mentality rather than on
the lived conditions of the majority of Earth’s population. Nathan Hare (1970, 6, 7) famously

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offered Black Ecology as a lens through which to examine the experience of Black Americans:
“Throughout a person’s life, both his probability of dying and the type of death he meets may be
in large part a product of the kind of community in which he lives,” and as a result, “no solution to
the ecology crisis can come without a fundamental change in the economics of America.” Hare’s
work has been reinvigorated in contemporary culture through the African American Intellectual
History Society’s creation in 2020 of a blog series #BlackEcologies, which “provides a way of
historicizing and analyzing the ongoing reality that Black communities in the US South and in
the wider African Diaspora are most susceptible to the effects of climate change” (Hosbey and
Roane 2020). To Catherine Gardner (1999, 207), the issues of Black Ecology are best attended to
within ecofeminism:

the movement for environmental justice does not appear—unlike ecofeminism—to be able to
provide the framework that will allow us to examine the connections between the oppression
of women and the oppression of the environment or the connections between sexism and
racism.

To Gardner, the utility of ecofeminism’s approach to the environment has to do with its embrace
of intersectionality, the notion that oppressions based upon various categories of identity—race,
ability, class, gender, gender expression, and sexuality—act together to compound the marginal-
ization that individuals experience (Crenshaw 1989).
Feminist disability studies, like ecofeminism, takes an increasingly intersectional approach.
Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim (2017, 124) examine the importance of allyship and collective
action: “Intersectionality means not only reading disability alongside race, or bringing disability
theory to bear on queer theory, but investing in each other and ‘each other’s battles.’” The overlap
between Kafer and Kim’s formulation of feminist disability studies and Gardner and Kwaymul-
lina’s understandings of ecofeminism is significant. Nevertheless, the intersectional approach to
disability studies is not yet as widespread as it might be. According to Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay
Sibara (2017), too few disability studies scholars have examined the impact of pollutants and envi-
ronmental illness within representations of disability. This is a critique particularly relevant in K.
M. Ferebee’s Chapter 48, which examines a subset of autobiographical writing identified by Stacy
Alaimo (2010) as the material memoir. This genre represents the self and experience of chronic
illness and disability through scientific and medical knowledge, particularly focused on the role of
environmentally-mediated conditions. Ferebee posits, however, that the material memoir largely
enforces a dualistic and heteronormative worldview that avoids placing the individual’s experi-
ence of disability within a larger context of environmental justice. By contrast, feminist of color
disability studies, which engages multiple disciplines and identities, has great potential in fostering
discourses on disability among people of color and low-income communities.
One area where feminist disability studies has historically outperformed ecofeminism is in the
inclusion of the LGBTQIA communities. Part of the reason for this has to do with the history
of ecofeminism itself, particularly in regard to matters of gender essentialism. Early ecofeminists
tended to overemphasize the “natural” connections that female-sexed bodies had to Mother Na-
ture, resulting in dichotomous thinking about women’s communal, care-based, maternal, biocen-
tric views versus men’s individualistic, opportunistic, paternalistic, anthropocentric perspectives
(Tong 2013). This framework fails to recognize that those of any gender may espouse a commu-
nal, care-focused approach to the natural world. A productive example of resistance to ecofeminist
essentialism can be seen in Slovene literature and scholarship. In Chapter 13, Katja Plemeni-
taš discusses Jožica Čeh Steger’s ecofeminist literary criticism, which critiques the essentialism
of spiritual ecofeminism in favor of a more constructionist viewpoint. Indeed, certain veins of
ecofeminist thought have been viewed as transmisogynist or transphobic. Slovenian critic Anja

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Koletnik (2017, 62), for instance, exposes cisnormativity in Carol J. Adams’ work and argues that
“transcending binary logics” is beneficial to vegetarian ecofeminism. Moreover, the emphasis on
women’s labor within the home in early ecofeminist thought was often based on heteronormative
assumptions about the Western nuclear family without acknowledging same-sex family structures
and households of various cultural norms (Sandilands 2002). Queer disability studies, including
Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013) and Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness,
and Liberation (1999), attends to diversity within sexualities and genders. The disability and D/
deaf communities have offered a vital platform for social justice and activism. Take, for instance,
Sky Cubacub’s (2020) manifesto on a sliding-scale pay, fully customizable clothing line for those
with multiple disabilities and gender presentations. Patty Berne (2020, 235), the cofounder of Sins
Invalid, a disability justice performance project, argues that the disabled, queer-identified com-
munity offers an innovative approach to the climate crisis due to a long-established heritage of

creative problem-solving within a society that refuses to center our needs. If we can build an
intersectional climate justice movement—one that incorporates disability justice, that centers
disabled people of color and queer- and gender-nonconforming folks with disabilities—our
species might have a chance to survive.

The search for innovative strategies to address the problems of our age and those of the future is
shared across feminist disability studies and ecofeminism.
Coalitional and intersectional work promote not just disability rights but rather disability jus-
tice. Historically, in the United States disability activism had concentrated on the implementation
and enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the passage of the Amer-
icans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (amended in 2008) with a focus on privileged disabled lives.
Born of the Disability Justice Collective in the early 2000s, disability justice is best understood as
a movement that centers on the histories and experiences of Black and Indigenous People of Color
(BIPOC), queer, and gender nonconforming disabled activists and artists in an intersectional
framework. According to Berne (2015), disability justice “cannot comprehend ableism without
grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism.”
Those who challenge both ableism and environmental racism—the set of conditions and policies
that place nuclear, industrial, and/or chemical toxins or pathogens in proximity to or among
people of color, low-income families, or other marginalized communities—work together within
this movement. The late activist Stacy Milbern (2020, 269) emphasized that disability was not a
box on a social justice checklist “because disability justice (and disability itself ) has the potential to
fundamentally transform everything we think about quality of life, purpose, work, relationships,
belonging.” The transformational change of integrating disability is also reflected in contempo-
rary ecofeminist literature that seeks to frame these discourses in representations of both human
and nonhuman beings navigating disability.

Disability in Ecofeminist Literature

The teratological, the study of perceptible bodily anomalies present at birth, encompasses some
of the varied representations of disability in ecofeminist literature. Elisha Coles’ An English Dic-
tionary (1677) defines teratology as “a discourse of wonders.” This term represented to Coles’
­seventeenth-century audience both the miraculous and the monstrous. Representations of the
teratological in Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World
(1666) and N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Kingdoms (2010) offer important examples of how early and
late fantasy engage with foundational tenets of ecofeminism. The expansiveness of the teratolog-
ical hybrid offers productive ways of representing disability in a set of environments increasingly

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polluted and damaged by human activity. Moreover, it offers a lens for interpreting the many
representations of disability and animality from classical to contemporary literature.
Teratology has been prominent in classical medical and theological treatises from Aristotle and
Galen to Augustine, but the term also continues to be used in contemporary scientific study. The
difference between these definitions over time reflects the known and assumed causes of birth
anomalies within developing scientific knowledge. What it does not address is the lived experience
of the disabled person navigating a world that views their difference as “monstrous.” Medieval and
early modern (mis-)understandings of teratology reflect both religious and scientific thoughts of
the era. For instance, many prominent theorists suggested that birth anomalies were the result of
too much or too little sperm in the womb, acts of bestiality, or signs of God’s judgment or punish-
ment. Another prominent explanation placed responsibility solely upon a gravid woman’s imag-
ination during coitus or gestation, meaning that if a woman looked upon or conjured the image
of an animal or god, the resulting child might be shaped by the will of the mother’s mind. Ross
Hagen (2013, 33) explores the threat that women’s imagination could pose to the patriarchal order,
in that the mother’s thoughts were believed to “usurp the male’s [perceived] dominant creative role
and imprint the child with her desires,” making her “a parthenogenetic mother.” Moreover, the
price of such transgression could be very high, as it was for a woman who was publicly burned in
Copenhagen in 1643 for “having been delivered of a cat-headed child” (Taylor 2020, 564).
The contemporary medical formulation of teratology emerged in the early twentieth century
as “the study of environment-induced malformations,” including those caused by nutritional de-
ficiencies, pharmacology, or chemical exposure (Finnell 1999, S337). In other words, whereas
earlier notions of teratology focused more prominently on the faults of the mother’s mind or sins,
more modern understandings assess her intake of foods and medicines, her drug use or chemical
exposure, and the effects of the environment in which she lives. Under these differential defini-
tions of teratology, my own club feet and hip dysplasia, for example, would have been deemed
as teratologic in the early modern period—like the club-footed god Vulcan—but not in modern
medical literature unless they were symptoms of a larger disorder caused by a suspected environ-
mental agent. When considered from a disability studies perspective, the teratologic bears much
potential in understanding bodily variance and in challenging the medical community’s overem-
phasis on a cure rather than on disabled peoples’ own perceptions about quality of life and treat-
ment of their conditions. The teratologic unites theories of disability and ecofeminism particularly
in the concepts of environmental racism and speciesism.
In the seventeenth century, English writer Margaret Cavendish wrote The Blazing World
(1666), which engages the concepts of ecofeminism while also imagining a world of hybrid hu-
manoid species. The prose fiction follows an unnamed woman who is kidnapped by pirates and
floats through an Arctic portal into an alternate reality. The woman becomes Empress of a nation
that includes humans of all colors (including azure and grass-green) and humanoid animal-hybrid
creatures, such as fox-men, bird-men, and fly-men. In a departure from seventeenth-century
theories of race as reflecting hierarchies of virtue or climate, Cavendish’s (1666, 133) narrator
proposes an early scientific hypothesis about whether the “colours and complexions … were made
by the bare reflection of light, without assistance of small particles, or by the help of well-ranged
and ordered atoms.” In other words, The Blazing World does not make value judgments about the
origins of differing races in the kingdom it represents.
Similarly, each of the species of animal-human hybrids in the kingdom are respected for pos-
sessing a unified language, culture, and custom despite the varied qualities, bodies, and diets
among them. The empress explains, “the rest of the inhabitants of that world were men of several
different sorts, shapes, figures, dispositions, and humours” and each race “followed such a pro-
fession as was most proper for their species,” such that the bear-men were “experimental philos-
ophers,” the ape-men were chemists, and the spider-men were mathematicians (Cavendish 1666,

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134–135). Cavendish’s fictional world represents bodily difference and the attendant skills of each
species as both normalized and natural. The Blazing World recognizes the birth of “monsters”
among the various species, but both the satyrs and bear-men strongly object to experimentation
on these babies: “neither will the dissection of monsters prevent the errors of nature’s irregular
actions” nor prevent other anomalous births (Cavendish 1666, 158).3 This kingdom, moreover,
defies the norms of environmental racism, in that each species in the world lives in the climate
and situation most appropriate to their habitat and resource needs with no race or species favored
over any others.
Turning to contemporary literature, N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Kingdoms (2010), the second
novel in The Inheritance Trilogy, is a work of fantasy that takes place in a world rife with factional-
ism, where certain figures wield the power of magic. The three gods of this world—the Night-
lord, Bright Itempas, and the Gray Lady—the godlings (their children), and demons (the offspring
of gods/godlings and mortals) all have access to magical power and yet often find themselves at
the mercy of mortals and their political machinations. The novel’s narrator Oree Shoth, whom
we later discover to be a demon-woman, is a blind artist who uses magic in her artistic process.
Jemisin explains that her decision for the Gray Lady to describe “demons as ‘monsters’ was not a
mistake” because she wanted to represent hybridity with disability in Oree’s character ( Jemisin
2011). Unlike The Blazing World, certain races and families exercise supremacy in this kingdom.
Oree is immediately recognizable to others in the novel as being of Maroneh descent, due to her
“storm of hair” and “smooth, near-black Maro skin” ( Jemisin 2010, 414). Her people live a life
of displacement, as the Nightlord destroyed her homeland during the gods’ war centuries prior,
meaning that she lives a life of both slow violence and crip time. As a demon—one born as a ter-
atological Maroneh-godling hybrid—Oree is under threat from both gods and mortals alike. On
the one side, Bright Itempas has prohibited godlings from procreating with mortals. On the other,
some mortals seek to exsanguinate demons for their magical blood. Ecofeminist Erika Cudworth’s
(2015, 41) definition of speciesism as “a prejudice which licenses all forms of exploitative and op-
pressive practices that harm sentient beings” would undoubtedly apply to the immortal/mortal
beings of The Broken Kingdoms. Oree’s precariousness as a prohibited yet valuable being drives
much of the action of the plot, but it also connects her experience to disabled mortals as well. She
describes hiding out from her adversaries in Ancestors’ Village:

It’s where the city’s homeless population had made a camp of sorts.... Many of the Villagers
were sick in body or mind, too harmless to be quarantined, but too ugly or strange or pitiful
to be acceptable in the orderly society of the Bright. Many were lame, mute, deaf … blind.
In my earliest days in Shadow, I’d been terrified of joining them
( Jemisin 2010, 657–658)

In the hierarchy of this kingdom, disabled mortals and demons live precarious lives at the furthest
margins of society.
Nonetheless, Oree’s status as a teratologic being offers these kingdoms a potential new path.
In punishment for his crimes against his fellow gods, Bright Itempas is condemned to inhabit the
body of a mortal for an indeterminate time in which he falls in love with Oree. When the other
gods insist upon Itempas and Oree’s permanent separation, as a continuation of his punishment,
Oree discovers she is pregnant with Itempas’ child. Despite Itempas’ initial fears of what Sami
Schalk (2016, 1256) calls “inter-species love,” he shifts his thinking for his beloved demon and his
demon child. Indeed, Oree believes the conception is “his way of making up for past mistakes”
( Jemisin 2010, 757). While the change is neither immediate nor revolutionary, the compensatory
breakdown of this speciesist hierarchy, even in an exceptional case, leaves the door open for future
mortal–immortal relationships resulting in greater hybridity of birth in the kingdom.

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Beyond the diversity of bodyminds evident at birth, ecofeminist literature is especially atten-
tive to cross-species interactions and transformations. In Chapter 9, for instance, Abhik Gupta
discusses the foundational role of Rabindranath Tagore’s writing in Bengali literature, which not
only depicts the slow violence inflicted upon women in India in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, but also connects their suffering to animals and the natural environment. As
Gupta outlines, the titular heroine of the novel Subha (1892), a girl with a speech disability, finds
community and acceptance in communicating with domesticated animals and livestock as well as
wild birds. Another heroine with a speech disability and a connection to avian life is explored in
Lesley Kordecki’s Chapter 26 on animal studies, which looks at the myth of Philomela and Procne
in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1 A.C.E.; translated in 2004). Procne’s husband Tereus rapes her sister
Philomela and severs her tongue with a sword to prevent her from implicating him in the crime.
Central to the plot is the effect of the physical and psychological trauma and disability Philomela
experiences at the hands of Tereus, as the narrator notes, “and yet from suffering / Comes native
wit, and often cleverness / is born of misery” (Ovid 2004, 6.829–831). Philomela through “mute
gestures” convinces an enslaved person to deliver to Procne a tapestry she has woven that tells the
story of her trauma (Ovid 2004, 6.836). The sisters conspire to murder Tereus’ son and bake him
into a pastry to be served to Tereus during a private feast. When Tereus once again unsheathes his
sword, Philomela and Procne are transformed into songbirds to escape Tereus’ now-harmless hoo-
poe beak. Philomela’s wish for “the faculty of speech” is fulfilled in her transformation into the
nightingale with its lovely and distinctive song (Ovid 2004, 6.957). The Philomela tale emphasizes
the pain that both sisters feel in being displaced from their home, family, customs, and stability.
The sense of place is especially significant in many ecofeminist disability narratives. In Richard
Magee’s Chapter 37 on sentimental ecology, he defines this literary feature as one that central-
izes land, home, and community within narratives of human stewardship of the natural world.
In Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, Eli Clare (2017, 16) describes the process of walking
through a former agribusiness cornfield being restored to prairie. He describes the labor that goes
into mowing, burning, rooting out invasive species, and replanting native seeds:

J. and his friends worked hard, remembering all the while that neither they nor the dairy
farmer down the road owned this land. It was stolen a century and a half ago from the eastern
Dakota people. The histories of grass, dirt, bison massacre, genocide live here, floating in the
air, tunneled into the earth.

To Clare, settler colonialism is inseparable from understandings of the land and its ecosystem.
From a stance of epistemic privilege, as a genderqueer individual who lives with disability, Clare
recognizes that the process of rehabilitation of the land neither fully resurrects its former iterations
nor erases its history. His musing, “what was once normal here; what can we consider normal
now? Or are these the wrong questions? Maybe the earth just holds layer upon layer of history”
signals his reflections on precarious bodies and existences as well as the divergence of his own path
down these converted corn furrows (Clare 2017, 17). Other memoirs of the fight for disability
justice are enmeshed with precarity and guided by resistance to ableist standards of living, as is the
case, for instance, in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samrahsina’s Dirty River Girl: A Queer Femme of Color
Dreaming Her Way Home (2015).

Conclusion
Ongoing ecofeminist and disability studies are examining the interconnections possible between
disability, ecofeminism, and literary representation. For instance, discussions of speciesism and
interdependence between disabled people and animals are emerging. Sunaura Taylor (2014, 112)

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has advocated for “moving conversations about animal and disability liberation away from limited
narratives about suffering and dependence to more radical discussions about creating accessible,
nondiscriminatory space in society.” More broadly, disability studies will continue to benefit from
ecofeminist understandings of the ethics of care within social justice, and the notion that skilled
caregiving labor must be safe, sustainable, and fairly compensated for the worker. By the same
token, ecofeminists will deepen their understanding of the complicated relationship that many
disabled people have with receiving care, struggling for bodily autonomy, resisting institutionaliza-
tion and conservatorships, and enforcing their right to consent. Collaborations between ecofemi-
nism and disability studies have accomplished much, but there is still more work to be done.

Notes
1 Margaret Price defines “bodymind” as “the imbrication (not just the combination of the entities called
‘body’ and ‘mind’ as a feminist materialist concept” (270).
2 Schalk and Kim focus not on the identity of the scholar engaging feminist of color theory but rather on
the discourses and legacy of women of color feminism.
3 Whereas Cavendish’s characters interpret birth anomalies as naturally occurring phenomena that do not
require cure or objectification, they do advocate euthanizing such babies.

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 29
GENDER ESSENTIALISM AND
ECOFEMINIST LITERATURE
Asmae Ourkiya

Introduction
There is an existing and continuously evolving bona fide research in academia that has been con-
ducted in assessing the impacts of gender on humans’ environmental experiences (Clayton et al.
2003). Nonetheless, a binary approach has been strongly present and dominant, averting the re-
search focus on the interlacement of other-than-binary identities with the shaping of environmen-
tal identities. Ecofeminism is the research field that began, since its genesis, to challenge ecological
scholarship’s lack of intersectionality. From Diana fuss’s challenge of essentialism (1989) to Greta
Gaard’s call for queering the field (2011), ecological feminism has witnessed a revolutionary trans-
formation that is heading towards inclusivity within the climate justice work. This chapter aims
to be part of this transformation, by providing gender perspectives that break the existing binary
dichotomies in climate research. Firstly, it examines the risk that essentialism and heterosexism
pose to the quality of fairness and justice in environmental research. Secondly, it brings ecological
matters related to transgender, non-binary, and intersex experiences to the forefront. And last but
not least, it involves postgenderism’s potential in re-introducing ecofeminism as queer, hybrid,
and more inclusive critical theory.

Essentialist Entanglements
Ecofeminism emanated from the gender-nonchalance of ecological criticism, environmental re-
search, and ecological activism. The term was coined by Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974. Con-
sequently, it landed a place in academia in the 1970s when the exploitation of nature and the
oppression of women became distinctly intertwined. Ecofeminism opposed the sexist exploitative
power granted to the white heterosexual man to exercise control of what he deemed to necessitate
taming. The logic behind this domination goes as follows: If you’re a female, Black, Indigenous, a
person of colour, homosexual, gender non-conforming, or disabled, you are no different than the
wilderness of nature that has been depicted as irrational and in need of mastery. In early ecofem-
inist writings, the focus has been put mostly, if not solely, on women and nature. Consequently,
ecofeminism’s essentialist notions of biological characteristics became what defines the theory.
Nonetheless, some scholars in the field challenged essentialist thoughts. Elizabeth Carlassare and
Kari Marie Norgaard recognized the problematics in the belief that there are true forms of es-
sences that are ahistorical, biologically inherent, “prosocial, innate, and unchanging” (1994, 221).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-31311
 Asmae Ourkiya

Norgaard believed that essentialism has “a turbulent history in progressive social thought, partic-
ularly in feminist, antiracist, and ecofeminist movements.” (1998, 492)
The interlacing of women’s subordination associated a set of attributions to both womb-­
bearing humans and anything that falls under the “nature” umbrella. Such attributions can be
submissiveness, fertility, femininity, reproduction, or the lack of autonomy. Initially, ecofeminists
found these similarities to be a strong argument as to why women and nature are both victims of
the same patriarchal capitalist exploitative system that thrives off the mastery of non-male non-
white non-heterosexual beings. However, this enabled the ambiguity to essentialized notions of
the female gender: Women were given a set of characteristics, consequently dismissing transgen-
der women, non-binary people assigned female at birth, lesbians and non-heterosexual women,
women who have no desire to reproduce, and other women who do not fall under the mainstream
definition of a woman.
If we consider the division of humans into the man/woman categories, it is conspicuous that
men have always been the ones most likely to have power, control, and privilege. From claiming
sovereignty over resources, animals, and women to asserting superior hierarchical positions in
society, man’s superiority marked centuries of humans’ existence on Earth. During the 1970s,
grassroot ecofeminist movements manifested in the global south while the world witnessed an
explosion in environmental writings following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
(Carson 1962). Feminists stepped in to highlight the necessity of including gender in climate
research and environmental studies. The focus, however, has intensely connected women and
nature. Before advocating for the liberation of all humans and non-humans from all forms of
oppression, liberating humans with wombs and nature from the oppression wielded by humans
with penises was ecofeminism’s sole cynosure. Consequently, the definitions of man and woman
were rendered essentialized, restricting masculinities to dominion, control, heterosexuality, and
excessive pride in manliness. The dichotomy between essentialism and constructionism is what
resulted in the division between ecofeminist scholars and activists. Thereupon, scholars took dif-
ferent roads and formed their own different theories; hence, the birth of cultural ecofeminism,
socialist ecofeminism, and radical ecofeminism. The main difference between these branches is
the perception of the associations between gender oppression and environmental degradation.
Their collision revolves around whether the similarities between the female and the natural should
or should not be deconstructed. Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman suggests in Chapter 23 that a vast ma-
jority of ecofeminism studies, especially in English literature, support the constructions of nature
as maternal and feminine and that such an association is used to control and subdue women and
nature. Nonetheless, not all ecological feminist scholars agreed with intertwining both. This
resulted in the division between ecofeminist scholars, making some essentialists and some anti-­
essentialists. Thus, to some, bodies, gender, sexuality, and the natural held on to fixed conditioned
definitions. Vis-à-vis individual environmental identities, nature connectedness was shaped by
where an individual falls under the “natural” umbrella.
Diana Fuss’s book Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference (1989) addressed the nature
versus culture debate by engaging with arguments of feminist, gay, and Afro-American critics
and debating whether femininity, homosexuality, and race have essential natures. She even argued
that constructionism is just another “sophisticated form of essentialism” (Fuss 1989). She discussed
the “risk of essence” as well, a sign that many theorists believe to be convenient since essentialism
may after all be inevitable. Whether this “risk” can be allowed is of high importance to ecofem-
inists especially the ones who intersected the field with queer theory. This is because such a risk
determines the lens and methodologies researchers would use to build their arguments. Fuss used
Peggy Kamuf ’s warning about this risk of essentialism. According to Fuss, Kamuf argued that
allowing room for essentialism as a “risk” will only lead to people “accident” ally falling into
it by using the term “risk” as an excuse. (Fuss 1989) That gap between possibility and potential

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mishaps will be the reason why theorists will not consider the consequences of essentialist state-
ments as they would be likely protected by the “it was an accident” response. Fuss attempted to
break the constructionist/essentialist binarism in feminism by discussing both the weakness and
the strengths of each. In her piece The “Risk” of Essence, the author argues that essentialism has the
tendency to oppress women due to its “totalizing symbolic system” (1989, 17). Essentialism thus
engenders monolithic boxes for human identities, eliminating the possibility for people in several
parts of the world to explore who they are to the fullest without the gendered and racialized pre-
conditioning that is attached to them since birth. As a result, human-environmental interactions
are impacted by how connected people feel to their environments. Thus, if an individual does
not fit in the essentialized monolithic categories, they would naturally feel alienated, different,
unwanted, rejected, or anomalous, hence, the possible inability to form a healthy empathetic re-
lationship with one’s natural environment.

Environmental Identities: Towards Breaking Dichotomies

In The Land Ethic, Aldo Leopold wrote that “We can be ethical only in relation to something
we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in” (1949, 214). Yet how do we expect
people to develop environmental awareness and ethics if their identities are imposed on them by
intercepting them from their path to becoming their authentic selves and therefore genuinely car-
ing for the ecosystem that sustains them as they can finally feel a sense of belonging?
Before all else, environmental identity is itself a complex term. In layman’s terms, it is human’s
perceptions of themselves in the natural world and the extent of bondedness they have with nature.
Andrew J. Weigert defined environmental identity as “one’s self-meanings in relation to the envi-
ronment” (Weigert 1997). This definition, however, is gender blind. Ruolin E. Miao and Nicolette
L. Cagle wrote their piece “The role of gender, race, and ethnicity in environmental identity devel-
opment in undergraduate student narratives” to fill one of the gender gaps in environmental iden-
tity research. They emphasized the important role other identities such as gender and race play in
shaping and developing one’s connectedness to nature. Yet how is it possible for a person to develop
pro-environmental behaviour if they do not feel a sense of belonging to what was assigned to them
as “the natural”? The reason why it’s important to link environmental identity to other identities
is to assess a person’s ability to feel truly connected to nature and to have empathy towards one’s
environment as well as towards other humans and non-humans. Salvia Estella Artman’s doctoral
dissertation entitled Out in Nature: Queer Environmental Identities took 16 participants to study
how socially ascribed identities such as race, gender and sexual orientations impact one’s environ-
mental identity (2019, 1–2). Artman’s data collection and analysis provided outstanding results:
Besides the feelings of shame perpetrated by the belonging to one or more marginalized identities
or the absence of this shame if one belongs to a normative group, participants from different back-
grounds “expressed how spending time in nature, away from humans who might be perpetuating
cissexism, cis-genderism, heterosexism, racism, and other forms of oppression, provided them space
to be their authentic selves” (2019, 66). Escaping social norms by immersing oneself into the natural
world serves as a validation to one’s queer identity according to the participants. However, not all
participants felt safe pursuing this validation. Dan, one of the participants commented on his feel-
ings in relation to the homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard. The author quoted Dan who said:

I go to the outdoors because I love it, because I want to be connected. But it’s also when I’m
very aware of being vulnerable around strangers, in open land... like my queerness isn’t free
in the outdoors. If anything, my queerness feels more restricted because I don’t want to be
targeted when I’m out. I’m not going to go camping or to a national park and really embrace
my partner because I don’t know what kind of assholes are around me. If anything, that’s

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when it feels the most unsafe...I mean, Matthew Shepard wasn’t that long ago. And that, to
me, is outdoors, open land, homophobia. You know, like violence on queer bodies and it’s
pretty consistent. So just because people are out hiking or trying to connect with trees, like
that’s great, but they’re not going to leave their biases behind and I don’t want to be out there
in the middle of nowhere and get attacked. Like where am I going to go, you know? So yeah,
I have reservations....My queerness brings hesitations about going to some outdoor places.
(2019, 79)

Dan’s testimony reflects the fear, sense of precariousness, and shame that encounter ­non-conforming
people when they try to find their place in the world. Queer bodies, regardless of their aware-
ness of nature and ecology’s queerness, are always guarded by the cisgender heterosexist socially
enforced restrictions. Although nature is welcoming of all genders, races, bodies, and sexualities,
nature is also a host of humans who may not be as embracing.

When Ecofeminism and Heterosexism Collide

The intersections of feminist theories, queer theories, and environmental justice resulted in the
queering ecofeminism. This became a matter of interest to several researchers like Greta Gaard
and pattrice jones. They called for the integration of queer theory because they linked the op-
pression inflicted by heteronormativity and heterosexism on people to the oppression inflicted on
nature, which has long dismissed homosexuality in thousands of other species. Despite its queer-
ness, ecofeminism adopted an essentialized view of gender and sexuality ever since its genesis, (un)
consciously excluding transgender, non-binary, agender, gender-fluid, and intersex people. This
pervasive bias entails the belief that people are not the same and are to be categorized based on
either their skin colour, genitals, and other bodily features. Racial essentialism for instance divides
people based on what is assumed to be biological and cultural differences. Gender essentialism, on
the other hand, believes in maleness and femaleness. The results then may range from exoticism,
racism, colourism, chauvinism, transphobia, and homophobia, leading to prosecution, mistreat-
ment, and colonialism. The same happens to nature when it is alienated, perceived as inferior,
eroticized, or seen as an infinite access to limitless resources. Essentialism in all its forms fosters
dangerous ideas such as the feminization of womanhood, masculinization of manhood, the supe-
riority of heteronormativity leading to homophobia, the superiority of cisgender people leading
to transphobia, and racial prejudice leading to neo-nationalism.
Despite the existence of Queer Ecology as the challenging polarizing field to all heterosexist
notions of nature, only a few researchers questioned the absence of queerness in ecological crit-
icism. Catriona Sandilands’ “Queer Life? Ecocriticism After the Fire”, a chapter in The Oxford
Handbook of Ecocriticism, examines the relevance of queer theory to ecocriticism. According to
Sandilands, ecocriticism, among others, is an uncritically heteronormative ecological thought
(Sandilands 2014).
In 2018, the University of Nebraska Press published Kyle Bladlow and Jennifer Ladino’s book
Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment. This collection of interdisciplinary essays
brought new perspectives to ecocritical scholarship that revolve around emotion, feminist theory,
and queer theory. Bladlow and Ladino edited this book based on the turn they wanted to bring
to environmental humanities researchers out there who may or may not have thought about the
way places shape our emotional lives. They combined entries from scholars who brought inter-
connected grounds for social and environmental justice by integrating psychology, feminist, and
queer theories. As they suggest: “The “affective turn” has deep roots in Marxist, psychoanalytic,
feminist, and queer theory and is understood at least in part as a corrective to a poststructuralist
overemphasis on discourse at the expense of embodied experience” (2018, 4).

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Yet this book lacks a focus on gendered ecologies while it has a major focus on the psychology
and anxieties of living in and coping with the Anthropocene. Nicole Seymour’s chapter “The
Queerness of Environmental Affect” brought queerness to ecocritical scholarship. Influenced by
the 2016 Orlando shooting inside the gay nightclub Pulse, Seymour dives into the melancholy
that comes with the shame, guilt, and regret that accompany homosexuality and focuses on the
negative. She refers to Catriona Sandilands’ work to connect homophobia’s melancholic political
impacts and the negative emotions that emerge from the environmental crisis. Even though queer
theory, according to Seymour, has not been interested in environmental questions, she links the
anxieties that come with both. This invites the reader to think critically about the way we perceive
our environment and how our perceptions have historically been in continuous metamorphosis
depending on our prejudices against queer bodies. Seymour saw potential in queering ecocriti-
cism believing that queer theory and ecocritical scholarship can inform one another. The first part
of her essay challenges ecocriticism to look beyond the wilderness as a potential space worthy of
ecocritical analysis and offers gay and queer spaces for an ecocritical scholarship to be examined
with the inclusion of affect in the analysis. The second part of Seymour’s essay scrutinizes the rep-
resentation of queer bodies in nature. It takes Kim Anno’s short films that represent post-sea level
rise societies in port cities and looks at the queer presence in them and the emotional state they
bring her. The presence of a Black transgender woman in Anno’s 2013 film Water City reflects the
kind of ecosystem she wanted to create: One that is not anthropocentric and nor queer-centric.
It is simply one where humans are part of whole, and queer people are a vital part of this whole,
not a part that should draw attention for examination. The essay points out what ecocriticism has
been missing for decades. Via the examples she discussed, Seymour invited interested researchers
to link queer theory to ecocritical scholarship based on the premise that natural spaces have always
been and will always be queer.

Intersex, Transgender, and Non-binary Bodies: The Gateway to Post-gender

Ecological Feminism
Hermaphroditism exists among plants and animals. Yet humans have lived with long-lasting
polarized gender identities and have carefully selected example species from the wide range of
non-human beings to uphold their perceptions of what is constitutive of being natural. This
polarization pressured people to dress, behave, and perform according to their assigned gender.
The belief that the world is divided neatly into two separate groups has been the driving reason
behind the corrective surgical procedures that are imposed on s large number of intersex babies
worldwide. “Intersex is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born
with a sexual or reproductive anatomy that does not fit the typical physical definitions of female
or male” (Horowicz 2017, 186).
While the initial traditional mainstream ecofeminism in the 1970s highlights the complex
relationships between women and nature by either linking their similar nurturing features or
blaming this similarity for their oppression, ecological masculinities play the role of complement-
ing ecofeminism. This completion lies in the way ecological masculinities address oppressive
masculine hegemonies that people have long used to dominate the earth, women, Indigenous
peoples, people of colour, LGBTQI+ communities, and other marginalized groups. Yet not all
oppressed groups fall under the descriptory women/close to nature umbrella and not all oppress-
ing individuals or institutions fall under the man/close to culture one. Gender identities are diver-
sified and so should the theories that study them be. Masculinities and femininities can be found
in people regardless of how they identify: Identifying as a female does not exclude the presence
of masculinity, identifying as a male does not exclude the presence of femininities, as much as
identifying as non-binary, two-spirited or agender does not preclude the absence nor the presence

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of any or both. Ecological femininities have been explored for decades throughout ecofeminist
writings starting from the infamous works of Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, Val Plumwood, Greta
Gaard, and Karen Warren to the most recent work of researchers like Nick Rumens and Douglas
Vakoch. It seems that the more publications on ecofeminism, the more interest male researchers
have developed in the field. From gendering ecocriticism to queering, politicizing, and globaliz-
ing ecofeminism, half a century has been enough to revolutionize environmental humanities by
gendering them. This gendering, however, has been focused on the feminine, the womb-bearing
individuals, and womanhood as if gender is exclusive to women, rendering men as the norm.
However, recent years saw the emergence of eco masculinities which has finally begun to stand
on its own as a field. The main reason behind the need for a specific focus on masculinities is
to remind the world that the masculine is gendered, has feelings, can be oppressed and has the
ability to care and nurture just like its contrasting feminine. Thus, in order to move towards a
postgender non-binary approach, an ironically binary work needs to be completed by giving equal
attention to masculinities in the study of ecology and the non-human world. The need for such
research will help our species understand the roots of why our existence has long been polarized
and divided. Therefore, ecological masculinities were introduced to reshape men’s relationships
with nature. Dr. Paul M. Pulé for instance wrote his PhD thesis in 2013 on ecological mascu-
linism. The project entitled “A declaration of Caring: Towards Ecological Masculinism”1 constructs the
theoretical framework of ecological masculinities and addresses malestream norms and hyper-
masculinities. These two terms are presented as the underlying reasons behind environmental
degradation since they restrict men’s abilities to care and are consequently standing in the way of
sustainability and planetary recovery. Instead of painting men as the devil in the story of nature’s
destruction, the thesis puts the oppression of men under the spotlight as the main reason why
men are taught to restrict their caring and nurturing capacities. Not being allowed to show care,
love, and nurture prevents individuals from fostering selfless and caring relationships with other
humans and non-humans. As a result, the emotions that are allowed and accepted in multiple
societies, especially Western ones revolve around anger, frustration, and oppression as they’re not
viewed as emotions in the first place.
Pr. Martin Hultman and Dr. Paul M. Pulé wrote Ecological Masculinities: Theoretical Foundations
and Practical Guidance (2018) together where they brought important theories and perspectives
to the complexities of the interrelation of gender and the environment. As a response to the
numerous publications where the hegemonic masculinities became the ultimate cause of envi-
ronmental crises, both authors produced a pioneering work where gendered ecologies took a
new turn. Unlike former publications that remained within the circle of providing sufficient
arguments to support the masculinities’ statement, Hultman and Pulé’s book took a step forward
by conceptualizing these masculinities and has not left non-binary people out of the gender and
the environmental discourse. The book brings the complexities of masculinities to the table and
simplifies these complexities by deconstructing them and de-essentializing them. The book’s pro-
logue argues that being born into malestream norms forces people to reject emotions and adopt
rationality since emotions imply weakness and rationality implies strength. This message has
long been directed to males while females have been the target of imposed femininity and were
encouraged, if not forced, to rid themselves of any masculine traits. Despite that the masculine
has been drastically associated with domination, authority, and supremacy, it is the hegemonic
kind of masculinism that requires ecofeminists’ attention. In Chapter 30, Lydia Rose calls for
the recognition of heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity within dominating powers.
This is due to the importance of distinguishing gender-specific masculinities from authoritarian
­hetero-masculinities as the latter are the problematic ones.
It’s also important to note that any human being can be the product of western malestream
norms. The gendered conditioning of people based on their biological sexes does not serve

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social hierarchies only; it serves the corporate world in the finest ways. These malestream norms
restrict their followers emotionally and socially and caring becomes limited to very specific
topics such as caring about one’s sports team, career, family, employer, or professional identity.
(Hultman, Pulé 2018) Yet if this masculine care moves beyond caring about the aforementioned
matters, the masculine identity becomes threatened. This can be observed when one shows
queerness in gender or sexual orientation to society, when one talks about their feelings and
mental health, when one acknowledges or admits weaknesses such as phobias or past traumas,
or when one pursues love while not knowing whether it is going to be reciprocated: Vulner-
ability becomes weakness, and weakness has no room in malestreamness. Hultman and Pulé
described this care as “myopic” (Hultman, Pulé 2018) as it is blinded by the set of rules that
prioritize ego, money, power, and oppression over being true to oneself. People, regardless of
their gender identities, who either willingly or reluctantly find themselves in positions where
they must follow these rules, end up living restricted lives. The definition of being human has
long been polarized by gender and heteronormativity, leaving no room for non-conformity
since the latter transforms one’s status from being a human to a subhuman. According to both
authors, masculinities are not linear: They are “structural, personal and unavoidably plural”
(Hultman, Pulé 2018).
Thus, one of the main reasons why there should be an urgency in breaking binaries in gender
and the environment research is the necessity to rectify all former false climate research data
and start more accurate research. Considering that any gender identity that did not fall in one
of the two normative ones was dismissed, the data are false by default since most of it – if not all
of it – consulted and studied human experiences without allowing room for queer, transgender,
and non-binary voices. The focus has been too binary for too long, yet some researchers started
to dismantle this contrasting gemination. For instance, in the aforesaid work of Ruolin E. Miao
and Nicolette L. Cagle, the authors explored how gender and race impacted environmental
identities. To conduct their study, they interviewed 30 undergraduate students from diverse
backgrounds. Some of their interviewees did not identify as neither male nor female. When
providing results based on their interviews, the paper authors did not limit the results to male/
female but added a third gender section entitled “other gender”. The acknowledgment of having
a gender-diverse group and the inclusion of other people’s identities is what led to more explicit
research outcomes. This, however, has not been done in most – if not all – e­ nvironmental
research.
Lucy Nicholas questioned the omnirelevance of sex and gender identity. They described the
compulsory binary understanding of self hood as linked to notions of biological materiality. They
use the reference of intersex births to demonstrate how gender is immediately assigned (which
they refer to as non-consensual gendering) to the baby despite their “ambiguous genitals”, which
led eventually to the intersex rights movement (2014).
By introducing a thorough introduction of Post-genderism, they introduced the importance
of breaking biological determinism by dismantling binary understandings of gender and sexu-
ality. In a postgender world, humans are no longer to be defined by their genitals, gender iden-
tities, sexualities, or reproductive abilities. However, it won’t eliminate the choice of expression
and all identities and orientations would be valid, but not hierarchized. Post-genderism sees sex
for reproduction as obsolete since access to assisted reproductive technologies (ART) is already
available to replace traditional sexual intercourse for the sake of reproduction. From an ecofem-
inist perspective, which has long been defined by its gendered polarisations, assigned binary
gender identities should no longer hold as much space in the conversation as moving towards
fluid identities and acknowledging the existence of a non-binary gender umbrella and a fluid set
of sexual orientations is the only way to ensure the inclusion for all humans and non-humans in
environmental research.

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Towards Queer Hybrid Ecofeminism: The Path to Inclusion

Ecofeminism might have assumed an essentialized gender ever since its genesis resulting in the –
not necessarily intentional – exclusion of intersex and transgender people. In today’s world, where
far-right politics are posing a threat to different vulnerable communities, it is time to re-read
ecofeminism by queering it and freeing it from all essentialist approaches. Essentialism in all its
forms fosters dangerous ideas such as the idealization of womanhood, the superiority of heter-
onormativity, and racial prejudice leading to neo-nationalism. Nevertheless, rejecting it does
not mean rejecting differences. We are not the same, we are different, but we should all be equal
because we share the same thing: our humanity and 99.9% of our DNA. Thus, by dismantling
essentialist ideologies and politics, we will leave room for equality to step in and for discrimina-
tion, oppression, and exclusion to step out. This is where queer theory and queer ecology step in,
bringing an end to essentialized notions of gender, reproduction, and sexuality in ecofeminism.
Having researched ecofeminism for over six years, I gained new perspectives when I visited
the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland in September 2021 to see The Narrow Gate
of the Here-and-Now: Queer Embodiment exhibition. Prototypes: Quantum leaps in trans-semiotics
through psycho-analytical snail serum was the installation that caught my attention the most as it is an
excellent speculative, utopian, revolutionary, posthumanist, and Dadaist multi-screen production
by Doireann O’Malley. Merging posthumanism and ecological feminism is an excellent way to ap-
proach gender, bodies, sexuality, and metamorphosis. Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu provides a detailed
discussion of this merging in Chapter 34 where they define posthumanism as a material-­d iscursive
framework that offers a platform for discussing how human exceptionalism has eradicated material
and conceptual existences and differences of natures, sexualities, and bodies.
O’Malley’s work, which ranges from installations to video productions, revolves around inter-
secting trans experiences, bodily transformations, nature and technology, and gendered perspec-
tives within biotechnology, cybernetics, and quantum physics among many more. The installation
is a combination of computer-generated imagery and atmospheric soundscapes where the protag-
onist is centred on their monologues. Writing these monologues was a result of a collaboration
with psychoanalyst Dr. Andrés Ocazionez and gender psychiatrist Eva Sophie Philips. The first
part sheds the light on a person’s experience transitioning from female to male. The subject’s
monologue walks the watcher through how they feel in their body now their outside look matches
their gender identity. In another scene, the conversation is between a patient and a psychologist.
The patient explicitly describes their dream where they experience holding their own tongue.
They sketch an image of their tongue being attached to another tongue placed in its root. The
patient, who is gender non-conforming, is trying to understand why they had this dream. The
therapist’s analysis associates the metaphoric loss of one’s voice with being disconnected from
one’s physical environment. Losing one’s voice in a world where heteronormativity presides over
queerness means taking a step backwards and leaning towards isolation. Instead of engaging and
being an active and efficient member of the ecosystem, one struggles to navigate a world where
they are barely, if not at all, represented, acknowledged, and celebrated.
After absorbing their therapist’s interpretation of their dream, the patient admits that they have
indeed difficulties communicating their wants, their aspirations, and their desires. They described
that in their dream, when they tried to put their tongue back in their mouth, it suddenly started
expanding and it filled their whole mouth. The therapist responded by interpreting what the “fe-
male” mouth stands for. They told the patient that a female mouth is a signifier of receptivity [...]
inviting penetration and represents control and transformation.
This installation elucidates the interrelation between gender and the environment pertaining
to identity. It highlights how gender non-conformity and one’s inability to develop a sense of
belonging affect the way one relates to the world.

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Considering that in most cultures – if not all – a person’s gender is assigned to them at birth and
sometimes even before that, it is only reasonable to question why humans are expected to con-
tinue to adhere to a role that was biologically accidental. Ecofeminism owes it to non-conforming
gender identities to revolutionize its theoretical backgrounds. And by incorporating postgende-
rism and including identities other than the blunt male/female ones is much needed to advance
towards a more intersectional and comprehensive scholarship.

Conclusion
Interdisciplinary conversations about sex, gender, and finding our place within the natural envi-
ronment need to be more present in ecofeminist research. Opening the door to an anti-essentialist
and postgender cosmogony is necessary in order to build a framework inclusive of all identities.
Destabilizing the gender binary as well as the conjectures about heteronormative sexuality and
defying the belief that human bodies are meant to be static will revolutionize climate justice and
environmental research. Highlighting the contrast between the corrective surgical procedures
that are imposed on non-normative bodies and the biotechnology available nowadays to trans-
gender and non-binary people should foreground the importance of physical integrity and bodily
autonomy. This latter is an important factor in shaping one’s connection to the world. This, free-
ing gender expression from the femininities and masculinities assigned to them has a liberatory
effect that enables people to explore their bodies without prejudice. By doing so, an abundance
of endless futurities is unlocked for individuals as they know that existing in the natural world
means the possibility of living in continuous metamorphosis. With this chapter, I invite scholars
and researchers to follow up with intersectional, ecological, queer, feminist research inclusive of
transgender, agender, fluid, and non-binary, identities first and foremost for the sake of represen-
tation and acknowledgement, and for the sake of tracing a new path for postgender environmental
research.

Note
1 Paul Mark Pulé does not use the term “masculinism” anymore. He wrote in a footnote in his 2018 book:
  It is worth noting that I (Paul speaking here) deferred to the use the term “ecological masculinism” in
my doctoral dissertation (Pulé, 2013). This pains me to admit now. I’m sorry to say that it was the prod-
uct of graduate student naïveté; I was not supervised by a gender scholar and did not do the very appro-
priate and necessary filtering of the term that I should have. I got excited about the idea of positioning
my research as the mirror image to ecological feminism, not realising that the -ism suffix made reference
to emboldening Logics of Domination (Plumwood, 1993). I take full responsibility for that miss (sharing
an embarrassing facepalm with you here). My thesis has consequently been received by some, prior to
reading the content, as a men’s rights treatise, which has been the source of great consternation for me,
since that research, limited as it was and a solid stepping stone as all good Ph.D. journeys ought to be,
proposed exactly the opposite! I hope those of you who are well-grounded (eco)(pro)feminists and would
understandably take issue with my earlier use of ecological masculinism can look past my graduate stu-
dent folly (Pulé 2018).

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 30
HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY AND
ECOFEMINIST LITERATURE
Lydia Rose

Introduction
In most literature (including scientific literature) tropes of domination exist in the form of met-
aphors and/or narratives as well as in norms and manners to reproduce existing social structures
(Rose 1997), many times unconsciously. Hegemony is a concept that refers to the covert means in
which the masses consent to the power relationships within society, the leaders that dominate, and
cultural norms regarding power (Rose 1997). This consent is rooted in the social structure that
normalizes oppression as routine or as normative. Cultural norms both formal (laws, policies, and
rules) and informal (expectations of behavior, manners, and common courtesies) make up how
life is lived through daily practices. These daily practices are typically supported and manipulated
by those who control the means by which a society produces, distributes, and consumes. Antonio
Gramsci referred to this dynamic type of hegemonic power as cultural hegemony (Rose 1997).

Hegemonic Masculinity: An Extension of Cultural Hegemony

Hegemonic masculinity is an extension of cultural hegemony that brings attention to the ways
that masculinity is embedded within the culture normalizing a masculine-based domination
(Rose and Bartoli 2021a). The domination of nature and the domination of women have a shared
history with hegemonic masculinity. The dominant literary products that are quickly and easily
disseminated normalize hegemonic masculinity. While much of the early ecofeminist literature
did not use the term “hegemonic masculinity,” the core elements are embedded within ecofemi-
nist thought. For example, discussions of how women are controlled in the same manner in which
nature is controlled in literature are discussed in much environmental work; this focus on con-
trolling natural environments and exploiting the resources provided by the planet is at the core of
the emergence and development of ecofeminism in general (Khanduja 2017).
Ecofeminist literature has been at the forefront pushing back at, working to reveal, and dis-
mantling hegemonic masculinity within cultural products and practices. Adams and Gruen (2014,
12) write “Ecofeminism addresses the various ways that sexism, heteronormativity, racism, co-
lonialism, and ableism are informed by and support speciesism and how analyzing the ways these
forces intersect can produce less violent, more just practices.” It is important to recognize the
connection between heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity within dominating forces of
production, distribution, and consumption, especially in literary products.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-32321
 Lydia Rose

Many of the chapters in this book bring to light the Eurocentric colonial practice of extractive
exploitation of natural environments and the bodies of Indigenous people, particularly women.
This chapter will highlight several chapters that specifically emphasize resistance and revolution-
ary practices to counter such nefarious practices of hegemonic masculinity and resist cultural
hegemony. Chapter 5, Vietnamese Literature and Ecofeminism by Quynh H. Vo, is a prime example
of how Vietnamese fiction writers can be read using ecowomanism to elucidate the destruction of
natural lands and human lives, as well as the endless struggle against colonial violence character-
istic of the hegemonic masculinity of imperialism, war, and global capitalism.
Chapter 7, Tamil Literature and Ecofeminism by Chitra Sankaran and Gayartri Thanu Pillai, brings
to light resistance to hegemonic masculinity by tracing the emergence of gendering and analyzing
human-nonhuman exchanges through traditional esthetic theories, particularly the concept of
“thinai” in ancient Sangam literature and the ways that thinai is re-emerging in contemporary
Tamil literature following colonialization. Chapter 17, South American Literature and Ecofeminism
by Nicolás Campisi, presents the ecofeminist theory put forth by Patricia de Souza that provides a
revolutionary praxis, particularly by rejecting the first person singular. Campisi’s chapter analyzes
multiple South American literary works of ecofeminism through the concept of bodies-territories
to drive home the point that the natural environment and landscapes are part of an “embodied”
experience connecting human and nonhuman forces.

Ecofeminism
Many feminist scholars and activists have worked and are working to bring awareness to the many
intersectional ways in which women are dominated in society with a conceptual awareness of gen-
dering within the forces and practices of “isms.” Various forms of feminism have been articulated
including liberal (Baehr 2017), radical (Atkinson 2000), socialist (Black 1989), womanist (Can-
non 1988), and Black feminist (Collins 1990), all logically falling within ecofeminism (Rose and
Bartoli 2021b; Warren 2000). Literature written by feminist scholars typically refers to the focus
of domination as rooted in the dominating forces of production, distribution, and consumption
patterns. However, there are many intermingling, dynamic elements, and practices of domination
within society. People of color and Indigenous scholars have furthered feminist scholarship by em-
phasizing intersectionality. Along the way constructions of multiple masculinities have emerged
as gay white men became politically active. Black men have struggled against the connection of
Black masculinity and constructions of deviance rooted in the structures of enslavement and Jim
Crow laws illuminated through the literature of the Black Power movement, and more recently,
the Black Lives Matter movement (Rose and Bartoli 2021b). Structural practices of colonialism,
imperialism, and capitalism are supported by patriarchal values, norms, and beliefs, creating an
ideological superstructure that views many oppressive practices as normal and expected.
Ecofeminism, like all theoretical perspectives, is a collection of work with no single, hardline
definition. Rather, ecofeminism is a living, growing body of knowledge that can be understood as
a praxis to dismantle oppressions, and hegemonic masculinity in particular, by taking into account
the whole of environmental and socio-ecological systems including the physical, biological, intel-
lectual, and behavioral. To this end of dismantling oppressions, ecofeminist scholarship and the
scholarship on hegemonic masculinity can be understood as converging within a socio-ecological
model to decenter patriarchal practices and the exploitation of fauna (people and animals), flora
(plants), and the earth’s nonrenewable resources. Chapter 12, Turkish Literature and Ecofeminism by
Hatice Ӧ vgü Tüzün, highlights literary works that seek to raise awareness of environmental issues
and “interdependent systems of oppressions.” Such oppressions can be identified as founded on
hegemonic masculinity. Additionally, this chapter exemplifies how literary Turkish fiction serves
to recover ancient Turkish belief systems (like Shamanism), myths, and tools that could perhaps

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work to resist and counter practices that reify the separation of nature and the self, possibly inspir-
ing political action to resist exploitation and destructive beliefs and attitudes.
Hegemonic masculinity is embedded with western technology, which encroaches on social and
biological relationships by changing and manipulating natural environments and natural processes
of life. Thus, a major element of ecofeminism is activism, making life on our planet “less violent”
and “more just” not just for women, but for all species (see Chapter 25, Activism and Ecofeminist
Literature). Since the peak of the industrial revolution, concern for environmental conservation and
restoration has been centered on women’s movements. Women gathered to alleviate oppressions
and outcomes of poverty, many times starting with environmental issues related to health and
wellness. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) was a literary product that served to inspire
environmental activism, fostering an environmental consciousness that led to the establishment of
the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and the first Earth Day.
The ecofeminist movement early in the 1970s emphasized male domination and identified
patriarchy as an ideological concept that contributed to the control and destruction of nature.
Feminist literature examined constructions of women as connected to nature. The concept of
hegemonic masculinity emerged in the 1980s to describe and explain the fluid, dynamic ways
that white men of power maintain and reproduce their positions of power as a normative practice,
dominating women, nature, and other emergent forms of masculinities. The seminal work on
hegemonic masculinity emerged in the academic literature by interrogating patriarchy, gender,
power, class, imperialism, and masculinities, most notably in Robert W. Connell and James W.
Messerschmidt’s (2005) scholarly article “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.”
This heavily-cited article popularized studies of masculinity within the fields of gender studies
(including feminist research) and critical race theory – fields that had been pushing back at the
then-dominant scholarship that articulated linear power relations and static sex roles. Some of the
static gendered practices associated with dominant masculinity included emotional detachment,
competitiveness, and sexual objectification of women (Bird 1996). Bird (1996) found that while
individual dissatisfaction with these practices existed, normalizing hegemonic masculinity per-
sisted. Connell and Messerschmidt suggested that scholarship on hegemonic masculinity could
focus on the relational aspect of multiple genders and gender dynamics with an emphasis on a
holistic approach that considers agency by subordinated groups. This was similar to the work by
Anthony J. Lemelle (2010) on Black masculinity and multiple genders that go beyond the dichot-
omized gendering of men and women.
Complicity in normalizing hegemonic masculinity is achieved through ideological culture and
societies’ institutions. The cultural aspects of hegemonic masculinity institute patriarchy through-
out social institutions and industrial complexes such as family, education, government, military,
prison, and medical systems. The literary works designed for children serve as a socializing ele-
ment. Chapter 41, Children’s Fiction and Ecofeminism by Anja Höing, brings to light the essentialist
concept of “the child” as existing within hegemonic dualistic structures of child/nature versus
adult/culture, similar to the way that women are dualistically structured within hegemonic mas-
culine practices as woman/nature versus man/culture. Höing acknowledges that the major project
of children’s fictional literature is to guide the maturation process to adulthood. Although not
historically emphasized, ecofeminist children’s literature has the potential to counter-hegemonic
masculinity that emphasizes the self within the colonial, masculine hierarchies dominant in most
societies with socio-historical practices of slavery and colonialism.
Dominant hierarchies position an alpha white male at the top, supported by non-alpha males
and women, with both covert and overt practices and ideological belief systems. The abstract
nature of hegemonic masculinity has inspired scholarship to explore and discuss the possibilities
in an underlying belief that other forms of masculinities and femininities could become hege-
monic. However, as dominant forms of masculinity are questioned, interrogated, and resisted,

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the political reassertion of patriarchy re-emerges in different ways and spaces. One way is toxicity
characterized by violence and other overt oppressive practices to position a patriarchal stance that
continues to control women, non-alpha males, trans individuals, and nature. Other ways are more
covert, occurring through oppressive practices deployed through the language and practice of
leadership, development, progress, and abundance. In addition, leisure and sports are experienced
and practiced in ways that reassert hegemonic masculinity.

Tropes and Narratives of Domination

The omnipresence of hegemonic masculinity is reproduced by being embedded in many cultural
products, tropes, and narratives that depict controlling women and nature. Cultural products in-
clude many forms of literary products that go beyond the tradition of stories and poetry to include
products such as film, music, commercialism, short videos, memes, and other social media outlets.
Online environments have become a space in which hegemonic masculinity prevails even when
contested. Trott (2020) conducted a network analysis of comments that were posted on a short
YouTube video designed to contribute to a campaign against bullying, sexual harassment, and
toxic masculinity. The backlash to the video resulted not only in over a million downvotes but
became fodder for countless memes and social media postings ridiculing the campaign and reas-
serting traditional hegemonic tropes of domination. Hegemonic masculinity is not only present
within traditional social interactions but has also found an overt place in digital, online environ-
ments and within digital online literary products of consumption. Trott’s study analyzes the pub-
lished comments to “identify how digital tactics are employed by a masculine public to achieve
digital hegemony in the networked sphere” (Trott 2020, 1). Not only does Trott’s study exhibit
a dominant “masculine public,” but it also serves as an example of expanding notions of literary
products – people spend time writing, reading, and responding to comments about online con-
tent. While the content may be contesting ideological constructions of masculinity, Trott found
the backlash within the comments online to have a layered element within a digitally networked
public that reproduces global hegemonic masculinities.
In Chapter 17, South American Literature and Ecofeminism, Campisi presents Carolina Caycedo’s
work as an artist and activist who has created performance pieces where she uses objects from as
well as members of the community as “political dissent.” Such creative performative art has the
potential to counter hegemonic practices. While dissent occurs, there are still many ways in which
women, nature, and other species are controlled and manipulated that represent hegemonic mas-
culinity. The control of nature can mean many things from the basics of reproduction and change
to the direct control and manipulation of land, water, vegetation, and animals. This control is
greatly tied to the means of production in human society, particularly exploitative capitalism.
Chapter 5, Vietnamese Literature and Ecofeminism, examines two literary works that can specifically
describe how such control and manipulation took place during the Vietnam war, the most harm-
ful example being when the United States military sprayed the country with Agent Orange in the
forest, releasing a lethal poison to clear the vegetation and expose Vietnamese soldiers who were
taking shelter in the forest. The result was the destruction of animals, trees, and other plants as
well as the humans who relied on the forests and lands for subsistence. This practice is indicative
of an era in which imperialism is founded on the control of nature, natural environments, and the
inhabitants of those lands.
This era is known as the Anthropocene, whereby people control all aspects of nature:
­mono-agriculture, the hunting and destruction of free-born animals, the mass reproduction of
domesticated animals for food and consumer products, and the reconstruction of the environment
to manipulate and redesign land masses to extract minerals, metals, coal, and crude oil for human

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consumption. Such manipulations of the environment are situated as male-dominated activities

and careers. Much of this manipulation involves tools and equipment that are constructed as mas-
culine representations. It is in this sense that hegemonic masculinity dominates the consciousness
of social practices that control nature as normative. These examples of hegemonic masculinity
dominate our literature and fictional products. For example, Rose and Bartoli (2021a) conducted
an ecofeminist analysis of the film Avatar to highlight the tropes of domination within cultural
and literary products. Such storytelling, especially in fiction, affects the subconscious, (re)pro-
ducing hegemonic masculinity in different forms. Lifestyles and norms – even those that are
considered leisure activities and sports – reproduce standardized hegemonic masculinity through
narratives and tropes of domination.

Ecofeminism and Hegemonic Masculinity: The Hunting Narrative

Ecofeminism is a holistic approach to understanding and dismantling dominant forms of mascu-
linity that serve to oppress, subordinate, and control women, nature, and non-dominant forms of
masculinity. Recent ecofeminist work emphasizes a socio-ecological model to understand the mul-
tiplicity and dynamic nature of power relations within a complex system. Seeking to understand
how people experience nature and the ways that nature is manipulated to re-assert hegemonic
masculinity falls within ecofeminism. One example is the way in which the sport of hunting exerts
a dominant masculinity narrative even when other genders participate in the sport. In the 1990s,
the number of women who participated in hunting as a sport doubled (Fritzgerald 2005). Even
with this doubling, women are participating in male-dominated and male-defined sports, many of
which still very much exude hegemonic masculinity. The superficial means in which the sport of
hunting is feminized is merely in superficial esthetics (e.g., painting weapons pink or bedazzling
with sparkle), while females sexualize weapons as phallic symbols. The goal of the sport can still be
viewed and described as fundamental hegemonic control, domination, and destruction as modeled
by male masculinity, reproducing a “hunting” narrative (and practice) to assert masculinity.
The ideal masculine prototype of the weaponized hunter is very much unattainable by most
men and women, but valorizing the ideal serves as a means by which hegemonic masculinity
is continually reproduced and sustained. Chapter 46, Fantasy and Ecofeminism by Rhian Waller,
provides insight on how natural worlds are reimagined. Indeed, the interrelationship between
the politics of gender, landscapes, and the female body is embedded in fantasy literary works.
Waller describes how landscapes are linked with the female body, where the land is many times
described in terms of a woman’s body, while women’s bodies are described in terms of land. Fan-
tasy, according to Waller, is not bound by realism. That is, norms of domination and oppression
can be contested. But fantasy, according to Waller, reflects the realities within which the fantasy is
imagined. In fantasy sword and sorcery works, Waller finds that male figures outnumber women
figures. Waller also finds that many of the stories will have “threads of eroticization and threats of
rape.” These kinds of works can be categorized as part of the hunter trope of domination or the
hyper-masculine hunting narrative.
In real life, the woman/nature – male/culture connection is not a cultural dichotomy that
is easy to bypass and ignore, whether in fantasy or in the practice of sports like hunting, which
directly attacks free-born animals in their natural environment. To preserve and control wildlife
and natural environments, hegemonic masculine practices are built into laws and regulations
that limit the number of animals that can be hunted and when they can be hunted (i.e., hunting
seasons). The outcome of such laws is to preserve an ecological system that serves the goals and
pleasure of the hunter, as well as to preserve a static (un)natural environment esthetic. However,
not everyone abides by the rules and laws.

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Green Criminology: Hunting and Blood Sports

Green criminology, that is, the study of crimes against the environment, is an emerging field
(Wolf 2011). Environmental justice and green criminology are two areas within the scholarly
literature that converge when examining the impact of hegemonic masculinity on the natural
environment and the earth’s resources, including water, air, soil, and free-born animals.
Studies that connect hegemonic masculinity and ecofeminism are typically centered around
the abuse of the environment and non-human animals. For example, Ragnhild Sollund (2020)
examines wildlife crimes as crimes of hegemonic masculinity by connecting green criminology,
ecofeminism, and hegemonic masculinity. Green criminology examines offenders involved in the
illegal wildlife trade and the illegal killing of endangered predators. Sollund finds that the ma-
jority of offenders committing harms and crimes against nonhuman animals are males, and these
crimes serve as a means to express dominant masculinities. Using ecofeminism, Sollund’s research
explores how patterns of abuse and oppression have their source in androcentric culture and power
and how the ideals that govern our treatment of non-human, free-born animals are engrained by
patriarchal values. Sollund (2020) describes how the sport of hunting is used as an example of how
boys who are subjected to the practice of hunting are taught that the killing of an animal serves as
a rite of passage – that is, killing an animal during the hunt transforms the boy into a man.
Offenders of wildlife laws and regulations are likely to be engaged in a practice that is founded
on an ideology whereby the killing of animals serves as a re-enactment of the rite of passage to
manliness. Sollund (2020) uses the example of wildlife trafficking as a green crime to describe
how hegemonic masculinity serves as a foundational ideology that supports the capture, selling,
and killing of protected wildlife, as well as other types of violence to free-born animals.
Green crimes have been organized using the concepts of ecology, laws, and victimology (Wolf
2011). Wildlife crimes are prime examples of hegemonic masculinity, especially when protected
animals are killed and displayed as trophies. The cultural practices of such green crimes play out
in fictional products as narratives and tropes of domination. The narratives of the hunt, the rites
of passage tied to the killing of animals, and the abuse of animals are used in storytelling as met-
aphors and allegories, especially when symbolically describing romantic relationships and inter-
actions. Veblen (1899) in The Theory of the Leisure Class describes how women were first captured
and used as trophies in barbarian cultures. This barbarian practice of collecting trophies is very
much part of a trope of domination reproducing hegemonic masculinity seen in many literary
products. Narratives such as those that revert to the practice of collecting trophies, treat women
as spoils of war and conflict, or display animals as captured and domesticated are seen throughout
history and literature, reproducing practices that justify and valorize male domination. The saving
and displaying of the head of the hunted serves as a trophy to display especially if the animal is a
protected species. While many practices that harm animals and the environment are outlawed,
criminalizing the behavior, the metaphors and narratives continually reproduce the valorizing of
hegemonic masculinity.
Hunting narratives are many times justified within the cultural practices related to the histor-
ical basics of survival: food sourcing and home protection. Today, hunting in most nations is a
sport where enthusiasts emphasize guns, ammunition, and travel. “Blood sports” are coordinated
activities for entertainment or leisure involving bloodshed and ending with death. Predominately
men engage in or are drawn to participate in and/or watch blood sports (Iliopoulour and Rosen-
baum 2013). In the case of dog fighting, typically men raise an animal and then gather with other
men to have their dog fight with other dogs to the death. Cockfighting involves pitting a rooster
(raised to be aggressive) to fight another rooster to the death. In both dog fighting and cock-
fighting, the winner is the owner of the animal that survives. Iliopoulour and Rosenbaum (2013)
explored three theories of why men are attracted to blood sports, focusing on dog fighting (Evans,

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Gauthier, and Forsyth 1998), cockfighting (Geertz 2005), and bull fighting (Marvin 2007). In
the example of dogfighting, they present Evans and colleagues’ (1998) theory of how dogfighting
subcultures provide a space in which working-class/lower-class men can symbolically express and
validate their masculinity through the means in which one dog honorably fights another dog to
the death. Evans et al. (1998) surmise that working-class men have fewer alternative avenues for
achieving status than do middle-class or professional men.
However, within the working enterprises as well as academia, the tropes and narratives of dog
fighting among middle-class professionals are quite present, many times instigated by upper-class
professions. In academia, for example, activities such as “merit awards” can be likened to a “dog
fight.” One’s achievements, academic products, and constructions of influence are pitted against
one’s colleagues to vie for accolades and monetary rewards; the fight is set up by upper manage-
ment under the guise of motivating high achievers. The same can be observed in capital-driven
enterprises that vie for sales and profit.
The semantics of cock fighting is a metaphor for phallic dominance with language and prac-
tices that contribute to the naturalizing of hegemonic masculinity. The narrative of cockfighting
is very much tied to the ongoing sport, although it is illegal in most countries. Iliopoulour and
Rosenbaum (2013), in trying to understand why men are attracted to blood sports, reviewed the
theory put forth by Geertz (2005), who visited Bali in the 1950s and observed men engaged in
cockfighting. His theory included ties to status and prestige, whereby the cock represented the
men as well as provided a means by which men experienced in an indirect way both rivalry and
comradery.
Blood sports like dog fighting and cock fighting are illegal in the United States and typically
involve illegal gambling. The tropes and narratives of the “dog fight” and the “cock fight” abound
in literature reproducing hegemonic masculinity. The fight to the death as a manner of manliness
reinforces existing relationships over the control of others, women, animals, and nature.
In Chapter 17, South American Literature and Ecofeminism, Campisi presents the work of Mari-
sol de la Cadena and discusses the role of Indigenous leaders as mediators between humans and
“other-than-human beings.” Other-than-human beings include more than just animals; it in-
cludes lakes and mountains as sentient beings whose existence needs to be taken into account in
political decisions. Such practices have already been put into place. The Whanganui River, the
third-­longest river in New Zealand, became the first waterway in the world to get legal person-
hood. The Whanganui has two guardians that can represent the river in court. This practice of
recognizing the “other-than-human” may be an important step in the ecofeminist movement to
protect earth beings that go beyond the myopic perception of life on earth as elevating human life
over all other forms of life.

Conclusion
Ecofeminism can work to redefine humanistic relationships and resist hegemonic masculinity.
Literary works that come from an ecofeminist perspective illustrate ways that the imagination
can be used to create eco-friendly, humanistic norms, such as masculinities/femininities without
hierarchies.
Vo’s Chapter 5 on Vietnamese literature highlights works that are themselves revolutionary in
reclaiming and controlling historical narratives that militarized, imperial, and colonial powers
attempted to erase or rewrite, overcoming hegemonic masculinity in constructions of historical
war records. Vo uses three main works of fiction – The Lotus Season, The Smoke Cloud, and the
novel The Mountain Sings – to exemplify ecowomanist/ecofeminist perspectives. While Vo does
not use the language of “tropes of domination,” the substance of domination is seen through Vo’s
descriptions of global exploitation, exploitation of environments, and exploitation of women in

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these literary works. The framework of ecowomanism, according to Vo, provides a means of
empowerment. This helps transcend traditional narratives to embrace narratives of change and
empowerment in understanding Vietnamese women situated within historical trajectories of op-
pression and the exploitation of the environment.
Sankaran and Pillai’s Chapter 7 on Tamil literature finds that traditional frameworks such as
thinai can offer a different narrative, perhaps one that can overcome hegemonic masculinity. By
focusing on a range of literature from ancient to contemporary works, the authors draw connec-
tions between how women and nature are devalued, not just in Tamil, but in nearly every soci-
ety. The authors analyze thinai literary products, clearly explaining how the poems go beyond
describing landscapes to include the significance of women and men, as well as cultural practices.
The authors describe the grammatical rules of content for thinai literature that lend an analysis to
tropes of domination for landscapes, genders, and identities as related to the land.
Tüzün’s Chapter 12 on Turkish literature documents how women have rebelled against re-
strictive conditions of a culture that valorizes hegemonic masculinity. The author acknowledges
that relationships of domination and subordination must be addressed in order to restore ecolog-
ical harmony. Tüzün highlights how Buket Uzuner’s literary work presents spirituality through
eco-shamanism to overcome the traditional binary thinking typical in supporting industrial eco-
nomic structures and cultures that are responsible for the extinction of non-human animals and
gross polluting industries.
The concept of bodies-territories from Campisi’s Chapter 17 on South American literature is
an important concept to go beyond the individual and instead link to all bodies and landscapes.
The goal of tearing apart patriarchal structures and resisting extractive projects such as mining
and hydroelectric facilities has been put forth consistently by people of Indigenous and African
descent. Literary works discussed in this chapter make a direct link between the violence in and
on women’s bodies and communal lands as the practice of Western colonization. The colonial
narrative is the most prevalent trope of domination that is widespread across the globe. The patri-
archal foundation of the colonial narrative is toxic hegemonic masculinity aimed at taking pos-
session of and control of land and bodies (women’s bodies, workers bodies, and animal bodies). A
current strategy in the environmental movement to protect the environment and waterways from
pollution, polluting industries, and destructive extractive practices is to assign personhood status
to land and rivers. Likewise, Campisi’s chapter describes the collection of Indigenous stories and
histories that emphasize the sanctity of the environment as well as the preservation of language as
resistance to western exploitation of the environment and propagation of consuming garbage per
the neoliberal practices of gross consumerism.
In Chapter 41, Children’s Fiction and Ecofeminism, Höing acknowledges the potential of ecofemi-
nism to have a stronger stance in writings for children to develop an ecofeminist ethic of humanity
with nature. The harm of dualism or binary thinking of child/adult and nature/human is similar
to the harm that comes from dichotomizing women/men and nature/culture that ecofeminists
have been countering since early thinking on ecofeminism. The trope of domination that comes
from the dichotomizing of child/adult is founded on hegemonic masculinity, patriarchy, and pa-
ternalism. Höing’s explores the potential of ecofeminism to counter these tropes of domination in
children’s literature rather than naturalizing the harmful dualistic thinking that is typical.
Fantasy has just as much potential to provide ecofeminist ideals to readers, as seen in Waller’s
Chapter 46, Fantasy and Ecofeminism. However, as Waller describes in her chapter, traditional
patriarchal tropes of domination that establish and re-establish hegemonic masculinity, like sexu-
alized rape narratives and master/slave narratives, are rampant in fantasy fiction. However, Waller
presents examples of fantasy fiction that demonstrate resistance to these traditional tropes of dom-
ination by allowing for push-back and reimaging of relationships and core thoughts regarding

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gendered, racialized, and minoritized peoples and non-human animals in the complex struggle
against ecological destruction.
Greta Gaard writes,

For any egalitarian socioeconomic and eco-political transformation, such as that advocated
by ecofeminism to be possible, both individuals and institutions need to shift away from
overvaluing exclusively white, male, and masculinized attributes and behaviors, jobs, envi-
ronments, economic practices, laws and political practices, in order to recognize and enact
eco-political sustainability and ecological genders.
(Gaard 2014, 225)

As this handbook demonstrates, literary works provide critical resources to help make the tran-
sition from oppressive cultures of dichotomized genders into more egalitarian cultural products
and practices.

References
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Atkinson, Ti-Grace. 2000. “Radical Feminism.” In Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, edited by
Barbara A. Crow. New York: New York University Press. https://www.google.com/books/edition/
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 31
INTERSECTIONALITY AND
ECOFEMINIST LITERATURE
Chan Kit-sze Amy

Introduction
The concept of intersectionality was promulgated by Kimbrele Crenshaw in a 1989 article in
which she challenged the value of feminist theory to Black women. In a strict sense, intersec-
tionality refers to the marginalization of Black women in the interface among gender, race, and
class hierarchies. In the old days, Black women were said to be “doubly oppressed” due to their
gender and race. By delineating the conditions where Black women lived under in some real-life
cases, Crenshaw (1989, 149) criticized the limitations of the “single-issue analyses” of feminist
theories and conceptualized the idea of intersectionality. Though Crenshaw and others have been
strengthening the concept during the past 30 years (Carastathis 2016; Collins 2016; Crenshaw
1991, 2019a, 2019b, 2023), it appears to become a cliché (Carastathis 2016).
In this chapter, I am going to bring in some concepts connected to Crenshaw’s original concept
of intersectionality, that is race, class and gender as well as ecology and feminism to the discussion
of ecofeminist literary texts with the aim to reinvigorate and reinforce the importance of inter-
sectionality in feminist studies. In Crenshaw’s words,

The intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that
does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner
in which Black women are subordinated.
(1989, 140)

As exemplified in various chapters of this collection, ecofeminist literature is gaining ascendence

as one of the most important genres in the twenty-first century due to its interconnection with
various cultural concepts (such as postcolonialism, postmodernism, posthumanism, new material-
ism, animal studies, affect theory, the Anthropocene, etc.), and also pressing issues (such as climate
change). Since some of these cultural concepts have been thoroughly discussed in other chapters,
I am not going to introduce those in detail and will refer to the respective chapters for more de-
tails; instead, this chapter will mainly focus on the discussion of how intersectionality works by
analyzing selected literary works.
According to Trexler (2015), the bibliography of climate fiction (cli-fi) has grown to 150 novels
and it has continued to swell. Interestingly, the genres of these cli-fi span from literature (Doris
Lessing, Jeanette Winterson, Barbara Kingsolver), science fiction (Kim Stanley Robertson, Ur-
sula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler) to bestsellers. Nevertheless, not all cli-fi novels

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-33331
 Chan Kit-sze Amy

have an ecofeminist concern and vice versa, not all ecofeminist literary works have their focus
on climate change. As Ralph points out in Chapter 44, Climate Fiction and Ecofeminism, Michael
Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004) is cli-fi but it is masculinist. The literary works in this chapter
are selected based on the relevance to the cultural concepts that I would like to discuss in relation
to intersectionality.

Nectar in a Sieve (1954): Colonialism, Anthropocene, Capitalocene

Kamala Markandaya’s novel, Nectar in a Sieve, is one of the earliest Indian ecofeminist novels.
Nathan and Rukmani, a newly-wed young couple, earn their living on a rented plot of land.
Though the land does not belong to them, they work very hard on it and enjoy several years of
self-sufficient life. While Nathan grows crop, Rukmani has her own small garden to grow differ-
ent types of vegetables. Their wish is to save enough money to buy off the plot of land from the
landowner one day. Contrary to their wish, their lives get deteriorated with the “development”
(or maldevelopment in Vandana Shiva’s terms) of the village. At the end, they are almost reduced
to beggars if not with the support of one of their sons. Rukmani is the youngest daughter of the
village headman. With three elder sisters, Rukmani is not blessed with a dowry and thus can
only marry down to a tenant farmer. Nathan is a kind-hearted and hardworking man who loves
and respects his wife. Upon knowing Rukmani can read and write (which is rather unusual for a
village girl), he compliments her instead of stopping her from writing and reading “as lesser men
might have done” (Markandaya 1954, 11) in Rukmani’s words.
The narration makes it clear that Rukmani’s misfortunate is not due to oppression from males
but is a result of the intersection of several other factors. Farmers’ livelihood depends on the cli-
mate and all their toils will be in vain if there is bad weather. In traditional textual analysis, the
novel is a “classic pastoral narrative” (Patil 2019, 37) and Nathan and Rukmani are victims of the
cruel nature:

The drought continued until we lost count of the time. Day after day the pitiless sun blazed
down, scorching whatever still struggled to grow and baking the earth hard until at last it
split and great irregular fissures gaped in the land. Plants died and the grasses rotted, cattle
and sheep crept to the river that was no more and perished there for lack of water, lizards and
squirrels lay prone and gasping in the blistering sunlight.
(Markandaya 1954, 69–70)

Rukmani is smart enough (she is actually the wisest character in the novel) to foresee troubles
starting from the day the owner of the tannery buys the farmland from the villagers. Her neigh-
bours are glad to sell their farmland at good prices and some get a job at the tannery later. Most
villagers are happy with the construction of the tannery since it brings workers and their families
into the village and they spend lavishly on rice and vegetables with their pay. Rukmani also ben-
efits from them since she can sell her produce at a much higher price. When the construction is
completed, the workers are all gone and the villagers are sorry to see them go. But not Rukmani.
She says that it is true that they are able to make more money but they can no longer afford sugar,
dhal or ghee. She laments that,

They lay their hands upon us and we are all turned from tilling to barter, and hoard our silver
since we cannot spend it, and see our children go without the food that their children gorge,
and it is only in the hope that one day things will be as they were that we have done these
things.
(Markandaya 1954, 25)

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The tannery keeps on expanding by buying more and more farmland from the villagers. The
tanning process not only uses a lot of water but also pollutes water with toxic chemicals which
worsens the water shortage and contaminates the soil in the village. The high living standard cou-
ples with the droughts finally swallow up the villagers. Men are forced to go to the city to seek
work and women are debased to prostitution to survive. At last, Nathan and Rukmani are forced
to leave the village because the land that they rent from a well-off landowner is purchased by the
tannery. In his 1963 publication, Fanon discusses the importance of land to the colonized: “For a
colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost
the land: the land, which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity” (Fanon 1963, 9).
As Rukmani has realized, their misfortune is not only a result of drought but also depletion of
resources and “progress” of an agrarian society to an industrial town. Not only nature is to blame
as we now realize. In the Anthropocene, humans have altered the Earth to such an extent that
now we have to imagine an “ecology without nature” (Morton 2009). The Anthropocene is an
epoch after the Holocene that has yet to gain formal recognition. The Nobel Prize winner, Paul
Crutzen, led a group of geologists who have been proposing that a new geological epoch of Earth’s
history called the Anthropocene should be instituted since 2000. The argument is that human
activity has altered the Earth to such an extent that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have
increased “by 30 percent and methane by 100 percent, triggering significant changes in global tem-
perature and climate” (Trexler 2015, 1). There is no consensus on when the Anthropocene began.
Whereas some mark the year 1610 as the start (Menely and Taylor 2017), more (including Crutzen)
believe that it began with the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century (Clark 2015; Haraway
2016; McCorriston and Field 2020). Grusin (2017) coined the term Anthropocene Feminism to ex-
plore the impact of the Anthropocene on feminism. He asks specifically these two questions: “What
does feminism have to say to the Anthropocene? How does the concept of the Anthropocene impact
feminism?” (x). Colebrook (2017) launches a forthright attack on human progress:

It is possible to imagine a counterhistory of minimal impact on the planet that might still
allow for many of the things we know to be human…. It is possible to think that humans
could never have “progressed” without some planetary damage or alteration but that such
“progress” would not have developed to quite such a suicidal and decadal pitch and would not
have generated the globalism of humanity in general…
(16)

Colebrook’s idea of progression with minimal impact is best exemplified by Ursula Le Guin’s The
Left Hand of Darkness in which the place called Winter has progressed so slowly by choice that
the narrator (who is an envoy from another Ekumen) finds it ridiculous at first but then comes
to appreciate it when he discovers “Winter hasn’t achieved in thirty centuries what Terra once
achieved in thirty decades. Neither has Winter ever paid the price that Terra paid” (2010, 105).
Another striking feature of Winter that the envoy discovers is the people there are “hermaphro-
ditic neuters” (2010, 50) – they are sexless except for the kemmer during which they may choose
to be male or female. Given their distinctive biological feature, they are feminine in nature
which, the envoy deduces, may explain why they never go to war. The envoy opines that they
behave like animals in that respect. That may also explain why they adapt to the extreme cold
weather as best as they can instead of using their full force to change the environment. Byrne
analyses other two novels of Ursula Le Guin in Chapter 45. Another novel of Le Guin, The Word
for World is Forest (1972), imagines a deforested world. The novel is constructed on a rather crude
dichotomy. On one hand is the exploitative and masculine perspective; on the other hand is the
eco-friendly and feminine worldview. Bryne also discusses the novel, Always Coming Home (1985)
and calls it a yin1 utopia.

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If we adopt Timothy Morton’s reading strategy of scaling up, the problems of a village in In-
dia are caused not only by the Anthropocene but the Capitalocene as Donna Haraway argues in
Staying with the Trouble (2016). She writes, “if we could only have one word for these SF2 times,
surely it must be the Capitalocene” (2017, 47). More (2016) explains that the Capitalocene does not
simply mean Capitalism. He writes, “the Capitalocene signifies capitalism as a way of organizing
nature—as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology”. More (2016) claims that the tactic of
Capitalism is “to cheapen, to degrade, or to render inferior in an ethico-political sense, the better to
make Nature cheap in price” (italics in the original). As mentioned above, the villagers are able to
make more money with the arrival of the construction workers and their families and later through
working in the tannery, but what they earn is never able to catch up with the inflation brought by
the tannery. So the more they earn, the poorer they are. What is worse is that in the old days, even
if they didn’t have surplus produce to sell at the market to make money, they had enough rice to
feed their families. Now they don’t even have food since most villagers have sold their land.
The character of Kenny, an English physician who has helped Rukmani and her family
throughout the story, illustrates another point in the intersectionality of ecofeminism. Kenny,
being a white man, belongs to the colonist class. Though he represents the “good guys” who are
sympathetic to the Indians and tries to do something for them (such as raising money for the con-
struction of a hospital), the villagers treat him as a lord or a god. For example, when Rukmani sees
Kenny after a long time, she bends down to kiss his feet (Markandaya 1954, 28). Kenny, though
sympathetic, is annoyed by the stoic attitude of the Indians. When everyone in the village is suf-
fering from a drought, Rukmani tells Kenny that, “We have a little rice—it will last us until times
are better”. Kenny throws a fit and shouts,

“Times are better, times are better,” he shouts. “Times will not be better for many months.
Meanwhile you will suffer and die, you meek suffering fools. Why do you keep this ghastly
silence? Why do you not demand -- cry out for help -- do something? There is nothing in
this country, oh God, there is nothing!”
(Markandaya 1954, 39)

Colonialism does not only produce colonizer/colonized, but also different layers of oppressors. For
example, there is an overseer of the construction workers of the tannery who is Indian yet he is dressed
as Englishmen and gives instructions to the workers in a loud voice to exert his authority. It is, in fact,
these Indian men who directly oppress the villagers and it is also these men who pay the women in the
village for sex. Here we have an example of why the traditional theory of intersectionality that em-
phasizes the intersection of race, class and gender is not adequate to deal with the complicated entan-
glements of class, gender, colonialism, capitalism in this case. Moreover, the tactics of colonialism are
similar in every part of the world. As early as 1991, Mies (2014) points out that, “[t]he ever-increasing
wealth of the rich countries within a limited world is at the expense of what I continue to call the colo-
nies: Nature, women, the (so-called) ‘Third World’, or the “South’”. Patil’s analysis of Hindi literature
also points out that the human attitude to natural resources is influenced by capitalism, globalization
and development (Chapter 8). This is echoed by Campisi’s Chapter 17, South American Literature and
Ecofeminism, where he writes the intersectional nature of South American ecofeminism can be found
in the relationship “between colonialism, extractivism, racism, and gender violence”. A detailed dis-
cussion of postcolonialism and ecofeminism can be found in Değirmenci Altın’s Chapter 33.

So Far From God (1993): Ecosickness and the Affective Turn

Ana Castillo’s novel So Far From God (1993) tells the story of a family of five women in New
Mexico with a touch of magical realism. The mother, Sofia, raised four daughters on her own

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after her husband runs away. All the daughters have their extraordinary tales to tell but the most
interesting one is the youngest girl, La Locha, who died and came back to life at her funeral when
she was three years old. Ever after, she cannot be touched by anyone except her family members
and animals. She has been the caretaker of animals since the age of five or six and is an excellent
trainer of horses. She even sleeps half the time in the stall with the horses (Castillo 1993, 183).
She doesn’t allow any human to touch her because she was repulsed by the smell of humans. She
tells her mother that “all humans bore an odor akin to that which she had smelled in the places
she had passed through when she was dead” (Castillo 1993, 14). Caridad, the second eldest sister,
is the most beautiful girl in the house. She sleeps around with men after she has separated from
her husband. One night she was found mutilated and covered with blood on a road. Nevertheless,
she recovers speedily without even a scar, or in the narrator’s words, she has a “Holy Restoration”
(Castillo 1993, 31). After that incident, she moves out and becomes an apprentice of a healer and
channeller, doña Felicia and learns from her how to treat ailments with herbs. The eldest sister,
Esperanza, has a successful career as an anchor on a local television channel. She then decides to
take up a job in Washington. Before long, she is sent by the television station with a small crew to
cover the war in the Persian Gulf where she and the crew disappear ever since.
While Caridad is a victim of sexual violence and Esperanza one of political violence, Fe, the third
eldest sister, is obviously killed by the toxic chemicals in the factory she worked for. After getting
married to her cousin, she switches her work from the bank to a factory which pays much higher.
Fe, like all other suburban housewives, dreams of having a fancy kitchen with dishwasher, micro-
wave and Cuisinart. To pay for all these appliances, she works overtime on extra duties at her job not
knowing that she will be killed by these extra duties. In fact, most of the people in the area know
that something is slowly killing them when they find cows die in the pasture, sheep get sick, birds
drop dead in mid-flight and fall on the roofs and people’s heads, and many of the women working
in the factory suffer from nausea and severe headaches. They just pretend not to notice because they
enjoy the money. What happens to Fe is her extra duty requires her to take care of some chemicals.
Though she is given some special gloves and cap, apparently the chemical is absorbed by the lung
and the kidneys through her pores. She has been suffering from migraines but she only gets alarmed
when her husband, Casey, says her breath emits a kind of sweet but peculiar smell. But then it is
too late as she has already got cancer inside out. What is most terrifying is the torture she has gone
through before dying. She is literally mutilated by numerous surgeries to remove the cancerous moles
on her body. Unfortunately, she does not resurrect or restore like her two siblings. The novel seems
to suggest that mutilation by men can be healed but that the environment is more deadly. Houser
(2014, 3) argues that ecosickness fiction is an emerging genre in the contemporary world where a
human has an “embodied engagement with environments”. She defines ecosickness as “pervasive
dysfunction; it cannot be confined to a single system and links up the biomedical, environmental,
social, and ethicopolitical; and it shows the imbrication of human and environment” (Houser 2014,
11). She draws on the affective turn in cultural studies to argue how ecosickness fictions are effective
in showing the entanglement of techno-capitalism, human and environment given “the shape of
its narrative, its tropological schemes, and the relations between its characters” (Houser 2014, 16).
The affective turn made popular by Patricia Clough has its origins in Baruch Spinoza, Henri
Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Spinoza in his Ethica or Ethics explains that affect
refers to the variation of power of acting. Contrary to what we believe, the action involves not
only the body because mind and body are not dichotomous but interdependent. He argues that
thought and emotion, good and bad, right and wrong, order and confusion work in the same way.
Thus, Seigworth and Gregg (2010, 1) comment that “[a]ffect arises in the midst of in between-ness”
(italics in the original). Spinoza’s vein of thinking, in fact, is similar to the Daoist yin-yang concept
I discussed in Chapter 2. All the dichotomies are not opposites but are interdependent and fluid.
In Part II, Prop XIV of Ethica, Spinoza (1677) postulates,

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Proof.—The human body (by post. 3 and 6) is affected in many ways by external bodies, and
is disposed to affect external bodies in many ways. But all things which happen to the human
body (by prop. XII, Part II) must be perceived by the human mind. Thus the human mind is
capable of perceiving many things, and is the more capable, etc.; q.e.d.
(129)

The power to affect other bodies and to be affected is what defines affect. Deleuze and Guattari
in What is Philosophy? (1994, 164) claim that what is preserved in itself in an artwork is “a bloc of
sensation, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects”. It is convenient to interpret affect as
subjective feelings; however, we are reminded that affect differentiates itself from affection for
“affect is a more brutal apersonal thing” (Sullivan 2006, 50; italics in the original). He continues
to write that affect “is the matter in us responding and resonating with the matter around us”
(Sullivan 2006, 50). This is to say when we look at an artwork, the affect transmitted between us
and the artwork is a result of the matter in our body responding and resonating with the matter of
the artwork. It is not simply how we feel subjectively about the artwork. It is also how our body
responds to the matter of the artwork.
Ahern discusses how affect theory brings new insights into literary work. Drawing on Spino-
za’s philosophy, Ahern (2018, 45) argues that “literature is a thing”. He continues to write that, “in
the era of the Anthropocene, we might think of literature as a posthuman thing with a materiality
independent of human consciousness…” (Ahern 2018, 45). However, “the thingness of literature
is tied up in its materiality and given meaning only when activated by human consciousness”
(Ahern 2018, 45). In other words, literature has a material body that grants it an existence inde-
pendent of human consciousness, but at the same time, it is given meaning by human conscious-
ness. In Deleuzoguattarian term, every reading of literature is an event. This is echoed by Sullivan
(2006, 44) who proclaims that affect “is an event, or ‘happening’”. He also argues that art

is not made for an already constituted audience but in fact calls its audience into being. It is
through the extraction of ‘new harmonies, new plastic or melodic landscapes, and new rhyth-
mic characters’ that art summons forth this new people
(2006, 68)

Massumi (2002, 35), following the Spinozan and Deleuzoguattarian tradition, writes that,
“[a]ffects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing,
particular things that embody them” (italics in the original). He defines affect as “the coupling of
a unit of quasi corporeality with a unit of passion” (Massumi 2002, 61). An emotion or feeling is a
recognized effect of affect but not all of it for affect is visceral and its unit is the degree of intensity.
For Houser (2014, 2), “contemporary novels and memoirs deploy affect in narratives of sick
bodies to bring readers to environmental consciousness”. As her analyses of contemporary U.S.
fictions unfold, environmental pollution bears hard on women and indeed scientists tell us that
toxic chemicals are especially detrimental to female reproductive organs. In So Far From God,
the mishandling of toxic chemicals does not stop at Fe’s body: “About the chemical she more
than once dumped down the drain at the end of her day, which went into the sewage system
and worked its way to people’s septic tanks, vegetable gardens, kitchen taps, and sun-made tea”
(Castillo 1993, 154). Houser (2014) mentions a movie in her book, Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995),
in which a suburban housewife becomes sick with an illness caused by the environment around
her. There are no catastrophes such as oil pollution, nuclear reactor explosion, cyanide gas leak
or even wildfires. The pollutants are found in her daily life, for example, shampoo, hair spray,
laundry detergent, pesticide in the garden, etc. There are so many sources of toxic chemicals that
it is impossible to pin down any of them that directly causes her cancer. Brennan in her book The

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Transmission of Affect (2004) brings scientific knowledge into the discussion of affect. Her argument
is that the transmission of affect is social or psychological in origin and affect alters the biochemis-
try and neurology of the subject even if only for a fleeting moment. She writes that,

The fact is that the taken-for-grantedness of the emotionally contained subject is a residual
bastion of Eurocentrism in critical thinking, the last outpost of the subject’s belief in the su-
periority of its own worldview over that of other cultures.
(Introduction)

In fact, I would add that it is not only the belief in the superiority of its own worldview over that
of other cultures, but also of other species and other life forms. We are indeed not as self-contained
as we think. We are entangled and entrained with the environment, the “non-human or ‘earth’
others” (Braidotti 2013, 49).
Ecosickness is undeniably tangled with technology. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in
1962 which alerted the whole world to the adverse effects of pesticide. However, as we have
witnessed, environmental pollution keeps on worsening in the twenty-first century due to the
over-development of industrialization in the Capitalocene. Del Rio Gabiola (2020, 30) argues that
affects may disrupt the public sphere because affect is “proto political in that it includes relation
in the definition”. To affect or to be affected always happens in an encounter, thus affect is an
event. An event is an emergence where innumerable elements intersect. Take Fe as an illustra-
tion. Her death is caused by technology, capitalism, environmental exploitation, consumerism,
gender (there are only female workers in the factory) and other nuanced elements that may even
be invisible to our naked eyes. Contextualizing affect theory in Latin America, del Rio Gabiola
denounces the globalization of emotions, feelings and affects as reflected in the gross national in-
dexes of happiness, depression, and experiences and ignoring the fact that feelings, emotions and
affects are “culturally conditioned and articulated” (2020, 36). I would add that it is also gender
and race conditioned. Del Rio Gabiola (2020, 49) points out that within the global market-led
system, “difference and biodiversity are undervalued, while standardization and homogenization
prevail”. Any non-western cultures are not appreciated, so are women’s contribution to the com-
munity. Traditional medicinal knowledge in Indigenous groups is always passed down from an
elderly woman to a younger one. This type of alternative medicine, common among Indigenous
people, was marginalized at best and usually condemned as heresy. Caridad is initially working
in a hospital as an orderly but during her healing process after the assault, she gains the power to
heal and channel as if she acquires that power in her brief trip to hell. Doña Felicia tells Caridad,
“Everything we need for healing is found in our natural surroundings” (Castillo 1993, 47). In
the novel Hamnet, the mother Agnes (presumably William Shakespeare’s wife) is a woman who
lives on the edge of the forest. She is strange, free-spirited, unconventional and possesses intuitive
power. She is also a talented herbalist whose potions are believed to be able to cure any diseases.
It is said that, “she sells cures, she grows her own medicines, she collects leaves and petals, bark
and juices and knows how to help people” (O’Farrell 2020). Even though she moves into town
after getting married, she never feels at home there. When the labour pain begins, she goes into
the forest alone to give birth to the twins. She and the forest form an affective assemblage in such
a way that she gains a vital life force from the forest.

Prodigal Summer (2000) and The Signature of All Things (2013)

The new materialism, new vitalism or vital materialism vehemently oppose the idea that the abil-
ity to affect and to be affected is limited to humans. Jane Bennett’s concept of Thing-Power (2010,
6) states clearly that inanimate objects also have the ability “to animate, to act, to produce effects

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dramatic and subtle”. She quotes a number of examples to illustrate that the seemingly inanimate
objects also have agency, for example, water, rocks, coal, or even a pool of thread in Kaf ka’s short
story Cares of a Family Man. She argues that human is a collection of materials: “[E]ach human is
a heterogenous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter” (Bennett 2010,
13). In the Deleuzoguattarian philosophy (to which new materialism is indebted), each human is
an assemblage of vibrant matter. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) are critical of the hierarchy
in species, animals, plant or whatsoever. They argue that the classification of animal kingdom is
arbitrary since a working horse is more akin to an ox than a racing horse. Therefore, animals are
always interkingdoms. However, there are critics (especially feminists) who are not happy with the
Deleuzoguattarian philosophy. Donna Haraway (2016) criticizes the Deleuzoguattarian concept
of becoming too anthropocentric and advocates that instead of becoming-dog, becoming-animal,
it should be becoming-with non-humans and making kin of them. Haraway is the most famous
of her essay A Cyborg Manifesto [1985](1991) and later she wrote The Companion Species Manifesto
(2003). The affective encounters between human and non-human and their bodily responses to
each other and the subsequent entanglements seem to suggest that the apparent one-way and linear
becoming in the Deleuzoguattarian philosophy falls short of capturing the complicated relation-
ships between human and non-humans. In Ağ ın’s chapter on material ecocriticism, there is a de-
tailed account of new materialism, the concept of becoming-with, and ecofeminism (Chapter 32).
In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer (2000), three separate plot lines are beautifully
intertwined by a few elements: coyote, chestnut tree, sheep, etc. All three females in those stories
are either divorced or widowed. Nevertheless, it is out of their choice that they stay where they
are alone. Deanna Wolfe is a 40-plus forest ranger who prefers staying in the mountain to being
with humans. When a young ranger, Eddie Bondo, from Wyoming invades her territory, they
enjoy a prodigal summer. Eddie is coming to the Appalachian Mountains in Newfoundland to
hunt coyotes while Deanna is spending most of her time tracking the coyotes down and protecting
them from harm. Interestingly, Deanna wrote her doctoral dissertation on coyotes and one of the
ideas she put forth is killing coyotes would accelerate their breeding. Eddie is young, passionate
and caring but, like any other male farmers, he has a desire to kill all animals that they believe
threaten their herds of cow and sheep. They hate the coyotes to such an extent that the Mountain
Empire Bounty Hunt is organized to hunt them. Deanna says, “A coyote is just something you
can blame. He’s nobody’s pet; he doesn’t belong to anybody but himself. So, great, put a bullet in
him” (Kingsolver 2000, 178). The brother-in-law of Lusa, the protagonist in another thread of
the novel, is said to have killed a whole family of coyotes when he found a den of them up in the
woods. The coyote shares a similar fate to the fox that I discussed in Chapter 2 on Chinese litera-
ture. Both of them started as an auspicious and well-respected figure in mythologies but were then
turned negative at some point in history. The coyote in Mesoamerican cosmology is a symbol of
military might. It was later depicted as a trickster that uses deception and humour to rebel against
social conventions.
When Deanna is searching all over the mountains for the den of coyotes, she attempts to think
like a coyote. The question is: is it possible for a human to think like other animals? Deleuze and
Guattari (1987) introduce the concept of becoming-animal in A Thousand Plateaus that has been
much discussed in critical animal studies. Kordecki also made a note of that in her discussion in
Chapter 26. However, for Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-animal does not literally mean hu-
mans become animals. It is a process where humans deterritorialize their boundaries and exchange
molecular elements with non-humans and through which humans become imperceptible and im-
manent. Thomas Nagel (1974) discusses whether it is possible for us to think and experience like a
bat. His conclusion is our constitution is so very different from a bat (for example, a bat perceives
the world mainly through sonar) that it is impossible for us to imagine what it is like to be a bat.
What we attempt to describe, for example, what a dog or a cat “says”, is what we think it is saying.

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Nagel reiterates that what he wants to know is what it is like for a bat to be a bat” (439; italics
in the original). She calls for “a phenomenology to describe the sonar experiences of bats” (449)
which Ian Bogost (2012) later named “alien phenomenology”. Alien phenomenology belongs to
the category of speculative realism that is best known for Graham Harman’s object-oriented phi-
losophy (2002), Quentin Meillassoux’s correlationalism (2008), and Ray Brassier (to whom the
term speculative realism is credited) and Iain Hamilton Grant’s object-oriented ontology. Bogost
(2012, 27) says alien phenomenology does require speculation into the process of how utterly in-
comprehensible objects in exotic worlds “constantly machinate within themselves and mesh with
one another, acting and reacting to properties and states while still keeping something secret.”
Ursula Le Guin has explored what it is like for a tree to be a tree in a short story, Direction of The
Road (1974), in which an oak tree tells its life on the road. As traffic grows heavier, it takes the tree
more skills to make way for the cars. The tree also mentions that the road also displays high skills.
It relates to a story where a car tries to overtake another car at a high speed, the oak tree tries its
best but inevitably hits the car. A similar attempt at speculation is found in Prodigal Summer where
nature is given a voice to speak for itself in several instances. In Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing
Trees (2021), the fig tree is one of the narrators. An extreme example is found in the South Korean
author Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian (2007) where a woman, Yeong-hye, suddenly stops eating
and preparing meat dishes and then gradually stops eating altogether. At the end of the novel, she
turns herself into a plant.
An important concern of thinking like a thing is time. We always think time is objective and
forget that we experience time only as human time. One thing that Deanna has in common with
Alma Whittaker in The Signature of All Things (2013, 317) is their recognition and respect of the
different times for non-humans. Since Deanna is living in the mountain, she is measuring her
time in “forest time, timeless time, noting the changes in leaf and song and weather but imposing
no human agenda”. After being attracted by algae and moss, she recognizes there are four distinct
and concurrent varieties of time and names them: “Divine Time, Geological Time, Human Time,
Moss Time” (Gilbert 2013, 295). Moss time is in between Geological Time and Human Time:

By comparison to Geological Time, Moss Time was blindingly fast, for mosses could make
progress in a thousand years that a stone could not dream of accomplishing in a million. But
relative to Human Time, Moss Time was achingly slow. To the unschooled human eye, moss
did not even seem to move at all. But moss did move, and with extraordinary results. Nothing
seemed to happen, but then, a decade or so later, all would be changed. It was merely that
moss moved so slowly that most of humanity could not track it.
(Gilbert 2013, 170)

For a stone, moss eats it up in a shockingly short period of time (according to the novel, it takes a
decade of Human Time).
There are some big contrasts between the male and female views of nature and animals in Prod-
igal Summer (maybe a too simplistic worldview). I have mentioned the different attitudes towards
coyotes of Eddie and Deanna above. A similar argument happens between Garnett and Nannie in
the third thread in the novel. Garnett Walker is an elderly farmer who endeavours to revive the
American chestnut tree and he is constantly fighting with his neighbour, Nannie Rawley, who
runs an organic orchard and is a devoted opposer to pesticides or any other chemicals. While Gar-
nett would go to lengths to revive the American chestnut tree, he is no lover of nature. To protect
his chestnut trees, he sprays pesticides and does not mind if caterpillars, bugs and songbirds are
killed. When Garnett applies pesticide to kill caterpillars, Nannie tells him that there will be more
caterpillars on her apple trees after the spray (which echoes Deanna’s argument in her PhD disser-
tation on the killing of coyotes). Moreover, Garnett is a fierce defender of his territory. When a

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 Chan Kit-sze Amy

tree on the border of his and Nannie’s land collapses, he insists that Nannie has to pay half of the
fee for the removal of the trunk. Nannie says, “people just adore fences, but Nature doesn’t give
a hoot” (Gilbert 2013, 88). As for Deanna, she thinks the mountain is “nobody’s damn mountain,
this mountain that belonged to scarlet tanagers, puff balls, luna moths, and coyotes” (Gilbert 2013,
102). Lusa, a newly widowed young lady in the second thread, develops a tactile entanglement
with her environ:

She learned to tell time with her skin, as morning turned to afternoon and the mountain’s
breath began to bear gently on the back of her neck. By early evening it was insistent as a
lover’s sigh, sweetened by the damp woods, cooling her nape and shoulders whenever she
paused her work in the kitchen to lift her sweat-damp curls off her neck. She had come to
think of Zebulon as another man in her life, larger and steadier than any other companion
she had known.
(Gilbert 2013, 34)

Having been a postdoc researcher on moths, Lusa has acquired at least one of the abilities of moth,
which is a perception by smell. Her relationship with her husband Cole started with his interest
in moth and pheromones. After the decease of Cole, Lusa stays alone in the farmhouse and she
claims that she smells of people in the house, including her grand-father and Cole. Coincidentally,
Deanna also relies on smell. She can even taste the smell of the wood by her tongue. In The Sig-
natures of All Things, when Alma is losing her eyesight in old age, she works with moss by touch.
Humans, especially in the twenty-first century, rely too heavily on sight and other senses are
gradually failing. The Deleuzoguattarian concept of becoming-animal reminds us that we may
embody ourselves in our environ with different perceptions.
Alma, who calls herself “Curator of Mosses” (Gilbert 2013, 485), is able to study moss and
publish two volumes of The Mosses of Northern Europe partly indebted to the microscopes with
which she can look at the magnificent biological world and the moss. It is written that, “[s]he also
loved her microscope, which felt like a magical extension of her own right eye, enabling her to
peer straight down the throat of the Creator Himself ” (Gilbert 2013, 78). Yazgünoğ lu discussed
posthumanism and ecofeminism in Chapter 34 with the focus on the more advanced posthuman-
ism of Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway; however, I want to note here that the augmentation
of human bodies with technology marks the beginning of posthumanism in 1990s as evidenced
in “A Cyborg Manifesto”. Just as I have discussed above that human and environ form an af-
fective assemblage, technology and human also form an assemblage which in Haraway’s term is
called “natureculture”. This natureculture assemblage is best exemplified by Henry Whittaker’s
greenhouses in The Signature of All Things, which can yield pineapples and cherries in the freezing
winters in West Philadelphia. Besides tropical fruits, Henry also keeps tropical exotic plants from
all over the world in the greenhouses. It is said that in the year 1816 (remembered as the Year
Without a Summer in history), thousands of families lost everything but Henry still managed to
keep most of his tropical exotics alive because “he’d never made a living off the risks of outdoor
farming” (Gilbert 2013, 87–88). Compared to this type of farming with that in Nectar of a Sieve,
technology does make a big difference in human lives. Though Henry has made his fortune in
botany, he doesn’t love botany or plants. He is knowledgeable in botany but it is only a means for
him to make money and build his own empire. In this respect, he is similar to Sir Joseph Banks,
who is in charge of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The enormous collection of plants from
all over the world was part of the British Empire’s conquest of the third world. Nevertheless, Sir
Joseph is credited for making Kew the leading botanical garden in the world. Henry’s botanical
empire in West Philadelphia is meant to be revenge on Sir Joseph’s insult of him. If we contrast
Henry’s manoeuvre of technology and that of Alma, we can see that Henry (by extension also Sir

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Joseph) uses technology to build up his empire while Alma discovers knowledge about moss and
even the theory of evolution with technology.
All four females in Prodigal Summer and The Signature of All Things have opted for a solitary life
in some instances: Deanna after divorce, Lusa and Nannie after their husbands’ decease and Alma
lives in solitude most of her life. Nevertheless, at the end of the novels, they all choose to reunite
with their families. Perhaps that is a reminder that “[e]verything alive is connected to every other
by fine, invisible threads” (Kingsolver 2000, 26) or as Bogost (2016, 22) writes, “something is
always something else”.

Conclusion
When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989, she referred to the margin-
alization of Black women in the interface among gender, race and class hierarchies. The origin of
intersectionality can be traced back to Crenshaw’s background in critical race theory. Crenshaw
thinks that discrimination against a Black woman does not only involve her race or her sex but the
overlapping identities. It is only when we are aware of the multitude of social injustices that discrim-
ination against Black women could be abolished. Coincidentally, Félix Guattari published The Three
Ecologies ([1989] 2000) in the same year in which he coined the term ecosophy.3 For Félix Guattari,
it is not a short form of ecological philosophy but a complex ethico-political articulation among
what Guattari (1989) calls the three ecologies: social ecology, mental ecology and environmental
ecology. The gist of Guattari’s ecosophy is that it is not accurate to talk about individuals and their
environment because the entity does not pre-exist with their interaction with the environment. By
environment, Guattari refers to both nature and human-made institutions. He (1989, 52) writes,

Ecology must stop being associated with the image of a nature-loving minority or with
qualified specialists. Ecology in my sense questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic
power formations, whose sweeping progress cannot be guaranteed to continue as it has for
the past decade.
Manola Antonioli (2018, 75)

further explains that ecosophy “draws our attention to the plurality of ecologies, environments,
habitats, that do not ‘surround’ us as a container would envelop its contents, but that define us
and that we constantly define and reconfigure in a network of relations”. More than 30 years have
passed and new critical theories have appeared since then. Some of these theories have definitely
made an impact on feminism as well as critical race theory. By incorporating cultural concepts,
such as postcolonialism, posthumanism, speculative realism, affect theory, the Anthropocene and
the Capitalocene, new materialism or vital materialism, object-oriented ontology, critical animal
studies, into the reading strategy of ecofeminist literature, I would like to demonstrate that the
entanglements of ecology and feminisms are more complicated than ever. Haraway’s string figures
from Navajo are perhaps a good way to visualize the intersectionality of ecofeminism albeit they
are too neat and clear.

Notes
1 See my Chapter 2, Chinese Literature and Ecofeminism, for a more detailed discussion of how the yin prin-
ciple is important in the discussion of ecofeminism.
2 SF refers to “science fiction, speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation, science fact,
and also, string figures” (Haraway 2016, 10).
3 The term is also attributed to Arne Næss. Næss defines the term as “a philosophy of ecological harmony
or equilibrium” (Dregson and Inoue 1995, 8).

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 32
MATERIAL ECOCRITICISM AND
ECOFEMINIST LITERATURE
Başak Ağın

Introduction
As an attempt to “triptych” material ecocriticism, this chapter emanates from my situated posi-
tionality as a Turkish posthuman-material ecofeminist scholar, primarily trained in British literary
and cultural studies, where I initially studied various mythologies and classical literatures. There-
fore, while the focus is on mainly a theoretical expansion of material ecocriticism with ecofemi-
nist, posthuman feminist, and French feminist twists, my literary analysis entails a combination of
Discourses or Fihi Ma Fihi by thirteenth-century Persian-Anatolian poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, with
whose poetry I grew up familiar, and several contemporary online texts and illustrations that re-
read Medusa’s mythical tales, which accumulated as multilayered hypertexts from 2017 to 2020.

Triptyching Medusa
I use social media very often, and this has been increasingly so with the growing trend of hold-
ing online or hybrid events since the global-scale lockdown in March 2020. At around the same
time, a meme featuring the image of Medusa, the most famous Gorgon of Greek and Roman
mythologies, went viral. It read: “Medusa was trying to defend herself.” This tagline, which I first
came across as a text title on the blog Black Dog Diary, later became an important part of online
cultural repertoire. Deconstructing the patriarchal narrative and replacing it with a tale of social
justice, interpreting Medusa not as a ghoulish monster but as a woman fighting for herself reverts
the reader’s perspective. As Medusa is the only mortal among her sisters, some part of her remains
connected to our earthly stories, and her hair, entangled in snakes, builds analogies between the
othering of women and animals. This reading highly resonates with contemporary ecofeminisms,
which see “connections among racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, speciesism, and [the domi-
nation of ] the environment” (Gaard 2011, 26).
Thus positioned, Medusa’s reconfiguration spread a narrative of women’s empowerment and
alliance against patriarchy: “Think about it,” the anonymous blogger wrote, “would Athena really
blame Medusa for being raped? Athena knew better. But her hands were tied – as women’s often
are – and the only thing she could do was to protect Medusa at all costs” (2017). Born, raised, and
based in a country where violence against women has now become a daily news staple, I could not
agree more, especially as regards the call for alliance among women. But I must not have been the
only one thinking this way because this new version of Medusa has been disseminated fast within
online cultures since its launch, which is how I re-encountered it in its meme format in 2020. As

344 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-34

 Material Ecocriticism

Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu (Chapter 34) contends, the human-centered, expansionist, extractionist,
neo-liberal capitalist ideology, both feeding and fed by heteropatriarchal norms, no longer serves
our “(post-)human” purposes or needs. And clearly, the readers of this “new” Medusa aligned
with this view, allying against such androcentric hegemony which reiterates itself through those
outdated patterns of cultural domination. Re-turning (to) the “mirror eyes” of Medusa in a
­m aterial-digital environment (in cartoonish drawings, tattoo sketches, or meme format) pinpoints
an urgent need for building novel ways of understanding, depicting, and reworking the stabilized
notions of other(ed) bodies while defying their constant subjugation under the fixated category of
Anthropos. This, of course, requires a rethinking of our chronically sick relations with nonhuman
nature, too, as Yazgünoğ lu would also agree.
This is why the Medusa meme immediately rang a bell the moment I saw it, but I needed some
time to fully link it to my conceptualization of what I call “mattertext,” which emerged from my
diffractive thinking on Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s “storied matter.” There were
two main impediments before those diffractions evolved into something meaningful. To begin,
back when the Medusa meme became viral, I was trying to emotionally recover from the harsh
critique I received from a well-known female scholar—someone who was not familiar with my
previous work, but was trained and taught in the same areas that I did, although she obviously
walked through a different pathway, a predominantly Western one, to reach the culmination of
her philosophy. She gave “feedback” on my paper, completely rejecting my idea that we could
establish bonds between écriture féminine and posthuman-ecological strands of feminism, such as
ecofeminism and material ecocriticism. I was not convinced with what she chose to say because
the link was obvious from where I stand, but looking back on my earlier manuscript, I can see
that the way I penned the paper was somehow nonlinear and nonhierarchical, as opposed to what
we often expect from a scholarly paper, hence the rejection, which brings me to my second im-
pediment: Having read and spent a lot of time thinking about many feminisms and mythologies
since my undergraduate years, the image of Medusa—as a meme, as an artwork, and as an ancient
or a present-day narrative—spoke volumes to me, but I was not sure of how to express that in the
linear realm of written communication. Finally, in the summer of 2021, three different forms of
expression, all via online channels, conversed with me. But before elaborating on those conversa-
tions, my formulation of mattertext requires a visit.
Broadly speaking, mattertext is a reworked and diffracted version of Iovino and Oppermann’s
“storied matter,” echoing the Harawayan “naturecultures” and Margaret Price’s “bodymind.” Its
noun form, “mattertextuality,” is a salute to the postmodern uses of Julia Kristeva’s “intertextual-
ity” and Gérard Genette’s “hypertextuality.” As what follows will elaborate, mattertext is thus a
posthuman-ecofeminist concept that indicates the always-already embeddedness and the inextri-
cable intertwinement of matter and text. But it marginally differs from Iovino and Oppermann’s
“storied matter,” which is the landmark of their material ecocritical theory, modeled as a diptych,
“a painting on two panels, or an ancient writing tablet made of two hinged leaves” (Iovino and
Oppermann 2012, 448). According to Iovino and Oppermann, one of those panels or leaves is
“ecological postmodernism” and the other is “the new materialist theories” (2012, 448).
While storied matter denotes “matter’s dynamic expressiveness” (Oppermann 2018, 412) with
a highlight on narrative agency, the textual aspect of mattertext does not necessarily involve
narrativity, storytelling, or narrative agency. It refers to the enmeshment of the corporeal and the
inscriptional in all the planetary inhabitants, all living and nonliving matter. All these bodies, I
argue, are composed of a bodily and a textual aspect, independently of a human observer to inter-
pret their narratives, but interdependently with the human as one of the many agentic bodies of
the world. On this, the coiners of storied matter do not think much differently from me. “Matter’s
stories,” writes Oppermann, “emerge through humans” (Oppermann 2018, 412). “But at the
same time humans themselves,” she continues, quoting Jeffrey J. Cohen’s words, “emerge through

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‘material agencies’ that leave their traces in lives as well as stories” (Cohen 2015, 36; Oppermann
2018, 412). These words clearly signify that material ecocritics emphasize the entwined bodies
and narratives of the humans and the nonhumans, and yet there is still a scholarly tendency to
criticize this view, arguing that it centralizes the human via an emphasis on the act of storytelling.
Bearing in mind such critiques, what arises out of my diffractive thinking on storied matter is a
minor focus shift.
The focus of the “textual” aspect in mattertext is on “text” itself, rather than stories. I find such
emphasis on textuality instead of narrativity necessary because, apparently, the critiques are rooted
in a misreading of anthropomorphism here. Although storied matter’s anthropomorphism is a
“heuristic strategy” to lessen “the linguistic, perceptive, and ethical distance between the human
and the nonhuman,” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 8), the humanlike qualities that we attribute
to the earth’s story-telling creatures in explicating their narrative capacities are often misunder-
stood or misinterpreted as anthropocentric, within especially the non-posthumanities spheres.
Even if, as Jane Bennett contends, “a touch of anthropomorphism […] can catalyze a sensibility
that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects)
but with variously composed materiality that form confederations” (2010, 99), and although the
intersections of posthumanities and environmental humanities have strongly attested to the need
for an ethico-onto-epistemological approach in the humanities, I do not think this crystallizes
in the minds of scholars who speak a different language than ours, since they argue against “our
bestowing” humanly features on nonhuman animals and matter, as if those nonhuman bodies
were devoid of a textual aspect (as in their DNA, for instance) or narrative capabilities (as in the
biosemiotic processes of plants, for example). While emphasizing one more time and clarifying
that those narrative capabilities are not something that we humans grant to the nonhuman matter
but are already inherent in all living beings and nonliving things, the extension of the diptych
into a threefold framework serves as a tool to further reinforce the building blocks of material
ecocriticism.
Returning to the three voices that spurred this chapter, then, I must underline that they par-
allel the three-fold nature of the triptych. The first voice surfaced through the e­ mail-interview
I conducted, for the Turkish posthumanist website PENTACLE,1 with the new materialist
philosopher Evelien Geerts. In tracing the lineage of new materialisms, Geerts also found reso-
nances between écriture féminine and contemporary material feminisms, despite her awareness
that Luce Irigaray was not one of the first thinkers that come to mind when we think of this set
of theories. Geerts noticed that, like I did, Irigaray’s work (1985) was “crucial for projects that
revalue matter and materiality” as well as for those “that engage in a posthumanist decentering
of the canonical subject ‘Man’” because her work “paved the way for Deleuzoguattarian new
materialists such as Rosi Braidotti (2013) and Elizabeth Grosz (2017) by focusing on the erasure
of sexual difference and the prevalent existence of somatophobia in modern Western philosophy”
(2021; original italics). This is something I definitely concur with, but with one addition. Al-
though I am also aware, like Geerts, that Irigaray follows a completely different school, that
Grosz “clearly disassociates herself from ecofeminism,” and that “Rosi Braidotti does not seem
interested in” ecofeminism “anymore” (Casselot 2016, 73), I also see through my diffraction
that there are patterns of repetition between their work and the work of ecofeminists like Val
Plumwood and Greta Gaard, especially considering their focus on the body and difference and
their strong stance against the governing rules of Anthropos—even if this is always not openly
expressed in academia due to our diverted attention to schools and -isms. In other words, we
cannot see the forest for the trees.
The second voice, which guided me in seeing the forest rather than the trees and in bringing
together so many diverse perspectives, belonged to Rumi, who wrote: “If you consider the roads,

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they are beyond counting, with infinite differences. But when you consider the goal they are all
in accord with one desire” (Arberry 2000, 175). With these lines, Rumi not only resolved the
problematic dualisms of the Western thought but also provided relief for the concerns over the
erasure of differences. Such concerns, I believe, rise out of a negative bias against the relational
process ontology, from which new materialisms and material ecocriticism often borrow. Unlike in
the Western thought, which has been striving for the past quarter century or so to overcome its di-
chotomy of unity/difference via ecofeminist and posthumanist theories, the Eastern philosophies,
specifically those involved in the lines of Anatolian poets Yunus Emre, Hacı Bektaş -ı Veli, and Pir
Sultan Abdal, as well as Rumi, have long accentuated oneness and harmony while reminding us of
embracing diversity. In his introduction to A. J. Arberry’s English translation of Rumi’s Discourses
(2000, vi), for instance, Doug Marman reminds us of this, by referring to Rumi’s “call for seekers
of truth,” and quotes:

Come, come, whoever you are.

Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a hundred times.
Come, yet again, come, come.

“Even in his day,” as Marman notes, Rumi “was sought out by merchants and kings, devout
worshippers and rebellious seekers, famous scholars and common peasants, men and women. At
his funeral, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Arabs, Persians, Turks and Romans honored him” (2000,
vi). Evidently, to achieve unity, one did not have to erase their identity. And this identity does not
only entail class, ethnic, sexual, or religious ones as Rumi’s lines might evoke, but might as well
involve gender and even species identity. From my situated positionality, this is something I also
find in both the ecofeminist and the Deleuzoguattarian roots of posthumanism, and thus its eco-
logical sibling, material ecocriticism. From a posthumanist perspective, for instance, Rosi Braidotti
famously writes: “We-are-(all)-in-this-together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same” (2019, 57).
I understand why and how this maxim probably came to life, perhaps to avoid being accused of
reductionism, and I agree with it mostly, but why the need to underline “not being one”? Noting
that posthuman subjectivity does not refer to an understanding of “people” as a “unitary” category
but comprises a “heterogeneous multiplicity that cannot coalesce into unity on pregiven grounds,”
Braidotti almost defensively argues that “people” is not “self-constituted as ‘we, the people’” (2019,
57). From where she stands as a continental philosopher, I can relate to her rationale in doing so.
But what I read in these lines, from my own position, is an effort to finetune the posthumanist con-
cept of entanglement, which emphasizes togetherness, and the philosophy of difference, which me-
ticulously strives to avoid sidelining any one of the involved parties in that entanglement. And right
now at this moment, while this chapter is being composed, that same idea still remains valid. In her
2022 Posthuman Feminism, too, Braidotti emphasizes once more her focus on together-ness rather
than one-ness, which shows a clear-cut disparity between the Western and the Eastern views of the
issue. This means that we still have a long way to go to achieve that “posthuman t­ogether-ness” in
a sense of unity and harmony as the main dichotomies still persist.
In my view, then, to tackle such struggle requires deconstructing the Western idea of equating
one-ness and same-ness. “One” is not necessarily a number that reduces our differences to the
same identity. And viewing patterns of similarity (along with those of differences) may not always
turn out threatening. “Be(com)ing one” may not have to be the haunting specter that we must

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evade at all costs. Rumi’s lines in his Discourse 7 also attest to this: “someone comes along whom
oceans do not satisfy; another finds a few drops enough and any more would be harmful” (Arberry
2000, 57). Considering how he calls for unity and oneness in his philosophy, these lines indicate
that it is possible to become one and a whole, even when embracing differences. As I often quote
from Star Wars: “Embrace others for their differences, for that makes you whole” (2020).
Put differently, while the idea of “becoming with” or “worlding” has repeatedly been dis-
cussed in the past decades, say, by Karen Barad, by Donna Haraway, or by Braidotti herself,
along with many other thinkers from similar cohorts, the problem with the Western tradition of
thought, to me, still persists. This is because, from what I observe, they have difficulty in or de-
liberately refrain from expressing this very thought as “becoming ‘one’ with,” for what I believe
to be anxieties over marking, not erasing, differences. Returning to Rumi’s lines, on the other
hand, one could easily see that oneness, or unity, or wholeness for that matter, does not necessarily
mean sameness or reduction, nor does it have to lead to a wipe-out of differences. It does mean,
however, becoming “entangled” with, being, acting, and doing with, together. To borrow
Kate Rigby’s words, “To hold that nothing can be said to pre-exist its relational becoming
does not imply a disregard for the singularity of things that do thereby come into existence
and that, in their singularity, are only ever partially disclosed to one another” (2014, 288). As
Rigby notes, with reference to the Hegelian critique of Schelling, “a philosophy or theology
of intra-active becoming does not necessarily plunge us into a ‘night in which all cows are
black’” (2014, 288).
With those ideas in mind, the third voice I put myself into a dialogue with was that of the
Canadian illustrator Jacqui Oakley’s depiction of Medusa, commissioned for Bitch Magazine to
accompany the American writer McKenzie Schwark’s article “Snake Eyes.” Instead of the well-
known portrayals illustrating Medusa with venomous snakes in her hair and a grim expression on
her face, this design pictured her with the enmeshment of the serpents with colorful flowers and
a proud face. Looking at the miniature statue of the “Man” in her hand with a condescending
expression, Medusa was aware of her power to overthrow Anthropos and his order of life as bios,
ready to replace it with a “zōē -centered” worldview, in words that Braidotti would use to describe
it. Following Oakley’s affirmative interpretation of Medusa, which seems to me as prepared to
deploy her (life-) forces as the sexual and species other, Schwark (2019) wrote:

The narrative of women competing with […] one another is so ingrained in our storytelling
that it can be hard to look past it and see the potential camaraderie between women in my-
thology. But when we examine these stories and look at female relationships in relation to the
male figures, we can start to deconstruct the patriarchal lens through which these stories are
often viewed. We can gaze at the patriarchy so harshly that we turn it to stone.

Schwark’s reference to reiterating such male-centered narratives of competition and missing the
“potential camaraderie” leads us in two directions. First, the male-centered perspective in which
we are entrenched is so dominant that even when we use anthropomorphism as a catalyzer or
a heuristic strategy, there will always be others viewing this as anthropocentrism. This is what
happens in the case of new materialisms and material ecocriticism. The second route is that losing
the golden opportunity of alliance between women for our embeddedness in male narratives is
something that women do not only suffer from in mythological tales or their mundane lives. It
has also shown itself through “academic critiques” within feminist circles. What I experienced
through the female scholar’s critique mentioned at the beginning of this chapter could be read as
one such example. For reasons I will probably never know, but perhaps out of a scholarly habit,
she preferred to criticize, rather than diffract and go critical with, the way that I wanted to make a
difference, “as” and “like” a drop in the ocean. This attitude of hers reminds me of Barad’s words:

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“Critique,” Barad underlines, “Is all too often […] a destructive practice meant to dismiss, to turn
aside, to put someone or something down—another scholar, another feminist, a discipline, an ap-
proach, et cetera. So this is a practice of negativity that I think is about subtraction, distancing and
othering” (2012, 49). Instead of critique, citing Bruno Latour’s Alan Turing reference, she suggests
“going critical,” and taking Haraway’s metaphorical use of diffraction as her basis, she presents
another mode of thinking and doing, by “being suggestive, creative and visionary” (2012, 49–50).
Only by this mode, I believe, can we achieve something and overthrow the conceptualization of
bios as the only life worth living. Why can we not, as Braidotti notes (2022, 421), simply take the
“non-denominational” qualities of posthuman feminism in its “feminist theoretical allegiances”
as our model, just for once? Why not try to “activate modes of collaborative interconnectedness,
mutual interdependence, care and infinite compassion,” as Braidotti suggests (2022, 421), which
would help “enhance our collective ability to pull through” the culture of critique?
The preference for “dismissal” over “alliance” poses strong obstacles to our ­m aterial-
ecological-feminist growth at every career level, as many examples showcase. Barad herself, for
instance, has been targeted for her idea of “posthumanist performativity” and was accused of “ob-
sessing over” matter. Indeed, many scholars working on new materialisms have been criticized
either for fetishizing and objectifying matter (Ahmed 2008, 35) or for neglecting or ignoring the
contributions of ecofeminism to the development of some of its underlying notions, such as the
entwinement of the material and the cultural or the dismantling of Western dualisms (Casselot
2016, 73–74; Gaard 2017b, 81–97; MacGregor 2021, 49–50). When one considers how much
backlash ecofeminism has received since its onset in the 1970s, as Karen Ya-Chu Yang (Chapter
35) also mentions, it is not surprising to see that new materialisms and its feminist allies are also
becoming the targets of harsh critiques. But it is worth noting that ecofeminism has grown out
of such counterattacks from both outside and within by undertaking the difficult task of revising
itself. It did so by pointing out the material aspects of what would seem to be purely ideological,
and the discursive aspects of what would seem to be purely physical, as Yang also notes. As a result,
although looking for what is missing in the bigger picture is a feminist methodology in itself, and
although constructive criticism provides a way for further growth, the fights over “who neglects
what” within the feminist circles themselves, especially when they involve a tactless lexical choice,
seem to remain moot, or worse, prove counterintuitive. The materialist tendencies that seek to
highlight the entangled relations between the material and the discursive realms have undeniable
roots in ecofeminism, and the contemporary material strains of feminisms will also continue to
thrive—thanks to and despite criticisms directed at them. What we seek to express is one thing,
but how we express it is another.
For the purposes of this chapter, I will not here further discuss to what extent these criticisms
fall apt—because some of them do, especially Gaard’s as she bases the argument on the question
of where the ecofeminists are and Marie-Anne Casselot’s as hers is a compare-contrast approach
to new materialisms and ecofeminism—but I will focus on whether material ecocriticism also
receives its share from such critiques. True, Ahmed’s position paper (2008) predates the on-the-­
record emergence of material ecocriticism by a few years; Gaard’s frequent citation of and col-
laboration with Oppermann [in co-editing International Perspectives on Feminist Ecocriticism (2013),
writing a chapter for Material Ecocriticism (2014), and to acknowledge her as a “material feminist
ecocritic” in Critical Ecofeminism (2017a, xxvii), to name a few] tells us this is probably not the case
for her work; and there is no mention of material ecocriticism within Casselot’s (2016) and Mac-
Gregor’s (2021) articles. But since material ecocriticism is “situated in the conceptual horizons of
the new materialist paradigm” (Oppermann 2013, 55), I feel the need to emphasize its feminist
aspect once more to leave aside the fruitless discussions over what new materialisms and their rel-
evant branches, like material ecocriticism, are useful for. I will do so by drawing energy primarily
from Hélène Cixous’s metaphor of Medusa and secondarily from posthuman feminism.

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Cixous pointed out the “infinite richness of ” women’s “individual constitution” in “The
Laugh of the Medusa” (1976, 876), in which she argued against defining “female sexuality” as
“uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes,” and urged women to write against all odds,
in their unique ways. This meant disposing of the necessity of abiding by the imposed rules
of “objectivity” and “rationality” of the male-dominant realm of written expression. In other
words, it was a call for nonlinearity, which echoed the intricate and dynamic relations between
all components of life, as opposed to life’s linear representations in the patriarchal inscriptions
authored as objective and external observers of nature. Such claims of impartiality have brought
about detachment from nature, paralleling a way of thinking established on the Western-invented
binary oppositions. As many feminist critics and scholars following Cixous would likewise argue,
various forms of hierarchical dualisms characterized women’s oppression. A quarter century after
Cixous’s Medusa, Gaard (2001), for example, would problematize “the construction of reason as
definitionally opposed to nature and all that is associated with nature, including women, the body,
emotions, and reproduction” (159). Along the same lines, Catriona Sandilands would draw further
attention to the influence of heteropatriarchal anthropocentric culture on nature, women, queer,
and other oppressed peoples (1999, 68).
Envisioned on similar grounds as these later ecofeminists’ lawful arguments, Cixous’s Medusa
emphasized fuzziness, complexity, and multiplicity rather than a one-way, linear exit toward the
ultimate truth because it meant diversity in writing. What ecofeminists (and later material femi-
nists) further polished was an emphasis on the body, with their reminder of diversity in the lived
experience of women and all othered bodies. All these scholars were producing knowledges on
battling against Anthropos as a white, Western, heteronormative male figure, who believes that
whatever or whoever is different from him should be under his domain and at his service, but what
they did was to follow different pathways to reach their goal. Does this not recall, then, Rumi’s
poetry?

The ways may vary, but the goal is one. Don’t you see that there are many roads to the Kaaba?
For some the road is from Rum, for some from Syria, others come from Persia or China or
by sea from India and Yemen. […]
The hearts are one in their longing and love […] That love is neither belief nor non-belief,
for it has nothing to do with the various roads. Once we arrive, this argument and war and
those differences in the roads—this woman saying to that man, “You are false, you are an
infidel,” and that man saying the same about her—once we arrive […], we realize that such
fighting is over the roads only […].
(Arberry 2000, 175)

Therefore, I believe, regarding the Medusa metaphor as only an insignia of écriture féminine
would misguide us. Medusa also implies a flourishing possibility of becoming alive, reverberat-
ing Ruth A. Miller’s (2016) in-depth explorations of Braidotti’s views on women’s writing and
life itself: “It is specifically the act of writing as a female subject that makes possible an embrace,
rather than a rejection, of biological vitality” (69). It is in this regard that I see resonances between
Cixous’s écriture féminine, ecofeminism, material ecocriticism as well as material and posthuman
feminisms. We can even draw analogies between Medusa and Haraway’s long-debated, emanci-
patory metaphor of the cyborg, which emphasized the entanglement of the organic and the ma-
chine, in their resistance against masculine paradigms and attempts to instantiate a different logic
rather than a binarized model. To see these intersections, we need “to look at the Medusa straight
on” (Cixous 1976, 885) instead of merely invoking the Freudian analyses which quite often read
her hair as “a representation of the phallus and of pubic hair” (Bostow 2016). One might argue
that sexuality has heteronormatively been subject to male desire to control and that any female

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body consciously in control of her own sexual premises has been considered dangerous, hence
the Freudian references. But we must also admit that there is more to Medusa and her hair than
standing for sexual desire, potency, and fertility.
Although the snakes that composed Medusa’s hair were depicted as venomous and thus asso-
ciated with enmity and deadliness, it is also known that the serpent figures symbolized healing
and medical powers in their relation to the ancient Greek god of medicine, Aesculapius, as well
as immortality and wisdom in many other mythologies ranging from East Asian to Persian and
Anatolian. After all, Medusa’s head would “literally ward off or turn away the evils” (Garber and
Vickers 2003, 2). So, in this regard, Medusa was not only an invocation of ecospirituality (in a way
that echoes Rigby’s and Gaard’s 2014 essays in Material Ecocriticism), but also poison and cure at
the same time, reminding us of, first, the Derridean pharmakon, but more likely invoking a spec-
trum of biophilia and ecophobia, in terms that recall Simon C. Estok’s hypothesis (2018), which,
in itself, bears resemblances to the position held by Sandilands and relies heavily on the material
ecocritical perspectives of Iovino and Oppermann. In this regard, Medusa is the third panel that
bridges the first two in the original theorization of material ecocriticism. It brings together diverse
elements that seem to be at odds with one another at first glance, hence the mattertextuality—
playing along with the transversalities between the poststructuralist and the material turns.
Conceived this way, Medusa symbolizes both the creative life force and the creativity of written
text. And I argue that this was so in Cixous’s terms, too. It was both corporeal and inscriptional
at the same time, summoning to the stage the Harawayan material-semiotic nodes, the Baradian
material-discursive practices, and my mattertextuality, which binds the (non-)living matter and
text in a manner that parallels Iovino and Oppermann’s storied matter. If Medusa conveys the
vitality of the serpent and the woman, and if through meaning-making practices, that is, the
myths, her textuality has come to interconnect people’s, especially women’s knowing and being
for centuries, then this makes her amenability with mattertext quite clear. From this perspective,
Medusa adds not only a more overtly ecofeminist touch (with the snakes and the woman being
one) into the concept of storied matter, but it also conjures up the enmeshment of the body and
women’s writing through écriture féminine.
What I mean by the myths do not necessarily mean a return to the tales that spread from Antiq-
uity via Homer, Ovid, or Hesiod, but also involves those texts that contemporary women write,
such as one that is penned by Schwark or one in which Tyler A. Donohue (2020) reads Medusa as
a figure that opposes the Foucauldian concept of docile bodies—hence my emphasis on textuality
(and inter- and hypertextuality) rather than narrativity. After all, it is through texts that we have
access to the (corpo-)reality of Medusa. But it is her paintings and sculptures, or memes, or tattoo
designs, or artistic recreations as in Schwark’s and Oakley’s complementary depictions, which
show us the vivid, visible, and tangible culture embedding her bodily side, that we can acknowl-
edge her bodily and written existence. In other words, the body and the text have always been one
in the multiple images of Medusa, and as we keep writing and reading them, seeing and touching
and experiencing them, and as we diffract them, and as we build upon our powers as the Gorgon
sisters, be it in the inscriptional or the visual forms of expression, Medusa enacts her own be(com)
ing as an icon and as a metaphor.

Conclusion
As I suggested in 2015, “in the polyphonic naturecultures of the planet, in its corporeal and
inscriptional aspects, matter and text are always already enmeshed” (40), and as Medusa is both
a myth (not only a narrative but also layers and layers of texts) and a living body (of the serpent
and the woman), it is from her figure that mattertextuality emerges. From the very beginning,
then, Medusa has always already been a symbol of women’s (and excluded others’) power of life

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(as in Braidotti’s zōē -centered worldview) and of writing (without neglecting the discursive and
textual aspect of life). But this is not necessarily so in a discourse of promising “freedom from”
patriarchy, but as a matter of “freedom to” enact women’s own liberty, just as Elizabeth Grosz’s
concept indicates in her feminist re-exploration of the notion of agency in a new materialist sense
(2010, 141). So, rather than focusing on “negative, subject-centered theories of agency as freedom
from patriarchal constraint,” as Lois McNay underlines (2016, 53), the female subject can spotlight
her energy on and envisage what she is “capable of doing” (54). This, I believe, is possible in the
image(s) of Medusa, and in our diffractive—not critiquing—energies.

Note
1 Both the original English version and my Turkish translation of this interview appeared on https://
thepentacle.org on July 04, 2021.

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day Turn in Environmental Politics.” Environmental Politics 30, nos. 1–2: 41–60.
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Hawkesworth, 39–60. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Mary Hawkesworth, 61–78. New York: Oxford University Press.
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POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Aslı Değirmenci Altın

Introduction
An analysis into the convergence of postcolonial literature and ecofeminism, or the field of “post-
colonial ecofeminism” first requires identifying some of the issues in the larger contexts of post-
colonialism and environmental studies as well as a look into postcolonial feminism. The fact that
both postcolonial studies and ecocriticism as well as ecofeminism are large fields often including
contradictory definitions makes an examination of ecofeminist postcolonial literature quite a
challenging task. As a result, this chapter first examines some definitions of postcolonialism and
ecofeminism as well as some issues in postcolonial feminism, and then tries to elucidate what an
ecofeminist critique of postcolonial literature looks like. Postcolonial literature is vast in itself and
it is almost impossible to survey postcolonial literature from one or two postcolonial geographies,
let alone all of it. Even the fact that this volume alone has ten chapters (from Arabic to Australian
to Bengali to Philippine to South American literature) that can be considered under the umbrella
term of postcolonial literature is a testament to not only the difficulty of making generalizations
but also the vast impact of long colonial histories around the globe. Thus, this chapter frames
the compatibility of ecofeminism and postcolonialism in terms of the objectives and the theoret-
ical basis they share as well as examining ecofeminist activism from the postcolonial world and
ecofeminist issues in postcolonial literature.

Definitions: Common Grounds and Purposes

Before examining ecofeminism and postcolonial feminism, the larger fields of postcolonialism
and ecocriticism and their interaction should be introduced. Postcolonial studies and ecocriti-
cism are two significant fields that emerged in the humanities more or less at the same time in
the 1980s. The convergence of these two fields, mostly called “postcolonial ecocriticism,” might
appear uncomplicated, and even required to adequately assess the ecological disasters happening
in postcolonial and neocolonial environments that are still under the influence of western impe-
rialism. Accordingly, Huggan and Tiffin point out the common ground of interest in both fields:
“postcolonialism’s concerns with conquest, colonization, racism and sexism, along with its invest-
ments in theories of indigeneity and diaspora and the relations between native and invader soci-
eties and cultures, are also the central concerns of animal and environmental studies” (2015, 6).
Moreover, out of this convergence between postcolonialism and environmental studies came out
some important concepts such as ecological imperialism, environmental racism, biocolonialism,

354 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-35

 Postcolonial Literature and Ecofeminism

and environmentalism of the poor (Crosby, Nixon, Shiva). Despite this convergence, however, it
is also suggested that the two fields in fact contradict each other at certain points. Postcolonialism
can be interpreted as focusing on humans too much, and thus not immediately seeing the need
to do away with anthropocentrism, something most ecocritical theories would find a significant
starting point for environmental studies. Ecocriticism, on the other hand, its history being em-
bedded in the West, can appear as ignoring the need for the examination of different cultures and
their relation to nature as well as the need to address a long colonial history of inequalities, which
is still pertinent for postcolonial studies. Huggan and Tiffin in their book-length effort to gap this
difference also point out this discrepancy suggesting that “ecocriticism has tended as a whole to
prioritise extra-human concerns over the interests of disadvantaged human groups, while post-
colonialism has been routinely, and at times unthinkingly, anthropocentric” (2015, 17). Of the
efforts to bridge this alleged gap between ecocriticism and postcolonialism, the most useful might
be focusing on the common perpetrator.
For this purpose, I want to look at two definitions of postcolonialism. The first one is Robert
Young’s definition in his Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. He suggests that “[Postcolonial-
ism] resists all forms of exploitation (environmental as well as human) and all oppressive conditions
that have been developed solely for the interests of corporate capitalism” (my emphasis 2003, 113).
A more recent definition is Pablo Mukherjee’s definition of postcolonial which he describes as
“a historical condition of intensified and sustained exploitation of the majority of humans and
non-humans of the former colonies by a cartel composed of their own and ‘core’ metropolitan Eu-
ropean/north American elites” (my emphasis 2010, 5). The emphasized phrases in both of these
definitions propose that a postcolonial focus includes the exploitation of not only the human world
but also the environment and the nonhuman component of postcolonial geographies. The second
common point is the perpetrator in these definitions: “corporate capitalism” for Young and a car-
tel of western and local elites for Mukherjee as well as the emphasis on the ongoing nature of these
exploitations. Postcolonialism, then, is already invested in nature and its exploitation and not only
in the human world and its injustices. Accordingly, the objectives of postcolonial ecocriticism
which Huggan and Tiffin call “utopian ambitions” in the same manner bring together the natural
and human world in its call for addressing the wrongs: “to make exploitation and discrimination
of all kinds, both human and nonhuman, visible in the world; and, in so doing, to help make them
obsolete” (2015, 16). The reason to call this aim “utopian” might be the difficulty in stopping all
discrimination and exploitation, especially when it continues so strongly in global and imperialist
capitalism. The other part of this objective, making the exploitation visible, is a more reachable
goal, and in fact, literature becomes imperative specifically in this vein of making problems visible
and raising consciousness, so that the activism “to make them obsolete” can start.
From an ecofeminist perspective, the definitions of postcolonial and postcolonial ecocriticism
would also need to acknowledge that women and nature are connected in the oppression they
face almost everywhere in the world. This issue is also the cause of disparity between cultural (or
spiritual) ecofeminists that believe there is an innate connection between women and nature and
the constructivist ecofeminists that suggest any connection between nature and women is a social
construct. As such, an examination into definitions of ecofeminism emphasizes this connection as
well as the oppression women and nature suffer at the hands of patriarchal ideology. Furthermore,
just like in the definitions of postcolonialism above, these definitions also indicate the oppressor
and the possible solution to bring an end to the oppression. One of Greta Gaard’s earlier defini-
tions of ecofeminism is a good example as she suggests that “ecofeminism’s basic premise is that
the ideology which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality,
physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature” (1993,
1). Gaard also lays out the objective of ecofeminism as it calls “for an end to all oppressions, argu-
ing that no attempt to liberate women (or any other oppressed group) will be successful without

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an equal attempt to liberate nature” (1993, 1). In a similar vein, one of the most influential voices
in ecofeminism, Indian scholar and environmental activist Vandana Shiva identifies patriarchy as
the culprit:

Wherever women acted against ecological destruction or/and the threat of atomic annihila-
tion, they immediately became aware of the connection between patriarchal violence against
women, other people and nature, and that: In defying this patriarchy we are loyal to future
generations and to life and this planet itself.
(Mies and Shiva 1993, 14)

In early definitions like this, and even from scholars from two separate camps of ecofeminist
thought, ecofeminism is clear about the need to end the oppression of nature as well as women
and other oppressed groups.

Dualisms
This connection between women and nature and their mutual oppression is explained by dualisms
created by patriarchal and androcentric views which are at the center of the hierarchy and inequal-
ity that many ecofeminist theories are trying to undo. Australian philosopher Val Plumwood,
one of the most prominent voices in ecofeminism, succinctly explains that “women in Western
culture have been historically associated with the ‘lower’ order of nature and materiality, and men
with the contrasting ‘higher’ order of mind, reason, and culture” (1998, 214). However, women
are not the only category associated with nature. Plumwood further explicates that nature and
anything associated with it is devalued as a result of positioning them against “reason”:

Nature, as the excluded and devalued contrast of reason, includes the emotions, the body, the
passions, animality, the primitive or uncivilised, the nonhuman world, matter, physicality
and sense experience, as well as the sphere of irrationality, of faith and of madness. In other
words, nature includes everything that reason excludes.
(Plumwood 1993, 19–20)

In this androcentric and anthropocentric ideology, “the dominant subject” in Braidotti’s words
is “assumed to be masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually
inscribed in a reproductive unit, and a full citizen of a recognized polity” (2017, 23). The main
dualism created by the West, the culture/nature binary, thus creates other dualisms of male/fe-
male, mind/body, master/slave, civilized/primitive, human/animal, reason/emotions as well as
dualisms based on race, religion, and ethnicity that become important in a postcolonial and/or
neocolonial context.
In fact, Plumwood argues that

colonialism and sexism have drawn their conceptual strength from casting sexual, racial and
ethnic difference as closer to the animal and the body construed as a sphere of inferiority, as
a lesser form of humanity lacking the full measure of rationality or culture.
(1993, 4)

In colonized geographies as well, this dualism is still pertinent as can be seen in Chapter 11, “Ar-
abic Literature and Ecofeminism,” by Pervine Elrefaei in this volume. In her survey, Elrefaei pro-
poses a reconsideration of Arabic ecofeminist literature through postcolonial lenses. She suggests
that patriarchal discourse in Arabic literature equates women with the motherland, and this, in

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turn, creates a dualism that sees women as land, as things to be possessed, abused, and governed.
More importantly, Elrefaei underlines the fact that this dualism can be seen as a legacy of what
Plumwood calls “master identity” of the west, thus she connects this dualistic way of thinking
in mainstream Arabic literature to the results of colonialism. Discussing ecofeminism in Bengali
literature in this volume, Abhik Gupta (Chapter 9), similarly emphasizes the fact that ecofeminism
is against colonialism since, as a system, it abuses not only the natural resources but also the human
and nonhuman components of colonized lands. For colonial and capitalist discourses, Gupta sug-
gests, the women as well as the nature only have a use value and not intrinsic value. In the same
vein, Campisi (Chapter 17) emphasizes the significance of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant
women in the activism against extractive projects that harm the ecologies of South America. Re-
ferring to Gago’s term “bodies-territories,” he underlines the fact that the subjection of women
and nature cannot be separated from the exploitation of colonies by the capitalist western civi-
lization. These manifestations from various postcolonial and neocolonial geographies underline
Plumwood’s point on how colonialism and sexism employ the same strategy of perceiving the
ethnic, racial, and sexual others closer to the animal and nature, thus inferior and outside the
reason and culture, which, clearly leads to exploitation based on difference. Ecofeminism’s main
objective, then, becomes disrupting these dualisms and association of sexual, racial, neocolonial,
nonhuman others with inferiority as advocated by an androcentric ideology.

Postcolonial Feminism and Ecofeminist Activism

It is not surprising, in this sense, postcolonial feminist movements protesting the exploitation of
nature not only precedes the emergence of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies but also that of
ecofeminism itself. Women-led ecological activism and movements from the previously colonized
geographies, such as the Chipko movement in India, had started before Françoise d’Eaubonne
coined the term “ecofeminism” in 1974. Similarly, Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement
started in Kenya in 1977 before ecofeminism was established as a field. In fact, the compatibility
of ecofeminism and postcolonialism is visible in early texts about ecofeminism as well as books on
postcolonialism. Postcolonial feminism built on activism is typically almost always informed by
ecological problems and activism by women to stop environmental degradation. Young’s chapter
on “postcolonial feminism” in his Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction for the most part fo-
cuses on the Chipko movement and other environmental issues taken up by third world women.
Although Young refrains from making generalizations just based on an example like the Chipko
movement, he also states that “given that it is rural women supporting families who are most
directly affected by any degradation of their environment, the gendered force of these struggles
remains prominent” (2003, 106). Thus, while positioning postcolonial feminism mainly in the
ecofeminist activism of postcolonial women, Young also suggests that such a visible connection
between postcolonial women and nature is a direct result of the socioeconomic position of women
affected by environmental problems.
As Young emphasizes this connection between postcolonial feminism and ecofeminism, early
texts on ecofeminism equally include references to activism from the postcolonial world such as
the Chipko movement. In a similar way to Greta Gaard’s definition, Karen Warren suggests that

an ecofeminist ethic… Not only recognizes the multiple voices of women, located differently
by race, class, age, ethnic considerations, it centralizes those voices. Ecofeminism builds on
the multiple perspectives of those whose perspectives are typically omitted or undervalued in
dominant discourses, for example Chipko women, in developing a global perspective on the
role of male domination in the exploitation of women and nature.
(1988, 151)

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Warren’s reference to Chipko women parallels Young’s reference to the Chipko movement,
though these writers are defining different fields of postcolonialism and ecofeminism. Warren also
asserts that “An ecofeminist perspective is … structurally pluralistic, inclusivist, and contextualist,
emphasizing through concrete example the crucial role context plays in understanding sexist and
naturist practice” (Warren 1988, 151). It is vital that Warren defines ecofeminism not only as “in-
clusivist” as it is significant that concerns of women in postcolonial and neocolonial geographies
would be voiced within ecofeminist praxis but also as “contextualist” since material realities of
women—in and outside postcolonial geographies—simply are not the same.
These inclusive early definitions of ecofeminism and postcolonialism clearly indicate a possi-
bility that the two fields can work together toward a common goal. However, this does not mean
that the field is without any problematic issues. The criticism of postcolonial feminism toward
mainstream feminism holds true at some points for postcolonial ecofeminism as well. Postcolo-
nial feminism has long argued that mainstream or western feminism has ignored the plights of
the third-world women, often homogenizing them. Chandra Talpade Mohanty famously states
that “the application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the third
world colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location of different groups of
women in social class and ethnic framework” (1984, 351). Similarly, one of the most influential
names in postcolonialism, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asserts that “Between patriarchy and im-
perialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into
a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-
world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” (1994, 102). In terms of ecofemi-
nism, though it operates with an inclusivist and pluralistic ethics from the start, it is significant to
take into account the differences among women from postcolonial geographies without homog-
enizing them into a single category. In her discussion of Native American ecofeminism, Benay
Blend in this volume (Chapter 19) brings up the same question of whether or not mainstream
feminism can be adequate to address the different needs of Indigenous women. More importantly,
Blend underlines the fact that besides sharing issues with the larger context of women of color
feminism, there is also a focus on decolonization in Native American ecofeminism. Similarly,
Melanie Duckworth emphasizes (Chapter 6) that the colonial histories, as in the case of Australia,
prove crucial to the development of ecofeminism. Duckworth points out that Indigenous women
of Australia suffered under colonialism while white women were complicit in colonial violence.
As a result, Duckworth suggests that grouping the white women, Indigenous women, and the
natural world together from an ecofeminist point of view is not a sound argument. Citing In-
digenous Australian writer Ambelin Kwaymullina, Duckworth draws attention to the need for
ecofeminism not to repeat the mistakes of feminism and environmentalism in not recognizing
the Indigenous women’s problems and the entitlement of Indigenous people to their culture. In
terms of ecofeminist literary criticism, Laura Wright rightly suggests that “ecofeminist readings
of non-Western, postcolonial women’s narratives must be informed by an understanding of the
double bind that marks their subjects and authors as both female and colonized” (2010, 129).
As mentioned above, the Chipko movement comes forward as an important example of
ecofeminist activism and struggle in postcolonial feminist history as well as being included in
many early texts on ecofeminism. The Chipko movement was led by local rural women in Indian
Himalayas who wanted to protect the forests that their livelihood depended on. Their nonviolent
resistance, hugging the trees so that they cannot be felled, became an important example in South
Asia for the subsequent protests and movements such as those opposing the Narmada dam con-
struction and protesting nuclear disasters. Of these, Narmada Bachao Andolan, which opposed the
construction of large dams on the Narmada River and was led by Medha Patkar, stands out as one
of the largest environmental movements. In Africa, one similar early movement is the Green Belt
Movement founded by Wangai Maathai in Kenya in 1977. Since then, GBM has planted over 50

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million trees and still continues the important work against deforestation and desertification. It is
also vital that GBM emphasizes the work and activism done by women; their website defines the
objective of the movement as “to promote environmental conservation; to build climate resilience
and empower communities, especially women and girls; to foster democratic space and sustainable
livelihoods” (emphasis added; “Who We Are”). Similar to the Chipko Movement, the Green Belt
Movement is also led dominantly by rural women who are among the first to feel the effects of
degradation of their close environment.
Vandana Shiva examines the plight and resistance of especially rural women in India struggling
for their subsistence such as the women who led the Chipko movement. Shiva and Mies suggest
that “women are nearer to this [subsistence] perspective than men—women in the South working
and living, fighting for their immediate survival are nearer to it than urban, middle-class women
and men in the North” (Mies and Shiva 1993, 20). Detailing a critique of development which
Shiva calls “maldevelopment” they suggest that development projects backed by the west and
supported by the neocolonial governments are the main reason nature is exploited and women are
uprooted from their homes and oppressed further. Shiva suggests that

When commodity production as the prime economic activity is introduced as development,

it destroys the potential of nature and women to produce life and goods and services for basic
needs… More growth in what is maldevelopment has meant less nurturing of life and life
support systems.
(Mies and Shiva 1993, 75)

By centralizing patriarchal capitalist development as the reason for both disrupting women’s lives
and destructing nature, they see the need for a “subsistence perspective” that supports grassroots
democracy, sees “the creation and re-creation of life” as the reason for economic activity, and
recognizes nature’s own subjectivity (Mies and Shiva 1993, 319). In the same vein, referring to
movements from Argentina and Chile, Campisi (Chapter 17) makes the connection between the
femicides and the colonized Indigenous territories that face extraction under the neoliberal rule in
South America. This elucidates once again quite obvious that the women are being subjected to
various forms of violence; silenced, raped, and killed just as the land and nature are being abused
for more profit under neocolonial capitalism.

Literary Criticism
Despite the plurality of ecofeminist activism in the postcolonial geographies, in terms of literary
criticism, there are few examples that use postcolonial ecofeminism as a theoretical basis for their
analysis of postcolonial literature. One reason for this might be related to the analysis Benitez
makes in this volume (Chapter 4) as he makes an excellent point on the scarcity of the ecofemi-
nist focus in Philippine literary criticism despite many Philippine literary works focusing on the
environment and climate change. More crucially, Benitez suggests despite this apparent lack of
ecofeminist critique and thought in Philippine literary tradition, the core ideas of ecofeminism
can actually be seen in other fields that foreground concerns of women and nature such as postco-
lonial, decolonial, anticolonial, and Indigenous traditions.
In one of the essays focusing on postcolonial ecofeminism in recent years, Gurpreet Kaur
references many Indian novels authored by female writers that focus on women and the environ-
ment and notes a shift from rural to urban spaces. Citing the popularity of Arundhati Roy’s The
God of Small Things (1997), Gurpreet Kaur suggests that earlier Indian novels by feminist writers
such as Kamala Markandya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1954) and Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain (1977)
also portray rural environments but they depict “darker shades of nature” and women not in a

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deep connection with nature (2012, 389). In her article, Kaur takes issue with Vandana Shiva’s
ecofeminism and suggests that her portrayal of rural Indian women innately close to nature is ro-
manticized and shows a disregard for their poverty (2012, 386). Rejecting Shiva’s argument on the
basis of its essentialism, Kaur proposes that Shiva’s position feeds into the nature/culture dualism,
which should be disrupted as she believes “Women are, in fact, much more ambivalently placed in
relation to colonialism, development, nature and culture than Shiva allows” (2012, 386). In terms
of the Indian novels Kaur analyses, she comes to the conclusion that they represent an ambivalent
relationship between women and nature:

Disrupting the [nature/culture] dualism posits the women in an ambivalent relationship with
nature, while straddling the grey area between the two binaries. Much of the ecofeminist
theory and women-led activism does not allow such an ambivalence to emerge. Women
writing Indian fiction in English highlight this ambivalent relationship that women have
with the environment, thus providing an important counterpoint to both theory and
activism.
(389)

By suggesting that female characters in many Indian novels do not show an affinity toward nature,
Kaur questions the universality of the nature–woman connection that forms the basis of western
ecofeminist thought. Kaur also criticizes the lack of visibility of the Indian novelists in the dis-
cussions of ecofeminism. She states that with the exception of Arundhati Roy, Indian novelists
are left out of mainstream ecofeminist literary critique despite calls for an ecofeminist praxis that
takes into account oppression based not only on gender but also on race, class, ethnicity, caste,
religion, and age.
Another critic writing on postcolonial ecofeminism in the South Asian context is Nelam Ja-
been who points out the shortcomings of postcolonial ecofeminism the way it is typically prac-
ticed since “it uses the mainstream western ecofeminist lens to analyse a postcolonial text” (2019,
355). According to Jabeen

A postcolonial ecofeminism should not only locate a woman–nature connection and society’s
treatment of both but should also critically examine the women–nature relationship unique
to postcolonial societies owing to the double bind of postcolonial women. Not only gender,
but also class, race, religion, geography, and politics affect this relationship.
(2019, 355)

Jabeen suggests that the material conditions and realities should be taken into account while exam-
ining texts through a postcolonial ecofeminist lens. In her examination of Pakistani Anglophone
fiction, namely, Rukshana Ahmad’s short stories and Uzma Aslam Khan’s novels, Jabeen comes
to the conclusion that in these texts “the women–nature relationship cannot be ascribed to one
attribute: compassion” (2019, 364). Rather, these writers portray the relationship between women
and nature as “multifaceted, determined by the material conditions of their characters” (2019,
365). Jabeen criticizes the Western ecofeminist tradition in its treatment of the ­woman–­nature
connection as merely symbolic and asserts that

These so-called symbolic women–nature connections are not merely symbolic in many South
Asian societies, including Pakistan. Women’s bodies are treated as land where their only func-
tion is to reproduce. If they fail to do so, they are useless, just like barren land.
(2019, 364)

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As a result, Jabeen suggests that

Rejecting embodiment as essentialist cannot solve the problem when women’s bodies are
actually treated as commodities. Such examples from Pakistani texts shed light on the inad-
equacy of mainstream ecofeminism to explain women–nature connections as lived experi-
ences and pave the way for a comprehensive postcolonial ecofeminism
(2019, 364)

In another article, Jabeen furthers this argument by analyzing the woman–land connection in
Indian novels such as Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Water, the novels that
portray women getting raped and forced into prostitution. She suggests these examples depict
“the women–land connection by showing women’s bodies treated as land – for their instrumental
value” thus, again, emphasizing that the women–land connection does not exist only on symbolic
level (2020, 1108). Elrefaei in this volume (Chapter 11) underlines the same literal connection in
her close reading of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, examining the woman–nature paradigm in the
Palestinian writer’s novel in which the rape of a Bedouin Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers goes
hand in hand with the colonization of Palestinian lands by Israeli forces. Elrefaei’s analysis is a
good example of what Jabeen suggests about the woman–nature or woman–land connection in
postcolonial geographies; this connection is not just symbolic but rather violently real. Jabeen’s
solution to this problem is to acknowledge women–land embodiment despite its seeming essen-
tialism and instead “[dismantle] the ideological basis that defines women and nature as inferior to
men, and body as inferior to mind” ( Jabeen 2020, 1109).
Perhaps the only book-length work on ecofeminist literary criticism of South Asian literature
is Sangita Patil’s very recent book Ecofeminism and the Indian Novel in English (2020), in which she
examines Indian novels focusing on different environmental issues such as agriculture, dam con-
struction, animal sacrifice, and nuclear disasters. After close readings of the novels, Patil comes to
the conclusion that “though the Indian novels exhibit the traits of ecofeminism in their thematic
concerns and vision, the underlying structure of these novels while portraying the ecological cri-
sis goes beyond the gender issue” and therefore Indian novels “conceptualise the ecological crisis
more as a human problem than as a gender problem” (2020, 138). This conclusion she draws from
the novels she examined makes Patil propose “to reconsider ecofeminism as ecohumanism” (2020,
143). According to her, despite including feminist concerns, the novels are

Not blind to men as saviours of nature and subjugated by ecological crisis,” which implies that
“feminism, which has largely been imported from the West, takes a backseat and ecological
crisis appears as a general human problem in Indian novels.
(2020, 143)

It is unfortunate that Patil’s application of ecofeminism as a literary critical lens is very narrow as
she interprets the existence of male characters equally harmed by ecological degradation or those
who have a connection with nature and thus working toward saving it as the grounds to assert
that the novels she has examined do not have an ecofeminist (or feminist) viewpoint. Whereas
Kaur and Jabeen suggest that for an inclusive postcolonial ecofeminist reading the specific material
conditions of the postcolonial women in their specific societies and their double bind should be
taken into consideration, Patil rejects underlining the experience of postcolonial women as doubly
oppressed, and thus also rejects basic tenets of ecofeminism. In fact, Patil’s work ends with a strong
anthropocentric message, which has been, as explained at the beginning of the chapter, one of the
main critiques of ecocriticism toward postcolonial studies.

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Postcolonial ecofeminism, bringing three already major fields—postcolonial studies, ecocrit-

icism, feminism—together, is difficult to navigate, especially when each of these fields contains
multitudes of (sometimes contrary) definitions. On the other hand, one discernible difficulty of
using ecofeminist theory in the analysis of postcolonial literature seems to be the various contra-
dictory views on the women–nature connection. In this sense, it is exemplary to see that Kaur and
Jabeen, two female scholars from South Asia who write on postcolonial ecofeminism in the South
Asian context and discuss the same novels in their works, agree that the western way of practic-
ing ecofeminist theory in discussions of South Asian literature is not adequate; yet, they disagree
on the cause and the solution. In their respective discussions of Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in
a Sieve, one of the most studied Indian novels in terms of ecofeminism, Kaur proposes that the
female characters do not have a deep connection to nature, thus they defy the essentialist western
woman–nature paradigm. On the other hand, Jabeen suggests that the western woman–nature,
or women–land embodiment is not merely symbolic but quite real as women’s bodies are treated
as lands, as commodities. In her discussion of the same novel, Chan, in this volume (Chapter 31),
argues that the characters of the novel, subsistent farmer villagers at first seem to lose their liveli-
hood as a result of the droughts (natural causes) and the building of a tannery in their area which
eventually buys the land they rely on for their livelihood (development); yet, she also proposes, the
problems in an Indian village in the 1950s were caused not only by the destruction of resources in
the name of progress but also by the age of capitalocene, the effects of “capitalist world ecology”
in More’s words. As such, in this postcolonial example, Chan argues the impact of colonialism
and capitalism have to be considered in addition to that traditional intersectionality theory based
on race, gender, and class.

Conclusion
The fact that there are very few academic works focusing on ecofeminist critique of postcolo-
nial literature mostly reflects the difficulty of acknowledging the women–nature connection as a
cross-cultural and even universal fact. On the other hand, the women and other underprivileged
groups—sexual, racial, ethnic, and colonized others—are unquestionably connected to nature
in terms of the common perpetrator—the global capitalist imperialism—that deems them ex-
pendable and facilitates their exploitation. Focusing on this patriarchal capitalist ideology behind
this oppression and exploitation might prove useful in overcoming the difficulty of establishing a
universal understanding of women–nature connection. Intersectional, inclusive, and antidualist
comprehension of ecofeminism would broaden the application of it in postcolonial literary analy-
sis, and move beyond a strict focus analyzing the existence (or lack thereof ) of female characters’
connection to nature in literary works.

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 34
POSTHUMAN LITERATURE
AND ECOFEMINISM
Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu

Introduction
Anthropocentric climate change, species extinction, global pollution, and environmental despo-
liation have been consuming the Earth, leaving indelible fingerprints on the environment and its
cohabitants. No wonder, then, that the ecological reality in the future would become dark, dan-
gerous, and indeterminate, rendering all life and natures vulnerable to environmental catastro-
phes. Nevertheless, Ynestra King comments on an ecological future of how the Earth “ought to”
become, suggesting that humans, rather than “succumb to nihilism, pessimism, and an end to
reason and history,” seek to “enter into history, to a genuinely ethical thinking—where one uses
mind and history to reason from the ‘is’ to the ‘ought’ and to reconcile humanity with nature,
within and without. This is the starting point for ecofeminism” (1990, 116). The only detriment
to such a future imaginary, according to contemporary ecofeminists such as Greta Gaard, is the
anthropocentric, colonial-capitalist, hetero-patriarchal ideology that not only “authorizes oppres-
sion based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species,” but also “sanctions the
oppression of nature” (Gaard 1993, 1). Thus, they suggest, we need to forge a new framework
for describing and challenging the subjugation of otherized bodies, and the ecocide with which
humans and nonhumans are nowadays confronted (Gaard 2017b; Warren 1996).
Likewise, posthuman thought fleshes out how anthropocentrism and speciesism, along with
industrialism and capitalism, have constructed a thoroughly exclusive culture that regards itself
as separate from natures, and oppresses what it excludes: natures, women, children, refugees,
nonhuman animals, the poor, and people of color. Criticizing such exclusion, posthumanisms,
and ecofeminisms problematize anthropocentric and androcentric set of values and practices that
subjugate genders, sexualities, the underclass, and natures, illustrating how nature and culture are
interdependent with relational, precarious, and porous boundaries between the human and the
more-than-human worlds.
This chapter offers a critical analysis of the relationship between posthumanism and ecofemi-
nisms, proposing an alternative understanding of posthuman ecofeminism, one that acknowledges
that all planetary bodies and systems—human and nonhuman alike—are in a perpetual process of
change and transformation, brought about through natural and cultural convergences. This un-
derstanding might open up a deanthropocentric, antiessentialist, and antispeciesist space for what
Greta Gaard offers “a fourth-stage critical ecofeminism” (2017a, xvi). In this stage, this chapter the-
orizes what I would call “ecological felting,” predicated on multispecies kinship, intersubjective
becoming, and inhuman life. I first problematize Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s discussion of

364 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-36

 Posthuman Literature and Ecofeminism

“felt” as an ecological paradigm in which all human and inhuman actors are inextricably bounded
together by a mesh of complex relations, one that reconfigures the relations between women, na-
tures, and bodies, resulted in an intersubjective becoming. So posthuman ecofeminism can add to
an inhuman perspective on how the human and the nonhuman are relationally embedded within
the inhuman life by theorizing and reimagining ecogenders, prismatic natures, and embodied
subjects beyond the posthuman. Bodies and natures in this reimagination emerge as ecological
intersubjective becoming out of the uneasy coexistence and tension between nature and culture,
becoming neither mechanical nor textual—nor are they only gendered. Instead, they fundamen-
tally change the material-cultural identities of the two realms as they co-constitute one another
in ecological felting.

Posthuman Ecofeminisms: Embodied Subjects, Posthuman Bodies,

and Ecological Genders
Arguing that the posthuman tendency with ecofeminisms necessitates a rethinking of the human
seen as a rational, cultural and historical, male subject, and the nonhuman relegated to an infe-
rior place, this chapter shows that the very motif of the posthuman is inextricably tied to what
ecofeminists such as Carolyn Merchant, Noël Sturgeon, Catriona Sandilands, and Greta Gaard
articulate in their discussions; that is, to injustices based on gender, race, class, and species, and the
Enlightenment ideologies that perpetuate the systematic exploitation of environments (Sandilands
1999; Sturgeon 2009). The ecofeminist thought, first, revolves around two interconnected poles:
gendered positions and nature. It is worth noting in these discussions that gender relations are key
to shaping and construing human and nonhuman experiences of environments, for ecofeminist
approaches fully recognize that colonial-capitalist “opposition to nature,” as King remarks, “re-
inforces the subjugation of women” (1989, 19), and pinpoint interconnections between “how one
treats women, people of color, and the underclass on the one hand and how one treats the non-
human natural environment on the other” (Warren 1997, xi). The parallel domination of women
and nature by heteropatriarchy and colonial capitalism positions humans as fundamentally op-
posed to, excluded from nature. As Linda Vance contends, “the patriarchal domination of women
runs parallel to the patriarchal domination of nature. Both women and nature have been con-
trolled and manipulated to satisfy masculinist desires” (1997, 60). Ecofeminist thought advances
this line of enquiry by exploring how ecofeminisms foreground the connection between social
oppression and environmental exploitation. It is important to destabilize such material-discursive
practices that have been historically engendered by the values of hegemonic male dominance.
However, these values have perpetuated the trenchant Cartesian dualisms that ecofeminisms and
posthumanisms aim to deconstruct and challenge. Ecofeminist thought questions the Cartesian
propensity to consider culture and nature, mind and body as mutually exclusive categories, crit-
icizing hegemonic heteronormative practices. Obviously, hegemonic heteropatriarchy and co-
lonial capitalism exploit the very dualisms so as to justify the superiority of the “Anthropos”
(“human” in the ancient Greek) over the more-than-human world and the relegation of otherized
non/humans to inferior status. Underlining this predicament, King argues that “the systematic
denigration of working-class people and people of color, women, and animals is connected to the
basic dualism that lies at the root of Western civilization” (1990, 106). Similarly, Val Plumwood
contends that master narratives of Western culture maintain dualisms, such as reason/emotion,
mind/body, text/matter, culture/nature, male/female, subject/object, to dominate the latter cat-
egories of these dualisms (1993). Not only do the former categories of dualisms subordinate and
even eliminate the latter ones, according to Plumwood, but also such dualisms reveal hierarchic
relations of power (1993, 31). As such, ecofeminist thought is a critique of this hierarchical pro-
cess, pointing out that it is impossible to impose a hierarchy on humans and nature. In so doing,

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ecofeminisms dismantle the common equation of women with nature, and men with culture, and
thus reconfigure natures, genders, and bodies with an ecological niche.
Posthumanism owes much to ecological feminism in this regard because it further unsettles
the Cartesian dualisms such as nature and culture, human and nonhuman, problematizing what
might count as “the human.” Now, if human reality were always already construed by hierar-
chic structures of dualisms, then posthuman future would be always already established by he-
gemonic male dominance. But since human reality is inextricably bound up with both material
and cultural forces, movements, and practices, it is possible to portray the posthuman condition
neither as hierarchic nor as reductionist. Rather, it might be considered as contingent upon hu-
mans and nonhumans, as it is continuous, in flux and interconnected with inhuman forces. Thus
the posthuman has been conceptualized neither as a fixed state of being nor as an immutable,
closed entity temporally and spatially confined to only dualisms. Instead, the posthuman is a rela-
tional site of mutation, transformation, heterogeneity, and differences, one that is transcorporeally
interconnected with the more-than-human world. Notably, the premise of posthumanisms is
to decenter and deessentialize what we call “the human,” that is, the Cartesian subject consid-
ered as autonomous, self-determined, and rational. In addressing the question of the Anthropos,
for instance, Rosi Braidotti describes “Universal Man” as “masculine,” “white,” “urbanized,”
“speaking a standard language,” heterosexual, Eurocentric, able, and rational (2013, 65). This
image of modern Western “Man” based on Enlightenment’s anthropocentric ideals of self-made
man, and Cartesian human reason and agency has been under scrutiny in posthuman approaches
(Braidotti 2013; Ferrando 2019; Nayar 2014; Wolfe 2010). Posthumanism as a material-discursive
framework thus provides a platform for discussing how human exceptionalism has eradicated
material and conceptual existences and differences of natures, sexualities, and bodies. The reason
behind the “radical decentring of the traditional sovereign, coherent and autonomous human”
in posthumanisms (Nayar 2014, 11) is to construe the human not as a being of superior species,
but as a becoming, which has coevolved with other life and nonlife forms, and as a relational
position characterizing the interconnected relationship of the human and the nonhuman to the
material environment. The posthuman is open to the “open-ended, inter-relational, multi-sexed
and trans-species flows of becoming through interaction with multiple others” (Braidotti 2013,
89). Instead of being disembodied and superior to other life forms, the posthuman functions as
a multifarious and embodied assemblage of different actors, forces, and movements. As feminist
new materialisms underline it, the material body, be it a virus or fungus, might be considered as
an “agentic force that interacts with and changes the other elements in the mix, including the hu-
man” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 7). The posthuman, then, is neither a just biological entity nor
a sociocultural artifact; rather, the posthuman is a material-discursive ontology of entanglements
of “naturecultures,” to use Donna Haraway’s compound term (2008).
Furthermore, as Ba şak Ağ ın also demonstrates in Chapter 32, the inextricable entanglement
of human and nonhuman, mind and body, matter and text articulate a material-discursive reticu-
lation within which human and nonhuman find themselves always already enmeshed. Underlin-
ing the naturalcultural interconnections through agencies, forces, affects, and assemblages, Ağ ın
emphasizes the role of material embodiment in posthuman subjectivity in relation to race, class,
gender, and sexuality because the driving forces of material embodiment, which feminist new
materialist scholars and ecofeminists seek to discover and depict, might only manifest themselves
in the varied relations and actions of human, nonhuman, and inhuman actors. “Being environ-
mentally bound and territorially based,” the posthuman “feeds upon, incorporates and transforms
its (natural, social, human or technological) environment constantly” as Braidotti suggests (2013,
139). As Ağ ın also discusses in Chapter 32, nonhuman and inhuman individuals in this posthuman
reimagination possess agentic character features that manifest “vitality” in Jane Bennett’s words
and “act as quasi agents” (Bennett 2010, viii). As such, the nonhuman world and things can attain

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agentic status by mediating relations with the human and nonhuman realm and by being con-
nected with naturecultures. Complex interrelations in life can only be perceived materially and
ecologically, posthuman ecofeminisms would argue, as can the essential rather than temporary
in society and life. Posthuman subjectivity thus grounds material embodiment and inhuman life
as a whole to which Ağ ın draws attention in Chapter 32, so that it “reshapes the identity of hu-
manistic practices, by stressing heteronomy and multi-faceted relationality, instead of autonomy
and self-referential disciplinary purity” (Braidotti 2013, 145). As a result, in posthuman ontology,
humans and nonhumans can only be rendered as ecological and embodied, interconnected with
other fleshy bodies, which posthuman ecofeminism would also envision.
Before delving into posthuman ecofeminism, it is noteworthy to explicate what Rosi Braidotti
terms “posthuman feminism,” by complicating the traditional distinction between nature and cul-
ture. Posthuman feminisms, including feminist new materialisms, contemporary ecofeminisms,
feminist science studies, and feminist affect theories, challenge not only anthropocentric ideals of
the Anthropos as merely sovereign and autonomous over other life forms, but also androcentric
ideals of “Man” that see other human and nonhuman beings as inferior. In varied posthuman
feminist imaginaries, the questions of the posthuman, the female subjectivity, queer sexualities,
strange natures, and inhuman ecologies are posed, as feminist scholars, such as Braidotti, Cecilia
Åsberg, Myra Hird, Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Lynda Birke, Elizabeth Grosz, Greta Gaard, Mel
Y Chen, and Patricia MacCormack, conjure up an ontological, epistemological and ethical space
for rethink and de/reconstruct humanity, animality, relationality, affectivity, and inhuman life
with regard to concerns over gender, sexuality, race, class, justice, health, sustainability, and death.
Despite their differences, they share the same premise that humans and nonhumans are always part
of all naturalcultural processes and posthuman systems even if the idealized Anthropos has dreams
of mastery over human and nonhumans life, claiming that under no circumstances can feminist
posthumanism be conceived without humans, nonhumans, and inhumans. In fact, posthuman
(eco)feminisms are concerned with such a relational ontology in which human and nonhuman
materialities are continually formed and re-formed through their relational engagements with
other life and nonlife forms, rejecting fixity, disembodied condition, and givenness.
Posing a challenge to the Enlightenment understanding of the Anthropos as the independent,
self-fashioning force, Rosi Braidotti in “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism” further advances
on what contemporary feminist discourses set up in feminist political subjectivity and the posthu-
man (2017). She propounds four theses regarding posthuman feminism, all of which contributes
a postanthropocentric and nondualist way of life including humans and nonhumans: “feminism
is not a humanism; that Anthropos has been decentered and so is the emphasis on bios; and that, as
a result, nonhuman life, zoe, is now the ruling concept,” and she continues to contend that sex-
uality is “a force beyond, beneath, and after gender” (2017, 21). Braidotti’s posthuman feminism
is thus based on a zoe-centered ontology that deconstructs the dualisms. Posthuman feminism in
this framework is the very critique of what Eurocentric humanism has constructed such as xe-
nophobia and racism, challenging the boundary between self and other, and accepting otherness
as a positive difference. In so doing, posthuman feminism challenges the deep anthropocentrism
in society because the Anthropos as the “universal humanistic measure of all things” and as the
“emblem of an exceptional species” (Braidotti 2017, 26) by no means plays a key role in hybrid sys-
tems and naturalcultural processes, since contemporary knowledge production systems are not at
all dependent on this idealized figure. Therefore, contemporary technological and other systems
have decentered the Anthropos, as Braidotti contends, stating that the “decentering of Anthropos
challenges also the separation of bios, as exclusively human life, from zoe, the life of animals and
nonhuman entities” (2017, 26). What she emphasizes is that rather than the hyperseparation of
bios from zoe, “a human–nonhuman continuum” (2017, 26) emerges. As such, Braidotti adopts
a geocentric position, not an anthropocentric one, suggesting a postanthropocentric framework

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through “an active embrace of zoe: nonhuman life” (2017, 30). Within this framework, most of
all the process is to be seen in “becoming-earth (geocentered)” or “becoming-imperceptible
(zoe-centered),” for it “entails a radical break from established patterns of thought (naturalization)
and introduces a radically immanent relational dimension” (2017, 30). On this view, the insight
might provide a new vision of subject formations predicated on a zoe-centered ontology. In this
new vision of feminist posthuman subjectivity, as Braidotti claims, it is necessary to “rethink
sexuality without genders” (2017, 36), and sexuality cannot be reduced to genders, which is also
contestable in the analysis of ecological gender (Gaard 2014). This is because she underlines sex-
uality’s transversal vitality, pointing out that as “life force, sexuality provides a nonessentialist
ontological structure for the organization of human affectivity and desire” (2017, 36). As Asmae
Ourkiya also argues in Chapter 29, however plural genders seem to be, gender arguably is much
more problematic when one takes account of the fixed associations that social regimes carry with
them. In order to explain the very relationship, Ourkiya articulates what Braidotti states that “sex-
uality is both post- and pre-identity, as a constitutive force that is always already present and hence
prior to gender” (2017, 36–37). Yet while some critics argue that genders are an essential part of
the human and the nonhuman, posthuman feminists conceive gender as a “form of governance
that has to be disrupted by processes of becoming-minoritarian/becoming-woman/becoming-
animal/­becoming-imperceptible” (Braidotti 2017, 37). Central to this view is “becoming” be-
cause posthuman subjects become sexed through interconnections, associations, and alliances,
thereby trespassing the fixed boundaries of genders and bodies. Reconfiguring the body as queer
and “incorporeal complex assemblage of virtualities that encompasses sexuality as a constitutive
element” (Braidotti 2017, 37), as Ourkiya underlines in Chapter 29, posthuman feminism in this
regard suggests that sexualities might be considered as “a generative ontological force” that “is
capable of deterritorializing gender identity and institutions” (Braidotti 2017, 37–38). Repudiat-
ing the dualistic view of gendered identities, posthuman feminism’s primary concern here is to
illustrate the polymorphous nature of sexuality as a human and nonhuman force. What constitutes
posthuman sexed subjectivity is its relational ontology in this account, that is to say, it is through
a web of affective alliances, interconnections, and disidentifications that the posthuman subject is
materialized as sexed and sexualized (see Ourkiya’s Chapter 29).
Nevertheless, beyond posthuman feminism, what this chapter theorizes is the question of to
what extent a posthuman ecofeminist onto-epistemology (in Karen Barad’s sense (2007)) envi-
sions embodied subjects, sexualities, and natures as ecological intersubjective becoming. Thus,
I would argue that all entities, be it human, plant, or art, are always already part of “ecological
lefting” through their intersubjective becoming with other life and nonlife forms. What I want to
add here, drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s argument on felt, is to explore how
materialities, sexualities, natures, inhuman forces, nonhuman bodies, and sociocultural artifacts
ecologically felt together into new assemblages of becomings predicated on differences and oth-
erness of inhuman life. First, we can question whether the concept “felt” opens up a postanthro-
pocentric space for breaking down the distinction between nature and culture, self and other,
human and nonhuman, and body and mind, and in doing so paves the way for new formations,
new sexualities, new natures, and new subjects. As a material, felt is a nonwoven fabric made out
of different multiple threads, as Deleuze and Guattari defines it as “an antifabric” that is “in prin-
ciple infinite, open, and unlimited in every direction; it has neither top nor bottom nor center;
it does not assign fixed and mobile elements but rather distributes a continuous variation” (1980,
475–476). The chief property of felting is entanglement, not of a fixed, closed kind, but consisting
of the entanglement of conflicting forces and structures; felting is characterized, as Deleuze and
Guattari suggest, by “no separation of threads, no intertwining, only an entanglement of fibers
obtained by fulling” (1980, 475). Felting, unlike weaving, constructs a new formation that is in-
extricably entangled. Ecological felting in my contention might be thus associated with complex

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coexistence and entanglement; it is the open process of the radical interaction of its parts, but this
interaction depends as much on their difference from one another as on their coeffectual relations
with each other. For posthuman ecofeminism, complex coexistence and entanglement of differ-
ences together constitute the key considerations in the analysis of sexuality, race, class, justice,
and subjugation of humans and nonhumans. This is where posthumanism and ecofeminism share
a common ground. They are both dependent on relational coexistences and interconnections
embedded within naturecultures. Posthuman ecofeminism in this sense brings into dialogue post-
human feminism’s inhuman and relational life, where a new kind of knowledge is construed,
through an encounter with ecological intersubjective becoming.
It is useful to clarify further posthuman ecofeminism’s relationship with ecological intersub-
jective becoming on the one hand, and with inhuman life on the other. First of all, posthuman
ecofeminism attaches subjectivity and vital agency to nonhuman and inhuman entities as does
feminist new materialism, and in doing so constructs an interrelatedness in which different sub-
jects are posthumanized by the ecological lefting of complex relations. From this entanglement
ecological intersubjective becomings flourish. These new subject formations are in direct alliance
with Donna Haraway’s “multispecies kinship.” Haraway’s conceptual tools, “becoming-with”
and “making kin,” in her onto-epistemological project are quite important to understand her
formulation of multispecies relationality. She argues that all of the creatures of the earth exist
through becoming-with other life forms, pointing out that “becoming is always becoming with,
in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake” (Haraway 2008, 244).
In other words, the mutual relations of humans and nonhumans, both embodied and embedded,
constitute a relationality, a dynamic interaction that is nonhierarchical and symbiotic. Rather than
highlighting separation, Haraway also suggests that “making kin” is part of multispecies and com-
posite interconnectivity with the more-than-human realms (2016). Pointing to the symbiotic re-
lations between humans and nonhumans, in this sense, kinmaking creates numerous alliances and
connections with nonhuman entities that cohabit and co-constitute the earth. This thus epito-
mizes the fusion between self and other through becoming with the more-than-human creatures.
Secondly, posthuman ecofeminism imbricates the body and the environment through inhu-
man life in the ecological lefting, pointing to the permeable boundaries, porous subjects, and
ecosexualities in prismatic ecologies. Here “inhuman” is used to “emphasize both difference
(‘in-’ as negative prefix) and intimacy (‘in-’ as indicator of estranged interiority)” (Cohen 2015,
10). Thus one can find differences occurring during relational processes, and agentic intimacies
between humans and nonhumans in inhuman life. Yet at the heart of the argument is the inquiry
of what is and constitutes inhuman life. Broadly speaking, inhuman life is conceptualized neither
as given and fixed nor as ahistorical and cultural; rather, it is considered as “vital” (Bennett 2010),
“geologic” (Yusoff 2013), “darklife” (Thacker 2017), and “molecular intimacy” (Davis 2016). As
an active and reactive force, inhuman life is productive and constitutive in becoming with other
life and nonlife forms, a relational power that reconfigures, regulates, and remakes the bonds that
tie humans to nonhumans. Although the politics of life has been exploited to “humanize, racial-
ize, gender, pathologize, and manage human and nonhuman bodies” (Weinstein and Colebrook
2017, 2), inhuman life as a becoming dramatically unsettles and changes what counts as “life” in
the twenty-first century. What is more, according to feminist new materialist scholars such as Jane
Bennett, a vital life is considered as the basis of all foundations of systems. What is empathically
underlined is that a “life” designates “an interstitial field of nonpersonal, ahuman forces, flows,
tendencies, and trajectories” (Bennett 2010, 61). Regarding everything, including viruses, fungi,
trees, and leachate, as being “in a sense, alive,” life might be conceived not just as a vibrant force,
but also as an ontological foundation interconnected with other vital agents. Inhuman life thus
signifies something more than just a given force; it is inhuman’s coeffectual and co-constitutive
relationship with the more-than-human world.

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Likewise, Kathryn Yusoff proposes life as a geomorphic force, human and nonhumans subjects
as becoming-geologic, contending that “in multiple ways, being is always tied into being toward the
geologic, conceptually, ontologically, and materially” (2013, 792). Yusoff draws specific attention
to fossil fuels which, according to her, have not thoroughly been “indivisible” from human and
nonhuman subject formations since multispecies becomings, albeit ontological differences, are
“coconstituted with fossil fuels, as much as reconstituting alternative energetic materialities” (Yu-
soff 2013, 792). Regarding geologic life not just as an element but as a relational process contrib-
uting to becomings, Yusoff argues that the matter—fossil fuels—is not “outside of life,” and it has
“agency, and directs, forms, and differentiates the geologic subjects of the Anthropocene” (2013,
792). Accordingly, humans might “can only follow after the flows of energy, be in concert with
Earth processes and inhuman forces” (2013, 792). The vibrant matter—fossil fuels—is seen as an
essential part of geologic ontologies of humans, nonhumans, and inhumans, and so conceived,
these material relations produced by geologic life and geo-transformations are always effective in
new formations, and are in a state of flux, thereby illustrative of how inhuman life changes as a
relational force. For this reason, inhuman life is before, after, and beyond the posthuman.
This posthuman ecofeminist onto-epistemology unravels how relational ontologies of the earth
co-constitute new forms of subjectivity such as “embodied gender (corporeality)” (Hird 2008),
ecosexualities (Gaard 2014), interspecies becomings, and strange ecologies. A new sense of post-
human and material reality shaped by inhuman life engenders the permeable connections between
nature and culture, mind and body, human and nonhuman, cisgender and transgender, and self and
other, which is best illustrated in the ecological intersubjective becoming of material bodies. In the
feminist discussion of the body, to insist on disembodied cultural subjectivity and abstract indi-
vidualism does not solve the problem of how hegemonic masculinity and anthropocentric genders
perpetuate the exclusion and subjugation of otherized humans and nonhumans, and this is partic-
ularly so where the relation of heterosexism to the biopolitical and social world is problematic. In
order to reverse this material-discursive practice, it is necessary to consider gendered bodies not as
“disembodied discursive subjects” but “emerge through their differential becoming as embodied
subjects intra-acting with myriads of visible and invisible agents of the material world (bacteria,
viruses, toxic chemicals, food, water, energy)” (Oppermann 2013, 25). Thus, a posthuman ecofem-
inist project might be a way out for the future of multispecies bodies and the earth.
So contemporary ecofeminists like Greta Gaard offers a way of dealing with anthropocentrism
and hegemonic masculinity on a broader social and ecological scale. Questioning how hegemonic
hetero-masculinity is challenged and then reconstructed as ecological, Gaard is concerned to form
new ecogenders, ecomasculinities, and ecosexualities, so that these feminist ecological subjects
may recognize and wage war on advanced capitalism and anthropocentrism maintaining the du-
alist thought (2014). First, we need to reconfigure gender because, in particular, masculine gender
identity is commonly seen as “anti-ecological” (2014, 231), as she argues, and thus ecomasculin-
ities would “enact a diversity of ecological behaviors that celebrate and sustain biodiversity and
ecological justice, interspecies community … and direct action resistance to corporate capitalist
eco-devastations” (2014, 232). As these are valid for all ecogenders, ecosexualities also need to
focus everything around inhuman life into new configurations through ecological behaviors. For
our embodied ecological relationality is always already bound to other life forms, and so with this
recognition of inhuman life, we can make the earth a living terra full of multispecies symbioses,
ecological becomings, and inhuman assemblages (see Ourkiya’s Chapter 29).

Posthuman Ecofeminist Readings

Unraveling the intertwinements between human and animal, nature and culture, self and
other, matter and text, gender and sexualities, contemporary British fiction is preoccupied with

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contemporary ecological concerns as much as the inquiries of what comes after the human, or
nature, what inhuman life is, and how the place of humans within interspecies multitudes is. A
question to ask is whether or not contemporary British fiction generates a new form or trope to
envisage an ecological feminist posthumanism, and in so doing, gives an agency to more-than-
human life. Yet if one speaks of the human and the nonhuman, does this already denote some
kind of multispecies subjectivity regarding the porous body? Responding to such questions and
examining “what constitutes the nature of human being” in the twenty-first-century British fic-
tion, Peter Boxall indicates that contemporary British fiction deals with an “emergent hybridity”
that is articulated in the blurring and messy boundaries between the human and the animal other,
and that finds expression in the “image and the conception of the disassembled body, the body
which comes apart” (2013, 101). The adjacency of the human and the nonhuman and posthuman
hybridity can be found in contemporary British fiction, not just as subject-matter but as part of an
ecoesthetic dynamic, a narrative force that creates new multispecies forms and embodied subjects
within the borderlines produced by material-discursive practices and inhuman life itself. As the
works of Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Sarah Hall, Daisy Johnson, Liz Jensen, Zadie Smith, and
Max Porter show, contemporary British fiction expounds how humans and nonhumans are in-
terwoven in a relational terrain of the imaginary lefting. In the relational liminality, inhuman life
merges with gender, community, class, race, natures, politics, and family, bodies blur the bound-
aries, and multispecies becomings break down the (un)stability of anthropocentrism and hege-
monic male ideals throughout contemporary fiction. For example, Liz Jensen’s Ark Baby (1998),
and A. S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” (2003) respectively weave a posthuman ecofeminist account
of inhuman life (humans, animals, stones, and interspecies subjects) to reveal that the present is
integrated into our multispecies becoming and kinship through ecological feminist bodies.
In her neo-Victorian and futuristic narrative Ark Baby, Liz Jensen approaches a posthuman no-
tion of multispecies becoming to reinscribe gender identity and reproduction as an ecological and
countersocial force. Moving between 2005 and 1845, the novel presents two intertwined stories;
the futuristic one defined by the “Fertility Crisis” centers on Bobby Sullivan, aka Buck de Savile,
a representative of anthropocentrism and hegemonic masculinity, who is accused of murdering a
nonhuman monkey, Giselle. On the other hand, the second narrative thread revolves around the
multispecies kinship between Tobias Phelps, a figure of interspecies becoming, and Violet Scrapie,
a later vegan, who constructs an ecogender based on inhuman intimacy. First, it is through the
lens of Bobby Sullivan that we witness how the crisis makes nonhuman animals, monkeys in this
case, as surrogates and disposable bodies as he cannot accept the nonhuman as subjects, so speak-
ing of Giselle: “‘Look, she wasn’t a girl,’ I said, nudging at the body-bag. ‘She was a sodding ma-
caque monkey’” ( Jensen 1998, 11). Yet her mother, Mrs. Mann, subjectifies her by asserting that
“‘Giselle was a person’” ( Jensen 1998, 13). No matter how hard the hegemonic masculine system
tries to exclude the nonhuman animal by killing it, the interspecies kinship between Giselle and
Mrs. Mann illustrates how the human has an intimate relationship with the nonhuman other. This
narrative is later connected to the alternative neo-Victorian story through interspecies kinship,
which is the key to the fertility crisis. As an example of the tangling of the human and monkey,
Tobias Phelps, the narrator of the neo-Victorian world, is stigmatized as the other because of his
creaturely body till Violet Scrapie loves and resubjectifies him through her ecological gendered
behavior. As the plot unfolds, the Scrapie family, the father of which is Queen Victoria’s taxider-
mist, represents a carno-phallogocentric one, eating exotic meat in every meal. After her mother
dies of poisoning, she comes across Henry Salt on the street, a member of the Vegetarian Society,
holding the placard, “MEAT IS MURDER” ( Jensen 1998, 156). Violet’s vegetarianism is also
parallel to her intimacy with Tobias Phelps. As various species “shape each other throughout the
still ongoing story of co-evolution” (Haraway 2003, 29), Violet and Tobias have a co-effectual
connectivity with each other through their material-discursive entanglements, thereby forming

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an ecological gender identity in the novel. At an important moment Violet declares her love for
Tobias, acknowledging Tobias’s interspecies origins: “Mr. Phelps, I am—aware—of your true or-
igins.” […] “I love you all the more!” ( Jensen 1998, 329). What can be seen here is the beginning
of an inhuman intimacy with the nonhuman other, one that opens up some possibilities for an
ecological future with more-than-human life. As Jensen’s novel suggests, the multispecies kinship
that characterizes posthuman ecofeminism is also a defining feature of ecological intersubjective
becoming, which is precisely what Tobias spends much of his life trying to understand.
Unlike Jensen, A. S. Byatt exemplifies becoming-with inhuman life in her short story “A
Stone Woman” as pointing to the entanglement of stone and humans through geo-ontological
formations. Demonstrating the codependence of bios and geos, “A Stone Woman” invokes the
geologic transmogrification of the protagonist, Ines, who is a professional lexicographer as it posi-
tions inhuman life as emerging within a variety of minerals, stones, and gemstones. Following the
loss of her mother, she realizes after her surgery that she goes through a gradual metamorphosis
of her corporeality petrifying into gemstones. Although this material change might be seen as a
metaphor for the process of her grief, the visceral reality of her body, rife with variegated stones,
lava, gemstones, and minerals, foregrounds that stone as an inhuman force is vital and vibrant,
becoming part of the human, thus underlying human’s embeddedness within inhuman life, be it
geologic or ecological. As her metamorphosis progresses, her corporeality’s boundaries are burst
asunder, and she recounts the beginning as such

A necklace of veiled swellings above her collar-bone which broke slowly through the skin
like eyes from closed lids, and became opal—fire opal, black opal, geyserite and hydrophane,
full of watery light. […] She saw dikes of dolerites, in graduated sills, now invading her inner
arms.
(Byatt 2003, 122–124)

It is crucial to read this transformation in relation to the posthuman understanding of stone as

explored by Jeffrey J. Cohen. Arguing that one can find intimacy in the complex entanglement
of human and stone, Cohen points out that stone is “primal matter, inhuman in its duration. Yet,
despite its incalculable temporality, the lithic is not some vast and alien outside. A ­limit-­breaching
intimacy persistently unfolds” (2015, 2). Notably, through her becoming-geologic in the cor-
poreal reterritorialization, Ines enacts a posthuman subjectivity with which geologic forces are
co-constitutive. Her human self and its geologic other in this sense concurrently exist in the inter-
subjective becoming. Through the tale of her total “becoming-earth” (Braidotti 2013) in Iceland,
“A Stone Woman” dramatizes how the human finds solace and even freedom by embracing oth-
erness. Above all, these geologic and ecological transformations and multispecies kinship in these
posthuman narratives are striking expressions of a zoe-centered inhuman life materialized in the
relational ontology between the animal, the human, and the stone.

Conclusion
Adopting “a new and more inclusive form of ethical pluralism” (Wolfe 2010, 137) regarding
nonhuman animals, plants, ecologies, and inhuman life, to conclude, posthuman ecofeminist
discourses, narratives, and stories make us aware of how humans, nonhumans, and ecologies are
inextricably enmeshed in and negatively or affirmatively interdependent with one another with
no boundaries between natures and humanity, self and other. This approach also brings further
significance to multispecies intersubjective becoming since the ecological intersubjective becom-
ing in the lefting of complex relations that posthuman ecofeminism locates in relational ontology
emerges as a central aspect to hybrid subjectivity, ecogenders, and embodied bodies experienced

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by the contemporary subject. Ecofeminist stories and posthuman ecofeminism challenge anthro-
pocentric and androcentric perspectives in favor of becoming with and making kin, and so reg-
ister the blurred connection between subject and object, human and animal, nature and culture.
The posthuman ecofeminist framework in this sense might act as a catalyst of change and hope,
not only progressing us toward posthuman ecological-feminist realities, but also propelling us
toward an ecoconscious behavior.

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 35
POSTMODERN LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Karen Ya-Chu Yang

Introduction
Postmodernism as a cultural and conceptual movement of the latter half of the twentieth century
witnessed the heterogeneous blossoming of literary ventures in parody and pastiche, fragmented
subjectivities and heteroglossia, intertextuality and heterotopias, and pluralism and contingency.
Whether formed through the rise of postindustrial computerized and technologized societies, as
stated by Jean-François Lyotard (1979), or the emergence of consumer or multinational capitalism,
as pronounced by Fredric Jameson (1992), the era of postmodernism declared its disillusionment
with Enlightenment unity and universality. This critical stance is shared by ecofeminism, which
primarily focuses on the detrimental consequences of Eurocentric patriarchal humanism grounded
in Cartesian dualism which inferiorizes nature, woman “as nature,” and other naturalized others
as disposable bodies. A fundamental discrepancy between ecological and postmodern approaches,
however, is often found in the former’s prioritization of material and the latter’s centralization
of the discursive. Yet, rather than positioning them as contradictory opposites, ecocritics such as
Patrick D. Murphy (1997), Daniel R. White (1997), and Serpil Oppermann (2006) propose con-
ducting complementary engagements between the disparate disciplines to more wholly examine
the diverse and relational complexities of lived experiences and matters.
Compared to ecocriticism, which generally practices a strong commitment to realist epistemol-
ogy, ecofeminism has had to defend itself against accusations of essentialism from wary feminists
since its introduction in the 1970s. As a result, ecofeminism has developed with greater regard for
drawing out complicated entanglements between material realities and ideological frameworks.
Ecofeminism realizes that

[C]oncepts around ‘nature’ are also recognized as made from assemblages of cultural norms,
social ideologies and scientific discourses so that they are irreducible to the ‘natural’ but, at
the same time, nature is also embodied and has a material basis that cannot be subsumed
within human construction.
(Phillips and Rumens 2016, 10)

This perception sets up a strong common ground for fruitful dialogues between ecofeminist and
postmodern ventures.
Since the coining of the Anthropocene at the turn of the twenty-first century, contemporary
academic terminology has, in an effort to address the excesses of human impact, mostly substituted

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-37 375

 Karen Ya-Chu Yang

“postmodern” for other terms such as the “posthuman” and “postnatural,” Gayatri Spivak’s “plan-
etarity,” or according to Michael Kane (2020, 40), “postextractivist” for some. Whether theorists
consider the era of postmodernism to have ended or rather to have evolved into the posthuman
and postnatural framework, relocating materiality in the discursiveness of the last half century’s
postmodern literature help postmodern deconstructions of essentialism avoid the pitfalls of relativ-
ism and the reduction of all reality into textuality. Rereading postmodern literature through the
language of ecofeminism also brings the literary genre into conversation with narrative develop-
ments of the Anthropocene in these last few decades. On the other hand, examining postmodern
devices used to deconstruct metanarratives can open up new routes and discourses for ecofeminist
concerns about reconstructing neglected marginalized pasts and presents. For ecofeminism, at-
tention to the past and present contributes to generating better measures for moving forward into
the future. Thus, ecofeminism’s future-oriented mentality offers means to mobilize postmodern-
ism’s past–present compulsion into active resistance and prospective change. In acknowledging
the material-discursive nature of existence, ecofeminism modulates postmodern suspicions and
anxieties regarding human agency to generate a more affirmative stance and further expands ideas
of interconnectedness to include nonhuman agencies and new materialist notions of intra-active
entanglements. In this chapter, I will offer varying examples from postmodern rewriting and
postmodern literature’s sister genre, science fiction, to draw out intersecting dialogues between
postmodern literature and ecofeminism.

Postmodern Rewriting
Opposing the critique of postmodern esthetics as schizophrenic pastiches and simulacra lacking
historical or political consciousness, Christian Moraru (2001, 156) argues that in postmodern
rewriting,

The re-storying of a former story resists the restoring of these categories and, by the same token,
the reproduction of power configurations based on them; how, in other words, writing as
rewriting encroaches upon the ‘traditional’ space of political agon.

In other words, postmodern rewriting is not ahistorical or apolitical, nor does it summon a nostal-
gic return to the past; rather, postmodern rewriting rethinks and unthinks the presence of the past
to question whose reality is being represented. Among these attempts, Linda Hutcheon (1988, 5)
examines in particular the “historiographic metafiction” form, which refers to postmodern
­reworkings of the past that demonstrate a “theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as
human constructs” through the employment of typically postmodern narrative devices including
self-reflexivity and parody. According to Hutcheon (1988, xiii), the postmodern “marks neither
a radical Utopian change nor a lamentable decline to hyperreal simulacra,” but an effort “to see
what happens when culture is challenged from within: challenged or questioned or contested,
but not imploded.” By revealing art as discourse, postmodern literature problematizes references
between narrativity, textuality, and the production of knowledge. In her discussion on material
ecocriticism and ecofeminist literature in Chapter 32, Ba şak Ağ in also emphasizes the importance
of discerning intertextuality and hypertextuality through the layering of texts.
An ecofeminist approach to postmodern rewriting would invite reconsiderations of the various
constructs of women, nature, and naturalized others from a material-discursive perspective. Some
texts and authors of potential interest may include Julian Barnes’s modern/postmodern quest in
Flaubert’s Parrot, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, which reframes Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe through cast-
away Susan Barton and also gives more presence to the original novel’s native character Friday, as
well as various works by Margaret Atwood such as Lady Oracle and The Penelopiad. In particular,

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as typical postmodern texts, neo-Victorian novels including John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s
Woman and A. S. Byatt’s Possession reflexively reconsider the developments of women and feminin-
ity under the growing impact of Darwinism and the rise of modern science since the latter half of
the nineteenth century. Engaging these postmodern rewritings with ecofeminism draws specific
attention to entanglements between the evolution of modern science and the modern woman and
their overlaps moving into the contemporary era. In Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels,
John Glendening offers a compelling account of the intermix of Darwinism and postmodernism
in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Possession. He notes that

Evolutionary science radically differs from postmodernism because it means that numerous
qualities in the individual and society arise from biology and thus are innate or partially so…
in other words, nature operates in tandem with nurture but should not be regarded as negated
by it.
(129)

Despite this, he points out that Darwinism and postmodernism also share commonalities such as
underscoring the significance of change and indeterminacy as well as collapsing binary opposi-
tions between human and animal, nature and culture, and past and present.
Charles Smithson, the leading character of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, is a fossil collector who
“called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Dar-
win himself ” (Fowles 1969, 49). As an amateur paleontologist, he finds comfort in fossils that serve
to prove Darwin’s evolutionary theory in which “inexorable laws… very conveniently arranged
themselves for the survival of the fittest and best, exemplia gratia Charles Smithson” (Fowles 1969, 49).
Nevertheless, by detailing Charles infatuation with the unfathomable and unattainable Sarah and by
employing postmodern techniques of frame-breaking and multiple endings, Fowles’ postmodern text
deprecates the reduction of Darwinian evolution to the survival of the finest and emphasizes instead
the relevance of change and adaptability as well as contingency and unpredictability in the process of
evolution. The latter qualities are emphasized by Darwinian feminism and feminist science studies.
The shoreline—a space where land and sea meet—represents a manifold and ambiguous state
of existence in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles’ novel opens with a vivid depiction of Lyme
Bay’s charm, located at the intersection between land and sea, culture and nature. The narrator’s
description of the space encompasses both the natural powers of the sea and the creative processes
of human history

Redolent of seven hundred years of English history… a superb fragment of folk art. Primitive
yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore
or a Michelangelo; and pure, clean, salt, a paragon of mass.
(Fowles 1969, 4)

The coast is ever-changing, as depicted in the tendency of the strata of Lyme to slide; thus, much
land has been lost to the sea. In the epigraph to this chapter, Fowles cites Alfred Tennyson’s
“In Memoriam” to reference the employment of water-related verbs to animate solid land. For
example, the flowing hills and the land that melts like mist and shapes into clouds. This inter-
mediary space where sea and land collide is the fated place where Charles encounters his newest
­obsession—Sarah Woodruff, that is, “the French Lieutenant’s woman.”
In an attempt to trace the unknown past, Charles indulges in seeking out historical relics
along the shoreline. His alignment of Sarah with fossils is epitomized in their first encounter in
which Charles mistakes her sleeping form for a dead body. She becomes his latest fossil discovery
and obsession—albeit one which continuously undermines and perplexes his various attempts at

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deciphering. Charles’ description of Sarah is often imbued with natural references, many of which
are sea imageries. He employs water imageries to describe Sarah’s tragic countenance:

[I]ts sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland
spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign
of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such
sorrow; as if the spring was natural in itself, but unnatural in welling from a desert.
(Fowles 1969, 10)

For Charles, Sarah appears antithetically natural and unnatural, tame and untamable, as seen in his
reference to the welling woodland spring against the backdrop of the mad sea. This resonates with
Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman’s Chapter 23 and Nicole C. Dittmer’s Chapter 40, in which the authors
reference Carol Merchant’s Death of Nature to address the historical dichotomization of woman
and nature in English literature, which is characterized by contradictions and instabilities. In her
focus on Victorian literary studies, Dittmer observes that Victorian literature is permeated with
correlations of femininity and nature as ontologically bifurcative. Woman, who is cast as virgin or
witch, is likened to nature, which is regarded as nurturing or destructive; in the case of the latter
categorizations, “unruly” woman and nature are often regarded as in need of being controlled and
domesticated (see Dittmer’s Chapter 40).
For Charles, the male protagonist of Fowles’ postmodern neo-Victorian novel, his dichoto-
mous mind frame prohibits him from reconciling differences and he eventually concludes that

The frontier between the real Sarah and the Sarah he had created in so many such dreams…
He even saw himself coming upon her again—and seeing nothing in her but his own folly
and delusion. He did not cancel the insertion of the advertisements; but he began to think it
as well that they might never be answered.
(Fowles 1969, 429)

In ecofeminist terms, Charles may have failed at border-crossing and diversifying women’s con-
nections with nature through material-discursive conversations, but he eventually comes to the
poststructuralist recognition that his inscriptions of connections between women and nature are
illusively self-imposed misconceptions chiefly derived from his own egocentric narcissism.
In comparison, although Sarah cannot, strictly speaking, be defined as an ecofeminist prac-
titioner either, she exemplifies ecofeminist dynamics through her character’s material-discursive
destabilizations. The authors of “The Undercliff of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman:
A Note on Geology and Geography” argue that Sarah is “[not a woman] of the landscape, and
neither [does she frequent] it to admire its natural beauty. Rather, [she] borrows the landscape
for her own purposes and ultimately leaves it” (Bawden et al. 1999, 137). Sarah scatters the coast
with her wandering presence and silent absence—an embodiment of the indeterminate coastline’s
rhizomatic potential. Matthias Stephan (2019, 61) identifies the rhizome, a philosophical concept
developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as the key postmodern metaphor. The rhizome,
a vegetable system where the root “was never present, and can never be present,” engages post-
modern philosophy with ecological materiality. As a plant system that expands horizontally and
vertically without an identifiable central center,

[T]he rhizome maps a territory in which all concepts are leveled on the same surface, and thus
weighted equally. There is no hierarchy or privileging, in any objective sense, and any such
‘arborization’ would be done arbitrarily, thus becoming alterable.
(Stephan 2019, 61)

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The rhizome metaphor resonates with ecofeminism’s material-discursive approach to dismantling

hierarchies and rooted binaries in an effort to posit more dynamic and interconnected paradigms.
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, contrary to Charles who seeks to trace the biological and histor-
ical origin of fossils and relics, Sarah’s enigmatic characterization maps out a labyrinth of haunting
existences. Her predominant silence throughout the novel starkly contrasts the interpretive incli-
nation of Charles and other characters as well as the narrator/author’s insertions. As she explains,
“I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I
have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing. I am hardly human any more” (Fowles 1969, 175).
Sarah’s mental and physical unpredictability and indeterminacy bluntly resist generalized classifi-
cations and rationalizations deduced from scientific and/or fictional disciplines. In refusing to be
defined, she says to Charles, “I meant that I am not to be understood even by myself. And I can’t
tell you why, but I believe my happiness depends on my not understanding” (Fowles 1969, 452). In
contrast to Charles who restlessly travels around Europe during the latter part of the novel before
setting sail to America to no avail, Sarah eventually settles down by the River Thames in London.
Her destination is land not sea, albeit land with a direct channel to the sea.
Angela Carter is another postmodern writer whose fantastic fabulations set out to demytholo-
gize popular historiography and are invested in undermining patriarchal idealizations of feminin-
ity and humanity through reimaginations of intimate woman–animal contacts and hybridizations.
For example, Nights at the Circus returns to the Victorian period; a bird-woman hatched from an
egg is its leading protagonist. Her fairytale rewritings, many of which are collected in The Bloody
Chamber, reveal the segregative oppression of folkloric constructions imposed on women and
animals to argue for more diversified and interconnected woman–animal engagements and repre-
sentations. Also debunking phallocentric myths, Carter’s Black Venus revisits legendary historical
figures by shedding new light on the marginalized subjects of previous narratives.
Carter’s interest in disarming historical knowledge to imagine a more empathetic woman–­
animal relationship is specifically spotlighted in her recreation of the historically infamous Lizzie
Borden murders through two short stories—The Fall River Axe Murders and Lizzie’s Tiger. The
first story is a closer account of the events leading up to the murders whereas the second story is
an imagined tale of four-year-old Lizzie’s encounter with a circus tiger. The opening lines of The
Fall River Axe Murders present the recreation of history as a combination of myth, fact, and fiction.
Carter’s story begins with a prologue that quotes the popularized children’s rhyme “Lizzie Borden
with an axe/Gave her father forty whacks/ When she saw what she had done/ She gave her mother
forty-one” (Carter 1996, 395). The first sentence of Carter’s story then cites the historically docu-
mented date and location of the murders: “Early in the morning of the fourth of August, 1892, in
Fall River, Massachusetts” (Carter 1996, 359). The following line, which starts a new paragraph,
goes on to dramatize the narrative with a literary illustration of the day: “Hot, hot, hot…very
early in the morning, before the factory whistle, but, even at this hour, everything shimmers and
quivers under the attack of white, furious sun already high in the still air” (359). As Christine
Berni (1997, 49) argues, Carter’s “attention to historical detail and her richly rendered descriptions
of material reality comprise a kind of hyper-realism… At the same time, Carter’s story is deeply
suspicious of narrative, particularly as a vehicle of historical knowledge.” For instance, the narra-
tor starts the account by describing how “[f ]ive living creatures are asleep in a house on Second
Street” (Carter 1996, 361) before deciding to delete two characters from the script; the line is thus
rewritten as “One old man and two of his women sleep in the house on Second Street” (Carter
1996, 362). This metafictional exposure of narrative device resists “the consolations of realistic
fiction” (Berni 1997, 49).
Carter’s metafictional disclosure of narrative skepticism toward historical, cultural, and lit-
erary accounts is not a postmodern fall into the cognitive abyss but calls forth more responsive
and responsible interactions with texts and matters, which include those between humans and

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nonhuman animals. For instance, the popular myth of Lizzie’s murder being triggered by her
father’s decapitation of her pet pigeons with a hatchet is spotlighted in Carter’s rewriting. Carter’s
interest in exploring woman–animal relationships is further accentuated in her choice to focus
her second Lizzie story on imagining the young girl’s encounter with a circus tiger. Scholars
have mostly approached the pigeons and tigers in Carter’s rewriting as literary or psychological
analogies.1 In addition to these symbolic renderings, recent developments in animal studies fore-
ground approaching animals as their own essence of being rather than reducing them to figurative
projections of the human mind (see Kordecki’s Chapter 26). Ağ in’s term “mattertext,” which
is a diffracted version of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s “storied matter,” similarly
emphasizes acknowledging the enmeshed entanglement of intertextual layering and corporeal
materiality (see Ağ in’s Chapter 32). Ağ in argues for the deconstruction of the Western idea which
equates one-ness with same-ness to instead recognize the possibility of becoming one and a whole
while also embracing differences. Similarly, various concepts such as “becoming with,” “world-
ing,” “natureculture,” “bodymind,” “material-semiotic,” and “material-discursive” emphasize
the mattertextuality of all living and nonliving existences (see Ağ in’s Chapter 32).
To generate closer encounters between humans and animals, ecofeminist concepts of care and
empathy can contribute further insights to the observation of physical and emotional encounters
between women and animals. Josephine Donovan (2016, 10) proposes an ecofeminist esthetics
of care which is “nonviolent, adaptive, responsive, and attentive to the environment, perceiving
other creatures as subjects worthy of respect, whose different voices must be attended to, and
with whom one is emotionally engaged, interwoven in an ecological and spiritual— subject-­
subject— continuum.” In Lizzie’s Tiger, the young Lizzie’s enamored engagement with the tiger
is contrasted with the circus tamer’s conquering spectacle. Seeming to enter a time and space of
their own, Lizzie and the tiger stare into their differences which might lead toward “a peaceable
kingdom”:

Her pale-blue Calvinist eyes of New England encountered with a shock the flat, mineral eyes
of the tiger…It seemed to Lizzie that they exchanged this cool regard for an endless time, the
tiger and herself…It stopped roaring. Instead it started to emit a rattling purr. Time somer-
saulted. Space diminished to the field of attractive force between the child and the tiger. All
that existed in the whole world now were Lizzie and the tiger.
(Carter 1996, 392)

The circus tiger is no longer generalized nor analogized among the category of tiger or tiger
imageries; rather, the encounter between the girl and the tiger is described through personal and
intimate engagements. This subject-subject encounter evokes the humble recognition that the
tiger’s mind “remained, however, a law unto itself…There was a wrinkle in its nose and it buzzed
and rumbled and they never took their eyes off one another, though neither had the least idea what
the other meant” (Carter 1996, 392). Furthermore, the child’s professed love for and admiration
of the tiger demonstrates her rejection of the tiger tamer’s proclamation that the hierarchy of fear
is the nature of the bond between the Beast and Man. Yet, Lizzie’s “nonviolent” subjugation of the
tiger through her love is described with disturbing gestures, as she “wind[s] it to her on an invisi-
ble string by the exercise of pure will…the power of her love forced it to come to her, on its knees,
like a penitent” (Carter 1996, 392). The fact that the narrator of the story appears unable to access
either the girl’s or the tiger’s mind but remains an outside observer and commentator adds ambiv-
alence to the reader’s interpretation of the girl and tiger’s close/closed encounter. This narrative
distance also obliges readers to witness the tiger’s reaction to the girl’s infatuation, which is viv-
idly portrayed through personification devices to strengthen the empathetic connections between
human and nonhuman animals. Many critics read this scene as signifying the demonstration

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of female power through a tiger-girl becoming, although scholars differ in their opinions as to
whether this newly discovered power is empowering or destructive. From an ecofeminist care
theory perspective, the presentation of this scene and the titling of this story in the possessive form
also caution against merely caring about nonhuman others without caring for their wellbeing,
with the latter being a core intention of human-animal empathetic exercises.

Science Fiction
In addition to postmodern rewriting, science fiction, which is considered by Brian McHale (1987)
to be a sister genre of postmodern literature, also holds much potential for productive conversa-
tions with ecofeminism. Specifically, feminist science fiction’s imagining of alternative realities
interrogates the confinements of patriarchal assumptions by envisioning an extended range of
possibilities in the postindustrial technological world. Along these lines, in Chapter 44, which
deals with the uses and abuses of technology in the context of climate fiction, Iris Ralph describes
feminist action as engaging with cooperation rather than competition, with conservation and
preservation rather than removal and displacement, with retreat and compromise rather than ad-
vance and takeover, with coexistence rather than mono-existence and absolute forms of power,
and with the Taoist philosophical concept of “yin” rather than “yang.” In feminist science fiction,
employing postmodern techniques further heightens and magnifies the imaginative decentering
of metanarratives, blurring of boundaries, and destabilization of categories. Among these “alien
constructions,” a phrase borrowed from Patricia Melzer (2006), a popular model has been Donna
Haraway’s (1985) cyborg. Haraway’s postmodern concept proposes a feminist destabilization of
rigid separations between humans and nonhuman animals and machines via the cyborg’s manifes-
tation of biotechnological hybridity. One of the earlier introductions of the female cyborg can be
found in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975). Told in a fractured narrative voice and storyline by
the “four Js” ( Joanne, Jeannine, Janet, Jael) and the authorial narrator as well as by the four worlds
and the novel’s montage style, Russ’ novel “disrupts nearly every conventional aspect of narrative,
including coherent plot, identifiable chronology, and singular character” (Robinson 2017, 98).
Amanda Boulter (1999, 155) similarly notes that The Female Man’s anarchic structure “articulate[s]
the contradictions within and between feminist perspectives without then reconciling them in a
linear narrative…generat[ing] a series of contradictions which remain deliberately unresolved.”
These narrative disruptions employ postmodern indeterminacy and polyphony to deconstruct
patriarchal gender norms and contemplate challenges of transgressive gender identities.
Among the novel’s four protagonists, Jael manifests Haraway’s cyborg concept with her steel
teeth and cybernetic claws. Living in a dystopian world where Womanland and Manland have
been at war for 40 years, Jael physically embodies the postindustrial technoscientific career woman
who disrupts human–nonhuman, natural–unnatural, male–female, and past–present–future dis-
tributions in her struggle to pave the way for Janet’s utopian Whileaway. Jael’s border-crossing
flexibility parodies the heterosexual institutions of Womanland and Manland, as exemplified in
cases where she acts out performative gender roles to deceive residents confined to their respective
notions of heteronormativity.
In contrast, Janet’s lesbian Whileaway is depicted as a utopian society whose all-female resi-
dents undermine heteronormativity with their ability to genetically procreate without the assis-
tance of men. In Whileaway, technology and nature are not dichotomized. This is expressed in
Janet’s opening statement: “I was born on a farm on Whileaway… I’ve worked in the mines, on
the radio network, on a milk farm, a vegetable farm…I’ve supervised the digging of fire trails,
delivered babies, fixed machinery, and milked more moo-cows” (Russ 1975, 1–2). Janet’s unques-
tioned practice of occupations that are typically limited to a single-sex and her association with
both machines and organic beings accord with ecofeminist rejections of dualistic divisions which

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prioritize men and culture over women and nature. The young girls of Whileaway are educated
on “how to run machines, how to get along without machines” (Russ 1975, 50). In this world,
technology is not a means to master nature, for the women of Whileaway are both technologically
advanced and naturally connected.
Another interesting detail is the depiction of “Whileawayan cows… [which] pine and die
unless spoken to affectionately” (Russ 1975, 51). This feature demonstrates ecofeminist empathy
toward nonhuman animals, albeit not fully in the sense of Lori Gruen’s (2015) “entangled em-
pathy,” which signals the blending of emotion and cognition to responsibly respond to another’s
wellbeing; rather, Russ’s human–animal relationship places life-and-death value on the emotional
aspect of linguistic communication. The above-quoted line and the event it describes show that
discourse affects material reality and emotion has physical consequences; it also illustrates a dia-
logic interaction between an ecological concentration on material natures and postmodern atten-
tion to language and textuality. The Female Man’s postmodern play with the spatial displacement
of words and experimental stylization of narratives draws attention to diversified practices and
potentialities of language as well as the coexistence of parallel worlds. In the end, the segregated
world of Whileaway is neither the ultimate ideal nor end as the narrators bid farewell to each other
in the denouement of the novel: “I said goodbye and went off with Laur, I, Janet. I also watched
them go, I, Joanna; moreover I went off to show Jael the city, I Jeannine, I Jael, I myself ” (Russ
1975, 212). In addition to fragmenting the subject “I” through the intermingling of the Js, the
ending scene further accentuates postmodern intertextuality with the narrator’s acknowledgment
of these narratives having now become a “little book” whose independent existence has no con-
trol over its reader’s interpretative comprehensibility. Yet, the postmodern death of the author
suggested by the novel does not imply the death of subjectivity but rather indicates the liberating
transformation into plural subjects-subjects with the narrator’s final recognition that “we will all
be changed… For on that day, we will be free” (Russ 1975, 213–214).
Ursula Le Guin’s understudied apocalyptic/postapocalyptic novel Always Coming Home (1985),
which narrates environmental devastations via intensified levels of postmodern reflexivity, is an-
other postmodern science fiction with abundant ecofeminist potentials. The book is presented
as an archeology of the future Kesh people who “might be going to have lived a long, long time
from now in Northern California” (Le Guin 2001, xi). Rejecting linear narrative conventions,
the larger portion of Le Guin’s novel is a compilation of anthropological and ethnographic field
notes, interviews, stories, (auto)biographies, historical documents, charts, maps, sheet music,
and recipes, mixed in with poems, plays, myths, and stories. Composed through a reflexive
narrator/author and a wide assortment of documentations, Le Guin’s utopian/dystopian novel
accentuates heteroglossic discursions and metafictional artifice. In effect, Lisa Garforth (2005,
401) argues that

living in accordance with modern concepts of linear history and the idea of progress displaces
one from a ‘mindful’ relationship with the lived world of nature and interpersonal relation-
ships, causing one to fall ‘outside’ the world. By taking us temporarily and jarringly ‘outside’
the fictional world of the Kesh, deploying the reflexive devices that define Always Coming
Home, Le Guin shows us the environmental apocalypse immanent in our own.

In eschewing traditional utopian schematics, Garforth (2005, 410) argues that the green utopia of
Always Coming Home “embodies a close-up and experiential Utopian mode, signifying through
‘bits, chunks and fragments’ the irreducibility of ordinary life and its partial, local, and ecological
temporalities.” Sandra J. Lindow (2012, 62) similarly views the novel’s “messiness” as reflect-
ing “a natural, organic construction” composed in reaction to the tightly knitted science fiction
popular during the mid to late twentieth century. Always Coming Home’s nonlinear structure and

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polyphonic composition open up multiple entry points for readers and thus rejects privileging any
single account or logic as the exclusive agent of knowledge and truth.
In this reflexive ecotopian novel, the postmodern heterogenization of agency resonates with
ecofeminism’s attentiveness to biological diversity. Vandana Shiva (2017, 384) contends that “[t]he
marginalization of women and the destruction of biodiversity go hand in hand. Loss of diversity
is the price paid in the patriarchal model of progress which pushes inexorably towards monocul-
tures, uniformity and homogeneity.” Le Guin’s Always Coming Home is sprinkled with abundant
varieties of geographical, anthropological, ecological, and literary accounts of botanical details
and nonhuman animals. Discussing this remarkable diversity and plurality, Deirdre C. Byrne’s
chapter on science fiction and ecofeminism (Chapter 45) contends that animals, plants, celestial
bodies, and even weather phenomena such as wind, rain, cloud, and fog are regarded and treated
as “people” in Always Coming Home. Her discussion on the ethnographer/narrator’s employment
of the word “commensal” to describe multispecies companionship bears reference to Kerim Can
Yazgünoğ lu’s Chapter 34 on posthuman ecofeminist concepts such as intersubjective becoming,
natural-cultural processes, and the codependence of bios and geos. These new materialist en-
tangling dynamics proliferate through Kesh documentations of their universe and cosmology in
Always Coming Home.
Kesh culture’s combination of Native American Indigenous spirituality with Eastern Taoist
philosophy further demonstrates the international scope of Le Guin’s futuristic vision. Reso-
nating with Ralph’s (Chapter 44) inscription of feminist action as relating more to the “yin”
of the Taoist yin-yang symbolic structure, Byrne (Chapter 45) reads the Kesh utopia as a yin
utopia where survivors are acutely mindful of the entanglements of various life forms and mat-
ters, and in particular, considerate of their own entanglement with animals and plants that are
used for consumption. In Chapter 2 on Chinese literature and ecofeminism, Chan Kit-sze Amy
contends that yin-yang is interdependent rather than dualistic and is constituted by a Deleuzian
­deterritorializing-reterritorializing relationship. By bringing in an assorted variety of matters,
mediums, cultures, agencies into mutual relations and dialogue, the plethora of Le Guin’s novel
illustrates the worlding interdependency of naturecultures and thus underscores the importance
of human’s responsibility, kindness, empathy, and respect toward the diverse heterogeneity of
natures and communities.

Conclusion
Engaging postmodern literature with ecofeminism further heterogenizes the scope of past and
future imaginaries to encourage more reflexive, affective, and interactive mattertexting. Con-
cluding this chapter with Le Guin’s novel gestures toward continuing progress in inciting conver-
sations between postmodern literature and ecofeminism by expanding inquiries into international
postmodern literature. This practice holds much potential for opening up new routes and inter-
sections between postmodern esthetics and ecofeminist concerns.

Note
1 Paul Vlitos (2017) reads the closing line of Carter’s story—“Outside, above, in the already burning air,
see! the angel of death roosts on the roof-tree” (Carter 1995, 379)—with reference to Gustave Flaubert’s
Un Coeur simple and Gabriel García Marquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. For Vlitos (2017,
1413), the ending image of a “possibly hallucinatory yet curiously material mythological being” prompts
readers to “reflex anxiously on the relationship between representation and reality” by underscoring de-
liberate ambiguity when “establishing an illusion of referentiality, to pretend to collapse the distinction
between referent and signifier.” Other analogical discussions include Janet L. Langlos’s (1998) and Anja
Müller-Wood’s (2004) articles, which read Lizzie’s tiger episode through Freudian projections.

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References
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Boulter, Amanda. 1999. “Unnatural Acts: American Feminism and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man.” Women:
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 36
RACE AND ECOFEMINIST
LITERATURE
Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman

Introduction
Nell Irvin Painter (2010, ix) opens The History of White People with the claim that “race is an idea,
not a fact, and its questions demand answers from the conceptual rather than the factual realm.”
Painter’s argument is grounded in the subjectivity and variability of these signifiers—“white” and
“Black”—that have determined so much of Western (and Earth) history. Even if not biological,
Painter admits, race is undeniable in the sense that the categorization of race results in very real,
material outcomes such as the deprivation of Civil Rights, mass incarceration, and ongoing racial
violence. In this assertion that race is socially constructed, which is also a central tenant of critical
race theory, and in the tension between social construction and social justice, conversations about
race find parallelism with ecofeminist theory, which similarly acknowledges the shaping of the
constructs “woman” and “nature” through historical discourses while simultaneously claiming
the material, referential world as the object of study. Ecofeminist scholars tell us that nature is both
an idea and a material reality that exists independent of the human; the concept of woman is cul-
turally and historically dependent yet real bodies are controlled and restricted every day based on
this concept; race is not physical, we know, but Black bodies bear the scars that prove otherwise.
In these paradoxes are the most significant intersections of race and ecofeminism, and this chapter
will consider the ways in which women of color, specifically Black1 and Indigenous writers and
activists, have contributed to both the literary and theoretical understandings of race and nature
and also been on the front lines of activism for human and nonhuman lives, as well as the ways
ecofeminist theory provides a productive framework to account for the layers of history, culture,
language, and empire that inform the lives and work of women of color.
Certainly, discussions of race are not and should not be limited to Black and white; as the
breadth of this volume indicates, power structures that determine value and social standing
continue to function across the globe. Collectively, the chapters in this book demonstrate the
variation in women’s lives and views on nature, as well as the diverse responses to and from
ecofeminism. In Chapter 17, South American Literature and Ecofeminism, Nicolás Campisi effectively
demonstrates the relationship between colonialism, extractivism, racism, and gender violence
through the work of Mapuche poet Daniela Catrileo, for instance. Other chapters relevant to
this discussion on local and international scales include African Literature and Ecofeminism (Chapter
10) and Tamil Literature and Ecofeminism (Chapter 7). Contributions from postcolonial ecocriti-
cism 2 are also crucial for a more complete analysis of the function of racial constructs and prog-
ress toward dismantling oppressive systems. Aslı Değ irmenci Altın explores the possibilities and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-38 385

 Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman

challenges of ecofeminist approaches to postcolonial literature in Chapter 33 through examples

of South Asian and African texts.
Still, ecofeminism has to confront Blackness (and whiteness) head-on—not only because Black
women have explicitly called for us to do so,3 but because it is impossible to account for current
environmental and human rights emergencies without understanding race as a tool for manipu-
lating land and people, what Kathryn Yusoff (2018, 107) calls a “geopolitical act in the division
of flesh and earth through the grammar of the inhuman” in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.
Yusoff’s book is an important example of the ways in which ecocriticism/ecofeminism must learn
from critical race theory and Black feminist scholars because the material realities of racism and
extraction are so entangled that to treat them independently equates to erasure. For Yusoff (2018,
2), the “racial categorization of Blackness shares its natality with mining the New World, as does
the material impetus for colonialism in the first instance.”
Ultimately, Indigenous women and Black women of African descent have been at the forefront
of critical conversations about race, gender, and environment, and their theoretical and imagi-
native texts, as well as real-world activism, are critical to ecofeminist thought. Therefore, this
chapter will use the examples of Black and Indigenous writers and theorists to think through the
ways that ecofeminism offers a robust framework to consider the layers of gender, race, and class
that impact marked bodies (Alaimo 2010) and the nonhuman world inextricably.

A Summary of BIPOC Relationship to Mainstream Feminism and Ecocriticism

In “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib” originally published in 1971 in New York
Time Magazine, Toni Morrison (2008, 20) wrote, “What do Black women feel about Women’s Lib?
Distrust.” In her essay for the landmark publication of the 80s, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings
by Radical Women of Color, Doris Davenport (2015, 87) takes the feminist movement to task, writing
that “[f ]rom coast to coast, the feminist movement is racist, but that news is old and stale by now.
It is increasingly apparent that the problem is white wimmin [sic].” These are just two examples
of this sentiment, which led Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to establish the theory of intersection-
ality, due to the fact that “Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider
intersectional identities such as women of color” (Crenshaw 1991, 1242–1243). Intersectionality
has robust applications for a variety of theoretical frames including ecofeminism, which could help
address the most fundamental issue Crenshaw’s work addresses: the safety and security of Black
women. Disproportionate exposure to violence faced by Black women—from domestic causes, law
enforcement, or in childbirth—can and should be treated as an environmental issue. (See Chan
Kit-sze Amy’s Chapter 31, Intersectionality and Ecofeminist Literature, for more about intersectionality.)
In addition to this general skepticism toward organized, mainstream feminism, there is the
added problem of the ways in which the environmental movement first, and later ecocriticism, has
been slow to acknowledge and include non-white, Western voices and experiences. The result is
that Black and Indigenous women have an especially complicated relationship with ecofeminism,
which is the convergence of two schools of thought that have arguably been associated with elit-
ism and whiteness historically. It is clear that the so-called nature writing of William Wordsworth
and Ralph Waldo Emerson4 has nothing to do with Black history nor Black experience, much
less ethnic and Indigenous ways of knowing and inhabiting the earth. Although it is widely noted
that Native American and Indigenous texts have gained “enthusiastic attention” from ecocritical
scholars (Dodd 1999, 1094), their inclusion is sometimes superficial. As Cherrie Moraga reminds us
(2015, xviii), “Social change does not occur through tokenism or exceptions to the rule of dis-
crimination, but through the systemic abolishment of the rule itself.” Dr. Chelsea Mikael Frazier
(2020) sums up this issue well in her manifesto Black Feminist Ecological Thought:

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In mainstream films, books, and political discourse the erroneous notion that Black women
and their communities do not care about the natural environment, sustainability, or their own
health loom large. To add insult to stereotype-informed injury, Black feminist voices have
often been seemingly absent from mainstream environmentalism and the intellectual move-
ment that sprang forth from it in the early 1990s. But Black Feminist Ecological Thought has
been present and continues to evolve alongside an ecocriticism that often fails to recognize its
existence and its intellectual and creative authority.

Ecofeminist scholarship must do more than romanticize or idealize a vague “connection to the
land” that can be found in the literature of Black and Indigenous writers. The writer-activists I
mention in this chapter insist that they are not simply tokens nor teachers, and sustained, serious
research and scholarship should be devoted to the ways in which race has shaped earth and human
history, as well as the innumerable contributions of Black and Indigenous peoples to more sus-
tainable ways of knowing and inhabiting the earth. Yvette Abrahams (2014) uses the example of
soap in her article Moving Forward to Go Back: Doing Black Feminism in the Time of Climate Change.
While Abrahams found that (racist) travel narratives described the Khoesan people of South Af-
rican as “greasy,” her research found that the Buchu oil was actually used to keep fleas away and
possesses healing properties. Compared to the soaps and oils sold at Walmart, all detergent-based
and loaded with petroleum-derived chemicals, which Abrahams argues caused her psoriasis, the
Khoesan ointments “fed my skin certain adaptogenic nutrients, making it softer and sensitising it
to touch. It responded by immune system balance” (Abrahams 2014, 47). Abrahams uses the ex-
ample of Buchu and Waxberry to illustrate the ways in which colonial narratives shaped attitudes
and perceptions of others and brought us further from sustainable practices. In many ways, human
and environmental health crises are the result of racist systems that devalue practices that do not
increase the wealth of white capitalists.
Kimberly Ruffin (2010, 1) opens Black on Earth with this sentence: “For as long as Africans
have been Americans, they have had no entitlement to speak for or about nature.” Ruffin and
others identify stereotypes that reduce African Americans to “urban” and disinterested in envi-
ronmental concerns as one reason Black voices have been excluded from nature writing anthol-
ogies and narratives of environmental history. Certainly, the impetus to perpetuate this kind of
stereotype—through the practice of othering—is complex and beyond the scope of this chapter
to adequately address. Still, as Camille Dungy (2009, xxi) puts it, “To bring more voices into the
conversation about human interactions with the natural world, we must change the parameters of
the conversation.”

Othering and the Origins of Race

The ideological construction of otherness—this identifying human and nonhuman persons as
“not me”—was a crucial step in the establishment of race, historically, and a necessary concept
to consider for the intersectional treatment of race, gender, and nature. Postcolonial critics such
as Homi Bhabha (2004, 94) have pointed to the insistence on the rigidity of cultural/historical/
racial difference by power structures (colonialism, empire, capitalism). Indeed, those in power
have gone to great lengths to defend and perpetuate otherness in order to maintain economic and
social power at the expense of women, nonhuman animals, ecosystems, and people of color (i.e.,
scientific racism and eugenics).
In The Origin of Others African American writer Toni Morrison (2017) delves into the psy-
chological motivations for inventing an Other, a practice “employed by virtually every group on
earth” (5)

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For humans as an advanced species, our tendency to separate and judge those not in our
clan as the enemy, as the vulnerable and the deficient needing control, has a long history
not limited to the animal world or prehistoric man. Race has been a constant arbiter of dif-
ference, as have wealth, class, and gender—each of which is about power and the necessity
of control.
(3)

The racial history of the United States demonstrates the stubborn and violent lengths an in-
terested party will go to in order to cling to the “illusion of power through the process of in-
venting an Other” (24). Through this concept of the Other, ecofeminist and race theory find
common ground. In a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy5 women, nonhuman, and non-
white bodies are inevitably othered, and it is in this shared position of otherness that Black and
Indigenous women, for example, become powerful advocates for the natural world, despite the
fact that their voices have been omitted or subordinated in the environmental literary tradition
and scholarship.
The psychology of othering has robust applications for ecofeminism and ecocriticism more
broadly. We can see evidence of it in the treatment of nonhuman animals, minorities, and women;
this “convincing oneself that there is some sort of natural and divine delineation between the en-
slaver and the enslaved” (Coates 2017, xii) is mandatory for the continuation of things like factory
farms and immigrant detention centers. One can see ongoing examples of the

necessity of rendering the slave a foreign species appears to be a desperate attempt to confirm
one’s own self as normal […] The danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility
of becoming a stranger. To lose one’s racial-ized rank is to lose one’s own valued and en-
shrined difference.
(Morrison 2017, xiii)

As global capitalism (or late or post capitalism?) remains antagonistic to the acknowledgment,
and empathy for, the suffering of the other. Black feminists like Kimberlé Crenshaw (2021) insist
that ongoing systemic injustices must be understood in relation to the complex systems that are
founded on the exploitation of black bodies, particularly women’s bodies:

Black women have been key to the production of this nation’s massive wealth since arriving
on American shores in chains over four centuries ago. The industrialized rape of our fore-
mothers is the ugly and uniquely gendered underbelly of white supremacy,

Crenshaw writes.
More honest and exhaustive considerations of race are necessary to work toward what Ruether
(1997, 40) calls “An ecofeminism that is not primarily a cultural escapism for a privileged Western
female elite must make concrete connections with women at the bottom of the socio-economic
system.” In addition, Reuther continues, we

Must recognize the devastation of the earth as an integral part of the appropriation of the
goods of the earth by a wealthy minority who can enjoy strawberries in winter winged
to their glittering supermarkets by a global food procurement system, while those who
pick and pack the strawberries lack the money for bread and are dying from pesticide
poisoning.

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The Other Resists

One important strand in “nature writing” by people of color is the resistance of Black and nonhu-
man bodies to power structures that attempt to subjugate them. Despite the fact that the natural
world and Black bodies are entangled (against their will) with systems of oppression, for many
writers, nature throws into relief the falseness of “othering” to become an engine of resistance
and reclamation.
The prominent social, cultural, feminist critic, and author bell hooks wrote about this quality
of nature often in such essays as Earthbound on Solid Ground and Touching the Earth. Noting the
potential for the natural world to provide a foil to racist systems, hooks (2002, 68–69) explains,

Even when that land was owned by white oppressors, masters and mistresses, it was the earth
itself that protected exploited Black folks from dehumanization… No man can make the sun
or the rains come…This relationship to the earth meant that southern Black folks, whether
they were impoverished or not, knew firsthand that white supremacy, with its systematic
dehumanization of Blackness, was not a form of absolute power.

Here, one might think of the camaraderie Black southerners expressed for pests like the boll
weevil who spoiled a cotton crop, thereby foiling a farmer’s plans and resisting all attempts at
eradication (Giscombe 2009, 109). Audre Lorde praises the cockroach for its resilience and likens
herself to the “brown menace” in her poem, The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches,
which echoes Toni Morrison’s psychological analysis of the white supremacist whose fragile iden-
tity rests on the subjugation of others. Lorde mocks her white audience’s inability to destroy the
roach (blackness): “call me/roach and presumptuous/nightmare on your white pillow/your itch
to destroy/the indestructible/part of yourself ” (lines 7–12). Perhaps, in the white Western patri-
archal construction of nature as pristine, passive, and maternal, poems such as Lorde’s and blues
songs about the boll weevil have been neglected twofold: first because they acknowledge and cel-
ebrate the strange, random, and undesirable forces of the natural world, and secondly, because the
canon has excluded Black voices far too long. As Lorde ends her poem, “To survive./Survive.” an
ecofeminist interpretation might locate a critical thread in the woman–nature relationship: one of
communal strength and persistence. In “Touching the Earth,” hooks (1999, 51) declares, “When
we love the Earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully.” For “Black folk” especially, hooks
(2002, 70) argues, “proclaiming the humanizing restorative of living in harmony with nature so
that the earth can be our witness is meaningful resistance.”
Perhaps the most provocative and critically acclaimed example of resistance through radical
love is Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved. Morrison poignantly illustrates the ways that slavery
attempts to strip Sethe and her family of all of their humanity—in this system, love is a liability
and motherhood most of all. Sethe’s unconditional—“too thick” (193)—love for her children is
diametrically opposed to institutionalized racism, and Morrison uses the most horrific illustration
at her disposal to demonstrate this: a mother who slits the throat of her baby to free it from slavery.
In the novel, love—for one’s family, oneself, the earth—points to a reality outside of racist sys-
tems, and this message comes from the matriarch Baby Suggs (Morrison 2004, 103–104):

In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the
grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t
love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back.
Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie,

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bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them.
Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love
that either. You got to love it, you!

Suggs goes on to celebrate the mouth, feet, neck, liver, heart, lungs, and womb, all the parts that
have been colonized and dehumanized through the plantation system. For Janie in Zora Neale
Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a pear tree—and its symbiotic relationship
with the bees—is an example of a perfect marriage, an image of hope and love and possibility
that she carries with her as the foil to the inherited notion that the black woman is the “mule
uh de world” (Hurston 2006, 14). What on the surface seems a romanticized notion of a young
girl—“from now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over
everything” (Hurston 2006, 32)—is, in the context of Black feminist nature writing, a bold proc-
lamation of self hood and “taking back” of an intimate connection with nature.

Nature as Paradox: The Example of Trees

In an interview on the Generation Anthropocene podcast, poet Camille Dungy (2017) explains
that the dominating white, Western views of nature (i.e., the pastoral tradition) are insufficient
for Black Americans:

If I walk under a tree, what are the other memories that I have either through my, kind of,
epigenetic code, or a direct family memory or just stories. Trees were sites of lynchings, open
spaces were sites of danger, of hunts where the prey, the quarry were human beings. I can’t
necessarily walk out into open space and be like ‘oh I feel so safe and secure’ in the way that
the white folks in the REI commercials get to be.

With this in mind, collections such as Black Nature (2009), the first collection of American nature
writing that focuses on poetry written by African Americans (Dungy, xviii), have the potential
to reshape ecocritical and ecofeminist conversations as the natural world is presented in ways con-
trary to master narratives. Nature is far from pristine or passive, Dungy explains in the introduc-
tion to this volume, for it is also the site of trauma, violence, and complex beauty, and for African
American poets, nature creates various “taunts and tragedies even while flaunting potential beauty
and possibility” (xxxi). Ecofeminist scholarship must pay attention to the ways in which Black
women of African descent, especially, imagine and write about natural features, such as trees, to
more thoroughly consider the entanglement of race and nature.
For example, in the following poem, Lucille Clifton describes what Kimberly Ruffin might
describe as the ecological “burden-and-beauty-paradox” in her book Black on Earth (2012), as
Clifton (2004, 23) experiences both a deep connection to the natural world and grapples with the
collective trauma that haunts her as a Black woman:
surely i am able to write poems
celebrating grass and how the blue
in the sky can flow green or red
the waters lean against the
chesapeake shore like a familiar
poems about nature and landscape
surely but whenever i begin
“the trees wave their knotted branches
and…” why
is there under that poem always
an other poem?

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The trees that haunt the final lines and conjure this “other poem” are indicative of the way
nature is impossible to separate from “culture” or “society,” as the poem enacts the awareness that
a pure pastoral is not possible for the speaker. For many writers, lynching signifies the dual viola-
tion of nature and humans, the ultimate betrayal not only because of the unimaginable violence
of the act but also because it permanently interferes with a person’s ability to access or perceive
the natural world, via trees, directly without the haze of trauma. Tiana Clark’s (2018, 80) poetry
collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood contains similar images such as this one
from the poem “What the Blood Does”:
I see trees, but they look like men, hanging.
I see men, but they look like trees, walking
(on fire).
In Beloved, Morrison inscribes Sethe’s body with a tree-shaped scar, a literal representation of the
ecological beauty and burden paradox (Ruffin 2010), as Amy regards it as a chokecherry tree in
bloom (Morrison 2004, 93). Anissa Janine Wardi (2011, 6) makes a similar study of water in her
book, Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective, where she notes that water is
“at once sensuous and abstract, geographically bounded and boundless, is an evocation of mem-
ory and history.” For writers of African descent, water evokes the middle passage but also signals
interconnectedness. If ecofeminism is to challenge master narratives, language binaries, and patri-
archal ideologies, it must be careful not to perpetuate white, Western views of nature or presume
the right to speak for all peoples: “Imagining alternative ways of mapping land and water, African
American writers challenge the conventions of nature writing, while simultaneously participating
in a tradition that is grounded in place and environment” (Wardi 2011, 11).
(Intersectional) ecofeminist approaches have the potential to account for the complex ways that hu-
man and nonhuman bodies have been impacted by imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
As Toni Morrison (2008, 22) explains, “Black women are different from white women because they
view themselves differently, are viewed differently and lead a different kind of life.” It also stands to
reason, as I have already noted, that the Black experience of the natural world would be different due
to the construction of race that has controlled, and even prohibited, access to nature. Two poems by
contemporary Black women illustrate this point through the treatment of place, Natasha Trethewey’s
Enlightenment and Tiana Clark’s Soil Horizon. Trethewey (2006, 43) describes a trip to Monticello
from the perspective of a mixed daughter of a white man. The poem closes with the following scene:
Imagine stepping back into the past,
our guide tells us then — and I can’t resist
whispering to my father: This is where
we split up. I’ll head around to the back.
When he laughs, I know he’s grateful
I’ve made a joke of it, this history
that links us — white father, Black daughter —
even as it renders us other to each other.
As the “official” story of Monticello is overshadowed by questions about Jefferson’s relationship
with his slave, Sally Hemings, the narrator becomes hyperaware of the difference between her
experience of the place and her father’s. This “rendering” of one to another through the land is
central to Clark’s poem (2018, 13) is set at the Carnton Plantation in Franklin, Tennessee, where
a mother-in-law insists that a family photograph—featuring her Black daughter-in-law and white
son—might “redeem the land,” while the narrator of the poem expresses the chasm between the
white experience of this place—the magnolias in bloom, pamphlets honoring the Confederate

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soldiers who stood their ground, mint juleps—and the Black one. While she poses for the photo-
graph, and her mother-in-law’s voice echoes “Can’t we just let the past be the past?,” Clark’s persona
experiences an intimate connection with the land, as her consciousness (via the rain) channels
down into the earth, the layers

Organic and holy, wet as Dixie/myth—mixing with iron, clay, aluminum, and revision—­
romancing the dirt/and undead, churning the silt in the subsoil, steeping farther down—
deep, deep/into the dark pocket of the earth, to the part material, layers of large unbroken
rocks,/down to the antebellum base, the bedrock of Southern amnesia.

Here, Clark uses a familiar trope in nature writing—that of digging into the past—to suggest the
ways in which race is entangled with Earth’s geology, and significantly, it is not only the individ-
ual experience but the collective that the poet’s persona experiences: “I carry so many black souls
in my skin, sometimes I swear it vibrates, like a tuning fork when struck” (Clark, 2018, 13). Like
Morrison’s Beloved—the ghost, what Morrison calls rememory, the composite of all that has been
lost and given—Clark and other Black authors and feminist theorists materialize the weight of
their trauma and demand that it be accounted for. As Dorceta Taylor (1997, 65) puts it, “Whereas
ecofeminists recognize the degradation of nature and link it with the degradation and devaluation
of women, women and men of color point to the degradation of nature, then to the accelerated
degradation and exploitation of nature in their communities in the United States and developing
countries, and argue that such degradation has a racial and class basis, too.”

Conclusion
Finally, it is important to mention the actions and activism of women of color who put their bodies
and lives on the line to defend and advocate for the health of other human and nonhuman bodies.
The contributions of Black and Indigenous women to the environmental movement extend far be-
yond the page. Gwyn Kirk (1997, 10) details the role of women in seeking explanations and justice
for illnesses, particularly those affecting their children, caused by pollution and contamination, not-
ing that women have been vocal and persistent when taking on government agencies and corpora-
tions despite the cultural stereotypes that might label and dismiss them as hysterical or uninformed.
As Kirk notes, this is especially true for women of color, immigrants, Indigenous, and Black women
who are even more likely to be exposed to toxic environments and then ignored. In Chapter 19,
South American Literature and Ecofeminism, Nicolás Campisi explains that it is no coincidence Indige-
nous and Afro-descendent women are commonly the leading activists against large-scale extractive
practices. Sunaina Jain’s Chapter 25, Activism and Ecofeminist Literature, outlines some of the contri-
butions of women of color to preserving forests, protecting water, and advocating for more sustain-
able agricultural practices, for example. In addition, one might think of the Indigenous women at
Standing Rock who protected the water and land at all costs in opposition to the construction of the
Dakota Access Pipeline.6 First Nations women in Canada fight daily against the tar sands industry,
and the Undocuqueer Movement leads the fight for rights for undocumented workers.7
In her novel, Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko tells the story of Tayo, a “mixed-blood” Laguna
Pueblo war veteran who participates in a healing ceremony to free himself and the land from
witchery, a force roughly synonymous with racism and greed. Significantly, for Silko, witchery,
perhaps those interlocking systems hooks identified as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,
destroys white people as much as it affects Indigenous lives and the land. In the novel, Silko
complicates racial divides by demonstrating that white people, too, are sick from wars and lies,
and just as the suffering is communal, the solution must be also: “It cannot be done alone. We
must have power from everywhere. Even the power we can get from the whites,” the mysterious

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earth-woman insists (Silko 2006, 139). For Tayo, and all humans and nonhumans in the novel,
the “sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in some-
thing great and inclusive of everything” (Silko 2006, 116). Ultimately, “environmental issues
cannot be intelligently approached without the perspectives of women, the poor, and those
who come from other parts of the globe, as well as those of all races and cultural backgrounds”
(Starhawk 1990, 83). Contributions from Black and Indigenous women are essential for the
twenty-first-century ecofeminism that accounts for the mistakes of the past and the possibilities
of the future.

Notes
1 There is still some debate over the capitalization of “Black” to designate a cultural group (rather than
a color). I will capitalize it to follow most style guides and the preference of the majority of the writers
whose work informs this chapter.
2 For a helpful summary of the evolution and status of postcolonial ecocriticism, see Cara Cilano and
Elizabeth DeLoughrey, 2007, “Against Authenticity: Global Knowledge and Postcolonial Ecocriticism,”
ISLE 14, no. 1, 71–87.
3 As just one of far too many examples, Yusoff (2018, 17) describes the lack of recognition of race in the
“white spaces of Anthropocene academic events” and the scholarly community’s “decision not to engage
with race and settler colonialism.”
4 See Painter’s excellent chapter on Emerson, Emerson in the History of American White People, for a detailed
examination of Emerson’s role in reifying whiteness as synonymous with American.
5 bell hooks (1997, 7) explained the significance of this phrase in an interview, and it’s worth replicating
here because ecofeminism must take a similar approach to consider the various systems that cause environ-
mental issues that affect nonhuman and human bodies: “I began to use the phrase in my work ‘white suprem-
acist capitalist patriarchy’ because I wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually
of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality and not to just have one thing be like, you
know, gender is the important issue, race is the important issue, but for me the use of that particular jargonistic
phrase was a way, a sort of short cut way of saying all of these things actually are functioning simultaneously at
all times in our lives and that if I really want to understand what’s happening to me, right now at this moment
in my life, as a Black female of a certain age group, I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through
the lens of race. I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of gender. I won’t be able
to understand it if I’m only looking at how white people see me.”
6 See the writings and work of Winona LaDuke, for example, www.honorearth.org
7 Read more about this here: https://equalityarchive.com/issues/undocuqueer-movement/

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 37
SENTIMENTAL ECOLOGY AND
ECOFEMINIST LITERATURE
Richard Magee

Introduction
In Thin Places, Irish writer Kerri ní Dochartaigh weaves together the trauma of her childhood
in Derry, Northern Ireland, during the Troubles with the trauma she feels over environmental
degradation. She says:

Somehow I had always viewed the loss of wild things as being unrelated to the loss in my
homeland, as though they could not really be spoken of in the same breath. But I started to
feel an ache, a deep sorrow, when I began to see it all in the clear light of day. How intercon-
nected, how finely woven every single part of it all was. In Ireland, the loss we experienced
has had a rippling impact on our sense of self and our place in the world, which has its impact
on our ability to speak out, to protect, to name. Our history, our culture, our land, our iden-
tity: we have had so much taken away from us—we were never given any of it back.
(20)

She repeatedly turns to the sectarian bombings and shootings in the segregated neighborhoods of
Derry, and her own experience of violence as a “mixed” child—a Catholic mother and Protestant
father—and sees clear parallels between the overt political violence and the more insidious and
hidden violence of a natural world in increasing peril. Both types of violence, in ní Dochartaigh’s
eyes, share a target. The contested ground of Northern Ireland with its borders hidden and terri-
fyingly obvious, and the “loss of wild things” both strike at her sense of home.
Because ní Dochartaigh presents us with an ecological vision that is deeply personal and rooted
in her sense of home, her book provides an excellent case study to exemplify sentimental ecology.
Before delving into her text’s examples, I will set out the necessary definitions of the sentimen-
tal literary movement in the United States in the nineteenth century and how the concept of
sentimental ecology can help inform our ecocritical and ecofeminist theories. Moreover, ní Do-
chartaigh’s deep identification with the Irish landscape as the ground for her memoir holds deep
significance. In Chapter 48, Ferebee uses Stacy Alaimo’s definition of trans-corporeal to describe
things that are part of the world that is outside of strictly human concerns. Ní Dochartaigh de-
scribes her emotions, her traumatic reactions, and her ways of looking at the world as inextricably
linked to the landscape, collapsing the separation of the human subject and nonhuman object
that Ferebee describes as being a significant part of environmental autobiography from Thoreau
onward.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-39 395

 Richard Magee

Sentimental Literature
For readers unfamiliar with sentimental fiction of the nineteenth century, I will give a definition
and brief synopsis of two significant novels from that period. Joanne Dobson provides the best
definition of the subgenre, saying that it is “premised on an emotional and philosophical ethos
that celebrates human connection” (Dobson 1997, 266). To begin, Susan Warner’s 1850 novel,
The Wide, Wide World tells the story of a young girl who is orphaned and must navigate her way
to proper Christian womanhood with the help of some friends while keeping away from threats
to her moral life. Next, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin arrived two years later and is
today better remembered than Warner’s novel. These two books do not form a monolithic literary
movement, but they, along with dozens of others written at the time, do share an ethos. They all
focus on the lives of girls and women, with particular attention to the details of everyday exis-
tence. The home and hearth typically stand in important places in these novels, and the primary
conflicts often revolve around family and personal relationships. Furthermore, and not coinciden-
tally, both of these novels were extremely popular, becoming blockbuster bestsellers.

Sentimental Ecology
I introduced the term “sentimental ecology” in a graduate class on nineteenth-century literature
that focused on domestic fiction and the critical response to these novels. The paper for a graduate
class became a conference paper, and that grew into a dissertation followed by a number of articles
examining the sentimental ecological rhetoric found in both fiction and nonfiction works. In
much of the literary scholarship on sentimental literature of the nineteenth century, the intercon-
nection of families and friends plays an important role in creating narrative tension and engaging
the attention of readers. When readers can see how the relationship bonds form, they can often
feel that they are a part of that affective web either because they identify with some of the char-
acters or they recognize in the depictions their own cohort of family and friends. The actions of
a seemingly insignificant character can reverberate throughout the narrative, leaving emotional
shockwaves echoing in the readers’ minds long after finishing the book. Similarly, ecology studies
the interconnection of things, though in this case, the things are all of the living and nonliving
systems in the environment rather than being limited to human characters. Sentimental ecology,
then, is a rhetorical trope that uses the language of home, community, and emotional connections
to explore the complex relationship between humans and their environment while also advocat-
ing ecological stewardship based on domestic values as well as scientific facts. Appeals to emotions
are powerful rhetorical tools and sentimental ecological writing does not shy away from this fact.1
Although the initial focus of my research was on nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, with
a particular emphasis on the nature writing of Susan Fenimore Cooper, I soon expanded the scope
and examined the ways in which the term could be useful for understanding nature writing. In
Reintegrating Human and Nature: Modern Sentimental Ecology in Rachel Carson and Barbara Kingsolver,
I argue that both authors use many sentimental tropes and craft their language in such a way that
their readers will experience an emotional reaction similar to that which happens when reading
sentimental fiction. In the case of Barbara Kingsolver, the links to nineteenth-century sentimental
literature appear to be more obvious. Her novels frequently deal with family dynamics and center
on women protagonists while at the same time displaying a keen eye for the natural setting and
advocating for ecological awareness. The case is more difficult to make for Carson, but a close
evaluation of her rhetoric shows that she often casts her summaries of environmental problems as
domestic narratives that her readers might understand more easily and find familiar. Thus, at the
beginning of Silent Spring, often hailed as the text that helped start the modern environmental
movement, Carson begins with what she calls a “fable,” that both welcomes readers with a homey

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suburban setting and disturbs them with a clear evaluation of the threats to that setting; readers
are coaxed in and then invited to create an emotional connection to the situation. Similarly, a
medical report on a child’s death from exposure to a dangerous chemical reads as a drama where
a baby dies unexpectedly, leaving bereft parents wondering what went wrong and searching for
answers. The image of a sick or dying child plays upon the most powerful sentimental imagery,
and we might think of the somewhat overwrought but nevertheless effective death of Little Eva
in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
In this chapter, I also point out one of the problems that arise when labeling these texts as sen-
timental, or at least claiming that they have sentimental aspects. The term “sentimental” suffers
from a surfeit of bad press that decades of scholarship has not been able to erase. Nature writing,
especially nature writing that aims in some ways to raise ecological awareness and promote social
and political change, cannot be seen to be anything less than serious, and any whiff of the senti-
mental seems frivolous or lacking in sound, hard logic. Indeed, I point out:

Roland Barthes called the sentimental “unwarranted discourse” and contends that Mod-
ernism is the opposite of sentimental (Clark 1991: 1). Ann Douglass has argued that “the
sentimental undermines the serious” (Clark 1991: 3). Sentimentalism bears, or seems to bear,
connotations of weakness, frivolity, hysteria, immaturity, and runaway emotionalism, all of
which are exactly the accusations fired at Rachel Carson’s work.
(Magee 2012, 67)

We may take solace in the last point I make. When readers are outraged about an author’s points
and argue that the writer uses too much emotion, it is usually because the readers fear that the
writing is going to be effective and actually make some people change their minds about things.
Even in fiction is the charge of sentimentalism dangerous and subversive. In another article
on Kingsolver, this one on her novels Prodigal Summer and Animal Dreams, I note that one of the
characters in the former novel accuses another character of being sentimental about nature because
she is from the city, “where nature’s already been dead for fifty years.” This accusation, I argue,
“conceptualizes ‘nature’ as something separate from the human” while also “denigrat[ing] senti-
mentalism as a false way of looking at nature that does not or will not face the practical realities
of daily life” (Magee 2008, 16). Kingsolver implicitly corrects these misconceptions by having
her character, Lusa, face the realities in an ecologically sensitive way that builds on family and
­community—the cornerstones of sentimentalism—to succeed in the end.
Others have also found significant links between emotion and ecological awareness expressed in
literature, both fiction and nonfiction. In her comparison of John Clare and Gerard Manley Hop-
kins, Kelsey Thornton notes that both poets “lament the destruction of a formerly beautiful scene
that had a deep personal meaning for the observer” (Thornton 2012, 46). The poems in her analysis
both focus on the loss of trees cut down for profit at the expense of the landscape, and she con-
nects this to the “tradition of writing on the loss of trees, which many of us seem to feel as a truly
personal loss” (Thornton 2012, 49). The “us” in that passage bears closer observation. By acknowl-
edging our shared emotional response to loss in nature, Thornton is validating the sentimental.
For Clare, the loss occurs during the controversial process of enclosure, where private land-
owners began separating large swaths of formerly common land and fencing or hedging them in.
Because Clare was not a wealthy landowner, he could no longer experience his beloved nature in
the way he had in the past, and this separation affects him as much as the loss of a friend. According
to Thornton, many other writers feel the same sort of loss as Clare when trees are cut down. John
Constable lamented the cutting of trees, going so far as to describe one tree as a woman who is
fatally insulted when a sign is nailed to her, leading her to die “of a broken heart” (Thornton 2012,
49). Similarly, the diarist Kilvert loads his description of trees being cut with highly emotional

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and evocative language, saying that “Cwmgwanon Wood is being murdered” and that the trees
are “friends” who have been “murdered” (Thornton 2012, 50). Thornton concludes her analysis
of the language the authors use to describe the loss of trees by saying that they “indicate… The
development of what one might call a sentimental ecology” (Thornton 2012, 50).
Summer Harrison, writing in ISLE, makes the social and political implications of the use of
sentimental language in the service of ecological goals more obvious by using cognitive linguist
George Lakoff’s theories of framing and rhetoric. Lakoff acknowledges that we tend to believe
“that reason is conscious, literal, logical, unemotional, disembodied, universal” (Harrison 2017,
457). However, Lakoff goes on to say, and Harrison emphatically agrees, that “[r]eason and emo-
tion are not separable… but complementary and inextricable” (Harrison 2017, 458). She makes
this argument in the face of the “alternative facts” that have become an increasingly disturbing
part of all public discourse, but even more so in ecological matters; we live in a world where peo-
ple may not believe in global warming not because they are trained experts who have evaluated
sources but because they choose not to believe. This leads Harrison to argue for a different way of
convincing people to care about ecological issues:

If overcoming the belief gap requires linking environmental facts to emotion, metaphor,
and symbolism, then as ecocritics we must consider what role literary narratives can play in
the process … narratives offer a means of organizing and processing moral knowledge that a
facts-only approach cannot achieve.
(Harrison 2017, 458)

She uses as her example Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats. The novel tells various stories to
illustrate environmental facts by creating narratives appealing to the emotions of readers using just
those literary elements mentioned above. Harrison concludes by saying the novel “demonstrates
how sentiment, properly contextualized and self-aware, can be an effective tool for combatting
environmental ignorance and inspiring political action” (Harrison 2017, 458). We could easily
substitute “environmental ignorance” with “racial injustice” and have a description of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.
Stephen Mercier’s analysis of the naturalist John Burroughs begins with a passage from Locusts
and Wild Honey that Mercier describes as demonstrating Burroughs’s “sensory and emotional en-
gagement with the scents and sounds of the natural world” (Mercier 2010, 509). He goes on to
explain that his analysis of the “emotional engagement” is based on Joanne Dobson’s definition of
sentimental literature I presented earlier. At the end of his exploration of several of Burroughs’s
texts, he concludes:

Refocused attention on the political potential of emotional forms of nature writing will help
to enlarge the sphere of environmental discourse and assist the goals of environmentally con-
cerned persons. This is precisely one of my points in regard to Burroughs’s texts: sentimental
nature writing largely functions in establishing emotional affiliations and sympathetic rela-
tions between readers and the nonhuman world.
(Mercier 2010, 522)

Once again, the literary analysis reveals that creating an emotionally resonant and using sentimen-
tal techniques can have a powerful effect on readers’ political stance. In order to create social and
political change that will benefit the natural world, we must appeal to the “emotional affiliations”
of readers.
“Sentimental” had found its way into scientific discourse, and this is where one of the weak-
nesses of the term arises. Generally, when used in literary criticism, “sentimental” either refers

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explicitly to the subgenre as categorized by Joanne Dobson and others, or it is employed in a

non-pejorative manner to indicate a powerfully emotional appeal. When “sentimental” is taken
out of this literary context, it falls back into negative connotations of unearned, excessive, or in-
sincere emotionality.
David Jachowski is the self-described “Sentimental Ecologist” of his article. In this short essay,
he recounts his experience as a wildlife biologist working on species conservation, specifically his
work studying the effects of a plague on prairie dogs. In the west, the war on prairie dogs is long
and bitter, with ranchers complaining that the animals eat fodder their cattle would have, create
holes that can injure livestock, and are a generally nuisance. Many communities view the rodents
as something good only for target practice, and prairie dogs have been the target of eradication
campaigns using poison. Jachowski finds himself in the difficult position of arguing to a Utah city
councilman that some steps need to be taken to save the endangered prairie dog from the sylvatic
plague. The councilman is unable to see Jachowski’s point of view, and the misunderstanding
appears to be mutual. Jachowski realizes:

My drive to conserve species of the brink of extinction was sentimental and no different than
the sentimentality behind the beliefs of the councilman … Perhaps the only thing that is
natural is the urge to hold onto and protect what we know and hold dear.
( Jachowski 2011, 576)

His use of the term “sentimental” here is instructive. He implies that sentimental feelings are the
antithesis of scientific understanding, but he also understands that policy and science exist along-
side the emotional. His conclusion is not that sentimentality must be eradicated but that we must
understand how sentimental concerns inform the way we frame our worldviews.
Scientific discourse tends to run into sentimental discourse when the topic is animals, as Ma-
son and Michaels point out in Sentimental Ecology, Science, and Sustainable Ecosystem Management.
Their study looks at various plans to reintroduce disappeared animal species, including moose
and wolves, into Adirondack Park in northern New York. Predictably, controversy arises at the
suggestion of bringing a species back into an area where human activity has taken on such a large
role, but Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental advocacy group, did not back down from the
fight. Because the organization was promoting the reintroduction of wolves, they relied a great
deal on sentimental imagery of wolves as large, furry, dog-like animals with cute expressions.
This tactic will come as no surprise to anyone who has received a solicitation in the mail from any
environmental organization: we need to look no further than the panda logo the World Wildlife
fund uses. However, in this case, Defenders of Wildlife relied too much on past experiences and
ignored the ecological realities. The wolf reintroduction plan was devised using the grey wolf as
the keystone predator, but much research suggested that, prior to their eradication, Canadian red
wolves were the dominant species in the Adirondacks. Because their prey patterns are different,
gray wolves would have a different ecological impact on the park than the original Canadian red
wolf. Defenders of Wildlife, Mason and Michaels argue, “found themselves in the uncomfortable
and embarrassing position of not having science to underpin their sentimental ecology” (Mason
and Michaels 2001, 79). Here, the term “sentimental ecology” is used to describe an explicitly
nonscientific way of understanding the environment rather than as a rhetorical method that com-
plements scientific discourse.

The Sentimental Ecology of Nature’s Liminal Spaces

Ní Dochartaigh returns frequently to the idea of liminal spaces, the “thin places” of her title. To
her, these places create a sort of veil that separates our ordinary experiences from the “unnamable

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places, not to be found on any map,” and they exist as “dancing, beating, healing places” (53).
Liminal spaces loom in our imaginations as frightening limbos or great voids, but ní Dochartaigh
sees them differently, arguing that they are correctives to the problem of our relationship with
nature. She writes:

We have built up a narrative over many years—decades, centuries?—of “nature” as “other.”

There is so much separation in the language we use with each other; we seek to divide hu-
manity from its own self again and again, and this has naturally bled into how we view the
land and water that we share with one another—and with other species.
(54)

The thin places, where the veil blows aside, allow her to feel rooted and connected to the natural
world.
She calls the disconnect from the natural world and the pain such separation creates “eco-
grief,” which she defines as “the knowledge that we have lost so much…that we mostly stand no
chance of being able to bring back” (44). Later she invokes the image of the sixth-century Irish
monk St. Kevin to illustrate her point. She tells the story of St. Kevin praying with his hands out-
stretched when a blackbird lands on one hand and lays her eggs there. The saint remains standing
with his hands out until the eggs hatch and the birds learn to fly away. In ní Dochartaigh’s telling,
the saint’s sense of “ecological grief ” prohibited him from creating any more environmental deg-
radation or loss. By linking the modern sense of eco-grief to the ancient mystic, ní Dochartaigh
crosses historic and political borders to reify our emotional responses; we feel eco-grief not be-
cause it is something trendy in the news but because it is a very human reaction to a real threat.
Throughout her memoir, ní Dochartaigh recounts the myriad ways ecological grief merges
with other forms of grief—most notably the PTSD from the terrors of the sectarian violence
that plagued Derry during her childhood—and leaves her bereft. She leaves Derry and travels to
Scotland, Wales, and England before returning to Ireland. In each place, she hopes that the new
scenery will somehow allow her to heal, but the trauma manages to follow her no matter the
geography. Her cries for environmental justice are interwoven with her trauma, and the desire to
seek healing or at least some relief from her existential pain motivates her activism. In Chapter
28, Jacobs argues that our relationship with nature may be better understood when we are able to
acknowledge that there are ways of being in nature that are shaped by our race, class, and gender
identity. Our understanding of ní Dochartaigh’s call to activism increases when acknowledging
that her gender, her status as neither Protestant nor Catholic (in a place where these are the two
major defining categories), and her mental illness all contribute to her complex relationship with
Ireland’s natural landscape.
Although ní Dochartaigh’s illness is not caused by the landscape in the same way that Ferebee
describes environmental illness in Chapter 48, there are some parallels between her plight and
that of someone fighting a difficult-to-define illness brought on by a toxic environment. The
Northern Irish Troubles that define so much of ní Dochartaigh’s life and have caused so much of
her trauma are not environmental in the same way living next to a superfund site would be, the
landscape nevertheless holds constant reminders of the long history of colonialism and oppression
that function as emotionally toxic fixtures. Ferebee lists a number of authors who sought escape
in the natural world for its ability to provide a means of healing. For ní Dochartaigh this is com-
plicated, as when she visits a beach near Donegal and is forced by geography to think about the
contradictions of “north” and “south” in Ireland, or when she realizes that a liminal landscape
is also the site of trauma for those who fled Ireland during the Famine. The Irish landscape thus
functions both as a disease and as a cure.

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The borders that surprise and alienate ní Dochartaigh are also thin places because they serve
as the threshold or doorway between two political entities while lifting the veil on the absurdity
of arbitrary lines drawn on a map. Standing on a beach in Donegal where “The South” is north
of “The North,” or watching a moth flutter across a road that is also a border reveals the tenuous
status of divisions. The sectarian violence of the Troubles that burned the 12-year-old ní Dochar-
taigh out of her home parallels the violence and resulting trauma that threatens the natural world.
She is herself a product of both sides with her Catholic mother and Protestant father, so she liter-
ally embodies the absurdity of the border between Catholic and Protestant. Similarly, we humans
are not separate from but a part of the natural world, and any attempts to tear us away from that
truth and remove us from contact with nature result in the same trauma.
The home lies at the center of both of these borders. In ní Dochartaigh’s Derry of the 1980s and
1990s, a person’s entire identity could be assumed based on where their house was, and whether
they lived in a Catholic or Protestant neighborhood. Because of her mixed parentage, she could
never be truly at home in any of the neighborhoods, and the deep psychological pain of that dis-
location haunts her memoir. At the beginning, she speaks of her intention to leave Derry, and this
becomes a constant refrain and theme. After her house is firebombed in 1995, she and her family
leave and find other housing. Eventually, they leave Derry but return. After finishing school,
ní Dochartaingh leaves not just Derry but also Ireland, but after many years abroad in England,
Wales, and Scotland, she feels compelled to return. She never feels at home anywhere, and this
dislocation is exacerbated by her deep-rooted connection to the natural world at odds with the
political world. As an adult living in Derry and worrying about how the Brexit vote might reopen
old, scarcely healed wounds, ní Dochartaigh comes across a white moth, “wild and beautiful, in
flight in the least likely of settings” (15). The moth, native to Derry, represents her home.
The natural world and home overlap in other ways. In a dream, ní Dochartaigh sees her home
and “a shelf full of found objects from wild places” (19). The objects are not unusual or striking
in any way, but are shells, bones, and other natural tokens picked up on walks to the thin places.
These objects are all destroyed when her childhood home is hit by a petrol bomb. Later she de-
scribes some new tokens that she has acquired, bits of dried gorse from the Caha Mountains and
heather from Crow Head. They each stand for her anguish as well as her survival, “a dried-out
reminder of that achingly beautiful, haunting landscape, of that part of my life I was convinced
I wouldn’t make it through” (127). However, when she moved back to Derry years later, she lost
them just as she had lost the other objects in the attack. The loss of the sentimental keepsakes
symbolizes the anguished separation she feels from her sense of home—home both in the sense of
a place where she lives and in the sense of her necessary grounding in the natural world.
The language of the home also plays a significant role in ní Dochartaigh’s sense of alienation
from nature. In sentimental ecological discourse, naming provides a potential connection be-
tween humans and the natural world because local customs and names rooted in the community’s
linguistic traditions are often based on an organic, direct familiarity with the things named, un-
like colonial or scientific names, which often show little or no understanding of how the people
of an area interact with the landscape. For someone in Northern Ireland, the problem of naming
is problematized by the often fierce debates about language, where English, though spoken by
nearly everyone, is seen as a loyalist, while Irish, though often not spoken, is seen as native or
Catholic (this is, of course, a radically oversimplified explanation). When mentioning her home
city, ní Dochartaigh sometimes gives a full name of Derry/Doire/Londonderry to emphasize the
borders while at others just uses the anglicized Irish name of Derry. She also explicitly addresses
the issue of Irish place names and the debate over the language divide, noting that “[p]lace-names
in the North of Ireland, as well as the South, come from a variety of sources; however, the vast
majority derive from Irish.” She sees opposition to the Irish language act as a way of obscuring

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the past that “speaks volumes about Ireland’s terrifying loss of connection with the natural world:
our unwilding” (35).
The loss of language and heritage is a direct result of her situation living in a postcolonial
landscape where her status is complicated by her mixed parentage and having had homes in both
Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. Ní Dochartaigh repeatedly turns to the natural world
because that is all she has. As Değ irmenci Altın states in Chapter 33, any exploration of postcolo-
nial ecocriticism needs to point out that both women and nature have been oppressed through-
out history, and that their concerns are therefore linked. So much of the trauma ní Dochartaigh
presents comes from the political forces tearing apart her hometown, but that is exacerbated by
her diminished status as both a woman and a woman living as a subaltern in the site of contested
colonial identity. It is no wonder, then, that she sees angry denunciations of the Irish language as
threats. The Irish language might be found on a list of endangered things that also includes the
moths or birds that symbolize home to ní Dochartaigh, and the real violence that accompanies the
threats has left indelible scars.
She revisits the significance of language as a crucial connection to the natural world after
hearing about species loss. Realizing that she has no idea what the Irish word for a moth was, she
downloads an Irish translation app on her phone and ponders the “link between the past and the
future, the land and the language” (43). She goes on to say, “Naming and language hand in hand,
called to me that night” (44). Her app reveals to her that the Irish word for moth is leamhan, so
she begins “writing them [Irish words] down on a piece of paper and guessing how to pronounce
them as they danced on the paper like lights on rippling water” (45). The moth’s Irish name is her
entry point—or doorway threshold—to ways of thinking about how the land and her identity
are intertwined. The cover art on her book shows moth wings, and she frequently returns to the
image of the moth’s delicate wings as symbols of the delicate state of the landscape, the future of
Northern Ireland, and her own psyche. In a linguistic coincidence, the Irish word for “book” is
leabher, a word that looks similar to and rhymes with the Irish word leamhan. Her act of writing
is performed on paper, a word she repeats in the passage above, but in some ways, her writing is
performed on the wings of the moth.
As Lesley Kordecki points out in Chapter 26, nonhumans and the rhetorical power they hold
present an important question in an examination of the ecological message of a text. The temptation
to consider animals and their plight as a mere literary tool rather than as beings with actual lives can
lead us to see the creatures as unimportant except for their metaphorical possibilities, thus diminish-
ing them. This diminishment of the animals as active forces in the world with their own lives and
importance parallels centuries of male interpretation that commits similar diminishment of the fe-
male. The challenge, then, is to see nonhuman nature as crucial autonomous beings, and the power
of ní Dochartaigh’s emotional response to the moth derives from her insistence that moths have im-
portance in and of themselves. Although she sees the specter of climate-change-induced extinction
of the moths as a warning for herself and other humans, she refuses to drop the insect in a neatly
labeled symbolic drawer but weeps for its death in a profound moment of interspecies empathy.
The losses of the natural world, and the threat of even more losses in the face of environmental
degradation and climate change parallels in ní Dochartaigh’s mind the losses of “our identity, our
language, and our traditions and culture” (50). Returning to the Irish language that she never
spoke in some ways helps her return to her identity. More importantly, the Irish language literally
provides her with hope. She learns that the Irish word for hope is dóchas or dóigh, and that it shows
“glimmers of the Irish word for giving, for belonging, for beauty: dóighiúil” (51). The moment she
learns this, she realizes just how revolutionary taking back her language can be. She says, “Yes,
we are ready, now, to speak of hope. We have the words for it, and that changes things. In fact, that
changes everything” (51). Only by having the language of her home, that place that helps create her
identity, is she able to move and take action.

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In sentimental literature, the biggest threat and ultimate tragedy are to lose one’s family. The
loss of family is the tragedy Harriet Beecher Stowe exploits so deftly in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, making
the horrors of slavery real by showing her readers the great lengths a mother might go to in order
to keep her child. Similarly, as ní Dochartaigh is facing her eco-grief at the thought of species ex-
tinction, she recalls a moment in the countryside that brings the traumas of nature and humans to-
gether. On a drive on a Famine Road in Donegal, she stops at “The Bridge of Sorrows.” A plaque
next to the bridge has an inscription in Irish and English that reads: “Family and friends of the
person leaving for foreign lands would come this far. Here was the separation. This is the Bridge of
Tears” (47). The Famine—an Gorta Mór or the Great Hunger in Irish—was caused by an ecolog-
ical disaster (the potato blight) exacerbated by the political policies of Britain that privileged the
economic desires of the wealthy over the poor of Ireland. Ní Dochartaigh implies that a similar
combination of ecological disaster and political posturing lies in wait for the people of Northern
Ireland, and the Bridge of Tears symbolizes the sentimental price that will be demanded.

Note
1 My full argument and description of sentimental ecology is in “Sentimental Ecology: Susan Fenimore
Cooper’s Rural Hours” (Magee 2001) and “Sentimental Ecology: Susan Fenimore Cooper and a New
Model of Ecocriticism” (Magee 2002).

References
Clark, Suzanne. 1991. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Dobson, Joanne. 1997. “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature.” American Literature 69, no. 2: 263–288.
Harrison, Summer. 2017. “Environmental Justice Storytelling: Sentiment, Knowledge, and the Body in
Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats.” ISLE 3, no. 24: 457–476.
Jachowski, David S. 2011. “The Sentimental Ecologist.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 9, no. 10:
575–576.
Magee, Richard M. 2001. “Sentimental Ecology: Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours.” In “Such News of
the Land”: American Women Nature Writers, edited by Elizabeth DeWolfe, and Thomas S. Edwards, 27–36.
Hanover: University Press of New England.
———. 2002. “Sentimental Ecology: Susan Fenimore Cooper and a New Model of Ecocriticism.” PhD
diss., Fordham University.
———. 2008. “The Aridity of Grace: Community and Ecofeminism in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal
Dreams and Prodigal Summer.” In New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism, edited by Andrea
Campbell, 15–26. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
———. 2012. “Reintegrating Human and Nature: Modern Sentimental Ecology in Rachel Carson and
Barbara Kingsolver.” In Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature, edited by Douglas A.
Vakoch, 65–76. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Mason, R., and S. Michaels. 2001. “Sentimental Ecology, Science, and Sustainable Ecosystem Manage-
ment.” In Ecology, Uncertainty, and Policy: Managing Ecosystems for Sustainability, edited by J. W. Handmer,
T. W. Norton, and S. R. Dovers, 66–82. New York: Routledge.
Mercier, Stephen. 2010. “John Burroughs and the Sentimental: Revaluing the Literary Naturalist.” ISLE 3,
no. 17: 509–525.
Ní Dochartaigh, Kerri. 2021. Thin Places. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Thornton, Kelsey. 2012. “Sentimental Ecology, John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Trees: A Note.”
John Clare Society Journal 31: 43–50.

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 PART III

Literary Periods and Genres

 38
GOTHIC FICTION AND
ECOFEMINISM
Anja Höing

Introduction
As Teresa Goddu (1997, 2) has famously noted, gothic fiction is often denigrated as “an escapist
form”. Accordingly, the genre1 is frequently accused of cementing stereotypes and reinforcing
dualist structures (racial, social, or gendered) rather than challenging and deconstructing them—
as would be the central project of ecofeminism. Yet, despite its bad reputation in mainstream
academia, gothic fiction has proven to be one of the most enduringly prolific writing traditions
of the past centuries. Its central motifs such as the victimized heroine, the haunted house, or the
augmented man-created monster belong to the best-known literary tropes of the Western cultural
tradition and continue to shape representations far beyond the original genre.2
While the role of women in gothic literature is an exceptionally well-researched field, and
scholars have drawn to attention that “Gothic fictions embody a dialogue between an unquestion-
ing representation of the female body as threatening and an awareness how such images work to
sustain a misogynistic patriarchal inheritance” (Mulvey-Roberts 2016, 108), far fewer studies have
shed lights on the interrelations between gothic representations of male/female dichotomies and
representations of “nature” and “the natural”. Even less attention has been paid to an issue that,
from an ecofeminist perspective, is a major conundrum inherent to the very fabric of the gothic:
its inherent duality. As ecofeminist pioneers have outlined, the “logic of domination” (Warren
1990, 133) is powered by dualistic structures that, in the words of Val Plumwood (1993, 47), allow
for “the dualised other [to be] systematically and pervasively constructed and depicted as inferior”.
Accordingly, it is ecofeminism’s central project “to suggest alternative models that do not rely on
… dualisms” (Davion 1994, 9). The gothic, however, is dependent on dualistic structures: there
needs to be a dualism in existence for a text to be able to generate terror by threatening its hier-
archy. On the one hand, this makes the genre a perfect platform to practice ecofeminist criticism,
but on the other hand, this renders the gothic a rather problematic genre from an ecofeminist
viewpoint.
This chapter will explore the issue of the (inherently?) dualistic structure of the gothic in
more depth, as well as other fault-lines between the gothic and ecofeminism, most centrally the
construction of women as “natural” versus “unnatural”. Starting with a brief overview of those
aspects of gothic literature criticism particularly relevant to an ecofeminist approach to the gothic,
I will then provide an overview of some milestone texts of gothic fiction, arguing that they often
construct starkly dualistic patterns, reinforcing narratives that represent “good” women as passive
and natural, while female agency is often demonized as “unnatural”.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-41 407

 Anja Höing

Twentieth and twenty-first-century gothic fictions (often deliberately) challenge such patterns,
yet, as I will show, even while opening up new spaces to its female protagonists, newer traditions
of gothic writing often continue to adhere to dualistic structures as such. In consequence, in the
very project of emancipating their female protagonists, they often silence nature, or, alternatively,
drive nature into the equally problematic role of the villain.

Criticism of Gothic Fiction and Ecofeminism

As Ruth Bienstok Anolik (2004, 1) sets out, the major strength of the gothic is to provide a plat-
form that allows its readers “to safely confront … fears and horrors”, the artificiality of the genre
providing a safety net necessary to develop a “meaningful response”. Anxieties are, as Donna
Haraway (2008, 10) outlines, often provoked through confrontation with an “other”, as “‘Oth-
ers’ have a remarkable capacity to induce panic in the centers of power and self-certainty”. The
gothic generally renders the other as “horrifying or monstrous” (Binstok Anolik 2004, 2), as, in
short, “unnatural”. Othering is a technique not only ecofeminist philosophers deem inherently
problematic, as it is utilized to naturalize and hence justify oppression (Plumwood 1993, 41). Ac-
cordingly, recent criticism of the gothic (as well as new contributions to gothic fiction), strongly
focuses on vindicating the othered groups. These may be racial, religious, or social others, or,
especially with regard to horror gothic, women.
It is indeed about time for gothic literature criticism to approach this issue, yet seeking to
break down oneself/other dichotomy without dismantling the underlying dualist framework as
such will only relocate the problem elsewhere. This is where ecofeminism can make its probably
most valuable contributions to the criticism of gothic literature: ecofeminist criticism can unearth
the networks of interconnected dualisms each single dichotomy in a gothic text is only a minute
part of, and can provide a versatile theoretical frame to tackle the problem at its root rather than
chopping off its individual branches.
Yet, in many ways, even recent criticism has worked to strengthen rather than dismantle dual-
istic structures in the gothic. This chapter is too short to go into detail, but there is one dualistic
distinction, in particular, I would like to call to attention, as it continues to haunt academic ap-
proaches to the gothic until today: the differentiation between “female” and “male” gothic. The
term female gothic was first introduced by feminist scholar Ellen Moers in Literary Women (1976).
Moers conceptualized the female gothic as, simply, “the work that women writers have done in
the literary mode that… we have called the Gothic” (1978, 90). But, mainly due to a monograph
by Anne Williams, the term has since come to be associated with a persecuted heroine, happy
endings, and, most centrally, the so-called “terror gothic” that subtly works suspense through lim-
ited points of view, while apparently supernatural elements find a rational explanation (Williams
1995, 100–101). Williams also popularized the corresponding concept of the “male gothic”, not
so much defined by male authorship, but through writing conventions that—in diametrical dif-
ference to what Williams terms the “female formula”—are conceived of as masculine: sexualized
females, tragic endings, horror (working through bloody shock rather than through muted uncer-
tainty) and multiple, fragmented points of view on a world in which the supernatural is real (101;
102–106). The differentiation between “male and female narratives [in the Gothic]” (Williams
1995, 100) is thoroughly dependent on hyperseparation, a “key indicator of dualism” (Plumwood
1993, 49) in which the two poles of a dichotomy are hierarchically polarized as radical oppo-
sites, denying continuity. Contrary to most other hyperseparated systems, the “female gothic/
male gothic” dualism posits the female gothic in the privileged role. The predominantly feminist
scholars to introduce the distinction experienced the “male gothic” as semi-pornographic, mi-
sogynist and hence repugnant,3 while the female gothic continues to profit from flagship author
Ann Radcliffe’s evaluation of terror as “intellectually and artistically superior” (Hughes 2018, 149)

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to horror.4 Although the “female gothic”/“male gothic” dualism has been hotly debated since its
advent, it remains surprisingly productive in gothic literature criticism to this day.5 This uniquely
persistent dualism might be one reason why ecofeminism struggles to find avenues to approach
the gothic in a more holistic fashion rather than through the isolated close readings of individual
texts that provide the vast majority of ecofeminist approaches to the genre.

Ecofeminist Perspectives on Milestones of Gothic Fiction

Providing an even remotely comprehensive overview of the history of gothic literature through
an ecofeminist lens would go far beyond the scope of this chapter. For this reason, the following
sub-chapter will only provide brief glances at a few selected milestone publications in the history
of gothic fiction, and offer some rudimentary (and at times quite deliberately provocative) sketches
of possible starting points for ecofeminist readings.6 The first such milestone is Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first fiction to advertise itself as “gothic” on its title page. Walpo-
le’s story of the morally dubious Manfred who brings about the destruction of his own family is
primarily concerned with issues of legitimacy (Smith 2007, 21–21), yet has also established many
of the dualisms structuring gothic writing until today. Most centrally one can note the diametrical
opposition between agentic, cultural men (either, as villains, influenced by “unnatural” desires,
or, as heroes, guided by reason) and passive, emotional, women who “naturally” fall into the role
of the victim and whose central function is a reproduction of the male line. It is certainly not by
accident that these interconnected dualisms neatly align with “key elements in the dualistic struc-
ture in western thought” (Plumwood 1993, 43) as outlined in Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the
Mastery of Nature. From an ecofeminist perspective, it is interesting to note that different sets of du-
alisms constructed in The Castle of Otranto behave in vastly different fashions depending on gender
playing a role or not. The borderline between the (male) self and the (equally male) threatening
other is precariously unstable. As Robert Miles remarks: “Scratch the surface of an Englishman
and one finds his repressed, Catholic, past, and Other. Rather than a binary story of them and
us, there is a palimpsest, one thing only superficially written over the other” (Miles 2019, 302).
Gender dualisms in contrast are unassailable; their stability is never even threatened, is, in short,
taken for granted. Hippolita “swoon[s] away”, Mathilda “faint[s]”, and Isabella “shudder[s]” and
“shriek[s]” in emotional outbursts, while Theodore shows “steady valour” and a rational “pres-
ence of mind” (Walpole 1764, 110, 142, 118, 119, 121, 122). Unlike dichotomies between men,
gender dualism with its associated characteristics is represented as an essential given.
The heyday of gothic fiction in the late eighteenth century was characterized by two writing
traditions in particular. The writings of Ann Radcliffe have come to stand as prime examples of
the style generally referred to as “terror gothic”. Her best-known novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794) cements a strong, often mutually connective and emotionally saturated link between the
sensitive heroine Emily and the sublime natural environments that reflect her state of mind, calm
her nerves and inspire her to spontaneous poetic creativity. This interconnection between the
heroine and the natural world might be read as a precursor of the ecogothic,7 but it might also be
conceived as just one more representation of the woman-nature link so central to Western thought
and often connected to narratives of male superiority (Plumwood 1993, 21). In The Mysteries of
Udolpho, nature reflects Emily’s emotions and Emily reflects nature (via her emotions), both are
essentially “natural” and inherently good, but this emancipates neither of them. Agency remains
firmly with the male characters, while Emily’s task is to ponder, shudder and bear her lot stead-
fastly—as is nature’s.
Matthew G. Lewis’ The Monk (1796) is in many ways the horror gothic counterpoint to Rad-
cliffe’s terror gothic. In deliberate opposition to Radcliffe’s writings, Lewis’s then scandalous
horror novel breaks the connection between women and nature that provides the foundation for

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Radcliffe’s plots. But instead of using this as a lever to undermine the dualistic gender framework
as such, The Monk merely erases nature from the equation, leaving nothing but a void. Deprived
of the connection to nature that provides Radcliffe’s Emily with the strength to withstand all
trials, Lewis’s heroines Agnes and Antonia find themselves passive marionettes in a thoroughly
masculinized culture, and hapless victims of an unnatural evil roaming free without a balancing
force. The “unnatural” hence can be the only space open for a female protagonist to gain agency
in Lewis’s storyworld, and accordingly, the only agentic female is the demonized Matilda, who,
in gaining ultimate power over the monk, Ambrosio, usurps the role of the “master” that is gen-
erally masculinate in the Western master narrative (cf. Plumwood 1993). Adam-like (and hence
perhaps representative of “man” as such), Ambrosio—ultimately very literally—falls under her
temptation, and nature, a vengeful, perhaps even divine and exceptionally powerful nonhuman
force entirely disconnected from the female, punishes him cruelly (Lewis 1796, 339). A prime
example of how the gothic projects anxieties onto a demonized other, The Monk hence mirrors
the apparently very pervasive apprehension of a patriarchal ruling class feeling threatened by the
women it marginalized.
Pervasive apprehension is also central to the text that probably most enduringly influenced
gothic fiction and particularly its public image: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).8 Frankenstein
shows the close, but also uneasy connections between the gothic and Romanticism, challenging
many key Romantic assumptions about “the natural”.9 From an ecofeminist perspective, the
probably most important aspect of Frankenstein is that despite its famous posthuman ring and
its implicitly ecofeminist repudiation of patriarchal master narratives of (male) human control
over nature (see Mondello’s Chapter 39), Frankenstein nonetheless entrenches a number of in-
terconnected dualisms. As Mondello points out in her chapter in this volume, gender dualism
was one of the most central concepts of the Romantic era, and this binary was directly linked to
nature: the feminine was associated with the natural (and in particular with reproduction), while
the cultural sphere, including science, was gendered as masculine (see Mondello’s Chapter 39).
Frankenstein too constructs an active/masculine/urban public realm governed by progress and
changeability. The pinnacle of this masculine realm is a science that, in a Romantic criticism of
Enlightenment aspirations, oversteps its “natural” boundaries. This, Frankenstein diametrically
contrasts to a passive/feminine/domestic/rural realm that is statically contained within its bound-
aries of the natural.

Little alteration, except the growth of our dear children, has taken place since you left us. The
blue lake, and snow-clad mountains, they never change;—and I think our placid home, and
our contented hearts are regulated by the same immutable laws.
(Shelley 1818, 63)

Frankenstein’s love Elizabeth writes to him, shortly before the shockwaves of Frankenstein’s crime
against “the natural” will shatter the rural female idyll. As Mondello outlines in Chapter 39, this
female realm is repeatedly failed and violated by the male one it is dependent on, yet it can never
emancipate itself above the role of silently suffering victim.
The posthuman force of creating the monster is clearly situated on the “male” side of this
dualism (it is not without reason that Frankenstein cannot bring himself to create a female), yet
the monster itself is not. Having usurped the most profoundly “female” space of all: procreation,
Frankenstein creates a living oxymoron: a hybrid of the natural and the unnatural. As Mondello
discusses in more depth in Chapter 39, the creature blends aspects from both poles of the dichot-
omy, yet, as the manifold different readings of the creature outlined in her chapter clearly show-
case, the creature’s indefinability does not liberate it from the dualist structure as such: instead of
overcoming the dichotomy in a posthuman fashion, the creature is torn apart by its push and pull.

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Although the dualistic boundaries Frankenstein constructs are hence profoundly unstable in a
technological sense, the narrative presents them as morally absolute: trespassing in the other gen-
der’s sphere is essentially wrong, and will be punished. Again, there is hyperseparation at work:
as the female realm in Frankenstein is natural, and, as Elizabeth’s letter showcases, static as well,
crimes against “nature” can only be enacted by men. This makes Frankenstein indeed, as Parui
(2016, 196) argues, a “critique of patriarchy, parenting, and the politics of productivity which
effaces and exploits the order of nature and natural sustainability”. Yet in its rigid persistence on
a woman–nature dualism aligned with the reproduction of an ultimately static system, the novel
also reinforces two of the most problematic pillars that feed into the “logic of domination” (War-
ren 1990, 133): the narrative of “woman-as-nature” and the narrative of “nature-as-stasis”, both
of which in conjunction work to perpetuate a perceived link between patriarchal conservatism
and conversation to this day.10
In the Victorian era, the gothic mode spread widely into different writing traditions not gen-
erally treated as a “canonical” part of gothic literature, such as the penny dreadfuls Nicole C.
Dittmer focuses on in Chapter 40, Victorian Literature and Ecofeminism. Canonical Victorian gothic
fiction became a primarily male-authored tradition (though there were, of course, also significant
female authors such as Emily Brontë). Gothic settings often move to the city, and plots mainly
probe the internal machinations of man’s mind (gendering intentional). Famous Victorian texts
are Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (1897). These narratives, each in their
own way, intensify a trend toward a marginalization of female characters that echoes Plumwood’s
(1993, 190) model of “the master’s logic of colonization”. While “Jekyll and Hyde” is set in a male-
only world in which women can only enter as thoroughly instrumentalized servant characters,11
Stoker’s novel quite literally bleeds out its female characters for them to be ultimately “devoured”
(cf. Plumwood 1993, 192–194) either by their “justified” master (i.e., the husband), or by the
usurping “othered” master, the vampire. Not only Lucy Westenra, but even the originally self-­
reliant Mina ultimately turn into passive objects the males conduct their tug-of-war over. Each of the
parties literally pumps their blood into the women, usurping the body, which, as M ­ ulvey-Roberts
(2016, 106) outlines, is so often the central feature associated with femininity in the gothic. Af-
ter Mina’s premarital autonomy is dissolved by her metamorphosing into “Mrs Harker”, the only
glimpses of female agency in Dracula are reminiscent of Lewis’s The Monk: Matilda-like, unnatural
vampiric females prey on the men—who guided by Van Helsing as an epitome of the benign pa-
triarch, prove much more steadfast than Lewis’s Ambrosio. Lucy Westenra in particular becomes a
“devilish mockery” of feminine “purity” (Stoker 1897, 221). Agentic, voiced, sexually “hungry”,
but unable to biologically reproduce (1897, 219), she usurps a male space. Yet, vampiric Lucy is only
a brief flash of deviant femininity soon to be vanquished by male heroism in their quest to restore
the natural order. As Nicole C. Dittmer’s Chapter 40 in this collection showcases, the gothic is not
the only Victorian writing tradition grappling with the angel/demon dichotomy underlying the
Victorian conceptualization of the female. It is probably because these two identities are generally
constructed as mutually exclusive, not in spite of this, that Victorian literature finds itself so preoc-
cupied with the manifold, often uncanny forms in which this dualism proves to be s­elf-defeating—
and becomes even more problematically unstable when expanded to include an additional, equally
hyperseparated natural/unnatural dimension (cf. Dittmer 2022, 432).
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, finally, Dorian falls for Sibyl Vane because he
perceives her as an empty hull upon which the theatre director can inscribe whatever meaning
he wants (Wilde 1891, 66). Dorian’s view on Sibyl hence mirrors what Plumwood describes as
the precondition for annexation, perceiving the other as a “terra nullius, uninhabited by mind,
totally available for annexation, a sphere easily molded to the ends of a reason conceived as
without limits” (1993, 192). Sibyl longs for this annexation. In an almost uncanny echo of

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Plumwood describing the other as “reinvested with agency and purpose only through being
brought captive as means within the master’s sphere of ends, through assimilation to the sphere
of self via use, in commodification or consumption” (1993, 192), she enjoys her “prison of pas-
sion” (Wilde 1891, 73) and “shudder[s] at the thought of being free” (81). Yet in the homosocial
universe of Wilde’s novel where (biological/female) reproduction is no longer an issue—it has
been superseded by (masculinate) cultural reproduction—annihilation is all that remains for the
subordinate other: Sibyl has to die. The second female character Dorian interacts with, Hetty,
epitomizes the w ­ oman-nature bond for the narrating Dorian: “flower-like”, associated with
“apple-blossoms” and set “in her garden of mint and marigold” (Wilde, 1891, 241), she remains
a discursive specter of an irrevocably lost naturalness briefly haunting a discussion between
Dorian and his mentor Lord Henry.
It is worth pointing out that, especially from an ecofeminist perspective, there are clear paral-
lels between this male-dominated domain of the Victorian gothic and the nascent genre of fan-
tasy. As Waller’s Chapter 46 in this volume addresses, late Victorian fantasy (i.e., those works of
fantasy published contemporaneously to the heyday of the Victorian gothic) shares many key fea-
tures of the parallel gothic writing traditions, most centrally male-dominated or virtually male-
only worlds as in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” or The Picture of Dorian Gray, and a cast of unnatural
women that threaten the male hero and therefore need to be vanquished, mirroring Stoker’s vam-
piric Lucy and Dracula’s brides (Waller 2022, 492–493). The increasing popularity of fantasy in
the Victorian era might also have contributed to the shift toward the urban gothic: the sublime
or daunting natural spaces dominating the previous literary “ecological niche” of the gothic now
came to be populated by the rival genre.
In the twentieth century, female authors started to “write back”,12 recolonizing the gothic and
reinventing its traditional motifs for new audiences. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, a rewrit-
ing of the Bluebeard legend, is the perhaps most critically acclaimed narrative in this tradition.
Angela Carter, whose work is also discussed in Waller’s Chapter 46 and in Yang’s Chapter 35 in
this volume, is critically acclaimed for blending feminism with postmodern magical realism. As
both Waller and Yang set out, Carter’s works often re-tell well-known stories, especially fairy
tales and popular myths, with a tiny, but for this very reason immensely powerful subversive twist
that challenges the meanings traditionally assigned to them. In her Bluebeard story The Bloody
Chamber, Carter’s unnamed heroine is rather reminiscent of Lewis’s victimized Antonia than of
Radcliffe’s Emily. Passive, naive, domestic and silent, yet deprived of any bond to nature to grant
her a psychological hold, she has to learn that passive endurance will not save her—yet her tiger
mother will (Carter 1979, 2, 45). For an ecofeminist approach to the story, this mother is probably
the most central character. Guided by “maternal telepathy” (Carter 1979, 46) and represented as
virtually a force of nature—

a wild thing… her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white
mane, … one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father’s ser-
vice revolver, and behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of
a furious justice.
(45)

—this femme-fatale interpretation of what Teodorescu (2017, 78) calls the “good mother para-
digm” reinvents the woman–nature bond in the context of second-wave feminism. But female
emancipation in the story is utterly reliant on a dualism-based interplay between the woman–­
nature bond and attributes that, in the Victorian gothic, were clearly denoted as masculine. Take
away the mother’s bond to nature, and the character to emerge would be strikingly similar to
Stoker’s heroes, even down to the Victorian ring of her accomplishments: fighting Chinese pirates,

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and shooting a man-eating Indian tiger and a wife-murdering Frenchman. This is imperial British
masculinity par excellence. Carter’s mother character does not triumph over Bluebeard because
she has dissolved the dualisms that render female characters passive in traditional gothic literature,
but because she has usurped the male side. “Nature” remains as the sole anchor to underscore her
femininity in the face of this masculinization, remains, in short, as the single attribute to be con-
structed as essentially female. While Carter’s story hence deliberately challenges the role of women
in gothic fiction, “nature” continues to be constructed along the lines of gender essentialism.
Of course, it is virtually impossible to sum up 250 years of gothic fiction into a single bottom
line, but through an ecofeminist eye, there are indeed some common denominators tying together
these so vastly different textual milestones. As I hope to have shown, the gothic has a strong po-
tential to break down dualistic structures, but often does not utilize this potential. Dualisms are
frequently re-arranged rather than broken down, and the probably most persistent dualism of all
is precisely the naturalization of gender boundaries that form the heart and soul of the ecofeminist
catchphrase that there are “important conceptual ties between the domination of women and the
domination of nature” (Davion, 1994, 8).

Conclusion
In the twenty-first century, gothic fiction is as productive a writing tradition as ever, also having
branched widely into televisual and musical culture, as well as into children’s and especially young
adult fiction. Young adult fiction in particular is, as Deininger’s Chapter 42 in this volume out-
lines, a genre that thrives on exploring the anxieties of its time. Hence it provides the ideal host
genre for the “shifting aesthetic” (Gamer 2000, 4) of the gothic. As is frequently the case in the
gothic, identities in young adult fiction are unstable (see Deininger’s Chapter 42), apparently stark
dualisms turn out to be untenable (but also refuse to be easily discarded) and many of the dysto-
pian societies drawn by contemporary young adult fictions have a distinctly gothic ring to them:
they flesh out the horrors the genre’s young target group might expect to face in the not-too-
distant future (see Deininger’s Chapter 42). Similar is true for science fiction, which, as Deirdre
C. Byrne argues in Chapter 45, is becoming increasingly pessimistic in the twenty-first century.
No longer buoyed by the firm belief in science and progress that buttressed the science fiction of
previous centuries, the futures envisioned nowadays are far more frequently dystopias than uto-
pias. Again, the gothic proves an ideal mode to express these anxieties for the future prospect of
(mainly) humanity. The science fiction short stories by Anacristina Rossi that Byrne discusses in
her chapter in this volume even take up the incest narrative so central to the founding texts of the
gothic, such as Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk or Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, hence showcasing
that the traditional anxieties voiced through gothic fiction have not given way to a set of entirely
new ones to inform the twenty-first-century imagination, but have rather become supplemented
by additional fears and doubts. Unsurprisingly, the most persistent fear to supplement the standard
repertoire of gothic narratives in the twenty-first-century imagination is the consequences of
climate change in their unimaginable vastness and unpredictability. Climate fiction (or cli-fi), as
discussed in detail in Iris Ralph’s Chapter 44 in this volume, accordingly frequently employs the
gothic as a mode to drive home its messages.
At the moment, we are also seeing the rise of the vibrant new sub-genre of the ecogothic
in which nature steps into the role of the suppressed other whose retribution the self fears.13
Byrne’s examples of twenty-first-century science fiction (Chapter 45), as well as Deininger’s ex-
amples of twenty-first-century young adult fiction (Chapter 42), prove the ecogothic to be the
currently most productive mode of gothic writing: both young adult fiction and science fiction
frequently resort to its tropes. Alder and Bavidge intriguingly argue that the ecogothic is some-
how inherently ecofeminist, as in engaging with ecophobia it showcases that “retreat can lead

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only back to hyperseparation. The alternative is inevitably feminist” (2020, 229). Yet, the two
main storylines to dominate this tradition are old acquaintances (and though both indeed have an
immense ecofeminist potential, neither one necessarily makes use of it). Nature either occurs as
an avenger rising against an “unnatural”, threatening mankind in self-defense, a narrative follow-
ing a roughly Romantic pattern. This formula provides the basic plotline for numerous disaster
movies (one that has achieved a somewhat canonical status by now is the The Happening (2008) in
which mankind is decimated by plants that evolved the capacity to chemically self-defend). In the
alternative standard storyline, following what might be called an Enlightenment narrative, nature
may occur as a curiously “unnatural” force threatening humans whose cultural rationality pro-
vides the key to subvert imminent destruction. Frances Hardinge’s young adult gothic novel, The
Lie Tree (2015), winner of the Costa Award, may stand as an example of this narrative. As in The
Happening, the antagonist is vegetal, but Hardinge’s semi-vampiric Lie Tree does not show “nat-
ural” plant behavior. To the contrary, it becomes the living symbol for all that is “unnatural” in
the strictly dualistic system of science vs. religion, progress vs. stasis, and (female) agency vs. (male)
structure governing Hardinge’s storyworld.14 Again, dualisms are not surmounted: Hardinge’s
indeed “explicitly feminist” (Buckley 2018, 200) gothic tale simply moves its heroine to the more
desirable side of a system that remains starkly hyperseparated.
In their conclusion that “adept at transgressing boundaries and creating monsters without pre-
tending such moves aren’t scary or unproblematic, Gothic can go where other esthetics cannot”
(Alder and Bavidge 2020, 231), Alder and Bavidge make an excellent point. There is a sheer enor-
mous transgressive potential in gothic fiction, a genre whose bone marrow it is to subvert bound-
aries that appear to be unassailable, and that, as ecocritics do not tire to point out, introduced
discourses of the posthuman15 centuries before we had a word for this concept. Ecofeminism is
an exceptionally useful theoretical tool to tease out this potential, and indeed this is the task most
ecofeminist approaches to the gothic until today have subscribed to, for example, by highlight-
ing ecofeminist undercurrents in gothic milestone texts, as Parui’s reading does for Frankenstein.
Yet, as I hope to have shown, despite all its transgressive potential, to this day gothic fiction of-
ten moves the goalposts rather than changing the game, transplanting rather than dissolving the
boundaries it challenges, or, when destabilizing one boundary, erecting a new one elsewhere.
Something, it appears, is always stigmatized as “unnatural”, and as long as the narratives gothic
fictions re-tell uphold an essentialist natural/unnatural paradigm, gendered in no matter which
direction, the gothic still has a long way to go to catch up with Val Plumwood’s vision that

if we are to survive into a livable future, we must take into our own hands the power to cre-
ate, restore and explore different stories, with new main characters, better plots, and at least
the possibility of some happy endings.
(Plumwood 193, 196)

This is where ecofeminism has perhaps most to offer to critics as well as authors of the gothic: it
can provide stimuli for changing the story.

Notes
1 If, that is, the gothic can indeed be termed a genre. Robert Miles and Michael Gamer quite convincingly
argue that one might alternatively conceptualize the gothic as a “discursive site crossing the genres”
(Miles 1993, 189), or even as a “shifting ‘aesthetic’” characterized by “its ability to transplant itself across
forms and media” (Gamer 2000, 4, italics in original).
2 For a concise summary of the classic ingredients of gothic fiction, see Hogle (2002, 2–3).
3 See, for example, Williams 1995, 106.
4 For a neat summary of the differences between terror and horror gothic, see Wright (2007), 35–56

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5 See Kay Chronister, “‘On the Moon at Last’: We Have always Lived in the Castle, Female Gothic, and
the Lacanian Imaginary” (2020) for a recent example of an article in a major gothic journal to build its
feminist reading on this hyperseparation.
6 For further reading on the history of gothic literature and its key texts, the reader may refer to Andrew
Smith’s (2007) concise introduction Gothic Literature, or, for a more comprehensive approach, to the
three volumes of The Cambridge History of the Gothic (2020), or to the still growing series of Edinburgh
Companions to Gothic literature.
7 See, for example, Lisa Kröger, “Panic, Paranoia and Pathos: Ecocriticism in the Eighteenth-Century
Gothic Novel” (2015).
8 For recent ecofeminist readings of Frankenstein that also touch several of the points I make below, see
Parui (2016) and Mondello (2022).
9 For further reading, see Townsend and Wright (2016), Parui (2016), Mondello (2022)
10 For further reading on the interconnection between conservatism and conservation see Höing 2017, 38.
11 See Plumwood (1993, 122, 146) on the interconnections between the instrumentalization of women and
of nature.
12 A term originally coined by Teresa A. Goddu (1999, 138) for the African-American gothic purposefully
“interven[ing] in discourses that would demonize [African Americans]”.
13 For further reading, see Smith and Hughes, Ecogothic (2015), and Emily Alder and Jenny Bavidge, “Eco-
criticism and the Genre” (2020). There is no clear borderline between the ecogothic and climate fiction,
so I would also like to redirect readers with a deeper interest in the topic to Ralph’s Chapter 44 on
climate fiction in this volume.
14 For a more comprehensive close reading, see Höing (2021), 163–165.
15 For further reading on the intersections between ecofeminism and the posthuman, see Yazgünoğ lu’s
Chapter 34 in this volume.

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Construction Sin the Literary Imagination, edited by Ruth Bienstock Anolik, 1–14. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Buckley, Chloé Germaine. 2018. Twenty-First Century Children’s Gothic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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In three volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. [1886] 2004. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, edited by Richard Drury.
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Stoker, Bram. [1897] 2002. Dracula, edited by John Paul Riquelme. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Teodorescu, Adriana. 2017. “The Woman-Nature Connection as a Key Element in the Social Construction
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Wright, Angela. 2007. Gothic Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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 39
ROMANTIC LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Kaitlin Mondello

Introduction
The Romantic period, though the shortest literary period, dated between the late eighteenth and
1

mid-nineteenth centuries,2 is one of significant social and literary upheaval. In response to increas-
ing systemic injustices in England and abroad, the Romantic era gave rise to many of the struggles
for rights that continue to the present, including justice for women, people of color, laborers and
the working class, the rural poor, animals, and the environment. The period is associated with the
worship of nature, what M.H. Abrams (1973, 97) called a “theodicy of the landscape” as part of his
larger argument for a kind of “natural supernaturalism,” in a period that saw “the secularization
of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking” (12). For the “second generation” Romantics,
in particular, this included a turn toward pagan relationships to nature over Christian ones. This
reverence for nature originated in part in response to increasing industrialization and privatization
of land; indeed, proponents of the controversial idea of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch
that marks “global-scale human influence on the environment,” originally dated it to this time
period (1800) (Steffen et al. 2011, 842). Concomitantly, the rapid rise of scientific experimenta-
tion and discovery, which in turn fed increasing mechanized industrialization, resulted in both
an expanded understanding of natural processes and forces, as well as a Romantic concern for the
objectification and exploitation of nature by science and industry.
At the same time, galvanized by Mary Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman (1792), new roles for women in the public sphere began to open, especially in writing
for a wider reading public (Lynch 2018, 9; Mellor 2000). Wollstonecraft vehemently opposed the
Enlightenment belief that women were closer to nature as they were linked to both animals and
children, who were likewise deemed deficient in reason. While Romanticism broadly rejected the
Enlightenment’s privileging of reason, it nonetheless retained an undercurrent of both women and
a feminized nature as muse across some male canonical writing.
In ecocriticism, the Romantic period’s intensive focus on nature led critics, most notably
Jonathan Bate (1991, 2000) and Karl Kroeber (1994), to herald it as an early example of environ-
mentalism, from which environmentalist aesthetics, practices, and values could be gleaned. Such
claims have been developed in nuanced ways by critics such as James McKusick (2000), but also
remain contested within and outside of Romanticism, in part influenced by Jerome McGann’s
earlier foundational work against Romanticism’s self-defined representations (1983) and later by
ecocritic Timothy Clark (2011, 2019), as well as Romantic feminist scholars (discussed in the fol-
lowing section). M.H. Abrams’ definition of Romanticism suggests this tension:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-42 417

 Kaitlin Mondello

To a remarkable degree external nature—the landscape, together with its flora and fauna—
became a persistent subject of poetry, and was described with an accuracy and sensuous nu-
ance unprecedented in earlier writers. It is a mistake, however, to describe the romantic poets
as simply ‘nature poets’ ... While many major poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge—and to
a great extent by Shelley and Keats—set out from and return to an aspect or change of aspect
in the landscape, the outer scene is not presented for its own sake but only as a stimulus for the
poet to engage in the most characteristic human activity, that of thinking.
(Abrams and Harpham 2015, 239)

While this perspective is challenged by Romantic ecocritics, the debate has largely ignored
ecofeminist interpretations of the role of nature in the period, despite shared concerns. Because
Romanticism has long been defined almost exclusively by the “Big Six” male poets (William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and
John Keats), female voices, representing a plethora of relations to both gender and nature, have
not been accounted for sufficiently in the debates over the Romantic relationship to nature and
its potential relevance to current environmental issues and aesthetics. Notably, gender is far more
likely to appear as its own category or chapter than the environment in handbooks and guides
to the period, but more importantly, the two are rarely considered together. This is particularly
evident in the tendency to define the period by the first generation of writers (namely, Word-
sworth and Coleridge), whereas the second generation (especially the Shelleys and Byron) presents
an increasingly dark and apocalyptic relation to nature, influenced by the Gothic as well as by
the failures of the French Revolution. Turning to the female authors of the period further opens
new questions about how to define Romanticism, particularly in foundational questions about its
representations of nature.
The first wave of feminist Romantic scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s concerned itself
primarily with the problematic link between women and nature in the canon of male Roman-
tic writers, while at the same time advocated for feminist recovery projects of lost or silenced
female voices in the period. Early studies focused on the most well-known female writers in the
period, especially Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but subsequent work
has included a wider range of female writers including Dorothy Wordsworth, Anna Leticia
Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Joanna Baille, Anna Seward, Elizabeth Inchbald, Felicia Dorothea
Heymans, Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L), Charlotte Smith,
among others, 3 and more recently, Mary Prince, a formerly enslaved woman born in Bermuda
who published her autobiography as a free woman in London. Feminist scholarship has called
attention to how these female writers sought to move from object to subject through author-
ship. Given the fraught associations between women, animals, and nature in the period, it is
no wonder that some female Romantic writers invoked a critical distance from these subjects.
Ecofeminist scholars of Romanticism, however, have read some female-authored Romantic
texts as evincing a radical ecofeminist consciousness that links gendered and environmental
oppression in the period, as well as flattens hierarchies across genders and between the human
and the nonhuman.

Male Is to Culture as Female Is to Nature: Early (Eco)Feminist Critiques of

“Masculine” Romanticism
Feminist scholars, working primarily in the late twentieth century, called attention to the poli-
tics of gender in Romanticism, often in relation to Romantic concepts of nature, notably Meena
Alexander, Elizabeth A. Fay, Paula R. Feldman, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Margaret Ho-
mans, Mary Jacobus, Theresa M. Kelley, Anne K. Mellor, Mary Poovey, Gayatri Spivak, and

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Susan J. Wolfson, among others. Many of these scholars offered powerful critiques of canonical
male Romantics, finding in their work what Alan Richardson calls a “Colonization of the Femi-
nine” (1988, 13) that directly parallels the subsuming of the natural world into the human mind,
imagination, the sublime, and/or the divine.
In her early influential ecofeminist article, anthropologist Sherry Ortner (1974, 69) asks “Is
female to male as nature is to culture?” arguing that “the universal devaluation of women” results
from a cultural perception that women are closer to nature. This interlocking binary for both
nature and women pervades much of the Romantic period to such an extent that Mellor (1993)
divides the period into “masculine” and “feminine” Romanticism (not exclusively by the sex of
the author, but rather by their prevailing attitudes).4 Following traditional gender stereotypes, the
former is characterized by an autonomous self that speaks for and masters nature, while the latter
focuses more on cooperative relations within social and natural systems. Mellor (1988, 8) encap-
sulates the early ecofeminist critique of the period: many of the “Big Six” male poets (mentioned
above) “have been heralded because they endorsed a concept of the self as a power that gains con-
trol over and gives significance to nature, a nature troped in their writings as female.”
Indeed, this important body of scholarship demonstrated that gender binaries related to ideas
about nature pervade many of Romanticism’s foundational concepts, including science as the
study of nature, Edmund Burke’s conception of the sublime and the beautiful, and the represen-
tation of nature in poetry.
Science (then called natural history) was considered primarily as masculine in its pursuit of a
feminized nature, though many women were actively involved in the sciences in the period with-
out receiving proper credit for their work (Ogilvie 1986). In developing an empirical scientific
method, Francis Bacon (1620, 363) writes “so the secrets of nature betray themselves more readily
when tormented by art than when left to their own course.” Notably, Victor Frankenstein, the
“mad” scientist in Mary Shelley’s famous novel from the period, echoes this precise sentiment
with heightened gendered and sexualized rhetoric: “with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness,
I pursued nature to her hiding-places” (Shelley 1818, 33). Many feminist scholars of Romanti-
cism have called attention to this gender divide in the novel, which is discussed in the subsequent
section on Female Romantics. For continued discussion of the sexist science of the nineteenth
century, see Chapter 40, Victorian Literature and Ecofeminism, in this collection.
Nature and gender are likewise central to Edmund Burke’s influential theory of the sublime
and the beautiful. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), Burke distinguishes these key terms in explicitly gendered ways. While the former is asso-
ciated with power, strength, astonishment, infinity, and divinity, the latter is defined by delicacy,
fragility, weakness, and timidity (Burke 1757). Again, here Mellor (1993, 108) decries, “Burke’s
aesthetic classifications participated in, and helped to support, a powerful hegemonic sexual pol-
itics. As he constructed the category of the beautiful, Burke also constructed the image of the
ideal woman.” See Mellor’s chapters Domesticating the Sublime and Exhausting the Beautiful (1993,
85–143), for an extended analysis of gender in Burke’s formulation.
Romantic poets further developed the concept of the sublime, sometimes perpetuating Burke’s
sexist characterizations. Building on the work of Mary Jacobus (1989) and others, Aidan Day in
Gender and the Sublime, (1995, 91) reads the sublime as highly masculinized in Wordsworth’s epic
The Prelude:

[S]ignificance is reserved for the spiritual, the invisible, the transcendental, which in contra-
distinction to feminine nature is associated with the masculine. Nor is it unimportant that
that masculinized spiritual power is described in terms of imperial power …. In this economy
the feminine is expunged by the divinely sanctioned, masculine, imperial force of spirit or
imagination.

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Here, Day reflects on the conflation of the sublime with the political, likewise endemic to Burke’s
conception (evidenced in his staunch opposition to the French Revolution). For Wordsworth, the
figure of “Mother Nature,” intersects with mother tongue and mother country (as in Mother En-
gland), a locus of both potential for and the loss of natural, familial, and political harmony.5 The
poet, in his appended “Preface” (1800, 1802) to Lyrical Ballads (1798) (often dated as the origin of
Romanticism), establishes clearly gendered lines for the project through consistent repetition of
“men” and the male pronoun only: “The language, too, of these men is adopted (purified indeed
from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust)
because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language
is originally derived” (290). Here, nature (“the best objects”) seems to be associated almost exclu-
sively with the masculine, but in Wordsworth’s poetry, nature frequently is gendered female. Alan
Richardson (1988, 19, 22) warns,

when androgyny functions as another manifestation of the male poet’s urge to absorb femi-
nine characteristics, his (or his protagonist’s) female counterpart stands to risk obliteration ...
The Romantic tradition did not simply objectify women. It also subjected them, in a dual
sense, portraying woman as subject in order to appropriate the feminine for male subjectivity.

This form of absorption and transference of the feminine to the masculine pervades one of Word-
sworth’s most famous poems, “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” an import-
ant touchstone in Romantic ecocriticism, in which he casts nature as a female provider, a “nurse,”
(line 110) ministering to the psychological and physical needs of those who love her. The lines are
addressed to “My dear, dear Sister!” which doubly links nature with feminine care: “Nature never
did betray / The heart that loved her … / She can so inform the mind that is within us, so impress /
With quietness and beauty, and so feed / With lofty thoughts” (lines 122–124, 126–129). Jacobus
(1989, 215) notes that Wordsworth “adopts the myth of nature as Romantic Mother without ever
confronting maternal desire, whether the mother’s for and in him, or his own for the mother.” In
a similar vein to Richardson above, Gayatri Spivak (1981, 334) contends that Wordsworth claims
for the mature male poet, “an androgynous plenitude which would include within the self an
indeterminate role of mother as well as lover.”
Indeed, Romantic nature itself often is figured as both mother and lover.6 This dual identity
combines in the poem “Nutting,” where Wordsworth explicitly employs a sexualized metaphor
for the harvesting of a nut bower. After coming upon “A virgin scene!” “Then up I rose, / And
dragg’d to earth both branch and bough, with crash/and merciless ravage; and the shady nook/Of
hazels, and the green and mossy bower / Deform’d and sullied, patiently gave up / Their Quiet
Being” (lines 20, 42–46). The poem concludes much like Tintern Abbey with an address to a female
figure on the ideal relationship with nature: “Then, dearest Maiden! Move along these shades /
In gentleness of heart with gentle hand / Touch—for there is a Spirit in the woods” (lines 53–55).
This sudden imperative to a maiden seems to elide the intended recipient of the lesson, the young
male narrator of the poem (linked to the poet himself ), thus potentially displacing responsibility.
Notably, the “dear, dear Sister” Dorothy Wordsworth focused her own writings on meticulous
observation of the natural world itself, which William Wordsworth sometimes incorporated into
his poetry (for a fuller discussion of Dorothy Wordsworth’s work, see Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman’s
Chapter 23 in this collection, as well as foundational feminist studies by Homans (1986), Levin
(1987), Alexander (1989), and Mellor (1993), among others).
As each of the very brief examples in this section reflects, early feminist scholarship established
that some of the most foundational characteristics of Romanticism, especially those connected to
nature, are steeped in gendered rhetoric.

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Female Romantics as Ecofeminists

Discussed briefly in the introduction to this chapter, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1792) is considered one of the first works of modern feminist scholarship. In this
text, Wollstonecraft extended her argument for human rights in A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790)—a refutation of Edmund Burke’s antirevolutionary stance in Reflections on the Revolution
in France (1790)—directly to women. In her earlier political tract, she lambasts Burke’s gendered
concepts of the sublime and the beautiful to expose the intersection of the “natural,” the aesthetic,
and the political:

You could readily exculpate yourself by turning the charge on Nature, who made our idea of
beauty independent of reason. Nor would it be necessary for you to recollect, that if virtue has
any other foundation than worldly utility, you have clearly proved that one half of the human
species, at least, have not souls; and that Nature, by making women little, smooth, delicate, fair
creatures, never designed that they should exercise their reason to acquire the virtues that
produce opposite, if not contradictory, feelings.
(45)

Indeed, Wollstonecraft’s reinterpretation of the sublime (and rejection of the beautiful) was shared
by other female writers of the period, as explored in Patricia Yeager’s Toward a Female Sublime
(1989) and Mellor’s Romanticism and Gender (1993).
In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft argues that the perceived lack of rationality in women is
due to a lack of education rather than to an essential or biological reality linked to animality or
nature itself. In Chapter 40, Victorian Literature and Ecofeminism, Nicole C. Dittmer addresses the
history of shared exclusion from rationality for women, animals, children, and nature, as well
as the entrenchment of the traditional gender roles that Wollstonecraft opposed. Consequently,
many critics have read Wollstonecraft’s work as necessarily distancing women from nature in the
period,7 but recent ecofeminist scholarship has reclaimed Wollstonecraft as part of critical or radi-
cal ecofeminism in her recognition of the shared plight of women, animals, and the environment.
Barbara Seeber, for example, contends “Wollstonecraft anticipates one of ecofeminism’s most
central insights: the connection between human-nature dualism and social hierarchies” (185). In
a telling passage from Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft (1792, 244) traces the intersectional nature
of violence and oppression:

Habitual cruelty is first caught at school, where it is one of the rare sports of the boys to
torment the miserable brutes that fall in their way. The transition, as they grow up, from bar-
barity to brutes to domestic tyranny over wives, children, and servants, is very easy. Justice,
or even benevolence, will not be a powerful spring of action unless it extends to the whole
creation; nay, I believe that it may be delivered as an axiom, that those who can see pain,
unmoved, will soon learn to inflict it.

Wollstonecraft follows this passage with a critique of women who likewise mistreat animals and ser-
vants, concluding “The wife, mother, and human creature, were all swallowed up by the factitious
character which an improper education and the selfish vanity of beauty had produced” (244–245).
Notably, Wollstonecraft’s feminist manifesto produced a satiric response, Thomas Taylor’s Vin-
dication of the Rights of Brutes (1792), which lampoons the idea of rights for women by extending
Wollstonecraft’s arguments to another group supposedly bereft of reason: animals. (For a useful
discussion of the parallels between the oppression of women and animals, see Chapter 26, Animal

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Studies and Ecofeminist Literature, in this collection.) In a recent article, S. Marek Muller (2021)
attempts to reclaim Taylor’s satire from an ecofeminist perspective, reading against the grain.
Additionally, Wollstonecraft’s other major writings have also been read through an ecofeminist
lens, including Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) and
two novels, Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman: or Maria (1798) (see, e.g., Hust 1996).
Though Mary Wollstonecraft tragically died of an infection after giving birth, her daughter,
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, continued and built on her exceptional legacy. Shelley is perhaps
the best-known canonical Romantic writer and the most studied writer of Romantic feminism
and ecofeminism. While she is acclaimed for Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, 1831),
critics have also taken interest in her lesser-known novel The Last Man (1826). The rebellion of
the Creature in Frankenstein and the global plague in The Last Man firmly establish a powerful
ecofeminist critique that no patriarchal “fantasy of complete mastery” over nature is possible
(Plumwood 1994, 110). Ecofeminist scholarship primarily critiques Victor Frankenstein’s ideology
and behavior, notes the limited roles of the female characters, and explores the representation of
the Creature in connection with women, nature, and animals, as well as the Creature’s own mis-
treatment of and misconceptions about women. Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman’s Chapter 23 in this
collection continues the discussion of these themes in Frankenstein.
In their landmark work, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-­
Century Literary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979) read Shelley’s novels as evinc-
ing the revenge of the repressed female, particularly in response to John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Bate (2000) and Mellor (1988) read the Creature in a similar way as enacting the revenge of nature
against human and/or male hubris and mistreatment. Mellor (1988) explicitly notes the ways in
which the Creature is tied to a feminized nature and (along with Poovey (1984), Homans (1986),
and others) offers a scathing critique of Victor Frankenstein’s relationship to both women and na-
ture. This early feminist scholarship calls attention to Victor Frankenstein’s desire for procreation
without a biological woman, thereby assuming the traditionally feminine and/or natural power of
fertility, conception, and birth. As Ellen Moers (1974, 216, 224) strikingly claims in her reading
of the novel, influenced by Shelley’s biography, it is “a birth myth” that “transform[s] the standard
Romantic matter of incest, infanticide, and patricide into a phantasmagoria of the nursery.” Moers
reads the novel in the tradition of what she calls the Female Gothic, which originates in the work
of Ann Radcliffe. Recent criticism also identifies a central place for the novel in the Ecogothic
(Hughes and Smith 2013). For further discussion, see Chapter 38, Gothic Fiction and Ecofeminism,
in this volume.
In the novel, Victor Frankenstein’s mistreatment of women goes beyond the metaphorical level
of a feminized nature. He consistently fails his betrothed Elizabeth and allows Justine Moritz to be
executed for a crime he knows the Creature commits. In a telling scene in the novel that conflates
lover and mother, Victor dreams that when he kisses Elizabeth, she turns into the decomposing
figure of his dead mother Caroline. Despite Elizabeth’s attempts to defend Justine, neither woman
can persuade a patriarchal legal system of her innocence. Victor further refuses the Creature’s
desire for a female mate and eventually dismembers her partially completed form in a scene that
foreshadows the potential rape and murder that the Creature enacts against Elizabeth in revenge.
In keeping with this violence against women, unlike the welcoming figure of Mother Nature in
Wordsworth’s or Burke’s conception of the beautiful, Shelley employs nature in all its sublime
terror, including lightning, storms, and the extreme cold of the Alps. Numerous studies make
the connection to the writing of the novel during “The Year Without a Summer,” a widespread
climate cooling due to the volcanic eruption of Tambora.
Critics read the Creature as representing a variety of subject positions. In “Listen to Me: Fran-
kenstein as an Appeal to Mercy and Justice, on Behalf of Persecuted Animals,” Stephanie Rowe
(2006) contends that the Creature represents the plight of animals. For a generative discussion

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of the intersections of ecofeminism and animal studies, see Lesley Kordecki’s Chapter 26 in this
collection. Rowe further notes that, as Carol Adams (1990, 104) has also pointed out, the Creature
himself is vegetarian, which corresponds to the rhetoric of vegetarianism at the time (following
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Percy Shelley) as a choice between a more peaceful life in harmony
with nature, as opposed to one in which humans are corrupted by their own insatiable appetites.
Peter Heymans (2012) directly relates Frankenstein to fears about evolution, describing the crea-
ture’s physical traits as an “aesthetic shock” that exposes the body as material. In a similar vein,
Janelle Schwartz (2012, 153–154) reads the Creature as “a fully realized account of nature’s kinetic
materiality” in which he is “an exaggerated artifice of the role of decomposition in nature’s or-
ganic cycle” and thereby a kind of “monstrosity” inherent within nature itself. In these ways, the
Creature comes to represent nature and by extension, his exclusion from the world of the human,
defined by the patriarchal control of both nature and those most closely associated with it.
Shelley’s third novel, The Last Man, globalizes contagion and despite human attempts to over-
come it (like Victor’s to stop the Creature from ending his family line), humanity’s numbers
dwindle to one by the end of the novel. This text has garnered increased critical interest in part
because of its attention to disease and the effects of colonization (Bewell 1999), as well as its reso-
nances with the COVID-19 pandemic. The plague in The Last Man can be read as an expansion of
Victor’s fear of the female creature’s exponential reproductive capacity leading to human extinc-
tion. Whether through the biological threat of uncontrolled fecundity or mortality, the forces of
nature, gendered female, place the human species at risk of death. Shelley foreshadows this female
force of destruction in the opening scene of the introduction through the remnants of the cave of
the Cumaean Sybil whose prophecy states that humanity will disappear from the earth in the year
2100. The Plague follows the figure of the Cumaean Sibyl in the novel’s introduction8 as a female
prophet of destruction, which is personified as a dark mother nature that has been transformed
from health to sickness, much like the victims of the plague itself:

Nature was the same, as when she was the kind mother of the human race; now, childless
and forlorn, her fertility was a mockery; her loveliness a mask for deformity. Why should the
breeze gently stir the trees, man felt not its refreshment? Why did dark night adorn herself
with stars—man saw them not? Why are there fruits, or flowers, or streams, man is not here
to enjoy them?
(262)

In a parallel to Victor Frankenstein, the novel’s narrator here rejects nature outside of traditional
gender roles. This betrayal of Mother Nature becomes an inverse figure in the novel: “Plague
had become Queen of the World” (276). As Poovey (1984, 150) observes, “all the destructive
forces in this novel—the ‘PLAGUE,’ Necessity, and nature—are feminine.” Following Carolyn
Merchant’s (1980, 127) idea of nature as both virgin and witch, the Plague becomes associated
with “The witch, symbol of the violence of nature, raised storms, caused illness, destroyed crops,
obstructed generation, and killed infants. Disorderly woman, like chaotic nature, needed to be
controlled.” For more discussion of Merchant’s work, see Chapter 23, English Literature and Ecofem-
inism, and Chapter 40, Victorian Literature and Ecofeminism, among others, in this collection.
While Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley are among the most studied feminist writers
of the Romantic period, followed by Dorothy Wordsworth, numerous female writers not con-
nected to famous literary men of the time have helped to redefine a more inclusive Romanticism.
This range of voices received critical attention at the 2005 exhibition at the New York Public
Library “Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era” curated by Eliz-
abeth Campbell Denlinger. Further, the addition of excerpts from Mary Prince’s autobiography
to The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period (2018) calls attention to issues

423
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of race and colonization in the period and opens further avenues for intersectional ecofeminist
study. Prince consistently details the horrors she faced during slavery as akin to the treatment of
animals, asking

How can slaves be happy when they … are separated from their mothers, husbands, and chil-
dren, and sisters, just as cattle are sold and separated? … And then when we are quite done up,
who cares for us, more than for a lame horse?
(Lynch 121–122)

For further discussion of both race and animal studies in ecofeminism, see the respective Chapters
36 and 26 in this collection.

Recent and Future Trends in Romantic Ecofeminism

Recent Romantic scholarship has incorporated third-wave feminism, Feminist New Materialism,
Science Studies, Animal Studies, and Affect Theory—including new studies by Melissa Bailes,
Sylvia L. Bowerbank, Daniela Garofalo, Dewey Hall and Jillmarie Murphy, Kari E. Lokke, Kate
Singer, Ashley Cross, and Suzanne L. Barnett, among others—in exciting ways that could in-
fluence and even redefine contemporary ecofeminist scholarship in the period. (For discussion
of new materialisms and animal studies generally, see Chapters 32 and 26, respectively.) Critical
work remains to be done in thinking through the ecofeminist implications of the Anthropocene
and climate in relation to Romanticism, to build on the ecocritical work of Kate Rigby (2020)
and others. In particular, the period’s history of industrialization and colonization can be read in
relation to contemporary climate change in ways that acknowledge the disproportionate effects
on women and people of color globally, both then and now. Romantic ecofeminism needs to
expand further intersectionally, including with postcolonial ecocriticism, to extend the founda-
tional work of Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofskotch (1996), Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson (1998,
2004), Kevin Hutchings (2009), and many others. (See Chapters 31 and 33 in this collection re-
spectively on ecofeminist intersectionality and postcolonialism.) In short, the future of Romantic
ecofeminism depends on the work of scholars to continue to bridge diverse texts, writers, theo-
ries, and methodologies.

Conclusion
The Romantic era is defined largely in part by its relationship to and construction of nature. Eco-
criticism sustains both environmentalist value and critique in works of the period, while feminist
scholarship continues to expand on the wide array of Romantic texts by female writers that are
worthy of increased critical attention. As discussed in the section above, more dialogue between
these critical perspectives is needed, particularly given how endemic gender and nature are to
definitions of the period, as well as their conflation in many canonical works. Exploring construc-
tions of nature and gender by female writers paints a more accurate and complex picture of the
period’s relationship to these significant categories.

Notes
1 The origin of the term “Romantic” for the period dates to debates among nineteenth-century critics
who linked this movement to Medieval and Renaissance romances that deviated from classical norms.
As this early definition suggests, Romanticism itself is difficult to define and often contested in meaning
among critics. It is considered broadly a European movement that extended to America and other British
colonies. For the purposes of this chapter, the scope has been limited to British Romanticism.

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2 The exact dating of the period varies, but most commonly begins as early as 1785 with a failed Reform
bill, the start of the French Revolution in 1789, or the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and extends
through the successful passage of the first Reform bill in British Parliament in 1832 (Abrams 1993, 125;
Lynch 2018, 3–4).
3 Mellor (1993) surveys 20 female Romantic authors, while Fay (1998) touches on 25 female writers in
various categories from the period. Critical debate continues over how to classify Jane Austen since she
is part of the Regency period (which overlaps with Romanticism), and her work is often considered a
forerunner to the Victorian period. Though she is not included in this chapter due to a limited scope,
numerous studies discuss her work in its Romantic context, including Poovey (1984), Fay (1998), and
Deresiewicz (2004).
4 As Susan J. Wolfson (1998, 388) reminds us, in Romanticism, “Men’s writing … can articulate and
provoke gender critique—not only in the obvious way of stating critical and oppositional views, but
also in the way writers allow instabilities and irresolutions to press against traditional values and under-
standings. At the same time, much women’s writing in the age of Romanticism was not subversive, but
devoted to traditional understandings of gender.”
5 For a related discussion, see Chapter 23, English Literature and Ecofeminism, on the ideology of Mother
Nature; Chapter 40, Victorian Literature and Ecofeminism; and Mellor (2000) on gender in England. In
Chapter 30, Hegemonic Masculinity and Ecofeminist Literature, Lydia Rose notes the intersections of patri-
archy with colonial, imperial, and capitalist ideologies.
6 For a more recuperative reading of Wordsworth and gender, see Judith Page’s Wordsworth and the Cultiva-
tion of Women (1994) where she argues that Wordsworth’s “sexual conflicts and configurations of gender
within the family reveal both ... personal and political anxieties” (4); thus, she reads some of his suffering
female characters “as expressions of both guilt and empathy” (6). This work builds on James Averill’s
earlier influential work Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (1980).
7 For a succinct literature review of these critiques of Wollstonecraft, see Seeber 2014, 176 and for fuller
discussion, see Johnson 2002.
8 See Gilbert and Gubar’s (1979, 95–99) influential reading of the cave linked to the Cumaean Sibyl as a
feminine space.

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 40
VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND
ECOFEMINISM
Nicole C. Dittmer

Introduction
Ecofeminism, albeit a theoretical lens that emerged at a much later date than the nineteenth cen-
tury, provides Victorian literary studies with a bifurcated, and sometimes antagonistic, approach
to the enduring woman–nature relationship. A term coined by Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974,
ecofeminism is a concept that highlights the chronically assumed juxtaposition of nature and
women, with the objective of extricating both subordinates from patriarchal oppression. Stacy
Alaimo (2001, 3) argues that this oppression was created from a dual convergence of contradictory
meanings driven by the idea that “woman is closer to nature and thus inferior, woman is inferior
because nature made her so.” As Greta Gaard (1993, 1) stipulates, the interdisciplinary connection
of this idea’s foundation “draw[s] on the insights of ecology, feminism, and socialism” to form
a basis on “the ideology which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender,
sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of na-
ture.” Thus, the premise for ecofeminism “calls for an end to all oppressions” and, as Gaard (1993,
1) and many other feminists argue, female liberation will not be possible unless this consideration
is applied equally to the emancipation of nature.
Carolyn Merchant, in her expository text on feminism and nature, The Death of Nature (1980,
117), and in her subsequent retrospective The Scientific Revolution (2006), asserts how “wild and
uncontrollable nature” is notoriously associated with women. Dichotomized as a force of con-
tradictions and instability, historically nature was perceived as both nurturing and destructive,
while women were similarly cast into roles as either the passive virgin or aggressive witch. These
ideologies that correlate femininity and nature as an ontologically bifurcative echo through both
Victorian fiction and institutional (social, medical, and scientific) literature of the period. For ex-
ample, Denise Riley (1988, 2) and Susan Griffin (1978, 3) famously argue that Western history’s
portrayal of female “alliance” with nature reaffirms androcentric domination and forces women
outside the cultured domain into one of subjectivity, instability, and irrationality. This common
perspective that reverberated through the centuries caused some scholars, such as Merchant, to
critique the forced relationship between woman and nature. Supposing that the direct connec-
tion is a harmful construct for female identities and a derogation of nature itself, a segregation
of the two is suggested. One such advocate for this separation, Juliet Mitchell (1966, 11), posits
that the further removed from nature, the best chance for female liberation. However, modern
material-ecofeminist Stacy Alaimo in her text Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist
Space (2000) offers an approach that reidentifies the salience of the relationship between women

428 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-43

 Victorian Literature and Ecofeminism

and nature. Acting as a source of empowerment and agency, nature is no longer the oppressive
biological identifier to women but an “undomesticated space” for independence (Alaimo 2000,
22). Albeit a more modern approach to ecofeminism, this monistic interconnection of women–
nature–agency echoes through the neglected penny publications of the early-to-mid-Victorian
period. This chapter explores the purpose for the creation of this particular material-semiotic
literary figuration of women–nature.

Intertwining Victorian Discourse and Literature

The literature of the nineteenth century, or more specifically the Victorian period (1837–1901),
followed societal trends of gender-specific dichotomization, thus categorizing women in roles
informed by their metamorphic “nature”—specifically, biological reproductivity—while aligning
men with immutable culture. As Anja Höing addresses in Chapter 41 of this collection, Children’s
Fiction and Ecofeminism, literature of the nineteenth century was renowned for gendered segrega-
tion and behavioral constructs aligned with these assigned spheres. The feedback loop between
medical and scientific discourses, manuals for moral conduct, and popular fiction of the nine-
teenth century perpetuated these “rigid notions of gender” (Alaimo 2000, 16). Such circulated
material not only shaped gendered behaviors for British citizens, but also constructed cultural
boundaries as organized and cultivated, while labeling nature and all associated things “as a space
utterly free from such confining concepts, values, and roles” (Alaimo 2000, 16). For instance,
women, animals, children, bodies, and emotions are all situated and conceptualized within the
realm of nature, while men, logic, mind, and reason have historically been imagined as culturally
equivalent (see Höing’s Chapter 41 and Mondello’s Chapter 39). Drawing from this approach,
Kaitlin Mondello, in Chapter 39, Romantic Literature and Ecofeminism, further identifies the En-
lightenment belief of relative deficiency associated with gender roles and nonhuman nature as a
source of contention for such literary scholars as Mary Wollstonecraft. Arguing that assumed fe-
male irrationality was not inherent or identified as that of children and/or animals, Wollstonecraft
based it on limited education, thereby rejecting the biological assumptions as related to nature
and gender expectations (see Mondello’s Chapter 39). Moving into a more Romantic tradition
that argues for nature as reflective of the inner being, Mondello posits how female authors in the
eighteenth century sought to create a distance between themselves and this subject–object rela-
tionship. Although this period preceding the Victorian era suggests an upheaval that rejects the
alignment of female roles with biology, the language of nineteenth-century discourses perpetu-
ates the woman–non-human nature association (see Mondello’s Chapter 39). These gender speci-
fications, as Mondello elaborates, were divided into the masculine, a concept that functions as the
master of nature, and the feminine, which was considered both part of and controlled by nature.
The binary of nature and woman that Mondello sanctions as a foundational conscript for the Ro-
mantic period informed the social gender roles of the Victorian period. The task of ecofeminism,
especially when applied to Victorian studies, is to expose conflicts of this dualistic treatment and
as Gaard (1993, 5) suggests to illustrate how “naturalizing and analyzing women” into a femi-
nine space—namely, nature—allowed a society to justify the “domination of women, animals,
and the earth.” As the “most affected by the changing nature of medical practice,” women were
subjected to the arbitrary theories centered upon their own assumed biological capriciousness
(Houston 2004, 271). Therefore, women’s roles in the Victorian period and subsequent literary
figurations were reduced to their reproductive purposes, and women were identified as “slaves of
their function” who necessitated control and demanded subordination (Valera 2018, 17). Assumed
as unstable “animale sessuale” (Sarti 2006, 208) situated in and instructed by nature, women were
oppressed as patriarchal essential constructs to ensure that their behaviors aligned with the stabil-
ity of society by becoming “passive objects of biological necessity” (Yang 2018, 7).

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In the early years of the Victorian period, institutional instruction entered the “woman con-
versation” to assist in the reinforcement of dichotomies for female characteristics and behav-
iors: mind/body, nature/culture, angel/whore, human/animal—hence establishing a perfect area
of study for ecofeminists. For instance, in 1839 Sarah Stickney Ellis began to release her series of
conduct manuals to promote female acquiescence and morality, the first entitled The Women of
England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (1839), with the subsequent titles The Daughters
of England (1842), The Mothers of England (1843), and The Wives of England (1843). These guides
target the construction of rigid gender roles for the improvement of society. As a prominent voice
in early Victorian society, Ellis promoted A Woman’s Mission, an ideal that suggested women’s
strength is based on their influence of others, therefore they must act as paragons of morality.
In order to achieve this level of influence, Ellis argues, women must recognize and accept their
obligations as mothers and wives. Thereby, it was necessary for women to ignore their instinctual
desires and “lay aside all natural caprice” to find satisfaction in domestication (Ellis 1839, 45). In
Chapter 23, English Literature and Ecofeminism, Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman addresses how this spe-
cific correlation between women and nature was optimized throughout the nineteenth century
as a means of control. Focusing on texts and authors of the period, Taylor-Wiseman posits that
much of the relevant ecofeminist scholarship illuminates how constructs of nature were desig-
nated as feminine (i.e., motherly and nurturing) to objectify both women and the environs into
assumed roles of social essentialism and subjectivity (see Taylor-Wiseman’s Chapter 23). As beings
specifically correlated with nature, which Plumwood (1993, 19–20) posits “excluded and deval-
ued contrast of reason,” women were persuaded to abide by such conduct material to restrict “the
emotions, the body, animality, the primitive or uncivilized, the non-human world, matter, phys-
icality, and sense experience as well as the sphere of irrationality, of faith and of madness.” This
tradition of female dichotomization and behavioral restriction as exhibited by Ellis proliferated
through Victorian society and informed successive discourses.
Following Ellis’s and nineteenth-century society’s logic about the assumed instability of female
nature, medical institutions emphasized the “otherness” of women, rooted in their reproductive
functionality, thereby encouraging oppression and segregation (Alaimo 2000). Predicated on this
notion of biological metamorphosis and assumed body-mind vulnerability, the medical sciences
community based their doctrines and treatises of women’s behaviors on beliefs about the phys-
iology of the uterus, or in the case of Thomas Laycock (1840), the ovaries. Laycock, a neural
physiologist, preserved what Patricia Murphy (2019, 8) refers to as the “imagined bond” of West-
ern culture, responsible for gender polarization, in other words, woman–nature/men-culture.
Carrying on the Aristotelian philosophy that the demanding reproductivity of women caused
mental susceptibility, Laycock maintained that women and nature are associated with physicality,
emotion, and irrationality (Murphy 2019, 6). As a teleologist, Laycock maintained the founda-
tional belief that living beings and nature informed one another. Therefore, in his 1840 Treatise
of the Nervous Diseases of Women, Laycock’s exploration of female behavior and reflex theory pro-
moted the philosophy that nature is an unconscious force responsible for influencing the willing
neurological and psychological functions of women. Allocating “the human female” her faculties,
and attributing “mental emotions” to the dispositions of “lower animals” (Laycock 1840, 72) and
children, this popular medical discourse further establishes women as lower on the “cultural scale”
(Merchant 1980, 144) by forcing them closer to nature.
Maintaining a biological basis of functionality as a method of female oppression, one that
perpetuates the “objectification of nature and of women,” Victorian discourses encouraged this
reductionistic and essentialist role (Mitten and D’Amore 2018, 107). Likening their theories to
those of Ellis and Laycock, subsequent medical practitioners followed a similar trajectory that
advocated for strict gender roles and compelled women’s conduct. For instance, John Millingen’s
The Passions; or Mind and Matter (1848, 160) argues for the restraint and supervision of women

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based on their “vivid” and “irresistible” sympathies and sensations. Akin to prior medical philos-
ophies, Millingen (1848, 160) postulates that women are “less under the influence of the brain
than the uterine system,” therefore they suffer from an increased probability of manifesting “hys-
teric dispositions.” Synonymous with the philosophies of discourses past, prominent psychologist
Forbes Winslow (1851, 19) and British physician Robert Brudenell Carter (1853) reinforce the
woman–nature relationship by hypothesizing that reproduction functions are “imbued” with
activity, thereby any “irregular action” or uninhibited sexual instinct result in a decline or “de-
generation” analogous to that of the “lower animals of the scale.” While this reductionistic es-
sentialism of woman–nature was often juxtaposed as a unified construct in nineteenth-century
discourses as a method of repression, this relationship as identified by Taylor-Wiseman in Chapter
23 actually functions to disrupt the social constructs and traditional gender expectations. This
ongoing conversation of female reductionism, gendered concepts, and popular literature figured
women and nature as a singular oppressed construct bound by fetters to biological instability.

Ecofeminism and Victorian Penny Literature

As obscure and ephemeral publications, fictional works such as penny bloods and penny dread-
fuls from the nineteenth century have received relatively little critical scholarly attention. These
integral forms of literature, albeit amalgamations of varied literary sources and genres, were sig-
nificant and influential texts for the British populace during the Victorian period. While notable
modes and genres such as the Gothic and the Sensational received evaluative interpretations as
socially reflective literature, penny publications were disregarded as “pernicious” and unrefined
(Springhall 1994, 326). The scholarly dismissal of these once-popular texts represents a significant
gap in critical studies from an ecofeminist perspective. As a composite literary genre that wove,
albeit through plagiarism, integral texts ranging from canonical literature to medical and scientific
­information—for example, Anatomy Act of 1832, Treatise of the Nervous Diseases of Women (1840),
The 1848 Public Health Act—penny publications are a significant and unexplored source of social
issues and concerns. Therefore, this chapter offers a cohesive exposition of how the working-class
fiction of the Victorian period, known as “penny bloods,” was in direct conversation with ecofem-
inist concerns, most notably the direct correlation and essentialism of women and nature. Offering
a much-needed ecofeminist approach, this chapter uses the perspectives of Alaimo’s reclamation of
nature to demonstrate how authors of penny fiction illustrate the underlying fear of the monistic
woman–nature construct while simultaneously creating awareness. Antithetical to Merchant’s sec-
ond wave perspective, Alaimo (2000, 16) exposes the positivity of the woman–nature composition,
suggesting that nature is an untamed space that functions as an example for “female insurgency.”
Therefore, Nicole Dittmer (2020, 196) argues that nature as it is exhibited in penny literature “is
not considered a neutral sphere but a mirrored representation of the wild, unpredictable behavior
of women.” Likewise, in Chapter 13, Slovene Literature and Ecofeminism, Katja Plemenitaš investi-
gates how the Romantic tradition of the early nineteenth century categorized women as objects of
beauty, admiration, and affection for the male gaze. Illustrating how Slovene literature echoes these
characteristics of female constructs associated with roles of wives and mothers, Plemenitaš identifies
how natural spaces, such as orchards and gardens, served as substitutes for freedom from this restric-
tive notion of womanhood. Similar to Alaimo’s rebranding of nature’s true purpose, Plemenitaš
also argues that it is this space of independence and freedom that allows for the deconstruction
and rebranding of the woman–nature relationship (see Plemenitaš’s Chapter 13). Therefore, by
examining the penny serializations under Alaimo’s (2001, 283) ecofeminist premise that women, as
conservators of chaos, “must serve as the border zone between nature and culture, keeping nature
safely at bay,” Victorian scholars receive a new method of identifying the woman–nature relation-
ship as one inimical to the “angel” stereotype of the period.

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There are notable and canonical literary works that emphasize antagonistic Victorian women
with connections to both the surrounding environment and their inherent instinctual nature.
Some examples include Frederick Marryat’s Gothic novel The Phantom Ship (1838), Charlotte
Brontë ’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The working-class, ephemeral penny
literature exploits this popular belief for marketing purposes while also exposing the societal fear
of female nature through women’s immersion in the natural realm.1
One example that illustrates the woman–nature feedback loop is an anonymously authored
penny blood titled The Wild Witch of the Heath; or. The Demon of the Glen, A Tale of the most Pow-
erful Interest (1840). This penny blood, similar to that of George W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner, the
Wehr-Wolf, idealizes the interrelationship of the woman–nature construct through the figuration
of the witch and in the exhibition of the chaos and destruction from the surrounding environs.
As Rhian Waller suggests in Chapter 46, Fantasy and Ecofeminism, the female body has histori-
cally been associated with the environment. For example, in colonial narratives, or what Robert
Fraser (1998, 12) coins the Victorian “quest romance,” the landscape is likened to the segments of
the female form and equally shares the burden of gendered objectification (see Waller’s Chapter
46). Similar to Waller’s identification of woman–nature in fantasy and imperial literature, the
environment serves as an expressive representation of feminine instability and passivity, while the
female form functions as a material embodiment of biological nature, both of which, as assumed
by patriarchal standards, welcome invasion and conquest. As a Gothic-inspired tale reminiscent
of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606–1607), the ephemeral publication The Wild Witch, based
in the Scottish wilderness, is clearly informed by the emerging medical discourses of biological
instability paralleled by Victorian stereotypes of the passive angel and the destructive demon. The
titular Wild Witch, as both protagonist and antagonist, is a monistic figuration of the dichoto-
mous identities of Victorian women: angel and demon. Comprised of behaviors that coincide with
characteristics of the domestic housewife—that is to say , willful assistance and guidance—she
offers protection and hospitality to the wayward male characters. However, as a “natural crea-
ture,” as Alaimo (2001, 292) purports, the Wild Witch becomes a “threat against which humans
must defend themselves,” and exhibits the dualistic female aggressions feared by civilized society.
However, while The Wild Witch exhibits a clear conjunction of woman and nature that mirrors
the characteristics of one another, the language purposefully imagines this construct as a rela-
tionship of power, not passivity. For example, in place of a Victorian landscape that remarks on
such quiescent feminine landmarks as “two mountains” unimaginatively named “Sheba’s Breasts”
(Haggard 1885, 12), this penny blood suggests a potent environmental monstrosity of “forked and
vivid lighting” (Wizard 1840, 5), and dangerous mountains “inhabited by a wild and mysterious
being” (Wizard 1840, 17). This confluence of environmental chaos and feminine instability in the
unified form of a monstrous figuration demonstrates the purpose of tyrannical imperialism (see
Waller’s Chapter 46). The nineteenth-century fear of female sexuality and biological metamor-
phosis, as Waller further discusses, functions as a source of patriarchal anxiety, thereby equivo-
cating its representation to that of the savage, uncharted terrains that necessitate domination. As a
material-­semiotic literary figuration constructed from contradictory female stereotypes, strategi-
cally placed within while simultaneously demonstrating control over the natural realm, the Wild
Witch is a prime example of how ecofeminist theory is critical for Victorian studies.
Following a similar strategy for illustrating this women-nature convergence, the prolific penny
author James Malcolm Rymer published under numerous synonyms an array of serializations that
elaborate upon this interrelationship. Rymer’s The String of Pearls (1846–1847)—although argued
by some as written by Thomas Peckett Prest—is a complicated exhibition of the woman–nature
infiltrator in the domestic sphere through the figuration of Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney Todd’s decep-
tive counterpart.2 According to Alaimo’s (2000, 16) perspective of ecofeminism, nature is an

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“undomesticated” and “untamed” space used by women to gain agency and escape the confines
of domestication. Therein, nature functions as a realm of “wildness, sovereignty, [and] agency”
that women can designate as “truly and unequivocally theirs” (Alaimo 2000, 16). The criminal
figuration of Mrs. Lovett illustrates this perspective of women-nature agency by welcoming the
chaotic and wild characteristics of nature into the domestic realm. Offering an inversion of the
domesticated Victorian woman, Rymer’s Lovett is a confluence of the woman–nature dichotomy
that presents the domestic realm as a façade to conceal corrupted female nature, expressly, her in-
volvement with murder, butchery, and cannibalism. Functioning as a figure that exhibits feminine
appearances—a “female buxom, young and good-looking”—and behaviors that demonstrate hos-
pitality, as she “bestowed her smiles upon her admirers, so that none could say he was neglected,”
Mrs. Lovett presents the illusion of the Victorian “angel” (Rymer 1846–1847, 28).3 However,
following the theme of the other penny publications in this chapter, Rymer constructs Lovett as a
woman controlled by a corrupted nature. Alluding back to Ellis and Laycock’s concepts of biolog-
ical instability, Rymer’s serialization emphasizes the dangers of the uncontrolled woman–nature
interrelationship while simultaneously illustrating the shift from reductionism and essentialism to
one of agency.
George W. M. Reynolds, another prolific penny author, adopted this rejection of reductionism
in his 1846–1847 serialization Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf, mentioned earlier. Written during a period
when women were subjugated as “angels” and confined to the domestic sphere, this penny blood
rejects the oppression of the woman–nature construct and attempts to “transform the gendered
concepts” through the criminal figuration of Nisida of Riverola (Alaimo 2000, 12). Consisting
of multiple disjointed storylines and plot twists, Reynolds’s penny tale follows the conventions of
Victorian serializations, and while not the sole protagonist, Nisida’s story integrates with that of
the eponymous Wagner. As a member of a noble family, Nisida functions in the role of amenable
daughter to a dying father and protective sister to an incompetent brother. However, she operates
according to Luce Irigaray’s (1985, 76) mimesis, in which she “assume[s] the feminine role de-
liberately” while attempting to “thwart it.” In the obfuscation of her true intent, Nisida mimics
hearing and speech loss to better observe and gain trust, partakes in sexual activities with and
is impregnated by what she will discover at a later time is a werewolf, murders her paramour’s
granddaughter, transforms into the new “Eve” on a desolate island, and succumbs to her even-
tual transgressions. As Höing addresses in Chapter 41, female figures, unlike male characters,
focus on their one designated function and participate in such endeavors that prepare them for
the role and responsibilities of future motherhood. While the male figure in Victorian literature
undergoes a journey, typically one of imperial conquest (over opposing forces, women, and the
natural environs), female characters adhere to the ‘natural” role of mother, wife, and caregiver
(see Höing’s Chapter 41). However, Nisida’s adventure, which eventually results in motherhood
and death, is an inversion of the Victorian stereotype and expectations for women. Similar to
Casey A. Cothran’s investigation in Chapter 43, Mystery and Detective Fiction and Ecofeminism, of
women in criminal fiction from nineteenth-century author Wilkie Collins, twentieth-century
detective writer Agatha Christie, and twenty-first-century novelist Carl Hiassen, Nisida is an
afflicted woman aligned with a primal natural space (see Cothran’s Chapter 43). In the spirit of
the femme fatale trope, Reynolds’ Nisida is reticent and in possession of a secret about a crime that
could be used to destroy and/or punish the patriarch who restricts her freedom of expression and
capabilities (see Cothran’s Chapter 43). Rejecting the restrictions of society and expectations of
aristocratic femininity, Nisida indulges in nature—particularly, the environs and her inherent
instincts— “[f ]or no signs of the presence of man were there [and] Nature appeared to be the un-
disputed Empress of that land” (Reynolds 1846–1847, 65). Antagonistic to Waller’s argument that
necessitates imperial mastery over the savagery of nature that echoes the domination over female
individuality, the language of Reynolds’s anti-heroine in her natural habitat argues for a space of

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independence (see Waller’s Chapter 46). Thereby, Reynolds’s figuration of Nisida as hedonistic
and indulgent exhibits the embodiment of woman–nature is read as Alaimo’s (2001, 280) “collapse
of the boundaries between humans and nature,” who reinvents the space as agential.
Continuing the subversion of traditional Victorian female roles and the rebranding of nature
as a space of power and agency, Rymer’s subsequent penny titles clearly exhibit this attempt at
reclamation through the wildness of behavior and women’s connections to their environmental
surroundings. These penny titles are The Dark Woman; or Days of the Prince Regent (1861), published
with the pseudonym Malcolm J. Errym, and The Vendetta; or, A Lesson in Life (1863), which is later
retitled The Wronged Wife, or the Heart of Hate (1870), published under the moniker Septimus R.
Urban. According to early-to-mid-Victorian conventions, “women, like the natural elements, are
considered dangerous and lack reason, therefore they must be contained and kept silent within
the domestic sphere” (Dittmer 2020, 197). As a method and/or area of restriction and remiss of
individual agency, the domestic, as demonstrated by Ellis, Laycock, and Winslow, was designated
as a source of control over women’s so-called chaotic nature. However, antagonistic to the regu-
lations of strict ideals, a “paradigm” contingent of feminine nature and power, one that plays host
to agential women “without definitive borders or ideologies” (Dittmer 2020, 198) is exhibited
through Rymer’s literary figurations of tenacious women. In both penny serializations, Linda
Mowbray, or the titular Dark Woman, and Agatha Jeffreys, the eponymous Wronged Wife, are
figured as embodiments of unruly nature and destructive chaos in roles of criminal masterminds
or monstrous hysterics. Exhibiting a clear relationship between the ecofeminist nature–woman
paradigm, both Linda’s and Agatha’s domains and subsequently their behaviors transition from
the traditional sphere of acquiescent domestication and oppression to one of strength and agency.
Written at a time when Bénédict Morel’s Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et mo-
rales de l’espèce humaine (1857) and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) joined the
biological conversation with theories of evolution and degeneration, Rymer’s later penny bloods
intertwine and use the socially feared juxtaposition of woman–nature to illustrate female potential
in the reclamation of the instinctual self. Exhibiting Alaimo’s (2000, 3) logic that dictates women’s
space as separate from the domestic and embedded in the literal and imaginative “wilderness,”
Rymer’s figurations of criminal and hysterical females “throw off—or complement, subvert, or
bracket—their domestic roles.” Used as a method of critique against social roles, cultural norms,
and assumed conventions, Rymer demonstrates a pre-ecofeminist approach by the invocation of
nature as an agentic influence (Alaimo 2000, 3). For instance, The Dark Woman focuses on the
plot of the villainous protagonist Linda Mowbray, whose entire criminal ontology is predicated
on her “fall” from womanhood. Once a woman of noble stature and renown, Linda is deceived
by a member of royalty, partakes in instinctual indulgences, and produces an illegitimate child.
After this procreative process, Linda is declared—by her paramour—as a dangerous hysteric and
is unwillingly imprisoned in an asylum. Upon her escape and driven by obsession, Linda becomes
a criminal mastermind and mimetic virtuoso to enact revenge against the representatives of an
autocratic society. Identified as a “fiend in human form,” the Dark Woman is the embodiment of
metamorphosis whose appearance and demeanor mirrors the surrounding environs, thereby ben-
efiting from her settings (Urban 1861, 82). Linda’s figuration as the Dark Woman signifies what
Merchant (1980, 132) refers to as the symbolic association of “unruly nature” with the “dark side
of woman.” However, instead of an association of oppression, Rymer exhibits this relationship as
one of agency and potential.
Although Rymer’s The Dark Woman is an exposition of how the woman–nature figuration
functions as a source of manipulation, tactics, and deception, his later penny dreadful The Wronged
Wife, or the Heart of Hate (1870) illustrates the circumstantial relationship between these linked
entities. Following the amalgamative practices of penny publications, The Wronged Wife contains
a material-semiotic figuration of a female hysteric who replicates that of Brontë’s Bertha Mason.

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Appropriated directly from the pages of Jane Eyre, Rymer’s equivalent, Agatha Jeffreys, was driven
to madness by the traumatic events of an attempted sexual assault and the near-execution of her
husband. Unlike Bertha, Agatha is an occasionally functional hysteric who remains imprisoned
and silent until the “full of the moon” (Urban 1870, 26). Drawing from the biological philosophies
of Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and Laycock that correlate the lunar cycle with madness and repro-
ductive functionality, Rymer constructs Agatha as a creature who both informs and is informed
by nature. At the onset of the full moon, Agatha’s cries transform into “strange unearthly sort
of sound[s]” that permeate through the house, however, “as the moon wanes, she will be better
again” (Urban 1870, 27). While this influence of the lunar cycle demonstrates Merchant’s (1980,
xxi) perspective of “anthropomorphic and stereotypic labels that degrade serious underlying is-
sues,” it also rejects the reductionism applied to Victorian women. As Höing argues in Chapter
41, both children’s and women’s association with the natural self, or nature in general, creates a
dichotomy of cultivated culture and chaotic nature. This binary creates a segregative division of
essentialist behavior that allows for an ecofeminist deconstruction (see Höing’s Chapter 41). Such is
the case in Victorian literature, when the gendered and age divisions are outlined and emphasized
to create and reinforce specific constructs to align with social behaviors and expectations. This
dichotomous approach of male/female and adult/child, as Höing posits in Chapter 41, empha-
sizes that which ecofeminism argues against: the assumed placement of women and children into
the “natural” position as unstable progenies of nature. This deconstruction of assumed binaristic
constructs is clearly demonstrated in the hysterical form of Agatha Jeffreys through her vociferous
paroxysms and invocation of environmental responses. Whereas Rymer’s figuration of the female
hysteric is influenced by nature, he inverts this traditional stereotype to expose how women main-
tain control over nature. This is demonstrated by way of Agatha’s moments of mania when the
environs respond to her cries through “vivid flashes of forked lighting” and “reverberating roll[s]
of thunder” (Urban 1870, 94). As an agential entity in Rymer’s penny publication, nature func-
tions as a significant part of the woman–nature relationship where Agatha is remiss in expression.

Conclusion
While there is an ongoing debate between scholars such as second-wave ecofeminist Carolyn
Merchant (1980, xix), who argue for women to liberate themselves from the constraints men place
on both women and nature, and opposing scholars such as modern ecofeminist Stacy Alaimo
(2000, 10) who posit a repurposing and reidentification for the nature construct. Both justifica-
tions offer a parallel perspective that women and nature have been long entangled within the op-
pressive structure of men. In the spirit of foregrounding and deconstructing the constructs formed
by the assumptions of restrictive society, ecofeminism offers the necessary tools for a much-needed
approach to this historical dichotomy (see Höing’s Chapter 41). Examining these obscure Victo-
rian penny publications with an ecofeminist approach allows a shift that demonstrates nature as
an open “space for feminism” and removes the solidifying boundaries of “stasis and essentialism”
(Alaimo 2000, 10). As critical and underutilized sources of literature, these penny bloods and
dreadfuls of the Victorian period are apt for these dichotomous analytical approaches to ecofemi-
nism, whether the objective is to separate women from nature or to recreate the meanings of their
relationship.

Notes
1 For additional information on the woman–nature connection in these popular novels, refer to Nicole C.
Dittmer’s forthcoming monograph (2022) Monstrous Women in the Victorian Gothic, 1837–1871. Lanham:
Lexington.

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2 For more information on the debate and identification of authorship for The String of Pearls (1846–1847),
refer to Helen R. Smith (2002) New Light on Sweeney Todd, Thomas Peckett Prest, James Malcolm Rymer
and Elizabeth Caroline Grey. London: Jarndyce. Also see the forthcoming collection: Nicole C. Dittmer
and Sophie Raine (2023) Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic: Investigations of Pernicious Tales of Terror. Cardiff:
University of Wales Press.
3 Refer to Coventry Patmore’s (1858) The Angel in the House. London. John W. Parker and Son. Although
it appears during the mid-Victorian period, Patmore’s epic poem, dedicated to his wife, identifies and
provides a label for the stereotype of the Victorian “angel,” and later circulates as a common societal
ideology.

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 41
CHILDREN’S FICTION AND
ECOFEMINISM
Anja Höing

Introduction
Ecofeminism arrived in children’s literature studies somewhat belatedly, and is regarded skepti-
cally even now, though it has gained a foothold in other fields of literary studies it originally had
to fight to enter. In 2008 Clare Bradford and colleagues proposed that

a wide integration of ecofeminism [into children’s literature studies] is yet to come, although
we envisage that it will eventually play an oppositional, interrogative role in the field, with
a potential to reshape the nature and direction of environmental advocacy in children’s texts
and to disclose the operation of the culture/nature duality in a text’s orientation towards the
material environment.
(Bradford et al. 2008, 85)

More than a decade later, this claim is still substantially true: a wide integration of ecofemi-
nism into children’s literature studies remains a vision of the future. Yet by now, tentatively,
ecofeminism starts to assert its place in children’s literature criticism and has found its way into a
number of monographs and anthologies, though one will often only come across it as an aside to
ecocriticism.1
In the Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, David Rudd (2010, 169) attests that “ecofem-
inism has much to offer children’s literature,” but he does not elaborate. His claim is true: there
would indeed be tremendous potential in strengthening an ecofeminist presence in children’s
literature studies, as, to borrow from Massey and Bradford (2011, 112), ecofeminism provides a
uniquely useful toolkit to “problematize dualisms based on hierarchies of worth, of male/female
binaries to other binaries associated with human interaction with the environment, such as living/
non-living and human/animal.” This toolkit is not only useful in the analysis of environmental
literature for children, as both Massey and Bradford (2011, 112) and Curry (2013, 70) propose,
but far more generally applicable to any dualistic structure that is naturalized in a children’s book.
As Karen J. Warren (1990, 125) has famously attested, the very core of ecofeminism is to uncover
and ultimately unsettle conceptual frameworks feeding into the “logic of domination” underlying
the “dual dominations of women and nature.” Hence, ecofeminism provides a theoretical basis
that can point scholars toward what Greta Gaard (2011, 44) quite crisply calls a “common cause”
underlying many problematic structures so often tackled individually rather than in conjunction.2
Perhaps most importantly, however, it can be used to analyze how children’s fiction constructs

438 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-44

 Children’s Fiction and Ecofeminism

its central concept: the child. In literature, “the child” is one of the most firmly essentialist con-
cepts there are.3 Children are generally associated with nature in dualistic frameworks—as are
women—and they are diametrically opposed to the (cultural) adult. Yet, much of children’s fic-
tion aims to turn the (natural) child of the present into the (cultural) adult of the future. When
childhood is constructed along essentialist lines, this is a radical paradigm shift that necessarily
destabilizes the dualistic framework it relies on—and an ecofeminist approach is one of the most
useful analytic tools in existence to bring into the foreground the problems inherent to such
essentialist constructions of childhood, and to deconstruct the underlying child/nature–adult/
culture dualism.

Ecofeminism and Children’s Literature Criticism

There are a number of possible reasons it took so long for ecofeminism to enter children’s litera-
ture studies. These reasons also serve to explain why the discipline is still struggling to assert its
place. Two forms of impediment interlink here, one deriving from children’s fiction as a genre,
the other from children’s literature criticism.
First, children’s fiction as a genre is often rather conservative. In this, the mainstream of chil-
dren’s fiction is distinctly different from young adult fiction that, as Deininger outlines in Chapter
42, is rather a literary space celebrating liminality and flourishing on metaphors of movement.
Young adult literature, so Deiniger argues, represents fluctuating, changeable identities that, es-
pecially in the twenty-first century, mirror an equally unstable (story)world in crisis. In children’s
literature, in contrast, stories that lay strong emphasis on a child protagonist’s relationship to and
interconnectedness with nonhuman nature—a good example is the 2021 Carnegie nominee, So-
phie Anderson’s (2019) The Girl Who Speaks Bear—tend to follow conventional master narra-
tives of socialization and identity formation. As Lawrence Buell (2014, 414) suggests, they might
be read as a Bildungsroman with a green spin, in which “the dimension of environmental bond-
ing seems ancillary to the main business of growing up and presumably away from the intense
­bonding-with-nature phase.” Such maturation narratives are generally realized through reinforc-
ing rather than discarding dualist structures. Even children’s stories that do not follow such patterns
are often affirmative of oppositional structures and humanist discourses, that is, of the very struc-
tures ecofeminism challenges. In consequence, scholars scouring children’s fiction for ecofeminist
storylines—rather than employing ecofeminism’s “counter-hegemonic potential” (Curry 2013,
2) as a toolkit to analyze narratives that do not qualify as ecofeminist—will often search in vain.
On the one hand, this shows a rather uneasy footing for ecofeminist approaches to children’s
fiction. On the other, this showcases the necessity for a strengthened presence of ecofeminist read-
ings in children’s literature criticism to raise awareness of the dualistic structures many children’s
books naturalize. However, the field of children’s literature studies is often as conservative and as
preoccupied with certain narratives as the genre it approaches. Much criticism focuses on the child
(protagonist/reader) in opposition to the adult (character/author). Jaqueline Rose’s (1984, 2) well-
known claim that children’s literature always indoctrinates a child reader with adult ideologies
continues to act as a virtual perpetuum mobile in this regard. This claim is not wrong—every text
ever written for any kind of audience contains ideological structures it either overtly or covertly
presses on its readership. Yet assuming that this is somehow more problematic with regard to
children’s literature renders Rose’s claim deeply incompatible with an ecofeminist framework. To
talk with Val Plumwood, whose theory I will primarily base my following discussion of ecofemi-
nism and children’s fiction on, the very foundation for Rose’s claim lies in a hyperseparated child/
adult distinction. Hyperseparation, or “radical exclusion,” as conceptualized by Plumwood (1993,
49), entails that two dimensions are not only defined through their mutual opposition, but are

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hierarchically polarized. Only upholding a hyperseparation between child and adult allows Rose
to argue that the transmission of ideologies is exceptionally problematic in children’s literature.
Such a hyperseparation, in turn, is exactly what ecofeminism seeks to dismantle.

The Development of Children’s Fiction through an Ecofeminist Lens

The hyperseparation between child and adult that is often taken for granted both in children’s
fiction and in children’s literature criticism is of particular interest when brought in conjunction
with the literary construction of “the child.” The traditional human/male versus nature/female
dualism ecofeminism seeks to unravel tends to break down once a text attempts to regroup it as
human/adult vs. nature/child. Very roughly speaking, from an ecofeminist perspective the his-
tory of children’s fiction can be read as 500 years of texts persistently trying to—and spectacularly
failing—to box the child into this particular dualistic framework.
An important pillar to consider when analyzing the uneasy relationship between children’s fic-
tion and ecofeminism is hence the historical development of children’s fiction. Not only did a long
historical tradition of writing for children constitute the children’s literature of the t­ wenty-first
century, child readers still eagerly consume historical classics. A search on the website of a chil-
dren’s book shop will soon redirect its visitor to new editions of books such as Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows or C. S. Lewis’s The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, to name just three classics to pop up in every other online stroll
through a bookstore’s stock list.4 To start on a caveat, Kunze (2014, 31) is of course right in that
it would be anachronistic to call any children’s classic “ecofeminist.” This, however, does by no
means devalue an ecofeminist reading of books that precede the advent of ecofeminism, even if
they do so by centuries. Of course, this chapter can only give a severely abbreviated and necessar-
ily overgeneralized overview of the historical development of children’s fiction and the way this
intersects with ecofeminism. I will limit myself to the dominant discourses of each time, unfor-
tunately having to underrepresent other discourses that ran parallel.
The advent of Anglophone children’s literature is today generally situated in the early mod-
ern era, when both humanist educators and Puritan authors discovered children as a new target
group.5 The earliest children’s books primarily focused on a humanist education and preparation
for expected roles in society (humanist tradition), and/or on religious edification (Puritan writ-
ers). Humanist authors in particular also acknowledged the importance of reading for pleasure
(Lamb 2012, 69). The central aim of these texts is generally diametrically opposed to the tenets
of ecofeminism. Where ecofeminism seeks to unsettle and ultimately break the thought patterns
that tie the subjugation of women to the subjugation of the environment, these children’s texts
purposefully build up stark dualisms—though, on a closer look, one can see that they often fail to
maintain them—and preach on strictly hierarchical gender hierarchies that also reflect in physical
separation between masculine and feminine spaces. A similar radical exclusion was constructed
between humans and nature, as the human as a rational being created in God’s image was jux-
taposed to a natural world he (the early modern concept of the human was male by default) was
tasked to subjugate by divine command. As Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman points out in Chapter 23
of this volume, the dualistic categories set by the Judeo-Christian creation myth were frequently
revisited and reinforced in the literature of the time, most famously in John Milton’s epic poem
Paradise Lost that has come to be the perhaps most central text to ecofeminist interest in the early
modern era.
Interestingly, in early modern texts especially by Puritan authors, such as James Janeway’s
(1676) A Token for Children, children appear as both a central pillar of and a threat to the stability
of this dualistic system. Infants, irrational and incapable of articulate speech yet, were associated
with nature rather than with humanity—often with animals (Bach 2018; Fudge 2000), but also

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frequently with plants and noncultural spaces in general. They fell between the cracks of the clas-
sification system, and while much early modern children’s literature labors to uphold the impor-
tance of the dualistic structure, Puritan texts in particular project assimilation into this structure
into the child’s adult future (Ryrie 2013, 435). The child often remains in a curiously undefined
liminal space precariously posed between the two hyperseparated poles of human and nature,
combining the properties defining the (inferior) natural with the duties defining the (superior)
human.
In the eighteenth century, two very different traditions of writing for (and about) children
emerged. On the one hand, there were (predominantly male) Romantic poets such as Coleridge
whose poems celebrate idealized versions of the child-as-nature, again hyperseparated from a
human culture now frequently perceived as degenerate and highly corruptive. However, they
primarily wrote about children, not for them, using the image of the child, or of childhood as
one vehicle to explore the individual’s relationship with nature.6 The children’s fiction of the
time in contrast was dominated by exactly those voices Mondello argues to have been silenced in
both canonical Romanticism and mainstream Romantic literary criticism, as both rather focus
on the so-called “Big Six”, a group of male Romantic poets (see Mondello’s Chapter 39). The
authors of Romantic children’s fiction, in contrast, were predominantly female prose writers.
The best-known group of Romantic authors of children’s stories has come to be known under the
somewhat derogatory term “the Barbauld crew,” employed by Charles Lamb (1876, 421) in his
correspondence with Coleridge. In addition to the eponymous Laetitia Barbauld, important writ-
ers in this tradition were Dorothy Kilner or Sarah Trimmer. Their forcefully didactic tales pri-
marily sought to educate the child reader in Enlightenment rationality. However, educating the
child to full rational humanity and the concomitant human “dominion” over nature (Trimmer
1798, v) by stressing its human superiority in a hyperseparated human/nature dualism frequently
comes into conflict with the texts’ second aim, namely to stress the child’s inferior position toward
the adult. To achieve the latter aim, the texts frequently highlight the irrational, “natural” instinct
attributed to the child, hence constructing the child as human when brought in conjunction with
animals/nature, and as animalic/natural when brought in conjunction with adults. This tradition
of children’s fiction, too, thus finds itself incapable of upholding the dualistic framework it seeks
to perpetuate.7
The nineteenth century—and Victorian Literature in particular—is virtually infamous for its
strictly segregated gendered spheres. As Nicole C. Dittmer highlights in Chapter 40 of this vol-
ume, women were firmly aligned with reproductivity (and accordingly the role of the mother)
in this dualistic system, while men were associated with all things cultural. This dichotomical
distinction was generally believed to lie in the “nature” of the according sex, that is, was under-
stood to be essential/biologically or divinely determined rather than socially constructed (Chapter
40). Especially keeping in mind this cultural background, the children’s literature of the time is
surprisingly experimental with gendered behavior, but tends to ultimately perpetuate gendered
spaces despite this, hence suggesting that transcending dualist structures was considered a form
of child’s play, while maturation was associated with assimilation into these structures. Victorian
texts tend to strongly reinforce precisely those structures ecofeminism deems most problematic.
Male child characters go on quests that ultimately seek to subdue nature (and women), which
is constructed as the central component of an (in British literature often imperial) masculinity.
Female characters in turn undergo adventures that prepare them for the future role of the mother
which is clearly singled out as the single most important (in some books even the only) function
of the female in society.8 However, in focus here is not reproduction, the function women are so
often reduced to in dualist structures, and that, as Plumwood (1993, 38) highlights “is distorting
whichever of the alternatives, nature or culture, is chosen.” Instead, Victorian children’s fiction
tends to foreground homeliness and the role of the carer. The angel of the house is not yet an

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“angel in the ecosystem” (Plumwood 1993, 9)—though female care may well stretch to include
especially animals, the natural world primarily appears as something for the male character to
gain power over. All playful crossing of gender boundaries ultimately only serves to make each
gender respect their place in a rigidly structured dualistic framework. Once one takes gender out
of the equation, however, “the child” still proves to be profoundly unstable, an entity that often
even physically fluctuates between a human (rational) and a natural (fantasy) world—the latter of
which it will have to leave behind at an undetermined point in the future when it is to enter the
adult world.9
Fantastic natural worlds in Victorian children’s literature are often explicitly connoted as fe-
male spaces, as Waller remarks in her readings of Victorian fantasy literature directed at an adult
target group in Chapter 46 of this volume. In George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie (1883),
for example, male (human) characters such as Curdie’s mining community can only conquer one
dimension of nature, namely its physical aspect. This physical nature only is the “terra nullius”
(Plumwood 1993, 192) that is there for them to subdue. However, there is a second dimension to
“Nature” in the novel, a mystical, even supernatural space presided over by the fantastic great-
great-grandmother or “Old Princess.” This character, a mystified, virtually demi-god-like per-
sonification of the woman-nature bond, can be neatly aligned with the character of North Wind
in MacDonald’s second famous children’s fantasy, At the Back of the North Wind (1868), and also
with the White Lady in MacDonald’s adult fantasy Phantastes, which is the subject of close read-
ing by Waller in Chapter 46 of this volume. The White Lady, as Waller points out, represents an
archetype of the woman as mother, nurturer, and protector (Chapter 46)—her equivalent in The
Princess and Curdie is accordingly the role model the young human princess is to aspire to. Through
such female characters, Waller argues, an inherent value Phantastes assigns to nature is extended
to include women—but only those women who adhere to the glorified Victorian prototype of
the ideal mother. Male characters such as Ardorno, the protagonist of Phantastes, are both fasci-
nated and mystified by these superhuman personifications of a feminized nature (or naturalized
femininity) whom they can never fully understand, let alone conquer. Yet, MacDonald clearly
aligns this masculine incapability of grasping the “archetypal” female with male maturity: the
very young child hero Diamond in At the Back of the North Wind can easily connect to North
Wind, because he simply accepts her existence as a given without questioning it, while adolescent
Curdie has severe troubles to adhere to the teachings of the Old Princess. The narrator clearly lays
his problems at the door of Curdie’s nascent masculine rationalism, which precludes access to the
female sphere, and simultaneously glorifies the childlike simplicity that came before (Macdonald
1883, 12). The child, one can conclude, is still aligned with the same archetypal naturalness as is
the female.
At the turn of the twentieth century, British literature pushed the child/nature connection to
a pinnacle. The most emblematic text of this writing tradition is probably Kenneth Grahame’s
The Golden Age (1895), whose child characters the reader encounters immersed in eternal play at
a quasi-fantastical river Thames steeped in nature mysticism. In Grahame’s writings, in particu-
lar, his earlier ones just as his famous The Wind in the Willows (1908), a conservative, static vision
of childhood becomes a virtual antithesis of an adult world now rushing inescapably toward the
complications of modernism (Höing 2017, 38; Hunt 1994, 92). For what is probably the first time
in the history of children’s fiction, this adult future now gains the dimensions of a veritable threat
rather than an inevitable development—it will annihilate the child and all the romanticized natu-
ralness it is associated with. Somewhat ironically, when observed through ecofeminist glasses, the
primary fear that appears to be underlying Grahame’s writings is hence a perceived threat to stable
dualistic structures. Unlike most of his predecessors, Grahame’s writings actually succeed in thor-
oughly aligning the child with nature in a dualistic framework, but only as long as they keep the
child virtually frozen in time, as each step of maturation will shatter the illusion of a stark dividing

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line between nature and culture. The child’s position regarding the adult world that developed in
early twentieth-century children’s fiction thus can be neatly paralleled with the ways nonhuman
nature is often romanticized—and endangered—in contemporary children’s fiction. Hence it is
probably at this point in the history of children’s literature that we can situate the moment when
preserving the “myth of childhood” (Nikolajeva 2000, 19) became inseparably blended with an
equally romanticized notion of (environmental) conservation, and in turn with the conservatism
that tends to seep into discourses of conservation (Höing 2017, 38).
The turbulent cause of the twentieth century was severely disruptive to the writing traditions
of children’s fiction, as the chaos of the world wars, drastic paradigm shifts in dominant world
views and especially rapid changes to the perception of children’s needs led to significant move-
ment in the ideological structures feeding into the production of children’s literature. In the
mid-twentieth century, a writing tradition that championed stability above all gained prevalence.
Enid Blyton may stand as a flagship author for this tradition. Her books, such as Famous Five series,
revived a concept of childhood that stressed physicality and stable gender roles, and advocated
assimilation into strictly dualistic patterns. Yet, in the second half of the twentieth century, these
patterns became more and more destabilized in society, creating a rift between the children’s fic-
tion consumed and the reality lived by a child growing up in the 1980s or 1990s.
To sum up this historical overview in a somewhat provocative (and necessarily overgeneral-
izing) fashion: from an ecofeminist perspective, one might argue that the history of children’s
fiction primarily appears as a history of numerous attempts that, all in their own fashion, seek
to—and ultimately fail to—circumnavigate one central conundrum of conceptualizing the child
in a dualistic framework. In the central myth of childhood prevalent in Western cultures since
the advent of children’s literature in the sixteenth century, the child is associated with nature.
The major project of children’s fiction, however, always was and remains to be a didactical one:
to aid the child in its maturation process into human adult society, be it in form of socialization
into structures such as gender norms or peer groups (foregrounded, e.g., in the nineteenth and
mid-twentieth century), or be it in finding one’s individual agentic potential (foregrounded in the
early twenty-first century). This project necessitates aligning the child with the human, and, as
long as human and nature are understood as polar opposites, this means disconnecting the child
from “the natural.” If a text simultaneously seeks to uphold an adult/child dualism, however, dis-
connecting the child from “the natural” destroys the foundation the adult/child hyperseparation
is most generally based on. An ecofeminist scholar might suggest a simple solution: let go of the
restrictive dualistic framework itself. Yet, as even contemporary children’s fiction shows, these
dualistic structures are still firmly rooted in the cultural imagination.

Conclusion
One cannot deny that contemporary children’s fiction seeks new avenues, be it in the classical tri-
angle of cultural studies, class, race, gender, or in terms of incorporating environmental i­ssues—
often on a graspable local level the implied child reader is urged to directly relate to. But still,
the central messages of many children’s books remain focused on identity formation, today often
highlighting the potential for individual agency (rather than structure-conformant socialization)
that has also become one of the central pillars in the growing interdisciplinary field of childhood
studies.10 Environmental issues remain secondary to that, and often only serve as means to an end.
Natural spaces or nonhuman creatures (far more frequently animals than plants) may be saved in
the process, but the ultimate gain is the emotional growth of the human hero. A prime example
illuminating this pattern is Gill Lewis’s (2011) Sky Hawk, in which the child hero Callum uses
osprey conservation as a sandbox environment to practice humanitarian action. Whenever the
needs of the ospreys come into conflict with human needs, the story puts human needs first, even

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to the point that at one point the story represents it as justified to endanger the birds’ safety so that
Callum can re-connect with his peer group (Lewis 2011, 108). Bonding with a wild bird is only
a stepping stone to “show [him] … what you can do when you really want something” (Lewis
2011, 148).11 The ultimate aim is to reenact what Plumwood (1993, 196) calls “the master story of
western culture,” the narrative of rational man (gendering intentional) colonizing a natural world
he denies being dependent on.
There is also denial the other way around: many children’s books still deny that the depen-
dency between humans and their natural surroundings is mutual. Even when doing lip service
to environmental narratives, even children’s books of the twenty-first century often ultimately
present natural systems as static rather than changeable, and as ultimately self-reliant. Dualistically
opposed to an all-to-humanist narrative of progress, nature is represented as an eternal status quo,
a space—with all the nondescript fuzziness inherent in this concept—that child protagonists enter
to experience growth, that they might even influence to some degree (as the human agents they
are shaping to become) but which, like a compass needle drawn to the north, will always swing
back to its “natural” static condition once left in peace. This is not how ecosystems function.
Yet each new generation of children’s books adds to perpetuate the myth. For a final example, I
would like to turn back to the 2021 Carnegie nominee, Sophie Anderson’s (2019) The Girl who
Speaks Bear. The narrative looks eye-watering hope-inspiring for an ecofeminist—the child her-
oine, a human-bear hybrid, is tasked with saving her forest homeland from a vegetal fire dragon
created by a human who failed to respect his natural environment. And indeed, here we finally
have a narrative that manages to overcome one dualism: Anderson’s Yanka does not need to be
disconnected from nature in her maturation; she does not have to throw off irrational “childish”
instincts to gain human rationality. She can be both natural and human as a child, and she can re-
tain both these dimensions—a continuum, rather than a dualism—when she grows up. But there
is a price to pay for this dualism being discarded: as the narrative does not reject dualist structures
per se, discarding one dualism necessarily creates another stark boundary elsewhere, and this is
one between a static essentialist nature, passive and fully dependent on human care—a damsel in
distress, in fact—and a changeable, agentic child, that, embracing a full Fridays for Future-spirit,
acts as the knight in white armor riding out to save this hapless, dependent Other. We might have
an inkling that we have heard this story before, only that now the character cast has changed.
When analyzed through an ecofeminist lens, there is something of an inherent irony in chil-
dren’s literature: since its advent in the sixteenth-century books written for a child audience have
either labored to uphold dualistic structures they then simultaneously destabilized and revealed as
illusionary, or they have ostensibly labored to do away with dualistic structures they simultane-
ously reinforced and even naturalized. When one dualism falls, another always appears to take its
place. Ecofeminist theory, inherently counterhegemonic, posthumanist, and convivial, is an ideal
analytical tool to approach these issues, and should prove a uniquely powerful ally in the quest for
an alternative narrative that no longer seeks to define the child “against” the adult, the human, or
indeed, “against” anything else, but as a fluent concept in a deeply entangled socially constructed,
discursive network.
Children’s fiction is both immensely privileged and precarious to the same degree. Its target
group, its implied readers, are those people who will shape the future of the planet. The ideologies
they take from the books they read will shape their minds and in doing so will also govern their
future actions, both in engaging with their physical environment and nonhuman life and in en-
gaging with their human conspecies. Many children’s books today still naturalize ideologies and
especially dualist structures that contrast children and nature on the one hand and adults and cul-
ture on the other, setting out the process of maturation as the child’s journey from the one side of
this equation to the other. Such structures are not only problematic, but even counterproductive

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in envisioning a future in which humanity will no longer define itself against, but with nature.
When (second-wave) feminism and postcolonial studies turned their attention to writings for
children, they raised awareness of the problems inherent to many ideological structures children’s
fiction continues to perpetuate, and instigated an awareness of the representation of gender and
race, in particular, that has started to resonate in the children’s literature of the 2020s. Now is the
time for ecofeminism to follow suit.

Notes
1 See Copeland (2004), Bradford, Mallan, Stephens and McCallum (2008), Massey and Bradford (2011),
Curry (2013), and Seelinger Trites (2019). Curry’s (2017) A Question of Scale is a rare instance of a chap-
ter exclusively concerned with the intersection of ecofeminism and children’s literature, though Curry
narrows her gaze to posthumanist ecofeminism only. Journal articles on the issue remain a rarity, the
only somewhat influential one is probably Kunze’s (2014, 31) Winnie-the-Conservationist: Tuck Everlasting,
Ecofeminism, and Children’s Literature, which seeks to “demonstrate what ecofeminism might bring to the
academic and pedagogical study of children’s literature” through a close reading of Natalie Babbitt’s
Tuck Everlasting.
2 The versatility of ecofeminism as an analytical toolkit is impressively exemplified by Alice Curry’s
(2013) Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. Curry’s (2013, 6) monograph is,
to my knowledge, the first book-length study to consciously employ the versatility of ecofeminism
to approach texts written for a young audience, arguing that “the flexibility and integrative nature of
ecofeminist discourse leave it scope to encompass ‘the child’ as a third category of analysis alongside
women and nature.” See also Deininger’s Chapter 42 in this volume.
3 See Dinter’s (2020) Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel for a recent study outlining the essentialist
undercurrents of literary constructions of childhood even in novels that do lip service to constructivism.
4 As these examples already bear witness to, I will draw my examples primarily from British children’s
literature. This is not to suggest that other literatures did not add profoundly to the tradition of children’s
literature, but is simply due to the fact that, as a British literature scholar, this is my area of expertise.
For a glimpse into other traditions of children’s fiction and their links to ecofeminism, I would like to
direct the reader to other chapters in this volume, as several of them also touch the children’s fiction
of the literature in focus. Melanie Duckworth’s discussion in Chapter 6 of Australian children’s fiction
for example showcases that it is not possible to generalize the findings on British children’s literature I
present in this chapter even for other English-language literatures. Australian children’s literature, as
Duckworth’s analysis shows, needs to be looked at through an altogether different ecofeminist lens, as
the negotiations of child/adult and child/animal borders central to British children’s literature become
supplemented by the erasure of Indigenous identities and sentimentalist representations of the bush and
its inhabitants (Chapter 6). Similarly, Julia Kutnetski and Kadri Tüür’s Chapter 22, Estonian Literature
and Ecofeminism, shows that Estonian children’s texts bring into focus the mythological and archetypal
dimensions of not only nonmammalians (especially birds), but also plants, a group severely underrep-
resented in British children’s literature, and intersect these with discourses of femininity drawn from
Nordic folklore (Chapter 21). Irene Sanz Alonso’s chapter introduces the acclaimed Spanish author of
children’s literature, Laura Gallego, whose children’s writings foreground female children’s encounters
and engagement with otherness, and the agency and voice of the natural world (Chapter 16).
5 For a comprehensive overview of early modern texts written for children, see Lamb (2012).
6 This aim is discussed more closely in Mondello’s Chapter 39 in this volume, Romantic Literature and
Ecofeminism.
7 For a more comprehensive discussion of this issue in Kilner and Trimmer, see Ratelle (2015) and Höing
(2020).
8 See, for example, Frederick Marryat’s (1847) The Children of the New Forest or George MacDonald’s
(1883) The Princess and Curdie for books that set out both these gender patterns. For further reading, see
also Simons (2009, 144–151).
9 See, for example, Richard Jefferies’s (1881) Wood Magic and Mary Louisa Molesworth’s (1884) Christmas
Tree Land for two texts in which children can enter secondary worlds of nature that will inevitably close
to them in the process of growing up.
10 See, for example, James and James (2012, 3–6) and, Qvortrup, Corsaro, and Honig (2009, 4).
11 For a more comprehensive reading of this issue in Sky Hawk, see Höing (2021).

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Potter and Gene Stratton-Porter.” In Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, edited by Sidney
I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, 71–81. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Curry, Alice. 2013. Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
———. 2017. “A Question of Scale: Zooming out and Zooming in on Feminist Ecocriticism.” In The
Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by Claire Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva, 70–78.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Dinter, Sandra. 2020. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel. London: Routledge.
Fudge, Erica. 2000. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture. Basingstoke:
St. Martin’s Press.
Gaard, Greta. 2011. “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material
Feminist Environmentalism.” Feminist Formations 23, no. 2: 26–53. Accessed June 20, 2021. https://www.
proquest.com/scholarly-journals/ecofeminism-revisited-rejecting-essentialism-re/docview/902917617/
se-2?accountid=13022.
Grahame, Kenneth. [1895] 1900. The Golden Age. London: The Brodley Head. Project Gutenberg.
———. [1908] 2008. The Wind in the Willows. London: Puffin Books.
Höing, Anja. 2017. “A Retreat on the ‘River Bank’: Perpetuating Patriarchal Myths in Animal Stories.” In
Women and Nature?: Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, and Environment, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and
Sam Mickey, 27–42. London: Routledge.
———. 2020. “‘Advice […] by one as insignificant as a MOUSE’: Human and Non-human Infancy in
Eighteenth-century Moral Animal Tales.” In Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, edited by Martina
Domines Veliki and Cian Duffy, 159–182. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2021. “A Winged Symbol: The Power of the Child-Animal Bond in Gill Lewis’s Sky Hawk.” Chil-
dren’s Literature Quarterly 46, no. 2: 125–139. Accessed August 5, 2021. DOI: 10.1353/chq.2021.0027.
Hunt, Peter. 1994. The Wind in the Willows: A Fragmented Arcadia. New York: Twayne Publishers.
James, Allison, and Adrian James. 2012. Key Concepts in Childhood Studies. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Janeway, James. 1676. A Token for Children. London: Printed for Dorman Newman. Accessed March 3, 2017.
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tion:10750100.
Jefferies, Richard. [1881] 1995. Wood Magic. London: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.
Kunze, Peter C. 2014. “Winnie-the-Conservationist: Tuck Everlasting, Ecofeminism, and Children’s Liter-
ature.” The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature 38, no. 1: 30–44. Accessed June
25, 2021. doi:10.1353/uni.2014.0001.
Lamb, Charles. 1876. The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb. London: E. Moxon. Accessed June 10,
2021. https://archive.org/details/lifeletterswrit01lamb/page/n4.
Lamb, Edel. 2012. “‘Children read for their Pleasantness’: Books for Schoolchildren in the Seventeenth
Century.” In The Child in British Literature, edited by Adrienne Gavin, 69–86. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Lewis, C. S. [1950] 2000. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. London: Collins.
Lewis, Gill. 2011. Sky Hawk. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MacDonald, George. [1883] 1994. The Princess and Curdie. London: Puffin Books.
———. [1868] 2011. At the Back of the North Wind. Peterborough: Broadview Press.
Marryat, Frederick. [1847] 2000. The Children of the New Forest. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Massey, Geraldine, and Clare Bradford. 2011. “Children as Eco-citizens: Ecocriticism and Environmental
Texts.” In Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film: Engaging with Theory, edited by Kerry Mallan and
Clare Bradford, 109–126. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Molesworth, Mary Louisa. [1884] 1913. Christmas Tree Land. London: Macmillan.

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Nikolajeva, M. 2000. From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge.
Qvortrup, Jens, William A. Corsaro, and Michael-Sebastian Honig. 2009. “Why Social Studies of Child-
hood?” In The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies, edited by Jens Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro, and
Michael-Sebastian Honig, 1–18. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ratelle, Amy. 2015. Animality in Children’s Literature and Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rose, Jaqueline. 1984. The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: The Macmillan
Press Ltd.
Rudd, David. 2010. “Names and Terms.” In The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by David
Rudd, 139–258. London: Routledge.
Ryrie, Alec. 2013. Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seelinger Trites, Roberta. 2019. Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi.
Simons, Judy. 2009. “Gender Roles in Children’s Fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Liter-
ature, edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel, 143–158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trimmer, Sarah. 1798. Fabulous Histories, Designed for the Instruction of Children. London: T. Long-
man, G.G.J. and Jo. Robinson, Internet Archive. Accessed June 10, 2021. https://archive.org/details/
fabuloushistori01sargoog/page/n5.
Warren, Karen J. 1990. “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism.” Environmental Ethics 12, no.
2: 125–146.

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YOUNG ADULT FICTION AND
ECOFEMINISM
Michelle Deininger

Introduction
In July 2021, teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg commented on the increasing oc-
currence of “deadly heatwaves, floods, storms, wildfires, droughts, crop failures…” arguing that
“This is not ‘the new normal’”. Thunberg is often perceived as the voice of young people today,
articulating fears surrounding our continued destruction of the planet. It is perhaps no surprise
that many of the catastrophes she lists have been the concerns of recent Young Adult (YA) fiction,
from the flooding in Sarah Govett’s The Territory (2016) to the hurricanes of Sherri Smith’s Orleans
(2013). As Peter Hunt remarks about children’s literature more broadly, “its trends closely follow…
the sociological features” of a particular period (1994, 32). YA fiction, as a genre, often identifies
and charts the anxieties and cultural preoccupations of its time, whether these are nuclear apoca-
lypse, the increasing impact of environmental waste and toxicity, or the overstretching of natural
resources via overpopulation. Ariel Salleh writes that “ecofeminism is the only political frame-
work I know of that can spell out the historical links between neoliberal capital…nuclear weap-
ons, industrial toxics, land and water grabs, deforestation, genetic engineering, climate change
and the myth of modern progress” (2014, ix). The very stuff of one of the most popular strands
of YA fiction, environmental crisis fiction, has its roots in the same materiality and history as
ecofeminism. Indeed, as Alice Curry notes at the very beginning of Environmental Crisis in Young
Adult Fiction, “ecofeminism is rooted in the critical insight that environmental crisis is a feminist
issue” (2013, 1).
Ecofeminist analyses of YA fiction is a relatively young arm of the discipline, paralleled by ten-
tative steps toward the academic study of ecofeminism within children’s literature (as explored by
Höing in Chapter 41). Curry’s Environmental Crisis, for instance, is probably the first monograph
to tackle environmental issues in YA fiction through an ecofeminist lens. Curry does this via a
range of YA texts, mostly published between 2000 and 2011.1 While there are many journal arti-
cles exploring specific texts or writers, the focus is often on dystopia. This chapter aims to sketch
a broader history of YA fiction that can be read through an ecofeminist lens (and so say something
more about the cultural context of the specific moment of publication), highlight particular types
of YA fiction that particularly lend themselves to be read as an ecofeminist, and track some of the
key themes and recurring tropes within YA as a genre.
For many years, especially within the academy, YA fiction has often been perceived as lesser,
not quite ready to join the ranks of more “adult” work and seen as an awkward but necessary
transitionary stage between childhood and adulthood. Even now, there is often a note of snobbery

448 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-45

 Young Adult Fiction and Ecofeminism

in book reviews or publishing calls where YA fiction is seen as lacking quality or substance.
There are parallels here with the scholarly dismissal of popular genres, such as Victorian penny
bloods and penny dreadfuls (see Dittmer’s Chapter 40 in this volume) as well as the denigration
of Gothic fiction, a field traditionally associated with women readers and writers (discussed by
Höing in Chapter 38). Genre fiction is often perceived as a threat to the prevailing discourse, ex-
ploring ideas that undermine traditionally patriarchal or “rational” thinking and giving space to
“feminine” emotions, such as fear, horror, and terror. While YA does not necessarily have to be
gothic, it often borrows from the tropes that Höing identifies as gothic—such as the victimization
of female protagonists, haunted spaces, or monsters created by human hands. It is only in recent
years that universities have begun to offer courses that specifically teach YA fiction as a genre in
itself, not least due to its popularity in creative writing programs. As a genre (though genres plural
is probably more accurate, considering the wealth of writing that YA can cover), YA is relatively
new, developing slowly in the postwar years before coming into its own from the 1980s onward.
American publishers tend to subdivide into “middle grade” (8–12 years) and YA (13+), while la-
beling in Britain can be more fluid. For the purposes of this chapter, YA will be used to explore
texts aimed at the over 12s.
As a whole, YA fiction lies in a liminal position, somewhere beyond children’s literature but
unbound by the narrative expectations and limits of fiction aimed at adults. David Belbin has
described YA through the metaphor of “a bridge, or a multiplicity of bridges, carrying the reader
across the deep river that divides children’s fiction, which many grow out of in early adolescence,
and adult fiction” (2011, 143). This bridge is a mode of crossing, but it is often a thing of beauty,
wonder, or even danger. This metaphor of movement, of traveling from one space or state to an-
other, is also clearly relevant as YA fiction often charts the journey of a protagonist whose identity
is in flux, mirroring the changes that occur during adolescence, and echoing the structures of the
bildungsroman, a feature of “classic”, canonical literature, especially of the Victorian era. These
journeys also have parallels with the quest narratives found in fantasy literature (see, e.g., Waller’s
discussion of Tolkien’s work in Chapter 46). There is no doubt that the age of environmental
awakening, which fully began in the twentieth century, is equally in flux, welcoming the An-
thropocene, nuclear power, wide-scale pollution, climate change, and, ultimately, environmental
crisis. The intersection of these two narratives–identity in flux and world in crisis—make for es-
pecially strong and meaningful stories in YA fiction, fleshing out the nightmares that are increas-
ingly the reality of the world we live in now, paralleling the ecological impetus of adult fantasy
fiction, which as a genre also has the flexibility to imagine alternative visions of the future (see
Waller’s Chapter 46). By reading YA fiction through an ecofeminist lens, we can begin to draw
out the ways in which this developing and popular genre speaks to many of the concerns expressed
in ecofeminist theory, especially from a material perspective.
The texts discussed in this chapter represent a small proportion of the many reimaginings of
the present and future in YA literature, in which (often female) protagonists are faced with the
(sometimes literal) fallout of the actions of a world built on capitalist expansion and individual
greed. The potential danger in taking this approach, of course, is that it is anthropocentric, po-
sitioning human experience above damage done to the environment itself, playing into debates
about essentialism and fixed dualisms—issues that run throughout this Handbook. However, the
texts discussed have been chosen deliberately because of the complexities they already draw at-
tention to, recognizing the fragility of the most marginalized in a world where natural resources
continue to be plundered, yet imagining a future that has the environment at the center, rather
than human greed. Furthermore, they all demonstrate how close humanity is to self-annihilation
while also offering visions of different types of futures, including those where patriarchal oppres-
sion is abandoned in favor of communal, even socialist principles.

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Nuclear Fictions: Destruction, Rebuilding, Activism

Where exactly do ecofeminism and the nuclear intertwine in YA fiction? In many ways, especially
in British YA fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, the representation of the threat of nuclear power
and postnuclear worlds is a form of protest, with parallels in women’s activism, epitomized by the
Greenham Common Women’s Peace camp (1981–2000).2 In many respects, YA fiction of this
period centered on nuclear and postnuclear worlds is itself a mode of protest, as well as a form of
consciousness-raising (see Jain’s Chapter 25 on activism for a broader exploration of protest within
ecofeminist theory). In her most well-known YA novel, Children of the Dust (1985), British YA
author Louise Lawrence would describe one of the most harrowing and accurate depictions of the
effects of nuclear fallout on the human body, focusing predominantly on the lives of the women
who will bear the brunt of the consequences of the escalation of the Cold War.3 The opening
of the novel charts the return home of Sarah, running back from school and attempting to catch
a glimpse of the world that will soon be lost, to hold it in her memory. After reaching her little
brother, stepmother, and sister (Catherine), they all barricade themselves into the house and begin
the process of trying to survive the nuclear bombs that fall. Sarah’s slow and painful death, and
that of most of her family, haunt the reader long after finishing the novel itself.
Lawrence’s novel is divided into three parts, representing three generations of the same fam-
ily, entitled “Sarah”, “Ophelia” (half-sister of Sarah and born in the bunker where Sarah’s father
escapes to), and “Simon” (Ophelia’s son). A new way of existence has begun in the outside world
where survivors have become genetically adapted to live in an environment with little protection
from UV light. Lives are experienced in the local, in the community, and the large-scale cities
and governments of the past are long dead. Simon comes to understand that this new world is not
populated by “mutants” as he at first sees them, and that it is his society that had “destroyed ev-
erything and preserved themselves… dinosaurs in a bunker” (1985, 132). This new world outside
the bunker is a literal realization of the “social vitality of skillful, self-sufficient and autonomous
livelihood economies” (Salleh 2014, xi). It is the women in this novel who understand how this
new world must work—they make sacrifices in order to survive, but they embrace a world where
difference means life.
Children of the Dust retells some of the environmental warnings first found in Andra (1971), a
novel that explores the interconnected nature of the damage caused to women, both their bodies
and their psyches, as a direct result of the postnuclear world. Playing on the prefix “andro”, mean-
ing “man”, the eponymous Andra receives a brain graft (after an accident) that has been taken from
a long-preserved body of a teenage boy, called Richard Carson, a student of advanced botany and
zoology, from 1987. Now several thousand years into the future, Richard’s name clearly echoes
that of Rachel Carson, often perceived as the founder of modern environmentalism. Andra inher-
its Richard’s memories, but more importantly his love for the outside world and the lost beauties
of the planet. Andra only receives the graft because the surgeon undertaking the surgery wants to
show off his skill and while disappointed that Andra is not a grade of human worth saving (due to
her supposed low IQ), he does the operation anyway. Andra’s city is subterranean, buried beneath
the crust of a world made toxic by nuclear war. In a story arc that has some parallels with Kass
Morgan’s The 100 or Tochi Onyebuchi’s War Girls, the totalitarian state in which Andra resides is
building spaceships in order to colonize other planets, after centuries spent below ground.
As with many YA and adult dystopian or speculative novels, societies that are left behind often
focus outward, on finding a new, unspoiled home, rather than fixing the one they already have.
During an expedition to the surface, Andra surveys the damage done by the nuclear war of her
ancestors: “Look at it: not one living thing on the whole of its great barren surface. This is what
they made of something beautiful; this great ugly grey desert, and I have to suffer for what they
did” (Lawrence 1991, 125). Climate has been adversely affected by a change in orbit as nuclear war

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has nudged earth’s trajectory just enough to ensure that it now takes four years to do a complete
orbit, rather than one. Andra “damns the man who dropped that bomb”, shifting Earth’s orbit
“just to end one stupid war and [leaving humanity] with a lump of useless rock” (1991, 65). By
the end of the novel, Andra has uncovered a plot to launch the spaceships—empty—by Sub-City
One’s enemy, the country of Uralia. Andra saves the world from destruction by opening the doors
for the shuttles to leave, rather than exploding in the hangar. Angered by the visions of the world
she knows is lost and feeling that there is no place for her in this underground world, self-sacrifice
is the only option open to her. It is no coincidence that the novel is divided into sections named
after male characters until the very final one, which is named “Andra”.
There are many YA writers who could be classed as an ecofeminist, or aligned with an ecofem-
inist agenda, publishing in the same era as Lawrence. Lawrence stands out because her oeuvre
consistently highlights the unbreakable connection between patriarchy, weapons of mass destruc-
tion, and the near extinction of the human race, told from the perspective of those with the least
political power (usually women). The world of Andra, similar in many ways to the totalitarian
and power-grabbing world of Suzanne Collins’ more well-known series, The Hunger Games, is
regimented, controlled (see also a similar example discussed in Deininger’s analysis of The Word in
Chapter 24). People’s lives, especially women’s, are valued according to their intelligence, a trope
that recurs in Sarah Govett’s The Territory trilogy. In Children of the Dust, the bunker section has
many parallels to Andra, run by a military that has no government to guide it, and no real purpose
except surviving in increasingly hostile circumstances.

Fantasy, Magic, and Environmental Action: From Diane Duane’s Young Wizards
Series to The Nature of Witches
Nuclear YA fiction is rooted in the catastrophic consequences of science and conflict, but there are
multiple strands of YA fiction that use fantasy as a basis for ecofeminist approaches to the environ-
mental crisis. Beginning in 1983 with So You Want To Be a Wizard, Diane Duane’s Young Wizards
series encompasses over ten novels; the first two novels, in particular, resonate with the growing
awareness of the importance of caring for the environment and that young people have a part to
play in its salvation. Juanita Callahan and Christopher Rodriguez (known throughout the series as
Nita and Kit) are an unlikely pairing of two geeky, bullied, social outcasts who discover magic and
consequently find themselves. At the beginning of the first novel, Nita is desperately trying to escape
yet another beating, hiding in the public library for safety. While hiding, she discovers a book called
So You Want to be a Wizard, (named in the style of the So you Want to be A… career books) and then
goes on to become a wizard herself. Nita learns the skills to protect herself from the bullies, while
also becoming part of a larger organization of wizards whose sole purpose is to protect the earth.
Magic in the Young Wizards series is founded upon the relationship between words and the
world they describe. The Wizard’s Oath, a manifesto for environmental activism, that Kit and
Nita both pledge, is worth quoting in full:

In Life’s name and for Life’s sake … I say that I will use the Art for nothing but the service of
that Life. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well
in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of
the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will
put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so -- till Universe’s end.
(Duane 1992, 32)

The wizards are constantly in battle with The Lone Power, a kind of fallen angel figure who
brought entropy into the world. Nita and Kit’s job is to rebalance the world, keep life and death in

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equilibrium, and protect the environment. Small actions, such as cutting down trees unnecessarily
or even littering, are steps toward the death of the universe. The stories in the series repeatedly
focus on personal responsibility, communal undertaking, and the relationship between words and
action–words are literally power as spells are cast with The Speech, with spells delicately written
in the air and on the ground (again, see Deininger’s discussion of The Word in Chapter 24 for a
dystopian parallel to this imagery). The series frequently deals with issues surrounding pollution,
including the incremental contamination of the seas in the second novel, Deep Wizardry (1985).
For readers of the 1980s who encountered Duane’s unmistakable clarion call or newer readers who
find themselves immersed in her world (updated from 1980s technology to include smartphones,
via the New Millennium Editions imprint), Duane’s ecofeminist agenda is clear: by the end of the
first novel, Nita has helped to save the world, found an identity for herself that finally fits (includ-
ing the ability to speak to and protect the natural world–Nita is often found discussing matters
with the tree in her back yard) and has stood up to the bullies who threatened her at the begin-
ning. Nita is the epitome of feminist action (discussed in Ralph’s Chapter 44): she is empowered,
she has found her community, and her bravery is valorized.
If Young Wizards was a trailblazer in environmental YA fiction, then Rachel Griffin’s The Na-
ture of Witches (2021) pushes an ecofeminist agenda further. The novel offers an alternative present
in which witches control the climate, while also opening up conversations about sexuality, not
least because the central character, Clara is openly bisexual–perhaps even pansexual. This fluidity
complements her role as an Everwitch, a rare type of witch usually born once in a generation,
which means she can harness the power of other witches. Witches (a term that encompasses both
male and female in this world, as “wizards” does in Duane) draw their power from a particular
season and are strongest in their own season. Witches are dying because they are having to use
their powers out of season (known as being “depleted”), because the world, populated by the
Shaders (nonwitches) is being destroyed by the effects of the worsening climate crisis. Seasons are
literally out of joint, making witches’ magic unusable when the natural cycle between seasons is
eroded. In both Young Wizards and The Nature of Witches, magic is not some sort of short-hand to
salvation—it has a price, paid in literal life force in both cases (Nita, e.g., thwarts the Lone Power
early on the price is a year of her life span), and must be mastered through study, hard work and
perseverance. Most importantly, both Duane and Griffin point toward the community as the
source of power, rather than individuals—collective action is the only way to save the world.

Speculative and Dystopian Fictions: Scarcity, Overuse, and Overpopulation

If the earlier stories from Lawrence and Duane were cautionary tales to warn of impending nu-
clear and environmental disasters, YA fiction of the twenty-first century has provided a variety of
scenarios and complex situations to further explore environmental crises. The issue of resources
is one that keeps returning, repeatedly, from overpopulation to the scarcity of livable land. This
issue is itself one that is irrevocably connected to the concerns of ecofeminism, as Barbara T. Gates
has argued—“overpopulation is ruining both humanity and the earth, for the earth is treated
with the same disregard as women” (1996, 6). The same could be said for the plundering of nat-
ural resources. In Irish writer Sarah Crossan’s Breathe (2012), and its sequel, Resist (2013), oxygen
is the natural resource in the shortest supply. The first novel opens with the words “Oxygen is
essential for most living things. For 2.5 billion years, it was the most abundant chemical element
on Earth. Until the Switch” (Crossan 2012, epigraph). The origins of the Switch are unclear, but
in the fairly recent past, the earth became unsustainable for human life due to the oxygen level
in the air dropping to 4%, compared to the standard level of 21%. People survive the Switch (the
precise moment when unaided breathing becomes impossible) because of Breathe, a multinational
company that saves a small percentage of humanity through air tanks, initially, and then building

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the Pods–dome-like structures where the air is rationed according to income. The poor have to
walk through the domed cities, tracked and punished if they walk at a speed beyond their oxygen
allocation (a totalitarian regime with much in common with Andra). The rich, by contrast, can
purchase oxygen tanks so that they can take part in leisure activities, such as running. Class ten-
sions run high throughout the novels (as they do in Sarah Govett’s The Territory) and there are clear
lines of demarcation between the spaces the rich and poor can inhabit. The inequalities created by
multinationals are an underlying critique throughout the novel.
Alina, one of the three central characters and a futuristic Extinction Rebellion type figure,
tricks her way out of the Pod to join the rebellion that is mounting in The Outlands. There is
a particularly disturbing scene where Alina is surveying the broken landscape of the world left
behind, before the air ran out: “There is rubble and rubbish everywhere–evidence of the chaos at
the end: hundreds of rusted-out cars and buses and vans and shopping trolleys and blanched tree
stumps and collapsed telephone poles” (Crossan 2012, 90). The scene is reminiscent of the bleak
landscapes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), littered with reminders of the plastics that
will take centuries to break down–from toothbrushes to “trays, sunglasses, kites, wheelbarrows,
bowls and everything else” (2012, 91). In the school textbooks, blame is laid variously on China
(“all those factories”), India (“all those babies”), and America (“all those shoppers”, 92), but not
directly on Britain where the novel is set.4 In many ways, the present experienced by Alina is the
future to be feared in another recent speculative YA novel, Emily Barr’s Things to Do Before the End
of the World (2020), where the melting permafrost is about to unleash a “massive load of carbon
dioxide, laced with various toxins” (2020, 3) that will mean humanity cannot survive. As with
Barr’s novel, the cause of self-destruction in Alina’s reality is overdemand and misuse of natural
resources. Instead of melting icecaps from climate change, Alina’s world is sucked dry of air from
deforestation, excessive agricultural use, and wholescale pollution of the seas.
While oxygen is the reduced resource in Breathe, land plays a similar role in Sarah Govett’s part
speculative, part dystopian The Territory trilogy (2015, 2016, 2018). Govett explores the impact of
rising sea levels on the planet, in which large swathes of land are lost. With the soil ruined by the
saltwater, and now a “breeding ground for mosquitos”, these supposedly uninhabitable areas are
designated as the Wetlands (2015, loc 289). Much like Breathe, children are taught a quasi-Biblical
version of history in which the new government, The Ministry, saves humanity from the Dark
Days that follow the Great Floods and builds the Fence around the remaining dry land, referred
to as “the Territory”, and only allows children to stay beyond their 15th birthday if they pass the
intellectually grueling Territorial Allocation Assessment (TAA). Twenty-three years have passed
since the establishment of the Territory, so the world before is still within the living memory of
the adults who survived. As the history lesson, learned by rote by the central character Noa5 makes
clear: “Those that pass may remain in the Territory, but those that fail will be detained and re-
settled in the Wetlands” (Govett 2015, loc. 292). In Noa’s world, people are divided into Norms,
Childes, and Fish. Childes are young people who have had their intellect upgraded with computer
uploads, and are therefore guaranteed to pass the TAA, while Fish are those who are “resettled”
in the Wetlands. Noa remains a Norm as her parents refuse to have her upgraded. The TAA is
supposedly fair because it “applies equally to all children regardless of color, background or creed”
(Govett 2015, loc 290) though, in fact, it is wealth and power that determine the outcome of the
TAA—only those with large resources, whether that be wealth or political influence, can afford
the upgrade and so ensure the test is passed. Following Noa’s experience, we come to see how
the young people of her generation are treated as disposable, left to die in the Wetlands—a place
where 84% are likely to succumb to malaria. What Noa finds, however, is that life is possible in
the Wetlands, with some working together and communal action. There are some direct parallels
to be made between the almost utopian communities in Children of the Dust, where work is shared
and communal effort keeps people alive, without damaging the environment further.

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Race, Science Fiction, and Environmental Crisis

These utopian communities in the Wetlands find a dystopian counterpart in Sherri L. Smith’s
Orleans (2013). Part contagion novel, part science fiction (and climate fiction, or “cli-fi”) polemic,
Orleans imagines a world where rising waters have brought with them a host of “no-longer-­
treatable diseases” such as diabetes, asthma, and cancer, as well as Delta Fever (Smith 2013, 5).
America has been divided into the storm-affected areas of the Gulf Coast (now known as the Delta
and quarantined from the rest of the world) and the Outer States. The Delta has been forgotten,
annexed from the rest of the world by the Wall, where scarce resources and no infrastructure
have resulted in an alternative type of social structure. Delta Fever affects different blood types
in particular ways, so the people who are left behind break up into tribes, based on those types,
for protection (and more powerful tribes prey on weaker ones as a source of clean blood.) Most of
those left behind are people of color, including central character, Fen de la Guerre, a child born in
the Delta to scientists who stayed behind to fight the fever. Fen is orphaned at a young age when
her parents are attacked by roaming tribes.
The novel deftly tackles child abuse and exploitation, rape, racism, poverty, and disease along-
side the inequalities of cultural annexation, white privilege, and white saviorism. Fen meets Dan-
iel, a white scientist who illegally crosses the Wall, bringing with him an even deadlier version
of the fever that he hopes to adapt to cure the disease. Daniel is physically separated from the
Delta, through a type of Hazmat suit that recycles all his bodily fluids. Repeatedly, however, Fen
underlines how culturally separated he is, not understanding the way this new world works. For
Daniel, Orleans is that “mysterious, abandoned city…legendary in the rest of the United States,
like Shangri-La or Avalon” (Smith 2013, 52). But for Fen, Orleans is “layers of trash” (2013, 13).
As Fen notes, “what once been a green hill now be a beach dune made of debris–everything
from washing machines to refrigerators to old cars been hauled and dumped here…to shore up
the levee” (2013,13). This abandoned consumerist debris links symbolically to the undying waste
left by Styrofoam (discussed in King’s ecopoetry chapter, Chapter 49) but also the plastic bottles
of chemicals that replace the plants in Meehan’s “Death of a Field” (Deininger’s Chapter 24).
Throughout the novel, Daniel’s white savior complex is constantly contrasted with Fen, a survivor
who doesn’t need anyone’s protection. While the violent subject matter of the book–including
murder, human blood farms, torture–is discomfiting, it is the novel’s dual foundation in both the
legacies of Black exploitation and the history of climate change (especially extreme weather) that
makes it particularly impactful. Charting the hurricanes that hit the southern states (a speculative
list that includes Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and those that follow in the years directly after the
novel’s publication), the reader can clearly see an alternative future that is a hair’s breadth from
being fact. More importantly, it will be the poorest and most vulnerable, like Fen, who will bear
the brunt of this devastation, lacking access to the technology that could provide salvation.
Tochi Onyebuchi’s science fiction masterpiece, War Girls (2019), and its sequel, Rebel Sisters
(2020), envisions a future where the emerging state of New Biafra is at war with Nigeria. In Or-
leans, it is just the annexed Delta that is left to fend for itself. However, in War Girls, the white,
rich, and powerful discard a world ravaged by “wars, rising waters, invasions, nuclear disasters”
(Onyebuchi 2019, 451) for a new life in the Colonies—the people of the Global South are left
to survive on a planet that is, in many places, unlivable. While there is a colony that is mainly
populated by people from Africa (called “Centrafrique”), it is poorer than the others, especially
the colony of Alabast (the name clearly highlighting the dominant race) where most of the white
people live, so the structural and racial inequalities from Earth are replicated in space. Alabast even
has a Refuse Ring, where everything from single-use plastic bottles to plastic-lined coffins end
up, again echoing the debris deplored by ecopoets elsewhere in this Handbook. Where the Earth
is unpolluted, Biafrans and Nigerians fight over mineral deposits that power their high-tech war

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machines, known as “mechs”, “massive humanoid robots” (2019, 4), causing further destruction.
To say that the two novels are epic in their scope is an understatement. In the “Author’s Note” at
the end of War Girls, Onyebuchi describes how he drew on the recollections and experiences of
his mother during the Biafran War (known also as the Nigerian Civil War) which began in 1967.
The two novels transmute that conflict, rooted in the legacies of independence from British colo-
nial power, to a Nigeria of the 2100s.
A young Nigerian girl called Ify is saved from certain death by Onyii, a warrior known as
“the Demon of Biafra”, during one of the many conflicts. Ify, a technological prodigy, survives
the initial butchering of her family, followed by a later attack on the camp where she grows up
with Onyii, and is eventually reclaimed by the other side. Once in Nigeria, she begins to imag-
ine constructing a world that can survive the challenges posed by a postnuclear, environmentally
damaged planet:

She dreams of building extraordinary structures that will beat back the waters that gobble up
more and more shoreline with each passing month. And she will figure out ways to harness
that energy and power entire cities with it. She will figure out how to terraform those parts
of pasture in the North that the desert has conquered.
(Onyebuchi 2019, 128)

The story arc of Ify’s journey is complex and runs across both novels, inextricably linked to On-
yii’s. The two novels chart Ify’s determination to make a difference, to become a respected Black
woman in a white world (especially in the racist colony of Alabast, where she spends some time
studying as a medical student), but also expose how she, like the warrior Onyii, is a pawn in other
people’s stories, “rescued” in turn by various factions. What she comes to understand by the end is
that she cannot live her life for other people and must find her own way; she cannot single hand-
edly change the world, however much she might want to.
Diversity in YA fiction, whether that focuses on representation within fiction (via characters’
race, ethnicity, or sexuality), the writers themselves, or the publishing structures around them is an
increasingly urgent issue in the sector. Melanie Ramdarshan Bold’s research, including her 2019
study Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Color in the United Kingdom emphasizes the structural
inequalities that prevent writers of color from being heard in the first place. Novels such as Orleans
and War Girls represent complex explorations of the material reality of the environmental crisis,
told through the voices of those who bear the brunt of that crisis, while interweaving a critique of
the way racial inequality of the past still impacts the present. They also wreak havoc with essen-
tialist constructions of the concept of “the child” (see Höing’s Chapter 41 on children’s literature)
in Anglophone literature, where childhood is associated with nature and adulthood with culture.
The act of writing intersectional characters in moments of flux rejects fixed categorization and
calls into question the rigidity of these constructs in the first place. At the same time, the recurring
tropes that we find in other genres, especially the gothic, are reimagined and revitalized. Young
Wizards’ heroine Nita rejects her victim status at the hands of her bullies, learning to fight back
with new knowledge and skills; the haunted homes of the airless world in Breathe become spaces
of new life and hope where trees can grow; and the technologies that once built the monstrous
mechs of War Girls become the foundations of Ify’s cure for debilitating diseases in Rebel Sisters.

Conclusion
What will ecofeminist YA fiction of the future look like? Belbin’s metaphor of the bridge is one
we could return to as it links with the idea of crossover fiction, somewhere between YA and
standard, “adult” fiction. The novels of Premee Mohamed, an Indo-Caribbean scientist, and

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speculative fiction writer, are a case in point, often packaged as YA but, in reality, shot through
with violence and language that seems aimed at older readers. In Beneath the Rising (2020), Johnny
(real name Joanna) has made a Faustian pact with ancient monsters to give herself superhuman
intelligence, using up minutes of her life span every time she turns on “prodigy mode” to solve
the world’s problems. She develops self-sustaining, clean energy and a range of medical advance-
ments that change the face of human existence, as well as many other inventions in science and
technology. The novel, which brands itself as “cosmic horror”, carefully contrasts Johnny’s rich,
white, privileged background with the material realities of Nick and his family, who live on the
poverty line, and “know how hard it is to be brown” (Mohamed 2020, 42) in a post-9/11 world (in
this timeline, two planes nearly hit the Twin Towers, but overshoot into the river.) Mohamed’s re-
cently published The Annual Migration of Clouds (2021), a self-titled “cli-fi plague” novel, has much
to say about the cultural anxieties of a post-COVID world. Mohamed is part of a new generation
of writers, alongside Smith and Onyebuchi, whose novels are explicitly ecofeminist, tackling the
environmental crisis, gender and race with complexity, nuance, and sharp critique.
YA Fiction is becoming increasingly vocal about the climate crisis, and especially the way the
most disadvantaged and vulnerable are impacted by that crisis—whether that means rising water
levels, changing weather patterns, drought, famine, or uninhabitable land. What these texts ex-
plore, ultimately, is the price of inaction—while young people sacrifice their life force battling
evil, in order to save the world, we as readers are left reflecting on our own inaction. It is also
unsurprising, perhaps, that many of the YA novels explored in this chapter reject the masculinist
tropes of mainstream climate fiction identified by Ralph in Chapter 44 and are instead haunted
by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.6 At the beginning of Things to do Before the End of the World, as
the reality of mass annihilation hits home, one of the young female protagonists affirms: “We
had done this to ourselves, and to the creatures, and there was very little we could do about it. It
was the catastrophic breakdown of everything” (Barr 2020, 3). While this is highly reminiscent
of the prophetic lines from Carson’s opening (“No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the
rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves”, Carson 1962, 14), it
provides us, as contemporary readers, with a call to action. More importantly, it provides young
adult audiences with a road map for urgent political change. It might not be too late; the only
option left to us, to protect future generations and to avoid the devastation these texts lays out for
us, is—at the very least—to try.

Notes
1 The short span of Curry’s literary texts is absolutely necessary in order to build a coherent argument, but
a broader piece of research that explores the earlier roots of YA fiction with an ecofeminist element or
focus would now be very timely.
2 The Greenham Common movement was begun by Welsh women. Though Greenham itself is not
referred to in Chapter 24, there is a broader discussion of modern forms of Welsh activism through
ecopoetry.
3 Lawrence’s work encompasses the idea of extinction and annihilation. For a discussion of her short
­stories, see Deininger and Scammell (2021). “Extinction is Forever: Ecofeminism and Apocalypse in
Louise Lawrence’s Young Adult Fiction.” In Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriti-
cism of Science Fiction, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, 83–97. London: Routledge.
4 There are some clear parallels to be made with The Word, discussed in Chapter 24, where there is a
similar disconnection between the stories governments mandate in education and the realities faced by
those who live there.
5 Noa’s name is an obvious Biblical reference to Noah in the Old Testament (and the Ark that saves
­humanity from the Flood) but refigured as female. On the opening page she refers to herself as “Yes,
that’s Noah without an ‘h’” (Govett 2015, loc 9).
6 See Chapter 24 for some discussion of Carson’s influence on Welsh texts.

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References
Barr, Emily. 2020. Things to Do Before the End of the World. London: Penguin.
Belbin, David. 2011. “What is Young Adult Fiction?” English in Education 45, no. 2: 132–145.
Bold, Melanie Ramdarshan. 2019. Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom.
­L ondon: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Collins, Suzanne. 2008. The Hunger Games. London: Scholastic.
Crossan, Sarah. 2012. Breathe. London: Bloomsbury.
Curry, Alice. 2013. Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Deininger, Michelle, and Gemma Scammell. 2021. “Extinction is Forever: Ecofeminism and Apocalypse in
Louise Lawrence’s Young Adult Fiction.” In Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriti-
cism of Science Fiction, edited by Douglas Vakoch, 83–97. London: Routledge.
Duane, Diane. [1983] 1992. So You Want to be a Wizard. London: Corgi.
———. [1985] 1996. Deep Wizardry. New York: Magic Carpet Books.
Gates, Barbara T. 1996. “A Root of Ecofeminism: Ecoféminisme.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature
and Environment 3, no. 1: 7–16.
Govett, Sarah. 2015. The Territory. Cardiff: Firefly Press. Kindle edition.
———. 2016. The Territory: Escape. Cardiff: Firefly Press. Kindle edition.
———. 2018. The Territory: Truth. Cardiff: Firefly Press. Kindle edition.
Griffin, Rachel. 2021. The Nature of Witches. Naperville: Sourcebooks.
Hunt, Peter. 1994. An Introduction to Children’s Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lawrence, Louise. 1985. Children of the Dust. New York: Harper and Row.
———. [1971] 1994. Andra. London: Lions Tracks.
McCarthy, Cormac. 2006. The Road. London: Picador.
Mohamed, Premee. 2020. Beneath the Rising. Oxford: Solaris.
———. 2021. The Annual Migration of Clouds. Toronto, ON: ECW Press.
Morgan, Kass. 2013. The 100. New York. Little, Brown and Company.
Onyebuchi, Tochi. 2019. War Girls. London: Penguin.
———. 2020. Rebel Sisters. London: Penguin.
Salleh, Ariel. 2014. “Foreword.” In Ecofeminism by Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies, ix–xii. London: Zed
Books Ltd.
Smith, Sherri L. 2013. Orleans. New York: G P Putnam’s Sons.
Thunberg, Greta (@GretaThunberg). 2021. “Deadly Heatwaves, Floods, Storms, Wildfires, Droughts, Crop
Failures… This is not “The New Normal”. We’re at the Very Beginning of a Climate and Ecological Emer-
gency, and Extreme Weather Events will only Become more and more Frequent. #FaceTheClimateEmer-
gency.” Twitter, July 15, 2021. https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1415600846356819971?s=20.

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 43
MYSTERY AND DETECTIVE
FICTION AND ECOFEMINISM
Casey A. Cothran

Introduction
In mystery stories, authors explore the individual’s ability to read the people and events that exist
in a past time and space. The attempt to understand the past (for both the reader and the main
character or detective) is often challenged by the atypical, complex, and violent nature of the past
events being addressed within the text. As Lisa Zunshine has noted, “we open a detective novel
with an avid anticipation that our expectations will be systematically frustrated” (Zunshine 2006,
121). Notably, the quest for understanding that characterizes the mystery genre makes it a likely
space for the exploration of other, less concrete, mysteries. Luc Boltanski defines mystery as

a singularity … one whose character can be called abnormal, one that breaks with the way
things present themselves under conditions that we take to be normal, so that our minds do
not manage to fit the uncanny event into ordinary reality. The mystery thus leaves a kind of
scratch on the seamless fabric of reality.
(Boltanski 2014, 3)

Texts that address mysteries inspire readers to question the known world and to look for hidden
truths; they reward characters who ask questions and who question easy answers. Thus, mystery
and detective stories often push readers to consider larger ethical and social problems. These in-
vestigations can be buried within a search to know particular criminal circumstances or to under-
stand one individual’s behavior and motivations; nevertheless, on the whole, the genre has a way
of undermining or redefining the reader’s concept of the world.
In particular, the mystery genre can be seen to provide a space for authors to ask questions
about the violence enacted against women and against the environment. In many instances, this
violence is graphic and showcased; in others, crimes against women or nature are normalized, or
they exist as collateral damage alongside a more atypical transgression. Instead of exploring the
myriad of raped, murdered, and dismembered bodies of women that mark hundreds of detective
novels, or the mutilated animals, toxic dumping, and violent looting of natural resources that
often characterizes the actions of various criminal villains, this chapter will explore how mystery
novelists can use a text to critique social, cultural, or epistemological systems that simultaneously
oppress women and nature. This is a powerful technique, one that pushes readers to engage cog-
nitively with the larger problems of a socio-cultural moment, rather than simply feel sympathy for
a person or place who has been harmed by a specific criminal individual.

458 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-46

 Mystery and Detective Fiction

Slow Violence against Women and Nature

One might argue that there is a tradition within the English and American mystery genre, span-
ning back to nineteenth-century novelist Wilkie Collins (often called the first detective novel-
ist), echoed in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, frequently visible within
the twentieth-century works of Agatha Christie, emphasized in the works of Nevada Barr, and
taken up with striking power by twenty-first-century novelist Carl Hiaasen, that aligns wronged
women and unique, potentially dangerous natural spaces. The alignment of women and nature,
generally, is not an unusual literary device. In Chapter 23, English Literature and Ecofeminism,
Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman notes that, in British and American literary works, women are often
associated with nature or with natural spaces. She explores the Western concept of Mother Na-
ture (or Mother Earth), as well as a wide range of British and American literary texts from the
Romantic period to the present, where female writers and literary characters meaningfully engage
with the natural world, thus potentially resisting the oppressive binaries that often mark Western
modes of thinking. Taylor-Wiseman references the work of Margarita Estévez-Saá and María
Jesús Lorenzo-Modiaremind who argue that it is the goal of ecofeminist literature to deconstruct
such binaries (and specifically those that separate men and women or civilization and nature), as
they can result in the devaluation of the female and the natural. Taylor-Wiseman argues that, by
emphasizing the materiality of the body, or by describing a natural space as maternal/feminine,
writers can imagine a unity between woman and nature and thus push readers to question or resist
other epistemological binaries. It is not clear that the alignment of women with nature within
works of English literature is always empowering, but Taylor-Wiseman notes that literary depic-
tions of both women and nature often present them as engaged in efforts to resist systems that
either limit or actively harm them.
In the mystery texts I explore here, women are seen to possess secret and powerful knowledge
about crimes, and they have the potential to use it to punish (and control) those who under-
value them and the natural world with which they align themselves. It will be my argument that
this ecofeminist tradition encourages readers to consider the existence of “slow violence” against
women and nature. Rob Nixon describes slow violence as a violence that “occurs gradually and
out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional
violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2013, 2). In some works of mystery
and detective fiction, such less immediately visible criminal activity is described in detail along-
side the more familiar, more visible acts of brutality that often are featured. By drawing attention
to the slow violence enacted on women and natural spaces, mystery novelists can try to understand
(and protest) systems that encourage damaging behavior to women and the environment. They
can do this while also exploring the more obviously illegal actions of individual villains.
Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone was first published in 1868; TS Eliot called it “the first, the
longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.”1 Although “mystery” is a frequent
topic within numerous diverse works of literature, and although detectives had appeared in earlier
works of nineteenth-century fiction (perhaps most notably in Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 “The Mur-
ders in the Rue Morgue”), Collins is often credited with writing the first detective novel and with
establishing a number of detective fiction tropes. Steve Farmer notes that “The Moonstone often
garners recognition as the novel that established what many perceive to be the ‘rules’ of the genre”
(Farmer 1999, 11).2 Thus, a scholar of feminist ecocriticism might find it important to note the
striking and significant role played both by the setting and by the disempowered woman servant,
Rosanna Spearman, in this text. In The Moonstone, the female character who holds the key to the
mystery is intimately connected to a striking and unusual natural space. Both this character and
the natural space (denoted the “Shivering Sands”) exist as objects of either fascination or repulsion
for other characters; both hide secrets; both also push the reader to consider larger social problems

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 Casey A. Cothran

that haunt the novel but that will not be solved by the discovery of the lost Moonstone and its
return to India.
Rosanna Spearman is introduced early in the novel by the novel’s first narrator, the verbose
and genial butler, Gabriel Betteredge. Although a number of other characters distrust and dislike
her, Betteredge feels sympathy for Rosanna and treats her kindly. He describes her situation thus:

Rosanna Spearman had been a thief, and not being of the sort that get up Companies in the
City, and rob from thousands, instead of only robbing from one, the law laid hold of her, and
the prison and the reformatory followed the lead of the law.
(Collins 1868, 21)

Here is an early indication of the slow violence perpetuated by charitable organizations like
reformatories; this theme will be further emphasized later in the novel as Collins pokes merciless
fun at Drusilla Clack and Godfrey Ablewhite and their useless (and sometimes actively destruc-
tive) charitable endeavors. Rosanna is solitary and silent, possesses an unusual body (“having
one shoulder bigger than the other” [Collins 1868, 22]), and has “ just a dash of something that
wasn’t like a housemaid, and that was like a lady, about her” (Collins 1868, 22). She is frequently
found sitting by or staring off at the Shivering Sand, a deadly stretch of quicksand described by
Franklin Blake as a wet surface that “glitter[s] with a golden brightness, hid[ing] the horror of
its false brown face under a passing smile” (Collins 1868, 271). Although pockets of quicksand
occasionally appear on beaches throughout the United Kingdom, Collins’s memorable natural
space is an imagined one, rather than an actual feature of Yorkshire. Betteredge describes the
novel’s landscape thus:

The sand-hills here run down to the sea, and end in two spits of rock jutting out opposite
each other, till you lose sight of them in the water. One is called the North Spit, and one the
South. Between the two, shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies
the most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire. At the turn of the tide, something
goes on in the unknown deeps below, which sets the whole face of the quicksand shivering
and trembling, in a manner most remarkable to see, and which has given to it, among the
people in our parts, the name of The Shivering Sand[…]. A lonesome and horrid retreat, I
can tell you! No boat ever ventures into this bay. No children from our fishing-village, called
Cobb’s Hole, ever come here to play. The very birds of the air, as it seems to me, give the
Shivering Sands a wide berth.
(Collins 1868, 22–23)

This lengthy description of the natural space, provided to the reader by Betteredge, is soon made
more complex by Rosanna’s more imaginative reading of the landscape. She exclaims, “Isn’t it
wonderful? Isn’t it terrible? I have seen it dozens of times, and it’s always as new to me as if I had
never seen it before!” (Collins 1868, 22). Betteredge reads the space as a danger to be ignored and
avoided, a feature of “a horrid walk” (Collins 1868, 22), one of many walks available to the resi-
dents of the great house and one he would never personally choose to take. In contrast, Rosanna
is routinely drawn to the space and finds in it a source of wonder. She notes, “Do you know what
it looks like to me? […] It looks as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it – all struggling
to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps!” (Collins 1868, 25).
While Betteredge and Franklin describe the “face” of the sand, thus giving it a potentially ma-
licious (and, for Franklin, a racially identified) consciousness, Rosanna empathetically imagines
what lies underneath the surface, perhaps foreshadowing her own eventual suicide (by walking
into the quicksand).

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A number of critics have examined the passages surrounding the Shivering Sands and have read
them in different, thought-provoking ways. Lewis Roberts notes, “the function of this threaten-
ing and mysterious location in Collins’ narrative is to conceal and reveal secrets, and to complicate
the characters’ knowledge of each other and themselves” (Roberts 1997, 169). Additionally, Tim
Carens notes that the Sands’ “disturbing power emanates from the knowledge it discloses about
the structure of human subjectivity in England as well as India” (Carens 2003, 248). It is certainly
reasonable to claim that the natural space speaks about human suffering on a larger scale, and
that both Rosanna Spearman’s body and the “hundreds of suffocating people” that are imagined
struggling against the imprisoning sand are meant to push the reader to consider who is crushed
by slow violence – by Britain’s imperialist endeavors, and by the suffocating social, economic,
cultural, religious, or military forces that limit people’s lives (Collins 1868, 25). Shampa Roy has
noted, “The Moonstone is undeniably saturated with disparaging racial and colonial stereotypes,”
and yet “easy cultural binaries are also undermined in the novel” (Roy 2020, 120–121). Rosanna,
who literally disappears into the sand, is one of the characters in the text that pushes the reader
to ask whose distress is hidden away, whose bodies are mired in quicksand, and whose suffering
is disregarded and ignored. In turn, the Shivering Sand represents the embodiment (the “broad
brown face” [Collins 1868, 25]) of racial suffering, both at home (described through the suffer-
ing of Ezra Jennings) and abroad. Although this suffering is not accurately seen by a number of
characters in the text, the unique material space of the Shivering Sands continues to exist, despite
various characters’ efforts to avoid it, always moving in the bay behind the great noble house (and
the great noble nation) featured within the novel.
Although Rosanna is a character who kills herself early in the novel because the man she loves
does not return her affections, she regularly acts with ingenuity and exhibits high intelligence,
and she is mourned by a female friend who deeply laments the fact that the two of them never got
to move to the city to begin a life of meaningful and honest work together.3 Indeed, it has been
argued that her surprising, passionate (and lengthy) suicide letter marks the text in more emotional
and meaningful ways than the words and actions of the novel’s heroine, Rachel Verinder, a char-
acter who never gets the opportunity to act as a narrator in the novel.4 Ultimately, both Rosanna’s
voice and her special place, the Shivering Sands, permeate and haunt the novel, pushing readers to
think about larger questions of crime, inequality, class, and Empire, questions that go beyond the
mystery of who stole the diamond from Rachel Verinder’s room.
This trend is repeated in what may be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most successful Sherlock
Holmes text, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901). Here again, the main crimes of the novel (the
murder of Charles Baskerville and the attempted murder of Henry Baskerville) are explored
alongside less visible crimes (the villain’s physical abuse of his wife; the housekeeper’s secret sup-
port of her younger brother, the escaped Notting Hill Murderer; the seduction and abandonment
of a local young woman, Laura Lyons) and within a unique and frightening landscape. In a con-
versation between Watson and the novel’s villain, it is described thus:

“That is the great Grimpen Mire,” said [Stapleton]. “A false step yonder means death to man
or beast. Only yesterday I saw one of the moor ponies wander into it. He never came out. I
saw his head for quite a long time craning out of the bog-hole, but it sucked him down at last.
Even in dry seasons it is a danger to cross it, but after these autumn rains it is an awful place.
And yet I can find my way to the very heart of it and return alive. By George, there is another
of those miserable ponies!”
Something brown was rolling and tossing among the green sedges. Then a long, agonised,
writhing neck shot upward and a dreadful cry echoed over the moor. It turned me cold with
horror, but my companion’s nerves seemed to be stronger than mine.
(Doyle 1901, 58)

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Indeed, Jack Stapleton, the primary villain, repeatedly brags about his mastery of the wild Tor,
and his home is marked by various framed displays of pinned insects. In this novella, Doyle asso-
ciates Beryl Stapleton’s domestic abuse with her husband’s violence against nature; like a butterfly,
she is wrapped up, cocoon-like, when Holmes and Watson find her near the end of the novella.
Once she is cut free from her bindings, she divulges all of her husband’s murderous schemes, most
of which revolve around his violent training of a mastiff-bloodhound whom he coats in phospho-
rous in the hopes that he will be mistaken as a ghostly hound from Hell.5 As in Collins’s text, the
female character and the natural space hold hidden but crucial secrets. Additionally, in Doyle’s
text, both Beryl and the animals on the Tor (the butterflies, the hound) are clear victims of slow
(and legal) violence. Nevertheless, they each possess unique power; Beryl exposes her husband,
and he is ultimately killed by the quicksand in the Great Grimpen Mire.
In Chapter 40, Victorian Literature and Ecofeminism, Nicole C. Dittmer discusses Victorian liter-
ature’s association of complex and dangerous women with “wild nature,” often figured not only
as a space but as a state of mental instability. This connection certainly can be seen in Collins’s
depiction of Rosanna Spearman and Doyle’s characterization of Beryl Stapleton. Dittmer com-
pellingly describes the association of women and nature (in penny publications specifically, but
also longer literary works) as evidence of authorial attempts to create a literary space for female
characters who did not adhere to traditional nineteenth-century notions of angelic femininity; she
also illustrates how this wild nature can both mark female characters as dangerously chaotic and
also provide them with agency. Collins’s Rosanna and Doyle’s Beryl are both independent figures;
as noted above, both also possess important, influential knowledge about the major crimes in each
text, although, as a result of their deviant natures, they are never empowered to move beyond the
role of key witness to that of detective.
Later Victorian novels did occasionally feature female detectives;6 one may argue, however,
that the role is perhaps first perfected in Agatha Christie’s twentieth-century character of Miss
Marple. Marple is an amateur detective, rather than a professional; nevertheless, her character
features in 14 of Christie’s novels and has since been reenvisioned within numerous film and
television adaptations of those texts. Unlike the Victorian female characters explored above, Miss
Marple is eminently proper. Rather than being associated with wild nature, she is possessed with
an uncanny ability to read the natures of others. Indeed, Christie’s twentieth-century heroine de-
scribes herself as in possession of a special sense of “intuition,” a result of her age and experience.7
The decision to employ an elderly female as a regular amateur detective character was a unique
and groundbreaking choice for Christie. Miss Marple first appears in the 1930 novel Murder at
the Vicarage and is a lifelong resident of St. Mary Mead, a rural English village. Like other female
characters discussed in this essay, she is both associated with nature and a victim of slow violence.
Many of Christie’s works take place in villages, hotels, or country houses. Indeed, John Scaggs,
in his discussion of Golden Age detective fiction on a larger scale, describes “the central impor-
tance of realist spatial settings” in these pieces. Scaggs highlights Christie’s frequent use of maps
and drawings in her novels, noting that

Christie’s use of titles that refer to a particular location reinforces the central importance […]
of an objectified sense of place […] as well as the importance of an objectified sense of time in
the proliferation of times, clocks, timetables, and alibis.
(Scaggs 2005, 51)

Scaggs goes on to note that these items serve as “a marker of a modern, industrialized society: a
modern industrial world often quite at odds with the pastoral idyll that the Golden Age longs for”
(Scaggs 2005, 51). Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage is indeed characterized by its setting, the idyllic
village vicarage; it also features multiple maps and timetables (see Christie 1930, 21, 37, 67, and

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214–215), as well as an occasional, subtle “listing” of potential suspects for the reader to consider
(Christie 1930, 81–82). In contrast to a textual structure that encourages readers to take notes, to
perhaps even make their own charts in an attempt to solve the mystery through methods of logic
and organization, the character of the novel’s amateur sleuth, Miss Marple, thinks of the world
around her in less regimented terms. Though Christie’s works incorporate fewer wild, clearly
dangerous spaces than the other works discussed in this piece, Miss Marple is a woman who is
constantly gardening and bird watching, who collects stones for her garden and describes her life’s
great hobby as the study of “Human Nature” (Christie 1930, 212). Notably, she responds neatly to
her nephew, the Modernist novelist Raymond West, when he disparagingly compares the village
of St. Mary Mead to “a stagnant pool.” Miss Marple quips, “Nothing, I believe, is so full of life
under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool” (Christie 1930, 163). In this novel,
it is her time outdoors, as well as her knowledge of chemistry, that gives her clues to the identity
of the murderer, the secrets of her neighbors, and also the particulars of other, less dramatic crimes
taking place in the community. In this classic work of detective fiction, we again see a perceptive
and powerful female character who exhibits a connection with nature. Again, in discussions of
this character and of the natural spaces with which she is associated, readers are introduced to
other crimes that are less “solveable” than those that are featured in the primary narrative.
In Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple faces blatant attitudes of sexism, ageism, and provin-
cialism from the official police, male community members, and even her own nephew. Inspector
Slack announces, “I really believe that wizened-up old maid thinks she knows everything there
is to know. And hardly been out of this village her whole life. Preposterous” (Christie 1930, 71);
Constable Hurst notes, “You can’t take any notice of what old ladies say” (Christie 1930, 181); and
Colonial Melchett claims, “The typical elderly spinster […]. Well, I ought to know the breed by
now. Gad, the tea parties down here!” (Christie 1930, 63). Despite the fact that her insights are
unwelcome, Miss Marple is aware of more than Len Clement, the pastor/narrator of the novel. She
sees how the aftereffects of the war have adversely affected Hawes, the associate pastor and realizes
that Len’s wife, Griselda, lied about her movements on the day of the murder because she was
going into town to confirm her pregnancy. In addition to seeing these things, Miss Marple makes
claims that are less clearly substantiated as “true” later in the novel. Perhaps most importantly,
Miss Marple argues that Anne Protheroe, although she kills her husband, is merely “the shooter,”
and it is her lover, Lawrence Redding, who should be defined as “the murderer” for the way he
planned the event and manipulated his lover into committing it. She announces,

Much as I have always liked Mrs. Protheroe, I could not avoid coming to the conclusion that
she was completely under Mr. Redding’s thumb and would do anything he told her, and of
course he is not the kind of young man who would dream of running away with a penniless
woman.
(Christie 1930, 231)

This sort of manipulation of women by men is more problematic than the comments made by
other male characters about Miss Marple, and the fact that it is recognized by the successful (if
unofficial) detective in the novel adds another layer of critique to Christie’s depiction of the “slow
violence” caused by gender inequality in British postwar culture.
The connection between women and environmental spaces continues in mystery texts written
and published in the late twentieth century, as evidenced in Nevada Barr’s first Anna Pigeon novel,
Track of the Cat (1993). The series of Anna Pigeon novels features mysteries set in different Amer-
ican national parks; currently, there are 19 books in the series, printed between 1993 and 2016.
Patrick Murphy notes, “nature always receives significant attention in every novel, even when the
murder plot revolves around racial conflict, drug smuggling, or illegal immigration” (Murphy

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2009, 176). In Track of the Cat, the featured crime (the murder of a female park ranger) is contrasted
with less shocking but very real environmental crimes: the legal killing of “dangerous” livestock
predators (specifically wild cats), poaching, and the destruction of natural spaces that are not pro-
tected by the national parks system. Additionally, the poor pay and exploitation of both seasonal
and permanent members of the National Park Service are described as a form of slow violence.
Barr describes early in her first Anna Pigeon novel the ways that the National Park Service
depends on highly educated but poorly compensated summer seasonal workers:

Most had advanced degrees. Some had families to support. Yet they left jobs and homes and
husbands and wives for the privilege of living in a dormitory and working for six dollars and
fifty-four cents an hour, no retirement, no benefits, and rent deducted automatically.
(Barr 1993, 21)

She also describes the “tangled thickets of red tape” (Barr 1993, 21) that exist to prevent individ-
uals from accessing the few permanent positions in the service, and also the way that even perma-
nent employees are required to move every few years. Anna muses:

People who ‘homesteaded’ – stayed in one park too long – tended to come to think of the
place as theirs; they developed their own ideas of how it should be run. The NPS didn’t care
for that. It made people less tractable, less willing to follow the party line dictated from half
a continent away.
(Barr 1993, 23)

Amidst the search for a killer, this text explores the way that an employer can abuse its workers.
Indeed, Barr indicates that individuals who love the land are especially vulnerable to abuse. The
novel’s heroine thinks about a colleague, noting that he

had been with the Park Service for fifteen years yet he’d never been promoted higher than
GS-5, the grade of a beginning seasonal. His love of these mountains had cost him a lot.
Sometimes Anna wondered if it wasn’t worth it.
(Barr 1993, 23)

Indeed, the poaching ring in the novel that leads to murder is inspired in part by the low pay of the
NPS work. Even though the abuse of labor is not illegal, it is an act of slow violence that inspires
the killing of animals and eventually people.
As in some of the previous texts cited in this chapter, here the environment is not typically
beautiful or familiar, yet it exhibits unique features, majesty, and power. Middle McKittrick
Canyon, part of the Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas, is described as the home of lizards and
tarantulas. Barr writes:

Some of the scoured pits were thirty feet across and twenty feet deep. A litter of leaves and
bones lay at the bottom of the one Anna skirted. An animal – a fawn by the look of one of
the intact leg bones – had fallen in and been unable to climb out again. This was a section
of the canyon that Anna hated to hike, though its austere beauty lured her back time and
again. The high walls, with their steep sloping shoulders sliding down to slick-sided pits, put
a clutch in her stomach. Farther down the white basins would be filled with crystal waters,
darting yellow sunfish: life. But here the river had deserted the canyon for a world under-
ground and left only these oddly sculpted death traps.
(Barr 1993, 6)

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Despite the danger of this environment, a park ranger (and Federal Law Enforcement Officer)
Anna knows how to survive and thrive in the space (even alone, even at night, and even in the
presence of a half-scavenged dead body). She knows how to read the land and animals, even when
they are hostile. At the end of the book, she will leave the villain of the novel in the desert with a
broken ankle, allowing nature to provide consequences rather than the police or judicial system.8
Carl Hiaasen’s 2004 novel Skinny Dip may most clearly articulate the trend I’ve outlined in
The Moonstone, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Murder at the Vicarage, and Track of the Cat, where au-
thors align women with nature and use the mystery/detective structure to examine acts of slow
violence against the two. Indeed, I would argue that this novel is unique, for in it, the setting is
depicted as the murder victim. In Skinny Dip, the reader is presented with scenes where tons of
fertilizers (phosphorus) are continually funneled into the Florida Everglades, where a helicopter
ride allows one to see how “new subdivisions erup[t] like cankers in all directions” (Hiaasen 2004,
250), where alligators are illegally killed and eaten, where pet pythons are released into the wild,
where characters litter, and even where a group of home aquarium fish is repeatedly neglected.
Indeed, the text opens with the following introductory note: “This is a work of fiction. All names
and characters are either invented or used fictitiously. The events described are mostly imaginary,
except for the destruction of the Florida Everglades and the $8 billion effort to save what remains”
(Hiaasen 2004).
In the opening chapters of the novel, Joey Perrone (the heroine) narrowly escapes a murder at-
tempt. It is not completely clear that the space of the Everglades, also attacked by her husband, can
survive as she does; the book is deeply critical of how the land and animals are continually abused,
either purposely or through gross human ignorance. At certain moments in the text, Hiaasen
shifts into nonfiction mode, educating the reader on the state of the Everglades. In Chapter 9,
he describes the history of the land and how “Those wetlands that could not be dried, paved, or
planted were eventually trenched out and diked into vast reservoirs by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers” (Hiaasen 2004, 90). In Chapter 31, he explores why pesticides are a danger, noting that

Unlike more telegenic forms of pollution, the fertilizers pouring by the ton from the sugar
cane fields and vegetable farms of southern Florida do not produce sinking tides of dead fish
or gruesome panoramas of rotting animal corpses. Instead, the phosphates and other agricul-
tural contaminants work invisibly to destroy a mat of algae known as periphyton, the slimy
brown muck that underlies the river of grass and is its most essential nutrient.
(Hiaasen 2004, 334)

Hiaasen’s novel might be seen as an example of climate fiction, a subject explored by Iris Ralph in
Chapter 44. In her chapter, Ralph explores how “cli-fi” texts can frequently feature masculinist
action, a term coined by Greta Gaard to describe an activity that is marked by heroic endeavor,
danger, and exploration, but also by destructive individualism and assurance of gender and racial
supremacy (Gaard 2017, 93). Ralph contrasts the common trope of masculinist action in climate
fiction with what she terms feminist action, a form of behavior she associates with cooperation,
conservation, and coexistence. Although Hiaasen’s heroine is ready at one point to shoot her hus-
band while chasing after him in a speed boat, her supportive interactions with nature are mundane
rather than marvelous, and one might claim that she provides readers with (humorous) examples of
what Ralph calls feminist action. In the novel, Joey is associated with nature in creative ways. Her
parents were killed in a plane accident that seems to have been caused by their (potentially mas-
culinist) lack of proper respect for natural creatures; they got their pet bear drunk and let him sit
in the copilot seat, resulting in the crash. In contrast, Joey’s brother is an excessively devoted sheep
farmer, and, at her fake funeral, Joey is remembered for paying $2,000 to neuter a group of feral cats
that had congregated behind a local Kentucky Fried Chicken. (She also is celebrated for arranging

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medical care for a bottle-nosed dolphin who was suffering from a bowel obstruction.) As noted
previously, these examples provide humor within the novel, but they also show real, accessible
ways that individuals might have a small but positive impact on the animals in their communities.
In this novel, Joey is repeatedly associated with nature. Her name recalls a juvenile kangaroo,
and she is a great swimmer. (This is one of the reasons she is able to survive being thrown off of
a cruise ship and into the ocean by her husband, at least until a bale of marijuana floats by and
she is able to grab onto it.) In contrast, her husband Chaz Perrone is a biologist who hates nature
and who is bribed to falsify water test results; he’s also a womanizer, a narcissist, and an attempted
murderer. The novel makes it clear that, although he is being investigated by the police because
his wife has gone missing, he is a habitual criminal, and many of his crimes against nature will
go unpunished. When the detective on the case considers reporting Chaz’s water test lies to his
superior officer, Hiaasen notes, “Explaining the phosphorous scam would have brought either a
blank stare or a skeptical snort from Captain Gallo, who’d have instantly pointed out the difficulty
of selling such an arcane motive to a homicide jury” (Hiaasen 2004, 254).
The slow violence enacted by Chaz against his wife and the natural world is repeatedly linked
in the text. At one point Joey realizes,

He had betrayed the wetlands as nonchalantly as he had betrayed Joey. He had sold out – this
greedy swine she’d married – so that megatons of noxious crap could be pumped day and
night into the glistening waters below. Maybe for someone as soulless as her husband it wasn’t
much of a reach, Joey thought, from killing a place to killing a person.
(Hiaasen 2004, 250–251)

The natural world and the investigating female character are not the only figures that experience
slow violence in Hiaasen’s work; migrant workers also appear at the margins of the text, and the
abuse they suffer on giant industrial farms is another form of violence associated with the villains.
Similarly, the novel takes up the deep loneliness and feelings of imprisonment that are experienced
by the elderly in care homes.

Conclusion
Despite spanning a time period of close to 150 years, all five of the detective texts described here
explore wronged female characters who possess special insights and all three texts align these
female characters with natural spaces that are not always appreciated or protected by the range of
other characters in the piece. It is not my argument that every detective novel or series follows
this ecofeminist pattern, but that perhaps there is a trend here that can be traced by the observant
reader. Other works that follow this model might include a number of texts in more recent fe-
male sleuth novels by Alexander McCall Smith, Dianne Mott Davidson, Margaret Maron, Ann
Cleeves, and Elly Griffiths.9 Indeed, Susan Rowland, in The Sleuth and the Goddess, highlights
the rise of the modern genre of the “cozy mystery,” arguing that this form has its origins in the
novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers and claiming that these texts present “stories
with largely rural settings in which the solution to the crime restored the small community to
health,” exploring the genre’s “aim to restore Eden” (Rowland 2015, 15). I would argue that the
pattern I have highlighted in this essay is more often visible in the cozy mystery than in other
­t wentieth-century forms like noir or the police procedural.
Susan Rowland, in The Ecocritical Psyche, argues that “mystery fiction activates the trickster
aspect of psyche that has the potential to reorient our relation to human and non-human nature”
(Rowland, quoted in SG, 2015, 32). In addition to this, one can argue that some works of mystery
and detective fiction take up larger mysteries within their exploration of specific crimes. As Bran

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Nicol, Patricia Pulham, and Eugene McNulty note, “the study of how we represent crime to
ourselves can help us understand modernity” (Nicol, Pulham, and McNulty 2011, 9). It has been
my claim that works of mystery and detective fiction have the potential to explore examples of
slow ­v iolence – subtle yet deeply destructive crimes against marginalized or minority individuals,
or natural spaces – crimes that are not defined as illegal by the cultures that these groups inhabit.
Thus, these works of fiction do important work, pushing readers to consider less visible acts of
damage enacted by the systems in which they live. Although the reader, at the end of a detective
novel, will almost always discover the answer to the mystery that drives the text, the solution to
slow violence is rarely visible. Nevertheless, there is value in seeing the damage that systems of
power or thought can wreck on other humans, as well as to the single world we all inhabit together.

Notes
1 This sentence is the first line of Eliot’s introduction to the 1928 Oxford University Press edition of the
novel.
2 Farmer goes on to write, “Some of these precedents, common and immediately recognizable charac-
teristics in a century’s worth of detective fiction that has followed The Moonstone, go some way towards
showing the reader the debt owed to Collins by countless writers, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, An-
thony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy in the nineteenth century to G.K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr,
Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and P.D. James in the twentieth” (Farmer 1999, 11).
3 I have argued elsewhere that Collins empowers people with different bodies (like Rosanna Spearman)
with the ability to read people and circumstances in ways that able-bodied characters cannot: See Co-
thran, Casey A. 2006 “Mysterious Bodies: Deception and Detection in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the
Lady and The Moonstone.” Victorians Institute Journal 34:193–214.
4 Martha Stoddard Holmes describes Rosanna as “the only clear voice of sexual passion permeating a
courtship plot from which she is excluded, while Rachel Verinder, the ‘official’ nondisabled heroine, is
literally and figuratively silent for most of the novel” (Holmes 2003, 69–70).
5 The scene reads: “The room had been fashioned into a small museum, and the walls were lined by a
number of glass-topped cases full of that collection of butterflies and moths the formation of which had
been the relaxation of this complex and dangerous man. In the centre of this room, there was an upright
beam, which had been placed at some period as a support for the old worm-eaten baulk of timber which
spanned the roof. To this post a figure was tied, so swathed and muffled in the sheets which had been
used to secure it that one could not for the moment tell whether it was that of a man or a woman. One
towel passed round the throat and was secured at the back of the pillar. Another covered the lower part
of the face, and over it two dark eyes – eyes full of grief and shame and a dreadful questioning – stared
back at us. In a minute we had torn off the gag, unswathed the bonds, and Mrs. Stapleton sank upon the
floor in front of us. As her beautiful head fell upon her chest I saw the clear red weal of a whiplash across
her neck” (Doyle 1901, 113–114).
6 See, for example, Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875).
7 In The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple notes, “It’s really what people call intuition and make such a
fuss about. Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do that because
it has had so little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often
before” (Christie 1930, 81).
8 This is reminiscent of The Hound of the Baskervilles, where the villain is punished by the land and animals
he tried to control and abuse.
9 Alexander McCall Smith’s detective Mma Precious Ramotswe lives in Gaborone, the capital of Bo-
tswana, and she works hard to support and protect her beloved herd of cattle; Dianne Mott Davidson’s
detective (and professional caterer) Goldy Schulz lives in the fictional town of Aspen Meadow, Colo-
rado, and often considers the environmental consequences of the tourism industry on natural spaces in
the Rocky Mountains; Margaret Maron’s detective Judge Deborah Knott often focuses on the environ-
mental consequences of urbanization of Eastern North Carolina; Ann Cleeves’s detective Vera Stanhope
is continually haunted by memories of her father’s illegal trade of selling the eggs of rare wild birds; Elly
Griffiths’ detective (and forensic archaeologist) Ruth Galloway regularly considers the unique landscape
features and animals of the British marshlands. Notably, the heroine detectives Mma Ramotswe and
Goldy Schulz have escaped abusive marriages; detective Vera Stanhope has been affected by a police
force marked by sexism and ageism.

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 Casey A. Cothran

References
Barr, Nevada. [1993] 2003. Track of the Cat. New York: Avon Books.
Boltanski, Luc. 2014. Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels, and the Making of Modern Societies.
Translated by Catherine Porter. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Carens, Tim. 2003. “Outlandish English Subjects in The Moonstone.” In Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational
Wilkie Collins, edited by Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Tennessee Studies in Literature,
239–265. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Christie, Agatha. [1930] 2000. Murder at the Vicarage. New York: Signet.
Collins, Wilkie. [1868] 2002. The Moonstone. Toronto, ON: Dover.
Cothran, Casey A. 2006. “Mysterious Bodies: Deception and Detection in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the
Lady and The Moonstone.” Victorians Institute Journal 34: 193–214.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. [1901] 1994. The Hound of the Baskervilles. Toronto, ON: Dover.
Estévez-Saá, Margarita, and María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia. 2018. “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-caring:
Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(s).” Accessed December 15, 2021. https://www.tandfonline.
com/toc/gwst20/47/2.
Farmer, Steve. 1999. “Introduction” to The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. New York: Broadview.
Gaard, Greta. 2017. Critical Ecofeminism. Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Hiaasen, Carl. 2004. Skinny Dip. New York: Warner Books.
Holmes, Martha Stoddard. 2003. “‘Bolder with her lover in the dark’: Collins and Disabled Women’s
­Sexuality.” In Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins, edited by Maria K. Bachman and Don
Richard Cox. Tennessee Studies in Literature, 59–93. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Murphy, Patrick. 2009. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields.
Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Nicol, Bran, Patricia Pulham, and Eugene McNulty. 2011. “Introduction” to Crime Culture: Figuring Crimi-
nality in Fiction and Film. New York: Continuum.
Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Roberts, Lewis. 1997. “The ‘Shivering Sands’ of Reality: Narration and Knowledge in Wilkie Collins’ The
Moonstone,” Victorian Review 23, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 168–183.
Rowland, Susan. 2015. The Sleuth and the Goddess: Hestia, Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite in Women’s Detective
Fiction. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books.
Roy, Shampa. 2020. “Coloniality and Decoloniality.” In The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by
Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper, 120–128. London: Routledge.
Scaggs, John. 2005. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge.
Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University
Press.

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 44
CLIMATE FICTION AND
ECOFEMINISM
Iris Ralph

Introduction
Climate fiction, or cli-fi as it is commonly known, refers to any fiction that manifestly addresses or
otherwise discernibly responds to climate change (also known as global warming) and “the politi-
cal, social, psychological, and ethical issues” that are associated with it (Goodbody and Johns-Putra
2019, 1–2). Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009)
and MaddAddam (2013), Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007), Peter Verhelst’s Tonguecat (2005),
Michael Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005), and Rosa Montero’s Weight of the Heart
(2016) are a fraction of a sampling of texts that fit the given definition. A second, narrower, defi-
nition of cli-fi embraces only those texts that explicitly foreground “deliberate…and disastrous…
human interventions into global climatic conditions” (Goodbody and Johns-Putra 2019, 2). Third,
while cli-fi usually refers to cli-fi published after the 1960s and 1970s, or to literature published
after “the discovery” of climate change, the genre “logically embrace[s]” fictions that “predate
global warming” (Goodbody and Johns-Putra 2019, 2–3). Two notable examples that meet this
third understanding of cli-fi literature are Jules Verne’s novel The Purchase of the North Pole (1889)
and Alexander Döblin’s Mountains Oceans Giants (1924) (Goodbody and Johns-Putra 2019, 3).
In sorting through what critically floats or sinks cli-fi literature, scholars whose main area of
specialty is ecofeminism add to the general summaries of cli-fi and conclude that it is a body of
literature of which the most “prominent texts” are “masculinist,” “nonfeminist at best,” or “anti-
feminist and sexist at worst” (Gaard 2017, 145). The term “masculinist” in this ecofeminist assay
refers to divide-and-rule power structures, “holism over specific individuals,” “heroic feats of
conquest amid risk-riddled adventure,” and “techno-science solutions to the ecosocial problems
produced by runaway capitalist imperialisms” (Gaard 2017, 92). As they appear in and are repre-
sented by the most dominant forms of cli-fi literature, these structures, feats, and solutions identify
with plots revolving around humans’ ambitions to transcend the outermost or farthest known
limits of space and place and around conceptual organizations of reality that reflect a bias toward
“rationality, universality, and autonomy” as opposed to messiness, particularity, and collectivity
(Gaard 2017, 93). Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004) epitomizes this masculinist cli-fi, and
it also pushes cli-fi in disappointingly antienvironmental directions, catering to climate change
skepticism by depicting communities at the forefront of addressing climate change as being dan-
gerously misguided, radical, and deranged. These communities appear in the novel in the figures
of environmentalists and scientific experts—“PhDs, scientists, intellectuals, and feminists” among
them (Gaard 2017, 145). They are “so determined to promote fear of climate change that they

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-47 469

 Iris Ralph

use exotic technologies to start natural disasters (crumbling a massive Arctic glacier, triggering a
tsunami), and are willing to see innocent people die, just to make their case” (Gaard 2017, 145).1
A different kind of popular cli-fi is Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy: Forty Signs of Rain (2004),
Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007). It is a welcome change to the
masculinist polemic that distinguishes most cli-fi. Yet, as Gaard criticizes the trilogy, it is disap-
pointing insofar as all of the main plots “revolve around men,” “the main characters are men,”
and the representation of a “ecosocialist scientocracy” able to “solve problems of climate change,”
is “male-centered” (2017, 147). Moreover, Robinson’s trilogy reflects a lack of awareness of or
interest in the links between the inequities associated with climate change and those associated
with related phenomena (Gaard 2017, 146). Other popular works of cli-fi, for example, Paolo
Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010), Daniel Kramb’s From Here (2012),
and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), also fall short of ecofeminist expectations,
for not only do these works sidestep the masculinist links between climate change and other
­human-caused inequities but they also effectively attribute climate change to the failures of sci-
ence and technology rather than to the masculinist agents and agencies that propel and steer them
(Gaard 2017, 147).
The ecofeminist meaning and use of the terms, masculine and masculinism, are broad in their
sweep and I widen the umbrages further, as follows.2 Masculinism and masculinist behaviors tend
to be valorized more so than feminism and feminist behaviors. Feminist action refers to forms of
action that associate with cooperation as opposed to competition; conservation and preservation
as opposed to removal and displacement; retreat and compromise as opposed to advance and take-
over; coexistence as opposed to mono-existence and absolute forms of power; and receptivity,
passivity, nonconfrontation, and declination. Feminist action compares with Timothy Morton’s
“dark ecology” and the ancient Chinese philosophical concept of “yin” (the partner of “yang”).
Today, in many societies around the world, feminist action tends to associate with, seemingly
by default, weakness and passivity, and masculinist action tends to identify with initiative, daring,
and strength. The latter kinds of action drive and generate the most spectacular, breakthroughs
in science and technology. Examples of such breakthroughs are found in physics, biology, infor-
mation technology, astrophysics, and so forth. These breakthroughs (or discoveries) are dazzling,
but from ecofeminist perspectives, they are overrated, or unfairly emphasized and privileged, in
contrast with other kinds of achievements. The masculinist, attention-grabbing, breakthroughs
in science and technology are touted and flouted as if no ills attach to them, as if nothing is used
up or exploited along their way, as if the seeming great strides forward that they represent and
materialize did not occur and are not occurring at the cost of the trampling of “earthothers”
(Gaard 2017, 22), or as if billions of plants and nonhuman animals were not incarcerated, exper-
imented on, or otherwise used against their interests and extirpated in the wake of those strides.
Ecofeminism draws attention to the human and other beings who are the unasked, unwilling,
and unthanked footstools, doormats, and springboards of the seemingly gravity-defying leaps of
masculinist action, action that reflects commitment to the new at the expense of conservation of
and caring for the old.
The underestimation of feminist action—namely, validating, conserving, preserving, and re-
cycling the “what is” more than transforming it in the belief that change will carry with ready
solutions to any attendant faults—stamps cli-fi literature. Nonetheless, feminist action represents
some of the most impressive of cli-fi. This cli-fi includes Michelle Law’s short fiction, Bu Liao
Qing; Zoya Patel’s short fiction (2020), Displaced (2020); and Alexis Wright’s novel, Carpentaria
(2006).3 The three narratives also critically identify with the subject matter of Australian Literature
and specifically with the subject matter of ecofeminist Australian literature. As Melanie Duck-
worth addresses this subject—the relationship between ecofeminism and Australian l­iterature—in
Chapter 6 of this anthology, she emphasizes that there is a strong tradition of ecofeminist writing

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in Australia and it reconfigures notions of the feminine and concepts of non-human nature. It
does that, as Duckworth explains further, under a broad range of literary genres and a diverse
array of political and cultural topographies. The latter include Australia’s colonial and postco-
lonial political and cultural terrains. Australia was a colonizer-settler colony, established in the
eighteenth century on the colonialist masculinist principles of invasion and erasure and on the
colonialist masculinist identification of the female with the natural world and the colonialist mas-
culinist project of subordinating the female and the natural world. As Duckworth succinctly and
eloquently summarizes, ecofeminist Australian writers have engaged with these formidable dis-
criminatory colonial and postcolonial forces and attitudes since the time of the inception in 1788
of what is now called Australian Literature, and they have done so by highlighting the fact that in
1788, when Anglo-European people begin arriving in Australia in ever-increasing numbers, the
new arrivals largely dismissed Australia’s oldest languages and oral traditions, replacing them with
their own languages and oral and written traditions.
Duckworth’s Chapter 6 represents the growing recognition of ecofeminist Australian writ-
ers by scholars and critics. This recognition owes a great deal to postcolonialism, a subject that
Aslı Değ irmenci Altın addresses in Chapter 33 of the present anthology. Altın points out that if
ecofeminism and postcolonialism embarked on very different material and discursive grounds,
grounds that seemed to destabilize each other, then what the two emergent disciplines shared
would steadily bring them together, and in manifestly productive if also challenging ways. For
example, scholars situated in postcolonialism as well as feminism pointed out that mainstream
feminism ignored or insufficiently addressed feminist knowledge and practices of third world
women; and scholars situated in ecocriticism as well as feminism brought attention to the op-
pression of other than human beings as well as human female beings under masculinist forms of
knowledge and power.
My ecofeminist reading here of three works of Australian cli-fi owes to the productive exchanges
between both ecofeminism and postcolonialism and ecofeminism and (critical) animal studies. The
latter exchange is represented in the present anthology in Chapter 26 by Lesley Kordecki. Kordecki
begins the chapter by noting that before the birth of (critical) animal studies, comparisons made
between human female animal beings and other-than-human animal beings were considered to be
suspect and so to set feminism back. Yet, feminist ecocritics persisted in making those comparisons
and gave ecofeminism the shape it has today. Their comparisons first appeared more than 20 years
ago and tied to, among other areas of interest and research, primatology research and the challenge
to the masculinist dualisms that shaped and to a large extent misguided research on primates and
other hominoid animals (because of speciesist biases). Other areas to which their comparisons were
tethered, as Kordecki notes, include philosophy and such key figures in it as Gilles Deleuze, Felix
Guattari, and Jacques Derrida. These areas helped forge the discipline of (critical) animal studies,
and today it feeds into ecofeminism as much as ecofeminism informs it.
In what follows, I comment on Law’s, Patel’s, and Wright’s address of the phenomena of global
warming of desertification, increases in sea levels, and increases in levels of greenhouse gases
by measuring that address against the ecofeminist account and critique of cli-fi that is briefly
summarized in earlier paragraphs in this chapter. In my discussion, and as Kordecki, Altın, and
Duckworth’s discussions also reflect, what stands out is that ecofeminism closely intersects with
the areas of critical inquiry of postcolonialism and (critical) animal studies.

Bu Liao Qing by Michelle Law (2020)

Bu Liao Qing (Law 2020) takes place sometime in the more or less distant future in a downtown
area and in an outlying suburb of Sydney, the capital city of the state of New South Wales, Aus-
tralia. Much of the city now is underwater because of global warming, there is mass starvation,

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and the authoritarian government has tabs on everyone. Rising sea levels already have made parts
of Sydney uninhabitable inclusive of the Central Business District and the Sydney Opera House:
“When the ports flooded Circular Quay the ferries rose with the water and now their rusted,
empty carcasses bob around the harbor aimlessly,” and whatever fish remain are dead, “belly-up”
(Law 2020, 38). The city’s wealthiest populations now are “colonizing” (Law 2020, 30) the inner
western suburbs, pushing the poorer residents out as they (the city’s wealthier denizens) flee the
old-wealth suburbs that are close to the water. Many of the poorer residents are attempting to leave
Australia altogether. They include the narrator, a young woman. Her mother and the mothers of
other poor young women have secretly arranged for their daughters’ exodus. Most “likely,” the
older women “will be dead by morning,” sentenced to death because they are disobeying the law
(Law 2020, 29).
The narrator is pregnant with a child by Raymond, a boy whom she has known since second-
ary school. Raymond’s

great-great-grandparents on his dad’s side moved to Sydney from Beijing and started a con-
venience store business which went bankrupt when his dad was a kid and now his parents
worked in factories making OC’s, which was ironic because they earned so little they couldn’t
even afford to buy the clothes they were making.
(Law 2020, 42)

The acronym, “OC’s,” refers to “Outdoor Clothes” (Law 2020, 31), a special kind of protective
outer garment that people need to wear outside, in the globally warmed climate, which is even more
lethal to humans than in the past. Raymond’s older brother died as a direct result of these planetary
conditions. He succumbed to “an asthma attack as a baby because of the dust storms” (Law 2020,
42). The narrator’s grandparents, who used to “[run] a chain of Chinese restaurants across Sydney,”
died “from heat stroke when they stayed outdoors for too long trying to protect their restaurants
from looters” (Law 2020, 43). Their daughter, the narrator’s mother, now does “sewing jobs” to
make money and sometimes “[travels] to the houses of Officials to do their wives’ or mistresses’
nails” (Law 2020, 43). The narrator’s deceased father had been an international student from Sin-
gapore and “got king-hit by an Official while protesting” in Australia, when the narrator was still
a “toddler” (Law 2020, 40). He had “liked to break rules” and was punished for it (Law 2020, 40).
Law’s short story identifies with what in the opening paragraph of this paper refers to as a fairly
narrow definition of cli-fi, which is narratives that explicitly foreground “deliberate…and disas-
trous…human interventions into global climatic conditions” (Goodbody and Johns-Putra 2019,
2). The story also identifies with one of the three narrative strategies that cli-fi authors mainly
employ: the apocalyptic, the pastoral, and the satirical strategy (Goodbody 2020). “Bu Liao Qing”
is an apocalyptic cli-fi narrative. In addition, Bu Liao Qing identifies with “the ethics of poster-
ity” didactic of many cli-fi narratives ( Johns-Putra 2019, 9). According to this didactic, humans
should look after the planet so that their human offspring and their descendants will not suffer. As
cli-fi scholar, Adeline Johns-Putra, points out, this apparent means of persuasion betrays anthro-
pocentric responses to climate change. The heavy use of it by Law in “Bu Liao Qing” might be
considered to be a failing of this narrative. One wishes there were more notice of the plight of the
nonhuman, or what Gaard calls “earthothers” (2017, 22). There are several minor nonhuman ani-
mal characters or figures: the narrator’s pet cat, Rufus; the countless dead fish floating “belly-up”
in the ports of Sydney; and the “lots of ibises” that “[perch] everywhere” or “stalk down the roads
inspecting old food wrappers” (Law 2020, 34). However, it is the human characters caught up
in climate change that seem to be what the narratives asks readers to commiserate with and have
compassion for, and what hope there is for the future is invested in the human, and the future itself
is humanized. It takes the form of the narrator’s unborn child.

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At the same time, Bu Liao Qing foregrounds feminist concerns and feminist forms of action,
and these are salutary to see. The narrator and the people who make up her shrinking and flooding
world—the narrator’s mother, the narrator’s two best friends, Cherrie and Yu, and the narrator’s
boyfriend, Raymond—represent the feminist principles of sharing (versus hoarding and stockpil-
ing) of resources, cooperation versus competition, acceptance of each other’s differences versus
contempt for and efforts to exploit one another’s differences, and nonaction or positive, feminist,
forms of passivity. Even the action that the narrator’s mother and other mothers take to save the
lives of their daughters is feminist in the sense that it works through quiet kinds of declination
and resistance more than through loud, masculinist, forms of militant revolt. The altruism that
abounds in Bu Liao Qing (a story that takes its name from a popular Chinese love song, the title of
which translates into English as Endless Love), speaks for that kind of action.

Displaced by Zoya Patel (2020)

Zoya Patel’s Displaced (2020) references the environment as much as it does the human in ways that
reflect ecofeminist compassion for and recognition of the need to care for and preserve the envi-
ronment and the environment’s many non-human faunal and floral beings. The unnamed narrator
tells her readers about rising sea levels in the Asia-Pacific region because of climate change, which
now is forcing people to migrate to Australia, “a reluctant provider,” from countries such as Fiji,
the narrator’s first country (Patel 2020, 94). There, people—both the Indian and “kaiviti” Fijian
populations—had not been “strangers” to storms; they intimately knew and understood “[t]he
wind that howls with its own voice” and “the rain that comes in ferocious bursts, falling as though
a bucket has been tipped in the sky and the water has descended in one sheet” (Patel 2020, 92).
However, in recent decades, the cyclones in Fiji have been “out of season” (Patel 2020, 92).
“[C]oupled with” a heat that makes “the roads sticky with melting tar,” the cyclones are persuading
whole “villages…to migrate” (Patel 2020, 92). The number of those villages has gone from “three
or four to sixty” (Patel 2020, 92). Much of the migration is from rural areas into cities or from Fiji
to other countries, now “bursting at their seams” (Patel 2020, 93). Indeed, the situation now is one
of “mass departure” (Patel 2020, 93). The narrator wonders how long it will be before the islands
of Fiji will be “gone forever,” and “if [one can] be Fijian when Fiji [doesn’t] exist” (Patel 2020, 93).
Environmentally as well as culturally displaced, the narrator of Patel’s short story now seems to
belong “to a different [affluent] class” of people in contrast with the class that she and her family
identified with in Fiji (Patel 2020, 92). Apparently, she is “safe in the First World” of Australia
(Patel 2020, 92). In Fiji, her parents had made a meager living by cultivating wild sugarcane, a cash
crop introduced during the time of British rule. Yet, Australia also is environmentally penurious
because of climate change and the masculinist agencies that fund it. These masculinist agencies
or actions include colonization projects, both colonial (1788–1901) and postcolonial. In the Aus-
tralian capital city of Canberra, where the narrator now lives, the postcolonial manifestation of
colonial projects are projects of urbanization and industrialization that in effect entirely ignore the
interests of old Australian environments. The narrator lives in a small apartment “perched tall in
a skyscraper” on one of the main streets of the city (Patel 2020, 95). People refer to the city by a
“famous” term that no longer fits the city: “the bush capital’” (Patel 2020, 98). The word “bush”
in Australian cultural contexts means rural and remote areas, or part of the country that has not
yet been urbanized, industrialized, or otherwise overdetermined by human agencies. The bush
where Canberra sits was pushed to the side and has become arid and dry, “unable to absorb the
heat,” generated by the anthropogenic environs of Canberra, “a Legoland of buildings, apartments
towering to the sky, office blocks lining every street” (Patel 2020, 98).
The oldest people of Australia lived in ways comparable to those that the narrator in Patel’s
short story remembers as a child, when she was in Fiji; they lived with, not against, their country.4

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The oldest people of Fiji also had once lived with, not against, the environment. In Lautoka, Fiji,
the narrator’s old family home had been “surrounded by vegetation,” and “green fertile land”
(Patel 2020, 95). “[V]ines under the house crept up over the handrail of the front steps,” “the
grass was so thick, so soft, it was like carpet” and frogs and lizards peopled the gardens along
with human populations. “The environment was our home,” the narrator says (Patel 2020, 96).
“We did not fear it. We did not tame it,” she finishes (Patel 2020, 96). Patel’s story deconstructs
mainstream masculinist understandings of penury and prodigality and questions the masculinist,
anthropocentric and speciesist, kinds of human agencies that gave rise to apparently spectacular
new worlds, and climate change, and the extermination and marginalization of earthothers.
The most poignant passage in Patel’s cli-fi narrative, Displaced (2020), concerns a starfish, the
story’s principal ecofeminist trope. The narrator remembers when she was a child in Fiji fishing
with her father and grandfather, in the moment when her father is “leaning forward with a cry of
delight and scooping a starfish straight out of the water, holding it out for me to see” (Patel 2020,
104). The child wants to keep the marine animal, but the child’s father shakes his head and says,
“It belongs in the water” (Patel 2020, 105). These words reflect feminist forms action—namely,
caring for, conserving, preserving, and closely learning about what is. Such action contrasts with
more privileged forms of action, or masculinist action—namely, removing and transforming and
otherwise using beings and things in ways that do not evidently serve the interests of those beings
and things. The narrator’s father lets be, leaves alone, and minimally interferes with and acts on
the starfish. Starfish species are critical to and may even be “keystone species” of marine environ-
ments (Lamare 2021). When a keystone species becomes extinct, the entire ecosystem falls apart.
Extinctions and declines of keystone species have, therefore, a “disproportionately greater effect”
on the environments that they belong to (Lamare 2021). Patel’s narrative, “Displaced” (2020), em-
phasizes displacement in the figure of the starfish. The title of the short story is about humans who
displace other animals as well as about humans who displace other humans because of masculinist
agencies, forces that go by the euphemism of global warming and climate change.

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright (2006)5

The title of Wright’s novel, Carpentaria (2006), is an allusion to the Gulf of Carpentaria region
at the top end of Australia. It is a principal source of inspiration for the novel. Another source
of inspiration for the novel is Century Mine, an open-cut zinc, lead, and silver mine and mine
port facilities located in the northwestern region of Queensland on the southern Gulf of Carpen-
taria. Negotiations for the mine involving external, national and international, mining interests
as well internal, Gulf community, and other interests first began in 1991 (Scambary 2013, 187).
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and Queensland state mediators
were among the entities who earlier or later expressed interest in the project. Despite deep-seated
ambivalence about and vigorous opposition to the mine by many people, proponents of the mine
succeeded in gaining government approval for it. In 1997, an agreement was signed, the Gulf
Communities Agreement (GCA), by the Queensland Government, Century Zinc Limited (CZL),
and the Waanyi, Mingginda, Gkuthaarn, and Kukatj people (Scambary 2013, 187).6 The CGA
agreement is similar to the two other biggest mining agreements in the history of northern Aus-
tralia: the Yandi Land Use Agreement in the Central Pilbara, in Western Australia; the Uranium
Mine Agreement in the Kakadu region, in the Northern Territory (Scambary 2013, 187).
Wright’s cli-fi novel Carpentaria, is a First Nations author’s as well as an ecofeminist author’s
indictment of the kinds of mining agreements that stamp the three biggest of their kind in north-
ern Australia. They cover diverse First Nations countries. Wright’s First Nations Waanyi’s coun-
try is in what is now called the Northern Territory and the Gulf of Carpentaria, where there
also are massive mining operations. In representing her people and her language, Wright speaks

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for many people throughout the world who have fought and resisted colonial and postcolonial
mining projects. Those people include the First Nations people of North America. They are the
main subject of another chapter in the present anthology. In Chapter 19, Native American and
First Nations Literature and Ecofeminism, Benay Blend discusses several Native American authors
inclusive of Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Joy Harjo (Muscogee), Alicia Elliott (Mohawk), Kim An-
derson (Cree/Métis), and Louise Erdrich (Chippewa). Blend notes that Native American writers
critically shaped the discipline of ecocriticism and shifted its grounds, from an interest mainly
in white male North American authors of Anglo-European descent to an interest in writers of
other than Anglo-European descent and, specifically, an interest in First Nations writers. Blend
writes about First Nations authors who speak especially for the intersections between the female
and the natural world, and she focuses on one author, in particular, Louise Erdrich, and Erdrich’s
novel, Tracks, the third novel in a tetralogy. Through such memorable characters as Fleur Pillager,
as Blend argues, Erdrich portrays federal USA government legislation, inclusive of the infamous
Dawes Act of 1887, designed to weaken First Nations people’s traditions, cultures, and communi-
ties by separating First Nations people from and carving up and desecrating their country for the
purposes of mining it. Blend relates that subject matter to historical mining projects as well as a
current mining project. It refers to the controversial replacement of an oil pipeline (constructed in
the 1960s), the so-called Line 3 pipeline, that will carry oil from Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada,
to states in the Midwest region of the United States and cuts across the First Nations territory in
Minnesota. In commenting on this major pipeline and the grave environmental risks it presents,
Blend also comments on the ecofeminist activism of Lee Maracle, a Sto: lo First Nations woman
who spent much of her life actively resisting and writing about the colonial and postcolonial oc-
cupation of First Nations territory in what is now called British Columbia, Canada, an occupation
that was accompanied by almost completely unchecked resource extraction.
Blend’s ecofeminist reading of North American First Nations ecofeminist writers and activ-
ists highlights their role in drawing attention to the seizure and apocalyptic devastation of First
Nations territory by postcolonial powers inclusive of the fossil fuel and other resource extraction
industries. Alexis Wright has played a similar role in Australian Literature. Her novel, Carpentaria,
satirizes mining stakeholders’ definitions of and rationales for progress, projections of and asser-
tions about the future, and faith in the ability of the human to achieve more than any other species
or earthothers. Her satire complements other indictments of these mining agreements inclusive
of an essay by Victoria Herche and David Kern, entitled Corporate Interest and the Power of Mines in
Indigenous Writing and Film (2020), and Benedict Scambary’s My Country, Mine Country My Coun-
try, Mine Country: Indigenous people, Mining and Development Contestation in Remote Australia (2013)
(and, in particular, the chapter in it that is entitled “‘Achieving white dreams whilst being black’:
Agency and Ambivalence at Century Mine” [187–231]).7 In Wright’s fictionalized account of these
mining agreements, Century Mine is loosely disguised as “Gurfurritt International Mine.” This
epithet implicitly alludes to masculinist kinds of go-for-it acts, that is to say, acts of charging full
steam ahead with minimal interest in what is subordinated or pushed to the side and maximum
belief and optimism that what is projected will be a certain advance on what is.
“Desperance,” the main setting of Carpentaria, is a town situated on the Gulf of Carpentaria.
The town “belong[s] totally to the [Gurfurritt] mine” (Wright 2010, 98). Many of the residents
on the east side of Desperance (“Eastside” or “Uptown”) support the mine. Those who oppose
it mostly live on the west side of the town. At times they sympathize with and at other times
they despise the townspeople who “[run] down to the mine crawling on their stomach for a job”
(Wright 2010, 98). While the citizenry on both sides is a mix of masculinist (antienvironmental)
and ecofeminist (proenvironmental) action, the east-siders tend to represent masculinist action
more so than the west-siders. The former are led by Joseph Midnight, who claims his ances-
tors were in Desperance long before the “Johnny-come-latelies”—namely, the west-siders led by

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Norman Phantom’s people—arrived in “the Gulf ” (Wright 2010, 52). In Wright’s story, Norman
Phantom is the “rightful traditional owner” of the land where Desperance now stands (Wright
2010, 52). He and his supporters, who include his wife, Angel Day, and their son, Will Phan-
tom, most represent ecofeminist values. Mozzie Fishman is another west-sider who represents
ecofeminist values. He advocates sustainable, modest, small-scale practices in mining and other
resource extraction. He remembers “an old prospector” who mined the earth by “digging gravel
with a shovel” and how that was less harmful to the earth than the practices of the international
conglomerate Gurfurritt International Mine, which took over Fishman’s grandfather’s land 20
years earlier (Wright 2010, 136). Fishman’s and Phantom’s values correspond more with older,
marginalized, pre-1788 values than with post-1788, touted values.
Joseph Midnight, the leader of the east-siders, welcomes quick gain at the cost of long-term
loss and so welcomes the Gurfurritt International Mine. In return for signing agreements for the
mine to go ahead, “[a]ll part of [his] extortion racket with the government,” the state and private
mining interests pay him a handsome salary (Wright 2010, 51–52). They also pay him handsomely
to exterminate cane toads and (feral) pigs, animals that now thrive in northern regions of Australia
because of ecosystem collapses. Midnight, in the perverse tradition of masculinism, welcomes the
animals because he can earn money by killing them. He and other east-siders thus exacerbate the
problem of too many cane toads. “When [Midnight and other east-siders] heard that the govern-
ment was paying fifty cents for a cane toad…[t]hey could not stop wishing for the toads to arrive”
(Wright 2010, 53).
Another east-sider, Stan Bruiser, the mayor of the town of Desperance, also epitomizes mas-
culinist agencies. A former cattleman as well as a townsperson married to the mining industry,
Bruiser represents the darkest contours of both Australian pastoral—the farming of sheep and
cows—and industrial mining in Australia. Bruiser still hankers for his old work in the beef and
sheep meat industry, and he wishes he could capitalize on the live export of animals that has
transformed the industry since he left it. The live export of animals mostly refers to the shipping
of living cattle and sheep to overseas abattoirs, feed lots, sales yards, and the boots of people’s cars.
Bruiser wishes he could be involved in the recent live export trade, “[g]etting a thousand head
of cattle [onto a] ship” heading for countries where there is as big an appetite for cow and sheep
meat as there is in Australia (Wright 2010, 326). The live export trade, and the pastoral activities
of sheep and cattle farming of which it is part, not only are key drivers of global warming (Slezak
2018), but also cause great suffering to animals.
Bruiser, a “big, beefy, six-two, no fuss” man, “overshadow[s] the town with his power” (Wright
2010, 33), and he does so according to the nadir of every principle in the pantheon of masculinist
forms of action. Wright sums them up in these words, uttered with insouciance by Bruiser: “If
you can’t use it, eat it, or fuck it, then it’s no bloody use to you” (Wright 2010, 35). Bruiser brags
about his exploitation of Australian Aboriginal women. He is proud that he has “chased very
Aboriginal woman in town at various times, until he ran them into the ground and raped them…
[like] a bunch of cattle” (Wright 2010, 41). He is the only character described in the novel as an
“alien” (Wright 2010, 35, 312, and 223).
Carpentaria is about the loss of compassion tolerance, acceptance, and care for both human
beings and other than human beings as a result of the masculinist practices of big mining. That
content ties to global warming, the consequence of the privileging of masculinist principles and
practices. In the final chapters of the novel, Desperance is destroyed by a cataclysmic storm. The
ferocity of the storm represents relatively recent, anthropogenic, weather patterns, not pre-1788
predominantly ecogenic, meteorological phenomena. The weather, “the giant sugarbag man of
the skies” (Wright 2010, 37), has become demented, out of whack, because of the ways in which
governments privilege masculinist frameworks of progress and the masculinist agencies that these
frameworks support. They effectively legitimize the silencing and marginalizing of First Nations

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people and many other people who do not or choose not to fit with them, and the silencing and
marginalizing of other than predominantly human-made (anthropogenic) environments.
In Carpentaria, three local boys, aged between 10 and 12—Tristrum Fishman, his younger
brother Luke, and Arron Ho Kum—are falsely accused of killing a local neighborhood watchman
(Gordie). The boys are incarcerated, neglected, and left to rot in their cell, in the clothes that they
were wearing when they are first picked up by the police. Later, they are found dead, hanging
in their cells. Some people call their deaths suicide; others believe that the boys were murdered.
Their deaths haunt the novel, and they allude to the high rates of incarceration and suicide among
the oldest people of Australia. Bruiser pins the death of the boys on the local policeman, Constable
E’Strange. Also called “Truthful,” the police officer is vilified by the east-siders of Desperance,
who call him a “Black sympathizer,” and sympathized with by the town’s west-siders (Wright
2010, 347). Truthful also is found dead. As in the case of the boys’ death, only superficial inquiries
are made into the cause of his death. Brewster insinuates that Truthful became mentally deranged,
and, indeed, Truthful does seem to have a psychological breakdown, but this is because he is
shaken by the deaths of the three boys and the role that he played in their death. Brewster, as the
narrative strongly hints, is responsible for the deaths of Truthful and the three boys.
Kevin, the seventh and youngest child of Angel Day and Norman Phantom, especially rep-
resents the trampling of beings who are unwilling to or cannot fit with humans’ privileged mas-
culinist modes of living on the planet. The “beautiful last child who had inherited all the brains,”
Kevin has no prospects in Desperance because there are none there for him. He ends up, like many
of the youth, working in the mine. Unlike his brothers, Inso and Donny, “hulkily built men” who
are physically cut out enough to do mine work—in fact, they would have preferred to train to
become professional boxers—Kevin is more of a thinker. In the mine, he suffers a horrific accident
that renders him “an idiot” (Wright 2010, 109): “it was plain as day no prayers would undo the
damage” (Wright 2010, 109). He becomes an alcoholic, and wanders around the town. A gang of
east-side boys run him down at night in a car, using their “kangaroo spotter” (a powerful light
used to hunt and kill kangaroos) to corner him in the dark (Wright 2010, 112).
In the cli-fi narrative, Carpentaria (2006), Wright never abandons hope for ecofeminist endings
to the masculinist beginnings of big mining in Australia, but such hope hangs by a thread. Patel’s
and Law’s cli-fi narratives are equally bleak. “Displaced” (Patel 2020), about nonhuman as well
as human displacement as a consequence of climate change, reflects that our governments today
are doing little, or not enough, to halt climate change. Bu Liao Qing (Law 2020) predicts a future
where governments combat climate change merely by privileging a minority human population
and sacrificing the majority human population, and by installing authoritarian regimes. None-
theless, all three cli-fi narratives are important works of cli-fi, for they alert us to concerns that
much mainstream cli-fi seems to indulge in than to be worried about, concerns that are central to
ecofeminist theory and practice.

Notes
1 The ecocritic Peter I-min Huang (2021) makes a similar argument about a Chinese blockbuster cli-fi
novel by Cixin Liu, a trilogy entitled The Three Body-Problem. Huang’s argument is that in the first novel
in this trilogy, the three main characters in the novel that represent ecofeminist and other environmental
advocacy positions are disingenuously disparaged and reductively cast as ecoterrorists.
2 In the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014), editor Greg Garrard states that ecofem-
inism today is so wide in its interests that it longer can be discretely summarized or are difficult to
so summarize as being ecofeminism. Thus, with the exception of Stacy Alaimo’s “Feminist Science
Studies and Ecocriticism: Aesthetics and Entanglement in the Deep Sea,” Garrard does not include an
entry on ecofeminism in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, or no entry with the word ecofeminism in
the title. Yet, Garrard also singles out ecofeminism, along with deep ecology, as being the two areas of
ecocriticism that have contributed incalculably to it. Thus, he defends the omission in his anthology of

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ecofeminism (in the form of an entry that explicitly reflects this area of ecocriticism, ecofeminism (in
addition to deep ecology) by saying that precisely because ecofeminism (and deep ecology) constitutes
“the tacit knowledge base of ecocriticism” the explicit mention of ecofeminism is unnecessary (Garrard
2014, 5).
3 For a list of Australian cli-fi literature, see Climate Change Novels: Adult. The list includes Wright’s Car-
pentaria as well as another novel by Wright, The Swan Book. See, also, Henderson.
4 For this argument, see Gammage (2012) and Pascoe (2014).
5 All page number references for Carpentaria in this chapter refer to the 2010 edition published by Atria.
Carpentaria was first published in 2006 by Giramondo Publishing Company.
6 Disingenuous language in the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, signed in 1976, helped mining companies to
access Aboriginal land for the purposes of mining (Herche and Kern 2020, 235).
7 Wright’s interest in the mine includes the subject of one of the major fights against the mine, by Wright’s
Waanyi people, which took place in 2002 (Scambary 2013, 188 and 202).

References
Alaimo, Stacy. 2014. “Feminist Science Studies and Ecocriticism: Aesthetics and Entanglement in the Deep
Sea.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 188–204. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
“Climate Change Novels: Adult.” n.d. AustLit. The University of Queensland. Accessed December 13,
2021. https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/15321875.
Gaard, Greta. 2017. Critical Ecofeminism. Lanham, MD: Lexington (Rowman & Littlefield).
Gammage, Bill. 2012. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen
and Unwin.
Garrard, Greg. 2014. Introduction. In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 1–24.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Goodbody, Axel. 2020. “Cli-Fi – Genre of the Twenty-First Century? Narrative Strategies in Contem-
porary Climate Fiction and Film.” In Green Matters: Ecocultural Functions of Literature, edited by Maria
Löschnigg and Melanie Braunecker, 131–153. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Rodopi.
Goodbody, Axel, and Adeline Johns-Putra. 2019. Introduction. In Cli-Fi: A Companion, edited by Axel
Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra, 1–17. Oxford: Peter Lang AG.
Henderson, Caspar. n.d. “The Best Climate Change Novels Recommended by James Bradley.” Five Books.
Accessed December 13, 2021. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/climate-change-novels/.
Herche, Victoria, and David Kern. 2020. “Corporate Interest and the Power of Mines in Indigenous Writing
and Film.” In Ecocritical Concerns and the Australian Continent, edited by Beate Neumeier and Helen Tiffin,
235–249. London: Lexington, Kentucky (Rowman & Littlefield).
Huang, Peter I-min. 2021. “Chinese Sci-Fi and Representations of Eco-Feminists: Mad Women or Women
Warriors.” In Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature, edited by
Douglas A. Vakoch, 127–138. New York: Routledge.
Lamare, Miles. 2021. “Role of Starfish in the Ecosystem” (Transcript). Science Learning Hub – Pokap ū Ako-
ranga P ūtaiao. The University of Waikato Te Whare Wā nanga o Waikato, 2007–2021. Accessed April 4,
2021. https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/videos/41-role-of-starfish-in-the-ecosystem.
Law, Michelle. 2020. “Bu Liao Qing.” In After Australia, edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, 27–51.
South Melbourne, VIC: Affirm Press.
Pascoe, Bruce. 2014. Dark Emu. Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome, Western Australia: Magabala
Books.
Patel, Zoya. “Displaced.” 2020. In After Australia, edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, 87–105. South
Melbourne, VIC: Affirm Press.
Gaard, Simon C. Estok, and Serpil Opperman, 120–136. New York: Routledge.
Scambary, Benedict. 2013. My Country, Mine Country: Indigenous People, Mining and Development Contestation
in Remote Australia. Australian National University (ANU) E Press. Accessed April 4, 2021. https://press.
anu.edu.au/publications/series/caepr/my-country-mine-country.
Slezak, Mark. 2018. “‘Global Deforestation Hotspot’: 3m Hectares of Australian Forest to be Lost in 15
years.” The Guardian. Accessed May 20, 2021. www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/05/
goval-deforestation-hotspot-3m-hectaes-of-australian-forest-to-be-lost-in-15-years.
Wright, Alexis. [2006] 2010. Carpentaria. New York: Atria (Simon & Schuster).

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 45
SCIENCE FICTION AND
ECOFEMINISM
Deirdre C. Byrne

Introduction
In 1668, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published The Description of a New World,
Called the Blazing-World, in which a young woman is abducted and blown into polar waters, where
she crosses into a new world. The aliens who populate the new realm treat her kindly and take her
to their Emperor, who falls in love with her and marries her. She calls in one group of scientists
after another to teach her about their planet’s natural phenomena. The Worm-men, her natural
philosophers, explain that:

Nature is Eternal and Infinite, and her particulars are subject to infinite changes and trans-
mutations by vertue of their own, Corporeal figurative self-motions; so that there’s nothing
new in Nature, nor properly a beginning of any thing […] no part or creature of Nature can
either give or take away life; but parts do onely assist and join with parts, either in dissolution
or production of other Parts and Creatures.
(Cavendish 1668, n.p.)

Cavendish could not have suspected that her novel would inaugurate the genre of ecofeminist
science fiction. The Worm-men’s belief in one life as animating all living beings prefigures the flat
ontology of feminist posthumanism, which, as Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu argues in Chapter 34, is
based on relational coexistences and interconnections embedded within naturecultures (Haraway
2008). The parts that coexist, for Cavendish, as for feminist posthumanism, are not hierarchically
ranked, but are all vital to the well-being of the whole. At the same time, the Empress’s benevolent
exercise of power and habit of treating all living beings with respect articulate a fledgling feminist
view of the innate dignity of natural beings.
Cavendish was a prodigious natural philosopher who argued convincingly that matter is in-
telligent and self-propelling; she was the only woman to be invited to join the all-male Royal
Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (later the Royal Society), which her brother
John cofounded. The Blazing-World describes a woman-centered realm, where the Empress has
complete sovereignty, assisted by the Duchess of Newcastle (Margaret Cavendish). The idea of
sentient matter, which has close affinities with Spinoza’s monism, runs through the entire novel,
bringing it into the genre of ecoliterature, which is concerned with ecology, the study of the en-
vironment, our “oikos, ‘house, dwelling place, habitation’” (“Ecology” 2021).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-48 479

 Deirdre C. Byrne

James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster ecofeminist science fiction film Avatar is positioned at the
other end of cultural history. Avatar depicts the Indigenous Na’vi on the planet Pandora as hav-
ing blue skins with catlike patterns and living in a green, forested world. Neytiri, a young Na’vi
woman, is the spokesperson for their ecosystem, which is threatened by human miners. The Na’vi
believe in a goddess called Eywa, made up of the energy of all the planet’s living beings. Eywa
regulates the planet’s ecobalance, inter alia by monitoring birth rates. The Na’vi’s insistence on the
entangled nature of all life and their choice to live in respectful harmony with nature express a
distinctly ecofeminist vision.
Between Cavendish’s novel and Cameron’s film lie many novels, short stories, films, and other
ecofeminist science fiction texts. Before examining the genre’s development, I will explore the
key terms of this chapter: ecofeminist and science fiction. Radical feminist, Françoise d’Eaubonne,
coined the term “ecofeminist” in her 1974 book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or Death). D’Eau-
bonne holds patriarchy responsible for condemning the planet and humanity to death:

Enfin, en conclusion, c’est une urgence que de souligner la condemnation à mort, par ce
système à l’agonie convulsive, de toute la planète et de son espèce humaine, si le féminisme,
en libérant la femme, ne libère pas l’humanite toute entière, à savoir, n’arrache le monde à
l’homme d’aujourdhui pour le transmettre à l’humanité de demain.
(D’Eaubonne 1974, 11)

(Finally, in conclusion, it is urgently necessary to underline the death sentence, by this

system of convulsive agony, meted out to the whole planet and the human race, if feminism,
in liberating woman, does not liberate the whole of humanity, namely, does not tear the world
away from the man of today in order to deliver it to the humanity of tomorrow.)1

Her insistence that patriarchy oppresses both women and the environment made her the philo-
sophical mother of ecofeminism.
Since d’Eaubonne, “ecofeminism” has been used by theorists to refer to various predilections.
Radical and cultural ecofeminism are two significant schools of thinking. Both recognize that
patriarchal worldviews perceive women and nature as secondary terms in the binaries of men/
women and culture/nature, and they agree that this underpins patriarchal oppression of women
and nonhuman nature. However, they combat this oppression differently. Radical ecofeminism
strives to “delink” (Mignolo 2007) women philosophically, politically, artistically, and discur-
sively from nature. This, it argues, will free women of an oppressive patriarchal equivalence
and allow them to develop agency. By contrast, cultural ecofeminism regards the association
between women and nature as positive and, in some iterations, as an essential feature. Many cul-
tural ecofeminists draw on goddess worship and nature worship to strengthen the bond between
women and nature. The figure of “Mother Nature” features prominently in cultural ecofeminism
and is often criticized for being rooted in an essentialist view of womanhood and nonhuman na-
ture. Nevertheless, it is multivalently resonant, and may subtend respectful, even loving relations
with nonhuman nature, as Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman shows (Chapter 23). Nevertheless, as Giulia
Champion notes (Chapter 15), the trope of Mother Nature also holds colonial overtones, which,
decolonial feminists (rightly) argue, are ideologically questionable. As the example of Mother Na-
ture shows, ecofeminism enables a multifaceted approach to gendered human intra-actions with
the environment.
Ecofeminism responds to the actual state of society and the nonhuman natural world. It is
concerned to address environmental injustices (cf. Mies and Shiva 2014; Shiva 2002) and the
discursive, economic, spiritual, and material oppression of women (cf. Merchant 1983, Griffin
1984). It does not seem, at first, a good comrade-in-arms for imaginative writing, which addresses

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problems that may not yet have arisen. But this unlikely pairing is the source of ecofeminist sci-
ence fiction. Margaret Cavendish did not know that she was writing ecofeminist science fiction
when she penned The Blazing-World because the term had not been coined yet. “Science fiction”
would only appear in the 1920s in the United States with Hugo Gernsback’s magazine Amazing
Stories, dedicated to “scientifiction” (Brittanica n.d.), later to become “science fiction”, while
“ecofeminism” would take another half-century to emerge and would immediately become a new
movement. Likewise, Mary Shelley was unaware that Frankenstein – written in 1818 in response
to a dare from Byron, his doctor, and her husband Percy – would become the progenitor and
prototype of science fiction.
Science fiction has as many definitions as there are critics to write them. Gernsback believed it
to be imaginative writing that depicts the impacts of science on human beings and human soci-
eties. Darko Suvin holds that science fiction is distinguished from its cousin, fantasy, in ensuring
a rational basis for the “thing” that differentiates the presented world of a science fiction novel
from the world we live in. His word for this “thing” is novum, from the Latin “new”: a term that
recognizes the inventiveness of science fiction’s seemingly endless capacity to innovate, generate
and create. All the same, a work of fiction that appears to project into the future may end up re-
flecting back directly on the present, as Ursula K. Le Guin famously wrote: “Science fiction is not
predictive; it is descriptive” (1993, 151). Although it is commonly thought to be the literature of
the future, science fiction starts from present conditions and experiences, which it embellishes, ex-
trapolates upon, and extends imaginatively. It is, therefore, not surprising that the ­A nthropocene –
our current era, in which human acts have irrevocably shaped our planet’s fortunes and future –
has seen an explosion of science fiction and fantasy about environmental degradation. It is also
not surprising, as gender-based violence has come to dominate social media due to its escalating
prevalence globally,2 that recent science fiction centers on gender relationships. The result is a
burgeoning publication of ecofeminist science fiction.
Science fiction, as many theorists and critics have remarked, is not merely “escapist” literature,
although many scholars and lay readers see it this way. There is undoubtedly much poor-quality
science fiction, as Sturgeon’s Revelation tells us: “90% of everything is crud” (“Sturgeon’s Law”
n.d.). Sturgeon did not intend to damn the 90% of sub-standard science fiction, but to point out
that its mediocrity does not invalidate the other 10%. At its best, science fiction, according to
Pamela Sargent, is “the literature of ideas”:

Alone among our present genres it can show us a world which does not exist, has not existed,
but which could come into being. It can show us alternatives, many of which might be op-
posite to our presuppositions. It can mirror our thoughts, fears, and hopes about the future in
terms of literary experience.
(xxi)

Science fiction shares with fantasy the ability to revise history, reflect on the present and imagine
new futures, as Rhian Waller mentions in Chapter 46. This capacity to explore cognitively-based
alternatives – “which could come into being” – centers on science fiction’s ability to present
worlds and events that might or could become reality, but have not yet done so. These alternative
worlds and the works that depict them are explored in this chapter. Some of them evoke hope and
desire; others evoke aversion and fear.

Second-wave Ecofeminist Science Fiction

Second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s popularized the belief that women were pro-
foundly, even essentially, different from men. A prototypical text, Susan Griffin’s Woman and

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 Deirdre C. Byrne

Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978), often reads more like a poetic manifesto of sexual difference
than a scholarly argument, although supported by meticulous research. For example,

We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and
peach, we are air, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature.
(1, original emphasis)

Twenty-first century feminism can find much to criticize in this kind of writing. It is essentialist;
it homogenizes women; and it presupposes a naïve elemental bond between women and nature.
Nevertheless, there is great value in Griffin’s advocacy of rethinking the despised second terms
in the male/female and the culture/nature binaries, and indeed, completely deconstructing the
binaries. The ideas of Woman and Nature have permeated ecofeminist science fiction, especially
that published during second-wave feminism.
One of the earliest ecofeminist science fiction novels is Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of
Time (1987). This novel may or may not be science fiction. Read one way, it is a record of Con-
suelo Ramos (“Connie”)’s hallucinations. She is a poor, middle-aged Mexican woman, driven
mad by her daughter’s abuse at the hands of her boyfriend. Read another way, it is a time travel
narrative, which allows Connie to experience two futures. One is the utopia of Mattapoisett,
where there is no gender hierarchy and society is arranged to allow everyone to experience sexual
fulfillment, meaningful work, and enough leisure to create, think, philosophize, and labor in
the communal farms. Mattapoisett is a small village of peasants, who grow their own food and
eat mostly “plant proteins” (Piercy 1987, 70). Connie’s guide, Luciente, is a plant geneticist who
understands her work as part of an ecological whole. She explains that it is possible to change the
weather in Mattapoisett, but “‘[i]n biosystems, all factors are not knowable.’ First rule we learn
when we study living beings in relation […]” (Piercy 1987, 97). The key to Luciente’s world is “in
relation.” Humans understand themselves as connected in vital, entangled ways with the nonhu-
man natural world, where life forms and phenomena are similarly interwoven.
Mattapoisett differs from Connie’s world in three ecofeminist ways. First, they have abandoned
cities and live in small villages, where there are no multi-storey buildings and no densification
of housing; the population is strictly controlled. The second significant feature of Mattapoisett is
that it is a gender-egalitarian society, as signalled by the use of the gender-neutral pronoun “per”
to refer to all people, whether male or female. Their gender equality hinges on reproduction no
longer being women’s exclusive role. Luciente explains in a speech that recalls Shulamith Fires-
tone’s The Dialectic of Sex:

Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in re-
turn for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause
as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males would never be
humanized to become loving and tender. So we all became mothers.
(Piercy 1987, 105)

This view of reproduction has been controversial ever since the 1970s. Nevertheless, Luciente
and Bee, who present the idea to Connie, are convinced that an important part of an egalitarian
society is sharing parenthood among men and women instead of women claiming exclusive rights
over their children.
Piercy’s final ecofeminist innovation is to have all the adults in Mattapoisett contribute
to the labor of growing, preparing and serving food, where nobody is constrained into a
particular role in public or private life. People have as many lovers (called “sweet friends”) as
they like, and there are no legal obligations for lovers to maintain their commitments to each

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other. It is the world that the United States of the late 1970s could become if women contin-
ued fighting for sexual and gender equality, and if the nonhuman natural world were treated
with care and respect.
Connie, like many feminists in our world, does not like the idea of removing birth from
women. To show her where these sentiments would lead, Piercy has Connie travel into a second
future, where women’s breasts, buttocks and thighs are grotesquely oversized so that they can
appeal sexually to the men who keep them on sex “contracts” (Piercy 1987, 288). Connie meets
Gildina, a sex machine who hates the idea of birthing a child. In her world (as in ours), exploiting
women goes hand-in-hand with exploiting nonhuman nature. Food is manufactured out of “coal
and algae and wood by-products,” because only “richies” can afford to eat “[s]tuff from […] live
things” (Piercy 1987, 296). This gives a clue to the economic inequalities that may come into exis-
tence should Connie and the people in her world make poor choices about their relationships with
each other and with the nonhuman natural environment. Woman on the Edge of Time opposes a
utopian and a dystopian ecofeminist future. Readers are explicitly asked to align their actions with
their preferences for the future when Luciente tells Connie that her actions determine whether
Mattapoisett comes into being or not (Piercy 1987, 197).
Piercy presents the struggle for gender equality as interwoven with the struggle for environ-
mental justice. By contrast, Sally Miller Gearhart’s short story cycle, The Wanderground: Stories of
the Hill Women (1985), offers a politics of gender segregation. The Hill Women have forsaken city
life in order to seek freedom from men’s violence after they realized that men and women living
together can only result in violence. Nonhuman nature joins their renunciation of rape, which is
the most far-reaching form of violence meted out by men to women:

Once upon a time […] there was one rape too many. Once upon a time.
[…]
The earth finally said ‘no’. There was no storm, no earthquake, no tidal wave, no volca-
nic eruption, no specific moment to mark its happening. It only became apparent that it had
happened, and that it had happened everywhere.
(171–172)

For Gearhart, nonhuman nature inherently sides with women. On the other side of the binary,
men are indivisibly associated with violence. In this way the text accepts, even reinforces, the
binaries of men/women and culture/nature in its cultural ecofeminism. Significantly, Gearhart
founded a separatist community called “Women’s Land,” similar to the one described in The
Wanderground, in Willits, California, where she welcomed “fine women, cats, dogs, racoons, deer,
birds, and the occasional bear and human male with her stories, her music-making, and her
imaginative appreciation of the diversity of the human experience” (Cole 2021, n.p.). Gearhart’s
gender separatism may seem incompatible with an “appreciation of the diversity of the human
experience.” Nevertheless, “Women’s Land” brought the political and spiritual ecofeminism of
The Wanderground into the “real” world, melding artistic and political activism.
Gearhart’s women have renounced unnecessary violence, except in self-defence. In “The Re-
member Rooms,” three men come into their territory on a “Cunt Hunt” (174, original emphasis)
to find women to rape. They surprise two of the Hill Women, who are separated from their
friends, but “eleven strong women” neutralize the threat. The rescuers pick up the men’s guns,
but do not use them; they simply gesture for the men to leave. This memory reminds women who
watch it of the reasons for their separatist existence and the difficulties of establishing it. It also
reinforces the text’s emphasis on women as a collective, united against male violence. Community
and solidarity among women, Gearhart implies, are indispensable components in creating and
maintaining social change.

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 Deirdre C. Byrne

As though to reinforce the text’s emphasis on collectivity, the Hill Women have many names
and are of diverse ages and ethnicities. They have developed extraordinary abilities, such as telep-
athy and the ability to fly, apparently with the support of natural energies. The women’s psycho-­
physical similarities distance The Wanderground from conventional realist fiction’s deep investment
in individualism and the heroic or antiheroic journey towards or away from self-realization.
Multiple award-winner Ursula K. Le Guin’s whole oeuvre reflects her concern with environ-
mental ethics. I agree with Chan Kit-Sze Amy’s claim in Chapter 31 that Le Guin’s renowned
The Left Hand of Darkness is an ecofeminist text. Chan aptly relates The Left Hand of Darkness to
Claire Colebrook’s concept of slowing down human “progress” in order to benefit the environ-
ment. Here, though, I will focus on two of Le Guin’s works that are more overtly ecofeminist:
her Hugo Award-winning The Word for World is Forest (1972, hereafter WWF) and Always Coming
Home (1985, hereafter ACH). WWF was written in the wake of the Vietnam War’s devastation of
landscape, civilians, and soldiers. It takes place on the planet Athshe, which the Terrans call “New
Tahiti” (Word 9), which is completely forested. The Athsheans are greenish-brown, fur-covered,
intelligent alien beings. Earth/Terra has run out of wood, so a space mission has been despatched
to bring some home from a planet that has an excess of it, or so the colonizers believe.
WWF is structured around a stark philosophical dichotomy between an exploitative, extractive,
linear, masculine perspective that sees Athshe as nothing more than a resource to be plundered,
and a communal, eco-friendly, digressive, feminine view of life as an interwoven web, where all
beings are valuable and all contribute to the health of the whole. Captain Davidson epitomizes the
first view. In a disagreement with the ecologist Kees, he says: “I like to see things in perspective,
from the top down, and the top, so far, is humans. We’re here now; and so this world’s going to
go our way” (Word 14). Later Davidson reflects: “[Kees] didn’t see that you’ve got to play on the
winning side or else you lose. And it’s Man that wins, every time. The old Conquistador” (Word
15). Davidson’s use of “Man” contrasts strikingly with the description of women as “breeding
females” on the novel’s first page, leaving the reader in no doubt about his gender priorities. Le
Guin explains how the intersection of rampant (today we would say toxic) masculinity and the
exploitation of nonhuman nature informed the novel:

[I]t was becoming clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and grainlands
and the murder of non-combatants in the name of “peace” was only a corollary of the ethic
which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP, and the
murder of the creatures of the Earth in the name of “man”.
(Le Guin 1993, 146)

The entanglement of war, capitalism and masculinity is one face of the intersectionality Chan
explores in Chapter 31.
By contrast to Davidson’s brand of masculinity, the Indigenous Athsheans view life as an in-
terwoven living network of energies, where all life forms depend on all the others. A conscious
trance called “dream” is their preferred method of knowing and thinking, as opposed to the
phallogocentric rationality of Western thought. Dreams allow them to access each other’s and
the planet’s emotions and wishes through metaphor, and by this method of thinking collectively,
they learn to resist the colonizers. WWF becomes a parable, instructing readers of the dangers of
ill-advised, disrespectful engagements with nonhuman nature.
Le Guin’s later ecofeminist novel, ACH, breaks with fictional forms to embrace multiple
genres. In fracturing the conventional linear narrative, it “restories” its own fictive past – the
extractivist epoch we are currently inhabiting – and privileges heteroglossia over monovocal nar-
rative, in a similar way to Karen Ya-Chu Chang’s discussion of postmodernism in Chapter 35. It
includes fiction, poetry, drama, metadiscursive commentary, an invented language, a script, and

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music. Possibly sparked by Le Guin’s anthropological background, the work offers a richly layered
portrait of a people who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern
California” (1986, n.p.). Its central purpose, similar to Woman on the Edge of Time, is to educate
the reader about the urgency for human beings to develop respectful, reciprocal and harmonious
relationships with nonhuman nature. Although ACH does not allude directly to climate change,
it conforms to the principles of feminist action identified by Iris Ralph in Chapter 44, when she
discusses feminism’s passionate preference of cooperation over competition in climate fiction.
Le Guin, whose affinity with Taoism is well known, based the structure of ACH on the Taoist
yin-yang symbol. Yin and yang, in Taoist thinking, symbolize passive and active; feminine and
masculine; cold and hot; dark and light; slow and fast. Le Guin’s essay, A Non-Euclidean View of
California as a Cold Place to Be, contrasts yang and yin utopias:

Utopia has been yang […]. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progres-
sive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot.
Our civilization is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or
eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal.
[…]
To attain the constant, to end in order, we must return, go round, go inward, go yinward.
What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, partic-
ipatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold.
(1989, 90)

ACH is a yin utopia, encapsulating the qualities Ralph describes in Chapter 44 as belonging to the dark,
feminine, weak, cold pole of the yin-yang symbol. Its characters, the Kesh, are few, since most humans
have succumbed in an environmental apocalypse. Those who remain are extremely mindful of their
own entanglement with animals and plants that are used for food. All living beings consume resources,
and in a world of great scarcity, human beings kill only at need. This explains why a member of the
all-women Blood Lodge must be present to recite this poem whenever an animal is killed for food:
Your life ends now,
your death begins.
Beautiful one,
give us our need.
We give you our words.
(Le Guin 1986, 90)

Blood is a potent symbol of life, as Joan Slonczewski’s first novel, Still Forms on Foxfield, acknowl-
edges by depicting the Quaker settlers as dependent on alien commensals who use the iron in the
humans’ blood to remain alive. Women are biologically more acquainted with blood than men,
so, in ACH, they preside over the killing of animals for food.
Hunters hunting animals or harvesters gathering plants for food utter an abbreviated version of
the poem: “Beautiful one,/for your death my words!” (Le Guin 1986, 93). Repeating the poem
reminds everyone who inflicts damage or death to acquire food of the absolute proscription on
killing without need.
The Kesh have developed an extended cosmology called the Serpentine Codex, which allo-
cates all living and nonliving things to nine “Houses”. Inhabitants of a House may be living peo-
ple or animals; plants; celestial bodies; and even weather phenomena, which are all considered and
treated as “people”. Le Guin’s ecofeminist affinities are evident in the use of “people” for all these
phenomena. Similarly, Pandora explains that “[t]he word commensal has been used to avoid the

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condescending, patronising overtones of the word pet, and because it better translates the Valley
term, which means people living together” (Always Coming Home 419, original emphasis). “Com-
mensal” is derived from the prefix “com ‘with, together’ + mensal (genitive mensalis) ‘table’” (On-
line Etymology Dictionary, “Commensal”), as “companion” is derived from “cum panis”, which,
Donna Haraway points out, means “to eat together” (xxii). Both “commensal” and “companion”
emphasize that all living beings “eat” at the same table.
The entangled network of energies that make up the Kesh universe is captured in a vision of

[…] the universe of power. It was the network, field, and lines of the energies of all the beings,
stars and galaxies of stars, worlds, animals, minds, nerves, dust, the lace and foam of vibration
that is being itself, all interconnected, every part part of another part and the whole part of
each part, and so comprehensible to itself only as a whole, boundless and unclosed.
(1986, 290–291)

These words express an all-encompassing vision of existence as ecology. The vast network of
connections is life itself, which cannot be confined to an individual or community, but resides in
relations between them. This provides the philosophical grounding of ACH as an ecofeminist,
“yin” utopia.
Shortly after ACH, Judith Moffett published Pennterra, which presents a more male-oriented
world than ACH or The Wanderground. Pennterra recounts how a group of Quaker settlers on the
planet Epsilon Eridani II (loc. 663), which they call Pennterra, are joined by a second group from
Earth, which has been severely damaged by humans (loc. 1337), prefiguring the degradation of
Earth in the Anthropocene. The Indigenous beings on Pennterra are called hrossa, after CS Lew-
is’s aliens in Out of the Silent Planet (46–49). Lewis’s hrossa are seal-like and more than 2 metres
tall; Moffett’s hrossa are froglike and “repulsive” to human eyes. Like Lewis’s aliens, they possess
superior abilities. Their capacity, like Gearhart’s Hill Women, is empathy: they project emotion
and information across space and across species. Empathy capitalizes on feelings, long considered
to be the preserve of women, and invokes cognitive and corporeal attention to the needs of others.
The hrossa’s message to the settlers is that the planet itself will destroy them if they do not remain
in one valley, eschewing the use of machinery as well as the reproduction of more children than
can live in their area.
Karen Barad’s new materialism replaces “interaction” with “intra-action” (2007, 128) to high-
light the mutable and performative nature of life, and especially the fact that agents in relationship
emerge in and through their entanglement. Whether Moffett knows Barad’s work or not, the hros-
sa’s empathic communication strikingly foregrounds the centrality of connection on Pennterra.
The Quakers acknowledge that they cannot live on the planet without changing it: “Wherever
we go, even without the mass destruction we’d make with machines, we’ll terraform the planet
willy-nilly, just as we’re terraforming the valley” (loc. 988). “Terraforming” involves making an
alien planet Earth-like; it assumes – from the colonizers’ perspective – that Earth is the prototype
of all planets, just as Man is the “measure of all things” (Braidotti 2013, 28). While Kim Stanley
Robinson’s Mars trilogy details the project of terraforming Mars for human habitation, Moffett’s
Pennterra explores how human beings cannot help terraforming. While Robinson revels in the fact
that human inventiveness can reshape an entire planet, Moffett warns that worlds are entangled
systems of intra-actions, where life forms cannot help but affect others, often in damaging ways.
When the newcomers on Pennterra announce that they intend to occupy the entire planet,
the hrossa are deeply dismayed and let the settlers know that this course of action will result in
their deaths. They further explain that this will not be caused by them, but by the planet itself.
The Quakers debate this, asking themselves, “Is there any sense at all in which an entire planet
might be said to be alive, literally?” (loc. 1558) The answer reveals the depth of human ignorance:

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“Pennterra’s got an ecosystem—or is an ecosystem—which makes it alive in a sense. But […] I

don’t know of any way an ecosystem could take purposive action” (loc. 1558). These views express
a modified humanist perspective on nonhuman nature: since it does not have a central intelli-
gence, it cannot make decisions or engage in “purposive action”. Barad’s new materialism insists,
by contrast, on the agential nature of matter. Whether sentient or not, matter possesses agency
within its web of entanglements. Barad’s theory has affinities with Pennterra’s depiction of those
who acknowledge and limit their involuntary terraforming effects on the world, as well as those
who refuse to see life as entangled.
Fellow Quaker, Joan Slonczewski, has written several works of ecofeminist science fiction.
Her most famous novel is probably A Door into Ocean, which won the John W. Campbell Me-
morial Award. A Door into Ocean is structured around the binary oppositions of rock (hard solid)
and water (soft liquid). The planet Valedon is a world of hard rock, while Shora, entirely covered
by ocean, is all softness and water. Shora is inhabited entirely by women, who call themselves
“Sharers” because they speak of all actions, except death, as “sharing.” The novel recounts how
the Sharers defeat a mission from Valedon that is bent on subduing them, using no weapons but
their faith in the webs of interdependency between all life-forms and their long practice in passive
resistance. The entangled and interdependent nature of ecology is more evident on and in the
ocean, where the liquid element dissolves borders between beings that believe themselves separate,
than on rocky Valedon, where “stonecutting” is one of the most honoured professions. When the
Sharer, Merwen, is incarcerated in a Valan prison, she holds steadfastly to her freedom as well as
her mission to share with the Valans. She explains to her gaoler:

Fear is your ultimate weapon, not mine. Mine is sharing: to share my own soul with yours,
until the mask falls from your eyes. When you come to see that your survival is inseparable
and indistinguishable from mine, then we both will win.
(Slonczewski 1987, 374)

The Valans serve a supreme ruler, aptly named the Patriarch for his masculine style of leadership.
Merwen enacts a different kind of leadership, which Le Guin would call “yin,” being deliberately
weak, silent, cold, passive and still. Nevertheless, her simple refusal to yield prevails, and her in-
terrogator has to concede defeat and back away from the planned subjugation of the ocean planet.
Slonczewski’s insistence, throughout A Door into Ocean, that all life forms are connected and
reflect each other to each other, make the novel a powerful expression of ecofeminist principles.

Later Ecofeminist Science Fiction

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the hope in ecofeminist science fiction born
of second-wave feminism has dwindled in the face of deepening ecocide. It is hardly surprising,
therefore, that Anacristina Rossi’s ecofeminist testimony, The Madwoman of Gandoca (2006), is bit-
terly critical of the government officials who, in 1992, were set on destroying the wildlife refuge
of Gandoca in Costa Rica for profit. Rossi’s testimony is a paean to the vulnerability and beauty
of biodiversity. By contrast, her three science fiction short stories, “Abel” (2013), “La Incompleta”
(2015) and “La Esperada” (2019) reduce biodiversity to an absolute minimum. Set after an envi-
ronmental apocalypse, the stories center on Lalia, a woman who has inexplicably been spared the
fate of most other humans when the planet’s oxygen ran out. In “Abel,” Lalia steadfastly refuses to
reproduce with her own brother, out of horror at the thought of incest, and out of a need to spare
a sick planet any more children. However, by the end of “La Esperada,” Lalia has formed a part-
nership with another survivor of the environmental disaster, a man called Andrés. They agree to
maximize their miraculous survival skills by developing amphibian lifestyles. She has renounced

487
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reproduction, in a representational choice that echoes humanity’s failure to serve as effective stew-
ards of nonhuman nature (Mackey 2021, 1).
In the current context of deepening ecological disaster, it behoves human beings, as Le Guin
notes in A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be, to fashion different ways of in-
teracting and intra-acting with nonhuman nature. It is increasingly clear that approaching non-
human nature as a “standing-reserve” (Heidegger 1977, 17), which is devoid of agency and exists
purely for humans’ convenience and pleasure, does not work. This is similar to the increasing
prevalence of gender-based violence, which makes it ever more obvious that patriarchy is not a
viable approach to other humans. Ecofeminist science fiction shows readers “what might be” as
well as “what we would not want to be” and asks questions: Do we want to allow our planet to
destroy us? Are we going to persist in a rigid gender binary or are we going to develop more “yin”
methods of cooperation? Our answers may determine the fate of our species, even of our planet.

Notes
1 As the first English translation of Le féminisme ou la mort is only due for release in 2022, this translation
is my own.
2 See, for example, the global social media trends #MeToo; #NotInMyName; #MenAreTrash; and #Say-
HerName (ElSherief, Belding and Nguyen 2017).

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 46
FANTASY AND ECOFEMINISM
Rhian Waller

Introduction
This chapter provides a broad overview of ecofeminist issues in adult Western fantasy literature,
arguing many of the defining features of modern fantasy link to gender, conceptions of nature
and the gendering of imaginary spaces. As fantasy is a disparate genre, the chapter is organised
chronologically, and case study texts used to explore patterns of androcentrism and counter-­
androcentrism in these works.
Due to the sprawling nature of the fantasy genre, this chapter focuses on particularly prolific
and influential writers. The geography of the genre, even when confined to Anglophone, West-
ern texts, is blurred. Its relationship with the interlinked politics of sex and ecology, are likewise
complex and sometimes fuzzy. This chapter’s purpose is to provide a general map, with reference
to landmark works, which may encourage further, more detailed exploration in the future. Draw-
ing on the seminal writing of authors such as George MacDonald and J. R. R. Tolkien, it traces
themes of nature, wilderness and environmental degradation through an ecofeminist perspective
informed by the work of ecofeminist writers (e.g., Plumwood and Gaard). The aim is to present
an exploration of how ecocritical themes evolve and are reframed through successive generations
of fantasy writers. This will provide an insight into how the natural world(s) are reimagined in
relation to the feminine, and into the interrelationships between the politics of gender, landscape
and the female body in fantasy.
Fantastical landscapes are a mainstay of fantasy literature. Historically and culturally, the fe-
male body has frequently been linked with and likened to the landscape. Mountains are imagined
as mammaries and valleys as vulvas, in a practice that echoes across time and culture, running
from Lao Tsu to Freud (Oppel 2005, 167). This practice is not neutral. The landscape, in the
patriarchal, colonial imagination, is passive. Colonialists conquer land, “imagined as the abused
body of a woman” (Schaffer 1990, 93). The landscape, in the patriarchal, colonial imagination,
is passive and “inevitably” female (Porteous 1990, 77). Núñez contends that gender-based, fem-
inised language is an instrument strategically used to maintain colonial political and patriarchal
hierarchies (2015). This phenomenon also occurs in reverse. Women are imagined as land, their
bodies as passive, stationary sites, for instance, the “moss” of public hair discussed by Porteous,
and the mountainous cartographies of the female form in the poetic imagination (Westphal 2007,
67). The problematic aspects of this should be evident; if the land is constructed as passive and
open to exploration and exploitation, it follows that so too are female bodies, and vice versa. As
a side note, this chapter will return to the threads of colonial and postcolonial discourse that run

490 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-49

 Fantasy and Ecofeminism

through fantasy literature, but for far a deeper discussion of postcolonialism and ecocriticism, see
Chapter 33 by Aslı Değ irmenci Altın.
Sometimes disregarded as a form of escapism (in common with the Gothic, as Anja Höing
outlines in Chapter 38), fantasy fiction has been defended by writers like Neil Gaiman, who
points out that escapist fiction is not, in fact, a retreat from reality. Instead, it offers “knowledge
about the world… [it] give[s] you weapons, give[s] you armour: real things you can take back into
your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape” (Gaiman October 15, 2013).
Further to that, fantasy – in this instance fantasy novels for adult readers – arguably offers a unique
avenue for ecofeminist investigation. As Discworld author Terry Pratchett once put it, fantasy is
unique among genres as, “with fnantasy [sic] it is easier to bend the universe around the story”
(Lspace.org, n.d.). By its nature, fantasy is unbound from the constraints of realist literature, al-
lowing authors to fashion landscapes, cultures and worlds that operate beyond the systems and
norms that shape Western experiences of sex, gender and real-world biomes. In short, fantasy has
the potential to explore unexamined norms from an outsider's perspective, to present alternative
histories, offer fruitful alternatives to a damaging and restrictive status quo, and to imagine worlds
where the structures of patriarchy, tradition, religion and capitalism are deconstructed or, more
radically, are never constructed in the first instance. At the same time, fantasy is written within
the ontology shared by the author; fantasy may be fantastic, but it also reflects the realities within
which it is conceived.

Early Fantasy
Modern fantasy fiction is built on folklore, legend, saga, romance, mythology and borrowed
influences from beyond Europe and North America. These sources feed into proto-fantasy narra-
tives, such as Gullivers Travels, (Swift 2010) and Millenium Hall (Scott 1995) which provide fertile
analytical opportunities for ecofeminist scholars. For instance, Swift’s floating island of Laputa
provides a revealing and brutal fable of a hierarchy upheld by weaponised environmental depriva-
tion, while the sentient horse-shaped Houyhnhnm provides a model of non-human intelligence,
which, Deyab (2011) argues, makes a strong case that Swift advocates for a moral commitment to
the natural world. However, Swift’s work also exhibits disturbing misogyny, visible in Gulliver’s
neglect and visceral revulsion toward his wife (Brown 1990, 427). Scott’s female utopia is likewise
difficult to frame as wholly radical; it combines both a revisionist gyno-centric version of society
and an inherited, restrictive and extremely anti-sexual form of Christianity.
Phantastes, by George MacDonald, has been cited consistently as the first true fantasy book
written for adults (Carter 1970) (Mills 2018). It is a useful place to start, as it shows a preoccupation
with both nature and womanhood, and, in some ways, displays some of the potentials of the fan-
tastic to subvert or invert the norm. As Burt suggests, MacDonald’s work exhibits an “inextricable
connection between Nature and the fairy story” as MacDonald believes human imagination is
“entirely reliant upon the forms of Nature for its own imaginings” (2016, 91).
Phantastes is a picaresque tale in which the protagonist, Adorno, is drawn into the fairy realm,
wandering with little apparent purpose until he encounters his “ideal” (Salvey 2008, 19) in the
form of the Galatea-like White Lady, whom he reanimates from marble. MacDonald’s fairyland,
which is made up of shifting and varied biomes, is thickly populated with female figures, many
of whom exhibit and exert particular forms of power, although their roles are limited to three
archetypes: the motherlike nurturer–protector, including the hamadryad-like Beech tree, the
object of desire and the villainess, including the seductive Alder-tree and the ogress. Although
Adorno’s desire initially carries echoes of a misogynistic Pygmalion perspective, in the course of
his various adventures, the figure of the White Lady is literally and figuratively fleshed out as she

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gradually transforms from inanimate stone. Unlike the ivory figure of Galatea, she is presented as
a thinking, feeling individual – not a passive, perfect, erotic gift.
Although it draws on Ovidian metaphors that link natural features (rock) with female pas-
sivity and malleability, the notion of static geography is problematised in Phantastes; the forest is
alive and animate, and in the case of the Alder and the Beech, its constituent parts have purpose
and intent, both malicious and benign. Both the women and the landscape of fairyland act; the
appearance of a tiny fairy woman, followed by the verdant forest unfolding itself, uninvited,
within Adorno’s mundane bedroom space signifies the beginning of the narrative. Salvey argues
that, within this fantasy realm, nature is: “Not merely a method of discovering ideals, the natural
world is inherently valuable” (2008, 21). It follows this inherent value extends to women, who,
very early on, are referred to in close relation to nature; the first voice encountered by Adorno
and the reader belongs to a fairy, and “recalled a sensation of twilight, and reedy river banks, and
a low wind” (MacDonald 1858). The constructed interrelationship of woman and nature, as noted
above, is not necessarily benign, but in the case of Phantastes, man does not conquer the land. In-
stead, it is the land that transforms the man, and as he journeys through fairyland Adorno becomes
more receptive to feminine wisdom and also more connected to nature (Burt 2016).
As fantasy literature moves into the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, its supernat-
ural and fantastical elements fuse with adventure narrative structures, pulling the narratives away
from picaresque whimsy toward a more muscular, linear mode infused with colonial Victorian sen-
sibilities. For instance, the science-fiction/fantasy world that features in Edward B ­ ulwer-Lytton’s
The Coming Race (1871) is discovered through systematic exploration rather than being happened
across by chance. However, this hybrid work highlights one potentially destabilising feature of
both genres; whether artificial and alien intelligences, or fairies, dwarfs, elves, talking animals or
animistic spirits, speculative genre fiction may confront readers with non-­human intelligences.
On occasion, this is deployed to reinforce existing paradigms, but these tropes can also be used
to question them.
In contrast to the inferior-Other (the woman, the colonial subaltern, the animal), the valorised
Other may appear as a physical or intellectual equal or superior, as in the case of the Vril-ya. This
has the potential to invert or disrupt the accepted “truth” of social hierarchy. For instance, in
Bulwer-Lytton’s “gender reversal” (Braid 2003, 172) science-fiction/fantasy, Vril-ya women are
physically strong and sexually dynamic. However, they are still ruled by a patriarchal system and,
further, are constrained by their limited environment, which, at the end of the novel, leads them
to be reframed as a threat: the “coming race” of the title.
This hint of latent (womanish) monstrousness emerges as an exaggerated and retrograde aspect
of later texts, many of which reduce virtuous women and the natural world to prizes the (white,
male) protagonist must secure. The establishment of female power over the white male avatars
of imperialism is almost inevitably associated with tyrannous magic or deceit, and is charged
with danger and masculine anxiety. This is the case with Ayesha of She: A History of Adventure
(Haggard 1887), whose dangerous, age-obscuring beauty casts her as a foil not only to Ustane,
the tragic heroine of the same work, but also to the physically repulsive and “malevolent” Gagool
from King Solomon’s Mines, who leads the treasure-hunting protagonists into mortal peril (Hult-
gren 2011, 646).
Both women and landscape are explicitly eroticised in Haggard’s work, notably in Allan Quar-
termain’s description of the “Sheba’s Breasts” mountain range (Haggard 1885, 38), as noted by
McClintock (1990, 114). Female power and sexuality, like the savage and hostile territory of the
desert, jungle and mountains, must be survived and mastered. Further to that, Murphy con-
tends, feminine power is framed in Haggard’s work as unnatural: “Ayesha’s experimentation is
a violation not only of woman’s ‘nature,’ but also of the force of nature itself ” (2001, 46). The
framework of fantasy allows women to claim autonomy by becoming “sorceress and scientist”

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(Reid 2015, 357), but the narrative frames this as transgression from the rightful (subordinate)
position of women within a rational, natural hierarchy. At the end of She, the “error” of Ayesha’s
­a rtificially-obtained status is rectified and Ayesha is symbolically punished when she is stripped of
her immortality and ages and dies in an instant.
While the unnatural woman appears within fantasy literature as a threat that must be extin-
guished, the notion of the virtuous woman as “closer to nature” contributes to a dualistic concep-
tualisation of gender within which men occupy a position of technological/rational mastery and
women are relegated to the “sharply separate, even alien lower realm” of nature, “whose domina-
tion is simply ‘natural’, flowing from nature itself and the nature(s) of things” (Plumwood 2003,
4). The paralleling and interlinking of the passive female body/fruitful landscape and malevolent
female power/hostile territory reaches its apotheosis in the pulp novels of writers like Edgar Rice
Burroughs, whose fantasies frequently throw white male heroes into a “primeval wilderness”
(Burroughs 2001, 47) populated by “degenerate” peoples (Biggs 2013, 18), whether the degraded
alternative-history post–WWI Europe, Tarzan’s jungle, or the hollow earth of Pellucidar. Here,
the phallocentric customs and of exploration are formalised and mechanised. When the adven-
turers of Vril literally penetrate the Earth’s crust to gain entry to the labyrinthine, gutlike tunnels
of this undiscovered society, their entry is relatively gentle compared to the forcefulness of the
pointed, drill-tipped cylinder used to break into the hidden world of Pellucidar (Burroughs 1914).
While Biggs offers a much more nuanced view of Burroughs’ work than can be reflected here,
he owes that “Western representations of colonized women and their societies as exotic and erotic
has been a feature of the imperialist project since the sixteenth century, and features prominently
in Burroughs’ fiction,” (14) and that many of Burroughs’ “plots are driven by a series of rescues of
the heroine by the protagonist” (7), whose role is limited to a helpless victim of (racially coded)
rape. Likewise, the ecologies of Burroughs’ works are either objects to be desired and defended
by the (white, male) protagonist, or hostile territories that must be penetrated and conquered.
Burroughs’ work valorises the acquisitive, patriarchal rationalism of the early 1900s while simul-
taneously working to obscure the damaging results of imperialist expansion; as Cameron Stewart
notes in the introduction to The Human Body—The Land that Time Forgot, “In the real world, the
indigenous inhabitants of Caprona might well suffer a similar fate of dispossession and cultural
repression, as did the indigenous peoples of the world during the period of Western colonialism”
(2007, 117). By extension, the exoticized landscapes are also rendered ripe for exploitation. While
early fantasy positioned the protagonist as malleable and the landscape as transformational, these
narratives depict the protagonists as able to traverse and transform the landscape to their liking,
and in doing so, rationalise the very real asset-stripping projects of empire.
These ideological patterns carry through the various permutations of Western fantasy fiction
that bud out in the first half of the twentieth century, although other tropes and archetypes also
emerge. For instance, while the female figures of Robert E. Howard’s sword-and-sorcery stories
are outnumbered by men, and eroticisation and threats of rape underpin many plots, the woman-
warrior is codified as a staple of modern high and pulp fantasy. The sorceresses, swordswomen
and priestesses of the Hyborian Age manifest as anything between good, evil and ambiguous,
although the shadow of She hangs over the Conan series, particularly in the final installment, Red
Nails, where the sexually ambiguous queen Tascela, who resides in an artificial, domed city, seeks
to sacrifice Conan’s companion, Valeria, to restore her youth. Valeria herself is a complex figure;
as an adventurer and distaff counterpart to Conan, she adopts traditionally masculine behaviours
– including the role of avenging slayer, when she stabs Tascela through the heart in retaliation
for her near knife-point sacrifice. She is described in both (hetero)eroticised and gender-blurring
terms, as “tall, full-bosomed and large-limbed”, (Howard 1936, 211–212). She is thematically
linked to sea and sky (note the linguistic interrelationship between her origin as an Aquilonian,
and the Latin aquila, the eagle). However, in opposition to the traditional coupling of nature and

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passivity, Valeria’s nature-associations evoke impressions of movement and freedom. She, there-
fore, embodies both reductive gender stereotypes – the woman observed, a literary equivalent
to the object of the cinematic male gaze (see Mulvey 2003) - and inhabits a counter-position to
the established assumption of female/natural passivity; here, skyscape and seascape become met-
aphorical and physical signifiers of female autonomy. This complication of the thematic cleaving
of femininity/nature supports Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman’s assertion in Chapter 23 that associating
womanhood with nature is not always a method of oppression.

Fantasy in the Mainstream

In contrast with pulp fiction, women are conspicuously absent from one of the defining works of
high fantasy. The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954, like the Hobbit before it, features an intensely
homosocial cast. As Viars and Coker point out, there are “more named horses than women” in the
thousand-page epic (2015, 48). Nevertheless, Tolkien’s work provides fertile ground for ecofem-
inist analysis. The implied egalitarianism of elf-society, whose most prominent leaders include
Galadriel, one of the mightiest elves, and the refusal of Eowyn, the shield-maiden, to submit to
the gender-expectations of the horse-lord Rohirrim people, fuel feminist re-readings of his work,
and Schroeder’s assertion that, although Tolkien is not egalitarian, “his construction of gender did
not… participate in the same constructions of gender as the boy’s books [possibly Burroughs and
Haggard’s] with which it was linked” (2015, 76) is fair.
Tolkien’s work also offers an (incomplete and flawed) challenge to androcentrism by fore-
grounding non-human sentient species. Although the mythical taxonomy of Tolkien’s Middle
Earth is still hierarchical, the placement of man somewhere further from the top of this hierar-
chy indicates an interesting half-step away from androcentrism. Nor is Tolkien an apologist for
technologically-driven mastery of the environment. It is clear the wilderness of Middle Earth
has value beyond the economic. The environments within The Lord of the Rings and its ancillary
works are responsive sites; Mordor is a blighted, lightless, lifeless land poisoned by the evil of the
Dark Lord Sauron, while the agrarian Shire mirrors the pastoral nature of its hobbit inhabitants.
More than this, though, the landscapes and non-human intelligences of Middle Earth have agency
and motivation; Old Man Willow and the Ents are animate trees who, like the Alder and Beech
of Phantastes, move according to their own agendas. The shapeshifter Bjorn, in The Hobbit, blurs
the lines between man and animal. Tolkien appears to imply, as the environs of Isengard and
the Shire are deforested and undermined, that industrialisation is a visible manifestation of evil.
Tolkien’s work poses a question; would an empowered environment allow itself to be exploited?
It also provides an answer to the Ents’ victorious, concrete-cracking counter-attack against the
forces of Isengard.
The tremendous success of Lord of the Rings, estimated to have sold in excess of 150 million
copies (Reuters 2007), precipitates an expansion of fantasy literature. It is not possible here to enu-
merate or follow every branching sub-genre, but it is clear that the fantasy literature of the latter
half of the twentieth century features increasingly diverse voices, including writers working from
emphatically feminist perspectives. These include Ursula K. Le Guin, whose high fantasy Earthsea
series tackles issues of both gender and ecological balance.
After noting her wizards of Roke, who appear in the first Earthsea volume (1968), are uni-
formly male, LeGuin increasingly explores ideas of domestic and public power, the relationship
between humans and their environment, and the physical and systemic oppression of women.
When the cycle of death and life in Earthsea is threatened, the wizard Sparrowhawk must sacrifice
his power to restore balance. In Tehanu (LeGuin 1992) the climax of the story comes when the tit-
ular character, a young girl disfigured by her abusive father, discovers her latent dragon-form in a
transformative sequence that acts as a powerful metaphor for the reclamation of power and liberty.

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These are narrative antitheses to the myths of masculinity common to previous fantasy literature,
wherein triumphant acts of violent mastery lie at the crux of the narrative.
Around the same time, Angela Carter’s literary fantasy reworks fairytales and reshapes
­m aster-narratives into subversive, richly-descriptive challenges to the patriarchal orthodoxy. Like
Tolkien, her environments are active sites of resistance and counter-transformation. By way of a
single example, in The Passion of New Eve, which fuses science fiction with magical realism, the
protagonist Eve/lyn undergoes a journey that offers a radical counterpoint to the womb-diving
adventures of Burroughs’ Pellucidar cast. The underground chambers of the American desert are
not passive spaces waiting for exploration. Instead, they facilitate extreme physical and psycholog-
ical change as Evelyn is transformed into Eve, in the first instance physically within an artificial
womb, and in the second as a form of psychic rebirth within an organic, magical-natural cave
space. Here, the walls “ingest” her, suggesting geographical agency (Carter 1977, 184).
The fantasy-inflected works of Jeanette Winterson likewise bind femininity with nature in
ways that subvert the older, patriarchal model of passivity. For instance, Sexing the Cherry (1989),
introduces the monstrous-fantastical figure of the Dog Woman, who possesses supernatural size
and strength. The narrative reveals that she is the counterpart to an exhausted, mercury-poisoned
environmental protester who imagines herself able, in the form of the Dog Woman, to scoop up
and dispose of the politicians and industrialists who condone and profit from environmentally
damaging activities. This time-slipping, body-hopping discourse, Doan argues, allows Winterson
to “challenge and subvert patriarchal and heterosexist discourses and, ultimately, to facilitate a
forceful and positive oppositional critique” (1994, 138), which includes, I would argue, a rebuttal
to the damage-obscuring imperialism of early twentieth-century fantasy. The consequences of
environmental exploitation are shown and also experienced through the physical degradation
described by the modern-day Dog Woman, whose presence and actions disrupt the valorisation
of “masculinist action” (see Iris Ralph’s Chapter 44) present in much fiction, instead of centring a
preservative and restorative form of “feminist action”.
The 1970s and 1980s also see the mainstream emergence of comic and spoof fantasy, including
the works of Terry Pratchett. Pratchett recognises that, with the exception of the (often villain-
ous) sorceress, magic in much fantasy literature is a two-tiered system, wherein men are allowed
access to the so-called “high magic” of wizardry, while women are restricted to the domestic
hedge-magics associated with witchery and nature. He first addresses this in the third Discworld
novel, Equal Rites, where prospective wizard Eskarina is told by a patronising member of the mag-
ical Unseen University that: “High magic requires a great clarity of thought, you see, and wom-
en’s talents do not lie in that direction. Their brains tend to overheat” (1987, 158). This narrative
recalls Plumwood’s notion of hyperseparation, reinforcing the notion that “women’s ‘closeness to
nature’ is mainly a product of their powerlessness in and exclusion from culture, and from access
to technological means of separating from and mastering nature” (2003, 32).
Pratchett depicts Eskarina shattering the glass ceiling of wizardry, but he also explores natu-
ral, female-coded magic; the Witches sequence of novels showcases both the subtle applications
of witchery in healing and defence, and its potential to affect national politics in Witches Abroad
(1991) and produce spectacular deviations from nature, including shunting a kingdom forward in
time by more than a decade in Wyrd Sisters, (1988). Pratchett breaks down the fantastical forms of
sexual dimorphism wherein women are linked to “earthier” models of magic and men to “high”
magic (Sawyer), but he does not devalue female-coded magic in doing so.
The Discworld itself is an arena of radical social struggle as women and other sentient races fight
for human and non-human rights. The series reads as an extension of Tolkien’s partial decentreing of
humanity, but also as a response to Tolkein’s antipathy to industrial progress, his focus on the pres-
ervation of idealised wild spaces and corresponding lack of focus on social equity. Pratchett’s work
evokes, celebrates and sometimes anthropomorphises (thereby embodying) natural processes, in

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addition to exploring scientific and mythic conceptualisations of nature. This occurs overtly in The
Last Continent (1998), which references both the First Australian’s concept of dreamtime, and also
provides a comically irrational version of the evolutionary process. In the Discworld universe, magic
and technology operate independently and also as analogues to one another; for instance, thaumic
(magical) energy possesses the powerful and dangerously mutagenic properties of nuclear energy.
However, Pratchett’s work is not overly concerned with environmental preservation or ex-
ploitation. In general, the societies of the Discworld move along the same path as modernising
Western economies as they acquire steam power and forms of mass communication alongside
feminism and goblin equality. This occurs in a way that decouples intersectional feminism from
radical ecological activism and drives head-first into the “myth of modern progress”, discussed by
both Ariel Salleh (2014, ix) and Michelle Deininger in Chapter 42 of this volume. However, given
this is a world populated by animate stones and thinking trees, it may be Discworld ecologies may
self-regulate against over-exploitation, as they include, for instance, “rocks that suddenly stand
up and tear your arm off because you’ve just stuck a pick-axe in their ear” (Pratchett 1993, 58).

Contemporary Fantasy
The concepts of gendered magic and responsive ecologies are explored further in millennial and
post-millennial fantasy literature. The works of Megan Ogden, writing as Robin Hobb and Megan
Lindholm, are useful waymarkers, as her novels provide examples of both the increasingly popu-
lous urban fantasy subgenre, for example, Wizard of the Pigeons (1986) and ecologically-­conscious
high fantasy, particularly in the Realm of the Elderlings and the Soldier’s Son sequences. Like China
Mieville’s “new weird” novels, and the underworld fantasies of Neil Gaiman, whose novels draw
sympathetic focus to the often ignored and maligned inhabitants of city biomes – rats, insects and
dispossessed, homeless humans – Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons offers alternative takes on natural
magic. The (male) protagonist draws his power from positive interactions with flocks of “vermin”,
linking him to an avowedly non-pastoral, anti-idealised conceptualisation of nature. He is also
loaned access to “women’s magic” (3) which proves vital to defeating the rapacious antagonist. It is
worth noting here that urban fantasy itself offers a counterpoint to the traditionally male preserve
of high fantasy, while there is now far greater diversity of voices in mainstream fantasy literature,
urban fantasy is written, in the majority, by women (Crisp 2017). The emergence of primarily
­female-authored and female-centred urban fantasy (as noted by Ekman 2016) sits in sharp contrast
to the hyper-masculinity of earlier swords-and-sorcery work, and could be read as a radical at-
tempt by woman writers to claim fantastical a space not usually regarded as “natural”.
Both of Ogden’s high fantasy sequences hinge on the threat or remediation of ecological cata-
clysm and social imbalance. The Realm of the Elderlings series provides critiques of patriarchal tra-
dition in the Liveship trilogy (Hobb 1999), wherein the protagonists grapple with various forms of
male violence and gender-based disenfranchisement, and also visions of a more egalitarian society;
in the Farseer trilogy, women rulers and warriors are unremarkable, and one pivotal and sympa-
thetic character actively plays with ambiguities of sex in ways that question gender constructs
while profoundly shaping the narrative. The Elderlings series as a whole deals primarily with the
reintroduction of dragons as rivals to humans; almost uniquely, this is framed as a vital rebalanc-
ing of the natural hierarchy. In the Soldier’s Son trilogy (Hobb 2008), the colonial and industrial
progress of human society is challenged by the Speck, a shamanic forest-race who are spiritually
and physically interconnected with their home. It is a nuanced narrative, and neither the Speck,
who resort to biological warfare, nor the rigidly hierarchical human characters, are written as
deserving of a final victory; instead, balance and reconciliation are sought.
In common with Pratchett, Ogden’s work provides examples of reactive and proactive nat-
ural forces. It is clear, in both the Elderlings and Soldier’s Son novels, that undomesticated zones

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impact both human and non-human culture and physicality; like the mutagenic magic of the
Discworld, the natural magics of both Ogden’s imagined worlds inform cultural identity (the
plainspeople and the Speck are defined by their sources of magic) and shapes the minds and
bodies of characters who may transform, willingly or unwillingly, through ritual in the case of
the Speck or interspecies symbiosis in the case of the Elderlings, by taking on nonhuman char-
acteristics. This appears to be a response to the tendency of some fantasy literature, in common
with elements of children’s literature, to “deny that the dependency between humans and their
natural surroundings is mutual” (see Anja Höing’s Chapter 41). These transformations are not
always welcomed, but Ogden deliberately positions the concept of both male/female dualism
and nature/human dualism as, at best, as brittle social constructions and, at worst, as sources of
active and destructive antagonism.
Ogden’s contemporary, G R R Martin, the bestselling author of the grimdark A Song of Ice
and Fire series (2011), displays a more allegorical vision of ecofantasy. Martin has publicly drawn
parallels between his narrative, wherein a series of power factions squabble as the threat of climate
catastrophe looms, with the real-world politics of climate change (Miller 2018). This, arguably,
places the work within the first category of cli-fi outlined by Iris Ralph in Chapter 44. Here, on
full display, is a self-conscious deconstruction of the masculinist “divide and rule” power struc-
tures identified by Ralph. Yet, beyond the extended criticisms of how women and minorities are
represented in both the book series and its televisual adaptation, Martin’s is expressly devised to
demonstrate the impact of high-level politicking and warring on the smallfolk of his world. Yet
Westeros and Essos are seen almost exclusively through the eyes of royals and aristocrats.
Further, unlike the magical Long Night, which is not caused by the warring aristocrats of
Essos and Westeros, real-world climate change is anthropogenic. Therefore, while the warning
may be timely, the analogy itself breaks down. Despite this, Martin’s evocation of dragonfire,
necrotic winter and female power and disempowerment likewise warrants deeper ecofeminist in-
vestigation. Critical attention is now being paid to the gender politics of the series (e.g., Schubart
and Gjelsvik 2016) and its social-ecological representations (Nahornava 2020). The ecofeminist
aspects of this world likewise deserves attention, particularly as the titular “fire” finds its locus in
the blood and body of Daenerys, the dragon queen.
It is the case that, beyond these core texts, historic and contemporary fantasy authors use the
form in radical ways. For instance, The Deep (Solomon and Diggs 2019) fuses mermaid mythology
with the terrible realities of slavery, which are profoundly linked both to racialised and gendered
violence and to exploitative control of natural spaces. Historical fantasy has also been harnessed
to complicate the relationship between science in relation to the natural world. For instance, in
A Natural History of Dragons (2014), Brennan presents scientific processes as neither the preserve of
the patriarchy nor inimical to the preservation of nature and magic. Instead, they are pivotal to
developing an appreciation for and understanding of (fantastical) life and to ensuring the survival
of dragonkind. These and other texts represent the ecofeminist potential of fantasy literature.

Conclusion
Western adult fantasy fiction provides ample space for deeper and more detailed ecofeminist anal-
yses than can be attempted here. At their most radical, fantasy texts present powerful revisionist
views of history, reflections of the present and visions of the future. Its narrative infusions of magic
and non-human intelligence, and its flexibility in imagining political and social systems, allow
fantasy literature to reify unorthodox ways of being, and to explore alternative relationships with
and between women and the natural world. It also, as evidenced in the works of Burroughs and
others, has the potential to reinscribe restrictive hierarchical norms. Ultimately, the tropes of fan-
tasy are both powerful and malleable: like magic spells, they can be cast for good or ill.

497
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 47
TRAVEL WRITING AND
ECOFEMINISM
Lenka Filipova

Introduction
The genre of travel writing is a hybrid one with fluid aesthetic boundaries. Carl Thompson
notes that travel writing has a “highly protean nature” as it “encompasses forms as diverse as the
field journal, investigative report, guidebook, personal memoir, comic sketch and lyrical reverie”
(Thompson 2016, xvi). While this inherent diversity makes travel writing notoriously difficult to
define, it also provokes fruitful debates about what exactly makes this genre distinct. In addition,
it draws attention to the wide variety of concerns travelogues can address, inviting us to ponder
relationships of and between different places and their human and non-human members. In recent
decades, alongside globalization and the increasing circulation of populations, objects, ideas and
values, travel writing has received growing scholarly attention, as it stimulates a critical examina-
tion of questions of mobility and movement, cultural hybridity, and issues concerning social and
environmental justice.
Despite its long history and periods of immense popularity, travel writing only started to attract
the attention of scholars in the 1980s. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst offer one explanation for
this scholarly turn:

The impetus for travel writing studies as a discipline itself came in the 1980s when a ­counter-
traditional wave swept through the humanities. In literary studies, interest began to turn
from the canon to ‘minor texts’, alternative voices and petits récits in a war against grand
narratives. […] travel writing proved especially adaptable and responsive to the application of
cross-cultural, post-colonial, gender and globalization studies.
(Kuehn and Smethurst 2015, 1)

Given the inclusion of “minor” and “alternative” voices in travel writing, as well as the broad
variety of issues that it can concern, the relative lack of ecofeminist accounts of travel writ-
ing may seem surprising, as environmentally-inclined travelogues tend to have a lot in common
with ecofeminism. Besides ecofeminism’s intersectional approach to understanding and correct-
ing eco-social problems (see Chan Kit-sze Amy’s Chapter 31), it is also opposed to “Western
heroic ethics” which, as Marti Kheel argues, runs “counter to one of the most basic principles
of ecology, that everything is interconnected” (Kheel 1993, 258–259). By contrast with heroic
ethics’ focus on isolated and powerful, and individual agents, ecofeminism strives to uncover the
entanglement of environmental and social relations. Travel accounts informed by ecofeminist

500 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-50

 Travel Writing and Ecofeminism

perspectives not only contest hierarchies created along the lines of, and connections between,
“racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, speciesism, and the environment” (Gaard 2011, 26), but
also challenge instances in which elements of particular landscapes or places are disconnected from
each other or removed from broader contexts. At the same time, while one of the major concerns
of ecofeminism is to dismantle different forms of patriarchal oppression that cause or contribute
to environmental problems, such as those related to hegemonic masculinity (see Lydia Rose’s
Chapter 30), it avoids dogmatic theories or prescriptive approaches to the study of travelogues and
narratives more broadly. Instead, it attends to questioning underlying assumptions, dualisms and
domination, utilizing insights from fields such as environmental studies, feminism, postcolonial
studies and material studies.

Travel and Nature Writing: Landscape Aesthetics and Ecofeminism

One of the obvious objects of study in ecofeminist approaches to travel writing is hybrid works
of travel and nature writing. Michael P. Branch suggests that the term “nature writing” refers to

nature representation that is deemed literary, written in the speculative personal voice, and
presented in the form of the nonfiction essay. Such nature writing is frequently pastoral or
romantic […], and is often in service to an explicit or implicit preservationist agenda.
(Branch 2001, 91)

Branch’s emphasis on nature writing as predominantly pastoral or romantic is reductive as it

disregards less obvious spaces, such as urbanized areas and sites of ecological pollution, as well
as places manipulated by humans more broadly. Likewise, not all nature writing has historically
been invested with a “preservationist agenda”. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for
instance, nature writing, while often connected to some form of travel, was informed by forms
of aesthetics that were insinuated into actual landscapes and some of which were charged with
ideologies of extraction and domestication, as well as cultivation of perceived deficiencies of the
natural world. Yet it is precisely for this reason that the early works of travel/nature writing are
worth exploring through the ecofeminist lens as some of them also challenge received norms and
anticipate ecofeminism.
Eighteenth-century travel writing reflected related practices in the exploration of the globe,
natural history, and landscape art. As such, it was instrumental in producing what Paul Smethurst
refers to as “topographies of nature”, a term that he uses to denote “metaphorical representations
of the natural world, as well as to physical landscapes, plantations, gardens and the countryside”
(Smethurst 2012, 5, emphasis in original). In other words, travel writing from the period signifi-
cantly contributed to the creation of nature as a representation. In this respect, the late eighteenth
century witnessed a growing divide between humanity and the natural world brought about by
the creation of scientific taxonomies and other abstract systems, which led to a studied detach-
ment from the natural world. This divide was also caused by fashionable attitudes towards the
environment, and both of these causes were facilitated by and expressed in the growing popularity
of the picturesque, the sublime and common perception of nature as a utility. Elisabeth A. Bohls
explains that while the aesthetic of the picturesque, for example, formed and became dominant
in this period, it “endured into the nineteenth century, and established conventions and practices
still fundamental to tourism” (Bohls 2015, 246). The picturesque as a mode of representation was
not only an aesthetic ideal; it also entailed an a priori attitude to the natural world, serving a va-
riety of ideological functions, such as the commodification of landscape for profit, be it aesthetic
or financial (Leask 2002).

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Yet the assumption that the natural world is inherently in need of improvement and cultiva-
tion, and that its resources can be exploited without restraint was challenged in the works of some
women travellers from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, albeit to different de-
grees. Anne Radcliffe’s Observations during a Tour to the Lakes (1795), when compared to William
Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, for example, dissents against the ideology of improvement and
commodification, and provides instead a more environmentally sensitive approach to the land-
scape. Although there is “insufficient environmental or economic basis in eighteenth or even early
nineteenth-century England for a sharp binary opposition between wildness and development”
(Heringman 2004, 233), Radcliffe’s rendering of place can be understood as proto-ecofeminist
for its critique of mining in particular. Her imaginative revision of the Lake District depicts the
mining landscape as pitted and scarred, implicitly rejecting the rapid development of resource ex-
traction. Moreover, she associates the inhospitality and greyness of the mining site with a broader
system of exploitative and invasive extraction practices. Heather Frey argues that Radcliffe’s de-
piction of these issues, along with her critical observations of her “native” land and her ability to
assert the traditional masculine aesthetic judgement, is an important “precursor of today’s ecofem-
inism” (Frey 1997, 165). Yet Radcliffe also challenges the presumptions of a masculine subject of
travel and exploration, as well as masculine taste and order imposed on the landscape.
Another highly gendered aesthetic mode of representation in the eighteenth century, the sub-
lime, was typically associated with what Anne K. Mellor describes as “masculine empowerment”
(Mellor 1993, 85). Mellor foregrounds the implicit masculinity in the sublime of male Romantic
poets, and contrasts it with the “feminine” sublime in travel accounts by Radcliffe, as well as
poetesses such as Susan Ferrier, Helen Maria Williams and Sydney Owenson. In the work of
these authors, the anxiety of the male sublime is replaced by an experience of coexistence and
co-participation in nature, which, as Mellor notes, is marked by a sense of “participation” in
both human community and the natural world (Mellor 1993, 103). Similarly, in Recollections of
a Tour Made in Scotland (1803), Dorothy Wordsworth, a formidable walker, is both unassuming
in the face of the sublime and critical of the picturesque frame. As Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman
points out in Chapter 23, English Literature and Ecofeminism, Wordsworth disrupts conventional
constructions of nature by paying acute attention to the material qualities of the non-human
word. Taylor-Wiseman adds, pace Josephine Donovan, that Dorothy Wordsworth challenges the
work of her brother William who imposes symbolic order on the natural world for the signifying
purposes of his poetry. In contrast, Dorothy focusses on the ontological status of things that she
observes, foregrounding the notion of the materiality of the world (Chapter 23). Relatedly, in
Chapter 39 on Romantic literature, Kaitlin Mondello discusses both Edmund Burke’s gendered
concepts of the sublime and beautiful and William Wordsworth’s highly masculinized sublime.
Mondello shows how these notions have been challenged by both Romantic female writers and
feminist scholars (Chapter 39).
Yet Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel writing poses challenges to more than just the picturesque
and the sublime. Kerry Andrews observes that Wordsworth also pays a considerable amount of
attention to her experiences as a walking woman and the “material circumstances” that afforded
her the possibility to walk and travel for pleasure at a time when women were often stifled by
domestic duties (Andrews 2020, 70). By participating in and reporting on their outdoor recre-
ation, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft and other women travellers exert independence in a histori-
cally masculine space and defy traditional one-dimensional definitions of femininity. In this way,
their travel accounts challenge the conventional pitfall of mapping women as having a mysterious
connection with the earth, which, as ecofeminists suggest, is precisely what allows the physical
world to be repeatedly abused and exploited. Mary Mellor explains that seeing women as inher-
ently connected to the natural world “undermines the struggle that they have waged against the
way the identification of women with nature has been used to justify women’s subordination”

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(Mellor 1997, 2). The writing of male explorers from this period is marked by the development
of an exclusively male ego through and against wild nature, and it side-lines the extensive history
of women’s more intimate approach to the natural world. Works by Radcliffe and Wordsworth,
therefore, branch out from more traditional forms of the genre which tend to focus on represent-
ing majestic landscapes and later come to dominate what conventionally constitutes the landscape
in general. In this respect, ecofeminism argues that the exclusively male ego, which is put into
opposition with the natural world, needs to be substituted with a more relational subject that is
potentially also transhuman.
An example of more recent travel accounts that contest dominant narratives of distance from
and mastery of the natural world is Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (1977). Gillian Carter
argues that while writing about her travels in the Cairngorm Mountains, Shepherd describes a
way of engaging with a place that is more common for “a native dweller rather than a traveler,
tourist or scientist passing through a region”, and adds that it “alludes to a repeated engagement
with a single landscape that is an important part of the author’s everyday space” (Carter 2001, 27).
Shepherd’s writing refrains from using the passive language of science and does not aestheticize
landscapes, eschewing detached views of the world and unsettling habitual means of experiencing
the landscape in the discourse of tourism. For the mainstream traveller, Elizabeth Bohls writes,
“the picturesque substitutes imaginative for real possession as a central principle in aestheticizing
land” (Bohls 1995, 92). Shepherd, however, does not link vision with possession. Instead of using
the picturesque as an imaginative possession of the landscape or distancing herself from it, her
writing focusses on experiential relations between places and people and actively engages with
them. As such, The Living Mountain provides a representation of individual places in their specific-
ity so that embodied experience and discursive practice become inseparable and challenge abstract
and disembodied approaches to the land.

Wilderness and Travel: Ecofeminist Rewildings

Other more recent examples of travel and nature writing often combine the tropes of wilderness
and the “inner journey” of the traveller. Travel narratives of “inner journeys” approach travel
as a form of spiritual experience that enables the traveller to discover the regenerative power of
the natural world, often invoking “nature” as a powerful force that drives the natural world and
provides a sense of redemption and personal renewal. A classic of this genre is Terry Tempest
Williams’ Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991), in which the author interlaces her
mother’s diagnosis and development of cancer with both the tests of atomic bombs at a test site in
Nevada, and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Utah. William’s narrative
is an example of a travelogue that emphasizes stasis rather than mobility, and provides a detailed
representation of a particular place and its spatiotemporal relations. Peter Hulme notes that even
though travel is hardly possible without some sort of movement, travelogues are often marked by
a tension between “[m]ovement and place” (Hulme 2009, 132). While movement engenders the
“risk that impressions will be superficial”, it also opens the traveller’s mind to new perspectives
and ways of seeing (Hulme 2009, 132). A lack of movement, on the other hand, stems from com-
pulsion to “know more and more about less and less, to go deeper and deeper” (Hulme 2009,
132). Williams’ travelogue falls into the latter category as it foregrounds a detailed knowledge of
the place. Upon learning that six other members of her family have also dealt with cancer as a
result of the nuclear tests, Williams condemns the destruction imposed upon both women and
the natural world. Yet her observations of the environment depict a journey of spiritual change:
“A new contract was being drawn by the women, who understood the fate of the earth as their
own” (Williams 1991, 288). Having found unity with the land and allegiance within a human
community, the protagonist is capable of finding a way to regeneration in spite of the destruction

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imposed upon both humans and natural habitat. However, one also needs to note Williams’
problematic symbolic association between women and wild nature. Cultural critics such as Val
Plumwood and Kate Soper have pointed out how such gendering of nature implies that both
women and the non-human are driven by wild forces demanding social control, and Plumwood
and Soper foreground the need for a more nuanced nature-sceptical discourse (Plumwood 1993;
Soper 1995). Interestingly, K. M. Ferebee’s Chapter 48, Autobiography and Ecofeminism, discusses
the new subgenre of life writing called material memoir which is concerned with kinds of illnesses
that have an environmental component, and focusses on Williams’ Refuge as an example of this
subgenre (see Chapter 48).
Other instances of travel writing that merge memoir and wilderness address how narratives
of wildlife preservation have been tied to policies of inclusion and exclusion that bound both
land and people. Wilderness has been historically represented both as a masculine space and as a
concept erasing differences in class and race. Kevin DeLuca and Anne Demo argue that “white
wilderness” (DeLuca and Demo 2001, 550) is a construct grounded in various cultural ideologies
of whiteness which has been crucial in the process of constructing environmental knowledge. In
Black Faces, White Spaces (2014), Carolyne Finney also suggests that class and race biases plague the
notion of wilderness and create narratives that feed into stereotypes and ideologies which “can
lead to exclusion from places […] that are thought to be inclusive” (Finney 2014, 2). Relatedly,
Lauret Savoy’s essay “Untold Stories of National Parks” examines how far the U.S. National Park
Service has come in acknowledging this troubled aspect of its history (Savoy 2016). Even the dis-
course of ecofeminism historically tended to leave out specific groups of women by essentializing
the woman to a white woman (Sturgeon 1997), which is also one of the concerns of Asmae Our-
kiya’s Chapter 29, Gender Essentialism and Ecofeminism. One of the early and perhaps most visible
works to address these issues is Evelyn White’s influential essay Black Women and the Wilderness
(1999). White speaks about her anxiety in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains: “My genetic memory
of ancestors hunted down and preyed upon in rural settings counters my fervent hopes of finding
peace in the wilderness” (White 1999, 1064). Because of the enslavement and brutal mistreatment
of African Americans in the past, she is still coping with this knowledge today, in addition to be-
ing targeted as a woman. As such, her essay foregrounds how white hegemony has excluded Black
Americans from recreational enjoyment of nature and challenges the mainstream U.S. ideology of
wilderness as a space claimed to be accessible to all citizens equally.
Another example of travel writing concerned with the anxiety of travelling as a solo African
American woman traveller is Rahawa Haile’s essay Going It Alone (2017). Haile, who identifies
herself as a queer African American woman, reports on her experience of hiking the Appalachian
Trail, commenting on her discontent while observing Confederate flags in towns close to the trail
and experiencing hatred of Muslims when she is confused for one while wearing her headband as
a headscarf. Yet in spite of the fear she has to deal with, she also speaks about her family’s long tra-
dition of experiencing nature as a positive force, which runs counter to the dominant exclusion-
ary narrative of both white and masculine wilderness. Her writing suggests that Afro-American
histories of wilderness merit more attention from both the academic community and the public.
Likewise, queer bodies in the environment, as they are impacted by cis-gendered, heterosexist
social restrictions, need to be paid more attention in the ecofeminist discourse. In this respect,
Ourkiya points out in Chapter 29 that while ecocritical approaches to narratives continue to be
uncritically heteronormative, the relevance of queer theory for both ecocriticism and ecofem-
inism is still to be largely addressed by scholars in order to embrace the foundational principle
of inclusion within the field. Ourkiya argues that whilst ecofeminism tends to struggle with its
propensity to rely on a binary of constructionist/essentialist understanding of women, it should
abandon sexual and gender assumptions about humans and instead use queer theory to focus on
how different identities perceive themselves in the natural environment (Chapter 29).

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Besides travel narratives in which sites of wilderness allow the traveller to regain a renewed
sense of self, recent travel writing has also been concerned with practices of “rewilding”, whereby
places not commonly seen as sites of “wilderness” are explored with respect to their materiality.
These narratives often foreground the non-human parts of the natural world, while not losing
sight of broader ecological issues and the local and global relations of particular places. One way of
bringing the non-human into view is to highlight its agency through the lens of New Materialism.
Ba şak Ağ ın explains in Chapter 32 that material ecocriticism emphasizes the interrelated bodies
and narratives of humans and non-humans. She points out that the narrative capacity of non-­
human bodies is not something that humans bestow on non-human animals and matter, but stands
for the entanglement of the bodily and the inscriptional as all bodies are formed by both matter
and text. This does not mean, however, that the hierarchy between humans and non-humans
simply becomes levelled out. Rather, it is recalibrated as more complex. In this sense, materialist
approaches to questions of the environment and ecofeminism call for nonlinearity to account for
the dynamic and entangled relations between all components of life, whereby matter is seen as a
generative becoming rather than a passive substance (Chapter 32). In a similar vein, Kerim Can
Yazgünoğ lu shows in Chapter 34 that as a material-discursive framework, posthumanist ecofem-
inism challenges the idea of the human as a superior species and allows for a recalibration of the
human as a becoming that co-evolves with other life and nonlife forms (Chapter 34).
The agency of particular places in their complex materiality as well as their local-global entan-
glements are at the heart of a number of travel texts that invoke the loss of an idealized form of
“nature” and wilderness as they focus on sites of ecological damage. Besides frequently embrac-
ing the semiotics of the non-human, they tend to focus on the domestic rather than the foreign,
exploring places that have been impacted by human-induced environmental change. Such places
cannot be understood in the binary sense of human/natural landscapes, and often the aim of these
texts is to counter ecological estrangement in an attempt to dispense with “wilderness” and re-
cover instead a pervasive and inclusive “wildness” of these sites, highlighting the intersections of
people and place.
An example of this type of literature is the genre of New Nature Writing, a prolific body of
contemporary British and Irish place writing by authors who often openly profess their ecocritical
views and who have enjoyed growing popularity in the twenty-first century. Jos Smith argues
that these texts highlight the shift in environmental thinking which combines “the intensely local
and the globally interconnected” (Smith 2017, 17) as they explore “networks of subnational and
regional spaces within and beyond Britain” (Smith 2017, 21). Kathleen Jamie’s Findings (2005)
Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (2007), and George Monbiot’s Feral (2013) are examples of
these works as they either aim to recover “wild places” in the face of simultaneous loss of wilder-
ness, or they foreground commonly overlooked landscapes, such as container ports, the industrial
estate or peripheral urban areas. A more recent work, Samantha Walton’s Everybody Needs Beauty:
In Search of the Nature Cure (2021), provides an antidote to the sentimentalizing of the natural world
as a source of healing and criticizes contemporary “nature cure” myths created by the wellness
industry. Walton argues that a potential cure is not so much about being in nature as it is about
becoming aware of and cultivating the networks of relations that constitute us.
However, whilst works of New Nature Writing have configured an important shift in the
understanding of the wilderness, Kathleen Jamie has pointed out biases of “class, gender and
ethnic[ity]” in some of them as they disregard the fact that the figure of the literary landscape is
fraught with identity politics ( Jamie 2008). In response to this critique, Jos Smith contends that
Jamie’s own work may not be as different from that of Macfarlane, for instance, because her at-
tack on Macfarlane’s The Wild Places seems to disregard the inner drama and vulnerability of its,
albeit white and male, traveller-protagonist (Smith 2017, 85). Yet Jamie observes that even in the
twenty-first century, wildness still tends to be bound up with a masculine, and often nationalist

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ideal imposed on a historically compromised landscape, erasing an ordinary history of women as

well as different ethnicities. This tendency has recently been mitigated by platforms such as The
Willowherb Review which was founded by Jessica J. Lee to publish and celebrate nature writing
by writers of colour, and Walton’s work can also be seen as an intervention into this bias as it
foregrounds systemic relations rather than merely personal ones. Jamie herself has attempted to
correct this tendency by paying attention in her writing to the role of women in the creation of
Highland communities, as well as to the connection of the quotidian and domestic spheres to wild
nature more broadly, in order to recover “subtle marks” ( Jamie 2005, 126) missing on the map of
a Scottish wildness.

Decolonizing the Map: Global Ecofeminist Temporalities

The figure of “the map” constitutes an important element of a considerable body of both historical
and contemporary travel writing. Particularly in the (post)colonial context, maps and mapping
have played an important role as both navigation tools and concepts employed in constructions of
the “world”. In Interdisciplinary Measures, Graham Huggan discusses the “fascination of (…) post-
colonial writers with the figure of the map” (Huggan 2008, 21). He makes a distinction between
“physical (geographical) maps” used in the implementation of colonial policy, and “conceptual
(metaphorical) maps” employed to critique and undermine colonial discourse (Huggan 2008,
21). Within the colonial discourse, cartography supported the illusion of clear and uninhabited
space within the colony, casting it as peripheral, backward and ready to be colonized. The idea
of “empty space”, which is derived from the concept of “[a]bsolute time unfolding on a linear
line stretching to an infinite future” (Harvey 2009, 134), separates place from time and erases
the reality of lived experiences in particular places. The landscape is conceptually deprived of its
social fabric, and relations between communities are severed, so that political decisions on behalf
of the land and its community are concealed or obscured by the putative neutrality of the map.
The world becomes domesticated and ordered by drawing lines and creating borders in accor-
dance with colonial world-views and interests. Yet while maps may be used to impose colonial
domination, “they can also be used to make visible the process through which domination was
gained, and so to oppose it” (King 1996, 173). In decolonial travel writing, this abstract space is
challenged and opposed by the vibrant reality of multiple temporalities of places and their social
and ecological relations.
Within the discourse of ecofeminism, this includes contesting practices of colonial cartography
that are not only inherently gendered, but also erase realities of biopolitics and reify hierarchies
along class and ethnic lines. In Chapter 33, Postcolonial Literature and Ecofeminism, Aslı Değ irmenci
Altın explains that both postcolonial feminism and ecofeminism have long criticized mainstream
western feminism’s negligence of women in previously colonized areas who have often been
subsumed into a universal, homogenous category of the woman. This stems from mainstream
feminism’s tendency to ignore specific material conditions and realities of women in postcolonial
areas, especially in the Global South. As Değ irmenci Altın further notes, postcolonial feminism,
because of its intersectional approaches to forms of oppression and environmental degradation,
problematizes the sometimes essentialist (western) renderings of women as having some inherent,
symbolic connection to nature. As such, it does not simply reject notions of embodiment, but
has the potential to provide a critique of oppressive material conditions that different groups of
women suffer from in different places across the globe (Chapter 33). This focus on different forms
of material oppression is often at the heart of ecofeminist grassroots movements and forms of ac-
tivism that deal with both questions of environmental justice and the simultaneous concerns of
women and Indigenous peoples (see Sunaina Jain’s Chapter 25). It is therefore not surprising that
ecofeminist postcolonial writers are frequently involved in activism and often understand their

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texts as forms of activism. Their textual re-drawings of “the map” point out how the process of
colonial mapping elides gender, class, race and other differences and remap places by tracing ge-
nealogies of exclusion, and exposing and contesting intersecting terms of oppression.
Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (1994) is
such a text. It opens with a map of an area showing the Nevada Test Site and Yosemite National
Park, yet the book provides a narrativized mapping in order to transcend the limits of traditional
cartography. While it speaks about Solnit’s travel between the two sites and highlights histories
of violence and oppression of the Indigenous peoples, it also depicts sites of resistance. Daisy
Henwood argues that Solnit creates “an ecofeminist counter-map” or a “testimonial network”
that counters both silence and violence on the map (Henwood 2020, 107). Her work encourages
the reader to explore temporalities of place as layers of meanings that have been inscribed and
refashioned over time, debunking the myth of emptiness of the map and contesting narratives of
domination. More recently, Lauret Savoy’s Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Land-
scape (2015) draws attention to various landmarks in the American landscape, giving voice to
silenced histories of both enslaved Africans and decimated Indigenous peoples. Savoy highlights
how the social identities of individuals are shaped by memory in place, revealing the presence of
the past in her accounts of both biogeological and social processes, which are employed as over-
lapping and entangled metaphors. Speaking about “collision, displacement and erosion” (Savoy
2015, 104), for example, Savoy’s narrative highlights different layers of her own personal history
and her African American, Euro-American and Native American origin, as well as larger ecoso-
cial contexts.
Creating a map filled with multiple temporalities and contradictions is also the aim of Kim
Mahood’s more recent Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes and Memories (2016). Combin-
ing travel writing, regional historiography, personal diary and biography, Mahood provides
a remapping of the Australian landscape as well as the history of colonial violence and gen-
der oppression. Her text deconstructs colonial ideas of empty space and hostile landscapes and
constitutes an alternative mapping of the Australian outback, foregrounding both settler and
Aboriginal communities and their different ways of connecting to the land. As she records In-
digenous knowledges of the land in her writing, she at the same undermines the white settler
ideal of white urban femininity which she contests with her sympathy for women living in the
outback and her respect for Aboriginal women. Melanie Duckworth notes in Chapter 6 that
while Aboriginal philosophies have been foundational for many strands of ecofeminism in Aus-
tralia, the relationship between ecofeminism and Indigenous epistemologies cannot be taken for
granted. She explains that they cannot naturally be seen as allies because historically, Aborig-
inal women have been more impacted by harmful patriarchal approaches to the environment
than white women who may have faced gender restrictions, but often actively participated in
colonial practices. Duckworth argues, pace Aileen Moreton-Robinson, that a productive rela-
tionship between ecofeminism and Aboriginal philosophies is therefore only possible if Indig-
enous sovereignty is respected and if ecofeminism deals with both the intersectional oppression
of Aboriginal women, as well as the participation of white women in this oppression (Chapter
6). It is therefore important that Mahood not only foregrounds the significance of Indigenous
sovereignty and cosmologies, but also addresses her uncertainties when she questions her view-
point as a white artist writing about and working with Aboriginal peoples. She emphasizes that
while she cannot pretend to take on a Black identity, she believes “that the physical attributes of
place were among the earliest factors to shape the human mind”, and explains that her project
is “about wanting, as a white Australian, to find a vocabulary that tells […] the story of a place”
(Mahood 2016, 259). Position Doubtful therefore calls for opening one’s (white) mind to the ex-
perience of those whose ancestors lived in the outback, sharing across cultural differences, and
cultivating less dichotomous Black–white relations.

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Conclusion
Ecofeminist re-drawings of the map challenge practices of mere land-surveying and become more
comprehensive, albeit contingent and provisional, acts of “worlding”. They encourage us to look
beneath the map’s image and discover multiple temporalities and agencies of particular places as
relational hubs and processes. In this way, they urge us to think beyond the final page as they im-
plicitly raise the question of how connections are made and worlds created. More generally, read-
ing accounts of travel through the ecofeminist lens brings into focus the cruxes of gender, class,
race, economic capacity and so on that co-constitute particular locations as well as animate the
traveller. It foregrounds the specificities of place that compel a particular travel experience as well
as the way it is recorded, and can potentially negotiate the spatiotemporal relations of ecofeminist
communities across the globe. As such, it invites attention to much more than just the destination,
just as it also foregrounds the importance of environmental contexts and social identities of those
who travel and those who get to be accounted for in travel narratives.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND
ECOFEMINISM
K. M. Ferebee

Introduction
In her influential 2010 work Bodily Natures, environmental theorist Stacy Alaimo proposes a new
genre (or a form of “genre-bending”) that she sees emerging in twenty-first-century literature: the
“material memoir,” which she classifies as a form of self-reflective writing that “incorporates sci-
entific and medical information in order to make sense of personal experience” (Alaimo 2010, 87).
Alaimo suggests that the material memoir expresses or “conjures” a borderline-­unrecognizable
self-subject that is characteristic of the current moment, “a self that is coextensive with the en-
vironment” and that “epitomizes the larger scientific and popular movements of environmental
health that have arisen in what Ulrich Beck terms a ‘risk society’” (Alaimo 2010, 89). The con-
fluence of the scientific and the personal in material memoir transforms autobiography into some-
thing “profoundly biological” (Alaimo 2010, 102) that encompasses the environment as much as
the author’s experience of their body. This refusal to respect the foundational dualisms—subject/
object, self/other, reason/nature—underlying these boundaries would seem to situate the material
memoir genre as essentially ecofeminist in its approach and objectives, in contrast to the dominant
strand of environmental autobiography, which locates itself in a post-Thoreau lineage and that has
tended to uncritically reproduce gendered dualisms. Yet Alaimo, who explicitly resists the “em-
bedding [of ] an environmental stance within feminism” (Alaimo 2016, 93) but who also insists
that “[m]aterial memoirs arise from feminism’s long history of attending to body politics” (Alaimo
2010, 95), seems unconscious of the heteronormativity characteristic of the material memoir. At
the same time, the genre troubles the fine line that ecofeminist Val Plumwood charts between
“criticism of the dominant forms of reason” and “the rejection of all reason and the embrace of ir-
rationality” (Plumwood 1993, 4). Reading material memoir through an ecofeminist lens requires
recharting this line with attention to the dangers in each direction, creating a new nondualistic
approach to truth and reason.

Material Memoirs and the Trans-Corporeal Landscape

The attraction of material memoir for ecocritics lies in its formal potential to capture what Alaimo
terms a “trans-corporeal” self, which is always inseparably “enmeshed with the more-than-­human
world” (Alaimo 2010, 2), and to collapse the separation of the rational human subject from the
natural nonhuman object. Environmental autobiography from the time of Thoreau has typically
enforced this separation, understanding the human and the natural to be opposed in ways that

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 Autobiography and Ecofeminism

enable the displacement of core values to an ahistorical and eternal “over there” (Cronon 1995).
The nonhuman, identified as wilderness in its most extreme form, operates not only as a “pristine
sanctuary” (Cronon 1995, 7) but also as a “last bastion of rugged individualism” (Cronon 1995,
13) where the “confining, false, and artificial” (Cronon 1995, 14) world of human civilization can
be exchanged for the pure and regenerative qualities of the natural. This narrative of escape and
renewal is one that clearly structures popular examples of environmental memoir, from Cheryl
Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (in which Strayed struggles with grief,
divorce, and drug addiction by hiking the American wilderness), Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (in
which Liptrot struggles with alcoholism by moving to a remote Scottish island), Helen Macdon-
ald’s H is for Hawk (in which Macdonald struggles with the death of her father by raising a wild
bird), and Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path (in which Winn and her husband struggle with illness
and misfortune by hiking the British wilderness); more complex examples, such as Annie Dil-
lard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (in which Dillard struggles with theological problems by moving
to the Virginian wilderness) or Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (in which Abbey struggles with
civilization by moving to the Southwestern wilderness) still retain a fundamental commitment to
a cartography that sees nature as “remote from humanity and untouched by our common past”
(Cronon 1995, 19), and wilderness as “the locus of an epic struggle between malign civilization
and benign nature” (Cronon 1995, 20).
Alaimo argues that, in contrast, material memoirs reflect “a broad consciousness… that late
twentieth- and early twenty-first-century citizens may not imagine ourselves as separate from
the risky environments we inhabit” (Alaimo 2010, 95). Not only are the human and the natural
not separate in material memoir, they are not separable—even when we would like them to be.
The need to attend simultaneously to the personal self and to the environment in which the self
is situated necessitates the genre’s hallmark blend of subjective reflection and scientific data. But
any enthusiasm garnered by the idea of memoirist as a “new species of ordinary expert” (Di Chiro
1997, 210)—someone who has not only gotten “a PhD in herself ” (Ramey 2020, 215) but who,
having undertaken “the research,” has the job of performing the “ecological initiation” (Ramey
2020, 904) of others—ought to be significantly cooled by the resonance between such language
and the rhetoric of the antiscience/antivaccination movement. During the COVID-19 pandemic,
which has witnessed a remarkable rise in such movements, “do your own research” has become
the rallying-cry and sign-off of “antivaxxers” when presented with peer-reviewed evidence of
vaccine efficacy (Maruf 2021; Siegel 2020). Material memoirists and the scholars who study them
have a history of advocating for dubious or wholly disproven and dangerous environmental med-
icine claims.
The entwinement of the material memoir with fringe medical movements is not coincidental,
but emerges from a salient characteristic of the genre: having arisen from what Alaimo describes as
“the trans-corporeal landscape of risk society, environmental health, and the knowledge practices
of ‘ordinary experts’” (Alaimo 2010, 94), it is exclusively concerned with environmental illness.
I use this term not in its formal sense (Environmental Illness, sometimes used as an alternative
diagnosis for Multiple Chemical Sensitivity), but in a descriptive sense: the illnesses that material
memoir investigates are all perceived to originate in the environment, as opposed to originating
(or originating wholly) in the body. These illnesses include uncontroversial diagnoses such as
cancer, controversial diagnoses such as Multiple Chemical Sensitivity or Chronic Lyme Disease,
uncontroversial diagnoses that the author suggests come together to form a controversial or un-
known syndrome, and diagnoses that remain a question mark. The uniting factor is a perception
on the part of the memoirist that the illness is caused or triggered by an external environmental
factor. For esteemed environmental authors Sandra Steingraber (Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s
Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment; Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood)
and Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place), the origin of the

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cancers that have afflicted themselves (in the case of Steingraber) or (in the case of Williams) their
family lies in the toxic contamination of the environment by industrial pollution or nuclear tests.
For Kristin Iversen (Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats), nuclear
contamination caused by the Rocky Flats Nuclear Plant caused a variety of ailments that she and
her family have suffered. For science writer Julie Rehmeyer (Through the Shadowlands: A Science
Writer’s Odyssey into an Illness Science Doesn’t Understand), chronic fatigue syndrome can only be
alleviated by eliminating environmental contaminants such as “toxic” mold, a problem that also
afflicts Porochista Khakpour (Sick: A Memoir). Susanne Antonetta (Body Toxic: An Environmental
Memoir) suffers from mental health and fertility issues whose cause she locates in the toxic land-
scape of New Jersey. Anna Lyndsey (Girl in the Dark: A Memoir) is made ill by electricity. Sarah
Ramey (The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness: A Memoir) centers her memoir around the
figure of the woman with a titular “mysterious illness” who is “allergic to ____ (everything)” and
“possessed of at least one autoimmune disease” (Ramey 2020, 37).
This list immediately foregrounds an oddity: though its ailments are indeed “environmen-
tal” in the sense that they arise from the memoirist’s environment and are perceived to signal
environmental contamination, they are also all, or almost all, “anthropogenic”—and not only
anthropogenic, but specifically technoscientific (rarely, e.g., the consequence of natural outgas-
sing, the human sewage and coal soot of early urban pollution, or nonindustrial lead poisoning)
in the sense that they are attributed to specifically human contamination of a “pure” or “natural”
environment in which health is otherwise possible. In the case of illnesses that are not themselves
anthropogenic, as with Rehmeyer (who suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that she attri-
butes to a mixture of toxic mold and trauma) and Khakpour (who ambivalently names her illness
Chronic Lyme and attributes it to a mixture of bacterial infection and trauma) amelioration of the
illness necessitates a purifying retreat to nature: Khakpour flees toxic mold by traveling to New
Mexico for healing treatments that include a raw vegetable diet (Khakpour 2018, 712) and bee
therapy (Khakpour 2018, 696), while Rehmeyer similarly escapes to the Southwestern desert, un-
able to enter any manmade structure (tow trucks, hotel rooms, restaurants) without being brutally
attacked by mold. In this sense, the body of the subject comes to stand in for a human world that
is seen as impossibly contaminated, a narrative device that becomes more obvious in the case of
memoirists that explicitly frame their illnesses as anthropogenic. As Lenka Filipova notes in Chap-
ter 47 of the present collection, Travel Writing and Ecocriticism, Terry Tempest Williams equates
the damage done to the bodies of female family members by cancer with “the destruction of both
women and the natural world,” suggesting that “[a] contract had been made and broken between
human beings and the land” (Williams 1992, 288). In spite of her perceptive reading of Williams
as a travelogue that emphasizes stasis rather than mobility, Filipova is not critical of the suspect
essentialism here (nonhuman nature as a separate entity that has been sickened by the wrongdoing
of man), or of the way it exemplifies a tendency of the material memoir to collapse the distinctions
between scales, describing the nonhuman environment in language that anthropomorphizes it
and utilizing rhetorical techniques to equate the human body with the Earth. Ramey, for exam-
ple, describes the way that a woman with a mysterious illness “has to orient herself to her life as an
ecologist orients herself to the environment” (Ramey 2020, 1267–1268), “[m]uch like the way a
gardener relates to her plot of earth… But, in this case, she’s the earth” (Ramey 2020, 1277). Su-
sanne Antonetta writes that radionuclides “bear only female children… As they throw off atomic
bits [they] decay into other elements: fertile children, daughters” (Antonetta 2001, 209), while
Sandra Steingraber likens the human placenta to “a maple grove… the treetops of an entire forest
press up against the deepest layers of the womb” (Steingraber 2003, 30–31), and Rehmeyer titles
a section of her memoir In the Womb of the Earth (Rehmeyer 2017, 324).
It is perhaps clear from the examples I have provided that it is not just any bodies that are
likened to the nonhuman environment in these memoirs or that the nonhuman environment is

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likened to. In an example of what Plumwood terms “the feminism of uncritical reversal” (Plum-
wood 1993, 31), the nonhuman natural world is likened to the “female” body and, specifically,
the “fertile” female body—as Antonetta makes clear in the discussions of her infertility, which
she apposes to discussions of “deformed” and “mutilated” sea creatures (Antonetta 2001, 136) and
likens to a kind of death (Antonetta 2001, 222). Heterosexual biological reproduction is implicitly
figured as the “ne plus ultra” of naturalness and (therefore) the ultimate good; Rehmeyer’s mem-
oir finds its climax in her wedding, and more specifically at the moment during her husband’s
wedding vows when he emotionally utters the line “And perhaps we will be so lucky… to have
offspring in the form of a child” (Rehmeyer 2017, 1240–1241). The notion that marriage and
reproduction are the appropriate climaxes for a narrative about investigating an environmental
illness is one that is transparent only through a lens that understands marriage and reproduction to
be intrinsically connected to health; it is transparent, in other words, if one accepts that the female
body can best perform health through (cis) (heterosexual) marriage and reproduction, as many
examples of material memoir (Antonetta, Rehmeyer, Steingraber, even the child-free Williams)
suggest. This affirmative naturalizing of gender (and its upsettingly trans-exclusive implications)
is something that Ramey makes explicit in her suggestion that the real problem at the root of en-
vironmental illnesses is “contempt for women, and for the feminine” (Ramey 2020, 1540), which
can only be resolved by “learning to take seriously that men and women are not exactly the same”
(Ramey 2020, 1546) and recognizing that “[t]he feminine, the female, and women’s work have
to be put at the center again,” (Ramey 2020, 1558). While it’s doubtful that an academic theorist
would respond to this naturalizing rhetoric with anything other than the academic equivalent of
“yikes,” it’s rhetoric that is also very much reflected in Steingraber’s popular and well-respected
memoirs—particularly her memoir of pregnancy, Having Faith, which Alaimo discusses approv-
ingly in spite of notes of caution about “calcifying the female body as the reproductive body” and
“heteronormativity” (Alaimo 2010, 104–105).
Overwhelmingly, the material memoir is heteronormative, both in the traditionally under-
stood sense and in the sense that it normativizes the separation of the world into different and
oppositional categories. This is most evident in its preoccupation with anthropogenic contami-
nation of the “natural” body and the restless quest of its authors to purify that body. Indeed, the
material memoir might be described less as a quasi-scientific attempt to understand the personal
experience and more as a quasi-scientific attempt to uncover some pure, discrete self that can be
reclaimed from the onslaught of agents threatening its bodily integrity. Not for nothing does
Oliver Broudy observe, early in his account of journeys with an environmentally ill person, that
the man’s search for some unpolluted patch of earth is so obsessive that it seems as though “[i]t was
no longer a question of avoiding the contaminant… In his mind, he had become the contaminant.
Or the contaminant had become him” (Broudy 2021, 7). Broudy’s book is entitled The Sensitives:
The Rise of Environmental Illness and the Search for America’s Last Pure Place, and the “sensitives” he
encounters do indeed spend the majority of their time involved in efforts to locate and defend a
contamination-free area. Broudy links these efforts to the American history of medical migration,
noting that the nineteenth century saw large numbers of consumptives travel, like modern suffer-
ers of environmental illness, to the desert Southwest in the belief that “[t]he best way to restore the
body to a state of purity was… to transpose it to a place of purity” (Broudy 2021, 172).
Elsewhere in this collection (Chapter 28, “Disability and Ecofeminist Literature”). Nicole A.
­Jacobs points out that using the threat of disability to dramatize the dangers of climate change is
problematic and alienating to those who work in disability rights, and it seems relevant here to en-
gage with the lineage of eugenicist environmentalism that she references insofar as it is implicated
in material memoir’s portrait of the disabled (sick) body as contaminated/contaminant: impure.
Sarah Jaquette Ray, among others, has traced the rise of environmentalism as a response to a “cri-
sis of masculinity, gender, and sexuality” and anxiety about “moral, racial, and national ‘purity’”

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(Ray 2009, 258–259). Within this paradigm, the disabled body is simultaneously [1] figured as the
“corrupted” or “damaged” victim of human civilization, as in the example that Jacobs provides of
disability-as-consequence-of-environmental-disaster, and [2] excluded from the “solitary retreat
to nature” that is mythologized as “the primary source of an environmental ethic” (Ray 2009,
260). It is significant, therefore, that the environmentally disabled body can “become undisabled”
if it is correctly purified in nature, or if nature is correctly purified—that the apparently inex-
haustible vitality of nature can work to undo anthropogenic damage (and that the chief way that
this is portrayed in material memoir is, as I have mentioned, through the embrace of “natural”
femininity, which often includes lyrical paeans to childbirth and motherhood).
I would suggest that Jacobs is right to wonder whether this kind of portrayal of disability (and,
inextricably entwined, gender and race) is both alienating and prone to slipping toward White
Ecology/ecofascism. Indeed, current antivaccination rhetoric in the United States—which White-
head and Perry (2020a) find to correlate strongly with [white: (see Whitehead and Perry 2020b)]
Christian nationalism in spite of Black communities’ lasting distrust of vaccines—­mobilizes tropes
of both the “vaccine-injured” and invisibly-contaminated victim to support the figure of the
hardy “pureblood” vaccine resister who relies on their “natural” immune system, language that
draws on historical White race anxieties (Day and Carlson 2021). Within this narrative, the dis-
abled body is sacrificial/sacer: both disposable insofar as it may be sacrificed in order to ensure the
naturalness or “normality” of the nondisabled population (Grunawalt 2021), and sacred victim
insofar as it “must” be sacrificed in order to demonstrate the dangers of impurity. Jacobs’s concerns
about ecofeminism’s [lack of ] rigorous engagement with disability, therefore, seem well-founded.
Yet her call for ecofeminism to take up this challenge, and her discussion of the potential inherent
in such an engagement, ring true. Yet a material memoir is not only a means of narrativizing dis-
ability in an environmental context. It is also, according to Alaimo, defined by its unique mixture
of scientific information and personal experience—and here, too, ecofeminism seems to offer a
promise of productive engagement that is not currently being fulfilled.
At the heart of this lapse is a tension that is visibly present in Alaimo’s own analysis. When it
comes to the toxicity of certain anthropogenic substances, Alaimo writes, “[t]he science exists,
and it is staggering. But,” at the same time, “there is a chasm, a vast lack of proof, between these
scientific facts and the individual case history” (Alaimo 2010, 88). In other words: Alaimo knows
that anthropogenic substances are responsible for the environmental illnesses that material mem-
oirs describe, but she cannot “prove” it. Or rather: she can prove that anthropogenic substances
sometimes have toxic effects in some animals and some situations, but she cannot prove that they
have “these toxic effects (the environmental illnesses that material memoirs describe). She argues
in fact that the question of whether or not anthropogenic substances have “these” toxic effects
“cannot” be settled, as medical technology is currently not sophisticated enough to do so (ibid).
Yet in the same paragraph, she asks how toxic discourse can retain its import when “its truth is
always in question” (Alaimo 2010, 89); in the next paragraph, she describes the material memoirist
as “conjuring material memoirs from within this miasma of skepticism” (ibid).
Even within this short passage, therefore, Alaimo cannot resolve the tension of a knowing that
seems more appropriately called (I would argue, acknowledging that a Wittgensteinian labyrinth
lies in wait for those who choose to delve into the grammar of “knowing”) a “believing.” A sim-
ilar tension is present in the unusual example of an academic theorist who incorporates material
memoir into their book: Mel Y. Chen (a prominent queer ecotheorist whose work is multiply
cited in the present volume and briefly discussed in Jacobs’s chapter on disability). Chen, as part
of their monograph on queer animacies, pairs academic analysis with an eight-page memoir of
environmental illness that they title Toxic Worlding. Early in this memoir, they clearly identify
the source of their environmental illness as “mercury toxicity, perhaps related to receiving for a
decade in my childhood weekly allergy shots which were preserved with mercury, and having a

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mouth full of ‘metal’ fillings which were composed of mercury amalgam” (Chen 2012, 197–198).
(The claim that mercury, as a preservative for shots, causes unrecognized intoxication is a tenet of
the antivaccination movement, whose definitively disproven belief in a link between vaccines and
autism Chen also endorses—“While autism’s etiology,” they write, “remains controversial, a sig-
nificant number of accounts tie childhood autism to the neurotoxicity of environmental mercury,
with much attention to vaccines” [Chen 2012, 211].) Yet immediately after, they state that they
are “not invested in tracing or even asserting a certain cause and effect of my intoxication” (Chen
2012, 198). This is because doing so “would require its own science studies of Western medicine’s
ambivalent materialization of heavy metal intoxication as an identifiable health concern” (ibid).
In other words, Chen “knows” what sickens them, and even describes the mechanism of illness:

[t]he nature of metal poisoning, accumulated over decades, is that any and every organ,
including my brain, can bear damage… symptoms can reflect the toxicity of any organ…
I cannot sustain many everyday toxins: once they enter, they recirculate rather than leave.
(Chen 2012, 201)

They assert this knowledge, and yet they perform the same bracketing as Alaimo. It is true, but its
truth is in question. There is no proof.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Heather Houser, in her study of “ecosickness” novels, fo-
cuses so centrally on affect: the discord, wonder, disgust, and anxiety that drive the narratives
of sickness-in-environment she examines—“[u]niversalized but ultimately contingent aestehtic
principles [that] mold response to environmental and somatic dysfunction” (Houser 2014, 45)
and the dissonance when “lived experience grates against” the expectations produced by such
principles (Houser 2014, 38). “How Does It Feel?” her concluding chapter asks—a question that,
according to its understood grammar, neither expects nor admits proof. The answer, in material
memoir, is that it “feels” like the cause of the memoirist’s suffering is anthropogenic toxins. The
extent to which this “knowledge” is fundamentally an issue of affect can be seen, for example,
in Steingraber’s condemnation of a proposed waste incinerator that she judges as “obscene,” an
aesthetic-affective response that is contrasted to her experience of the “glorifying” music of Ralph
Vaughn Williams (Steingraber 2010, 233).
Ecofeminism, of course, argues against the binary division of reason and feeling. Yet material
memoir seems unable to surmount the paradox produced by any effort to collapse this distinction.
Its blend of personal experience and science instead works to move subjective affect into the realm
of objective data. Or, rather, it moves “everything” into the realm of objective scientific data, no
matter how trivial-seeming. Alaimo says rather tellingly of the Multiple Chemical Sensitivity
narrative that it can only be written “after one has concluded that one suffers from MCS, since
without that epistemological frame, no one would ever imagine including such things as copy
machines, perfume, or insecticides in one’s autobiography or personal history” (Alaimo 2010,
131). This is a practice characteristic of the larger material memoir genre; Khakpour is attentive to
instances of mold and possible tick exposure throughout her life, while, as I have noted elsewhere
(Ferebee 2021), Antonetta and Iversen produce seemingly unremarkable details from their child-
hood as “evidence of something.”
It would be easy to define what this “something” is by pointing to Ulrich Beck’s prediction
that in the modern “risk society,” counterscience threatens to become a kind of “seance” in which
“the role of the spirits would be taken over by invisible but omnipresent pollutants and toxins”
(Beck 1992, 74), and in which the visible world is shadowed by a secret one “only existent in
thought and yet concealed in the world”—the world of risk data (Beck 1992, 72). And it’s true that
the world of the environmental memoir does often resemble one in which “[e]verywhere, pol-
lutants and toxins laugh and play their tricks like devils in the Middle Ages” (Beck 1992, 73). Yet

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this description risks suggesting that pollutants and toxins have no material reality—­something
that is certainly not supported by the large amount of data that attests to our toxic world. Rather,
what we are faced with is the chasm Alaimo highlights between data and interpretation. In short:
the dubious aspect of environmental illness is not in the environment or the illness, but in the
meaningful linkage that the material memoir posits between the two. Within the world of the
material memoir, what Beck calls the “visible” world and I will term the material world is per-
ceived as a meaningful text that, when read correctly, communicates to us about the unseen secret
dimension. Broudy notes that for one of his case studies on environmental illness, “the problem
was not perspective but data. If something couldn’t be known, it was only because he lacked the
right instrumentation” (Broudy 2021, 44). This echoes Alaimo’s description of material memoir
as “offering up personal experiences as ‘data’” (Alaimo 2010, 87), and of the author “examin[ing]
her own life story through a scientific lens” (ibid). Both of these accounts highlight a practice in
which the sufferer-author positions themselves as subject-interpreter of a material world that exists
to be understood.
We might call this approach, hearkening back to Plumwood, “the science of uncritical re-
versal.” It preserves all of the most problematic aspects of reason/nature dualism, but shifts the
boundary of what counts as the proper object of study to include subjective bodily sensations/af-
fect. This practice affirms the legitimacy of the very rational Enlightenment science that it claims
(or is claimed) to resist—validating what was previously excluded from the category of data by
using the extant system of valuation. In other words, it offers no resistance at all. Rather, it adds
to incoherence by obscuring the real nature of the problem at hand: namely, how we can critique
capital-r dualist Reason without abandoning lowercase-r reason. I say this problem is “at hand”
because it has, in the COVID-19 pandemic, been responsible for huge numbers of preventable
deaths due to vaccine skepticism (Bosman and Leatherby 2021), mobilizing the very same sci-
ence of uncritical reversal to swell uncertainty surrounding the correct “interpretation” of our
­toxin-haunted material world.1
Alaimo (among others, including Kroll-Smith and Floyd) understands the science of uncritical
reversal to be about exposing the self as trans-corporeal, “constituted by material agencies that
are simultaneously biological, political, and economic” (Alaimo 2010, 87). Yet in fact, the self
is only perceived as trans-corporeal when it is viewed as data, a medical/ized object. The self as
subject-interpreter is never perceived as contingent and aggregate in this way. If it were, then the
material memoir could not insist on its absolute authority as both subject (who attests to the legit-
imacy of personal experiences) and interpreter (who evaluates risk). Attendant on the authority of
the subject-interpreter is a corresponding view of the material world as object whose correct role
is as text-to-be-interpreted, an understanding that further reinforces a reason/nature dualism.
Any ecofeminist revision or recuperation of this practice would therefore require not only a real
critique of the structure of scientific resolutions, but also an interrogation of our commitment to
a discrete, unified, and authoritative subject through whom the object-world can be exclusively
made sense. Perhaps, indeed, it would require the abandonment of the idea that the material world
must “mean” at all.

Conclusion
For at the heart of a schema that sees nature as knowable and meaningful is a nest of assumptions
about the human as proper or even potential interpreter of the nonhuman, in which category
one must include the nonhuman elements that make up what Stefan Helmreich has termed “the
microbial human” (Helmreich 2016, 62), or the other biological systems of the body that exist
on nonhuman scales. If the categories of the human and the nonhuman are trans-corporeal and
therefore irreversibly and always-already contaminated by each other, co-constructed on both

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material and discursive levels, then what kind of interpretation can take place? And if we in-
habit, as Timothy Morton has suggested in his work on “hyperobjects,” a world whose scales
are so unfathomably out-of-step with ours that, as Nicholas Mirzoeff posits, there are things we
can only “visualize” instead of “see,” then how can we have faith in the primacy of our percep-
tion? In light of these challenges, it begins to seem as though material memoir is a narrative of
­hypochondria—not insofar as it deals with imaginary illness, since the illnesses it deals with are
often clinically diagnosed, sometimes uncontroversial, and almost certainly based on some form
of pathophysiology, but in the sense that Catherine Belling describes the narrative of hypochon-
dria. Hypochondriacs, she writes, “seek the modernist (or classical) narratives of Enlightenment
science, the conclusive diagnosis, the trustworthy reassurance” (Belling 2012, 202). Denied this,
they produce “unstable autobiographies” that are shapeless and characterized by “an unresolved,
unending, ongoing anxiety about a ‘real story’ that refuses to begin” (Belling 2012, 203). Hy-
pochondria troubles our desire for a “clear-cut distinction” between the “real” and the fictional
(Belling 2012, 7); it is “mental distress caused by uncertainty about the meaning of actual somatic
experience” (Belling 2012, 16). It is, in this sense, a crisis of interpretation.
And it is a crisis that asks how we become the interpreter that a truly trans-corporeal world
demands. That is to say: how do we feel-with and reason-with nonhuman forces? How can we
lose our “I/we-ness” enough to collapse the subject/object gap? Lesley Kordecki, in Chapter 26
of the present volume, argues that “[t]he potency of the animal in story as in life relies on seeing
a nonhuman part of nature as another face, forcing that slippery ontological recognition that can
upset many deep-seated contentions about ourselves” (Kordecki 2023, 284). I would argue more
broadly an ecofeminist approach to interpretation relies on seeing a nonhuman part of nature as
another face—not in the Levinasian face-to-face greeting that Kordecki envisions, but as a form
of fluid transembodiment. The nonhuman is another face “of ours,” a face that is both ours and
always an “other.” Crucially, in this transembodied state, we hold no privileged position. We too
are merely the nonhuman’s “other” face. Equally crucially, the nonhuman here is not only the
animal, the lush flora, and all else that is moral-aesthetically appealing. A counter-aesthetic that
Houser notes in the work of Jan Zita Grover here comes into play: the “thanatological aesthetic
in which sickness and injury are redeemed as the quintessence of nature,” which “confers value
on decay” and “promotes an ethics of resilience and adaptation” (Houser 2012, 53). This esthetic
is rooted in an understanding that “[t]o remain practicable, the nature concept must shelter such
‘blemishes’ as landfills” (Houser 2012, 52)—and, I would suggest, toxins, even those that are man-
made. After all, even as landfills can serve as sustenance for omnivorous scavengers, new research
(Carrington 2021) suggests that microbes are evolving enzymes that allow them to digest the very
plastic that we perceive as sickening contamination. Surely this is an invitation to a new narrative:
one in which we admit the contingency of our affect by also admitting others into it, and utilize
the conceptual tools that ecofeminism offers to forge a new interpretation of “truth.”

Note
1 Indeed, identifiable trends within COVID-19 vaccine skepticism closely follow the key themes of this
reversal: antiexpertise beliefs in the innate ability of every person to “do the research,” technophobic
fears and a corresponding embrace of the so-called “natural,” and a general sense that risk is being con-
cealed by elite powers (Smith and Reiss 2020).

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 49
POETRY AND ECOFEMINISM
Andrew David King

Introduction
Although the term “ecoféminisme” entered critical discourse late in the twentieth century,
ecofeminist trends in world poetry reach back to some of the earliest poetic traditions for which we
have evidence—or so this chapter will argue (Gates 1996). Poetry’s heightened attention to form,
nuance, and multivalence has historically rendered it sensitive to the complexities of sex, gender,
and social role, even as the practice of poetry has at times been constructed as an exclusively male
undertaking (Voigt 1987). In particular, the genre’s attention—especially in the twentieth century
and beyond—to the capacity of texts to proliferate meanings has led poets to probe two distinc-
tions. The first is cosmological: the distinction between the human and the natural world (Mack-
Canty 2004). The second, however, is a socially-policed division within the realm of the human
itself: that between ideal males and females, understood as a consequence of patriarchy and ideol-
ogy (Plumwood 1993). In interrogating these distinctions, many poets have arrived at the ecofem-
inist view that the delegitimization of women’s experience and knowledge is coupled with the
exclusion of the environment from moral consideration, leaving both open to abuse (Roach 1996).
Rather than attempt to intervene in debates about the nature or direction of ecofeminist po-
etics, I take as a working understanding of ecofeminism the conjunction of the claim that the
realm of ethical value encapsulates nonhuman as well as human worlds with the claim that the
­oppression—and hence liberation—of women is interwoven with that of the nonhuman world
(Lahar 1996; Warren 1996). Poetry’s treatment of the cosmological as well as personal, often
within a single work, primes it to present the interconnection of the nonhuman and the hu-
man that ecofeminist thought highlights, and which resists the elevation of the categories of the
“masculine” over the “feminine” and that of the “human” over “nature.” As Danish ecofeminist
poet Inger Christensen argues, successful poems open up, rather than foreclose, possibilities for
meaning (Christensen 2018). Poetry’s ability to violate dominant norms, including those of lit-
erary realism, renders it nontrivially akin to fantasy as described by Rhian Waller in Chapter 46,
even as it often attends to real-world issues and events. One upshot of the genre’s amorphousness,
however, is that some poets’ and poems’ ecofeminism may not be obvious.

Poetry, Proto-ecofeminism, and Crypto-ecofeminism

This chapter makes an example-based case that ecofeminist poetics is, in practice if not theory, not
a recent development. More specifically, the history of poetry contains many examples of what

520 DOI: 10.4324/9781003195610-52

 Poetry and Ecofeminism

might be called, following Murphy (1998, 45), “proto-ecofeminism,” as well as, in my phrase,
“crypto-ecofeminism.” While both terms refer to cases where poets, for various reasons, do not
explicitly follow out the ecofeminist consequences of their verse, the latter refers to instances
where ecofeminist thought is strategically encoded. The ways in which ecofeminist poetry relates
to ecological and gender-based concerns runs from the figural and imagistic—including recla-
mation of the sometimes-patriarchal motif of women as especially connected to nature, and vice
versa—to the propositional and polemical. A brief chapter like this one will necessarily leave out
much more relevant material than it could possibly include—African literatures are unfortunately
absent, for example, as are attempts to situate the Akkadian priestess-poet Enheduanna and the
Taíno poet-queen Anacaona within an ecofeminist lineage—just as its speculative reach may in-
cur charges of anachronism. Nonetheless, I intend it as a very preliminary sketch of what might
be called a developing ecofeminist poetic tradition in “world literature,” itself a troubled concept.

World Ecofeminist Poetries

Many poems in the Chinese Shih Ching, or Book of Songs, sustain proto-ecofeminist readings. Dat-
ing from circa 600 BCE, the Shih Ching is a collection of roughly 300 pieces, mostly “communal
in origin, connected with courtship, marriage, and ceremonial activities in seasonal festivals…”
(Yip 1997, 31). Its 23rd poem takes as its dramatic centerpiece the sexually charged encounter
of a girl and a “fine man [who aims] to seduce her” (1997, 37). The poem begins, however, in
“the wilds,” where wilderness’s dangers are intimated by the mention of a dead doe wrapped in
white reeds (“No. 23…,” 1997, 37). The courtship attempt is sketched only indirectly by the girl’s
speech, which interrupts that of the anonymous, third-person narrator in the poem’s final lines:
A girl like jade.
Slowly. Take it easy.
Don’t feel my sash!
Don’t make the dog bark!
(“No. 23…,” 1997, 37)

The poem’s critical reception was dominated for over 1600 years by its “moralistic” Confucian re-
interpretation, which presented it as a parable about the necessity of strict, gender-based social rites
(Yip 1997, 32). Against the Confucian reading, however, Wai-lim Yip (1997, 32) urges that the
poem be read as one of the collection’s “rustic love songs.” Following Yip’s lead, we can interpret
the poem as a record of intertwining human and ecological processes in which the female figure is
the only one to speak. In commanding her suitor not to touch her and not to provoke the dog, she
not only establishes the limits of her body and guards her dignity but ensures nature’s equilibrium.
Predating the Shih Ching is a collection of oracle-bone inscriptions from the Late Shang dy-
nasty (Keightley 1999). Records of the dynastic practice of prophesizing from burned bones and
shells—a practice that took the human, natural, and supernatural worlds to be continuous and
mutually intelligible—are thought by some to reveal that women were involved in major Late
Shang cultural, military, and royal decisions (Chou 1970–1971). This Shang practice and its ex-
tensions have been drawn on by contemporary ecofeminist poets. Brenda Hillman conceptually
ties Shang tradition both to the later emergence of nüshu, a Chinese script developed by peasant
women in Hunan province for exclusive use by women, as well as to modernist poetics (Hill-
man 2008; McLaren 1996). Although the historical origins of nüshu are unclear, the script was
used to convey versified messages between laotong, or “sworn sisters,” that lamented women’s
subjugation, especially in marriage, and encoded stories of feminist resistance (McLaren 1996,

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382–398). Nüshu writings, though not “antimale,” define a distinctly feminist subculture dedi-
cated to women and their concerns (McLaren 1996, 394, 410–411). From an ecofeminist perspec-
tive, nüshu verse is of interest for its melding of feminist and natural themes, wresting the latter
from a male literary tradition. Consider a couplet sent between “sworn sisters”:

We sisters are made of a hundred scented flowers

truly like lotus buds set off in a fine bouquet.
(Quoted in McLaren 1996, 386)

Although “We sisters” may refer to two specific laotong, it may also generalize to all women writ-
ers of nüshu—a branching, rhizomatic community of ecofeminist poets and storytellers.
The history of East Asian poetics is rich with examples of proto- and crypto-ecofeminist po-
etics. In Japanese literature, Sei Shōnagon’s Makura no S ōshi, or Pillow Book, manifests ecofeminist
themes. The text, which consists of notes collected during her time as a lady-in-waiting to the
Japanese Empress Sadako near the close of the tenth century CE, is remarkable for its acerbic,
witty descriptions of court life (Morris 1967, 10). As a lady-in-waiting, Shōnagon participated in
gendered poetry-writing competitions, but she also turned poetry to feminist purposes (Shōnagon
[c. 990] 1967, 34–39). One striking instance of this involves her attempt to evade male visitors
while not at court. Her brother, visiting her in secret, recounts pressure from his superiors to
reveal her location, which he resisted only by eating a piece of seaweed so as to not smile. Later,
he sends Shōnagon a note to ask if she still wishes for him to conceal her location. In reply, she
mails him a piece of seaweed, a reference he fails to understand until she follows up with a poem
(Shōnagon [c. 990] 1967, 96–98). In the context of Shōnagon’s ecologically-minded thoughts
throughout the Pillow Book, it is difficult not to read her pairing of seaweed and poem as both an
act of feminist resistance to male demands and a sly statement about the semantic richness of the
natural world—about its ability, like poetry, to produce and sustain messages not legible within
patriarchal structures. Furthermore, according to Amy Chan Kit-sze, every poem in the classical
Chinese collection New Songs from a Jade Terrace mentions females, and many poems include bo-
tanical references (see Chan’s Chapter 2). As a final example, in the fourth century CE, Chinese
poet Su Hui stitched a work referred to as the Xuanjitu, or Picture of the Turning Sphere, to send to
her distant husband in order to prompt their reunion (Wang 2007, 49–52). Consisting of 840 char-
acters sewn into the fabric using five colors of thread, the palindromic poem embeds thousands of
interpretations while referring, in its structure and title, to the constellations and Chinese cosmol-
ogy (Wang 2007). Su Hui’s poem is remarkable not just for its framing of intimate longing in nat-
ural terms, but for its use of the gendered labor of embroidery to do so. Her work has been taken
up by contemporary ecofeminist writers and artists, including Jen Bervin and Charlotte Lagarde.
The cosmological framework of Su Hui’s poem calls to mind, across the Eurasian continent,
the shield with intricate cosmological designs that Hephaestus crafted for Achilles at the request of
his mother, Thetis, in Homer’s Iliad (18.453–719). Like classical Chinese literature, classical Greek
literature exhibits numerous ecofeminist themes. As Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman notes in Chapter
23, the poetry of Hesiod recounts the birth of female earth, Gaia, spawned from Chaos. This in-
augurated a thematic tradition continued in the Homeric Hymns, a collection of songs largely com-
posed from 700 to 500 BCE (Rayor 2004). One song is the “Hymn to Gaia,” addressed to “the
mother of all,” “the oldest deity, who feeds all the world’s life…” (2004, 100). Addressing Gaia
as “Queen,” the hymn declares: “you alone give mortal folk a livelihood/or take it away,” going
on to describe how men blessed by Gaia “rule with just laws cities of lovely women” (“Hymn to
Gaia” 2004, 100). Although the picture of human society that emerges in the hymn is patriarchal,
society’s flourishing is nevertheless exclusively authorized by the feminine power of Gaia.

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Ecofeminist themes are central to the poetry of Sappho, who wrote circa 600 BCE on Lesbos,
an island in the Aegean Sea (Rayor and Lardinois 2014). Sappho’s lyrics, charged with erotic and
homoerotic passion, fuse natural imagery and themes of feminine empowerment. Most of her po-
ems are now lost, though they were once so prized that an epigram spuriously attributed to Plato
calls her the tenth Muse, and she is included in canons of female poets of antiquity alongside Mo-
ero, Anyte, and others (Bowman 2004; Gosetti-Murrayjohn 2006; Rayor and Lardinois 2014). In
the only complete song of hers that survives, Sappho’s speaker pleads with “Immortal Aphrodite”
for assistance with an unrequited love, describing the goddess as riding in a chariot “yoked with
lovely sparrows/drawing [her] quickly over the dark earth…” (Sappho 2014, 25). For Sappho, eros
is continuous with beauty, whether natural, human, or divine: “Love shook my senses, /like wind
crashing on mountain oaks” (Sappho 2014, 50). Sappho sings of the Evening Star bringing “the
child back to its mother,” crafting, like Su Hui, a feminist cosmology; in another song, perhaps
alluding to misogyny, she writes of “[h]erdsmen” who “crush under their feet/a hyacinth in the
mountains…” (Sappho 2014, 72).
In Fragment 16, Sappho outlines a feminist revision of the legend of Helen in Greek mythol-
ogy. Promised by Aphrodite to the nobleman Paris, Helen was supposedly seduced by him and
brought to Troy against her will (Groten 1968). Sappho, however, imagines a freewheeling Helen,
spurred on by her love for Paris. She begins Fragment 16 by declaring that, while some say “the
finest thing on the dark earth” is an army or fleet, “I say it is whatever one loves” (Sappho 2014,
33). For evidence, she looks to Helen:

Everyone can understand this—consider

that Helen, far surpassing the beauty
of mortals, left behind
the best man of all
to sail away to Troy. She remembered
neither daughter nor dear parents,
as [Aphrodite] led her away…
(Sappho 2014, 33)

Ecofeminist poet and translator Anne Carson, in her edition of Sappho’s lyrics, translates this frag-
ment so as to emphasize that Helen is leaving her husband, affirming her refutation of domestic
male authority (Sappho 2003, 27). Helen not only departs for Troy of her own volition, but is
guided by the divine, feminine force of Aphrodite—frequently described by Sappho by means of
ecological imagery—thereby overdetermining the poem’s ecofeminist themes.
The last classical text I will discuss is the Song of Songs, a book of the Hebrew Bible composed
around the third century BCE (Hunt 2008). Writing of the Song, Patrick Hunt (2008, ix) argues
that, aside from Sappho’s work, “very little poetry of such merit deals so tastefully with Eros.” The
Song, a plotless, sensual dialog between two lovers, foregrounds the primacy of women’s worldviews
and sexuality while taking the wilderness as its backdrop and wild flora and fauna—especially the
wild gazelle—as its symbols (Hunt 2008). In Gianni Barbiero’s translation, the male interlocutor’s
last address to his beloved names her “You who dwell in the gardens,” suggesting a vision of Eve
without the Book of Genesis’s misogynistic account of the Fall (Barbiero 2011, 437; Genesis 3:
3–20). Feminist and ecofeminist interpretations of the Song form key strands of debate about the text.
Abi Doukhan argues that the Song addressed women who sought love outside the bounds of social
norms, in “the wild and untamed vineyards” of Galilee (Doukhan 2019, vii). Barbiero is emphatic
that the Song, despite being strenuously reinterpreted as a spiritual allegory, is not an allegory but an
account of actual romance—one with a lyrical, rather than narrative, unity (Barbiero 2011).

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Literatures of antiquity provided much material for ecofeminist poets of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, including Carson. As Lesley Kordecki notes in Chapter 26, many of Ovid’s
versified stories describe women turning into animals—often as the result of male oppression, as
in the tales of Philomela and Io. Louise Glück’s poem “Mythic Fragment” retells one such story,
voicing Daphne’s transformation into a tree to escape Apollo (Glück 2012, 156; Met. 1.470–601).
Gwendolyn Brooks, in her 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Annie Allen, modifies Virgil’s Ae-
neid to describe the life of a young Black woman (Brooks 2005). The collection’s centerpiece,
“The Anniad,” and other poems draw on the metaphor of dead flowers gathered from the fields
of Annie’s youth to represent the disappointments of female adulthood (Brooks 2005, n.p.). The
modernist poet H. D., preoccupied with antique and ecological motifs, theorizes an “over-mind,”
a heightened state of consciousness that women might more easily access than men (H. D., 1982,
18–20). The over-mind, built on notions from Greek philosophy, affords a “vision of the womb”
as opposed to a “vision of the brain,” and is analogized to a jellyfish, with long feelers reaching
through the body like nerves (H. D. 1982, 20–22).
More than a millennium and a half after the Song of Songs, the Italian writer Christine de Pizan
produced her versified Epistre au Dieu D’amour, or Cupid’s Letter, in 1399 (Willard 1984, 62). The
letter-poem marked the start of her career as a feminist writer—indeed, according to Simone de
Beauvoir, as the first feminist writer (de Beauvoir 1956; Willard 1984). In it, she challenged sexist
views encouraged by popular writings, including Jean de Meun’s narrative poem The Romance of
the Rose, which depicted its protagonist’s female conquest as a rose, one effectively raped at the
work’s end (Krueger 2013). Although her poetry evokes natural themes, Christine’s Cupid’s Letter
notably protests the use of naturalistic allegory for violent, patriarchal purposes. In this sense,
Christine can be understood to have inaugurated an obliquely ecofeminist poetics and criticism,
one continued with her City of Ladies, “perhaps the first popular feminist text” (Benstock, Ferriss,
and Woods 2002, 4). In another medieval work, the Parliament of Fowls by English poet Geoffrey
Chaucer, Nature is personified as female; the poetic dialog, whose characters are birds, ends with
each female bird granted the power to choose her mate (see Kordecki’s Chapter 26).
Several centuries after Christine and Chaucer, British Romanticism produced multiple gen-
erations of writers who turned to nature to both correct the course of the developing natu-
ral sciences and as a means of aesthetic inspiration and production (see Mondello’s Chapter 39).
Scholarly study of the period has long fixated on its male writers, however, leaving its female
poets and purveyors of ecofeminist poetics—including Anna Leticia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith,
Mary Robinson, Joanna Baillie, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (or L.E.L.),
and others—­overlooked, even as some scholars have explored these writers’ ecofeminist leanings
(see Mondello’s Chapter 39). Anna Leticia Barbauld’s poem “The Rights of Women” encourages
downtrodden women to “rise, assert thy right!” and make “treacherous Man thy subject, not thy
friend…”; nonetheless, it ends with the reconciliatory thought that “Nature’s school” ultimately
teaches that “separate rights are lost in mutual love” (Barbauld [1792] 2002, 130–131). Treasured
by American feminist Susan B. Anthony and read by Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Brown-
ing’s narrative poem Aurora Leigh has likewise only recently begun to be read for its ecofeminist
potential (Dalley 2006; Rich 1993; Yeo 2006). Lastly, William Wordsworth, a leading Romantic
figure, relied on the perceptive observations in his sister Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals for inspi-
ration for some of his most famous poems, even as Dorothy arguably articulated her own vision of
a distinct “‘material’ sublime” (see Taylor-Wiseman’s Chapter 23; Wilson 2019, 109).
Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley—arguably America’s first feminist poets—deserve men-
tion in any history of feminist thought, ecofeminist or otherwise, in American poetry. There
remains a dearth of work on their poetry’s ecofeminist aspects. Although the English-born Brad-
street’s 1650 work The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America recapitulates notions of female
inferiority, the ambitious scope of its long poetic dialogues—describing in naturalistic terms the

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elements, weather systems, and human physiology—belie them. Bradstreet’s clear interest in using
poetic resources to understand and explicate the natural world directly affiliates her with the proj-
ects of contemporary ecofeminist poets, even if her personification of nature is no longer generally
thought plausible. Wheatley, born in 1753, was seized from West Africa and enslaved in America,
where her writing and precocity gained renown despite her social position—her 1771 volume
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is prefaced with the signed attestations of eighteen
men, including Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, assuring readers that the enclosed
verse had in fact been composed by her (Wheatley 1773, n.p.). In contrast with Bradstreet’s work,
Wheatley’s poetry contains clear depictions of feminine agency and power, many of which combine
with her extensive naturalistic imagery. In an especially striking poem, Wheatley imagines “a kind
Nereid’s shield” saving the life of a woman caught in a hurricane (Wheatley 1773, 81; emphasis in
orig.). The poem ends by extolling “the blessings of maternal care,” which doubly refers to the Ne-
reid’s protection and to the woman’s love for her daughter, who she has survived to see again; this
care, furthermore, withstands the masculine fury of Aeolus, the god of wind (Wheatley 1773, 81).
In the shadow of Bradstreet and Wheatley, the work of nineteenth-century writer Emily Dick-
inson, I suggest, marks the beginning of a sustained and overt American ecofeminist poetic tradi-
tion. Ranging thematically from the sensual to the philosophical, Dickinson’s poems often express
an affinity with nature against the patriarchal establishments of home, society, and religion. In one
poem, the speaker wonders how she would style herself if she woke up as a queen:
Put from my simple speech all plain word –
Take other accents, as such I heard
Though but for the Cricket – just,
And but for the Bee –
Not in all the Meadow –
One accost me –
(Dickinson 2016, 263)
In ascending from “plain—/ Rank” to queenhood, Dickinson’s speaker shuns human company,
allowing only crickets and bees to approach her (Dickinson 2016, 262). A related sentiment emerges
in another poem, where the speaker rejects rubies, gold, and diamonds from male rulers in favor
of the “Diadem to fit a Dome” that she already possesses, whether the sky itself or her powers of
imagination (Dickinson 2016, 273). For Dickinson, nature and its activities are feminine, and ad-
mit to metaphoric linkages that bridge human and nonhuman worlds. “The Leaves like Women,
interchange/Sagacious Confidence,” she writes in one poem; in another, she compares nature to a
girl fond of “Trinkets” (Dickinson 2016, 490, 441). Furthermore, she understands the labor of po-
etry—and thus of her own writing—as informed by, and yet shaping, nature; she cautions readers to
“Touch lightly Nature’s sweet Guitar,” as the birds themselves will detect impostor poets (Dickin-
son 2016, 594). On the other hand, Dickinson ranks poets higher than nature and even “the Heaven
of God”: “Their Summer—lasts a Solid Year—/ They can afford a Sun,” she writes (Dickinson
2016, 292–293). She directly connects poetry and femininity with the freedom of wild animals:
They shut me up in Prose –
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet –
Because they liked me “still” –
(Dickinson 2016, 223)
Dickinson ends the poem by arguing that being “shut up in Prose” as a woman poet is as non-
sensical as imprisoning a bird “For Treason—in the Pound—”; both the poet’s mind and the bird

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exceed and overcome the misplaced restrictions of human society and patriarchy (Dickinson 1960,
223). For later feminist and ecofeminist poets, including the American poets Adrienne Rich, Su-
san Howe, and Lucie Brock-Broido, Dickinson was understood as a female “genius [that] knows
itself ”—a creative force keenly aware of its own inclinations and unafraid to heed them—even as
her work revealed how “[p]oetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender”
(Howe 2007, 138; Rich 1993, 179).
Extending Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman’s emphasis in Chapter 23 on the importance of Ameri-
can poet Walt Whitman for an understanding of ecofeminist literature in English, I suggest that
Whitman’s poetry is indispensable, specifically, for an understanding of ecofeminist poetics. This
is so despite Whitman’s maleness and the datedness and ethical complexity of some of his work.
A contemporary of Dickinson, Whitman described his Leaves of Grass as “essentially a woman’s
book,” and in his “Poem of Women” reverses the Book of Genesis’s story of Eve’s creation from
Adam’s rib: “every jot of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman…” (Genesis 2: 21–23;
Traubel [1908] 1961, 331; Whitman 1856, 102). The human body, in all its aspects, was a major
poetic subject for Whitman, and seemingly the means by which he dissolved personal, social, and
metaphysical binaries and oppositions (see Taylor-Wiseman’s Chapter 23). This turn to the body
as a site of unification can be found in works of contemporary ecofeminist poetry that respond to
Whitman. In poems like “Natural History” and “Characteristics of Life” from Trophic Cascade,
Camille Dungy draws on Whitmanic themes and rhetoric to expound an ecofeminist poetics of
motherhood (Dungy 2017, n.p.).
The twentieth century through the present has witnessed the proliferation of ecofeminist
poetry and poetics across continents, both anticipating and coinciding with the articulation of
ecofeminism as a distinct theoretical movement. (In the listings that follow, I omit authors men-
tioned elsewhere in this chapter.) In Anglophone poetry, this flourishing is evidenced by the out-
puts of an aesthetically diverse group of poets. These include lyric, realist, and confessional writers
like Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Anne Sexton, Denise
Levertov, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song, Marilyn Chin, Rita Dove,
Marie Ponsot, Wendy Battin, Jane Mead, Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde, Helen Macdonald, and
Muriel Rukeyser. A brief list of modernist and postmodernist ecofeminist poets might include
Mina Loy, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Susan Howe, Rosemarie Waldrop, M. NourbeSe Philip,
Alice Oswald, Jackie Wang, Claudia Rankine, Valerie Martínez, Allison Cobb, Desiree C. Bailey,
and Lisa Robertson. American Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker’s work anticipates contemporary
theorists’ positing that geological and biological categories may be continuous and interdepen-
dent, a theoretical trend touched on by Kerim Can Yazgünoğ lu in Chapter 34. Beat ecofemi-
nists include Jayne Cortez, Joanne Kyger, and Gary Snyder; Language (and ­Language-adjacent)
ecofeminist poets include Leslie Scalapino, Harryette Mullen, Joyelle McSweeney, Bernadette
Mayer, Caroline Bergvall, Elizabeth Willis, jos charles, Rae Armantrout, Nat Raha, Catherine
Walsh, and Lyn Hejinian. The latter’s seminal 1980 work My Life follows Gertrude Stein in re-
conceptualizing the domestic not as a feminine space, but as one freeing precisely because it is “not
of human nature but of the human mind” (Hejinian 2000, 367). Stein’s work includes the long,
proto-ecofeminist piece “Patriarchal Poetry” as well as the famous line “Rose is a rose is a rose
is a rose,” which first appeared in “Sacred Emily” (Stein 1922, n.p.). Although Stein is quoted by
Thornton Wilder as remarking that “in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry
for a hundred years,” the line is also worth noting for beginning with a proper name, presumably
of a woman, who by sonic repetition is transformed into a flower (Wilder 1947, vi).
Latin American ecofeminist poets of this era include Cecilia Vicuña, Magda Portal, Gabri-
ela Mistral, Juana de Ibarbourou (whose poem “Life-Hook” features a speaker who envisions
their reincarnation as purple lilies), Dulce María Loynaz, Delmira Agustini, Gloria Gervitz, and
Emma Villazón (de Ibarbourou 2011, 144–147). In Chapter 17, Nicolás Campisi discusses Vicuña

526
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as well as Daniela Catrileo, Márcia Wayna Kambeba, and Luz Argentina Chiriboga. Izabel F.
O. Brandão, in Chapter 18, highlights the work of Brazilian poets Ana Elisa Ribeiro, Lucinda
Nogueira Persona, Luiza Romão, Ana Martins Marques, and Beatriz Brandão. In Irish literature,
the poetry of Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill express ecofem-
inist themes; the latter’s poem “The Shannon Estuary Welcomes the Fish” compares the speaker’s
singing a lullaby to a child or lover to the estuary’s cultivation of aquatic life (Ní Dhomhnaill
1995, 480). Francophone ecofeminist poets include Anne Hébert, Catherine Pozzi, Danielle Col-
lobert, Valérie-Catherine Richez, Amina Saïd, and the Surrealist Joyce Mansour; a German list
might include Elke Erb, Sarah Kirsch, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Karin Kiwus.
As Abhik Gupta describes in Chapter 9, Bengali literature’s ecofeminist heritage includes
Rabindranath Tagore’s short story “Subha,” published near the turn of the twentieth century,
which tells of a disabled girl who cultivates relations with nature and animals in response to her ne-
glect by humans. In conversation with this tradition, contemporary poet Bhanu Kapil’s humanimal
[a project for future children] re-envisions the historical narrative of two Bengal girls discovered living
with wolves in 1920 who were then subjected to conversion attempts to Christianity by an Indian
missionary (Kapil 2009). Lastly, updating the East Asian traditions with which this chapter began,
Yeh’s 1992 Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry, McCann’s 2004 Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean
Poetry, and Rimer and Gessel’s 2007 Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature each contain
numerous examples of contemporary East Asian ecofeminist poetry. One contemporary example
is the work of the Hong Kong-based poet Wawa, whose dynamic speaker in Pei Pei the Monkey
King salvages feminist genealogies against a backdrop of environmental and political apocalypse.
Rather than further expand these lists or defend their contestable categories, I turn to Lu-
cille Clifton, an American poet not yet adequately attended to in ecofeminist criticism. Born in
1936, Clifton wrote unflinchingly of racial violence—her poem “jasper texas 1998” speaks in
the voice of James Byrd, Jr., lynched by white supremacists—and of the intimacies of Black life,
often in naturalistic terms (Clifton 2012, 552). In one of Clifton’s later poems, “mulberry fields,”
the speaker describes the removal of marker rocks from the fallow grounds of what was once a
plantation run on the labor of enslaved Africans and Black Americans, rocks that “marked an old
tongue…” (Clifton 2012, 582). Pondering the remains of an enslaved woman named alice “whose
great grandson is old now/too and refuses to talk about slavery,” the speaker declares:
i say that at the
masters table only one plate is set for supper i say no seed
can flourish on this ground once planted then forsaken wild
berries warm a field of bones
bloom how you must i say
(Clifton 2012, 582)

The field acts as a repository of natural and social history. The crops’ “refus[al] to grow” becomes,
in this light, nature’s own protest against the evils of slavery, the trauma of which is transfigured
into wild fruit (Clifton 2012, 582). The speaker’s closing line amounts to a blessing of all forms of
repair, one that celebrates pluralism while acknowledging that flourishing remains constrained by
oppression. Clifton’s use of floral imagery to imagine trauma and transformation finds precedent
in the work of other Black women writers, including the early poems of Zora Neale Hurston (see,
for instance, the latter’s poem “Journey’s End”).
Contemporary ecofeminist poetry and poetics—from the last several decades through the
­present—is the opposite of a fallow field, though it remains concerned, like Clifton’s work, with
history. Brenda Hillman’s work, mentioned in relation to nüshu writing, reimagines the pastoral
by recycling poetry, image, and found text in interrogations of history, investigations of the limits
of human self hood, and visions of alternative futures. Even as Hillman’s work deconstructs the

527
 Andrew David King

ideology of “the natural,” it connects the very real harms of environmental degradation and cli-
mate change with other social ills, locating advice for activists in the nonhuman world: “Lichen
says/accept what is then break it down” (2018, 58). Hillman’s project of unalienating the natural
world without downplaying its inherent nonhumanness is shared by other ecofeminist poets. Jody
Gladding (2016, 299) translates the lines left by burrowing bark beetles as fragments of the beetles’
own language—one in which, per Gladding’s paratext, only two verb tenses exist, the “cyclical”
and the “radiant,” and there are no pronominal distinctions between the first and second per-
son. The opening lines of Evelyn Reilly’s (2009) Styrofoam challenge human conceptions of time
and individuality in a darker way. Styrofoam prompts readers to consider the “deathlessness” of
­Styrofoam—immortality that threatens to upend ecological equilibria—and the consequences of
mass consumerism (Reilly 2009, 9).
Like Clifton’s and Hillman’s work, much recent ecofeminist poetics is intersectional—focused
on how different social categories, and the oppressions directed at each, can overlap—as, indeed,
the very term “ecofeminist,” a portmanteau, suggests (Crenshaw 1991). Examples of intersectional
ecofeminist poetry can be found in Native and Indigenous American literatures, in the work of
Joy Harjo, Layli Long Soldier, Elizabeth Woody, Natalie Diaz, and others. (For a more extensive
treatment of Native, Indigenous, and First Nations ecofeminist poetry, see Benay Blend’s Chapter
19). In poems like “My House is the Red Earth” and “She Had Some Horses” by Harjo, animals
act as bearers of mythological insight in a world of cultural and gender-based displacement and
injustice (Harjo 1989, 2; Harjo [1983] 2008, 59–68). Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS combines
poems addressing the tragic, covered-up violence of American settler colonialism with medita-
tions on the body’s boundaries: “on full days I/inhale fe-/male rain” (2017, 45). Another example
of ­intersectional ecofeminist poetics is Korean-American poet Margaret Rhee’s chapbook Yellow/
노란/노랑/Yellow. Rhee’s poem “Nectarines” ruminates on the hybridity of the fruit—described
by another speaker in the poem as the conjoining of a peach and a plum—as a metaphor for the
speaker’s heritage (Rhee 2011, n.p.). Citing Greek mythology, Jack London’s racism, and facts
about the Korean diaspora while borrowing the Persian poetic form of the ghazal, the poem ties
together wide-ranging questions of history and ethics by means of the nectarine as its central
motif (Rhee 2011, n.p.).

Towards an Intersectional Ecofeminist Poetics

This chapter began with the claims that ecofeminist themes and lines of inquiry can be found
across the history of poetry, and that poetry, as a genre, may be uniquely situated to function as a
site of contemporary ecofeminist discourse and resistance. Poetry’s capacity to incorporate other
genres and modes of inquiry may render it fertile ground for developing intersectional and in-
ternational ecofeminism in poetry and beyond, bringing ecofeminism past the Eurocentrism and
essentialism of its origins in Françoise d’Eaubonne’s work (see Champion’s Chapter 15). Viewed
from the beginning of the new millennium, contemporary poetry’s formal and thematic diversity
may aid ecofeminists in attempts to rethink anthropocentrism—even as anthropocentrism may
inevitably mark all human thought, as Bernard Williams has argued (1995). As Angela Hume,
Gillian Osborne, and Samia Rahimtoola (Hume and Osborne 2018; Hume and Rahimtoola
2018) note, scholars have only recently begun to explore the intersections of ecopoetics, including
ecofeminist poetics, with other social phenomena, including queer and trans experience. Many
connections between ecofeminist poetics and other areas of inquiry—including feminist disability
studies, discussed by Nicole A. Jacobs in Chapter 28—await to be made or strengthened.
In foregrounding intersectionality, I have tried to gesture toward ways that poets have imag-
ined how these tasks might be carried out, in conversation with practical and theoretical frame-
works that other scholars have proposed (Kings 2017; Sturgeon 1997). Poetry’s status as an art that

528
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engages with and also embodies “things, events, [and] systems” both raises the stakes of poetic
activity and offers avenues for hope and action in the face of climate and environmental catastro-
phe (Durand 2010, n.p.). One branch of feminist and ecofeminist thought, after all, empowers
women and others to see themselves not as “passive spectators of the drama of history,” but as
agents within a vast causal network (Greene and Kahn 1985, 17). I end with Korean poet Kang
Ŭn’gyo’s bracing illustration of this conviction in “Woman,” a portrait of an otherworldly and yet
wholly earthly oyster seller who “comes each morning/with the sea on her head”:
Faster than the dark,
lighter than a bird,
lovely, so lovely,
she strides beside the sun.
(Kang 1999, 160–161)

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Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.

100 Poems to Save the Earth (Cogan) 256, ecowomanism 108–109; Green Belt Movement
263–264, 265 107; lyrics as poetry 114–119; “Mother Africa,”
228 Incident 30, 33 concept of 110–111; “Mother Earth,” concept of
111; Négritude 109–110; Omalaitsha (Ndebele)
Aaron, Jane: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in people 120n1; performativity, concept of 115;
Wales: Nation, Gender, Identity 259 “proto-ecofeminism” or “crypto-ecofeminism”
Abaza, Tharwat 131; Shayie’ Mina al-Khawf (A 102; Sheng, slang and “code-switching” 115;
Sense of Fear) 131 Ubantu 111
Abbey, Edward 511; Desert Solitaire 511 African Traditional Religion: A Definition (Idowu) 110
ableism, concept of 9 Afro-Colombian communities 189; “juegos de
Abrahams, Yvette 387 sombra” or “shadow games” 190; Peru on
Abrams, M.H. 417 Leticia Incident or Colombia-Peru War 190;
Academia Brasileira de Letras (ABL) 195–196, 201n4 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
activism: cross-cultural connections and (FARC) 190
inclusivity 273; ecofeminism and agriculture/ After the Storm: Stories on Ondoy (Or) 36
forestry, intersection of 274–275; eco- Agent Orange (lethal chemical) 46
sufficiency/provisioning 274; Maathai 276–277; Ağın, Başak 9, 10, 28, 76, 148, 188, 366, 367, 376,
maldevelopment and reductionist science 275; 380, 505
Roy 277; Ruether 278–279; Shiva 275–276; Agustini, Delmira 526
Starhawk 277–278; Walker 273–274; see also Ahi, Eda 237, 238
individual activist Ahmad, Rukshana 360
Actor-Network Theory (ANT) 69 Air (Uzuner) 140
Aðalsteinsdóttir, Auður 6, 139, 228, 296 Alaimo, Stacy 13, 28, 49, 160, 197, 199, 200,
Adams, Carol J. 137, 162, 196, 198, 305, 321, 423 235, 238, 239, 246, 252, 304, 367, 395, 428,
Adamson, Joni 210, 211 431, 432, 434, 435, 510, 511, 513–516; Trans-
Adi-anto (From the Beginning till the End) Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature
(Deb Sen) 97 246; Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as
Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Feminist Space 428–429
Environment (Bladlow and Ladino) 314 Alarm Clock (Wägner) 224
Affirmations of an Indigenous Feminist (Anderson) 207 Al-Bab al-Maftouh (The Open Door 2017) (Latifa-al-
African aesthetic of “nommo” 4 Zayyat) 130
African literature 4, 103–104; Africa: My Native Alegre, Joycie Y. Dorado 36; Lunop Haiyan: Voices
Land 112; African 101–103; African Diaspora and Images 36
103, 120; African ecofeminism 103, 106–108; Alexander, Meena 418
African poetry 104–105; African women’s poetry Alfar, Dean Francis 36; Outpouring: Typhoon Yolanda
and ecofeminism 111–114; cultural traditions Relief Anthology 36
102; ecocriticism 105–106; ecofeminism 106; Alharthi, Jokha 127

533
 Index

Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) 63 and Woman–Nature Paradigm 127–128;

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll) 440 decolonization and New Woman–Nature
alien phenomenology 339 Paradigm 130–131; ecosickness and ecofeminist
All in a Month (Raine) 259 memory 131–133; environmental classism/
Alloor Nanmullaiyaar 69 racism 126; forensic ecofeminism 128–130;
Allotment Act 208 Mother Nature, Mother Earth, and women
All the Birds, Singing (Wyld) 62 134; “oil colonialism” 132; sustainability
Alunan, Merlie M. 36, 41; Our Memory of Water: 133–134
Words After Haiyan 36 Araluen, Evelyn 57, 59, 63, 64; Drop Bear 57, 64
Always Coming Home (ACH) (Le Guin) 333, Aranyak (Bandyopadhyay) 4
382–383, 484–486 Aravindan, Kamaladevi 74
Amazon: Las huellas de la lluvia (The Traces of the Aravāna Adikal 70
Rain) (Chiriboga) 189; O tempo do clima (The Arberry, A. J. 347
Time of Climate) (Kambeba) 189; see also South Arctic oscillation 180
American literature Ark Baby, neo-Victorian and futuristic narrative 371
American Civil War 251 Armantrout, Rae 526
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 305 Ars Amatoria (Ovid) 159–160
American War 51, 55 Arslan, Gamze 138, 143; Kanayak 143
Anaakhya and Sudhanvanshu (Ramkrishnadas) 79 Arulanandam, Sakti 75, 76; “Maramagi” (Of Trees)
Anae, Nicole 4, 8, 39, 49, 76, 145, 162, 234 75–76
Anatomy Act of 1832 431 Asenjo, Genevieve L. 42
Anderson, Kim 206, 207, 212, 475; Affirmations of Ashour, Radwa 132, 133, 134
an Indigenous Feminist 207; The Girl Who Speaks assisted reproductive technologies (ART) 317
Bear 439, 444 Astley, Thea 62, 297; Drylands 62, 297
Andes: “earth-beings” of Andean politics Atkinson, Ruby 58
188; notion of chi’xi 188; notion of At the Back of the North Wind (MacDonald) 442
“mattertextuality” 188; PALABRARmas poems Atwood, Margaret 247, 262, 263, 376, 469, 526
188–189; rights of Pachamama, for indigenous Australian literature 471; assumption of “terra
communities 187–188; see also South American nullius” 58; Childhood at Brindabella 61; climate
literature fiction and posthuman in recent fiction
Ang Li 2, 26–29, 33; The Butcher’s Wife 27–29 61–62; ecofeminism and animals 61–63;
Anglophone poetry 526 ecofeminist scholarship and indigenous
“Anglo-Welsh” literature 257 sovereignty 58–59; European-Australian
animal-human hybrids in kingdom 306–307 literature for children 62–63; literary tropes
Animal People (Wood) 61 and historical fiction 59–61; poetry 63–64;
animals and Chinese Goddesses: Chang women writers, genres, landscapes 61; young
Er 21; Nuwa and Fuxi 20–21; roots of adult literature 63
environmentalism in Buddhism 20; Taiping autobiography: anthropogenic substances 512,
Yulan 21 514; COVID-19 pandemic 511, 516, 517n1;
animal studies: “becoming-animal” assertions environmental autobiography 510–511;
283; connections between animals and women environmental illness 511–512, 514; “genre-
282–283; photographic and auditory devices bending” 510; hypochondriacs 517; material
282; political inquiry 284; stories with animals: memoirs and trans-corporeal landscape 510–516;
ecofeminist readings 284–289 “the microbial human” 516–517; modern risk
Ankhari Danv and Tede Mede Raste (Verma) 79 society 515; Multiple Chemical Sensitivity
Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (Yeh) 527 narrative 515; rise of environmentalism 513–514;
Anthony, Susan B. 524 “the science of uncritical reversal” 516; study
Anthropocene 324 of “ecosickness” 515; Toxic Worlding 514–515;
anthropos, critique of 10 “vaccine-injured” and invisibly-contaminated
Antonetta, Susanne 512, 513, 515 victim 514
Antoon, Sinan 130; The Baghdad Eucharist 130 Ævarsdóttir, Oddný Eir 218–221; Jarðnæði 218;
Anyte 523 Undirferli 219, 220
Anything we Love can be Changed (Walker) 273 The Awakening (Chopin) 245
al-’Aqqad, Abbas Mahmoud 127; Hathihi Eshagara Awiakta, Marilou 246, 247; Selu: Seeking the Corn
(This Tree) 127 Mother’s Wisdom 246
Arabela (Pajk) 151 Axfors, Anna 229
Arabic literature: aquapolitics: water hegemony/ “Axial age” 17–18
scarcity 131; Arab Uprisings 132; colonialism Azzopardi, Trezza 260; The Hiding Place 260

534
 Index

Bacigalupi, Paolo 470 Bengali poetry 96–99; ecofeminist thoughts in

backlash ecofeminism 349 short stories by women writers 95–96; Jalakeli
Bacon, Francis 419 (Frolicking in Water) 98; Joler Onek Niche (Deep
Badal Ki Mritu and Bhor ka Tara (Verma and Down in Water) 98; Mahesh (Chattopadhyay) 94;
Mathur) 80 “ontology of domination,” critique of 88; silent
The Baghdad Eucharist (Antoon) 130 dialogue 89–90; Women of Riverine Tracts
Baheya (Negm) 133 91–94
Bailes, Melissa 424 Bengali poetry 96–99
Bailey, Desiree C. 526 Benitez, Christian Jil 2, 211, 297, 359
Baille, Joanna 418 Bennett, Jane 298, 337, 346, 366, 369; Influx and
Baines, Elizabeth 261 Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman 298
Bakganka 116 Bergvall, Caroline 526
Bakr, Salwa 133 Berlant, Lauren 302
Balžalorsky Antiæ, V. 154 Berne, Patty 305
Baldry, Chris 253 Berni, Christine 379
Banabhatta Ki Atmakatha (Dwivedi) 79 Berry, Ron: Flame and Slag 260
Bandyopadhyay, Manik: Padma Nadir Majhi (The Bervin, Jen 522
Boatmen of Padma) 93 Bessora, Sandrine: Petroleum 171
Bandyopadhyay, Sanjukta 4, 90, 91, 93, 95, 274; Bhabha, Homi K. 75, 387
Peara Gachh (The Guava Tree) 95 Bharathi, Subramania 72, 73
Bangura, Saidu 292 Bhartendu Harishchanda 79
Barad, Karen 235, 239, 295, 348, 349, Bhatt, Balkrishan: Pashan, Anndhakar, and Nisha 80
367, 486, 487 Bhatt, Uday Shankar 79, 80; Vikramaditya, Dahar
Barbauld, Anna Leticia 418, 441, 524 Ath Sindh Patan, Muktipath, Shak-vijay, and
Barnes, Julian 376; Nightwood 253 Krantikari 79
Barnett, Suzanne L. 424 Bhije Matir Golpo (Tale of the Moist Earth) (Ghosh) 96
Barr, Nevada 459, 463, 464; Things to Do Before the Biafran War (Nigerian Civil War) 455
End of the World 453 Biden, Joe 47
Barthes, Roland 397 Bienes historia (Hennig) 225
Bartlett, Alison 61 Bienstock Anolik, R. 408
Bartoli, Teresa M. 325 “Big Six,” group of male Romantic poets 441
basuritas/little garbage 188 A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Yusoff ) 386
Basu, Samaresh 93; Ganga 93 biocolonialism 10
“batalha de poesia” (poetry competition) 198 Bird, Gloria: Reinventing in the Enemy’s Language:
Bate, Jonathan 417 Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North
Battin, Wendy 526 America 210, 212
Bazterrica, Augustina 6, 192 Birgisson, Bergsveinn 219; Lifandilifslakur 219
Beale, Anne 261; Vale of the Towey; or, Sketches in Birke, Lynda 367
outh Wales 261 Bishop, Elizabeth 526
Beatriz y la loba (Llamas) 178, 224 Bitsui, Sherwin 210; The Dine Reader 210
Beauty in Truth (Walker) 274 Björnsdóttir, Inga Dóra 213
Beck, Ulrich 510, 515 Blå (Lunde) 225
“becoming-animal” assertions 283 Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) 305
Beddoe, Deirdre 258 Black Ecology 304
Bedford, Anna 51 Black Faces, White Spaces (Finney) 504
The Beekeeper of Sinjar: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Black Lives Matter movement 278, 322
Iraq (Mikhail) 128 Black Madness: Mad Blackness (Pickens) 303
Al-Beheiri, N ‘emat 132, 133; Diary of a Radiating Blackness 10, 189, 386
Woman 132 Black on Earth (Clifton) 390
Belbin, David 449, 455 Black Power movement 322
Beloved (Morrison) 389 Black Venus (Carter) 379
Bengali literature: Abar Chorui (To be a Sparrow Blade Runner (Scott) 179
Again) 98; Brishti Amake Ghire Thako (Keep Me Bladlow, Kyle 314; Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion,
Enveloped, Rain) 96; concept of “It” and “Thou” Embodiment, Environment 314
89; concept of Mother Earth or Mother Nature The Blazing World (Cavendish) 306, 307
89; Durga and Village Woods in Pather Panchali Blend, Benay 6, 40, 58, 110, 141, 144, 170, 246,
(Song of the Road) 91; ecofeminism and Aranyak 272, 276, 288, 295, 358, 475
(Of the Forest) 90–91; ecofeminist philosophy in Blind Justice (Maracle) 211

535
 Index

Blodhofnir (Guðjónsdóttir) 214 Brontë, Charlotte 432; Jane Eyre 432; Wuthering
blood sports 326–327 Heights 432
The Bloody Chamber (Carter) 412 Brooks, Gwendolyn 524
“bloqueio meteorológico” or metereological Broudy, Oliver 513, 516; The Sensitives: The Rise of
block 197 Environmental Illness and the Search for America’s
Blossoms in Autumn (Tavèar) 150 Last Pure Place 513
Bobis, Merlinda 41 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 524
bodies-territories, concept of 328 Bruna Husky Series (Montero) 178–181
body images 159–160 Buber, Martin 90
bodymind 302, 309n1 Buell, Lawrence 250, 263, 439
A Body of Water (Farmer) 61 Bu Liao Qing (Law) 470, 471–473
Bogost, Ian 339, 341 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward: The Coming Race 492
Bohata, Kirsti 260 Burke, Edmund 247, 419–422, 502; A Philosophical
Bohls, Elisabeth A. 501, 503 Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
Boland, Eavan 527 and Beautiful 247, 419; Reflections on the Revolution
Bold, Melanie Ramdarshan 455; Inclusive Young in France 421
Adult Fiction: Authors of Color in the United Burroughs, Edgar Rice 493, 495, 497
Kingdom 455 Burroughs, John 398; Locusts and Wild Honey 398
The Book of Medicines (Hogan) 206 Burt, Michael 491
Bor, Matej 153; A Wanderer in the Atom Age 153 The Butcher’s Wife (Li) 2, 28–29
Boulter, Amanda 381 Butterfly People 116
Bowerbank, Sylvia L. 424 Byatt, A. S. 10, 28, 371, 372, 377; A Stone
Boxall, Peter 371 Woman 372
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 432 Byrd, Rudolph P. 274
Bradstreet, Anne 524, 525 Byrne, Deirdre C. 13, 140, 180, 333, 383, 413
Braidotti, Rosi 10, 22, 28, 340, 346–350, 352, 356, Byron, Lord 481
366–368
Branch, Michael P. 501 Cabezón Cámara, Gabriela: Las aventuras de la
Brandão, Beatriz 195, 200, 527; A Lagoa Pranteou China Iron (The Adventures of China Iron) 193
(The Lagoon Wailed) 199–200 Cadena, Marisol de la 6, 188, 327
Brandão, Izabel F. O. 6, 200, 288, 527 Cagle, Nicolette L. 313, 317
Branicki, Layla J. 238 Caliban and the Witch (Federici) 168–169
Brassier, Ray 339 Cameron, James 480, 493
Bratcher, Melanie 104 Campbell, John W., Memorial Award 487; for A
Brazilian literature: Academia Brasileira de Door into Ocean 487
Letras 195–196, 201n4; “batalha de poesia” Campisi, Nicolás 6, 38, 110, 144, 171, 182, 208,
(poetry competition) 198; “Coração de frango” 275, 288, 295, 322, 324, 327, 328, 334, 357,
(Chicken heart) 198; and ecofeminism 195; 359, 385, 392, 526; South American Literature and
“ecofeminist poetry and poetics” 196; fictions Ecofeminism 392
of ecohorror 190–193; green themes at work Cankar, Ivan 151, 152; The Ward of our Lady of
196–200; The Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha Mercy 151–152
195; “memoricídio” (memoricide) 196; “Morte” canon-making 258–259
(Death) (Ribeiro) 196–197; nature’s agency 197– capitalist world ecology, effects of 363
198; Persona’s poem 197; problem of pollution Cárdenas, Juan 190; Elastico de sombra 190
or idea of toxicity 199; slam poetry 198–199; care giving, significance of 9
“Taturanas” (Caterpillars) 197; violence against Carens, Tim 461
nonhuman animals 196; women writers 195–196 care, significance of 9
Breathe (Crossan) 452, 453 The Carhullan Army (Hall) 469
Brennan, Teresa: The Transmission of Affect 336–337 Carlassare, Elizabeth 142, 311
Bridge of Tears 403 Carpentaria (Wright) 62, 297, 470, 474–477
The Bridges of Constantine (Mosteghanemi) 127 Carroll, Lewis 440; Alice in Wonderland 63; Alice’s
Briksha (The Tree) (Sinha) 96 Adventures in Wonderland 440
Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Clare) 308 Carson, Anne 523, 524
Brishti Namey (It Starts Raining) (Yasodhara) 99 Carson, Rachel 250, 273, 312, 323, 337, 396, 397,
British Romanticism 524 450, 456; Silent Spring 250
Brito, Leonora: dat’s love 261 Carter, Angela 10, 11, 13, 247, 379, 380, 412, 413,
Brock-Broido, Lucie 526 495; The Bloody Chamber 412
The Broken Kingdoms ( Jemisin) 305, 307 Carter, Gillian 503

536
 Index

Carter, Robert Brudenell 431 Christie, Agatha 302, 433, 459, 462, 463, 466
Cartesian dualism 10, 365–366 Christine De Pizan 524
Casselot, Marie-Anne 349 Chua, Rina Garcia 36
Castillo, Ana 9, 334; So Far From God (1993): City of Ladies (Christine) 524
Ecosickness and the Affective Turn 334–337 City of Widows (Zangana) 128
Castle, Gregory 292 Civil Rights Movement 273
The Castle of Otranto (Walpole) 296, 409 Cixous, Hélène 196, 239, 286, 349–351; The Laugh
Castro, Fidel 274 of the Medusa 286
Catrileo, Daniela 6, 189, 385, 527; Rio herido 189 Clare, Eli 305, 308; Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling
Cavendish, Margaret 9, 13, 305–307, 479–481; The with Cure 308; Exile and Pride: Disability,
Blazing World 306, 307; The Description of a New Queerness, and Liberation 305
World, Called the Blazing-World 305, 479–481 Clare, John 397
Caycedo, Carolina 6, 194, 324 Clarinda (Madhaviah) 71
Čeh Steger, Jožica 147, 148, 151, 304 Clarke, Jacqueline 162
Cemre (İplikçi) 143 Clarke, Marcus 59
Centrafrique 454 Clark, Timothy 233, 253, 254, 391, 392, 417; I
Centre d’experimentation du Pacifique (CEP) 171, 174 Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood 391;
Ceremony (Silko) 392 Home at Grasmere 248; Soil Horizon 391
Cervantes, Lorna Dee 526 Cleave (Gemmel) 61
Césaire, Aimé 173 Cleeves, Ann 466
The Challenge for Africa (Maathai) 276 “cli-fi” 12–13; see also climate fiction (cli-fi)
Champion, Giulia 5, 72, 208, 210, 297, 480 literature
Chan Kit-sze Amy 2, 9, 31, 37, 170, 288, 383, 386, Clifton, Lucille 14, 390, 527, 528
391, 484, 522 climate change in novels, effects of 180
chaotic nature 434 climate fiction (cli-fi) literature 172; bibliography
charles, jos 526 of 331–332; Bu Liao Qing (Law) 471–473;
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung 526 Carpentaria (Wright) 474–477; Displaced (Patel)
Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra 94; Mahesh 94 473–474; global warming 469; masculine and
Chaucer, Geoffrey 8, 284, 286, 287, 524 masculinism 470; and posthuman in recent
Chen, Jade Y. 2, 30–31 fiction 61–62; see also “cli-fi”
Chen, Mel Y. 302, 367, 514 Clinton, Bill 47, 48
Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe 238–239, 242n10 Cloud Cuckoo Land (Doerr) 287
Chhayavad or Swachandwad period 81 Cobb, Allison 526
Chiang Kai-shek 26 Cobby Eckermann, A. 60, 64; Ruby Moonlight 3, 60
Chigiya, Joyce 113, 119; The Returnees 113 Coetzee, J. M. 376
children’s fiction: “Big Six,” group of male Cogan, Ross: 100 Poems to Save the Earth 256,
Romantic poets 441; development through 263–264, 265
ecofeminist lens 440–443; ecofeminism and Cohen, Jeffrey J. 345, 372
children’s literature criticism 439–440; (second- Cold War 47, 450
wave) feminism 445; hyperseparation or Colebrook, Claire 333, 484
radical exclusion 439–440; logic of domination Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 441
438; “myth of childhood” 443; versatility of Coles, Elisha 305
ecofeminism 445n2 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 451
Chinese frontier literature 26 Collins, Wilkie 302, 433, 451, 459; The
Chinese literature: animals and Chinese Goddesses Moonstone 302
20–22; plants in Chinese poetry 18–20; tien Collobert, Danielle 527
ren he yi 17–18; tree spirits and bestial ghosts in colonial Tamil literature: establishment of Madras
fiction 22–23; yin-yang 17–18 Presidency under British rule 71; nature,
Chin, Marilyn 526 culture, and the feminine in 71–73; poetry of
Chipko Movement, India 86, 126, 273, 275, Subramania Bharathi 72–73; Shaktism 72; see also
357–359 Tamil literature
Chiriboga, Luz Argentina 6, 189, 527; Las huellas de “Colonization of the Feminine” 419
la lluvia (The Traces of the Rain) 189 color disability studies, feminist of 303
Chitando, Anna 111 Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature
Chitradhara (Prasad) 81 (Rimer and Gessel) 527
Chitralekha (Verma) 82 Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry
Chiziane, Paulina 195 (McCann) 527
Chopin, Kate 245; The Awakening 245 The Coming Race (Bulwer-Lytton) 492

537
 Index

Condé, Maryse 173 Das, Jibanananda 4, 96

Confucianism 17–18 Das, Lala Sriniwas 79; Randhir Aur Premmohini 79
Connell, Robert W. 323 Das, Seth Govind 80; Kartavya, Vikas, Garibhi Ya
‘Constitution of Life’ 139 Aamiri, Shashi Gupta 80
contemporary fantasy 496–497 dat’s love (Brito) 261
contemporary Tamil literature: Kurinji Then Datuin, Flaudette May 39
(1964) (When the Kurinji Blooms) 74; Pazhayana Davenport, Doris 386
Kazhidalum (The Grip of Change) 74; Thinai in Davies, Rhys 258
74–75; Vanmam 74; see also Tamil literature Davis, Rebecca Harding: Life in the Iron Mills 250
Coonardoo (Prichard) 3, 57, 60, 296 Dawes Act of 1887 475
Cooper, Susan Fenimore 11, 396 Day, Aidan: Gender and the Sublime 419
“Coração de frango” (Chicken heart) 198 Daymond, Margaret J. 119
coronavirus 7, 238; see also COVID-19 and The Death of Nature (Merchant) 84, 245, 378, 428
pandemic D’Eaubonne, Françoise 5, 6, 17, 88, 169, 170, 271,
corporate capitalism 355 291, 311, 357, 428, 480, 528; Le feminisme ou la
Cortez, Jayne 104, 526 mort (Feminism or Death) 88, 169–170
Cothran, Casey A. 12, 179, 302, 433 Deb Sen, Nabanita 97, 98; Adi-anto (From the
COVID-19 238, 275, 295, 423, 456, 511, 516, Beginning till the End) 97
517n1; see also coronavirus and pandemic decolonizing map 506–507
Crane, Stephen 251 Defoe, Daniel 376
creation myths, role of 246–247 Değirmenci Altın, Aslı 10, 37, 47, 65, 75, 106, 126,
Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams 331, 341, 386, 388 171, 219, 247, 253, 271, 273, 334, 385, 402, 471,
Crichton, Michael 332, 469 491, 506
“crime against humanity” 225 Deininger, Michelle 7, 8, 12, 63, 140, 182, 226,
criticism and ecofeminism 148–149 413, 439, 496, 451
Crossan, Sarah 452; Breathe 452, 453 del Rio Gabiola, Irune 337
Cross, Ashley 424 Deleuze, Gilles 283, 335, 336, 338, 364, 368, 378, 471
cross-fertilization of perspectives 147 Delta 454
Cruz-Lucero, Rosario 40, 41, 297 DeLuca, Kevin 504
crypto-ecofeminism 102, 520–521 Demo, Anne 504
Cubacub, Sky 305 Derrida, Jacques 246, 283, 471
cultural ecofeminism 295–297 Desai, Anita 359
cultural hegemony, extension of 321–322 The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-
cultural materialism (CM) 294–295 World (Cavendish) 305, 479–481
cultural studies: cultural ecofeminism 295–297; Desert Solitaire (Abbey) 511
cultural materialism 294–295; description “development projects” 38
290–291; ecofeminism 291; ecofeminist D’hoker, Elke: Irish Women Writers and the Modern
literature 291–295; feminist new materialism and Short Story 259
ecofeminist literature 297–298; literature 292; The Dialectic of Sex (Firestone) 482
Orientalism 297; principles 293; Sinologism 297 Diary of a Radiating Woman (al-Beheiri) 132
Curry, Alice 226, 438, 448; Environmental Diaz, Natalie 528
Crisis 448 Dickinson, Emily 14, 98, 287, 288, 524–526
A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway) 338 Dick, Philip K. 179
Dillard, Annie 250, 511; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 511
Dabralgo, Manglesh: Ghatatee Huee Oxygen, Yahaan Dillwyn, Amy 258
Thee Vah Nadee, Vasant, and Aadivaasee 85 Dimmumót (Sigurðardóttir) 218
Dabral, Mangesh 85 The Dine Reader (Bitsui) 210
Dagbjartsdóttir, Vilborg 214, 215; Óðinn’s Lust Dinizulu kaCetshwayo 112
214–215 Dirty River Girl: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming
Dalit 74, 76n6 Her Way Home (Piepzna-Samrahsina) 308
D’Amore, Chiana 160 disability: animal-human hybrids in kingdom
Dang-wai movement 26 306–307; Black and Indigenous People of Color
Daoism 17–18, 31 305; Black Ecology 304; bodymind 302, 309n1;
dark ecology 470 disability justice 305; in ecofeminist literature 301,
The Dark Woman (Rymer) 434 305–308; feminist of color disability studies 303;
Darling River (Stridsberg) 229 “inter-species love” 307; LGBTQIA communities
Darwin, Charles 434; On the Origin of Species 434 304; nature and environment in 302–305; Not-
Darwish, Mahmoud 133 in-my-backyard mentality 303; queer disability

538
 Index

studies 305; slow death, concept of 302; “slow (Of the Forest) 90–91; and children’s literature
violence” of war 302; system of settler colonialism criticism 439–440; core issues and topics 8–11;
303; teratological hybrid 305–306; “wonderous” deconstruction of nature writing 84–86; defined
or hybrid humanoid birth 302 1, 49, 88, 93, 271, 311, 357, 428; development
The Disappearance of Ember Crow (Kwaymullina) 63 of 1, 10, 17, 24n1, 205, 224, 321, 358; and
Discourses or Fihi Ma Fihi (Rumi) 28 heterosexism collide 314–315; history of 4, 211,
Displaced (Patel) 470, 473–474 304; literary periods and genres 11–14; and
Distancia de rescate (Schweblin) 191 Victorian Penny Literature 431–435
Dittmer, Nicole C. 11, 151, 245, 287, 378, 411, 421, Ecofeminism and the Indian Novel in English
431, 441, 462 (Patil) 361
Divine Feminine in Medieval Tamil literature écoféminisme 88, 520
70–71; Kambaramayanam 70–71 Ecofeminismo decolonial y crisis del patriarcado (de
Divya, Manushyake Rup, Jhootha-Sach (Yashpal) 82 Souza) 186
Đỉnh Khoi (The Smoke Cloud) (Nguyê ̃n Thi Kim Ecofeminismo para otro mundo possible (Puleo) 177
Hòa) 48 ecofeminist activism 357–359
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick) 179 ecofeminist criticism 408–409
Döblin, Alexander 469 ecofeminist fantasy (Gallego) 181–183
Dobson, Joanne 396, 398, 399 ecofeminist literary criticism 147
Doerr, Anthony 287, 288; Cloud Cuckoo Land 287 Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange
Dollimore, Jonathan 294 (Donovan) 19–20, 248
Donohue, Tyler A. 351 ecofeminist literature 291–295
Donovan, Josephine 19, 162, 248, 380, 502; ecofeminist memory 131–133
Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange 248 ecogrief 400
A Door into Ocean (Slonczewski) 487 ecohorror, fictions of 190–193
Dot and the Kangaroo (Pedley) 63 ecological “burden-and-beauty-paradox” 390
Doukhan, Abi 523 ecological felting 364–365, 368
Dove, Rita 526 ecological genders 10
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 459, 461, 462 ecological masculinism 315–316, 319n1
Dracula (Stoker) 411, 432 Ecological Masculinities: Theoretical Foundations and
Dreese, Danelle 205, 206 Practical Guidance (Pulé) 316, 319n1
Dreiser, Theodore 251; Sister Carrie 251 ecological turn 157
“DROM-COM” 168 ecopoetry 257
Drop Bear (Araluen) 57, 64 ecosickness 131–133, 337, 515
Drylands (Astley) 62, 297 ecosophy 341
Du’a’a al-Karawan (The Call of the Curlew) (Hussein) eco-sufficiency or provisioning 274
128, 296 ecowomanism 49–50, 108–109
Duane, Diane 12, 451–452; The Nature of Witches ecriture feminine (Cisoux) 170
451–452; Young Wizards Series 451–452 Edgeworth, Maria 418
Duarte, Constância Lima 196 Edmonds, Taylor 262, 265
Dube, Adelaide Tantsi 119 Ehin, Kristiina 238, 239; The Drums of Silence 239;
Duckworth, Melanie 3, 195, 198, 204, 205, 261, Emapuhkus (Maternity Leave) 239; Janu on koikidel
271, 288, 296, 297, 358, 470, 471, 507 uks (Thirst is the Same for Everyone) 238–239;
Dungy, Camille 387, 390, 526 Kaitseala (Protected Area) 239; Luigeluulinn
Dwivedi, Hazariprasad 79; Banabhatta Ki (Swanbone City) 239; My limbs metamorphose 240;
Atmakatha 79 The Scent of Your Shadow 239
Eira, Rawdna Carita 228
Earth (Uzuner) 139 Ekman, Kerstin 224
The Earth Path 277, 278 Elastico de sombra (Cárdenas) 190
Easy Meat (Trezise) 260 El corazon de la tierra (Wilkins) 178
Echeverría, Bolívar 186 El Gaucho Martin Fierro (Hernández) 193
The Ecocritical Psyche (Rowland) 466–467 Elísson, Guðni 213
ecocriticism 105–106 Elliott, Alicia 205, 207, 475
Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity Ellis, Sarah Stickney 430; A Woman’s Mission 430
(Schliephake) 157 Elrefaei, Pervine 277, 296, 297, 356, 357, 361
The Eco-Criticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Emapuhkus (Maternity Leave) 239
Ecology (Glotfelty) 81, 244 embodied gender (corporeality) 370
ecofeminism: and agriculture/forestry, intersection embodied subjects 10
of 274–275; and animals 61–63; and Aranyak emotion and ecological awareness 397

539
 Index

Emre, Yunus 28, 347 The Fall River Axe Murders (Carter) 379
English literature: Gaia hypothesis 245; modernism Fanon, Frantz 173, 333
252–253; Mother Earth and Mother Nature fantastical landscapes 490–491
ideologies 244–246; naturalism and realism fantasy: contemporary fantasy 496–497; early
250–252; role of creation myths 246–247; fantasy 491–494; fantastical landscapes 490–491;
Romanticism and origins of materialism 244, Hobbit 494; The Last Continent 496; The Lord of
247–250 the Rings 494; in mainstream 494–496; A Natural
Enlightenment (Trethewey) 391 History of Dragons 497; Phantastes (MacDonald)
Enlightenment narrative 414 491–492; Realm of the Elderlings 496–497; A Song
environmental autobiography 510–511 of Ice and Fire series 497; Western fantasy fiction
environmental classism/racism 126 493; Witches 495; Wizard of the Pigeons 496; Wyrd
Environmental Crisis (Curry) 448 Sisters 495
environmental degradation and collapse 256–257 Farmer, Beverley: A Body of Water 61; Seal
environmental identities 313–314 Woman 61
environmental illness 511–512, 514 Farrell, Joseph 157
environmentalism 513–514 Fay, Elizabeth A. 418
environmental poetry in Wales 262–264 Federici, Silvia 5, 168, 169; Caliban and the Witch
environmental racism 10 168–169
environment and literature, intersection Feet in Chains (Roberts) 259
between 37 Feldman, Paula R. 418
Epic of Gilgamesh (Kutlu) 5 Felski, Rita 252, 253; The Gender of Modernity 252
Epistre au Dieu D’amour, or Cupid’s Letter (Christine) The Female Eunuch (Greer) 61
524 The Female Man (Russ) 10, 381–382
Era, Mahmuda Iasmin 92 female Romantics as ecofeminists 421–424
Erb, Elke 527 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Plumwood) 58,
Erdrich, Louise 208–210, 246, 475; Tracks 208–210 283, 409
Erevelles, Nirmala 302, 303 Feminism ou le mort (d’Eaubonne) 6
Ergin, Meliz 141 Feminist, Queer, Crip (Kafer) 305
Errym, Malcolm J. 434 Ferebee, K. M. 13, 14, 132, 187, 192, 250, 292,
Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference 295, 304, 395, 400, 504
(Fuss) 312 Fern Gully (Young) 63
Esta herida llena de peces (Masso) 189 Ferrier, Susan 418, 502
Estévez-Saá, Margarita 249, 459 Fifty Degrees Below (Robinson) 470
Estok, Simon C. 351 Filipova, Lenka 13, 171, 261, 512
Estonian literature: Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe Finnegan, Ruth 102
238–239, 242n10; empowering pandemic Finney, Carolyne 504; Black Faces, White Spaces 504
240–241; Libahunt Liisi 235–236; motherhood, Fire on the Mountain (Desai) 359
material and economic enmeshment 237–238; Firestone, Shulamith: The Dialectic of Sex 482
role of nature on 233–234; transcorporeality and “First World” 8
material-discursive intra-action 238–240; Vedaja First World War 225
(Liiv) 235 Fitzgerald, Stephanie 204, 205, 207, 208, 272
The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-caring: Contemporary Flame and Slag (Berry) 260
Debates on Ecofeminism(s) (Estévez-Saá and Flaubert’s Parrot (Barnes) 376
Lorenzo-Modia) 249 Flys Junquera, Carmen 178, 181, 183
Eunjung Kim 304 Foals Bread (Mears) 62
Evans, Margiad 258 Foe (Coetzee) 376
Evaristo, Conceição 199 forensic ecofeminism 128–130
Evasco, Marjorie M. 41 The Foretelling of Georgie Spider (Kwaymullina) 63
Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure Forty Signs of Rain (Robinson) 470
(Walton) 505 Fossey, Dian 283
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation Fowles, John 10, 377, 378
(Clare) 305 Francophone literature: Centre d’experimentation du
“Exile of Memory” (Harjo) 205 Pacifique (CEP) 171, 174; climate fiction 172;
The Eye of the Crocodile (Plumwood) 62 colonial relationality 168; concept of Relation
Ezz Eldin, Mansoura 133 (Glissant) 169; “DROM-COM” 168; (lack of )
Intersectionnalitude 170–173; L’ile (Spitz) 171, 173;
The Fallen (Hogan) 206 literary tradition or genre 167; “male System”
The Falling Woman (Hawthorn) 61 170; objectification and “cheapening” of life 169;

540
 Index

Petroleum (Bessora) 171; Terre mère’s Reproductive identities 313–314; essentialist entanglements
Labor 168–170; version of “terre mère” trope 311–313; gendered conditioning of people 316–
170–172 317; and heterosexism 311; intersex, transgender,
Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (Shelley) and non-binary bodies 315–317; masculinities
249, 410–411, 422 and femininities 315–316; post-gender ecological
Frankenstein, Victor 419, 422, 423 feminism 315–317; post-genderism 317;
Franklin, Miles 61, 62, 391; My Brilliant Career 61 queer hybrid ecofeminism 318–319; women’s
Frazier, Chelsea Mikael 386 subordination 312
Freeman, Kathleen 261; The Intruder, and other The Gender of Modernism ( Joyce) 252
stories 261 The Gender of Modernity (Felski) 252
Freitas, Daniela da Silva 198 General Allotment Act of 1987 (Dawes Act) 208
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Fowles) 10, 377–379 Genette, Gérard 345
Fresh Apples (Trezise) 260 “genre-bending” 510
From Here (Kramb) 470 geochoreographies 194
Frost, Robert 292 George, J. L. 262, 265
Fruta podrida (Meruane) 191 Gersdorf, Catrin 106, 293
Fulford, Tim 424 Gervitz, Gloria 526
Fuss, Diana 9, 311–313; Essentially Speaking: al-Ghanawi, Tofail 127
Feminism, Nature & Difference 312 Ghatak, Ritwik 92
Ghosh, Girijakumar 82
Gaard, Greta 18, 31, 49, 82, 128, 199, 200, 220, Ghosh (Sarkar), Nivedita: Bhije Matir Golpo (Tale of
233, 256, 264, 273, 282, 301, 311, 314, 316, 329, the Moist Earth) 96
346, 349, 350, 355, 357, 364, 365, 367, 370, 428, GIECO group 184n4
429, 438, 465, 470, 472 Gilbert, Elizabeth 9
Gago, Verónica 186, 187, 275, 357; La potencia Gilbert, Sandra M. 418, 422
feminista 186–187 Gilded Age 251
Gaia hypothesis 245 The Girl Who Speaks Bear (Anderson) 439, 444
Gaiman, Neil 491, 496 The Glad Shout (Robinson) 62
Galdikas, Birute 283 Glissant, Édouard 5, 169, 172
Gallego García, Laura 6, 178, 181–183; Donde Global Climate Risk Index (CRI) 2, 36
los arboles cantan [Where the trees sing] 181–182; global ecofeminist temporalities 506–507
ecofeminist fantasy 181–183; Finis Mundi 181; global warming 469
Guardianes de la Ciudadela [Guardians of the Glotfelty, Cheryll 81, 244; The Eco-Criticism Reader:
Citadel] 181; Las hijas de Tara [Tara’s daughters] Landmarks in Literary Ecology 81, 244
181–183; Memorias de Idhun [The Idhun Glück, Louise 524; “Mythic Fragment” 524
Chronicles] 181 Goddu, Teresa A. 407
Gallie, Menna 260; The Small Mine 260 The God of Small Things 277
Gandopadhyay, Leena 4, 95 Godwoman (Hepçilinger) 143
Ganga (Basu) 93 Going It Alone (Haile) 504
Gangopadhyay, Leena: Janmodin (The Birthday) 95 The Golden Age (Grahame) 442
Gan, Yao-ming 32–33, 274, 297 Golež Kaucic, Marjetka 148, 149, 152
Gardner, Catherine 304 González Reyes, María 177
Garg, Mridula 85; Kathgulab 85 “good mother paradigm” 412–413
Garland-Thomson, Rosemary 93, 302, 303; Gordan, Vivian Verdell 105
Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory gothic fiction: ecofeminist criticism 408–409;
302–303 Enlightenment narrative 414; female gothic/
Garofalo, Daniela 424 male gothic dualism 408–409; “good mother
Gates, Barbara T. 452 paradigm” 412–413; logic of domination 407;
Gearhart, Sally Miller: The Wanderground: Stories of maternal telepathy 412; model of “the master’s
the Hill Women 483–484, 486 logic of colonization” 411; terror gothic 408,
Geerts, Evelien 346 409; “unnatural” force threatening humans 414;
Gelder, Ken 63 Victorian gothic 412; women as “natural” vs.
Gemmel, Nikki 61; Cleave 61 “unnatural” 407
Gender and the Sublime (Day) 419 Goutam Anand and Pratap-Pratighy (Milind) 80
gender essentialism: assisted reproductive Govett, Sarah 448, 451, 453; The Territory trilogy
technologies 317; division of humans 312; 448, 451, 453
ecofeminism and heterosexism collide 314–315; Grahame, Kenneth 440, 442; The Golden Age 442;
ecological masculinities 315–316; environmental The Wind in the Willows 440, 442

541
 Index

Gramich, Katie: Twentieth-century Women’s Writing Harris, Melanie L. 49, 53, 108
in Wales: Land, Gender, Belonging 259 Harrison, Summer 398
Gramsci, Antonio 321 Hathihi Eshagara (This Tree) (al-’Aqqad) 127
Granström, Helena 229 Hawthorn, Susan 61; The Falling Woman 61
The Great Hunger (Diệu Lan) 50 Haynes, Todd 336; Safe 336
Green Belt Movement 107, 276, 357–359 Heaney, Seamus 64
The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and Hébert, Anne 527
the Experience (Maathai) 276 Heckman, Susan 49
Greenham Common movement 456n2 hegemonic masculinity: blood sports 326–327;
“green letters” 3 concept of bodies-territories 328; ecofeminism
Greer, Germaine 61; The Female Eunuch 61; White 322–324; extension of cultural hegemony
Beech: The Rainforest Years 61 321–322; green criminology, hunting and
Gregg, Melissa 335 blood sports 326–327; and heteronormativity
Gremaud, Ann-Sofie Nielsen 219 321; hunting narratives 325, 326; tropes and
Grenville, Kate 59; A Room Made of Leaves 59, 60; narratives of domination 324–325; woman/
The Secret River 59–60 nature – male/culture connection 325
Griffin, Rachel 452 Hejinian, Lyn 526
Griffin, Susan 7, 85, 247, 428, 452, 481, 482; Hemans, Felicia Dorothea 418, 524
Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her vii, Hemings, Sally 391
xxviii, 247, 481–482 Hepçilingirler, Feyza 138, 143; Godwoman 143
Griffiths, Elly 466 Herche, Victoria 475
Grosz, Elizabeth 346, 352, 367 Her Life (Kveder) 152
Gruen, Lori 137, 321, 382 Hernández, José 193; El Gaucho Martin Fierro 193
Grusin, Richard A. 333 Herrero, Yayo 177
Guardianes de la Ciudadela [Guardians of the heterosexism 9
Citadel] 181 Hiaasen, Carl 459, 465, 466
Guattari, Felix 283, 335, 336, 338, 341, 364, 368, Hiam (Sallis) 61
378, 471 The Hiding Place (Azzopardi) 260
Gubar, Susan 418, 422 “high magic” of wizardry 495
Guðjónsdóttir, Gerður Kristný 214; Blodhofnir 214 Hillman, Brenda 14, 521, 527, 528
Gulf of Carpentaria 474 Hindi Gady Saahity Mein Prakrti Chitran
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline: Undrowned: Black Feminist (Omprakash) 81, 86n1
Lessons from Marine Mammals 174 Hindi literature: Anaakhya and Sudhanvanshu
Gunnlaðar saga ( Jakobsdóttir) ( Jakobsdóttir) 215–216 (Ramkrishnadas) 79; Ankhari Danv and Tede
Gunnlöth’s Tale 215–217, 220–221, 296 Mede Raste (Verma) 79; Badal Ki Mritu and Bhor
Gupta, Abhik 1, 4, 54, 143, 206, 274, 288, 308, ka Tara (Verma and Mathur) 80; Chandrakanta
357, 527; Subha 308 and Chandrakanta Santati, Gadhkundar, and
Gupta, Balamukund 79 Mriganayani (Khatri) 80; Chitralekha (Verma)
82; Delhi Ka Darbar, Sarkar Tumhari Ankhonme,
Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli 347 and Ji Ji Ji (Ugra) 80; Divya, Manushyake
Hagen, Ross 306 Rup, Jhootha-Sach (Yashpal) 82; ecocritical
Haile, Rahawa 504: Going It Alone 504 narrative: paradigm shift 81–84; ecofeminism:
al-Hakim, Tawfiq 127 deconstruction of nature writing 84–86; fine
Hall, Dewey 424 narrative of nature 78–80; First Death and
Hall, Sarah 28, 371 Two Aspects 79, 83; Ghatatee Huee Oxygen,
Han Chinese colonial-settler people 26 Yahaan Thee Vah Nadee, Vasant, and Aadivaasee
Han Dynasty 22 (Dabralgo) 85; Goutam Anand and Pratap-Pratighy
Haraway, Donna J. 28, 283, 334, 338, 340, 341, (Milind) 80; Hansmayur, Purva ki Ore, Mangal-
348, 350, 366, 369, 381, 408, 486; A Cyborg sutra, Lalit Vikram, Gadhkundar, Bhuvanvikram,
Manifesto 338; Staying with the Trouble 334 and Mrugnayani (Verma) 79; Hindi Gady Saahity
Hardy, Thomas 251 Mein Prakrti Chitran (Omprakash) 81, 86n1;
Hare, Nathan 303 Kartavya, Vikas, Garibhi Ya Aamiri, Shashi Gupta
Harishchanda, Bhartendu: Niladevi 79 (Das) 80; Maila Anchal and Parti Pari Katha
Harjo, Joy 7, 204, 205, 210–212, 246, 272, 475, (Renu) 82; Niladevi (Harishchanda) 79; Nirmala,
528; “Exile of Memory” 205; Reinventing in the Godan, and Rangbumi (Premchand) 80; Pashan,
Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Anndhakar, and Nisha (Bhatt) 80; Rangbhoomi and
Writings of North America 210, 212; Washing My Godan (Premchand) 82; The Tale of Two Bullocks
Mother’s Body 204 and Sailor Bandar (Premchand) 82; Two Birds and

542
 Index

This Snake (Kumar) 82; Vikramaditya, Dahar Ath for solutions 217–219; Jarðnæði (Ævarsdóttir)
Sindh Patan, Muktipath, Shak-vijay, and Krantikari 218; Land of Love and Ruins 218–219;
(Bhatt) 79; Viswas Ka Bal, Patwar, Nimantran, Lifandilifslakur (Birgisson) 219; Lifandi vatnid
Manushya Aur Devata, and Gomati Ke Tat Par - - - (Sigurðardóttir) 213–214; objectification
(Vajpayee) 79; Zarana and Chitradhara (Prasad) 81 and alienation 213–214; Óðinn’s Lust
H is for Hawk (Macdonald) 511 (Dagbjartsdóttir) 214–215; “old wives’ tales”
The History of White People (Painter) 385 214; Power of Earth Goddess 215–217; symbol
Hoà, Nguyễn Thị Kim 47–49, 52–53, 55 of possibilities 220–221; Undirferli (Ævarsdóttir)
Hobb, Robin 496 219, 220; Völuspá 215
Hofskotch, Sonia 424 ideological frameworks 10
Hogan, Linda 204, 206, 246, 272, 475; The Book of Idowu, E. Bolaji 110; African Traditional Religion: A
Medicines 206; The Fallen 206 Definition 110
Höing, Anja 11, 12, 62, 236, 296, 323, 328, 429, Ilango Adigal 70
433, 435, 449 Iliopoulour, Maria A. 326, 327
Homans, Margaret 19, 248, 418, 420, 422 “Immortal Aphrodite” 523
Home at Grasmere (Clark) 248 In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl (Trezise) 260
Hopkinson, Nalo 51 Inang Bayan (Motherland) 40–41, 42n9
Horses Make the Landscape More Beautiful (Walker) 273 Inchbald, Elizabeth 418
Hossain, Selina: “Notun Joler Shobdo” (“The Sound of Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Color in the
New Water”) 95–96 United Kingdom (Bold) 455
Houellebecq, Michael 469 Indigenous ecofeminism 204, 205–207
The Hound of the Baskervilles (Doyle) 459, 461 Indigenous spirituality 2, 37–39
House of Mirth (Wharton) 251 individualism vs. cooperation 208–210
Houser, Heather 190, 335, 336, 515, 517 Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman
Howe, Susan 526 (Bennett) 298
How to Bee (MacDibble) 62 The Inheritance Trilogy ( Jemisin) 307
Huang, Peter I-min 2, 20, 152, 274, 288, 297 Inkesar al-Rouh (The Subjection of the Soul)
Huggan, Graham 354, 355, 506 (Qandil) 133
Huhndorf, Shari 206, 207, 209, 211 In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose
Hậu, Kiều Bích 47, 48, 53–55, 109 (Walker) 108, 273–274, 279n3
Hulme, Peter 503 Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory
Hultman, Martin 316, 317 (Garland-Thomson) 302–303
The Human Body—The Land that Time Forgot Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization and World
(Stewart) 493 Religions (Ruether) 278
humanimal [a project for future children] (Kapil) 527 Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Migration
Hume, Angela 528 Stories (Silko) 211
Hundimorsja (Kallas) 235 The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (Kwaymullina) 63
Hundi silmas (Nõu) 235 intersectionality: bibliography of climate fiction
The Hunger Games (Collins) 451 (cli-fi) 331–332; concept of Thing-Power 337;
hunting narratives 9, 325, 326 A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway) 338; ecosickness
Hunt, Peter 448 337; The Mosses of Northern Europe 340; Prodigal
Hurston, Zora Neale 527; Their Eyes Were Watching Summer (Kingsolver) 338–339, 341; Safe (Haynes)
God 390 336; The Signature of All Things (Whittaker) 339–
Hussein, Taha 127, 128, 131, 296; Du’a’a al-Karawan 340, 341; So Far From God (1993): Ecosickness and
(The Call of the Curlew) 128, 296 the Affective Turn (Castillo) 334–337; Staying with
Hutcheon, Linda 376 the Trouble (Haraway) 334; The Transmission of
Hutchings, Kevin 424 Affect (Brennan) 336–337; The Vegetarian (Kang)
hypochondriacs 517 339; virtual synesthetic perspectives 336
“inter-species love” 307
Ibarbourou, Juana de 526 In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and
Ibrahim, Hafez 127 Modernist Uses of Nature (Woolf ) 252
Ibrāhīm, Ṣunʻ Allāh 135 Introducing Cultural Studies (Sardar) 290, 293
I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood The Intruder, and other stories (Freeman) 261
(Clark) 391 Iovino, Serenella 10, 28, 345, 351, 380
Icelandic literature: Blodhofnir (Guðjónsdóttir) 214; Iplikçi, Müge 138, 143
Dimmumót (Sigurðardóttir) 218; Gunnlaðar saga Irigaray, Luce 346, 433
( Jakobsdóttir) ( Jakobsdóttir) 215–216; Gunnlöth’s Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story
Tale 215–217, 220–221; Islandness and search (D’hoker) 259

543
 Index

Ishaque, Abu 92; Padmar Polidwip (The Alluvial Kallas, Aino 223, 224, 235; Hundimorsja 235; Suden
Islands of Padma) 91 morsian 223
Ísleifsson, Sumarliði 219 Kamalambal Charitram (Iyer) 71
The Italian (Radcliffe) 413 Kambar 70, 71
“It” and “Thou,” concept of 89 Kambaramayanam 70–71
Iversen, Kristin 512, 515 Kambeba, Márcia Wayna 527; O tempo do clima (The
Iyer, B. R. Rajam: Kamalambal Charitram 71 Time of Climate) 189
Kanayak (Arslan) 143
Jabeen, Nelam 360–362 Kando Nodi Kando (Cry River Cry) (Waliullah) 92
Jachowski, David 399 Kane, Michael 376
Jacobs, Nicole A. 9, 93, 94, 132, 152, 288, 400, Kang, Han 339; The Vegetarian 339
513, 514, 528 Kang Ŭn’gyo 529
Jacobson, Lisa 62; The Sunlit Zone 62 Kapil, Bhanu: humanimal [a project for future children] 527
Jacobus, Mary 418–420 Karon, Alexis K. 108
Jade Chen 2, 30–31, 33; Mazu’s Body-Guards 30–31 Kartavya, Vikas, Garibhi Ya Aamiri, Shashi Gupta
Jaganath Prasad Milind 80 (Das) 80
Jain, Sunaina 1, 8, 38, 47, 109, 154, 170, 190, 191, Kathgulab (Garg) 85
205, 253, 295, 297 Kaunda, Chammah J. 106
Jakobsdóttir, Svava 215, 216, 220; Gunnlaðar saga Kaur, Gurpreet 359–362
( Jakobsdóttir) 215–216 Keats, John 285, 418
Jalakeli (Frolicking in Water) 98 Keith, Alison 161
Jameson, Fredric 375 Kelley, Theresa M. 418
Jamie, Kathleen 264, 505, 506 Kelly, Brigit Pegeen 526
Jane Eyre (Brontë) 432 Kern, David 475
Janeway, James 440; A Token for Children 440–441 Kernev Štrajn, J. 149
Janmodin (The Birthday) (Gangopadhyay) 95 Khakpour, Porochista 512
Jansson, Tove 219 Khalifeh, Sahar 133
Janu on koikidel uks (Thirst is the Same for Everyone) Khan, Uzma Aslam 360
238–239 Khatri, Devakinanda 80; Chandrakanta and
Jarðnæði (Ævarsdóttir) 218 Chandrakanta Santati, Gadhkundar, and
Jarvis, Matt 262, 263, 265; Welsh Environments n Mriganayani 80
Contemporary Poetry 262 Khedive Ism‘ail 127
Jaspers, Karl 17 Kim, Jina B. 303
Jaya, Jacobo 42 Kime, Bonnie 248, 252
Jeffords, Susan 48 King, Andrew David 14, 41, 63, 71, 102, 153, 195,
Je Jakey Dhorey Rakhey (Holding Each Other) 196, 200
(Mitra) 98 Kingsolver, Barbara 8, 9, 287, 338, 396, 397; The
Jemisin, N.K. 9, 305, 307; The Broken Kingdoms Poisonwood Bible 287; Prodigal Summer 337–341,
305, 307; The Inheritance Trilogy 307 338–339, 341
Jensen, Liz 10, 28, 371, 372 King, Thomas 246
Jewett, Sarah Orne 250; A White Heron 250 King, Ynestra 273, 364, 365
Jian-kang 20 Kirk, Gwyn 392
Johnson, Daisy 28, 371 Kirsch, Sarah 527
Johnson, Richard 291 Kitson, Peter J. 424
Johnson, Valerie Ann 303 Kitzberg, August 224, 234, 235; Libahunt (Werewolf )
Jökulsdóttir, Elísabet Kristín 221 224, 234
Joler Onek Niche (Deep Down in Water) 98 Kiwus, Karin 527
Joler Putul (The Mermaid) (Sinha) 97 Knowles-Borishade, Adetokunbo F. 116
Jones, Alex 260 Koletnik, Anja 305
Joshi, Ilachandra 80 Kordecki, Lesley 8, 22, 94, 128, 134, 149, 154, 178,
Joyce, James 252; The Gender of Modernism 252 235, 308, 338, 402, 423, 471, 517, 524
Junquera, Carmen Flys: analysis of Beatriz y la loba Korean War 130
178; Literature and Ecofeminism 178 Korun, Barbara 154
Kramb, Daniel 470
Kafer, Alison 9, 301, 304, 305; Feminist, Queer, Kramberger, Taja 154
Crip 305 Kress, Helga 215
Kaitseala (Protected Area) 239 Krishnan, Rajam: Kurinji Then (1964) (When the
Kalantari, Anis 296 Kurinji Blooms) 74

544
 Index

Kristeva, Julia 216, 345 The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin) 333, 484
Kristjánsdóttir, Dagný 216, 217 Le Guin, Ursula K. 10, 13, 247, 331, 333, 339,
Kristný, Gerður 214, 228 382, 383, 481, 484, 485, 487, 488, 494; The Left
Kroeber, Karl 417 Hand of Darkness 484; A Non-Euclidean View of
Kuehn, Julia 500 California as a Cold Place to Be 488
Kumar, Janendra 82; Two Birds and This Snake 82 Lemelle, Anthony J. Jr. 323
Kunksmoor (Pervik) 236 Leone, Maryanne L. 181, 184
Kunsmoor, case of 7 Leopold, Aldo 74, 209, 313
Kurinji Then (1964) (When the Kurinji Blooms) Leppänen, Katarina 7, 214, 217, 219–221
(Krishnan) 74 Leticia Incident/Colombia-Peru War of 1932 190
Kutlu, Ayla 5, 138, 142; Woman’s Epic 142 Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden,
Kuznetski, Julia 7, 143, 149, 170, 295 Norway, and Denmark (Wollstonecraft) 422
Kveder, Zof ka 152; Her Life 152 Levertov, Denise 526
Kwaymullina, Ambelin 59, 63, 303, 304, 358; The Lewis, Alun 258
Disappearance of Ember Crow 63; The Foretelling of Lewis, Gill: Sky Hawk 443
Georgie Spider 63; The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf Lewis, Matthew G. 11, 409–413; The Lion, the
63; The Tribe 63 Witch and the Wardrobe 440; The Monk 409–410,
Kyger, Joanne 526 411, 413
LGBTQ community 9
Lacuna, Isabel 37; Latag: Essays on Philippine LGBTQIA communities 304
Literature, Culture, and the Environment 37 Libahunt (Werewolf ) (Kitzberg) 224, 234
Ladino, Jennifer 314; Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Libahunt Liisi 235–236
Embodiment, Environment 314 Liddle, Celeste 64
Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon) 432 Lifandilifslakur (Birgisson) 219
Lady Oracle (Atwood) 376 Lifandi vatnidð - - - (Sigurðardóttir) 213–214
Lagarde, Charlotte 522 Life in the Iron Mills (Davis) 250
A Lagoa Pranteou (The Lagoon Wailed) (Brand ão) Liiv, Juhan 235; Vedaja 235
199–200 L’ile (Spitz) 171, 173
Lakshmi, C.S. 74 Lindholm, Megan 496
Lamb, Charles 441 Lindow, Sandra J. 382
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth 418, 524 Line 3 pipeline 212, 475
La potencia feminista (Gago) 186–187 Lines Composed A Few Miles Above
Las aventuras de la China Iron (The Adventures of (Wordsworth) 420
China Iron) (Cámara) 193 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis) 440
Las huellas de la lluvia (The Traces of the Rain) Liptrot, Amy: The Outrun 511
(Chiriboga) 189 Li Qingzhao 2, 20, 31
Lasker-Schüler, Else 527 Lispector, Clarice 195
The Last Man (Shelley) 422–423 Literary Women (Moers) 408
The Last Wild Witch (Starhawk) 277 Literature and Ecofeminism ( Junquera) 178
The Last Woman in the World (Simpson) 62 Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (Perrine) 292
Latag: Essays on Philippine Literature, Culture, and the Lizzie’s Tiger (Carter) 379–380
Environment (Ong and Lacuna) 37 Llamas, Concha López: Beatriz y la loba 178, 224
Latin literature: Ars Amatoria (Ovid) 159–160; Locusts and Wild Honey (Burroughs) 398
body images 159–160; construction of gender Lokke, Kari E. 424
identities 158–159; “ecological turn” 157; equus López Llamas, C. 6, 178, 183, 224
position 163n11; Metamorphoses (Ovid) 160–161; Lorde, Audre 11, 389, 526
motherhood 161; possession, abuse and sexual Lorenzo-Modia, Maria Jesús 249, 459
violence 161–162; study of gender in classical The Lotus Season (Kiều Bích Hậu’s) 48, 49,
antiquity 157 53–55, 327
The Laugh of the Medusa (Cixous) 286 Love Canal Movement 273
Law, Michelle: Bu Liao Qing 471–473 Loy, Mina 526
Lawrence, D.H. 251, 253 Loynaz, Dulce María 526
Lawrence, Louise 450–452 Lucashenko, Melissa 62; Too Much Lip 62
Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 526 Luigeluulinn (Swanbone City) 239
Lee, J. Jessica 506 Lunde, Melissa 225, 226; Blå 225; Przewalskis
Lee Pik-wah 23 hest 225
Le feminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death) Lunop Haiyan: Voices and Images (Alegre) 36
(d’Eaubonne) 88, 169–170, 291, 480 Luther, Annika 226

545
 Index

Lyndsey, Anna 512 Maracle, Lee 211, 212, 475; Blind Justice 211
Lyotard, Jean-François 375 “Maramagi” (Of Trees) (Arulanandam) 75–76
lyrics as poetry 114–119 Marang Goda Neelkanth Hua (Maji) 84
Markandaya, Kamala 9, 332, 361, 362; Nectar
Maarius, maagia ja libahunt Liisi (Reinaus) 235 in a Sieve (1954): Colonialism, Anthropocene,
Ma’at 105 Capitalocene 332–334
Maathai, Wangari 8, 106, 107, 190, 253, 272, Marley, Bob 274
276–277, 357, 358; The Challenge for Africa Marman, Doug 347
276; Chipko movement 357–358; concept of Maron, Margaret 466
Mottinai 276–277; GBM 358–359; The Green Belt Marques, Ana Maria 195, 199, 527
Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience Marryat, Frederick: The Phantom Ship 432
276, 357; pioneering African eco-warrior Martínez, Valerie 526
276–277; Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values Martin, George R. R. 497
for Healing Ourselves and the World 276; Taking Mary, A Fiction (Wollstonecraft) 422
Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai 276; The masculinism 253, 315–316, 319n1, 418–420,
Unbowed 276 470, 502
Macarthur, Elizabeth 60 masculinist romanticism 11
Macarthur, John 60 Masheane, Napo 116, 119; SAMBURU
Macbeth (Shakespeare) 432 ‘My People’ 116
MacCormack, Patricia 367 Mason, R.: Sentimental Ecology, Science, and
MacDibble, Bren 62; How to Bee 62 Sustainable Ecosystem Management 399
MacDonald, George 442, 490, 491; At the Back of massive humanoid robots 455
the North Wind 442; H is for Hawk 511; Phantastes Masso, Lorena Salazar: Esta herida llena de peces 189
491–492; The Princess and Curdie 442 Massumi, Brian 336
Macdonald, Helen 511, 526 Masuka, Dorothy 114, 115, 119; Nolishwa 114–115
Macfarlane, Robert 505 Matar Manóranćini (Brightener of Women’s Mind) 72
MacGregor, Sherilynn 295, 349 material autobiographies 192
Mackellar, Dorothea 63 material-discursive perspective 376
MaddAddam (Atwood) 469 material ecocriticism: backlash ecofeminism
Madhaviah, A. 71; Clarinda 71; Muthumeenakshi 71; 349; compare-contrast approach 349; and
Thillai Govindan 71 ecofeminism 28; existence of somatophobia
The Madwoman of Gandoca (Rossi) 487 346; idea of “becoming with” or “worlding”
Magee, Richard M. 11, 47, 145, 151, 308 348; male-centered perspective 348; material-
Magnason, Andri Snær 218 ecological-feminist growth 349; mattertext 345;
Magona, Sindiwe 114 new materialisms and material ecocriticism 347;
Maharana Pratap Singh 80 objectivity and rationality of male-dominant
Mahesh (Chattopadhyay) 94 realm 350; “posthumanist performativity” 349;
Mahfouz, Naguib: Tharthara Fawqa al-Nil (1966; storied matter 345–346; triptyching medusa
Adrift on the Nile) 131 344–351
Mahood, Kim: Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes material memoir 13, 292, 295, 504
and Memories 507 maternal telepathy 412
Maia, Anna Paula 6, 192, 193 Mathews, Freya 31, 58
Maila Anchal and Parti Pari Katha (Renu) 82 Mathur, Jagadish 80; Badal Ki Mritu and Bhor ka
Maji, Mahuna 84, 85; Marang Goda Neelkanth Tara 80
Hua 84 Matricide 218
Makarovič, Svetlana 149, 153, 154 mattertextuality 188, 345
Makhzangi, Mohamed 133 Matuk, Nyla 205, 206; Resisting Canada: An
Makura no Sōshi, or Pillow Book (Shōnagon) 522 Anthology of New Poetry 205–206
male-centered perspective 348 Ma Vãn Kháng 46
Mallabarman, Adwaita 92; Titas Ekti Nadir Naam Mayer, Bernadette 526
(The Name of the River is Titas) 92–93 Mayer, Sylvia 106, 293, 526
Malouf, David 57 Mayuram Vedanayakam Pillai 90
Mändmets, Jakob 235 Mazu’s Body-Guards (Chen) 2, 30–31
“The Man from Snowy River” (Patterson) 57 Mbiti, John S. 110
Mangahas, Fe B. 39 McCall Smith, Alexander 466
Mansfield, Katherine 253 McCarthy, Cormac 469; The Road 453
Mansour, Joyce 527 McEwan, Ian 470
Mansour, Surrealist Joyce 527 McGann, Jerome J. 417

546
 Index

McHale, Brian 381 Mitra, Jaya 4, 95, 98; Unnayan o Gharer Lakkhi
McKusick, James 417 (Development and the Homemaker) 95
McNay, Lois 352 Mitten, Denise 160
McNulty, Eugene 467 Modern Fiction (Woolf ) 248
McSweeney, Joyelle 526 modernism 252–253
McTeague (Norris) 251 Modjeska, Drusilla 60
Mead, Jane 526 Moero 523
Mears, Gillian 62; Foals Bread 62 Moers, Ellen 408, 422; Literary Women 408
“mechanical modern society” 6 Moffett, Judith 486
“mechs” 455 Mohammadi, Nahid 296
Mediterranean Waltz 138 Monani, Salma 210, 211
Mellor, Anne K. 418–422, 502; Romanticism and Monbiot, George 505
Gender 421 Mondello, Kaitlin 11, 150, 247, 298, 410, 411,
Mellor, Mary 17, 502 429, 502
Memorias de Idhun [The Idhun Chronicles] 181 The Monk (Lewis) 409–410, 411, 413
“memoricídio” (memoricide) 196 Monte de Ramos, Grace R. 41
Memory of Dinshwai and Farewell to Lord Cromer Montero, Rosan 6, 178–181, 183, 184, 469; Bruna
(Shawqi) 127 Husky Series 178–181
The Memory of Water 226–227 Moolla, Fiona F. 109; Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism
Merchant, Carolyn 7, 58, 84, 106, 220, 224, 245, and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural
246, 275, 294, 365, 378, 423, 428, 435; The Death Forms 109
of Nature 245, 428; The Scientific Revolution 428 The Moonstone (Collins) 302, 459–461
Mercier, Stephen 398 Moore, Henry 377
Mernissi, Fatima 133 Moore, Jason W. 169
Meruane, Lina 6, 191, 192 Moore, Marianne 526
Metamorphoses (Ovid) 160–161, 284–285 Moraru, Christian 376
Me Too-movement 214 More, Jason W. 334
Mets, Ena 240, 241 Morel, Bénédict: Traite des degenerescences physiques,
Miao, Ruolin E. 313, 317 intellectuelles et morales de l’espece humaine 434
Michaels, S.: Sentimental Ecology, Science, and Moreton-Robertson, Aileen 58, 507
Sustainable Ecosystem Management 399 Morrison, Toni 11, 250, 386, 387, 389, 391, 392;
Michalopoulos, Charilaos N. 5 Beloved 389; The Origin of Others 387
Mickey, Sam 147 Morse, Sarah 260
Miclat-Cacayan, Agnes N. 2, 37–39 “Morte” (Death) (Ribeiro) 196–197
“the microbial human” 516–517 Morton, Timothy 217, 241, 249, 334, 470, 517
Mies, Maria 129, 271, 275, 316, 334, 359 Moses, Bob 274
migrant ecocriticism 42n8 Mosteghanemi, Ahlem 127; The Bridges of
Mikhail, Dunya 128, 133, 134; The Beekeeper of Constantine 127
Sinjar: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq 128 “Mother Africa” 4
Mikita, Valdur 234 Mother Earth and Mother Nature ideologies 4, 89,
Milbern, Stacy 305 111, 134, 244–246, 480
Milind, Jaganath Prasad: Goutam Anand and Pratap- motherhood 7, 161, 237–238
Pratighy 80 The Mothers of England 430
Millay, Edna St. Vincent 526 Mott Davidson, Dianne 466
Miller, Ruth A. 350 Mottinai, concept of 276–277
Millingen, John 430, 431; The Passions; or Mind and The Mountain Sings (Mai) 48, 49, 50–51, 297, 327
Matter 430–431 Mountains Oceans Giants (Döblin) 469
Milton, John: Paradise Lost 246, 249 Mufti, Aamir R. 104
Minear, Andrea 303 Muhammad ‘Ali 127
Minh Chuyên 46 Mu ối c ủa r ừ ng or The Salt of Woods (Nguyễn Huy
Minhinick, Robert 263; Sea Holly 263 Thiệp) 46
Minor Detail (Shibli) 128–129, 361 Muinar 141–142
minority cultures 272 Mukherjee, Pablo 272, 355
Mirzoeff, Nicholas 517 Mullen, Harryette 526
Mistral, Gabriela 526 Muller, S. Marek 422
Mitchell, Juliet 428 Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) narrative 515
Mitra, Debarati: Je Jakey Dhorey Rakhey (Holding Mulvey-Roberts, Marie 411
Each Other) 98 Munif, ‘Abdulrahman. 132

547
 Index

Murder at the Vicarage (Christie) 462–463 Nicol, Bran 466–467

Murphy, Jillmarie 424 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala 527
Murphy, Patrick D. 18, 105, 159, 161, 227, 293, Ní Dochartaigh, Kerri 395, 399–403
375, 430, 463, 492, 521 Niedecker, Lorine 526
Murray, Les 57; “Noonday Axeman” 57 Nightwood (Barnes) 253
Muthumeenakshi (Madhaviah) 71 Niladevi (Harishchanda) 79
Mwale, Nelly 111 Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales:
My Brilliant Career (Franklin) 61 Nation, Gender, Identity (Aaron) 259
The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe) 409 Nirala, Suryakant Tripathi 81
mystery and detective fiction: defined 458; slow Nirmala, Godan, and Rangbumi (Premchand) 80
violence against women and nature 459–466; Ni Una Menos movement 187, 193, 275
violence against women and environment 458 Nixon, Rob 302, 459
The Mystery of a Woman (Kveder) 152 Nnaemeka, Obioma 101
“Mythic Fragment” (Glück) 524 Nolishwa (Masuka) 114–115
My Year of Meats (Ozeki) 398 “nommo,” African aesthetic of 4
A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to
Nagel, Thomas 338, 339 Be (Le Guin) 488
“Nahda” movement 127 non-human animals in novels 180–181
narrative fiction, principles of 13 “Noonday Axeman” (Murray) 57
Nascimento, Luciene 195, 200; Tudo nela e de se Noonuccal, Oodgeroo 64
amar (Everything in her is for love) 200–201 Nordic dystopian novels 7
Næss, Arne 224 Nordic literature: Alarm Clock (Wägner) 224;
Native American and First Nations Literature: Beatriz y la loba (Llamas) 224; Bienes historia
essentialist definitions of women 206–207; (Hennig) 225; Blå (Lunde) 225; City of the
“Exile of Memory” (Harjo) 205; Indigenous Homeless 227; Darling River (Stridsberg) 229;
ecofeminism 204, 205–207; individualism vs. ecofeminist theory and Nordic Classics 223–224;
cooperation 208–210 fear of transgression and violence 229; history of
Natives Land Act 112 Sápmi (Lapland) 228, 230n1; intergenerational
naturalism and realism 250–252 responsibilities 225–226; Libahunt (Kitzberg)
naturalist language 31 224; lost or hidden tradition 228; The Memory
natural supernaturalism 417 of Water 226–227; new ecological sensibilities
The Natural Way of Things (Wood) 61, 62 227–229; Przewalskis hest (Lunde) 225; Rosarium
naturecultures 28, 340, 345, 366 (Weitze) 225–226; skewed power dynamics
Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in 226–227; Suden morsian (Kallas) 223; Vackarklocka
Contemporary Cultural Forms (Moolla) 109 (Wägner) 223; The Wolf’s Bride 224; The
nature writing 3, 386, 501–503 Women’s Organization for World Order 224
Nayar, Pramod K. 22 Norgaard, Kari Marie 311, 312
Ndlazulwana, Thelminah N. 119; Ubufazi 119 Norris, Frank 7, 251; McTeague 251
Ndlovu, Malika 114 Northern Territory 474
Nectar in a Sieve (1954): Colonialism, Anthropocene, The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The
Capitalocene (Markandaya) 9, 332–334, 359, Romantic Period (Prince) 423
361, 362 Not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) mentality 303
Neerven, Ellen van 64; Throat 64 “Notun Joler Shobdo” (“The Sound of New Water”)
Negm, Ahmed Fou’ad 133; Baheya 133 (Hossain) 95–96
négritude 4, 109–110 Nõu, Helga 235; Hundi silmas 235
Nesibe, Gevser 140 NourbeSe Philip, M. 526
Netflix 6 nuclear fictions 450–451; destruction, rebuilding,
Neumann, Birgit 103 activism 450–451
New Nature Writing 505 nuclear war 450–451
New Woman–Nature Paradigm 130–131
Nguyen, Mimi Thi 48 Oakley, Jacqui 28, 348, 351
Nguyen Phu Trong 47 Obama, Barack 47
Nguyễn Huy Thiệp 46 objectification: and alienation 213–214; and
Nguyễn, Phan Quế Mai 47–53, 55, 109, 297 “cheapening” of life 169; and rationality of
Nguyễn Quang L ập 46 male-dominant realm 350
Nguyễn Thanh Tâm 46 objective (universal) forms of knowledge 290, 293
Nichols, Grace 114 Observations during a Tour to the Lakes (Radcliffe)
Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan 527 502

548
 Index

Ocazionez, Andrés 318 Padmar Polidwip (The Alluvial Islands of Padma)

Odds Against Tomorrow (Rich) 470 (Ishaque) 91
Ode to a Nightingale (Keats) 285 Painter, Nell Irvin 385; The History of White
Óðinn’s Lust (Dagbjartsdóttir) 214–215 People 385
Ogden, Megan 496, 497 Pajk, Paulina 150, 151; Arabela 151
O’Hara, Sabine 274 Pakhir Basha (The Bird Nest) (Sen) 95
“oil colonialism” 132 PALABRARmas poems 188–189
Okri, Ben 103, 104 Pan, Fu Jun 18, 19
Ólafsdóttir, Auður Ava 220 pandemic 7, 46, 187, 199, 238, 240–241, 275,
“old wives’ tales” 214 295, 423, 511, 516; see also coronavirus and
Oliensis, Ellen 159 COVID-19
Oliver, Mary 249 Pangcah Woman (Gan) 2, 32–33, 274, 297
Omprakash, Singhal: Hindi Gady Saahity Mein Pangcah Woman (Yao-ming Gan) 32–33
Prakrti Chitran 81, 86n1 Pant, Govindvalabh 80; Varmala 80
Ong, Timothy 37; Latag: Essays on Philippine Pant, Sumitranand 81, 82
Literature, Culture, and the Environment 37 Paradise Lost (Milton) 246, 249
On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 434 Parmar, Pratibha 274
“ontology of domination,” critique of 88 Parui, Avishek 411, 414
Onyebuchi, Tochi 450, 454, 455, 456; War Girls Pascual, Marta 177
450, 454 The Passions; or Mind and Matter (Millingen)
oodal 69 430–431
Opperman, Serpil 10, 28, 220, 295, 345, 349, 351, Patel, Zoya 470, 471, 473–474, 477; Displaced
375, 380 473–474
Or, Elbert: After the Storm: Stories on Ondoy 36 Patil, Sangita 4, 23, 39, 73, 89, 110, 196, 207, 288,
Orientalism 283, 297 334, 361
Orientalism: Western Representation of the Orient Patkar, Medha 358
(Said) 296 “Patriarchal Poetry” 526
The Origin of Others (Morrison) 387 Patterson, Banjo 57; “The Man from Snowy
Orleans (Smith) 448, 454 River” 57
Ortiz, Simon 211 Pazhayana Kazhidalum (The Grip of Change)
Ortner, Sherry 70, 419 (Sivakami) 74
Osborne, Gillian 528 Peara Gachh (The Guava Tree) (Bandyopadhyay) 95
Oswald, Alice 526 Pedley, Ethel 62–63; Dot and the Kangaroo 63
O tempo do clima (The Time of Climate) Peña-Reyes, Myrna 41
(Kambeba) 189 The Penelopiad (Atwood) 376
Othering: and origins of race 387–388; otherness Penmati Potini (Women’s Enlightenment) 72
of women 430; the Other resists 389–390; “penny bloods” 431
psychology of 388 performativity, concept of 115
Ourkiya, Asmae 9, 39, 76, 148, 153, 158, 168, 207, periphyton 465
220, 221, 272, 368, 504 permaculture 8, 279n8
Our Memory of Water: Words After Haiyan Perry, Samuel L. 514
(Alunan) 36 Persona, Lucinda Nogueira 195, 197, 200, 527;
Outpouring: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense 292;
(Alfar) 36 poem 197
The Outrun (Liptrot) 511 Peru on Leticia Incident or Colombia-Peru
Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the War 190
Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/ Pervik, Aino 236; Kunksmoor 236
Israel (Walker) 274 pesticide fictions 191
Ovid: Ars Amatoria 159–160; Metamorphoses 160–161 Petroleum (Bessora) 171
Owenson, Sydney 502 Phantastes (MacDonald) 491–492
Özdağ, Ufuk 138, 144 The Phantom Ship (Marryat) 432
Ozeki, Ruth 11, 398; My Year of Meats 398 Philippine literature: Agam: Filipino Narratives on
Uncertainty and Climate Change 36; babaylan
Pacific War 41 or shaman of precolonial times 39–40; BKL/
Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Bikol Bakla: Anthology of Bikolnon Gay Trans
Eco-sides (Ralph) 62 Queer Writing 42; environment and literature,
Padma Nadir Majhi (The Boatmen of Padma) intersection between 37; 2019 Global Climate
(Bandyopadhyay) 93 Risk Index (CRI) 36; Inang Bayan (Motherland)

549
 Index

40–41, 42n9; indigenous spirituality 37–39; The Possibility of an Island (Houellebecq) 469
migrant ecocriticism 42n8; Sustaining the postcolonial ecocriticism 354
Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Young) 355
36; Talinghaga ng Lupa: Mga Tula (Metaphors of the postcolonial literature: definitions 354–356;
Earth: Poems) 42 dualisms 356–357; ecofeminist activism 357–359;
Phillips, Mary 27 effects of “capitalist world ecology” 363; literary
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of criticism 359–362; postcolonial feminism 357–
the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke) 247, 419 359; symbolic women 355; utopian ambitions
photographic and auditory devices 282 355; women–nature connection 363
Pickens, Therí Alyce 303; Black Madness: Mad post-gender ecological feminism 315–317
Blackness 303; Black on Earth 390 post-genderism 317
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) 411–412 posthuman bodies 10
Piepzna-Samrahsina, Leah Lakshmi: Dirty River posthumanism and ecofeminism 28, 364
Girl: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way “posthumanist performativity” 349
Home 308 posthuman literature: Ark Baby, neo-Victorian
Piercy, Marge 13, 482, 483; Woman on the Edge of and futuristic narrative 371; Cartesian dualisms
Time 482 365–366; colonial-capitalist “opposition to
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Dillard) 511 nature” 365; contemporary British fiction
Pillai, Gayatri Thanu 3, 39, 72, 90, 322, 328; 371; ecofeminist readings 370–372; ecological
Pratapa Mudaliar Charitram 72, 90 felting 364–365, 368; “embodied gender
Pir Sultan Abdal 28, 347 (corporeality)” 370; embodied subjects,
Planet of Clay (Yazbek) 132 posthuman bodies, and ecological genders
plants in Chinese poetry 18–20; Ecofeminist Literary 365–370; Eurocentric humanism 367; “a fourth-
Criticism: Reading the Orange 19–20; Shi-jing (The stage critical ecofeminism” 364; human–nonhuman
Classic of Poetry) 18, 19; “Tao Yao” “(The Beautiful continuum 367; more-than-human realms 369;
Peach) 18; Yutai Xinyong (New Songs from the posthumanism and ecofeminisms, relationship
Jade Terrace) 19 between 364; A Stone Woman (Byatt) 372
Plath, Sylvia 245, 526 postmodernism 10
Plato 523 postmodern literature: Eurocentric patriarchal
Plemenitaš, Katja 5, 141, 143, 288, 304, 431 humanism 375; future-oriented mentality
Plumwood, Val 57, 58, 60–62, 83, 131, 178, 181, 376; “historiographic metafiction” form 376;
198, 234–237, 283, 284, 296, 316, 346, 356, 357, material-discursive perspective 376; material
365, 407, 409, 411, 412, 414, 430, 439, 441, 444, realities and ideological frameworks 375;
504, 510, 513, 516; The Eye of the Crocodile 62; postmodern rewriting 376–381; science fiction
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature 58, 409 381–383
poetry: in Anglophone poetry 526; British postmodern rewriting 376–381
Romanticism 524; contemporary ecofeminist Power of Earth Goddess 215–217
poetry and poetics 527–528; Homeric Hymns Pozzi, Catherine 527
522; “Immortal Aphrodite” 523; intersectional Prasad, Jayashankar 79, 81; Chitradhara 81; Zarana
ecofeminist poetics 528–529; Makura no 81
Sōshi, or Pillow Book (Shōnagon) 522; “Mythic Pratapa Mudaliar Charitram (Pillai) 72, 90
Fragment” (Glück) 524; New Songs from a Jade Prežihov, Voranc 148, 152
Terrace 522; “Patriarchal Poetry” 526; Poems on The Prelude (Wordsworth) 419
Various Subjects, Religious and Moral 525; proto- Premchand 80, 82; Nirmala, Godan, and Rangbumi
ecofeminism and crypto-ecofeminism 520–521; 80; Rangbhoomi and Godan 82; The Tale of Two
racial violence 527; Shih Ching, or Book of Songs Bullocks and Sailor Bandar 82
521; Song of Songs 523–524; The Tenth Muse, Prešeren, France: Toast 150
Lately Sprung Up in America 524–525; world Prichard, Katharine Susannah 57, 60, 296;
ecofeminist poetries 521–528; Xuanjitu, or Picture Coonardoo 3, 57, 60, 296
of the Turning Sphere 522 The Princess and Curdie (MacDonald) 442
The Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver) 287 Prodigal Summer (Kingsolver) 9, 337–341,
pollution, problem of 199 338–339, 341
Ponsot, Marie 526 proto-ecofeminism 102, 520–521, 521
Poovey, Mary 418, 423 Przewalskis hest (Lunde) 225
Portal, Magda 526 Puar, Jasbir K. 302
Porter, Max 28, 371 Public Health Act 431
Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes and Memories Puleo, Alicia 177; Ecofeminismo para otro mundo
(Mahood) 507 possible 177

550
 Index

Pulé, Paul M. 316, 317; Ecological Masculinities: Reinaus, Reeli 235; Maarius, maagia ja libahunt
Theoretical Foundations and Practical Guidance 316, Liisi 235
319n1 Reinventing in the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary
Pulham, Patricia 467 Native Women’s Writings of North America (Harjo
The Purchase of the North Pole (Verne) 469 and Bird) 210, 212
Pu Songling 22 relational ontology 28
Renu, Phanishwarnath 82; Maila Anchal and Parti
Al-Qadi, Mohammad Younis 127 Pari Katha 82
Qandil, Mohamed al-Mansi: Inkesar al-Rouh (The Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing
Subjection of the Soul) 133 Ourselves and the World (Maathai) 276
Queen Victoria 371 “resacralization of the cosmos,” notion of 31
queer disability studies 305 Resisting Canada: An Anthology of New Poetry
queer hybrid ecofeminism 318–319 (Matuk) 205–206
Queiroz, Rachel de 195 Retrospection (Verissimo) 116–118
Questions for Ada (Umebinyuo) 118 The Returnees (Chigiya) 113
The Return of the Soldier (West) 253
race 10; The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
of Roaches 389; “culture” or “society” 391; (FARC) 190
Earthbound on Solid Ground and Touching the Earth Reyes, Lina Sagaral 41
389; (intersectional) ecofeminist approaches 391; Reyes, María González 177
Nature as Paradox: example of trees 390–392; Reynolds, George W. M. 432–434; Wagner, the
Othering and origins of race 387–388; the Other Wehr-Wolf 432, 433
resists 389–390; psychology of othering 388; Rhee, Margaret 528
summary of BIPOC relationship to mainstream Ribeiro, Ana Elisa 195–197, 200, 527; “Morte”
feminism and ecocriticism 386–387 (Death) 196–197
racial violence 527 Rich, Adrienne 526
Radcliffe, Ann 11, 408–410, 412, 413, 422, 502, Richardson, Alan 419, 420, 424
503; The Italian 413; The Mysteries of Udolpho Richez, Valérie-Catherine 527
409; Observations during a Tour to the Lakes 502 Rich, Nathaniel 470
Raha, Nat 526 Richter, Ragnhildur 213
Rah Gayi Dishayon Issi Paar (Sanjeev) 84 Rico, Amanda Renée 109
Rahimtoola, Samia 528 Rigby, Kate 31, 58, 348, 424
Raine, Allen 258, 259, 265; All in a Month 259 Rio herido (Catrileo) 189
Rajam Iyer, B. R. 71 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia 188
Rajam Krishnan 74 Rizal, Jose 41
Rajasekar 74, 75 The Road (McCarthy) 453, 469
Ralph, Iris 12, 13, 37, 62, 139, 154, 172, 180, 189, Roberts, Kate 258, 259; Feet in Chains 259
192, 208, 230, 288, 332, 381, 383, 413, 456, Roberts, Lewis 461
465, 485, 497, 515; Packing Death in Australian Robertson, Lisa 526
Literature: Ecocides and Eco-sides 62 Robinson, Alice 62; The Glad Shout 62
Ramkrishnadas: Anaakhya and Sudhanvanshu 79 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 376
Ramāvatāram 70 Robinson, Kim Stanley 470
Randhir Aur Premmohini (Das) 79 Robinson, Mary 418
Rangarajan, Swarnalatha 73, 75 Rodman, Gilbert B. 290
Rangbhoomi and Godan (Premchand) 82 Romanticism and Gender (Mellor) 421
Rankine, Claudia 526 Romantic literature: “Colonization of the
The Rape of the Lock (Poe) 296 Feminine” 419; definition of Romanticism
Ray Chaudhuri, Yashodhara 98 417–418; environmental issues and aesthetics
Ray, Sarah Jaquette 304, 513 418; female Romantics as ecofeminists 421–424;
Rebula Tuta, Alenka 154 gender binaries 419; masculine Romanticism,
Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (Wordsworth) early (eco)feminist critiques of 418–420; natural
502 history 419; natural supernaturalism 417; nature
Refaat, Alifa 133 and gender 419; politics of gender 418–419;
Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) 421 recent and future trends 424; second generation
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place Romantics 417; self-defined representations 417
(Williams) 503 Romão, Luíza 195, 198, 527
Rehabilitation Act of 1973 305 A Room Made of Leaves (Grenville) 59, 60
Reilly, Evelyn 264, 528; Styrofoam 264 Rosarium (Weitze) 225–226

551
 Index

Rose, Deborah Bird 58 Saraogi, Alka 84

Rose, Lydia 9, 48, 58, 71, 73, 141, 152, 161, 279, sarbangsaha/all-enduring 98
316, 325, 440 Sardar, Ziauddin 290, 291, 293; Introducing Cultural
Rosenbaum, Rene P. 326, 327 Studies 290, 293
Rossi, Anacristina: The Madwoman of Gandoca 487 Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of
Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature the American West (Solnit) 507
(Rudd) 438 Savoy, Lauret 504, 507
Rowe, Stephanie 422 Sayers, Dorothy L. 466
Rowland, Susan 466 Scalapino, Leslie 526
Roy, Arundhati 8, 253, 272, 277, 360; The God of Scambary, Benedict 475
Small Things 277; Indian scholar-activist 277; “Scavengers” or carroñeros 192
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness 277; My Seditious Schaffer, Kay 59
Heart 277 Schalk, Sami 303, 307
Roy, Shampa 461 Schliephake, Christopher 157; Ecocriticism, Ecology,
Ruby Moonlight (Cobby Eckermann) 3, 60 and the Cultures of Antiquity 157
Rudd, David 438; Routledge Companion to Children’s Schwark, McKenzie 28, 348, 351
Literature 438 Schwartz, Janelle 423
Rueckert, William 81 Schweblin, Samanta 191, 192, 295
Ruether, Rosemary Radford 8, 272, 273, 278–279, Schwenkel, Christina 48
388; Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization and Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels
World Religions 278; intersection of religion, (Glendening) 377
ecology and feminism 278–279; My Quests for science fiction 381–383; later ecofeminist science
Hope and Meaning 278; Women Healing Earth: fiction 487–488; “Mother Nature” 480; second-
Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism and wave ecofeminist science fiction 481–487
Religion 279 The Scientific Revolution (Merchant) 428
Ruffin, Kimberly 387, 390 Scott, Bonnie Kime 252
Rukeyser, Muriel 526 Sea Holly (Minhinick) 263
Rumens, Nick 27, 316 Seal Woman (Farmer) 61
Rumi, Jalal al-Din 10, 28, 344, 346–348, 350 second generation Romantics 417
Rural Hours (Cooper) 11 Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945 26
Russell, Mary Doria 8, 287 second-wave ecofeminist science fiction: Always
Russ, Joanna 10, 381 Coming Home (ACH) 484–486; Serpentine
Ryan, Tracy 64 Codex 485
Rymer, James Malcolm: The String of Pearls 432; second-wave feminism 445
The Wronged Wife, or the Heart of Hate 434–435 The Secret River (Grenville) 59–60
Seethalai Saathanaar: Ma ṇimēkalai 70
Safe (Haynes) 336 Seigworth, Gregory J. 335
Saïd, Amina 527 The Self-Sown (Voranc) 152
Said, Edward W. 296; Orientalism: Western Šeligo, Rudi 153; The Witch of Upper Davča 153
Representation of the Orient 296 Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom
Salazar Masso, L. 189 (Awiakta) 246
Salleh, Ariel 58, 448, 496 Sen, Gopa 95; Pakhir Basha (The Bird Nest) 95
Sallis, Eva 61; Hiam 61 The Sensitives: The Rise of Environmental Illness and the
The Salt Path (Winn) 511 Search for America’s Last Pure Place (Broudy) 513
Salvey, Courtney 492 sentimental ecology: Bridge of Tears 403;
SAMBURU ‘My People’ (Masheane) 116 description 396–399, 403n1; ecogrief 400;
Samuels, Ellen 302 ecological issues 398; ecological vision 395;
Sandilands, Catriona 220, 314, 315, 350, 351, 365 emotion and ecological awareness 397;
Sangam literature 68–70; Ma ṇimēkalai 68, 70; experience of violence 395; Locusts and Wild
Silappatikāram 68, 70; Thinai, concept of Honey (Burroughs) 398; losses of the natural
68–70; Tholkappiyam, Ettuthogai, Patthuppaattu, world 402; loss of language and heritage 402;
Pathinenkeezhkanakku 68–69 My Year of Meats (Ozeki) 398; of nature’s liminal
Sangam period 3 spaces 399–403; sense of alienation from nature
Sanjeev 84, 85; Rah Gayi Dishayon Issi Paar 84 401; sentimental literature 396; Uncle Tom’s
Sankaran, Chitra 3, 37, 39, 90, 322, 328 Cabin (Stowe) 396–397; The Wide, Wide World
Sankritayayan, Rahul 79 (Warner) 396
Santos, Benilda S. 41 Sentimental Ecology, Science, and Sustainable Ecosystem
Sanz Alonso, Irene 5, 6, 139, 140, 211, 288 Management (Mason and Michaels) 399

552
 Index

Serpentine Codex 485 Sky Hawk (Lewis) 443

Seward, Anna 418 Sky Woman 246
Sexton, Anne 526 slam poetry 198–199
Seymour, Nicole 315 The Sleuth and the Goddess (Rowland) 466
Shafak, Elif 339 Slonczewski, Joan 485, 487; A Door Into Ocean 487
Shakespeare, William 284, 287, 294, 432; Slovene literature: Arabela (Pajk) 151; Blossoms
Macbeth 432 in Autumn (Tavèar) 150; Conceptualizations of
Shaktism 72 Animal Death: Anthropocentrism and (I’m)possible
Shawqi, Ahmed 127, 131; Memory of Dinshwai and Subjectivities 149; criticism and ecofeminism
Farewell to Lord Cromer 127 148–149; cross-fertilization of perspectives
Shayie’ Mina al-Khawf (1960; A Sense of Fear) 147; development from ecofeminist perspective
(Abaza) 131 149–152; Ecofeminism: Between Green Studies and
al-Shaykh, Hanan 133 Women’s Studies 149; ecofeminist perspectives
Shelley, Mary 11, 249, 410, 418, 419, 422, 423, 481; in second half of twentieth century and early
Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus 249, twenty-first century 153–154; examination of
410–411, 422; The Last Man 422–423 folklore and animal imagery 148–149; literary
Sheng 115 works 147; social visibility of women 150;
Shenoda, Matthew: Verse Africa: The Malleable unhuman subjectivity 149; women and nature,
Poetics of Some Contemporary African Poets 103 social nature of connections between 148
Shepard, Matthew 313, 314 slow death, concept of 302
Shepherd, Nan 13, 503 slow violence: of war 302; against women and
Shibli, Adania 128, 361; Minor Detail 128–129 nature 459–466
Shih Ching, or Book of Songs 521 The Small Mine (Gallie) 260
Shiva, Vandana 8, 85, 109, 191, 271, 272, 274–278, Smethurst, Paul 500, 501
316, 356, 359, 360, 383; Bija Vidyapeeth 275–276; Smith, Ali 28, 371
Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge Smith, Charlotte 418
275; creating local and sustainable communities Smith, Jos 505
275–276; Earth Democracy 275; Ecofeminism 275; Smith, Pamela 108
Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Smith, Sherri L. 448, 454; Orleans 448, 454
Freedom 275; Staying Alive 275, 277 Smithson, Charles 377
Showalter, Elaine 54, 247 Smith, Zadie 28, 371
Shukla, Ramchandra 79 Snyder, Gary 526
Sibara, Jay 304 So Far From God (1993): Ecosickness and the Affective
Sidhwa, Bapsi 361 Turn (Castillo) 9, 334–337
The Signature of All Things (Whittaker) 9, 337–341 Soil Horizon (Clark) 391
Sigurðardóttir, Jakobína 213, 214, 216, 296; Lifandi Soja, Edward W. 75
vatnid - - - 213–214 Solar (McEwan) 470
Sigurðardóttir, Steinunn 218; Dimmumót 218 Solberg, Sara 229
Silappatikāram 68, 70 Soldier, Layli Long 528
Silent Spring (Carson) 250, 273, 323, 337, 456 Sollund, Ragnhild 326
Silko, Leslie Marmon 207, 211, 392; Ceremony Solnit, Rebecca: Savage Dreams: A Journey into the
392; Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Landscape Wars of the American West 507
Migration Stories 211 somatophobia, existence of 346
Simpson, Inga 61, 62; The Last Woman in the Song, Cathy 526
World 62 Song Dynasty 20
Sinfield, Alan 294 Sonko, Mariama 276
Singer, Kate 424 Soper, Kate 504
Sing, Lian 37, 40 South American literature: fictions of ecohorror
Sinha, Kabita 97, 98; Briksha (The Tree) 96; Joler 190–193; geochoreographies 194; indigeneity,
Putul (The Mermaid) 97 Afro-Latinidad, and land rights 187–190;
Sinologism 297 material autobiographies 192; #NiUnaMenos
Sister Carrie (Dreiser) 251 and ecofeminist activism 193; pesticide fictions
Sivakami, P. 74; Pazhayana Kazhidalum (The Grip of 191; rights of Pachamama 187–188;
Change) 74 Transition 192
Siwila, Lilian Cheelo 111 Souza, Patricia de 6, 186, 187, 322; Ecofeminismo
Sixty Days and Counting (Robinson) 470 decolonial y crisis del patriarcado 186
Skinny Dip (Hiaasen) 465 Spanish literature: analysis of Beatriz y la loba
Skiveren, Tobias 298 ( Junquera) 178; Beatriz y la loba (Llamas) 178;

553
 Index

Bruna Husky Series (Montero) 178–181; and Tagore, Rabindranath 4, 89, 94, 308, 527; Subha
ecofeminism 178; ecofeminist fantasy (Gallego) 89–90, 308
181–183; effects of climate change in novels 180; Tait, Peta 58, 60
GIECO group 184n4; implications of being Taiwanese literature: Daoist formations of yin-
the other 181; issues in novels 179–180; issues of yang 31; Han Chinese colonial-settler people
otherness 179, 183–184; non-human animals in 26; material ecocriticism and ecofeminism 28;
novels 180–181 moral ties between humans and other beings
speculative and dystopian fictions 452–453 28–29; posthumanism and ecofeminism 28;
The Spiral Dance (Starhawk) 277 “resacralization of the cosmos,” notion of 31;
spirituality and politics 277–278 Xiang-tu movement 26
Spitz, Chantal T. 168, 171–173; L’ile 171, 173 The Tale of Two Bullocks and Sailor Bandar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 358, 376, 418, 420 (Premchand) 82
Starhawk 8, 142, 272–274, 277–278; Black Lives Talivee, Elle-Mari 234
Matter movement 278; City of Refuge 278; The Tamil literature: colonial Tamil literature 71–73;
Earth Path 277, 278; The Fifth Sacred Thing 278; Divine Feminine in Medieval Tamil literature
The Last Wild Witch 277; The Spiral Dance 277; 70–71; “Maramagi” (Of Trees) (Arulanandam)
spirituality and politics 277–278 75–76; Sangam literature 68–70; Thinai in
State of Fear (Crichton) 469 contemporary Tamil literature 74–75; see also
Staying Alive (Shiva) 277 colonial Tamil literature and contemporary
Staying with the Trouble (Haraway) 334 Tamil literature
Steingraber, Sandra 511–513, 515 Tang Dynasty 20
Stephan, Matthias 378 Tantsi, J. Z. 112
Stevens, Lara 58 “Taturanas” (Caterpillars) 197
Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Strange Case of Dr. Tavčar, Ivan: Blossoms in Autumn 150
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 411 Tawfiq, Sahar 133
Stewart, C. 493; The Human Body—The Land that Taylor, Sunaura 308; Vindication of the Rights of
Time Forgot 493 Brutes 421
Stoker, Bram 411, 432; Dracula 411, 432 Taylor-Wiseman, Rebekah 7, 10, 11, 72, 89, 108,
A Stone Woman (Byatt) 372 110, 134, 171, 206, 312, 378, 420, 422, 430, 431,
storied matter 28, 345–346 440, 459, 480, 494, 502, 522, 526
Storr-Hansen, Nanna 228 technodominationism 254n3
Stowe, Harriet Beecher 396, 403; Uncle Tom’s Cabin Tekin, Latife 5, 138–142; Berji Kristin: Tales from the
396–397 Garbage Hills 141; Dear Shameless Death 141; The
Stow, Randolph 57 Garden of Forgetting 141; Manves City 142; Muinar
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 141–142; There Is No Death in the Forest 141; use
(Stevenson) 411 of magical realism 140–141
Strayed, Cheryl 511; Wild: From Lost to Found on the Teodorescu, Adriana 161, 412
Pacific Crest Trail 511 Teodoro, John Iremil 42
Stridsberg, Sara 229; Darling River 229 teratological hybrid 305–306
The String of Pearls (Rymer) 432 “terra nullius,” assumption of 58
Strobel, Leny Mendoza 39, 40 Territorial Allocation Assessment (TAA) 453
Sturgeon, Noël 49, 220, 365, 481 The Territory trilogy (Govett) 448, 451, 453
Styrofoam (Reilly) 264 terror gothic 408, 409
Subha (Tagore) 89–90, 308 Tharthara Fawqa al-Nil (Adrift on the Nile)
subsistence 274 (Mahfouz) 131
Suden morsian (Kallas) 223 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) 390
Su Hui 522, 523 “theodicy of the landscape” 417
Sumayao, Ryen Paolo 42 The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen) 326
The Sunlit Zone ( Jacobson) 62 Thillai Govindan (Madhaviah) 71
Suvin, Darko 481 Thinai: land, nature symbols, and feminist
Suzack, Cheryl 206, 207, 211 reinstation in contemporary Tamil literature
The Swan Book (Wright) 62 74–75; Sangam literature 68–70
symbolic women 355, 360 Thing-Power, concept of 337
Things to Do Before the End of the World
Tabios, Eileen 36; Verses Typhoon Yolanda: A Storm (Barr) 453
of Filipino Poets 36 “third generation of Philippine feminists” 2
tacit (intuitive knowledge based on local cultures) “Third World” 8, 334
forms of knowledge 290, 293 Third-World feminism and gender politics 55

554
 Index

Thompson, Carl 500 Twentieth-century Women’s Writing in Wales: Land,

Thoreau, Henry David 11, 395, 510 Gender, Belonging (Gramich) 259
Thornhill, William 60 Two Birds and This Snake (Kumar) 82
Throat (van Neerven) 64
Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (The Name of the River is Ubantu 111
Titas) (Mallabarman) 92–93 Ubufazi (Ndlazulwana) 119
Toast (Prešeren) 150 Ugra, Pandey Bechan Sharma 80; Delhi Ka Darbar,
Tokarczuk, Olga 154 Sarkar Tumhari Ankhonme, and Ji Ji Ji 80
A Token for Children ( Janeway) Umebinyuo, Ijeoma 118, 119; Questions for Ada 118
440–441 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 396–397
Tola, Miriam 187 Undirferli (Ævarsdóttir) 219, 220
Tolkien, J. R. R. 490, 494, 495 Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist
Tonguecat (Verhelst) 469 Space (Alaimo) 428–429
Too Much Lip (Lucashenko) 62 Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine
Torres-Yu, Rosario 2, 41 Mammals (Gumbs) 174
Toulson, Shirley 261 United States Environmental Protection
Toward a Female Sublime (Yeager) 421 Agency 323
toxicity, idea of 199 Unnayan o Gharer Lakkhi (Development and the
Track of the Cat (Barr) 463–464 Homemaker) (Mitra) 95
Tracks (Erdrich) 208–210 Uzuner, Buket 5, 138–140, 138–142, 328; The
“Train Journey” (Wright) 57 Adventures of The Misfit Defne Kaman 138, 140;
Traite des degenerescences physiques, intellectuelles Air 140; Earth 139–140; Mediterranean Waltz 138;
et morales de l’espece humaine (Morel) 434 The Sound of Fishsteps 138; Two Green Otters,
Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Mothers, Fathers, Lovers and All the Others 138;
Nature (Alaimo) 246 Water 138–139
trans-corporeality 7, 13, 28, 238–240
Transition 192 Vackarklocka (Wägner) 223
The Transmission of Affect (Brennan) 336–337 Vajpayee, Bhagavati Prasad 79; Viswas Ka Bal,
travel writing: decolonizing map 506–507; global Patwar, Nimantran, Manushya Aur Devata, and
ecofeminist temporalities 506–507; landscape Gomati Ke Tat Par 79
aesthetics and ecofeminism 501–503; masculine Vale of the Towey; or, Sketches in South Wales
empowerment 502; “minor” and “alternative” (Beale) 261
voices 500; New Nature Writing 505; Valmiki 70, 71
“topographies of nature” 501; and wilderness, Vance, Linda 365
ecofeminist rewildings 503–506 Vanmam (Bama) 74
Treatise of the Nervous Diseases of Women 430, 431 Varadharajulu, Sara 158
tree spirits and bestial ghosts in fiction 22–23; Bai Varmala (Pant) 80
She Zhuan (The Legend of the White Snake) 22; He Varney, Denise 58
Hua San Niang Zi (The Third Madam of Lotus) 22, Vaughan, Hilda 258
23; Hong Lou Meng 23; Lian Xiang 22; Liaozhai Veblen, Thorstein 326; The Theory of the Leisure
Zhiyi (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio) 22; Liu Class 326
Xiu Cai 23; Taiping Guangji 23 Vedaja (Liiv) 235
Trethewey, Natasha 391; Enlightenment 391 Vedanayakam Pillai, Mayuram 72, 90
Trexler, Adam 331 The Vegetarian (Kang) 339
Trezise, Rachel 260; Easy Meat 260; Fresh Apples Verhelst, Peter 469
260; In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl 260 Verissimo, Olajumoke 116, 117, 119; Retrospection
The Tribe (Kwaymullina) 63 116–118
Trott, Verity Anne 324 Verma, Bhagavaticharan 79, 82; Ankhari Danv
truth and beauty of the “real” world 253 and Tede Mede Raste 79; Hansmayur, Purva ki
Tudo nela e de se amar (Everything in her is for love) Ore, Mangal-sutra, Lalit Vikram, Gadhkundar,
(Nascimento) 200–201 Bhuvanvikram, and Mrugnayani 79
Turkish literature: Cemre (İplikçi) 143; ecofeminism Verma, Mahadevi 81, 82; Chitralekha 82
137, 142–143; Godwoman (Hepçilinger) 143; Verma, Rajkumar 80; Badal Ki Mritu and Bhor ka
Kanayak (Arslan) 143; literary works 143–145; Tara 80
Tekin, Latife 138–142; Uzuner, Buket 138–142; Verma, Vrandavan lal 79
Woman’s Epic (Kutlu) 142 Verne, Jules 469
Tüür, Kadri 7, 143, 149, 170, 224, 234, 241, 295 Verse Africa: The Malleable Poetics of Some
Tüzün, Hatice Övgü 5, 288, 322, 328 Contemporary African Poets (Shenoda) 103

555
 Index

Verses Typhoon Yolanda: A Storm of Filipino Poets Walpole, Horace 409; The Castle of Otranto 296, 409
(Tabios) 36 Walsh, Catherine 526
Vičar, Branislava 148, 149 Waltham-Smith, Naomi 174
Victorian literature: The Daughters of England Walton, Samantha 257, 505, 506; Everybody Needs
430; and discourse, intertwining 429–431; Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure 505
ecofeminism and Victorian Penny Literature Walwicz, Ania 64
431–435; “imagined bond” of Western culture A Wanderer in the Atom Age (Bor) 153
430; The Mothers of England 430; “otherness” of The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women
women 430; “rigid notions of gender” 429; The (Gearhart) 483–484, 486
Wives of England 430; The Women of England, Wang, Jackie 526
Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits 430 Wardi, Anissa Janine 391; Water and African
Vicuña, Cecilia 6, 188, 526 American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective 391
Vidyalankar, Chandragupta 79, 83 The Ward of our Lady of Mercy (Cankar) 151–152
Vietnamese literature: Agent Orange (lethal War Girls (Onyebuchi) 450, 454
chemical) 46; ecowomanist empowerment Warner, Susan 396; The Wide, Wide World 396
49–50; issues in 46–47; Third-World feminism Warren, Karen J. 17, 106, 107, 119, 162, 178, 181,
and gender politics 55; US–Vietnam relationship 273, 316, 357, 358, 438
47–48 Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the
Vietnam War (the Second Indochina War, 1955– Sexual Blinding of Women (Walker) 274
1975) 3, 32, 47, 48, 50–52, 130, 132 Washing My Mother’s Body (Harjo) 204
Villazón, Emma 526 Water (Sidhwa) 361
Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (Taylor) 421 Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft) Perspective (Wardi) 391
417, 421 Wayna Kambeba, M. 189, 527
violence: against nonhuman animals 196; against We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For
women and environment 458 (Walker) 273
Viswas Ka Bal, Patwar, Nimantran, Manushya Aur Weaver, Rachael 63
Devata, and Gomati Ke Tat Par (Vajpayee) 79 Weight of the Heart (Montero) 469
Vital, Anthony 106 Weitze, Charlotte 225, 226; Rosarium 225–226
Vo, Quynh H. 3, 109, 322, 327, 328 Welsh Environments n Contemporary Poetry
Voranc, Prežihov: The Self-Sown 152 ( Jarvis) 262
Voss (White) 57 Welsh Language Act 257
Võ Thị Hảo 46 Welsh literature: All in a Month (Raine) 259;
Vrečko, Janez 149 “Anglo-Welsh” literature 257; canon-making
vulgar language and unsophisticated dialects 27 and ecofeminism 258–259; dat’s love (Brito)
261; Easy Meat (Trezise) 260; ecopoetry 257;
Wägner, Erasmo 192, 223, 224; Alarm Clock 224; environmental degradation and collapse 256–
Vackarklocka 223 257; environmental poetry in Wales 262–264;
Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf (Reynolds) 432, 433 Everything Change project 262–263; magazines
Walden (Thoreau) 11 261–262; Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing
Waldrop, Rosemarie 526 in Wales: Nation, Gender, Identity (Aaron) 259;
Waliullah, Syed 92; Kando Nodi Kando (Cry River Pembroke County Guardian 265; The Piteousness of
Cry) 92 Passing Things 265; Reports of the Commissioners
Walker, Alice 8, 108, 109, 190, 253, 272–274, 273– of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales 257;
274, 276–278; Anything we Love can be Changed short fiction: from travel writing to dystopia
273; Beauty in Truth 274; Horses Make the Landscape 261–262; A View Across the Valley 259; Wales and
more Beautiful 273; Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet industrialization 259–261; Well-being of the Future
Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Generations Act 262
Palestine/Israel 274; In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens Wharton, Edith: House of Mirth 251
273–274, 279n3; In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) 336
Womanist Prose 108, 273–274, 279n3; struggles, Wheatley, Phillis 524, 525
movements and cross-cultural concerns 273–274; White Beech: The Rainforest Years (Greer) 61
Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the White, Daniel R. 375
Sexual Blinding of Women 274; We Are the Ones We White, Evelyn C. 504
Have Been Waiting For 273 Whitehead, Andrew L. 514
Walker, Marli 197 A White Heron ( Jewett) 250
Waller, Rhian 13, 221, 288, 296, 325, 328, 412, White, Jessica 61
432, 433, 442, 481, 520 White, Laura 62

556
 Index

White, Patrick 57; Voss 57 Above 420; The Prelude 419; Recollections of a Tour
Whitman, Walt 7, 249, 250, 298, 526; Leaves of Made in Scotland 502
Grass 526 world ecofeminist poetries 521–528
Whittaker, Alma 339; The Signature of All Things World War I 253
337–341 World War II (Second Sino-Japanese War,
Whittaker, Henry 340 1937–1945) 26, 30, 32
Whittaker, Rich 69, 90 Wright, Alexis: Carpentaria 62, 297, 474–477; The
The Wide, Wide World (Warner) 396 Swan Book 62
Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray 411–412 Wright, Judith 57, 62, 64, 297, 470, 474–477;
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail “Train Journey” 57
(Strayed) 511 Wright, Laura 358
Wilkins, Juan Cobos: El corazon de la tierra 178 The Wronged Wife, or the Heart of Hate (Rymer)
Williams, Bernard 528 434–435
Williams, Helen Maria 502; Refuge: An Unnatural The Wrongs of Woman: or Maria (Wollstonecraft) 422
History of Family and Place 503 Wuthering Heights (Brontë) 432
Williams, Terry Tempest 250, 504, 511, 512 Wyld, Evie 61, 62; All the Birds, Singing 62
Willis, Elizabeth 526
Wilson, Edgar 192 Xiang-tu movement 26
Wimsatt, William K. 104 Xuanjitu, or Picture of the Turning Sphere 522
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame) 440, 442
The Windup Girl (Bacigalupi) 470 Yang, Karen Ya-Chu 10, 244, 287, 349, 381,
Winn, Raynor 511; The Salt Path 511 412Yao-ming Gan: Pangcah Woman 32–33
Winslow, Forbes 431 Yashpal 82; Divya, Manushyake Rup,
Winterson, Jeanette 28, 247, 331, 371, 495 Jhootha-Sach 82
The Witch of Upper Davča (Šeligo) 153 Yasodhara: Brishti Namey (It Starts Raining) 99
Wolfe, Cary 199 Yazbek, Samar 132, 134; Planet of Clay 132
Wolfson, Susan J. 419 Yazgünoğlu, Kerim Can 10, 21, 28, 181, 220, 288,
Wollstonecraft, Mary 11, 417, 418, 421–423, 429, 318, 340, 345, 383, 479, 505, 526
502; Letters Written during a Short Residence in Yeager, Patricia: Toward a Female Sublime 421
Sweden, Norway, and Denmark 422; Mary, A The Year of the Flood (Atwood) 469
Fiction 422; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman yin-yang 17–18
417, 421; The Wrongs of Woman: or Maria 422 Yip, Wai-lim. 521
Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (Griffin) young adult (YA) fiction 12; The Annual Migration
vii, xxviii, 247, 481–482 of Clouds 456; Beneath the Rising 456; essentialism
womanism 274 and fixed dualisms 449; fantasy, magic, and
Woman–Nature Paradigm 127–128, 325, 363 environmental action 451–452; identity in flux
Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) 482 and world in crisis 449; Nordic dystopian novels
Woman’s Epic (Kutlu) 142 7; nuclear fictions 450–451; nuclear war
A Woman’s Mission (Ellis) 430 450–451; race, science fiction, and
Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, environmental crisis 454–455; speculative
Feminism and Religion (Ruether) 279 and dystopian fictions 452–453; Territorial
“Women’s Land” 483 Allocation Assessment (TAA) 453
The Women’s Organization for World Order 224 Young, Diana D. 12, 63, 451–452
women writers 61, 195–196 Young, Robert J. C. 272, 273, 355, 357, 358
“wonderous” or hybrid humanoid birth 302 Young Wizards Series 451–452
Wood, Charlotte: Animal People 61; The Natural Yusoff, Kathryn 370, 386; A Billion Black
Way of Things 61, 62 Anthropocenes or None 386
Woody, Elizabeth 528 Yu Ying-shih 17
Woolf, Virginia 245, 248, 252, 253; In the Hollow
of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Zangana, Haifa 128; City of Widows 128
Nature 252; Modern Fiction 248 Zarana (Prasad) 81
“The Word” 262 al-Zayyat, Latifa 130, 277; Al-Bab al-Maftouh (The
The Word for World is Forest (Le Guin) 333, 484 Open Door 2017) 130
Wordsworth, Dorothy 19, 20, 247–249, 418, 420, zoe-centered ontology 28
423, 502, 503, 524; Lines Composed A Few Miles Zunshine, Lisa 458

557