A Poetics of Earth: Ecofeminist Spiritualities

Abstract

Ecofeminist spiritualities seek to provide restorative responses to disembodiment and dislocation in human-earth relationships. They engage the alternative ethical and epistemological frameworks delineated in previous chapters to foreground both the values of care and reciprocity traditionally underplayed within neoliberal ideologies and global corporate practices, and the women’s ‘ways of knowing’ traditionally marginalised in normative epistemic engagement. The alternative visions of ecofeminist theologies and spiritualities inhere in practices that seek to transform humanity’s emotional and spiritual engagement with place. The novels discussed engage these alternative spiritualities in negotiating their protagonists’ interaction with the world within — and in opposition to — the socio-political systems that secularise human-nonhuman relations. The novels seek to create an ecopoetics of embodiment and embeddedness within nature by evoking various competing spiritual paradigms. Like the epistemic frameworks analysed in my previous chapter, these formulations are more, or less, likely to engender ecoconsciousness in their young readers. Those less likely employ discourses of spiritual transcendence in place of ecological immanence, or base interaction with the earth on the instrumental use-value of the land rather than on its intrinsic value. Those more likely, by contrast, envision intimate and empathetic interaction between humans and the earth, often through allusion to indigenous notions of holistic ecological sanctity.