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Accepted Paper
The Voices of Resilience to Heal a Diseased Gaia: An Ecofeminist Reading of Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
Jagriti Upadhyaya
(Jai Narain Vyas University)
The voices of ecofeminism are diverse, but their common thread is the recognition of the relationship between the domination of nature and the domination of women. In the capitalist patriarchal model, the male tendency of treating nature a commodity to be used and harnessed is extended to their treatment of women’s bodied as a sexual commodity. My paper seeks to explore how our diseased ecological systems in the Anthropocene have resulted in silencing the birdsong and the spreading of cancer with reference to Terry Tempest Williams’ (An environmentalist and Utah naturalist), memoir-‘Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place’.The memoir is an evocative and poignant ecofeminist meditations on her mother, women, nature, and birds. Refuge splices together two stories, the story of her mother’s unsuccessful battle with spreading ovarian cancer with a record shattering, catastrophic rise of the Great Salt and its destructive effect on a nearby bird refuge. Williams‘s background as an environmental writer merges with her personal quest for an engagement with the earth as part of her Mormon culture. Traversing the personal and ecological spaces simultaneously, the narrative raises crucial issues of the ecological health of Mother Earth and community well- being and acts as an intertwined discourse of the human body and the earth body. Greta Gaard defines ecofeminism as a movement that’ calls for an end to all oppression, arguing that no attempt to liberate women (or any other suppressed group) will be successful with an equal attempt to liberate nature.’