Chapter 4 - The Essential Ecosystem

Summary

“The Essential Ecosystem” considers how environmentalist appeals to self-dissolution have influenced and undermined a number of identity movements and academic paradigms in the 1970s and after. Specifically, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) dramatizes and ultimately compromises the ideals of contemporary “nature feminists,” those who viewed reproductive capacity not only as the cornerstone of essential womanhood, but also as a privileged means of ecological awareness. The narrator’s own attempted identification with her biology broadens her idea of reproduction to include all material functions, from nutrient consumption to decomposition. This fixation on network disorients gender rather than shores it up. However, far from undermining identity, it also illuminates the extent to which social thought has at times rendered whole systems as a matter of essentialism. Reading Surfacing alongside Atwood’s later work illuminates lines of rhetorical continuity between the essentialist “all women” position in nature feminism and a potential “all matter” position in contemporary new-materialist writing.