The developing field of ecofeminism has recently produced an impressive array of anthologies, special issues of journals, and articles devoted to exploring and explaining the field's history and potential.¹ The differing and sometimes contradictory approaches represented within this growing body of ecofeminist literature make clear that ecofeminism is a constantly changing field that has evolved from a diverse background, including not only ecology and feminism but also socialism, philosophy, women's spirituality, and grassroots political activism.² While the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of ecofeminism makes it difficult to define, ecofeminist writers do share a general conviction that there are important connections between the oppression of women and the destruction and misuse of nonhuman nature within male-dominated cultures. And, whether their work takes the form of theory, cultural analysis, or creative prose or poetry, they all give a sense that it is politically essential to explore and emphasize these connections if the dominations of women and nature are to be substantively challenged. Unlike other forms of feminism, though, ecofeminism has yet to evolve a significant body of literary criticism that reflects and helps to advance its political goals. Ian Marshall, one of the first literary critics to explore the potential of an ecofeminist approach, explains this phenomenon by suggesting that the theoretical task of defining the premises of ecofeminism has had to precede any critical application of those premises (49).

However, I believe that creative, complex ecofeminist interpretations of literary texts should be able to enhance the growth of ecofeminist theory rather than wait for its development. For the project of ecofeminist literary criticism to flourish, though, it must become more responsive to its position at the intersection of two broad fields—ecofeminism and literary theory and criticism—and simultaneously draw from and contribute to both. Currently, ecofeminist literary criticism is dependent on ecofeminist theory, which limits its capacity to meaningfully contribute to literary theory and criticism; in particular, it is limited by certain trends of thought in ecofeminist theory that are difficult to apply to the interpretation of literature in ways that result in complex and ideologically subversive readings. The trends I refer to are allegorically described by Val Plumwood in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. As she explains, it is all too easy for the ecofeminist theorist “pilgrim” to “fall into the Ocean of Continuity on the one side or stray into the waterless and alien Desert of Difference on the other, there to perish” (3). As she suggests, there is a tendency within ecofeminist theory to emphasize the connections or continuity between women and nature at the expense of recognizing important differences between the two groups. Other tendencies within current ecofeminist theory go to the opposite extreme and emphasize differences based on aspects of identity such as gender, race, or species in ways that can isolate people from each other and from nonhuman nature.

The path between continuity and difference that ecofeminist theorists must walk is so narrow and difficult not because of inadequacies in the theorists or the theories, but because of the complexity of their task. Ecofeminism explicitly works to challenge dominant ideologies of dualism and hierarchy within Western culture that construct nature as separate from and inferior to human culture (and women as inferior to men).³ While many ecofeminists identify such ideologies primarily as masculine, such a characterization is overly simplistic; as Val Plumwood explains, “it is not a masculine identity pure and simple, but the multiple, complex cultural identity of the master formed in the context of class, race, species and gender domination, which is at issue” (5). The ideologies of dualism and hierarchy that ground all these dominations are such pervasive forces within our culture that even a movement with the most subversive motives and concepts cannot help but reflect their influence. Within ecofeminism, an unproblematized focus on women's connection with nature can actually reinforce the “master” ideologies of dualism and hierarchy by constructing yet another dualism: an uncomplicated opposition between women's perceived unity with nature and male-associated culture's alienation from it. On the other hand, an unbalanced emphasis on differences in gender, race, species, or other aspects of identity can deny the complexity of human and natural identities and lead to the hierarchical ranking of oppressions on the basis of importance or causality.

Although many ecofeminist theorists are keenly aware of the pervasiveness of dominant ideologies of dualism and hierarchy, they are far more likely to note the ways that other fields manifest the influence of such forces than to search for their traces in ecofeminist discourse itself.⁴ Thus, they risk unconsciously reinforcing the very cultural beliefs and attitudes that they wish to transform. To help fulfill the political potential of ecofeminism, ecofeminist literary critics must become more conscious of the ways that ecofeminist theory can be subtly diverted into the traps of continuity or difference and thus recontained by the pervasive force of dominant ideologies of dualism and hierarchy. And to make a significant impact on literary criticism and theory, ecofeminist literary critics must offer a perspective that complicates cultural conceptions of human identity and of human relationships with nonhuman nature instead of relying on unproblematized visions of continuity or difference.

One way that ecofeminist literary critics can work toward these goals is to expand their theoretical base beyond self-proclaimed ecofeminist theorists to other theorists and critics who have grappled with similar issues. Specifically, feminist theorists interested in poststructuralist thought, such as Teresa de Lauretis and Donna Haraway, are deeply concerned with the same issues of domination, gender, and nature that characterize ecofeminist theory. In this essay, I will examine how their work can help to identify the ways that ecofeminist theory is recontained by dominant ideologies and how such insights might help to avoid such recontainment. After offering this perspective, I will explore how these theoretical observations might be put into practice by formulating a model of poststructuralist ecofeminist reading and applying it to Ursula Le Guin's “Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight,” which also offers its own insights into some of the central problems of ecofeminist theory and criticism. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that by crossing the boundaries of ecofeminist theory and engaging with the ideas of other theorists, ecofeminist literary critics can further ecofeminism's agenda by proposing new solutions to the problems of how to negotiate connection and difference while simultaneously contributing to literary criticism and theory by showing how complex questions about the relationship between human subjects and nonhuman nature can result in new and exciting ways to read literary texts.

THE LIMITS OF SUBVERSION IN ECOFEMINIST THEORY

It almost goes without saying that the ecofeminist theorists most vulnerable to perpetuating dualism and hierarchy are those growing out of the tradition of radical or cultural feminism; by insisting upon essentialist connections between women and nature, such ecofeminists oppose women and nature to male-dominated culture in the most rigidly dualistic fashion. As Vera Norwood explains in Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature, ecofeminists who share the radical or cultural feminist viewpoint “focus on women's ‘physical’ connection with the earth as a result of their menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and childbirth” (265) to assert that women are inherently closer to nature than men.⁵ While essentialist ecofeminists such as Andrée Collard adamantly reject dominant ideologies that might use an inherent, biological connection between women and nature to dominate both, their representations of such a connection often simply reverse the traditional cultural hierarchies. In addition, as Ynestra King explains, by separating women and nature from men and culture, such a form of ecofeminism “does not necessarily question the nature-culture dualism or recognize that women's ecological sensitivity and life orientation is a socialized perspective that could be socialized right out of us depending on our day-to-day lives” (“Ecology” 23).

As Greta Gaard points out in “Misunderstanding Ecofeminism,” most ecofeminist writers are aware of the dangers inherent in essentialism and distance themselves from it (21). For example, Ynestra King's social ecofeminism displays a careful attention to the culturally as well as naturally constructed nature of women's identities. Even more interestingly, Susan Griffin—whose Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her has often been interpreted as a text of cultural ecofeminism—consistently goes beyond narrow, biological connections between women and nature in her writing. For example, in Woman and Nature she juxtaposes scenarios of the oppression of women and of nonhuman nature throughout the history of western civilization.⁶ Thus, she highlights the connections between the cultural positions of women and natural entities, suggesting that male-dominated culture has created the bond between women and nature that she seeks to reclaim and use in a liberatory fashion. For both King and Griffin, it is women and nature's shared oppression within male-dominated Western culture rather than biology or essential identity that constructs a special closeness between them.

By avoiding or complicating biological essentialism in their conceptions of women and nature, King and Griffin move away from a dualistic elevation of women/nature over men/culture: neither writer explicitly excludes men from a connection with nonhuman nature; instead, both stress that men and women are subject to cultural forces that can blind them to the participation in nature that all humans share.⁷ In addition, both are committed to overcoming a variety of other culturally encoded dualisms, such as mind/soul or intellect/emotion.⁸ Despite the strong antidualistic bent of King's and Griffin's work, though, both writers are—like all subjects within Western culture—vulnerable to the pervasive and often subtle influence of dominant ideologies of dualism and hierarchy. By showing some of the ways the work of two such different yet antiessentialist ecofeminists fall into the traps of continuity and difference, thus yielding to the hegemony of the ideologies they explicitly set out to challenge, I hope to suggest in this section that the pervasiveness of these ideologies limits the subversive potential of ecofeminist undertakings and thus is an issue that should concern all ecofeminists.

Central to the ecofeminist agenda is the goal of individual, social, and ideological change—specifically, change that will improve the cultural standing of women and nature. As I have suggested, one of the primary problems that essentialism can cause for ecofeminists is that, in many ways, it seems antithetical to change. An identity based on essential qualities is unchanging, and the ways essentialist connections between women and nature support dominant ideologies also limit ecofeminists' capacity to catalyze social and cultural change. One way that ecofeminists such as King and Griffin support the possibility of change is through their acknowledgment of the historically and socially constituted nature of the (female) subject. In taking this view of subjectivity, they share one of the widely accepted insights of poststructuralist thought. Growing out of the work of thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault, the poststructuralist view that ideological forces construct our subjectivities through discourse can be interpreted as allowing for the possibility that individuals, and thus culture, can change in a way that essentialist views of identity do not allow.⁹

However, the possibility of change depends on a sense that the forces that construct subjectivity can shift, alter, and even conflict. Ecofeminists such as King and Griffin often fail to support a sense that the forces constructing women's subjectivities are diverse and shifting because they rarely explore the effect of forces (whether cultural or natural) other than women's cultural/historic association with nonhuman nature. Their intense focus on the connections between women and nature can lead them to erase all differences between the two, and thus they fall inadvertently into Plumwood's “Ocean of Continuity.” While emphasizing the connections and potential for communion between any group of humans and nonhuman nature is an important step toward overcoming the dualisms that structure our culture's thinking, relying only on connection can collapse the self/other dualism into an undifferentiated whole. Such holism risks simply incorporating the other into the self, a move that Jim Cheney warns leaves no room for “respecting the other as other” (124).

The erasure of differences between women and nonhuman nature is perhaps most obvious when ecofeminists speak for women and nature as a group in such a way that they appropriate for all women nature's status within contemporary Western society as exploited victim of human culture. They emphasize the bond between women and nature to the extent that it completely determines the relationship between the two: they are represented as virtually one and the same. For example, in Woman and Nature, Griffin stresses the constructed association between the two to the extent that she creates an image of women/nature as a monolithic group consistently opposed to men. In one illustrative scenario, Griffin portrays a caged lion being examined by Western male scientists. The situation of this lion, for whose roaring the book is named, illustrates the basic opposition Griffin maintains throughout this work: “They wonder why she roars, and conclude that the roaring must be inside her. They decide to see it. She swings at them when they try to put her asleep. She has no soul, they conclude, she does not know right from wrong. ‘Be still,’ they shout at her. ‘Be humble, trust us,’ they demand. ‘We have souls,’ they proclaim, ‘we know what is right,’ they approach her with their medicine, ‘for you.’ She does not understand this language. She devours them” (187). Despite aspects and sections of her work in which she rejects hierarchy and dualism altogether, Griffin's consistent practice of opposing women/nature to male-dominated culture undermines the antidualistic aspects of her work.

When ecofeminists neglect to respect nature's differences from women, they can misrepresent the needs of natural entities and allow women to avoid acknowledging whatever complicity they might have in environmental degradation. As Vera Norwood explains in Made from This Earth, “some [ecofeminist writers] have cast women, along with nature, as an oppressed class that did not participate in the masculine agenda of domination” (276-77). While the degree of participation certainly varies from woman to woman, only an overly simplistic view of subjectivity can claim that any human is completely innocent of complicity in dominant ideologies; as the poststructuralist feminist Donna Haraway insists, “‘We’ cannot claim innocence from practising such dominations. … Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage” (157). Thus, even “the positionings of the subjugated are not exempt from critical re-examination, decoding, deconstruction, and interpretation” (191). Even Griffin and King, who emphasize that women's connection with nature is culturally constructed, rarely engage in such reexaminations and thus fail to explore the extent to which many women benefit from and participate in the ideological, political, and economic forces that sanction the domination and abuse of nonhuman nature. In a discussion of the feminist health movement and body consciousness, King does acknowledge that women have traditionally been complicit in such ideologies: “To the extent that we make our own flesh an enemy, or docilely submit ourselves to medical experts, we are participating in the domination of nature” (“Healing the Wounds” 1990, 119).¹⁰ However, she does not discuss the extent to which women have participated in the “medicalization of childbirth” (118) to a much greater extent than simply by acquiescing to the tyranny of medical experts. In fact, more and more women are becoming such experts, participating in the dominant forces of Western science and medicine, as doctors and researchers, marketers who promote the technologies, nurses who administer them, and so on. Although such participation need not always reinforce dominant ideologies, it is important to note that many women actively contribute not only to their own oppression but also to the domination of nonhuman nature in some aspects of their lives.

By representing women's bond with nature as something all women share equally and that significantly shapes every woman's identity, writers such as King and Griffin perpetuate a vision of identity that lacks an attention to difference: not only the differences between women and nonhuman nature but among women as well. Specifically, as Norwood points out, dominant Western society has traditionally linked wild nature with marginalized groups like African Americans and Native Americans to place those groups outside the bounds of culture. Consequently, she explains, a sense of connection with nonhuman nature may be more problematic for African American or Native American women than for other American women (177). This lack of attention to difference is significant, for the differences between women and the rest of nature mean that women can participate in cultural attitudes and practices that are environmentally destructive, and the differences between women mean that some participate more fully and consciously in these attitudes and practices than others.

The limited view of identity reinforced when women and nature are even subtly conflated by antidualistic ecofeminists can undermine ecofeminism's potential for subverting dominant ideologies because the erasure of difference within the category “women and nature” simply displaces difference elsewhere, where it often serves to reinforce dualism and hierarchy. In particular, the “Desert of Difference” is revealed in the way such views oppose women and nature to male-dominated culture instead of seriously destabilizing such oppositions and rankings. However, it also arises when ecofeminists fail to account fully for the complex nature of identity and for the multiple ways oppression occurs in our culture. In their quest to emphasize the significance of the culturally inferior position of women and nature, both King and Griffin claim that one form of oppression is prior to or the source of all others. For King, it is oppression of women by men; for Griffin, it is human domination of nature.¹¹ While these two views may seem to set women and nature at odds, in competition for the position of “most oppressed,” the ecofeminist emphasis on the woman-nature connection allows the qualities and position assigned to one group to be transferred to the other.

Of course, it is necessary for ecofeminists to stress that both the oppression of women and the domination of nature possess deep roots in Western culture, but the categorical assertion that any form of oppression is the ground of all others does little to challenge the ideologies responsible for dominations of all sorts. Although it is necessary to separate forms of oppression to discuss them, such a hierarchical and static approach goes beyond a sensitivity to difference to become a rigid code specifying which forms of difference should take political priority over others.¹² By giving in to the desire to establish such a code, even consciously antidualistic writers such as King and Griffin effectively enthrone gender and association with nature as the aspects of identity most vulnerable to oppression, thus implying that identity can be dissected into self-contained units that can be evaluated for severity of oppression. This need to rank aspects of difference inevitably alienates those who are foregrounding aspects of identity—such as race or sexual orientation—different from those selected as most oppressed. Thus, difference is again displaced rather than destabilized, serving to separate people from each other and from nature instead of encouraging them to form alliances for change on the basis of shared aspects of identity and experiences of oppression.

The challenge that faces ecofeminists who would avoid reinforcing dominant ideologies of dualism and hierarchy is to work toward a theory of human and natural subjectivity significantly more complex than the static concepts of identity that are found in both the “Ocean of Continuity” and the “Desert of Difference.” While poststructuralism's emphasis on the changing, constructed nature of the subject helps to avoid essentialist notions that can lead to rigid, unchanging identity categories that promote dualism and hierarchy, it is in feminist approaches to poststructuralism that I see the most promising efforts to work toward a theory of identity that recognizes the interweaving of oppressions both within the human subject and among the outside, discursive forces acting on that subject. As Teresa de Lauretis explains in “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,” feminist theory has reconceptualized the subject of poststructuralism as “shifting and multiply organized across variable axes of difference” (116), axes that include but are not confined to gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Like many other feminist poststructuralists, de Lauretis accepts “the interrelatedness of discourse and social practices, and of the multiplicity of positionalities concurrently available in the social field seen as a field of forces; not a single system of power dominating the powerless but a tangle of distinct and variable relations of power and points of resistance” (131). If we employ such a theory of subjectivity that affirms “the interweaving of oppressions rather than their hierarchical privileging” (Donaldson 8), we can acknowledge the ways that each person's socially constructed subjectivity is different from that of others without inevitably isolating us from each other. By viewing subjectivity as organized across multiple axes of difference, we can acknowledge the way that we foreground different aspects of our identity at different times. When I foreground a certain aspect or axis of identity, I can temporarily forge a connection with others who are foregrounding a similar axis of identity based on similar shaping forces in their own histories. I can establish connection without committing myself to a monolithic, static conception of identity—my own or others’.

While ecofeminists have much to gain by more fully integrating such a complex, shifting sense of the female subject into their theories of women's relationship to nature, they, in turn, can contribute to and complicate feminist poststructuralist thought. In particular, ecofeminists such as King and Griffin insist that nonhuman nature exerts a significant shaping force on human identity, even to the extent of representing aspects of identity such as psyche and sexuality as a kind of inner nature (King, “Healing the Wounds” 1989, 132). As SueEllen Campbell suggests, the poststructuralist insight that we are constructed by “all kinds of influences outside ourselves, that we are part of vast networks, texts written by larger and stronger forces” can easily be expanded to see nonhuman nature as one of those forces (209).¹³ However, few poststructuralists—feminist or otherwise—have seriously considered the implications of including nature as one of these forces.¹⁴ King and Griffin's refusal to leave nonhuman nature out of the process of constructing subjectivity productively challenges the human/nature dualism and could potentially expand the range of poststructuralist thought.

THE POTENTIAL OF POSTSTRUCTURALISM: AN ECOFEMINIST READING OF “BUFFALO GALS, WON'T YOU COME OUT TONIGHT”

Having explored some of the mechanisms through which ecofeminist theory can inadvertently and subtly reinforce dominant ideologies of dualism and hierarchy, the ways that the concerns and insights of feminist poststructuralists can help illuminate these mechanisms, and the possibility that ecofeminist theory might, in turn, enrich feminist poststructuralist thought, I now turn to the implications for ecofeminist literary criticism. By expanding the range of theorists that they draw on, ecofeminist critics can develop interpretive and analytical tools that will allow them to go beyond simply looking for literature that emphasizes women's or other marginalized people's sense of connection with nature (connections that are inevitably opposed to dominant culture's alienation from nature). One way of doing this would be to evolve approaches that ask questions that account for the complexity that poststructuralist feminist theory has accorded to human identity and that further develop that complexity in exploring the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature. These questions might include:

—Does the text convey a sense of the human subject as socially and discursively constructed, multiply organized, and constantly shifting?

—Does the text also account for the influence of nonhuman nature on the subject (and of the subject on nonhuman nature) without resorting to essentialism?

—Does the text avoid reinscribing dualisms and hierarchical notions of difference?

I do not mean to suggest that ecofeminist literary critics should confine their endeavors to texts that allow them to answer such questions in the affirmative; on the contrary, exploring ways that different texts both fail and succeed to construct subversive visions of human identities and nonhuman nature can help us to understand better the dynamics of domination, particularly as they are represented in discourse, and to learn better how we might disrupt them.

To demonstrate the potential for an ecofeminist literary criticism growing out of a broadened theoretical foundation, I offer a poststructuralist ecofeminist reading of Ursula Le Guin's “Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight,” the first work in Le Guin's volume of stories and poems entitled Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. I have chosen this novella not only because it allows me to demonstrate the potential of a critical framework that draws on theoretical works outside the boundaries of self-defined ecofeminist theory but also because the creative work itself can contribute to ecofeminist and other theoretical debates about identity, connection, and difference. In her introduction to Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, Le Guin makes clear that her primary purpose is to write about animals and other nonhuman living things in ways that belie the cultural myth that “animals are dumb: have no words of their own” (9). In doing so, she addresses the problems caused by “Civilized Man's” deafness to the nonhuman voices that would remind him of the connectedness of all life. Significantly, though, Le Guin does not recommend a point of view that allows connectedness to erase all difference, criticizing the “sloppy identifications” (12) of Walt Whitman, which annihilate the otherness of nature by engulfing it in his own ego. Instead, in “Buffalo Gals,” Le Guin creates a conception of human subjectivity and reality that engages with both connection and difference.

Le Guin's novella begins when a little girl, injured in a plane crash somewhere in a desert landscape in the American West, is discovered by a coyote, who tells the girl, “You fell out of the sky” (17). The coyote's unexplained command of human language creates the sense that this story will blur the boundary between humans and other animal species, a sense that grows as the little girl, Myra, follows the coyote back to her home. In the process, Myra's perception of the coyote is suddenly, inexplicably transformed from an animal “gnawing at the half-dried carcass of a crow, black feathers sticking to the black lips and narrow jaw” to a “tawny-skinned woman with yellow and grey hair and bare, hard-soled feet” (21).

Once Myra arrives at Coyote's village, she meets more characters who, despite predominantly human appearances, also possess qualities that identify them with particular species of nonhuman animals: Doe, for instance, could be identified as a deer simply by her walk—“a severely elegant walk, small steps, like a woman in high heels, quick, precise, very light” (33)—and the chipmunks live as a huge family in a dark, burrowlike house. In addition, these people possess characteristics that are distinctly supernatural: Blue Jay replaces Myra's eye, damaged in the plane wreck, with a new eye made out of pine pitch, and after a few healing licks from Coyote's tongue, it works quite well.

In creating such characters, Le Guin is drawing on Native American legends of the First People, whom the anthropological linguist William Bright describes as “members of a race of mythic prototypes who lived before humans existed” (xi). Le Guin's representation of these people, and especially Coyote, as ambiguous and irreducible to animals, humans, gods, or legends corresponds to the way Barre Toelken describes the Navajo conception of Coyote: “There is no possible distinction between Ma'i, the animal we recognize as a coyote in the fields, and Ma'i, the personification of Coyote power in all coyotes, and Ma'i, the character (trickster, creator, and buffoon) in legends and tales, and Ma'i, the symbolic character of disorder in the myths. Ma'i is not a composite but a complex; a Navajo would see no reason to distinguish separate aspects” (204). Ultimately, Le Guin's complex First People represent a worldview that resists definite boundaries and dualisms, neither choosing one side over the other nor collapsing difference. Nevertheless, this world is separated from the world of Myra's origin, a world inhabited by what the First People call the New People. This separation represents not an inevitable opposition between the two peoples, but rather the dualism that human culture has constructed, not only between itself and nonhuman nature, but also between its dualistic way of perceiving reality and a perceptual mode that refuses such boundaries. While the First People thus cannot be labeled “nonhuman” in the sense that they have no human aspects, they do represent the nonhuman to Myra in the sense that they offer an alternative to the dominant, dualistic human culture that she comes from. On this level, the story is about the process of Myra adapting to, learning about, and coming to love the nonhuman and to love Coyote in particular as their representative.

Significantly, although Myra is female, Le Guin does not suggest that her gender gives her an inherent or essential bond with Coyote or any of the other First People.¹⁵ In addition, while Le Guin has transformed the traditionally male Coyote of Native American legends into a female who “adopts” Myra in some human senses of the word, many of Coyote's behaviors fly in the face of human expectations about nurturing mothers (including Mother Nature). Coyote possesses an irreverent and often crude sense of humor, she entertains a constant stream of “boyfriends”—sometimes in the bed right next to Myra—she is boastful and lazy, and she talks to her own excrement. Of course, all of these characteristics correspond to the way Coyote is represented in Native American legend, but for Myra, “a lot of things were hard to take about Coyote as a mother” (37) and require a great deal of adjustment.

Le Guin's introduction to the volume containing “Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight” makes it clear that, for her, it is more important that Myra is a child than that she is female: “for the people Civilization calls ‘primitive,’ ‘savage,’ or ‘undeveloped,’ including young children, the continuity, interdependence, and community of all life, all forms of being on earth, is a lived fact, made conscious in narrative (myth, ritual, fiction)” (10). Instead of predicating an ability to connect with the nonhuman on an exclusionary, gender-based essentialism, Le Guin acknowledges the biological and physical interdependence all humans have with the rest of nature. Of course, her sense that “Civilization” masks or destroys an inborn sense of this interdependence does set up a potentially dangerous opposition between nature and culture, but her focus on childhood as the prototypical state of openness to the nonhuman is liberating in the sense that it becomes a possibility for every person.

Despite Le Guin's assertion that children possess an awareness of the interdependence and community of all life similar to the worldview of the First People, Myra's identity is also clearly a construction of her “civilized” culture. Before falling asleep on her first night with the First People, Myra's last thought is “‘I didn't brush my teeth’” (27). This sense that Myra, as a subject, is culturally constructed is heightened by the way she changes throughout the story in response to forces outside of herself. But by including nonhuman nature as an aspect of those forces, Le Guin avoids a human solipsism that refuses to acknowledge the power or effect of any force outside of human discourse. Instead, Myra's interactions with Coyote and the rest of the First People illustrate what Patrick D. Murphy identifies as the “ecological process of interanimation”: “the ways in which humans and other entities develop, change, and learn through mutually influencing each other day to day, age to age” (“Ground” 149).

As Murphy explains, to recognize the way nonhuman entities can participate in the ideological, discursive forces shaping human subjectivities, we must escape dominant constructions of the human-nature relationship that represent humans as superior to and separate from a passive, silent, nature: “just as that self enters into language and the use of parole, so too does the ‘other’ enter into language and have the potential, as does any entity, to become a ‘speaking subject’” (151). To recognize the potential of the nonhuman to speak and act, it is important for humans to “work to render the signification presented us by nature into a verbal depiction by means of speaking subjects, whether this is through characterization in the arts or through discursive prose” (152). Donna Haraway, too, emphasizes the importance of being able to perceive nonhuman “actors” as powerful, active speakers: “Actors come in many and wonderful forms. Accounts of a ‘real’ world do not, then, depend on a logic of ‘discovery’ but on a power-charged social relation of ‘conversation.’ The world neither speaks itself nor disappears in favor of a master decoder. The codes of the world are not still, waiting only to be read. … Ecofeminists have perhaps been most insistent on some version of the world as active subject, not as resource to be mapped and appropriated in bourgeois, Marxist, or masculinist projects” (198-99).

In representing the First People as she does, Le Guin makes the move Murphy and Haraway recommend: she renders the natural world in the form of speaking, active subjects, thus questioning the idea of impermeable boundaries between human and animal (especially the boundary that excludes the nonhuman from discourse). Importantly, Coyote is portrayed as especially active in seeking connections with Myra. In the legends of Native American cultures, particularly those native to the American Southwest, the figure of Coyote has links with human culture beyond the human aspect all First People share. William Bright characterizes the legendary Coyote as “a Levi-Straussian ‘mediator’ who links the world of humanity, with all of its curiosity, self-awareness, and resultant ‘cultural’ baggage, to the ‘natural’ world of animals” (22). The legendary Coyote's affinity for humanity is paralleled to some degree by the relationship of the biological coyote to dominant human culture: it has shown an impressive ability to adapt to the changes human cultures have imposed upon its environment, often expanding its range to include areas where wolves have been eliminated or adapting to life in close proximity to human beings.¹⁶ Even more incredibly, the species thrives in North America today despite persistent and brutal campaigns intended to eliminate it.¹⁷

True to this biological and legendary relationship with human culture, Le Guin's Coyote represents such an openness to interconnection, even when connecting means crossing hostile boundaries erected by human culture. As Myra figures out, “That was Coyote's craziness, what they called her craziness. She wasn't afraid. She went between the two kinds of people, she crossed over” (39). Eventually, Myra realizes that although some of the other People accept her, it is only with “the generosity of big families” (39). Coyote alone consciously chose to take care of her, a choice growing out of Coyote's “crazy” ability and desire to cross over and make connections with human culture. In response to Coyote's attitude and actions, Myra chooses to connect across the boundaries as well. She decides to stay with Coyote rather than Chipmunk or Rabbit, even though Coyote's house is filthy and her bed is smelly and full of fleas. Ultimately, as Myra lies listening to Coyote singing “one of the endless tuneless songs that wove the roots of trees and bushes and ferns and grass in the web that held the stream in the streambed and the rock in the rock's place and the earth together,” she tells Coyote, “I love you” (56).

Although Myra clearly changes in response to the worldview represented by Coyote and the rest of the First People, the question remains how significant any such change can be. After all, these People reach her precisely because of the human aspects of their appearance and language, so how successfully can their effect on her subvert dominant cultural ideologies that privilege the human? Similarly, an important question for many feminists is how to imagine a way in which discourse—which most poststructuralists view as the primary force determining the nature of social institutions as well as constructing meaning and human subjectivity—can be used to subvert the very ideologies it works to maintain. As Teresa de Lauretis explains in Alice Doesn't, “That patriarchy exists concretely, in social relations, and that it works precisely through the very discursive and representational structures that allow us to recognize it, is the problem and struggle of feminist theory” (165). This problem is further complicated by the sense that an extreme poststructuralist view of identity as purely socially constructed leaves little room for agency. In a version of social constructionism taken to its extreme, individuals have no real control over their actions or identities, but are instead “written” by history and culture and thus seem unable to intervene in these forces or in the construction of their own subjectivities in a subversive way. If Myra changes only in reaction to the extraordinary forces acting on her in the First World, without real choice or agency, how helpful can her example be for the rest of us?

For poststructuralist feminist theorists such as de Lauretis, the key to a theory of identity that allows for the ability of the subject to participate subversively in the construction of her own and others' subjectivities through discourse is the insight that the subject is constantly changing as it is exposed to shifting ideological forces and different discursive structures. As Joan Scott explains, “Subjects are constituted discursively, but there are conflicts among discursive systems, contradictions within any one of them, multiple meanings possible for the concepts they deploy” (34). It is the contradictions and conflicts among discursive systems and among axes of difference, and thus within the individual subject, that allows for the possibility of multiple meanings, or in other words, for interpretation. And it is through the act of interpreting the discursive and ideological forces acting on her that the individual subject can participate in the construction of those forces in return.

More specifically, in “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,” de Lauretis explores how individuals may achieve their potential to interpret and thus participate in the construction of ideological forces and their own subjectivities; they can do so by taking what de Lauretis calls an “excessive critical position,” a position “attained through practices of political and personal displacement across boundaries between sociosexual identities and communities, between bodies and discourses, by what I like to call the eccentric subject” (145). In this view, displacement gives the subject a new perspective, highlighting the discrepancies and possibilities of meaning that allow for interpretation.

Significantly, “Buffalo Gals” begins with Myra's displacement across a boundary, into a realm where she is asked to take a drastically different view of identity and community than that held in dominant human culture. Le Guin represents this boundary quite vividly by the change in Coyote's appearance from unambiguously animal—Myra first notes that the coyote is “a big one, in good condition, its coat silvery and thick. The dark tear-line from its long yellow eye was as clearly marked as a tabby cat's” (17)—to ambiguously human, animal, and supernatural. Near the end of the story, when Myra decides to try to reapproach the world of the New People, her experience suggests that the boundary between the two worlds extends beyond physical appearance to the way the people on either side of it perceive and name reality. As Myra draws near,

It did seem there was a line, a straight, jerky line drawn across the sagebrush plain, and on the far side of it—nothing? was it mist?

“It's a ranch,” the child said. “That's a fence. There's a lot of Herefords.” The words tasted like iron, like salt in her mouth. The things she named wavered in her sight and faded, leaving nothing—a hole in the world, a burned place like a cigarette burn.

(46)

Because she has crossed this boundary, at Coyote's invitation, Myra is confronted with confusions and inconsistencies, with multiple interpretations of reality and of her own identity. Throughout the course of the story, she learns to negotiate these multiple interpretations in a way that allows her consciously to step beyond her culturally constructed human perception and, at least temporarily, perceive as the nonhuman. For example, at one point Myra wonders why Coyote sleeps in the night and wakes in the day like humans rather than the other way around, but “when she framed the question in her mind she saw at once that night is when you sleep and day when you're awake” (34-35). While the readers of Le Guin's story may never be physically displaced across a boundary in the way Myra is, her experience can lead us to imagine situations that would encourage us to take the perspectives of identities and positions different than those to which we are accustomed.

Significantly, Myra's displacement does not lead her dualistically to choose one side of the boundary over the other or to try to eradicate the boundary through some form of homogeneous union of the two sides. Her response is instead dialogic, in the sense that Patrick D. Murphy explains in “Ground, Pivot, Motion”: “A dialogic method can recognize that the most fundamental relationships are not resolvable through dialectical synthesis: humanity/nature, ignorance/knowledge, male/female, emotion/intellect, conscious/unconscious” (148). Instead, a dialogic approach puts such “opposites” in conversation with each other, acknowledging similarities without erasing difference. When Coyote first meets Myra, she names her “Gal,” and Le Guin suggests that Myra deals with the potential contradiction between her two names by trying to look at the situation from Coyote's point of view: “She said it as a name; maybe it was the child's name, Myra, as spoken by Coyote” (23). Although Myra becomes better and better at understanding and adopting the worldview of the First People, she never entirely rejects her human perspective, either, somehow dialogically positioning herself on the boundary between the two: “The child thought of herself as Gal, but also sometimes as Myra” (39).

Of course, Myra's guide in learning to resist both dualism and dialectical synthesis is Coyote, a figure whose potential for connections that do not erase difference has been recognized by several feminist theorists. As Stacy Alaimo points out, Donna Haraway's use of the Coyote Trickster of Native American legend “not only resists glorified mystification, … [but] also destabilizes the dualism of active/passive, resource/user, knower/known on which an epistemology and a politics of domination is based” (145). Haraway sees in the liminal figure of Coyote a way to perceive.

that historically specific human relations with “nature” must somehow—linguistically, ethically, scientifically, politically, technologically, and epistemologically—be imagined as genuinely social and actively relational; and yet the partners remain utterly unhomogeneous. … Curiously, as for people before us in western discourses, efforts to come to linguistic terms with the non-representability, historical contingency, artefactuality, and yet spontaneity, necessity, fragility, and stunning profusions of “nature” can help us refigure the kind of persons we might be. These persons can no longer be, if they ever were, master subjects, nor alienated subjects, but—just possibly—multiple heterogeneous, inhomogeneous, accountable, and connected human agents.

(3)

What Myra learns from Coyote in Le Guin's story is precisely how to be such a human agent, and she achieves this state by learning to perceive reality in a new way. Myra's two eyes, one original and thus linked to the world of her origin and one given to her by the people of the First World, come to symbolize the ways of seeing represented by those two worlds. When she uses just her original eye in the world of the First People, “everything [is] clear and flat”; she learns she must use them both together if she is to gain depth perception. Chickadee hints at the potential power of such perception when she explains that “‘Things are woven together. So we call the weaver the Grandmother.’ She whistled four notes, looking up the smokehole. ‘After all,’ she added, ‘maybe all this place, the other places too, maybe they're all only one side of the weaving. I don't know. I can only look with one eye at a time, how can I tell how deep it goes?’” (50)

Of course, learning to use both eyes together is difficult in either world. The new eye does not work well until Coyote licks it, and Myra starts to feel like it is not seeing at all as she approaches the world of her origin. Adapting to her new eye, though, does not mean adopting from the First People some monolithic way of seeing that is opposed to her original mode of perception, for there is no one way of seeing among the First People. Just as Myra sees them as human in form, they all see everyone as resembling their own species: As Coyote explains, “Resemblance is in the eye. … So, to me you're basically greyish yellow and run on four legs. … To Hawk, you're an egg, or maybe getting pinfeathers” (35). It is clear Myra cannot abandon her old eye, her human perception. Instead, she learns to see with both eyes at once, adopting the realization that there are many ways of seeing and learning to figure that realization into her own perception. This alteration of perspective is not a simple integration of opposites, however, for the two eyes and the two worlds they represent cannot be reduced to a dualistic opposition. One eye roots her in her human origins, while the other gives her depth perception: the knowledge of her interconnections with other species and other spiritual planes, an understanding of the multiple ways of seeing related to those other species and places, and the ability to respect the differences among those ways of seeing. In his article “Voicing Another Nature,” Patrick D. Murphy gives us the term “anotherness” for this perception of otherness that respects difference without using it to justify domination or prohibit connection: “‘Anotherness’ proceeds from a heterarchical—that is, a nonhierarchical—sense of difference” (63).

Le Guin's story deals with the possibility of integrating the two worlds represented by the two eyes more overtly as well. Chickadee tells Myra that once the boundary between the two did not exist: “‘When we lived together it was all one place,’ Chickadee said in her slow, soft home-voice. ‘But not the others, the new people, they live apart. And their places are so heavy. They weigh down on our place, they press on it, draw it, suck it, eat it, eat holes in it, crowd it out” (49). But the idea of resolving the dualism between culture and its oppressed and repressed “others” by returning to some Edenic state when there are no discernible differences between humans, animals, and spirits is not a feasible one. As Donna Haraway explains, the answer to dualism is not to give into the seduction of such “origin myths,” which promise the return to some original “organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity” (150). While such a promise of the possibility of holism might seem the antidote to the hierarchical domination that proceeds from our culture's dualistic ideology, that sort of unity often requires that some entities be appropriated by or incorporated into others. Such an erasure of difference is just another kind of domination.

Le Guin, too, rejects the possibility that dualism may be resolved by returning to an original state of unity. Chickadee predicts that “Maybe after a while longer there'll only be one place again, their place. And none of us here. I knew Bison, out over the mountains. I knew Antelope right here. I knew Grizzly and Greywolf, up west there. Gone. All gone” (49-50). Thus, the possibility of achieving one place again is presented only as negative, as predicated on the eradication of the First People. The story also refuses the possibility of ending human culture's alienation from its “other” by rejecting the world of the New People. Myra has learned to adapt to and value the world of the First People, primarily through her emotional attachment to Coyote. Soon after Myra confesses to Coyote that she loves her, Coyote eats a poisoned salmon set out by one of the New People and suffers through an agonizing death. In her grief, Myra wants to reject all her connections with the world that killed Coyote; looking out at the town of New People, she pronounces, “I hope you all die in pain” (58).

However, Myra learns she cannot abandon her identity as a New Person; Chickadee and the spider-like Grandmother tell her that Coyote was in the process of taking her back to her own people before she was killed. Going back to the New People, though, does not mean leaving behind all her new connections with the First People or her newly learned way of seeing. They tell her she can keep her new eye, and Chickadee promises she will come if Myra makes gardens for her. Grandmother promises, “I'll be there too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark corners in the basement” (60). Myra learns she may even reencounter her beloved Coyote, who, true to her legendary prototype, “gets killed all the time” (59). Corresponding to the persistence of the coyote species, this lack of finality to Coyote's death may seem to undercut the importance of human culture's need to transform its destructive behavior toward nonhuman nature. Yet, as Chickadee has revealed, species like Bison and Greywolf have been unable to survive the pressures of human culture. And as Myra's experience attests, any diminishment of the diversity of the world of the First People represents a loss to all people.

In the end, Myra becomes one of the hybrid “buffalo gals” of the novella's title, with allegiances to the worldviews of both First and New People. Her experience demonstrates a way that human beings can forge a relationship with nonhuman nature for political ends without positing essential or static connections that erase difference and reinscribe dualism or hierarchy. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Donna Haraway turns to a model of political identity formulated by Chela Sandoval called oppositional consciousness: a kind of postmodern identity constructed out of “otherness, difference, and specificity” (155). Importantly, “this identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship” (157). Ultimately, Le Guin's story provides us with a sense in which we can each act as conscious agents of political change. Through an openness to viewpoints and communities outside dominant human cultural experience, Myra becomes, and accepts the necessity of remaining, what Haraway would call a “split and contradictory self.” Such a self holds the potential for subverting dominant ideologies because her divisions and contradictions allow her to connect without oversimplifying her identity in ways that reinscribe those ideologies in new forms; such a self is the one Haraway describes as able to “interrogate positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history” (193).

In this way, the work of poststructuralist feminists can complement and complicate the ideas most commonly associated with ecofeminism by providing an approach to identity that encourages neither the erasure of difference by representing women and nature as a homogeneous, continuous whole nor its overemphasis, which can lead to alienation and the dominations of humans and nature. Such a sense of identity destabilizes views of both human subjectivity and nature, refusing static, definite boundaries between nature and culture, myth and reality, or any other traditionally constructed dualisms. Given this transformed vision of identity, differences between humans and the rest of nature as well as the differences among humans, including gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, need not be the roots of conflict; instead, they can be the potential source of new and more sustainable relationships both within human culture and between culture and nonhuman nature. Thus, by going beyond the boundaries of self-defined ecofeminist theory, ecofeminist literary criticism can strengthen its potential to offer us models of human identity and human relationships with nonhuman nature that can disrupt and challenge dominant ideologies, both through literary interpretations and through the politicized perceptions and actions that texts and interpretations can inspire.

Currently, ecofeminist literary criticism exists primarily in potential form, and the potential it holds for contributing to ecofeminism's agenda of political change as well as for expanding and complicating literary criticism's scope and methodology is significant. However, critics must work not only to apply the principles of ecofeminist theorists but also to cross boundaries to put those principles into dialogue with other theories and critical approaches as well as with the literary texts themselves. In this way, ecofeminist literary critics can become, like Myra, buffalo gals who choose to form alliances across boundaries of difference. Such alliances will inevitably involve opening ourselves up to a variety of approaches and viewpoints, and negotiating the ways these approaches and viewpoints interact with our own will allow ecofeminist literary critics to engage in a process of constant self-interrogation and transformation. In this way, by exploiting our position at the intersection of ecofeminism and literary theory and criticism, we can encourage theorists, critics, and readers alike to cross boundaries, building on our connections with each other while using our differences to expand the range of what we can imagine for our future.

Notes

1. In “Living Interconnections with Animals and Nature,” Greta Gaard lists many of these publications. Notable among them for representing the diversity within ecofeminism are Caldecott and Leland, Diamond and Orenstein, and Plant. The 1993 collection edited by Gaard, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, expands ecofeminism's focus to include animals in particular (as opposed to a previous tendency to discuss “nature” in general).

2. For a graphic representation of some of the differences of opinion within ecofeminism, see Salleh “Second Thoughts” and Biehl.

3. I use dualism in the sense of radical dichotomy; as Plumwood explains, “Dualism is the process by which contrasting concepts (for example, masculine and feminine gender identities) are formed by domination and subordination and constructed as oppositional and exclusive” (31). Plumwood goes on to explain why dualism is inevitably linked with hierarchy: “In dualism, the more highly valued side (males, humans) is construed as alien to and of a different nature or order of being from the ‘lower’, inferiorized side (women, nature) and each is treated as lacking in qualities which make possible overlap, kinship, or continuity. The nature of each is constructed in polarised ways by the exclusion of qualities shared with the other; the dominant side is taken as primary, the subordinated side is defined in relation to it. … The effect of dualism is, in Rosemary Radford Ruether's words, to ‘naturalize domination’” (32).

4. For example, a number of ecofeminist writers have noted a masculine bias in the field of deep ecology, a branch of environmental philosophy that shares with ecofeminism the goal of ending humans' alienation from nonhuman nature. As the ecofeminist theorist Jim Cheney points out, though, deep ecologists' failure to question the role that patriarchal thought has played in human alienation from nature presents “inherent dangers, not the least of which is the possibility (or inevitability) that the methods employed for overcoming alienation … will be precisely those methods which originally produced or now sustain that alienation” (118). For introductions to the principles of deep ecology, see Naess, Fox, and Devall and Sessions. The ecofeminism—deep ecology debate has taken place largely within the pages of Environmental Ethics. In particular, see the work of Cheney, Salleh, and Zimmerman. For examples of ecofeminist critiques of deep ecology that occur elsewhere, see the work of Birkeland and Kheel.

5. Among ecofeminist theorists, there exists a spectrum of feminist positions on the issue of women's relationship to nature. The essentialism of radical or cultural feminists lies at one end; as Greta Gaard explains in “Misunderstanding Ecofeminism,” embracing the woman/nature connection “has been the path of cultural feminists, who seek to wash themselves clean of the masculine public realm entirely, and exalt, instead, all those attributes of feminine culture—darkness, the wild, nature, animals, spirituality, the body, emotion” (21). At the opposite end is the position that “you can reject it, which has been the strategy of liberal feminists, who seek to abandon anything attributed to the feminine realm and leap headlong into the public male realm of reason, to go ‘where the rights are’” (21). However, ecofeminists do sometimes disagree on the labels they give to these positions. In “Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and the Nature/Culture Dualism” (both 1989 and 1990 versions), Ynestra King suggests feminists who embrace the woman-nature connection should be called radical cultural feminists or simply cultural feminists to distinguish them from radical feminists who repudiate the woman-nature connection to claim women's place in the realm of culture. Plumwood uses the terms radical and cultural for those who embrace the woman-nature connection and claims that those who repudiate that connection follow “the feminism of uncritical equality” (30). Carolyn Merchant calls this second group liberal feminists: “Historically, liberal feminists have argued that women do not differ from men as rational agents and that exclusion from educational and economic opportunities have prevented them from realizing their own potential for creativity in all spheres of human life” (100).

6. As several critics have pointed out, the construction of women, nature, and Western culture found in Woman and Nature is far more complex than an unproblematized assertion of an essential, biological connection between women and nature. Ynestra King notes in “Healing the Wounds” (1989) that Woman and Nature, which is “located ambiguously between theory and poetry, has been read much too literally and at times invoked wrongly to collapse the domination of women and the domination of nature into a single, timeless phenomenon. Griffin collapses the rigid boundaries of the subject and the object, suggesting a recovery of mysticism as a way of knowing nature immanently” (125). King also notes, in “The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology,” that Woman and Nature is “antidualistic, struggling to bridge the false oppositions of nature and culture, passion and reason” (28n12). In “Voicing Another Nature,” Patrick D. Murphy argues that, in Woman and Nature, Griffin “employs a postmodernist metanarrative structure, polemically critiques what she observes, posits a utopian conclusion, and includes humans as part of the nature they study” (68); according to Murphy, Griffin's text is self-consciously about “the relationship of ideology to the constraints on dialogue about nature” (69).

7. In her theoretical essay “Split Culture,” Griffin makes clear that, despite the historical association between women and nature in Western culture, neither men nor women are “safe” from the “divided habit of mind” that sees humans as separate from the earth (12). In “The Ecology of Feminism,” King is careful to point out that if men feel more alienated from nonhuman nature than women do, it is a result of culture and history rather than an inherent aspect of men's identities. And thus ecofeminism should work toward “a dynamic, developmental theory of the person—male and female—who emerges out of nonhuman nature, where difference is neither reified or ignored and the dialectical relationship between human and nonhuman nature is understood” (“Healing the Wounds” 1989, 131). In addition to avoiding the dualism between men/culture and women/nature we see in more essentialist versions of ecofeminism, King is concerned with bridging the gap between rationality and spirituality she sees represented by socialist and cultural feminists. According to King, socialist feminists tend to share the rationalist bias of Marxist theorists and thus “have not seriously attended to the domination of nonhuman nature, nor to the domination of inner nature” (“Healing the Wounds” 1989, 128). Cultural feminists, with their focus on personal transformation and empowerment, account for the “inner nature” of human beings but fail to see women as social historical agents. For King, it is crucial for ecofeminism to go beyond the dualistic opposition implied by the extremes of these two positions: “we are not talking heads, nor are we unself-conscious nature” (128).

8. King's work demonstrates a consistent, explicit commitment to “the organic forging of a genuinely antidualistic … theory and practice” (“Healing the Wounds” 1989, 130). Griffin, in the preface to Woman and Nature, explains that one of her goals is to deconstruct the “separations that are part of the civilized male's thinking and living” (xvi).

9. As Stacy Alaimo explains, “the poststructuralist idea that there is no ‘outside’ of the text, nothing that is not discursive,” can actually be interpreted as broadening the possibilities for political effects and analyses because “breaking down the thought/reality opposition casts discourse as material” (151n3).

10. Note that this essay, as published in Diamond and Orenstein's 1990 collection Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, is a later version of the essay that appears in Jaggar and Bordo's 1989 Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. Although I cite the earlier version elsewhere in this essay, here I am citing the 1990 version because the earlier version does not include the discussion of body consciousness.

11. While King acknowledges that “the domination of sex, race, and class, and the domination of nature are mutually reinforcing” in “The Ecology of Feminism” (20), elsewhere she backs away from her commitment to the equal importance of all sources of difference and declares that “the mind-set of hierarchy” that allows domination to occur has “its material roots in the domination of human by human, particularly women by men” (“Healing the Wounds” 1989, 115-16). Similarly asserting that a certain form of oppression is prior to or the source of all others, Susan Griffin turns to the domination of nature as the original form of dualism and oppression in “Split Culture.” She roots Western society's enslavement of African people in the cultural association of Africans with nonhuman nature (14).

12. Donna Haraway sees a similar tendency on the part of socialist feminists to search “for a single ground of domination to secure our revolutionary voice” (160-61) and identifies it as a form of essentialism.

13. In “Ground, Pivot, Motion: Ecofeminist Theory, Dialogics, and Literary Practice,” Patrick D. Murphy even suggests a way to conceive of natural forces as acting on the subject through a form of discourse; using Bakhtin's theory of the utterance, he proposes, “If emotion and instinct arise from historical natural influences on the evolution of the species, then their exertions on our behavior, their entering into consciousness, are a form of the natural world ‘speaking’ to us through signs that our conscious renders verbally” (152).

14. Donna Haraway is a prominent exception to this trend.

15. Other stories in Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences may be more likely to create the impression of an essentialist connection between women and nature. In particular, “She Unnames Them” opposes women and nature to patriarchal culture and language. However, I believe the ingenious way in which Le Guin rewrites one of the dominant myths grounding Western culture's anthropocentrism (Adam's naming of, and consequent authority over, the animals in the Garden of Eden) can also be read as an exploration of the potential of language to subvert dominant cultural ideologies.

16. See Bright for more extensive discussions of the similarities between the biological coyote and the coyote of Native American legend.

17. In Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez describes how “the unrestrained savagery that was once a part of wolf killing in the United States continues with efforts in America to control ‘brush wolves’ or coyotes. These animals are hunted down by ranchers from helicopters with shotguns. Their dens are dynamited. Their mouths are wired shut and they are left to starve. They are strung up in trees and picked apart with pistol fire. They are doused with gasoline and ignited” (196).

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