Ecological Borderlands: Body, Nature, and Spirit in Chicana Feminism

by Christina Holmes

Overview

Environmental practices among Mexican American woman have spurred a reconsideration of ecofeminism among Chicana feminists. Christina Holmes examines ecological themes across the arts, Chicana activism, and direct action groups to reveal how Chicanas can craft alternative models for ecofeminist processes. Holmes revisits key debates to analyze issues surrounding embodiment, women's connections to nature, and spirituality's role in ecofeminist philosophy and practice. By doing so, she challenges Chicanas to escape the narrow frameworks of the past in favor of an inclusive model of environmental feminism that alleviates Western biases. Holmes uses readings of theory, elaborations of ecological narratives in Chicana cultural productions, histories of human and environmental rights struggles in the Southwest, and a description of an activist exemplar to underscore the importance of living with decolonializing feminist commitment in body, nature, and spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252082016
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	10/13/2016
Series:	NWSA / UIP First Book Prize
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Christina Holmes is an assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at DePauw University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction Ecological Borderlands: Connecting Movements, Theories, Selves 1

1 Borderlands Environmentalism: Historiography in the Midst of Category Confusion 25

2 Misrecognition, Metamorphosis, and Maps in Chicana Feminist Cultural Production 51

3 Allegory, Materiality, and Agency in Amalia Mesa-Bains's Altar Environments 75

4 Body/Landscape/Spirit Relations in Señorita Extraviada: Cinematic Deterritorializations and the Limits of Audience Literacy 97

5 Building Green Community at the Border: Feminist and Ecological Consciousness at the Women's Intercultural Center 111

Conclusion Bridging Movements with Technologies for the Ecological Self 145

Notes 153

Bibliography 163

Index 183

Editorial Reviews

National Women's Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize, 2013

"Congratulations to Christina Holmes for this stimulating study of Chicana and Mexican-American women's writing, art making, spirituality, and organizing for 'social and ecological justice, including the ways they overlap and are conceptualized as one and the same.'" —Signs


"The book demonstrates Holmes's in-depth interdisciplinary research and admirable skills in weaving three major areas of inquiry together and clearly identifying and defining organizing concepts and key terms." —Hypatia Reviews Online
 

"Holmes offers us new ways to consider what she calls performative ecological intersubjectivities that emerge from Chicana and Mexican American women's creative thinking, art-making, and spirituality, as well as from their commitments to social and ecological justice."—Irene Lara, coeditor of Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women's Lives

"This brilliant, accessible, and complex intervention should be read not just by those interested in environmentalism and feminism, but by all transnational, decolonizing, and materialist thinkers and doers, whether scholars, students, or activists."—Noel Sturgeon, author of Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural

From the Publisher