Is It Really Ecocritical If It Isn't Feminist?

This essay takes as its starting place a recent trend within ecostudies, the posthumanist approach that aims to decenter humans by focusing on the co-agentic qualities of “matter” over its social, especially linguistic, constructedness. Building on the work of such theorists as Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, ¹ to name but two, this approach considers the integral connection between various (and equally necessary) players in the ecosystem writ large with a focus on the smallest as well as the most towering of players—from particles and microbes to ice fields and weather systems. In their Introduction to a recent special issue of Shakespeare Studies, “Shakespeare and Ecology,” Julian Yates and Garrett Sullivan cite the democratizing promise of Latour’s approach to thinking about matter as a “Parliament of Things” that includes human and nonhuman participants alike. The role of the human, they assert, “would not be to speak on our own behalf or that of our fellows but to serve as mouthpieces or as some other variously sonifying, visualizing, or animating prostheses for the non-human entities whose existence and whose concern we hope to make present or knowable” (23). With humans as “mouthpieces” that “make present” the “existence” of the nonhuman, though, are we not simply (re)producing a version of the nonhuman rendered intelligible via the human? Is it possible to do anything but mediate the nonhuman through language, though? Latour himself admits in Politics of Nature that when humans serve as representatives of Nature, we are in fact “speaking of what is produced, constructed, decided, defined,” largely by the human and not simply conveying the presence of the nonhuman natural world in any sort of literal, corporeal, and certainly not any immutable sense (35). How, then, are we to make the “existence” and “concern” of nonhuman entities “present or knowable” without language, without finding ourselves once more shackled in the “prison house of language”? ²