RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

the overthrow of ―patriarchy and phallocentrism, demand male recognition of the other as
not only different . . . but also of equal ontological status‖ (4-5). The recognition that
other beings can use us as ―things-for-them‖ pries open the closure of masculine identity
to a feminist conceptual space in which self and other are ―interdependent, mutually
determinable, constructs‖ (5). Gender and ecological function are not conceived as
hierarchical binaries in this space, but as evolving processes of mutual construction. As
an activist, Carol J. Adams defines ecofeminism by opening the class of the oppressed, to
include ―the rest of nature‖ alongside downtrodden sexes, races, social classes, and other
cultural identities (1). If ecofeminism is about the liberation of people qua people and
people qua animal, then the subject position of its proponents should be insignificant next
to the liberating possibilities evoked by their texts. Snyder‘s identity is as viable as any
for performing ecofeminist critique.
―Wave‖ consists of six ―image clusters‖ (Almon 82) with one metapoetic aside,
making for seven permutations of one basic sentence: ―wave wife‖ (Snyder 7).
Each cluster qualifies this proposition to make it clear that Snyder believes that the
immanent world of biology and geology is an interdependent web of rhythms. Indo-
European traditions feminize change and associate stasis with masculinity, grounding the
vagaries of samsara in a changeless God-Brahma. The misogynistic implications to this
gendering of the rock-wave binary are well-known, and they are repeated when change
and movement are othered in an attempt to posit the spiritual-intellectual bedrock of an
un-moved mover. 19 With ―Wave,‖ Snyder opens Regarding Wave with an acceptance of
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19 The phrase un-moved mover derives from Aristotle‘s Physics, Book Eight: ―If there is
a series of things, each moving its successor and being moved by its predecessor, the