reinscribing marginalized subjectivities/identities

There is simultaneously a danger and benefit to drawing on poststructural notions of subjectivity when speaking about marginalized subjectivities/identities. While on the one hand it is helpful in that it can identify ways in which particular ways of being are marginalized, when applied to an already marginalized subjectivity/identity, a poststructural analysis can maintain rather than disrupt that position of marginalization. It has also made it difficult to embrace my felt experience of an intimate human connection with the more-than-human world.

For instance, from the poststructuralist perspective presented in one of my doctoral classes, it was suggested that my sense of connection with what I was then referring to as Land was socially constructed and it was inappropriate for me to think of myself as having any kind of inherent ecological identity; everything about my connection to Land was socially constructed.

In such a context, it was not possible for me to conceive of using the word 'animism,' or speak of coming to know through conversation with animate Earth. These were not words, nor discourses to which I had languaged access for quite some time.