Displacing Place, Unstating Feminism (or: One Migrant Settler’s Quest for a Standing Place)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Place forms the material grounds of our personal-political becomings, and feminist theory after Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde demonstrates how understanding our respective locatedness forms a critical step towards meaningful theory and praxis. Such politics and ethics of place are cultivated in the feminist environmental humanities to encompass desires for ecological justice, putting human ethical relationships with the non-human world squarely into feminism’s scope. This article arises from the observation that place-work taking Indigenous and white settler relationships to place seriously could be enriched by more substantively involving many other settler experiences. Here, I enflesh this gap: I explore personal narratives of middle-class South Asian migrant settlerhood, using the paradoxical place-with-placelessness this experience entails to further vitalise understandings of place and feminism in the environmental humanities. In doing so, I propose that ‘feminism’ and ‘place’, as categories of understanding, need not be static, stable or singular to orient our identities, passions, or politics – that even when connections to these categories are unstable and tenuous, that very displacement and its excess can be grounding.