Bodily Protest: A Material Feminist Reading Of Refuge

Terry Tempest Williams is an American author, environmentalist, feminist, andactivist. Growing up in a Mormon family in the Salt Lake City, Williams cherishes adeep love for nature and an enthusiasm for the freedom and rights of women. Refuge:An Unnatural History of Family and Place is a book written under such a thought byWillliams. The book has been considered as one of the classic works of both naturewriting and eco-feminism. Refuge combines two strands together: the rising Great SaltLake and Diane’s cancer. Through the two main lines, Williams explores the situation ofboth women and nature in the patriarchal society and shows her protest againstpatriarchal ideology.This thesis analyzes the bodies in Refuge from the perspective of materialfeminism of Stacy Alaimo. By analyzing the agency of bodies and the interconnectionbetween bodies and toxic bodies, this thesis points out that Williams criticizes thepatriarchal ideology and shows her hope for a fair world for nature and women.The thesis contains three parts: introduction, the main body and conclusion.In the introduction, I give a brief account of the author, Terry Tempest Williams,and the book Refuge. I also give a detailed literature review of the previous studies ofRefuge, both abroad and in China. A general introduction of Material Feminism and itsmain concepts are also included in this chapter.The body part includes three chapters. Chapter One analyzes the agency of bothhuman and nonhuman bodies. Williams believes that neither human nor nonhumanbodies are passive. Instead, they are agentic. In Refuge, Williams presents the agency ofbodies through her descriptions of Diane’s cancer and the rising Great Salt Lake. Thenshe shows her growing understanding of the body’s agency, which makes a contrastwith the patriarchal ideology as it only thinks about controlling the body from thebeginning to the end.Chapter Two delves into the interconnection between human and nonhuman bodiesthat Williams presents in Refuge. Alaimo brings up the concept of trans-corporeal space,which emphasizes that nonhuman nature and human beings are equal and interconnectwith each other. However, as patriarchy stresses that men are the center of the world,this connection is totally ignored by the patriarchal ideology. In Refuge, Williamscriticizes the patriarchal men, patriarchal government, and patriarchal culture, whichisolate human beings from nature, and shows the closeness between women and nature.Williams believes that, compared with males, females see more the interconnection between human and nature. In Refuge, there are comparisons of both woman to natureand nature to woman. Besides, by delineating Diane’s cancer and the lake’s rising,Williams shows the similarity between their development, which reveals the closeconnection between human and nonhuman bodies.Chapter Three explores the toxic bodies that Williams presents in Refuge. To startwith, Williams discovers the causes of the toxic bodies. She believes that the immediatecause is the nuclear tests conducted by the American government while the root cause isthe disregard of the well-being of women and nature and the desire to control both in thepatriarchal ideology. Williams also presents the ways of bodies’ contamination: directcontamination and indirect contamination by toxins.In the conclusion, I point out that, by presenting the agency of bodies, theconnection between bodies, and toxic bodies, Williams not only subverts the patriarchalideology but also shows her desire for an epistemological paradigm that men andhumans are no longer the center of action. Williams hopes that men, women and naturecan live in a world that every actor’s importance is recognized and their connection isvalued. She thinks that, only in such a world, human and nature can have a mutual andsustainable development.