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Articles

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

 
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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.

Additional information

Funding

This work was developed through my participation in the writing retreat and symposium ‘Feminist, Queer and Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene III: (what do we) WANT?’ funded by the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC) at the University of Sydney.

Acknowledgements

Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis brought about this article by inviting me to be part of the ‘Hacking the Anthropocene III: (what do we) WANT?’ writing retreat and symposium. I am so grateful for this invitation, for their generous editorial insights and support, and for the lovingly ethical communities, practices and thinking they cultivate in so many of their scholarly activities. Thank you to the other participants of the workshop and symposium; it was an honour to think in your company. Many thanks to Courtney Addison, Laura McLauchlan and Sophie Adams for their thoughtful insights on drafts, and to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their careful, engaged critical feedback. Thanks to Phillipa Louey-Gung, who shared with me her rather brilliant coursework essay which pointed me to several other texts that proved critical to my developing thoughts. Thanks, too, to the Western Sydney University Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders Advisory Board, the Mahi Tahi collective and the Free University of Western Sydney – proximity to these groups’ activities at different times has helped develop much of the personal work that informs this essay. I have so much to thank my parents for. But for now, I’ll just thank them for their willingness to appear in my work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mythily Meher is an anthropologist and feminist STS scholar whose work uses critical medical ethnography, decolonising knowledge perspectives, history and affect to study, theorise and work towards transformative justice, particularly in the history of science and in health/health-affecting sectors. This work grows from an ethnographic focus on care practices enacted through institutions, and it is also informed by literary studies, the environmental humanities and the critical potential of personal narrative. In 2019, Mythily recieved the Sam Taylor-Alexander Early Career Researcher Prize for Ethics and Engagement within Anthropology. She is currently a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Health and Medicine at the University of Auckland.

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