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What does ‘feminist views from somewhere’ mean? Frances Gray first explains that patriarchy has imposed a so-called objective view that is not, in fact, objective. This false objectivity is the real subjectivity of patriarchal thinking, notably set down in ‘neutral’ theories and practices that are actually male ones. Thus the purpose of the book is ‘acknowledging located-ness or situated-ness as sex/gendered individuals in a plurality of overlapping social contexts’ (Gray, p. xviii).
The first of those contexts is that of ‘earth’ and ‘physicality’. Lyn Cowan leaves a poignant testimony of the ‘geological configurations’ (Cowan, p. 5) left in our psyches by our ethnic histories, however removed from the past and from earth we think we are. As a Jewish woman she feels that, like earth, she has been ‘owned, rented, harvested, exploited, exhausted, platted, plotted, parcelled out, covered over, landscaped, plowed, stripped, furrowed, seeded, fenced, staked out, claimed, bought, and sold’ (Cowan, p. 7). Yet she knows of means of reclaiming feminine lands and bodies through poetry or concrete working of the land.
In ‘Becoming human’, Amanda Dowd subtly intertwines theory and practice on the khôra, this intermediate space between people which allows the creation of reality. This place is a ‘profoundly feminine and ecological approach to the problem of becoming human’ (Dowd, p. 10). Psychoanalysis has shifted from