Tigrilla Gardenia

The Feminist Plant: Changing Relationships with the Water Lily

I had intended to go through the whole paper, but that was totally ambitious!

This commentary follows much of Luce Irigaray’s thinking that a separation of the human from nature is a kind of non-thinking and causes a lack of living energy. By focusing on a return to the elements of nature – in this case the myriad possibilities that plant life can show us – humans have a means of returning to careful thought.

As an example, Gibson and Gagliano present the Water Lily, a plant that has been marginalized by botanists and revered only for “some” of ki’s qualities. How can Water Lily help us understand the need to expand gender expression and identity?

Wow… this was way more expansive than I expected! So many good concepts to explore.

Here are my three biggest takeaways:

There are more models of living. When we look to nature, we can reawaken our understanding of them.
In order for us to move beyond the limited thinking of our humanness, we need to step into our plantness and expand the limits of our senses/perceptions.
You can evolve through groundedness; you can have freedom of movement even while being rooted.

I want to hear your thoughts on this paper. Did you enjoy it? Did you learn something? Did it give you food for thought?

Discover this paper about plant intelligence:

Part 1 | Part 2

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View the paper here

Prudence Gibson, and Monica Gagliano. “The Feminist Plant: Changing Relations with the Water Lily.” Ethics and the Environment, vol. 22, no. 2, 2017, pp. 125–47. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.22.2.06. Accessed 25 Nov. 2022.

If you have a paper, essay, article, or video you would like me to comment on, send it to me!