Use Your “Mother Tongue” to Change the World: An Ecofeminist Reading of Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest on the Occasion of Its 50th Anniversary

Medlicott, Sheryl M.

doi:10.5840/acorn202492632

The Acorn

Volume 24, Issue 1, Spring 2024

Critical Inspirations from Ursula K. Le Guin and Judith P. Butler

Sheryl M. Medlicott

Pages 25-40

https://doi.org/10.5840/acorn202492632

Use Your “Mother Tongue” to Change the World
An Ecofeminist Reading of Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest on the Occasion of Its 50th Anniversary

On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ursula Le Guin’s novella The Word for World is Forest, the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures posed a question: what can this text offer to activists engaged in environmental and social movements today? In this response I propose we can learn from this book by noticing the ecofeminist perspective underlying its morality. In The Word for World is Forest, Le Guin demonstrates clear links between behaviours that discriminate against women and “others,” including indigenous people, and the degradation of the environment. But by tracing this ecofeminist ethic out from the content of the text to its form, I show that, despite the ecofeminist ideas within the text, the novella is still structured according to the masculinist patterns of thought it seeks to challenge. I consider this text in the context of Le Guin’s own critical engagement with the genres of science fiction and utopia through her essays and later fiction. Just as Le Guin deconstructed then remade these genres in order that her writing might better present her ideas without contradiction, I invite activists to explore how their practice might change if they consciously rescind the logic of man’s mastery over nature and others that has shaped the Western worldview for centuries. I speculate that if in our work we use our “mother tongue” and speak from outside of the masculinist paradigm that Le Guin critiques in The Word for World is Forest, it may set a course to enacting real change.

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