Quotes: "If the human, the top, is what Enlightenment discourses and its offshoots have taught us it is (i.e., white, western, heteropatriarchal, capitalist able-bodied male), with all other living things at the bottom, then I submit that the bottom is where we want to be. In contact. Entangled. Undifferentiated from other life" (James 50).
This quote, and the overarching idea of wanting to be a member of the social and hierarchal bottom, reminds me of the Britannica conversation we had in class. The Britannica definition of ecofeminism established a binary of cultural ecofeminism that wishes to retain an environmental affiliation representative of bioessentialist gendered traits and radical ecofeminism that wishes to completely eradicate women's affiliation with the environment. Yet James, through her ecofeminist commentary on The Combahee River Collective Statement, fills in a gap missing from the Britannica definition. A connection and affiliation to nature does not have to derive from an outside perspective/position of subjugation but an inside sense of resistance, shared experience/belonging, and belief that liberation is a bottom-up process. James does not completely present Black ecofeminism as seeing one's oppression in nature but also using nature as a vessel for re-connecting to what is lost from living under racial capitalism and re-finding one's self in the midst of that process. Unlike radical ecofeminism the rejects a reflexive nature or cultural feminism that internalizes gender bias, Black ecofeminism highlights an autonomy of resistance essential to global, human, and environmental survival.