Ecofeminist Perspectives on Gender, Power, and Environmental Ethics in Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake

The paper is an ecofeminist analysis of Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner to explore the overlaps of gender, power, and ecoethics. The paper uses qualitative textual analysis based on the ecofeminist literature analysis theories of Vandana Shiva, Val Plumwood, Karen Warren, and Greta Gaard to identify how women are portrayed in the literature as a form of domination, ecological violence and resistance. It explores the ways in which the patriarchal domination of women can be compared with the abuse of nature in the context of socio-political structure of the novel. Results indicate that Creation Lake criticizes extractive capitalism and power systems based on surveillance through preempting embodied knowledge, ecological interdependence, and feminist movements. The novel disrupts the human-nature dichotomy and illustrates that environmental degradation cannot be separated to gendered oppression. This study can add to the ecofeminist literary conversation because it places Kushner in the context of current environmental ethics and emphasizes the issue of modern fiction expressing the climate anxiety through the lens of feminist politics. Finally, the novel promotes a care ethics, a relational ethics, and an ecological ethics.