Watery Depths

1 he cultural and intra-psychic maps of "pollution," communicated through the narratives of Judeo-Christian tradition, position us in destructive relationships with wetlands.Both the ecological terrrain known as wetlands as well as women's wombs have been at times derogatorily labeled as "rotting flesh."Our reactions of repulsion engendered by such labelling have led us to devalue economically what are some of the most fecund and generative of habitats, construing ecological wetlands as "wastelands" and the wet wombs of women as "lacking"-and thus women as "lack-landers."Exploring Judeo-Christian texts through anthropologist Mary Douglas's work and philosopher Julia Kristeva's insights on purity and pollution, I attempt in this article to open out how patriarchy's sacred endeavor of becoming "dean and proper" has contrib uted to destruction of life's generativity.Ecofeminism unveils the parallel ways in which women and the land are imaged and the resultant treat ment to which they are then submitted.Through Douglas and Kristeva, I am attempting to disdose such images upon which our biblical narrative rides.These images generate our psychic maps as well as the geographic boundaries of self and other natural spaces.As Iris Marion Young opens out Kristeva's theory of abjection to suggest the psychic faultiness that

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics · Geology