Shifting Dynamics of Balance: An Ecofeminist Critique of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl

Abstract

The interrelation between nature and women that underlies ecofeminism initially is an ambivalent one, with workings of the relational balance of and in nature, in both theory and practice. Given the centralised nature of both environmental issues and gender, the ecofeminist paradigm provides an effective approach for uniting concerns related to the oppression of nature and women and building a sustainable developmental alternative around these concerns. This paper utilizes textual analysis of the renowned 21st-century fictional work The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, and unites ecofeminist criticism with ecofeminist literary criticism, to maintain natural ecological order and propel forward the gendered revolution. To progress economically capitalism needs women and nature and their productive powers. Every relation in this capitalist world becomes part of this technology with compromised principles and zero ethics. Thus, by balancing the scientific angle with the ecological issue, Bacigalupi subverts the rigid boundaries and values of the man-centred capitalist culture and reduces them to open non-hierarchical questioning by destroying in the novel whatever capitalism stands for.