Melody Graulich, Utah State University:
While Stacy Alaimo controls a wide range of theoretical reading, she does so with clarity, agility, and restraint. It is rare to see so theoretically sophisticated a writer as Alaimo so attentive to individual images and so playful with her own language. Her new and brilliant insights and her attention to texts totally overlooked in the field make Undomesticated Ground a significant contribution to ecocriticism, women's studies, and American Studies.
Undomesticated Ground is an important and informative book, and it should set the stage for an enlivened discussion of nature and feminism.
Nancy Walker, Vanderbilt University:
Undomesticated Ground engages important issues in feminist debate about women and nature. It will be controversial in some quarters, but it will be considered seriously by readers, and one can ask little more.
Catriona Sandilands, York University:
Throughout the book, Alaimo shows that women have made subversive use of the particular literary, political, and gender conventions around them to create spaces for and threads of women's liberation that do not rest on a separation from nature.... These insights are complex and generative, and I found Alaimo's analysis to be rich and thought-provoking.... In both form and content, then, this is an important book for ecological scholars of all traditions. Read it with pleasure.
Barbara Ryan, University of Missouri:
Students of nature writing, women's literature, and more familiar forms of imaginary domesticity will find rich insights in Undomesticated Ground.
Maureen McKnight, University of Wisconsin:
Stacy Alaimo challenges essentialized conceptions of nature in Undomesticated Ground, calling for nature's reclamation as feminist space.... Alaimo persuasively asserts that feminism will benefit from a more complex understanding of nature's multiple and, at times, contradictory representations.... Her work importantly lays the groundwork by which we can articulate essentialized notions of nature, disrupt them, and then question the framework of dualisms that guides our inquiry.
Paula Rabinowitz, University of Minnesota, author of They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary:
Emma Goldman as ecofeminist? Whales as earth mothers? Feminist cyborgs reclaiming abandoned wastelands? Undomesticated Ground even rediscovers the wacky 1970s feminist erotica Bear. Stacy Alaimo argues that the double valence of the woman–nature connection holds potential traps and benefits for both women and nature because both progressive feminisms and ecofeminism offer two sides of the same maternalist coin. What early twentieth-century writer Mary Austin found in the desert—an undomesticated female space, a hidden wildness tainted by racism—Alaimo finds in a range of American women's prose: fiction by communists; lesbian, postmodern SFers; and even in the well-meaning ecology fundraising letters crowding our mailboxes.
Shannon Sullivan:
Alaimo's Undmesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space ... takes on the important work of dismantling nature–culture dualisms in which culture is viewed as dynamic and nature as static.... Alaimo offers feminists an alternative path in which boundaries between human and nonhuman nature are permeable but not completely collapsed.
Meredith Criglington:
Undomesticated Ground explores a dazzling array of feminist texts that endeavour to inhabit and transform nature as a place of feminist possibility. Throughout, Alaimo remains sensitive to the pitfalls of any alliance between women and nature. The texts are grouped chronologically and thematically, and each is carefully considered in relation to its social and historical moment.
