Kavanaugh, Climate Grief, and Babies

There have been a spate of news articles of late that comment on the fact that millennials are choosing not to have children because of climate change.



Self-regulating to control population growth for the sake of the planet is not a new concept.  One need only to Google "overpopulation" to learn all about how the planet's woes can be solved by what you do with your uterus. Please, let's not pretend that vaginas have nothing to do with environmental politics.

As a feminist who also cares about the environment, I, too, have struggled with the question about whether I should reproduce and become one of those dreaded "breeders." I've read, and even published on, the complicated dilemma of being an environmentalist and a mother. Having a child is the worst thing you can do to supersize your ecological footprint. Environmentalists rage over whether having kids is a deal-breaker, or whether those who advocate for reproductive justice (often women, and often women of color), and those who advocate for the environment (often white people, and often men) need to play better together. This post is not about whether having kids is good for the environment, and I'm definitely not interested in telling anybody what to do with their uterus.

I won't rehash these debates here, but they serve to show how the new discussion about abstaining from reproducing is so different. The new argument is not about whether you'll add another person to an already burdened ecosystem.  It's easy to see why that goal might seem lofty and only appealing to elites. No, now it's about whether you can handle the grief of bringing people into the world who will experience it dying. That's a whole different existential question, if you ask me.

I'm of a generation that had children in the transition between these two rationales. By the time I had my second child, in 2014, I had stuck my feminist finger up at the populationist Malthusian fascists, but was fully immersed in a bad case of eco-grief.

Why did I have a second child? Total emotional and cognitive dissonance is my answer. But I can assure you that not a day goes by when I don't agonize about the world my children will grow up in, and I'm not just talking about politics. I mean the extinctions, the loss of beauty, the spread of toxins, cancer, and pathogens, and the geopolitical insecurity (and fear and nationalism it spawns) that climate change is already putting into motion. Forget polar bears, I cry regularly for the world their generation will inherit.

As couples of all sexualities and gender identities enter that time of life when they're trying to figure out whether they want to do that old-fashioned thing of "settling down and having kids", many of them are saying "hell no" in order avoid the guilt and grief of voluntarily foisting the next hideous 50 years of Anthropocene hell on their offspring.

But, I dare say, their abstention isn't just about the environment or love of their children. It's also a middle finger to the heteronormative, nuclear family fantasy. For many hetero women, the stakes are are high. In general, these women still do the vast majority of domestic labor, which goes up exponentially when you add kids. In general, these women are still paid 75 cents to a man's dollar, and even less for women of color. As a professor, I'm sure my students are watching me juggle home life and a career-- a great privilege, I concede!-- and thinking, "hell no. Not for me."

And frankly, I support them, especially my female-identified students. I'm sure that I shock them when I brazenly provoke them to imagine not having children, or at least doing so with eyes wide open about the costs. As someone who may appear to be a model for "having it all," and as someone who is fairly high-functioning, I may be hard to believe when I say I find my "life-balance" borderline impossible, and share the real stories of how my mental, physical, and marital health have taken some bad hits. Why would I wish this on anybody? I want to send alerts to future me-types from this side of the line, saying "don't come this way, too many booby traps!"

I'm not trying to be ungrateful. I just wish someone had sent me the memo when I was young that I could fulfill my maternal destiny by birthing many loves*-- books, intellectual work in the world, mentoring students, friendships, supporting my parents and other family members, the list goes on and on-- and not just actual babies.

Today, my partner asked me, "how will we tell our girls that they don't need to have kids?"

I've been rehearsing that answer in candid conversations with my students for years.  Here's what I said to my partner, without even thinking about it.

Let's tell them at an early age that their self-worth is not dependent upon others' views of them.

Let's tell them that their futures can include any number of fates that don't entail parenting (I never start any sentence with "when you grow up and have your own kids, you'll...").

Let's tell them that their power in the world is not derived from who they're related to ("someone's mother, daughter, sister") but from her own solo self.

Let's tell them that pleasing other people --be they potential partners, children, or their own parents--is not the only thing that will define their social value.

Sure, you can tell your daughters about the coral reefs and the rising sea levels, and fear-monger about climate refugees and the coming anarchy. Heck, try giving them a copy of The Population Bomb! for their 13th birthday.  But personally, as a feminist, I like to think that their empowerment as women is tied to the liberation of others, including other species, and that it doesn't require the suppression of their or anybody else's reproductive rights.

I may have made a different choice by marrying a cis-man and having kids, and it may seem I'm being hypocritical by saying these things. I know I'm walking on eggshells here, because I don't want to speak for all women, nor all hetero/nuclear family moms. And I know that my issues reflect my relative socioeconomic and racial privilege. I know these are not every woman's issues, for sure. I am also extremely grateful for my life and have no regrets. And obviously, as if it needs to be said, I love my kids. I wouldn't want to impose my choice to have kids on anyone else, just as I can understand why some people would disagree with me that having kids is still really oppressive for many American women. It's both/and. Having kids can be awesome, and also can be a personal journey through patriarchy. Furthermore, people who have kids sometimes care more about the future of the environment than they did before (this was certainly the case for me, but then of course having kids increased my footprint by ridiculous levels), but that doesn't mean that people without kids are likely to care less, and all of this is totally shaped by cultural upbringing, class, etc. etc. I concede all these eggshells I know I'm walking on. My arguments here admittedly are shaped by my perspective of being a white, hetero, cis, PhD-wielding, American woman.

All that said, when I was young, I did not get the message that I could be a whole and loved person, without children. It's taken having kids and navigating the brutal demands of work and domestic life in a heteronormative context for me to realize that "having it all" (kids+ career) isn't the only way for women to fulfill their purposes in the world. Only as I mature into mid-life do I realize that I have value as a human being outside of my ability to reproduce, parent, support a partner, and fulfill this dream of normalcy.

To me, the news that young people are thinking about not having kids is both tragic and fabulous. I am happy for them that they'll never go through watching their kids realize how bad things are, that they'll never feel that guilt and heartbreak. I also imagine all these women liberated to pursue their myriad loves-- first and foremost, themselves. I see all this patriarchy loosen its grip, because having children still so seriously constrains women's voices, choices, and ability to chart their own course.
But of course, I see the tragedy too: I wouldn't want my reproductive choices to be influenced by how much carbon will be in the air by the time my kids are adults. So I am sad for them, even as I'm giddy about what it will mean for rearranging sexual power relations. What will happen to all these things when fewer women are involved in "traditional" marital relations, having fewer children, and start to see their sexual and political identities in all these new ways? Oh my!

Whenever I think about young women making decisions about having kids, I don't just think about the planet, or their kids' potential future eco-grief. I think about young women's self-worth being measured by other things, things of their own determination, things outside the conventional nuclear arrangement--an arrangement that is frankly neither pro-environment nor pro-woman. I think of my girls living different childhoods than I lived, where their sense of self-worth eclipses what men think of them, and where their choice to potentially not have children won't feel like the same loss for them as it would have for me.

Like many of you, I am despairing about what I'm watching these past few days about Brett Kavanaugh's bid for the Supreme Court. As an environmental studies professor, as a feminist, and as a mother, I can't separate my desire to see ecological doom averted from my desire to see the next generation of women redefine the contracts of partnerhood, domestic life, and sexual power.  Gender relations are undergoing tectonic shifts right now. My hope is that both the planet and women will gain much from all these changes.


_________________

*Yeah, I am referring to Rebecca Solnit again. Her book, The Mother of All Questions, is inspiring to me, but I can't wait for the book that tells me how to do what she's doing, and also have kids. I guess that's the point-- it's still really hard to do both.

The Peace of Daily Things: Revising Wendell Berry for Ecofeminist Grief

I have often loved and taught Wendell Berry's poem, "The Peace of Wild Things," but struggle to really allow myself to take solace in it.

Given my recent dive into grief (see previous post, "The Vacuum"), I have continued to think about Berry's poem.

What bothers me about it is his use of nature as a crutch.  Someone I know and love often tells me that ultimately, the reason they can't dig religion is because of using God as a "crutch." But isn't Berry using nature as a crutch in this poem, in the same way? Manufacturing some idea of it, such that its sole purpose is to comfort a very human feeling of grief?  Honestly, I don't see the difference between God and Nature in so many claims.  Nature has taken over for God in a secular time, among my scientist and nature-loving friends and colleagues.

I'm not going to spend any more time right now on that issue, but would like to propose that Berry's poem doesn't work for someone like me, whose justice and feminist-oriented views of nature, much less grief, don't quite work the same way. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, and would like to offer this revision of Berry's poem, to suggest a feminist, perhaps overly domestic version that doesn't rely on an idea of nature as a thing "out there".

Rather, I hope this rings a Buddhist bell for you, regardless of the focus on motherhood, in terms of how grief has affected my sense of "the now" and my love of the things I've already spent so much effort cultivating.


____________________________

When despair for the world grows in me

And I wake in the night at the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down next to them

Rest in the beauty of their breathing, while the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of daily things

That do not tax their lives with future and past

Or grief. I come into the presence of the texture of my daughter’s hair.

And I feel next to me the blinding purpose of warm skin

Content in our dark contact. For a time

I rest in the grace of Thou, and am not alone.

____________________________

If it helps to be reminded of Berry's poem:

____________________________

When despair for the world grows in me

 and I wake in the night at the least sound

 in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

 I go and lie down where the wood drake

 rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

 I come into the peace of wild things

 who do not tax their lives with forethought

 of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

 And I feel above me the day-blind stars

 waiting with their light. For a time

 I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

_________________________

I wanted to challenge Berry's notion of nature as liberating us from the human. I wanted to challenge his notion of nature as a solace from the pain of daily life. I wanted to challenge his notion of the detachedness of nature from the human, and the notion of nature as peaceful, "still" like water, or feeding beautifully, as a heron would.  These projections of nature are inconsistent with my grief, and they are certainly inconsistent with the solace I find in my own ideas of nature.

In grief, I have found that I find solace in the mundane, in the comforts of daily life, in the gratitude of knowing there is so much love connecting me to things around me, especially my kids and immediate family. I don't need nature for that, but nature does help me focus on those things, sometimes. And nature is IN those things, always. 

This exercise of rewriting in the mode of another author reminds me of an exercise I'll never forget from seventh grade-- it was called "Imitation."  We would be given pieces of literature and asked to fill in the blanks to create similar structures but with our own images and ideas. Rewriting Berry allowed me to take HIM out of the poem, and leverage this sentiment and power of his poem for my own purposes.  

I can't write a poem about grief right now, but I can meditate on his.  

"The Beautiful Environmentalist: On the Real Food Movement and the Disciplined Body," by Madi Whaley

The following essay is a guest post by a brilliant student of mine, who I keep pestering to publish.  She agreed to let me post this essay as a start.  Enjoy!



The rhetoric of the “real food movement,” or “alternative food movement,” as termed by Julie Guthman, touts consumer food choices as beautiful, meaningful acts of food systems change, linking environmental ethics and healthy eating (Guthman, 2011).  Through this rhetoric, the mainstream real food movement creates a feminine-bodied archetypical beautiful environmentalist defined by lifestyle and image: environmentally conscious, healthy, and conventionally attractive. This archetype ultimately reinforces the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, as termed by bell hooks (hooks, 1981). This research contextualizes the archetype within a larger socio-political framework of environmentalism and analyzes the dominant narrative of the real food movement. In turn, it explores the archetype’s dangerous ramifications for the individual’s perceptions of, and actions toward, their bodies, as well as ramifications for cultural perceptions of people whose bodies are not included in this archetype. Furthermore, I offer my subjective experience with this phenomenon to actualize the potential danger in this narrative. Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentality, and the adapted concept of ecogovernmentality, serve as a framework to explain the relationship between the discursive tactics of the real food movement and the creation of self-disciplined environmental subjects (Foucault, 1978). Finally, I will discuss strategies for resistance to the patriarchal body ideals espoused by the beautiful environmentalist archetype, ultimately advocating for transformative food systems change with roots in community rather than in consumerism.

To understand how the real food movement creates this beautiful environmentalist archetype, we must first understand the dominant narratives, rhetoric, and cultural images produced by the real food movement. The real food movement is characterized by a focus on eating locally produced organic “wholefoods,” or unprocessed foods. The real food movement emphasizes the individual consumer’s choice, all the while directing individuals toward a specific realm of purchasing food that fits the healthy, organic, wholefoods criteria. Various aspects of culture shape the narrative of the real food movement. Michael Pollan has been instrumental in shaping this narrative and the beautiful environmentalist archetype. His well-read book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, contains language emblematic of the real food movement:

‘Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them. (2006)

Here, Pollan suggests that the individual’s consumption choice is more than a personal matter: it is a vehicle for radical social change. The body becomes a political agent. Those who “choose” to eat local, organic, wholefoods “eat with a fuller consciousness.” They are the enlightened, ethical environmentalists, and we should all aspire to be so good.  This contrasts with those who “choose” to eat food produced industrially, who are “eating in ignorance.” These people, Pollan implicates, are the unprincipled, the ignorant. Certainly, such traits are not ones well-respected in society.

            Pollan’s insistence on consumer behavior as an indicator of consciousness and enlightenment reinforces two related aspects of the dominant narrative. One of these is the fallacy of consumer activism: the idea that individual consumption habits are responsible for whether or not we transform industrial agriculture. The other is the moral high ground established for those who purchase real food. In her book Weighing In, Julie Guthman criticizes elitism in the real food movement. For example, she writes:

By exalting a set of food choices, the alternative-food movement tends to give rise to a missionary impulse, so those who are attracted to this food and movement want to spread the gospel. Seeing their food choices as signs of heightened ethicality, they see social change as making people become like them. This gives far too much power to those who happen to be privileged (and thin) to define the parameters of food system change. (2011).

Indeed, as Guthman explains throughout the book, people of color and lower-income are far less likely to have access to organic produce, to have the time to prepare their meals from scratch. Furthermore, as Sarah Wald explains in Visible Farmers, Invisible Workers, this perpetuates a neoliberal cycle of food production, wherein those consuming the food are made to feel morally righteous, healthy, and beautiful in their consumption meanwhile those producing “real” food (at least as far as large-scale organic food production is concerned) face low wages, unsavory working conditions, and are largely denied access to the food. Together, these pieces of the dominant narrative contribute to a culture of guilt and shame around food purchasing for those who may not have the access, the finances, or the “self-discipline” to purchase real foods, and inhibit our ability to put the power of food production in the hands of workers and communities.


At the same time, the real food movement packages this sense of morality with patriarchal beauty ideals, which are enhanced by social media and food blogging sites. For example, a popular plant-based food blog, “Oh She Glows,” features recipes to help you “glow from the inside out.” Radiance, vibrancy, light: these are components of the real food movement’s lifestyle. They work in tandem with the ethical notions of purity, wholesomeness, and the natural. In her book, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wulf explains that light has a strong historical association with divinity, radiance, and beauty. Conceptions of divinity, or purity, and radiance, or beauty, reinforce one another. Here, I argue that the beauty myth is getting packaged in a new form: going “green,” consuming “real” food makes one beautiful both in mind and body.

I argue that, albeit unwittingly, these discursive tactics reinforce the white supremacist patriarchy. Since, as scholars such as Guthman, Wald, and Van Jones note, “real” food is less accessible to people of color and low-income, one must ask whether this archetype allows for people of color and low-income to be considered beautiful. The archetype is certainly white-bodied, even though most “alternative food” is grown by migrant farmworkers. Furthermore, the real food movement’s conflation of authenticity, naturalness, purity, and beauty perpetuates patriarchy in a broad sense, through creating a new standard of female beauty and reinforcing the problematic conflation of femininity and naturalness. It perpetuates the cultural treatment of fat people as “ecological others,” as Sarah Ray would say. For environmentalists of varying positionalities, purchasing only “real” food may seem obligatory, especially with threats of climate change looming. The real food movement’s promise of agency and beauty add to this pressure. This is a cognitive and emotional pressure for those who experience it, but it manifests physically. We literally embody the narrative of the real food movement; the very compositions of our bodies are altered based on the “real” food we feel compelled to consume.

As such, real food movement discourse can be seen as an eerily literal form of biopower, a concept explored by French philosopher Michel Foucault. Biopower is characterized by “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations,” largely through discursive tactics that lead to self-discipline in the interest of the State (Foucault, 1976). Political ecologists and environmental humanities scholars have adapted Foucauldian concepts of biopower and governmentality to explain the ways in which the State and its auxiliaries exercise social control and control over the body to create “good ecological subjects.” Rather than offer structural or collective solutions such as small-scale worker-owned cooperative farms, the onus is placed on the individual consumer, who is expected to behave with moral discipline. In Discipline & Punishment, Foucault explains that such discipline creates “docile bodies,” easily transformed, yielding themselves to such mechanisms of power. Via the rhetoric of the real food movement, we are told that the good ecological subjects – those that are morally pure – improve their bodies, as they consume only the purest of foods: local, organic, wholefoods. Selectively disseminating knowledge, providing a set of principles by which the beautiful environmentalist archetype would eat, the real food movement creates an illusion of truth, autonomy, and freedom of choice for environmentalists with access to “real” food (Agarwal, 2005).

For example, ecogovernmentality is rampant at mainstream environmentalists’ grocer of choice, Whole Foods Market, which upholds the real food movement’s mantra of the conscious and beautiful consumer choice. The Whole Foods website hosts a page titled, “Healthy Eating: How to Eat Healthy Your Way.” This is followed with guides titled: “How to Eat Healthy on a Budget,” “What to Eat,” “How-to’s,” “Cooking and Shopping Tips,” “Family and Special Diets.” Whole Foods, ever so gracious, provides us with the necessary guides to healthy eating. They’re the experts, and they’re here to help us. We can take the information they provide and fine-tune it to meet our needs. Whole Foods’ rhetorical contribution to the real food movement perpetuates the beautiful environmentalist archetype, and provides consumers with the food they need to reach this ideal. Indeed, Whole Foods’ profits are hinged upon consumer anxieties and desires to feel healthy, beautiful, and morally righteous. Meanwhile, our individual consumption choices, and the increased pressure we feel regarding food choices do not result in the transformative food systems change that we need.

The Foucauldian framework also allows me to understand my own internalization of the real food movement narratives in a socio-political context. My experience also serves to illustrate the great potential for harm from this narrative. Having struggled with an eating disorder in high school, I sought recovery by ensuring that the food I ate was as “real” as possible, believing that it would improve my relationship with food, as an avenue for activism.

When grocery shopping or preparing meals, thoughts fired off so quickly in my mind that I sometimes thought it would overheat. Overwhelmed with the inescapable reality that almost every product I looked at somehow contributed to ecological, social, and personal health problems, my mind would fall into a swirl of panic over the choices at hand. Sometimes I would leave without food altogether, deciding that it was better to go hungry altogether than to make the wrong decision. And despite my great hunger and anxiety, this seemed perfectly justified based on the narrative I had been fed. To disappear, to become smaller, was to be beautiful. For I had consumed less resources, I had disciplined myself, given myself to some bigger issues. This was my reality: I wanted to save the world, and I wanted to be beautiful. I wanted to be that good, wholesome, beautiful environmentalist whose image was burned into my head by the rhetoric of the real food movement.

            But how do I make this real for you, my reader? This struggle seems so silly, so trivial, I’m sure. It may be incomprehensible, may seem preposterous that someone could internalize the rhetoric of the real food movement to such an extreme degree. And perhaps it seems quite a privileged kind of worry. Indeed, perhaps it is a luxury to fret over which produce I should buy rather than whether or not I can buy food at all. But the anxiety is real and it is horrible, I swear to you. It has consumed my mind and physically altered my body.

 In fact, various studies document the historical congruence between asceticism, with its goals of purity and freedom, and anorectic behavior, as well as the tendency among people with eating disorders to turn toward veganism or vegetarianism as a way to feel strong and righteous, while continuing rigid eating habits (Herzog, 2011) (Crisp, et al. 1986). For example, anthrozoologist Hal Herzog recalls a conversation with a young girl recovering from an eating disorder, who was attracted to veganism because of its “righteousness.” The phenomena they describe are consistent with my own experience regarding consuming “real” foods.  “Ecogovernmentality,” “self-discipline,” “rigidity,” and “orthorexia,” – these are the terms that describe the times when I go to the grocery store and feel my body start to shake, to feel a lump swell up in my throat, rendered unable to act. They describe my compulsion toward growing smaller, toward being pure and wholesome.

I do not mean to suggest that the rhetoric of the real food movement is wholly responsible for an epidemic of eating disorders. A variety of other cultural narratives, social situations, and interpersonal relationships influence our relationships with our perceptions of our own morality, our bodies, and our health. However, my experience exemplifies the severe reactions that a multitude of people can have to disempowering narratives.

To be clear: I firmly believe that we need to radically change our food systems. I want all people have access to healthy food. I want us to produce food in ecologically resilient manners. I want us as communities, as democratic social bodies, to have control over that production, to decide what we eat. I do not, however, believe that we can reach such change using the patriarchal and capitalist consumption-based narrative of the mainstream real food movement, where corporate control still reigns and farmworkers are still exploited, where farming practices are still unsound, and where women are shamed. We must focus our energy toward transformative food systems change, building networks of sustainable, community-centered food production. The beautiful environmentalist archetype has no purpose here. Indeed, as philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains, we cannot even create an ecologically sound world if our movement is focused on valuing that which is “natural” and “beautiful,” as if the two are mutually constitutive.

Many people can – and are – resisting this problematic rhetoric and constructing a more radically transformative food movement. Grassroots food systems change work is popping up all over the country, and the world. In fact, our abilities to mobilize on this front may be greater than ever before.

I believe that dismantling the oppressive structures in our own minds is a form of resistance. We must unlearn the problematic narratives we are subjected to, and create new stories for ourselves as individuals and as a society: stories that allow for us to be undisciplined, messy, dirty, impure; but full, happy, and healthy by our own standards. In my larger project, I discuss psychologist Michael White’s “deconstruction as therapy” to provide a framework for this change in thought. Perhaps we can see body positivity movements in ecological terms. We need to create our own narratives and our own cultures that are respectful of individual minds, bodies, and differences, as well as communities’ agency to produce their own sustenance.

Ultimately, the “real food” movement’s rhetoric certainly creates an archetypical beautiful environmentalist. The dominant narrative of the real food movement reinforces systems of power and privilege in society by tying morality to privileged consumption choices. It denies the transformative change required for our food systems, and by virtue of access and representation, excludes many people from the scope of beauty and environmentalism. Furthermore, it upholds patriarchal beauty ideals that are harmful to women at-large. Transformative food systems change truly addresses the issues that real food movement rhetoric caters to, without any need for shame regarding food consumption, without the need for white supremacist patriarchal beauty ideals.

The fate of the world is not resting in your stomach, and beauty is not predicated on likeness to the image, or essence, of the beautiful environmentalist. I have learned that you can eat the cookies if you want them, break bread with your community, and use the energy from all that good food to build community-oriented, ecologically resilient food systems.

Works Cited

Catalina Zamora, M.L., et al. “Orthorexia nervosa. A new eating behavior disorder?” Actas Esp Psiquiatr, vol. 33, no. 1, 2005, pp. 66-68.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. Éditions Gallimard, 1976.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol. 3. Éditions Gallimard, 1988.

Guthman, Julie. Weighing In. University of California Press, 2011.

“Healthy Eating: How to Eat Healthy Your Way.” Whole Foods Market, 2016, www.wholefoodsmarket.com/healthy-eating

McNay, Lois. “The Foucauldian Body and the Exclusion of Experience.” Hypatia, vol. 6, no. 3, 1991, pp. 125-139.

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Penguin Press, 2006.

Ray, Sarah Jaquette. “How Many Mothers Does it Take to Change all the Light Bulbs?” Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, vol. 2, no. 1, 2011, pp. 81-101.

Statenstein, Liana. “Why You Might Want to Head to Eastern Europe for Your Next Cleanse.” Vogue, 2016.

Van Dooren, Thom. “Care: Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 5, 2014, pp. 291-294.

White, Michael. “Deconstruction and Therapy.” Dulwich Centre Newsletter. No. 3, 1991.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. Harper Perennial, 2002.

Wright, Laura. The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror. University of Georgia Press, 2015.