seeyf 's review for:

Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore by Angelia Poon, Esther Vincent

4.0

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The title "Making Kin" is drawn from an essay by Donna Haraway where she calls for us to expand our notion of kin beyond birth families or even humans. Many of the essays in this collection echo this, showing how environmental and feminist ideas intersect in many ways while bringing in queer, indigenous, neurodivergent and other perspectives. One essay that stood out for me was Tim Min Jie's "Care is Revolutionary", where she argues that slowing down and finding joy and care is deeply necessary, and even essential to the environmental activism she does. These personal essays might not all fall under the conventional definition of "environmental" at first glance, but they do demonstrate the "thinking-with" that is necessary to overcome the separation between the self and other, to know one's connection to their history, land and sea as nor says while talking about their family spread across the region — leading to a more expansive way of seeing the world.