Cows and Others: Toward Constructing Ecofeminist Selves

I examine the kind of alliances and ironic crossing of borders that constitute an ecofeminist subjectivity by appeal to a postcolonial literary imagination and ahistorical philosophical argumentation. I link the theoretical insights of a modern short story “Bestiality” with a concept of “congenital debt” found in the ancient Vedic corpus to suggest a notion of ecological selfhood that transforms into the idea of a “gift community” to encompass nonhumans as well as people on the fringes of society, but without the usual problems associated with such a two-pronged extensionism.