The threshold of crisis: Liminality as a lens for Ecofeminist praxis

Introduction: The unsettled air of the in-between

No, you are not the only one who is feeling this way. The contemporary global condition, marked by accelerating ecological collapse, despicable systemic inequality, and existential uncertainty, is not one of crisis, but one of liminality. Drawing from Victor Turner’s (1969) anthropological tradition, liminality describes the 'betwixt and between' phase of a rite of passage, a state characterized by the suspension of structured social order and an intense ambiguity.

According to Truner,

"Liminal entities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial."

The Anthropocene constitutes an involuntary structural liminality. It is the prolonged, uncomfortable gap between a collapsing industrial paradigm and a necessary, yet unrealized, sustainable one.

The Earth Systems are hemorrhaging; the stability of the Holocene is gone. This is the Separation phase of the planetary rite, a violent detachment from the certainty of the "home-world" (Schutz, 1967). We are now in the Transition, where the logic that created the crisis has lost its epistemic authority, yet the successor logic remains fiercely contested.

This is where the promise of Queer Intersectional Ecofeminism enters the frame. As a philosophy that posits several links between the domination of nature and the oppression of women*/marginalized peoples, Ecofeminism provides the essential critical lens for navigating this global threshold. It acts as the necessary anti-structure (Turner, 1969), capable of deconstructing the hierarchical logics that led us to this liminal state. The task of the academic and the activist is to recognize this liminality not as an end, but as a fertile void that is continuously demanding an ethical re-authoring of the human-Earth relationship.

Historical liminality and the recurrent patterns of domination

To understand our present liminal moment, we should probably track the historical pattern of human societies entering and exiting transitional phases. History is replete with moments of structural liminality: the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Black Death, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, you name it! Each moment suspended the prevailing order and opened a phase of anti-structure that ultimately led to a reaggregation, aka a new structure (Turner, 1969). Let's look back into human history, a while back...

In 1517, the hammer that struck the 95 Theses in Wittenberg signaled Western civilization’s abrupt entry into a global structural liminality. The Separation (pre-liminal) was immediate: the Roman Catholic Church’s unified spiritual and political monopoly, the bedrock of the medieval "home-world", cracked, and consequently forced millions into an ontological void where truth became uncertain.

Europe then plunged into a century-long Transition (liminal phase) marked by anti-structure (Turner, 1969). Authority collapsed into endless theological disputes, which fueled peasant wars and the terrifying communitas of religious conflict. The collective uncertainty forced people to find solace not in external ritual, but in the internal conscience. This paved the way for the radical individualism that would later on define modernity.

Yet, when the Reaggregation (post-liminal) arrived with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the system simply traded one master for another. The spiritual hierarchy of the Church was replaced by the secular hierarchy of the nation-state and nascent capitalism (Weber, 1905). This new structure formalized the very logic of domination that Ecofeminism critiques: the individual (male, rational) was exalted, while the natural world and the "reproductive", relational work of life were externalized, devalued, and exploited as resources (Merchant, 1980).

The Reformation's liminal moment was a betrayal of potential. It broke the old structure but failed to embrace an ethics of reciprocity. Today, as our own capitalist structure collapses, Ecofeminism warns us: the risk of a similar "premature reaggregation", like a green techno-fix that saves the hierarchy, is the central danger of our modern threshold.

Another example would be The Scientific Revolution (16th–18th Centuries): This era was liminal for the European mind, transitioning from the teleological worldview to mechanical philosophy. The resultant reaggregation, however, formalized the subordination of nature. Francis Bacon famously argued that nature must be "hunted out of her wanderings" and "bound into service," a discourse laden with gendered, violent metaphors (Merchant, 1980). The male mind (Culture/Reason) was formally codified as separate from and superior to the female body (Nature/Emotion).

We are now facing the liminal collapse of this very industrial-capitalist reaggregation. The danger is that, blinded by the crisis, humanity will once again opt for a swift, seemingly pragmatic "green" reaggregation (geoengineering, carbon markets) that leaves the conceptual framework of domination, the dualism of human/non-human and the devaluation of Care, utterly intact. This would be the ultimate failure of the liminal period. 

The controversy: Essentialism, care, and the necessity of the subordinate space

The convergence of liminality and Ecofeminism is simultaneously potent and contentious. The persistent critique of Ecofeminism is its alleged reliance on essentialism: the idea that women are inherently, often biologically, closer to nature. This risks affirming the very binary that justifies oppression (Gaard, 2017).

Contemporary material and socialist Ecofeminist thought, drawing on scholars like Karen Warren (1990) and Val Plumwood (1993), and Ourkiya (2023) bypasses this trap. It focuses not on essential ties, but on the material, subordinate, and political location that women, the poor, Indigenous communities, and nature have been forced to occupy within the patriarchal conceptual framework. This shared, subordinate space (this political liminality) provides a non-dominant vantage point from which to critique and dismantle the collapsing structure.

The shared experience of planetary crisis creates a forced, destabilizing communitas (Turner, 1969). However, this communitas is false if it does not first acknowledge the radically unequal burdens of the transition (Wong, 2023). Ecofeminism forces us to ground the uncertainty of the global liminal phase in a rigorous intersectional analysis of power and material dispossession. It shifts the focus from the abstract universal human (which historically meant the propertied male) to the concrete, interconnected experiences of those historically excluded.

The Invitation: The Ethics of Care on the Threshold: The essential anti-structure that must emerge from this liminality is the Ethics of Care. This philosophical shift from an ethics of domination and instrumental value to one prioritizing relationality and interdependence is the core antidote to the prevailing logic. It is a necessary balm, a soothing alternative to the panicked, purely technological fixes that threaten a disastrous premature reaggregation.

Stepping into the new Earth

The global liminality is a terrifying gift. It has de-familiarized our world, tearing away the illusion of stability and exposing the brittle foundation of patriarchal-capitalist systems. Ecofeminism is the map through the terra incognita. It is a radical call, yet simultaneously a soothing reassurance that the solution is not more control, but more connection, more humility, and more care.

The current moment of uncertainty is not a flaw in the system; it is the system, suspended and laid bare. The responsibility of the present generation is to ensure that the eventual reaggregation, the structure that follows this threshold, does not once again subordinate the vital, life-sustaining work of the Earth and the bodies that sustain it.

Now is the time not only to image but to co-create new planetary culture where the values of care, embodiment, and interspecies relationality form the bedrock of the post-liminal state.