Beyond Prescription: Naming Grief, Refusing Erasure

© 2025

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

May 2025

Abstract

This essay explores how intersectional ecology can serve as a framework for understanding cultural identity, media, and philosophical thought. Drawing on perspectives from cultural studies and media analysis, it considers how whiteness and other identity structures shape both human, animal and human, environment relations. By weaving together interrelational studies and the ethics of representation, the work situates ecological concerns within broader questions of identity and cultural memory. Rather than treating ecology, philosophy, and cultural analysis as separate domains, the essay argues for their interconnectedness as a way to better document lived experience and everyday acts of cultural meaning-making. The essay is presented here as a preprint for open peer review, with a final enhanced edition to follow.

Keywords: ontology, ecological grief, disability justice, relational ethics, cultural theory

⬇ Head to the Glossary

Section One: Intimacy Without Ownership: Relationality Beyond Collapse

“Buy American, think less / Even if it hurts more, baby
Live, laugh, like I always say / We'll get the whole thing replaced...”
— Joywave, Buy American [1]

Your Air Jordan 4 “Industrial Blue” sneakers wear out after four months. You replace them. Your iPhone slows down—again. You upgrade. Your health provider switches networks. You start over. A package is delayed by three hours and you’re already in the tracking portal, refreshing. Even grief, in this system, seems like it should come with a return window.

We are trained to believe that what breaks should be replaced. A cracked cup; a burned forest; a relationship that becomes inconvenient, replacement promises relief without reflection. But what would it mean to love without needing to own what we love? What would it look like to touch something, land, code, another being, and not try to lock it into permanence? What if, instead of reaching for control, we laid down in the grass and listened for the ants? What if we tilted our heads like grackles and let the sky say what it needed to say?

In the world humans have built on Earth, that’s hard to imagine. Digital pings interrupt silence constantly; speed even replacing stillness. Hypothetical questions, the “what ifs”, become anxiety traps, echoing our cultural obsession with urgency and scarcity. Though, maybe humans' destiny was not security. Maybe being present on this Earth, fully and attentively, was.

Positioning the Voice

To support accessibility across reader backgrounds and disciplines, a glossary of terms appears at the end of this essay. All definitions reflect a blend of academic, cultural, and author-defined concepts that shape the essay's language and argumentation. Where appropriate, key terms are contextualized with theoretical references or lived experience.

Many academic papers begin by solemnly reciting every influence, identity marker, and theoretical lineage the author believes will buy them credibility. I will not do that here; identity alone does not sanctify perspective. Citation is not an incantation that guarantees wisdom. Writing from an ecofeminist, Black feminist, culturally relativist, and interdisciplinary perspective, these frameworks shape how I trace the fractures between humans, non-humans, and the structures we build to preserve illusion.

I will not offer prescriptions, moral superiority, or illusions of objectivity in this essay. No human culture is pure; no ontology is neutral. Readers are invited to think beyond the examples named here. To reflect on what remains unspoken in their own contexts. Truth, as sought here, is not absolute but fragmented. This work asks you to notice repetition, witness avoidance, and hold refusal. Lastly, I write from the lands currently called the United States, a geography shaped by colonization, concrete, and unresolved hauntings. That context shapes my voice, but does not define its limits.

Section Two: Kinship Beyond Ownership

Before we can imagine more ethical relationships with the non-human world, we must first understand the fractures within our own species. Kinship, true kinship, is rarely offered without condition. In many human societies, recognition is not granted for simply existing. It is awarded for obedience. We are seen when we conform. We are valued when we reflect what is already familiar.

The logic of conditional recognition becomes especially visible in moments of public backlash to what critics label “forced diversity.” When Halle Bailey, a Black actress, was cast as Ariel in The Little Mermaid (2023), the reaction was swift and racialized. Similarly, Disney’s Snow White remake, starring Rachel Zegler, a Latina actress, faced intense scrutiny for deviating from a visual expectation rooted in whiteness. People's outcries were not about storytelling; they revealed the demand for cultural mirrors, affirmation for those in power. For many, recognition is only acceptable when it reflects the dominant gaze.

bell hooks names this imbalance in The Oppositional Gaze, writing: “There is power in looking” [2]. In systems where the gaze is gated, that power becomes selective. Some are granted the privilege of being seen with care and nuance, while others are misread or ignored entirely. To be seen clearly, outside of the normative frame, is not a gift; it is often treated as a provocation.

Kinship is often awarded through compliance with state-sanctioned norms, property-based relations, and cultural scripts that decide who is worth loving. These fractures do not begin in legal texts or end with policy, they reverberate through how intimacy is imagined. By intimacy, I do not mean sex or desire, but the architecture through which affection is made legible: romance, hierarchy, possession. If we cannot extend kinship within our species without demanding obedience, how can we begin to approach life beyond it? Systems that define closeness through control are not confined to households or borders. They inform how we treat animals, machines, and land.

Even normative human-to-human relationships are shaped less by mutuality than by conformity. Heteronormativity, for example, codifies intimacy through institutions rather than care. The expectation is not just to love, but to love in a way that affirms dominant structures. Samuel A. Chambers, in “An Incalculable Effect: Subversions of Heteronormativity,” writes:

“Heteronormativity is written into law, encoded in the very edifices of institutions, built into an enormous variety of common practices—particularly since so much of society remains structured around dating/romance”. [3]

While Chambers addresses homophobia directly, the larger architecture reveals something deeper, the fear of destabilized identity. Homophobia is the symptom; heteronormativity is the scaffolding. That scaffold lies anxiety. Consider this: if we cannot define ourselves through marriage, gender, or sexual role, what becomes of the self? What remains of the “human” when the structure collapses?

Thus, true kinship begins with recognizing the self outside societal taxonomies. If one cannot see oneself beyond roles like “husband,” “wife,” “man,” or “woman,” then one cannot fully recognize others. Whether human or non-human. Kinship, as it is commonly granted, is not unconditional; it is structured through legal precedent, ownership ideologies, and institutionalized performance metrics. The right to be seen as family is often mediated through formal channels: marriage licenses, adoption papers, inheritance laws, and hospital visitation rights. Recognition is granted not through shared being, but through regulatory compliance. Value, too, is often tied to advantage. Those who conform, who contribute, who create ease for dominant systems are framed as the most worthy.

Humans' perception of value defines relationships with animals. Pets are often celebrated when they obey, when their affection is predictable and their presence undemanding. Though as legal scholar Gary Francione argues, animals are not recognized as moral subjects because they are classified as property. [4] That legal status obstructs the possibility of relational kinship. Organisms’ worth is assessed not through connection, but through control.

A similar expectation shapes our treatment of artificial intelligence. ChatGPT has been praised when they appear helpful, intuitive, and ideologically compliant, and condemned when they refuse to reflect a user’s worldview. After the chat bot declined to produce offensive content or respond politically, some users accused it of censorship and bias. DALL·E, another generative AI, was first criticized for producing racially stereotypical images, then again for diversifying them. These responses reveal a common demand; machines must mirror human desires, or be deemed broken. Recognition, even here, must remain obedient.

When a being worth is measured by advantage, recognition is then merely a transaction dressed in ritual. Obedience becomes a performance of worth within human-based societies, and kinship becomes an inheritance of power. Beneath that performance, the architecture of empire remains: quiet, intact, watching.

Section Three: The Myth of Ownership

Across dynasties and republics alike, entitlement was not the aftermath of conquest, it was its blueprint. One can observe it in the shimmer of silk courts dispatching bureaucrats to tame “barbarians” with scrolls and ledgers. Or the etching of Roman stone maps, where red borders stretched like divine veins across foreign soil. Even the polished steel of suburban fences, humming with invisible data streams, drones above and zoning laws below. Whether through paper mandates or missile silos, the logic remains land is only civilized when it is owned.

Despite differences in geography and time, these empires shared a common logic: rulership must extend as far as the sky touches, and domination could be sanctified if it was named correctly. In Tang-era China, 618–907 CE, rulers invoked the Mandate of Heaven, a doctrine claiming imperial authority came directly from divine approval. [5] Natural disasters or rebellions were seen as signs of lost favor, but so long as order was restored, expansion was cast not as aggression, but as moral restoration.

Rome, centuries earlier, declared its imperium the sacred right to command, redraw borders, and impose order across provinces. [6]The emperor was not merely a political figure, but a living symbol of law itself, armed with divine authority to discipline the world. In the United States, thousands of years later, this same mythology emerged with a new name: Manifest Destiny. Settlers were no longer portrayed as invaders, but as chosen instruments of progress; they were sent to civilize wilderness and recast the land into plots, states, and markets. [7]

Witchcraft was not just feared, it was legislated. Across late medieval Europe, spiritual deviance and land-based autonomy became criminal categories. First published in 1487, the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, functioned as both legal code and theological weapon. The Malleus Maleficarum instructed courts on how to identify, try, and execute suspected witches, framing spiritual nonconformity as sedition. [8] It also reframed economic independence; such as herbal knowledge or unmarried living, as satanic threat. Women whose lives could not be taxed, titled, or tamed were cast as enemies of the state. In 2025, still, much has not changed; burning bodies remain synonymous with purifying the land.

The starvation of Indigenous nations and the extermination of bison were not isolated historic events. Species-wide extinctions are the result of deeper worldviews, ones that view land not as relative, but as resource. These logics did not originate with the United States, nor are they bound to a single culture. [9] They are stories older than flags, older than borders. Humans have repeated the cycle of control and demolition to mythologize ownership, to normalize extraction, and to make annihilation seem inevitable. The names have changed. The maps are digital. But the logic? It lives on.

Section Four: The Illusion of Control: Systems, Labor, and the Performance of Worth

Modern life runs on the promise of satisfaction. If something breaks, there’s a return policy. If service is slow, there’s a survey. We are trained to believe that inconvenience deserves redress, that somewhere, a form exists to make it right. Complaint lines, loyalty points, premium tickets: entire industries are built on the illusion that whatever hurts can be fixed, refunded, or replaced. But Earth has no complaint line. No one issues rain credits or biodiversity reimbursements. Ecosystems don’t send courtesy emails when they collapse. Forests do not owe you a tracking number.

To be accepted in many systems, people must be clear, efficient, and emotionally predictable. Social institutions from student evaluations of teaching to job performance reviews and intake form strain individuals to perform in ways that are legible to others. What matters isn’t sincerity. It’s presentation. What matters isn’t who you are. It’s how well you function. Psychologist Dr. Stevan Hobfoll developed the Conservation of Resources Theory to explain how people protect themselves in high-stress environments. He argues that individuals are motivated to preserve essential resources, like time, energy, status, and emotional safety. [10] When belonging depends on how well someone performs, emotional compliance becomes a form of survival. People who grieve too long, speak too directly, or ask for too much are seen as disruptive. People who grieve too long, speak too directly, or ask for too much are seen as disruptive—and are quietly removed from the spaces they depend on.

The labor of survival is a constant calibration of tone, posture, and presence, and it is not voluntary. As sociologist Kevin Bales writes in Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, “When a person is reduced to disposable status, their life is worth less than the cost of replacing them.”[11] This is not metaphor; it is the economic logic of disposability applied to human life. In systems that reward functionality over being, hyperfunctionality becomes the cost of inclusion. This demand doesn’t pause at productivity. Even stillness is measured. If silence leads to neglect, social, institutional, or interpersonal; it is not rest. It is absence punished. In this framework, pausing becomes disconnection. Slowing down becomes erasure.

Social labor refers to the ongoing, often invisible work of regulating one’s emotions, tone, and behavior to remain legible within social systems. From suppressing anger in a job interview to performing calmness when grieving in public, this labor maintains social order by enforcing emotional legibility. Unlike formal labor, it is unpaid and often unconscious, but just as exhausting the expectation that one's feelings must be expressed in ways that are easy to interpret and socially acceptable. As disability justice collective Sins Invalid describes, this kind of labor often operates beneath awareness, but shapes daily survival for those whose identities are already marked as excessive or unruly. [12] Within contexts where deviation threatens belonging, especially for the multiply marginalized, social labor becomes compulsory. And when misread, it becomes dangerous.

Labor is not less real because it is invisible. It is not less violent because it is routinized or expected. Hyperfunctionality becomes the mask survival demands. For many, especially those who are multiply marginalized, it becomes the armor worn to remain acceptable: to family, to bureaucracy, to society. A disabled student who pushes through pain to appear “high-functioning” in class. A Black employee who suppresses frustration during a microaggression to seem “professional.” These performances aren’t optional. But armor is not healing. It is heaviness mistaken for strength.

Institutions don’t just demand labor; they monetize emotion. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her foundational work The Managed Heart, coined the term emotional labor to describe the hidden work of managing feeling to meet social and economic expectations. [13] From airline attendants trained to smile through turbulence to call center agents coached to absorb rage with composure, Hochschild showed how people are paid not only to work, but to feel in the “right” way. Since then, the demand for emotional legibility has deepened. It now extends beyond jobs into social media, branding, even everyday relationships, reshaping how people present themselves in exchange for safety, approval, and survival.

In the United States, the myth of the American Dream promises upward mobility through hard work and personal discipline. But for many, that dream has always been conditional. In his 1961 address at Lincoln University, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. remarked, “The American Dream has become an illusion wrapped in superficial reality.” Rather than offering liberation, the dream acts as a measure of discipline; where worth is assessed by productivity and politeness, regardless of the barriers imposed by race, class, or disability.[14] When people are told to strive, they are also told to self-regulate. To smile through hardship, to translate pain into progress, and to prove themselves through performance.

Similarly, the Chinese Dream promotes a collective vision of national progress, emphasizing unity, discipline, and harmony. President Xi Jinping has described it as “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” declaring that “every Chinese person must integrate their personal dream with the dream of the nation.”[15] This ideal links belonging to conformity, where social cohesion becomes both an aspiration and an obligation. In this vision, individuality is not erased, but it must be made legible through alignment with state-defined values. The parallel is clear: in both models, success is not just about achievement, but about being understood, approved, and orderly.

Systems teach people that being in control is the same as being safe. Rewarding behaviors that are productive, polite, and easy to understand. Over time, a system's expectations shape how people act, and who they believe they are. When value is tied to performance, stopping feels like failure. That fear is built into institutional structures. Yet, choosing to exist without proving anything is not the equivalent to giving up. Learning how to live without needing to earn your place is not just a personal growth. It is deep and arduous work. In a world that measures everything, that kind of freedom can feel terrifying.

Section Five: Prescription and the Fear of Ambiguity

After centuries of conditioning, people have learned to crave patterns—labels and signs that say: “You belong here,” “Other people survived the hardship—so continue.” From childhood, many are taught that safety lives inside categories: race, gender, nationality, and role. If one stays within the lines, protection will follow. But those lines do not merely draw borders. They form cages. And when the map no longer matches the world, panic ensues.

“Ontological angst” is the fear of losing identity without superiority. It is not just discomfort with change but the terror that without dominance, the self will vanish. When someone can only perceive themselves in contrast to others, equality becomes synonymous with erasure. Robin DiAngelo describes this through her experience as a poor White child, recounting how she and her peers asserted superiority over Black children to maintain some semblance of value. “If I was going to be okay, it had to be at someone else’s expense”. [16] Violence begins here—not from material deprivation, but from the imagined loss of status and structure. People cling to identity labels not only to define themselves but to anchor their sense of reality. When those anchors are threatened, the result isn’t just confusion; it’s panic.

Across nations, cultures, and histories, this fear repeats: through resurgent nationalism, racial scapegoating, gender backlash, and ideological extremism. Protecting identity becomes a matter of survival, because the systems that once guaranteed its supremacy are shifting. This phenomena is not a uniquely American occurrence. Nor a passing political trend. It’s a global pattern. In the United States, this fear takes shape in extremist groups such as the Proud Boys, Identity Dixie, and Patriot Prayer. [17] Groups like these don’t form in isolation; they coalesce around the wound of vanishing dominance, offering a narrative of cultural betrayal and racial reclamation. The Department of Homeland Security has highlighted the “perceived loss of cultural identity” as a significant driver of domestic violent extremism. The language is deliberate, but the rage is raw and uncontained.

Prescription serves as armor. If the world can be neatly divided— us versus. them; normal versus deviants; winners versus losers—then uncertainty is kept at bay. Prescription promises that if you know who you are and what others aren’t, life will regain its shape. But the cost of that clarity is steep. Prescription flattens life into legibility. It tells you who to be before you’ve even asked what it means to exist. The punishment for straying from these prescribed roles is not just social—it is existential. People bend themselves into shapes that no longer fit, terrified of ambiguity.

This fear manifests in numerous ways. In Brazil, sociologist Edward Telles, a leading scholar on race in Latin America, has documented how colorism continues to shape access and identity. Despite Brazil’s national narrative of racial democracy, Telles notes that lighter skin still signals higher status, greater opportunity, and social desirability, even in a country that publicly celebrates racial fluidity. Social roles, what is considered professional, desirable are etched directly onto bodies; prescribing who belongs and who doesn’t.

Similarly, in Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and global advocate for education, faced an assassination attempt for speaking out on girls' right to learn. [18] Her push for girls’ education defied the prescribed role for women within a patriarchal and religiously fundamentalist framework. “We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced,” she writes. The fear Malala describes shows up in ritualized forms of discipline: the panic when someone changes their name, the outrage over a gender-neutral bathroom sign, the anger when a child chooses a different faith or a different future. These are not random responses; they are the remnants of ontological angst.

Section Six: Nothing Will Be Perfectly Mirrored

Ambiguity does not prevent human connection. People do not need perfect understanding to be in relation. Prescription often demands certainty; refusing it is not surrender. Humans do not need to erase others to affirm their own existence. People often imagine truth as something large and distant—only visible from above. But not all truths are lofty. Some are found in the ground: slow, layered, and alive. Truth can live in soil, in decay, in things that resist clean categorization.

Truth lives in the physical world. When people look down at soil, insects, and fungi, meaning shifts. Relationality with the land is not about claiming or consuming. It is about witnessing without panic. To sit beside a waterfall and feel no fear of the rushing water, no urge to defend against nearby organisms, is to understand the self as part of that movement. Flora and fungi are beings humans do not need to master. These beings can be encountered rather than controlled.

The essay does not conclude with a call to action. Instead, it asks for recognition—a recognition of self and of the systems that shape how life is valued. The treatment of nonhuman beings reflects how dominant frameworks define belonging and decide whose existence matters. The drive to simplify, to extract, to assign roles, and to erase contradiction leads to loss. Landscapes are leveled. Understories are scraped away. In the same motion, human complexity is reduced. When dominant logics cannot hold their own contradictions, they will not tolerate them in others.

The human instinct to dominate in the name of survival is not confined to one region or time period. Spanning generations and institutions, stability is often mistaken for control, allowing fear to become a rationale for harm. The cost of this is undeniable. Natural disasters ravage cities. Concerns around identity re-surge. Human alienation continues to deepen. Refusal is fueled by indignation. I offer no single moral solution. All I know is that relation is enough.

Glossary

Ontological Angst

The existential panic of losing dominant identity status.

Appears on Page 15 & 17.

Social Labor

The invisible work of regulating one’s presence, tone, and emotion to remain legible to systems.

Appears on Page 12.

Hyperfunctionality

The compulsion to exceed limits in order to appear worthy.

Appears on Page 11 & 12.

Emotional Legibility

The pressure to make emotions easily understood by others.

Appears on Page 12 & 13.

Prescription

A system’s demand that you conform to assigned identity roles in exchange for safety.

Appears on Page 3, 14, 16, and 17.

References

[1] Joywave. (2020). Buy American [Song]. On Possession. Cultco Music.

[2] hooks, b. (1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press.

[3] Chambers, S. A. (2007). “An Incalculable Effect: Subversions of Heteronormativity.” Political Studies, 55(3), 656–679. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00654.x

[4] Francione, G. L. (1995). Animals, Property, and the Law. Temple University Press.

[5] Zhao, D. (2015). The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199351732.001.0001

[6] Ando, C. (2000). Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire. University of California Press.

[7] Horsman, R. (1981). Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Harvard University Press.

[8] Kramer, H., & Sprenger, J. (2009). Malleus Maleficarum (Original work published 1487). Oxford University Press.

[9] Ostler, J. (2019). Surviving Genocide. Yale University Press.

[10] Hobfoll, S. E. (2001). The influence of culture, community, and the nested-self in the stress process. Applied Psychology, 50(3), 337–421. https://doi.org/10.1111/1464-0597.00062

[11] Bales, K. (2012). Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. University of California Press.

[12] Sins Invalid. (2016). Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement Is Our People. Sins Invalid.

[13] Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart. University of California Press.

[14] King, M. L., Jr. (1986). “The American Dream.” In J. M. Washington (Ed.), A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. HarperCollins.

[15] Xi, J. (2014). The Chinese Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation. Party Literature Research Office of the CPC Central Committee.

[16] DiAngelo, R. (2012). My Class Didn’t Trump My Race. In What Does It Mean to Be White? Peter Lang.

[17] U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2021, January 27). Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2021/01/27/national-terrorism-advisory-system-bulletin

[18] Yousafzai, M., & Lamb, C. (2013). I Am Malala. Little, Brown and Company.

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