Everything that used to surround and sustain the represented object, such as preg­ nant women and local people, simply disappears or re-enters the drama as an agonist. For example, the pregnant woman becomes juridically and medically, two very powerful discursive realms, the "maternal environment" (Hubbard, 1990). Pregnant women and local people are the least able to "speak for" objects like jaguars or fetuses because they get discursively reconstituted as beings with opposing "interests." Neither woman nor fetus, jaguar nor Kayapo Indian is an actor in the drama of representation. One set of entities becomes the represented, the other becomes the environment, often threatening, of the represented object. The only actor left is the spokesperson, the one who represents. The forest is no longer the integument in a co-constituted social nature; the woman is in no way a partner in an intricate and intimate dialectic of social relationality crucial to her own personhood, as well as to the possible personhood of her social—but unlike— internal co-actor.37 In the liberal logic of representation, the fetus and the jaguar must be protected precisely from those closest to them, from their "surround." The power of life and death must be delegated to the epistemologically most disinterested ventril­ oquist, and it is crucial to remember that all of this is about the power of life and death.


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