The theory of hydrofeminism applies concepts from ecofeminist thinking to the specific relationship between women and water. Ecofeminism resists dominant post-Enlightenment thinking which dismisses the interconnectedness of life, and instead categorizes existence into a series of binaries: male / female (non-male gender expressions), white / non-white, self  / other, “civilized” culture / ”wild” nature, reason / emotion, heterosexual / queer, and universal / particular, among others (Gaard 158-159). These mutually-exclusive pairings solidify a hierarchy between the first and second descriptors, concentrating privilege on the white, “civilized,” rational, heterosexual, male individual, whose experience is universalized as “human,” while simultaneously rendering non-white, primitive, emotional, queer “others” as less than human (Wynter 131-132). Although the association of woman and water persists post-Enlightenment, the role has been reversed: women and water are “no longer revered as the source of life,” instead, “in Western cultures their association signaled their shared subordination” (Gaard 160). Yet although these dichotomies encourage an individualist and anthropocentric worldview, this model ironically reinforces the intersectionality between marginalized groups. In fact, an ecofeminist perspective posits an epistemology which recognizes and honors the interdependence of all beings, human and nonhuman, in their particularity (as opposed to homogenizing the human experience via universalism). Hydrofeminism draws on the pluralistic nature of water as both facilitator of life (birth waters, drinking water, etc.) and death (conduit of toxins and disease, threat of flooding and drowning, etc.). These qualities make wateriness undefinable in any reductionist manner. Like water, women also hold a fluid identity, embodying a challenge to the rigidity of “a system ‘most overtly captured in the image of the phallus that is always erect, rigid, stiff’” (Berger 17 qtd. in Staniland 10). The variety of representations of women in literature reveal the diverse points of connection women have historically held with water, including, bodily fluids, waterways, water cycles, menstruation, and spiritual / mythological figures (Mother Earth, sirens, nymphs, etc.) (Staniland 12). Ultimately the goal is not to reinvent a hierarchy based on binary-thinking, but rather to imagine a new relationship between the beings of the earth. One of the key conflicts within ecofeminist thought is the issue of female essentialism. Thinkers such as Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies have been accused of creating an “alternative universalism” by simply reversing the good / bad, woman / man, body / mind, science / nature dichotomy (Molyneux and Steinberg 94). This perpetuates the equation of gender with a certain morality and relationship to the world at large (men as essentially in opposition to nature, and women as essentially attuned to the earth), while romanticizing “a classless, raceless, heteronormative, biologically-fixed ‘woman’ who… ‘communed’ with nature as a result of her female biological facticity” in a way which ignores the diversity of the female experience (Mallory 16). Rather than perpetuating an essentialist connection between women and water, hydrofeminism imagines an expansive understanding of human experience which allows for the inclusion of gender fluidity and extends beyond the limits of an anthropocentric framework. In their water-based power, women are capable, not only of biological birth, but the metaphorical birthing of new epistemologies, which center the wisdom of anti-patriarchal relationships to the natural world, and challenge the problematic dichotomies of post-Enlightenment thinking.