ECOFEMINIST THOUGHT IN ZULFIYA QUROLBOY QIZI'S AND LOUISE ERDRICH'S STORIES: WOMAN, NATURE, IDENTITY

Ecofeminism holds that the domination of women and the exploitation of nature share a common cultural logic. This paper tests that claim on two bodies of fiction that are seldom read together: the stories of the Uzbek writer Zulfiya Qurolboy qizi and those of the American writer Louise Erdrich, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. The aim is to show how each author turns ecofeminist concerns into artistic form, and how the relation between woman, nature, and socio-cultural identity is built differently in two cultural settings. The study combines close reading with a comparative method and draws on the work of Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva, and Paula Gunn Allen. The analysis shows that Qurolboy qizi rarely speaks of nature in programmatic terms. Instead, the village, the yard, the weather, and the seasons form the space in which a woman's silence, labor, and loss become visible. Erdrich, by contrast, treats land as inherited kin and as a contested legal and spiritual territory, so that her women defend place as part of defending their community's identity. Three shared patterns are identified: the female body and the land as objects of claim and use; folk belief and oral memory as carriers of ecological knowledge; and identity as something formed through attachment to place. Qurolboy qizi writes in a quiet, domestic, psychological mode, while Erdrich writes in a political and mythic one. The paper concludes that ecofeminist thought is not a single imported theory but a way of seeing that takes different forms in different cultures. The comparison adds a new dimension to the ecocriticism of Central Asian literature and brings Uzbek women's prose into wider comparative discussion.