Gender Violence in Ecofeminist Perspective

Intersections of Animal Oppression, Patriarchy and Domination of the Earth

Gwen Hunnicutt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351026208
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book aims to begin an eco-centered, eco-feminist informed discussion about the ways in which our relationship to "nature" is bound up with gender, patriarchy, and violence.

Ecofeminist scholars study the interconnections between gendered relationships of domination among humans, between humans, and between humans, nonhumans, and the earth. It is in this ideological and structural tangle between humans and the environment that a deeper understanding of gender violence is possible. Ecofeminism offers analytical possibilities for understanding a "logic of domination" which sustain a whole host of problems, including the interrelated oppressions of gender violence and exploitation of the more-than-human-life world. In this book, Gwen Hunnicutt brings into dialog ecofeminism and gender violence. Ideological components, such as speciesism and the belief that the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants are ours to exploit, inform a host of other social practices, including interpersonal violence.

A portion of this book is devoted to exploring the ways in which patriarchy is foregrounded by another hierarchy—uman domination over "nature". Thus, gender violence stems from a logic of domination that is built on the domination of nature and the domination of the Other "as nature". As this blueprint of oppression repeats itself where there are vectors of difference, the chapters ultimately connect these oppressions by showing the inextricable bind of violence against humans and the more-than-human-life world. This book will serve as a resource for scholars, activists, and students in sociology, gender violence and interdisciplinary violence studies, critical animal studies, environmental studies, and feminist and ecofeminist studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Ecofeminism, “nature”, and gender violence

Ecofeminism has been gaining theoretical ground across disciplines as diverse as public health, philosophy, ecology, and various sciences (Eaton & Lorentzen, 2003; Seager, 2003). Ecofeminism operates with the idea that the injustices directed at marginal social groups share similar ideologies with those that legitimate the exploitation and degradation of the environment (Adams & Gruen, 2014; Thompson & MacGregor, 2017). Ecofeminism, also called feminist environmentalism, works to expose those gendered assumptions, performances, and practices that undergird human relationships with the more-than-human-life world (Gaard, 2017). Ecofeminists are taking on issues that range from global political economic issues, to animal rights, to environmental racism, and the environmental origins of illness (Alaimo, 2000; Harper, 2011; Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, & Wangari, 1996). Ecofeminism is, therefore, a multi-issue, anti-racist, inclusive movement with a diverse constituency (Gaard, 2017; Mies & Shiva, 2014). Even though environmental feminisms have the potential to generate insights and recommendations for many areas of social life, scholars have yet to fully tap its analytical potential to deepen our understanding of gender violence. This book aims to begin an eco-centered, eco-feminist informed discussion about the ways in which our relationship to the environment is bound up with gender, patriarchy, and violence.

Environmental feminist scholars study the gendered intersections of various relationships of domination those among and between humans, nonhumans, and the earth (Merry, 2009; Mies & Shiva, 2014; Plumwood, 1993). The ideological and structural conditions between humans and the environment offer insight into gender violence. This insight is achieved by exposing the logic of domination that sustains a whole host of problems, which includes the interrelated oppressions of gender violence and degradation of the more-than-human-life world. As ecofeminism and gender violence are brought into dialog, we begin to see how a gendered environment and gendered bodies are mutually constituted. Drawing on three key literatures—Gender Violence (as well as the overlapping Violence Against Women literature), Green Criminology, and Ecofeminism or Environmental Feminism—this book is an effort to encourage cross fertilization between these fields which strives to tease out links between gender violence, our relationship to the non human-life world, patriarchy, and the domination of our planet. Ultimately, this text rests on the assumption that human behavior is conditioned by our relationship with the non-human-life world; a relationship that is very gendered. This book, therefore, excavates the intersections of multiple patriarchies, ecology, and gender violence.

Gender violence is on the ecofeminist agenda, and gender violence may potentially be challenged through a strategic alliance between environmentalism and feminism. Indeed, ecofeminists have revealed those multiple linkages within the devalued category of the “Other” (Plumwood, 1993). Ecofeminists have pointed out how the association of characteristics between oppressed groups functions to reinforce their subjugation. For example, the association between women, or any “Othered” group, and animals emphasizes their joint inferiority as they are simultaneously being naturalized, feminized, and animalized (Adams, 1990, 1993).

While this text makes extensive use of ecofeminist perspectives, fundamentally, this book constitutes a sociological analysis of gender violence, exploring how this phenomenon has roots that extend into human domination of nature. Ideological components, such as speciesism and the belief that the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants are ours to exploit, inform a host of other social practices, including interpersonal violence (all of which, I will later argue, are gendered). Speciesism is an ideology that regards one species (humans) as superior and other species (nonhuman) as inferior. This belief system legitimates prejudice and discrimination. Speciesism is lodged within a larger hierarchical apparatus where entire populations are deemed inferior based on stereotypical assumptions about their intellect and physicality. Speciesism involves the position that animals—“a huge and unwieldy category that encompasses creatures as diverse as mosquitoes, jellyfish, dogs and orcas—are understood to be unquestionably inferior creatures” (Taylor, 2017, p. 19). Species is a constructed system of power which intersects with other hierarchies defined by gender. Understanding these intersecting systems of power can reveal how violence is threaded through the practice of othering animals, women, people of color, and other subordinated groups.

The inferiority articulated by speciesism is constituted not just through institutional processes where animals are incarcerated, oppressed, and exploited (i.e. research labs, slaughterhouses, hunting, factory farming, zoos) but also discursively and materially constituted in cultural processes. The oppression of animals—legitimated by species relations of “superior and inferior” and the institutionalization of animal subjugation—is now a normative practice, and the maintenance of such a social system of human domination requires violence (Cudworth, 2015). This understanding of species as relational and institutionalized helps us to think sociologically about a multitude of associations between human violence and oppression of domesticated animals. Combating gender violence, as well as other interlocking oppressions, requires structural and ideological changes in our oppressive relationship with nature. Challenging those power arrangements that inform gender violence also means challenging power relations with the biosphere.

It is no coincidence that we frequently conflate metaphors of human and nonhuman violence, such as “harvest of bodies”, “beating a dead horse”, “I have a bone to pick with you”, and “kill two birds with one stone”. In this same discursive thread, we often see violent domination of nature rationalized by feminizing the natural world in such phrases as “rape of the earth” and “mother nature is conquered”. These metaphors unmask a system of relational power where ecological and gender dominations are co-constituted with other kinds of complex forms of domination, and where gender violence is an outgrowth of our relations of domination with the earth. Just as gender violence stems from the same system of domination of the earth, ameliorating the problem of gender violence is yoked to advancement of eco-justice. There is no solution to gender violence and the ecological crisis if our fundamental model of relationship continues to be one of domination, precisely because patriarchal systems are bound up with other hierarchical systems. As such, an understanding of gender violence must be situated within larger fields of hierarchy where humans dominate not just each other, but also nature.

This work ultimately concludes that there is no social justice without climate and environmental justice. For all animals—human and nonhuman—to survive and thrive and live fully, our biosphere needs to be healthy. These struggles for nonviolence, for the human, for the animals, and for the environment, are interwoven. To end the exploitation of nature requires a dismantling of power structures that also undergird human exploitation. Since systems of oppression are often mutually reinforcing, ecofeminism is useful as it works at the roots of multiple dominations.

Notes on terminology

Both terms “gender” and “environment” are value-laden and take on different meanings in varying contexts. Both terms are products of particular power relations and are therefore understood differently over time and place. The term environment typically indicates the nonhuman natural world, positioned in such a way as to make a distinction from human societies (MacGregor, 2017). Synonyms for the environment include ENV, nature, biosphere, ecosystem, ecosphere, and planet earth. While the environment is frequently offered as a binary construction (i.e. environment and society), I aim to highlight the interconnectedness of human- and non-human-life worlds. Thus, the “environment” here is a more inclusive term, where humans are embedded in a more-than-human natural ecosphere.

The term gender refers to a social construct that is distinguished from biological sex. Gender is a social category and concept which organizes social life. All humans are gendered, sexual beings. Our life experiences and interactions are informed by our gendered expression. Gender is a social status that is infused with power relations, particularly as it intersects with other markers of difference. Gender can be a space of liberation or a construct that is used to oppress and marginalize. Gender can be an identity that an individual rejects, embraces or struggles with. Gender is therefore not just a personal identity, but also a lived experience and an ideology that is political in the sense that it shapes our cultures, our histories, and our system of rewards and privileges. Gender is used to reinforce categories of difference, sometimes resulting in pathologizing and infantilizing women, burdening men with impossible expectations for achievement of masculinity, punishing transgender or queer individuals for transgressing normative gender boundaries, or marking women as vulnerable and dependent. In other words, gender is a social force that is pervasive in how it has shaped our identities, privileges, risks, rewards, political power, opportunities, experiences, reactions, histories, politics, and the modern world (Bradley, 2013).

When I conceptualize gender as “women” or “men”, these references should not be interpreted as denying plurality or change. I am not referring to a singular or static condition. When scholars deploy the term “woman”, they may intend for the term to include all females, but instead often represents only a narrow group—the most privileged, white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class women. Gender is not fixed, but it instead varies across time, location, culture, race, class, and ability. However, when deployed in a binary manner, gender posits an opposition. The lived experience of masculinity will be different for a heterosexual, Latino man living in an urban U.S. city than a Muslim-American man living in the rural Midwest, so it is important to respect differences when studying gender. Even as gender expressions, identities, and performances exist as pluralities, gender ideology (common beliefs about gender) operates as a diffuse worldview that influences the operations of institutions and power relations. Gender does not trump other identities, such as race and class, but instead, our markers of difference are co-constructive. They are mutually constituted where, for example, gender forms meanings about race and race forms meanings about gender. Indeed, much of this work in feminist environmental studies “problematizes the concepts of ‘women’ and ‘nature’ and explores how gender (as a social category and power relation) shapes and is shaped by inter-human relations as well as human relations with other species and environments” (MacGregor, 2017).

The conceptualization of gender violence warrants a lengthy discussion. I elaborate on this topic in the next section. In this text, I use gender violence as a way of seeing all violence through the prism of gender. This approach is not so much about gender differences among the actors in violent scenarios and more about gendered social processes, gendered social contexts and the larger gender order where violence occurs. In other words, this approach is less about individual identity and more about how violence is shaped by gendered hierarchies, structures, situations, and beliefs. In the same way that all our life events are gendered in the ways that gendered situations, structures, and ideologies impact our actions and experiences, so too is violence (Throsby & Alexander, 2008). Therefore, all violence is gendered. When referring to violence, I am referencing bodily harm. Violence is a term used widely to evoke a whole host of harms and injustices. We sometimes talk about poverty being violence or even words as violent. In this text, I am using violence to reference a corporeal violation—physical harms against the body, including homicide, sexual assault, rape, and physical abuse. Violence, then, as it is used here, is centrally concerned with bodies (Aldama, 2003).

Typically, when the term animal is used, it references nonhuman animals. Humans, of course, are animals too. The term “animal” is typically employed in a dualistic manner where the human/animal binary is infused with insult and inferiority conferred on animals as “below” humans. Given this derogatory and charged use of the term “animal” I choose to use the terms, human–animal and nonhuman animal at various times throughout this text with the aim of disrupting this dualism, highlighting our biological similarities and reclaiming humans’ animality.

In this text, I am using the term ecofeminism to describe the scholarship, writing, activism, and ways of living that hold important the connections between human and nonhuman animals as well as the gendered environment (Adams & Gruen, 2014; Ashcroft, 2013). Feminist analysis of environmental issues may be called ecofeminism, gender and environment, environmental feminism, or feminist environmental justice (Sturgeon, 2017), all of which are used interchangeably in this text.

The term state is used throughout this text and refers to an elite governing body that includes agenda setters, leaders, and powerful institutions. This apparatus includes criminal justice, American foreign policy, and political campaigns. The state is a dynamic institution, not a monolithic actor with a fixed set of intentions (Watson, 1991), yet the state possesses governmental power to enforce and enact laws to maintain an economic system that represents their interests (Gramsci, 1992). The state is also highly influential among civil society: institutions such as religion and education. Indeed, the state is a purveyor of particular ideologies which are disseminated to serve its interests (Sassoon, 1980). Under such an arrangement, civil society institutions may operate as tools of the state which function to advance an ideology aligned with state interests (Nieto-Galan, 2011).

In this text, I define capitalism as a global political-economic system characterized by corporate and state actors who share the goal of endless capital accumulation and are acting in service of integrated transnational markets (Kotz & McDonough, 2010). Cultural and political convergences across countries are key to both the configuration and reproduction of the hegemonic global capitalist market. Neoliberal ideology is a political belief system deployed to sustain and reproduce this global economic apparatus (Harvey, 2005). This neoliberal political economy depends on the freedom to exploit the environment (Steger & Roy, 2010). In conceptualizing hierarchy, I rely on Murray Bookchin (2005, p. 68) who sees hierarchy as a

complex system of command and obedience in which elites enjoy varying degrees of control over their subordinates without necessarily exploiting them. Such elites may completely lack any form of material wealth; they may even be dispossessed of it, much as Plato’s “guardian” elite was socially powerful but materially poor.

Bookchin (2005) adds further nuance to the condition of hierarchy as not just a social condition but also a sensibility or a state of consciousness and that this frame of reference can exist in both personal exchanges and social experiences. While exploitation is not always a feature of hierarchy, the conditions that hierarchies create make exploitation possible.

Conceptualizing gender violence

Violence between human animals is a destructive anthropocentric practice. Historically, gendered patterns in violent behavior were (and still are among some scholars) named, violence against women. This naming of “violence against women” was a very important achievement of the second wave of feminist politics. Because violence against women was historically invisible, ignored, trivialized as unimportant and dismissed as a “private matter”, this naming of the problem resulting in the issue finally being acknowledged by the state, medical, and criminal justice practitioners. More recent work, however, has begun to problematize the phrase “violence against women”. As much as the phrase “violence against women” was necessary and useful for decades, scholarship has advanced in such a way that demands more inclusive language that strives to avoid problematic binaries of exclusion.

The effort to avoid either/or dichotomies of man/woman, agency/vulnerability, perpetrator/victim includes renaming “violence against women” to “gender violence”. There are several additional reasons why the phrase “violence against women” might be problematic. “Violence against women” suggests a set of power relations which “assume male strength and female weakness” (Barnes, 2008, p. 38). This phrase also implies that the unnamed, but assumed male are universally violent. The representation of “violence against women” also functions to afford agency to men while denying it to women. Where women are not actors in violent scenarios, violence becomes the exclusive province of masculinity (Howe, 2008; Shepherd, 2008).

Another potential problem with the phrase “violence against women” is that certain types of violence against women (especially sex trafficking) have become hypervisible and thus have become spectacle. The politics of visibility are in play once again, but this time the issue is hypervisibility (Nordstrom, 1999). The irony is that the more visible violence against women becomes, the more likely the origin of such violence is obscured. The violence that has been turned into spectacle becomes a distorted source of fascination and urgency. Hypervisible scenarios feed into urgent interventions, which often end up ignoring systemic violences that support our lifestyle, in particular “physical violence and coercion that sustains relations of domination and exploitation” (Žižek, 2008). In other words, as violence against women becomes a sensational subject of public fascination, we become distracted from the structural causes of the interpersonal violence. Žižek cautions us to move away from the seductive calls to stop violence—the “humanitarian” urgent agenda, and instead learn about the “complex interaction of all three modes of violence: subjective, objective, and symbolic”. Renaming violence against women to “gender violence” is another mode of resisting the fascination of subjective violence.

Sensationalizing violence happens largely because of a feminized story line, where there is a helpless, forlorn victim in need of rescue. This is consequential because not only might we be feeding an appetite for spectacle, but we might be unwittingly contributing to a “fake sense of urgency” (Žižek, 2008). The term “tyranny of urgency” is seen in feminist international relations (IR) theory (Sjoberg, 2010). The idea is that long-term perspectives are eclipsed by the pressure of immediate demands (Enloe, 2004; Jacobson, 2013). As an ameliorative technique, we can situate the study of gender violence within a larger landscape where environmental, political and economic conditions that create violence become visible. When seeking to uncover oppression and human suffering, a broader context is important to acknowledge (Abu-Lughod, 2013; True, 2012).

The conceptualization of “violence against women” simultaneously renders violence against men invisible and homogenizes all men as brutal. The term naturalizes the link between men and aggression, and it presents a rather crude depiction of men as uncontrollably aggressive (Everhart & Hunnicutt, 2013). By focusing on women as victims, but not men, war is still a justifiable endeavor and men are also not extended the right to have violence-free lives, nor are they offered the same moral outrage given to female victims. It is still the case that much scholarship continues to focus on violence against women, which results in the reproduction of binary structures of female victims and male perpetrators, while the scope and impact on male and other-gender victims are overlooked. Consider the work by Chris Dolan whose 2014 study of Congolese refugee men in Uganda showed that 38.5% experienced assaults at some point in their lives and 13.4% of male refugees reported at least one experience of sexual violence in the preceding year. These kinds of statistics are rare in the literature. Part of that stems from the “feminization of violent victimization”. The dominant narrative of violent victimization is closely bound up with “women only”.

Additionally, the phrase “violence against women” imbeds another hidden hierarchy—one of vulnerability, rescue, retaliation, and protection. Where language evokes chivalry or protecting women, then violence is required to maintain that hierarchy of protection (Chavetz & Dworkin, 1987). In this rescue scenario, retaliatory violence is expected. In this sense, the prevention of violence (against women) perpetuates other forms of violence (against “perpetrators”). Indeed, rates of domestic violence are higher du...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: ecofeminism, “nature”, and gender violence
• 2 Foregrounding patriarchy in a larger field of domination of nature
• 3 The intersection of masculinity, gender violence, and domination of nonhuman animals
• 4 Trans-species harm and the multiplicity of violence from climate change
• 5 Conclusion: toward a nonviolent ecological society
• References
• Index