Women and Nature?

Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, and Environment

Douglas A. Vakoch, Sam Mickey, Douglas A. Vakoch, Sam Mickey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351682398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Frauenrechtlerische Literaturkritik

Women and Nature? Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, and Environment provides a historical context for understanding the contested relationships between women and nature, and it articulates strategies for moving beyond the dualistic theories and practices that often frame those relationships.

In 1974, Françoise d'Eaubonne coined the term "ecofeminism" to raise awareness about interconnections between women's oppression and nature's domination in an attempt to liberate women and nature from subordination. Since then, ecofeminism has attracted scholars and activists from various disciplines and positions to assess the relationship between the cultural human and the natural non-human through gender reconsiderations. The contributors to this volume present critical and constructive perspectives on ecofeminism throughout its history, from the beginnings of ecofeminism in the 1970s through to contemporary and emerging developments in the field, drawing on animal studies, postcolonialism, film studies, transgender studies, and political ecology.

This interdisciplinary and international collection of essays demonstrates the ongoing relevance of ecofeminism as a way of understanding and responding to the complex interactions between genders, bodies, and the natural environment. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecofeminism as well as those involved in environmental studies and gender studies more broadly.

Part I

Overview

Introduction

Karen Ya-Chu Yang

In 1974, Françoise d’Eaubonne boldly coined the term “ecofeminism” in her foundational text Le féminisme ou la mort. She introduced the idea to raise awareness about interconnections between women’s oppression and nature’s domination in an attempt to liberate women and nature from unjust subordinations. Since then, ecofeminism has attracted scholars and activists from various disciplines and positions to assess the relationship between the cultural human and the natural non-human through gender reconsiderations. The coalition of women studies with ecocriticism has incited much controversy among feminists. After the women’s suffrage movement’s fight for political equality during the 19th and early 20th centuries, feminist projects of the 1960s expanded gender rights to social relations such as the workplace as well as to reproductive rights and problems of domestic abuse. Into the 1980s, an emerging new generation started to profess dissatisfaction toward the exclusive essentialism and oppressive universalism of previous feminist movements. Research from various fields of study, ranging from postcolonial and diasporic decentering attempts to poststructuralist and queer deconstructions, joined forces with feminist programs to destabilize and diversify the definition and fixity of binary oppositions and restrictive categorizations. As a result, the rise of ecofeminism or ecological feminism during the 1980s evoked much concern for fear of a fallback into dualistic oppressions by realigning women with nature, body, and the environment. For the movement’s supporters, however, the realignment between women and nature is not an essentialist return to feminizations of nature or naturalizations of women that previous feminist movements have fought hard to dismantle; on the contrary, ecofeminism argues for critical deconstructions of historical, cultural, and social dominions of women and nature in favor of a more complex, diversified, and hybrid bridging of the relationship between women and nature.

Ecofeminism reconsiders nature and environmental issues from a feminist perspective to uncover the perseverance of androcentric dualist thinking in society. Earlier writings such as Susan Griffin’s Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) traced the biased treatment of women and non-humans in Western history to depict women’s alliance with nature as a result of the dominance of patriarchy and androcentrism. Into the 1980s and 1990s, scholars continued to attack oppressions of women and nature and called for their joint emancipation from Man’s oppression and subordination (Shiva 1988; Sturgeon 1997; Sandilands 1999). To do so, ecofeminist inquiries took to criticizing and demolishing the sovereignty of Western dualistic thinking. Some representative works include Elizabeth Fishers’s Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (1979), Marilyn French’s Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals (1985), Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990) and her co-edited books with Josephine Donovan such as Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (1995), Greta Gaard’s edited volume Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (1993), Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), and Lynda Birke’s Feminism, Animals, Science: The Naming of the Shrew (1994), Noël Sturgeon’s Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (1997), and Catriona Sandilands’s The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (1999).

Through reflective re-associations between women and nature, ecofeminism aims to destabilize hierarchal dualisms where men rule as reason, subject, and master colonizing women as nature, object, and slave. This calls for an “anti-dualist ecological feminism” (Plumwood 1993, 40) so women can “move to a further stage in their relations with nature, beyond that of powerless inclusion in nature, beyond that of reaction against their old exclusion from culture, and towards an active, deliberate and reflective positioning of themselves with nature against a destructive and dualising form of culture” (39). Bringing women back in contact with nature does not suggest reinstalling fixed binaries; rather, such attempts aim to directly challenge the oppressiveness of dualistic hierarchies dominating the core of Western philosophy. Critical attention to the intersection between women’s oppression and environmental crises raises awareness to operating power politics which involve the sufferings of various groups marginalized as subordinate Others. Like Karen Warren contends, “Ecofeminist philosophy extends familiar feminist critiques of social isms of domination (e.g., sexism, racism, classicism, heterosexism, ageism, anti-Semitism) to nature (i.e., naturism)” (1997, 4). The way we treat nature is directly related to and reflected in the way we treat each other (O’Brien and Cahn 1996; Gaard 2001; Beyer 2014). The goal is to re-access human’s relationship with our material bodies and environment in a non-dominating manner so as to evoke more dynamic interactions with and between other human and biological communities.

Into the new millennium, with the emergence of environmental humanities, inquiries into women–nature relationships continue to broaden with diversity via approaches concerning ecocriticism, critical animal studies, queer theory, vegetarianism, biodiversity, new materialism, care theory, participatory epistemology as well as explorations from interdisciplinary, postcolonial, and cross-cultural perspectives. In underscoring nature and the body, the materialist turn of ecofeminist studies seeks to reconceive human and non-human relationships by looking into the dynamic interactions between material elements and social constructions. This material–discursive mangling aims at a “dynamic, nonessentialist and relational brand of materialist vitalism” (Braidotti 2014, 241). As Serpil Oppermann remarks, “Material feminist epistemologies especially encourage studies of sociocultural, literary, and ethical dimensions of the new material paradigm, offering a compelling model which casts matter (all physical substances) and bodies (human and non-human) not as mere objects of knowledge, but as agents with vitality of their own, and as interrelated forces beyond human control, linking human corporeality with non-human life processes” (2013, 27). Material feminism conceives of our bodies as intimately connected to the environment, as seen with Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “trans-corporeality,” which envisions the movement across bodies as revealing “the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures” (2010, 212). Also devoted to deconstructing binaries, feminist care theories criticize universal judgments abstracted from detached reasoning, and instead practice participatory epistemology set in context to draw out intersections between care and justice, emotion and rationality, material and social/cultural/historical, as well as human and non-human. Acknowledging these “agencies of entanglement” generates the need for humans to develop feelings of care and sympathy toward the various existences on our planet (Barad 2007, 33). The past few years have witnessed an increase of collections which manifest interdisciplinary and international observations produced from various backgrounds. Some edited volumes of interest include Women Writing Nature: A Feminist View (Cook 2008), Material Feminism (Alaimo and Heckman 2008), Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory (DeKoven and Lundblad 2012), East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader (Estok and Kim 2013), International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (Gaard, Estok, and Oppermann 2013), Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (Adams and Gruen 2014), and The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (Taylor and Twine 2014), A Political Ecology of Women, Water, and Global Environmental Change (Buechler and Hanson 2015), Contemporary Perspectives on Ecocriticism (Phillips and Rumens 2015).

Adding to a more multifaceted exploration of women–nature relationships, this volume includes studies from various disciplines and perspectives to further contemporary ecofeminism’s development beyond dualisms. The chapters apply different methods to dismantle hierarchal binaries of disseverance for the purpose of re-conceptualizing humans as dynamic beings of and participants in nature–culture environmental systems. As Stacy Alaimo, “I believe that neither a feminist retreat into nature where we pose as ‘angel[s] in the ecosystem,’ nor a feminist flight from nature is the answer. Instead, we must transform the gendered concepts – nature, culture, body, mind, object, subject, resource, agent, and others – that have been cultivated to denigrate and silence certain groups of humans as well as nonhuman life” (10). Interconnectedness and diversity constitute the essence of this interdisciplinary and international collection of essays. This volume joins together researchers from literary, media, postcolonial, sociology, environmental, gender and sexuality, psychology and health, as well as theoretical professions to offer varied approaches to the subject of women and nature. To forward the discipline of ecofeminist criticism, selected chapters offer re-examinations of prominent ecofeminist theories by François d’Eaubonne, Carol Adams, and Greta Gaard from fresh perspectives such as maternity arguments, transgender studies, and new materialism. In addition to research from the United States, this book also incorporates multiple case studies discussing women–nature challenges and activism in Israel, Mexico, and India. As a manifestation of scholars from various disciplines and national backgrounds, this collection serves as a collaborative contribution to generating more hybrid conversation regarding the global move beyond dualism in woman and nature interrelationships.

The collection begins with Luca Valera’s chapter, which provides background discussion on core ideas of Simone de Beauvoir and François d’Eaubonne. In this opening chapter, Valera traces the roots of men’s domination of women and nature to concepts of maternal dependency and care as well as to the major theorists of the Scientific Revolution who defined the modern age. Valera’s chapter discusses the historical and practical justification of ecofeminism and the need to overcome dualistic thinking in order for humans to flourish in harmony with nature and each other.

As a combination of feminist and ecological concerns, ecofeminism considers anthropocentricism and androcentrism as going hand in hand. The rise of critical animal studies draws attention to intersections between animal cruelty and other forms of oppression to raise awareness to sufferings and operating power politics behind human’s treatment of animals. These critiques have proved highly productive for gender, social, and race studies. In feminist literary studies, inquiries into animal metaphors and analogies offer insights and criticism to human history’s and society’s understanding of and relation to animals. New inclusions of queer studies and new materialism also provide alternative explorations of bodies and identities under oppression and/or seeking transgression. The following three chapters contribute to this growing concern for animals in ecofeminist movements. Anja Höing discusses talking animal stories, Stephanie Baran analyzes animal protection campaigns, and Anja Koletnik attempts to further vegetarian ecofeminist arguments on animal rights.

Höing’s chapter, “A retreat on the ‘river bank’: perpetuating patriarchal myths in animal stores,” draws up various talking animal stories from the 1970s to the early 21st century which problematically perpetuate patriarchal ideologies as natural myths. Höing argues that most of these stories operate within a Cartesian dualist framework by gendering talking animal protagonists as male while reducing female existence to passive objects of biological necessity. These patriarchal naturalizations reinforce oppressions of essentialist dualism and master narratives as they deprive females of their agency and materiality.

Turning to magazines, Baran’s chapter raises audience consciousness regarding the problem of campaigning animal protection through sexualized and racialized images. Focusing on advertisements released by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Baran criticizes the PETA for endorsing a “visualized patriarchy” which abuses rather than aids animals and women along with other marginalized populations. Many of these ads are misogynistic, racialist, and violent, and thus fail to realize environmental justice due to their complicity to the “sex sells” mantra dominating capitalist society.

In “Ethical transfeminism: transgender individuals’ narratives as contributions to ethics of vegetarian ecofeminisms,” Koletnik proposes “ethical transfeminism” as a means to unbind ecofeminist discussions from dichotomous analytical frameworks. In an attempt to further the study of vegetarian ecofeminism, Koletnik’s concept builds off of Carol Adam’s and Greta Gaard’s canonical studies on meat eating and animal suffering but seeks to expand discussions beyond the limiting usages of gender identity politics. In combing transgender studies with new materialist concepts, Koletnik’s ethical transfeminism practices transgressing binary systems in its highlight on ethical self-reflexivity as well as nature and culture/matter bi-directional causalities.

Adri...