International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism

Greta Gaard, Simon Estok, Serpil Oppermann, Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok, Serpil Oppermann, Simon Estok, Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok, Serpil Oppermann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415822602
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134079667
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploring environmental literature from a feminist perspective, this volume presents a diversity of feminist ecocritical approaches to affirm the continuing contributions, relevance, and necessity of a feminist perspective in environmental literature, culture, and science. Feminist ecocriticism has a substantial history, with roots in second- and third-wave feminist literary criticism, women's environmental writing and social change activisms, and eco-cultural critique, and yet both feminist and ecofeminist literary perspectives have been marginalized. The essays in this collection build on the belief that the repertoire of violence (conceptual and literal) toward nature and women comprising our daily lives must become central to our ecocritical discussions, and that basic literacy in theories about ethics are fundamental to these discussions. The book offers an international collection of scholarship that includes ecocritical theory, literary criticism, and ecocultural analyses, bringing a diversity of perspectives in terms of gender, sexuality, and race. Reconnecting with the histories of feminist and ecofeminist literary criticism, and utilizing new developments in postcolonial ecocriticism, animal studies, queer theory, feminist and gender studies, cross-cultural and international ecocriticism, this timely volume develops a continuing and international feminist ecocritical perspective on literature, language, and culture.

Part I Feminist Ecocritical Theory

DOI: 10.4324/9780203520840-2

1 Feminist Ecocriticism

A Posthumanist Direction in Ecocritical Trajectory

Serpil Oppermann

DOI: 10.4324/9780203520840-3

Transnationalism. Translocalism. Ecoglobalism. Ecocosmopolitalism. Posthumanism. Postcolonial Ecologies. Queer Ecology. Trans-corporeality. New Materialisms. Material Feminisms.¹ These are the new trends that noticeably characterize the current phase of ecocritical studies. They distinctively mark the field’s expansion into more politically and ethically inflected areas of concern, involving diverse but also disparate methodologies and perspectives which are often grouped together as aspects of a “third wave ecocriticism,” a rather controversial labeling coined by Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic in their introduction to the Summer 2009 special issue of MELUS. The wave metaphor that Adamson and Slovic have adopted from Lawrence Buell’s wave model of ecocritical developments directly echoes Ynestra King and Val Plumwood’s now problematic labeling of ecofeminism as a “third wave of the women’s movement,” and “third wave or stage of feminism” (Plumwood 39) respectively. In his 2010 essay, entitled “The Third Wave of Ecocriticism,” Slovic himself acknowledges that he and Adamson borrowed the wave metaphor “from the idea of first and second wave feminism” (5), but he also recognizes its shortcomings. “The wave metaphor,” he writes, “breaks down in the ecocritical context because the waves do not simply end when a new wave begins” (5). Greta Gaard, the first feminist ecocritic who has been overtly critical of the term, objects to its usage on historical grounds. Referring critically to Lawrence Buell’s use of the wave theory of ecocritical developments that inspired Adamson and Slovic to write their introduction, Gaard issues a significant warning about what is absent in this model and asks: “where are the analytical frameworks for gender, species, and sexuality? They do not appear” (“New Directions” 644). Gaard’s questioning enacts a yet unarticulated concern about ecocriticism’s polycentric focus and its rhizomatic trajectory² that seems to be strategically all-inclusive but paradoxically exclusive of the implications of gender and sexuality for environmentalism. The current ecocritical exploration of such issues as global and local concepts of place, translocality and bioregionalism, human and animal subjectivities, environmental justice, and posthumanist reinterpretations of such concepts as “agency,” “matter,” and “body,” as well as such issues as speciesism, ecophobia, biophilia, racism, and sexism within conceptions of the human and more-than-human world, have raised important questions on the expansion of the field and its multiple horizons. The exigencies of ecocriticism, to use Simon Estok’s phrase (“Reading” 77), also require engagement in the questions of gendered natures and sexuality, conceptual associations of nature with women, and queer sexualities among human and animal communities. Certainly incorporating feminist analyses of these issues into ecocritical scholarship more explicitly would enrich ecocriticism’s epistemic boundaries. That is why the correlations between ecocriticism and ecofeminism, or ecological feminism as it has been variously referred to, need to be re-articulated.

To understand the ways in which ecocriticism has grappled with environmental and social urgencies, and how it has elicited a wide array of standpoints and methods, one must first acknowledge ecological feminism as one of its primary roots. This recognition clarifies ecocriticism’s conceptual beginnings and its multivalent engagements across a broad range of disciplinary areas. It also sheds light on ecocriticism’s activist impulse as part of its ecofeminist heritage. Retaining the incisive force of ecofeminist thought, ecocritics on questions of ethics, green queer theory, postcolonial themes, and environmental justice models can effectively draw on the works of ecofeminist thinkers, who provide socially and culturally-informed models for critically engaging with ecological urgencies. That is why recuperating what has been—perhaps unwittingly—excluded from ecocriticism not only enriches its constituency but is also crucial in analyzing anthropocentric and androcentric discursive practices and socio-cultural formations in industrial societies. Such a feminist ecocritical approach exposes how human and more-than-human worlds have been discursively formulated to account for the ways in which anthropocentric (and also androcentric and phallogocentric) Western epistemologies have legitimated oppressive practices. It also stimulates adequate theoretical models to deconstruct the gendered dichotomies of nature/culture, body/mind, matter/discourse, and subject/object. Before I expand on the term feminist ecocriticism, it would be useful to briefly remember ecofeminism’s foundational assumptions that have paved the way for the emergence of ecocriticism and fostered its ethical, political, cultural, and literary projects.

Ecofeminist Lineage

In Ecofeminist Natures (1994), Noël Sturgeon defines ecofeminism as “a movement that makes connections between environmentalisms and feminisms” (23). Broadly speaking, as Catriona Sandilands also points out, “ecofeminism is a movement and a current analysis that attempts to link feminist struggles with ecological struggles” (The Good Natured xvi). But a rather more comprehensive definition comes from Greta Gaard. In her 2001 article, “Women, Water, Energy: An Ecofeminist Approach,” Gaard writes: “More than a theory about feminism and environmentalism, or women and nature, as the name might imply, ecofeminism approaches the problems of environmental degradation and social injustice from the premise that how we treat nature and how we treat each other are inseparably linked” (158). Indeed as many prominent ecofeminists have variously theorized it (Shiva, 1988; King, 1989; Mies and Shiva, 1993; Warren, 1994, 2000; Sturgeon, 1997; Murphy, 1995; Adams, 1990, 1993; Merchant 1992; Gaard 1998), ecofeminism is founded on the assumption that ecological and feminist issues are inextricably intertwined.

In order to explain what makes ecological feminism both feminist and ecological, Karen Warren, whose work has been central to the development of ecofeminist thought, draws attention to the converging views of feminist and ecological thought. In her introduction to Ecological Feminism (1994), Warren notes that ecofeminism is feminist, because it is focused on developing practices, policies, and theories that help eliminate gender-bias; and it is ecological in its “commitment to the importance of valuing and preserving ecosystems” (2). Warren also maintains that ecological feminism effectively counters all social systems of domination, such as “racism, classism, ageism, ethnocentrism, imperialism, colonialism, as well as sexism” (2). As such, ecological feminism has been part of a larger social movement concerned with cultural and social issues while at the same time remaining a distinct environmental philosophy with compelling critiques of anthropocentrism, speciesism and dualist epistemologies. As Noël Sturgeon also contends, ecofeminism “articulates the theory that the ideologies that authorize injustice based on gender, race, and class are related to the ideologies that sanction the exploitation and degradation of the environment” (Ecofeminist Natures 23). These definitions reveal that ecofeminism offers a viable intellectual-critical response to a wide range of ecological and social problems by illuminating the linkages among them. Ecofeminists have addressed these issues by drawing on many different feminist practices and theories. As Warren observes, ecofeminism “captures a variety of multicultural perspectives” (“Introduction” 1).

The genealogies of ecofeminism often refer to its classification in four different categories. The first category is liberal feminism which is “consistent with the objectives of reform environmentalism to alter human relations with nature from within existing structures of governance through the passage of new laws and regulations” (Merchant 184). Liberal feminism seeks gender equality in the existing economy and education. The second category is cultural ecofeminism, which celebrates femininity with the contention that women are more closely connected to nature than men. It is this strand of ecofeminism that has created a deep hostility to the field, especially in feminist circles. Noël Sturgeon, for example, has stated that many of her colleagues turned away from ecofeminism “because of its purported essentialism” (Ecofeminist Natures 6). A chief proponent of feminist eco-socialist philosophy, Val Plumwood,³ explains it in detail: “The very idea of a feminine connection with nature seems to many to be regressive and insulting, summoning up images of women as earth mothers, as passive, reproductive animals … immersed in the body and in the unreflective experiencing of life” (20). Social ecofeminism is the third category with its emphasis on social ecology as developed by Murray Bookchin. “Social ecofeminism,” Carolyn Merchant maintains, “envisions a society of decentralized communities that would transcend the public-private dichotomy necessary to capitalist production and the bureaucratic state” (194). Many famous ecofeminists, such as Ynestra King and Val Plumwood, have adopted this position. The fourth category is socialist ecofeminism. It is “a critique of capitalist patriarchy that focuses on the dialectical relationships between production and reproduction, and between production and ecology” (Merchant 196). According to Merchant, both social and socialist ecofeminism are closely allied in grounding “their analyses in capitalist patriarchy” (184).

These categories, however, are not without problems. In her book The Good Natured Feminist (1999), Catriona Sandilands (also Mortimer-Sandilands) has criticized the social ecofeminist position in terms of its insistence on a unifying sort of “politics of identity.” According to Sandi-lands, despite its many variants, its proliferation and inclusion of different issues of race, colonialism, social structures, and despite its attempts to transcend dualisms of all sorts, it is this desire for an identity “to act as a focal point for all ecofeminist struggles” that created the basic problem for social ecofeminism, locking it “in a destructively essentialist mode of analysis and politics” (66). In her later work, Sandilands has sought for ways “out of the ultimately sterile essentialism trap” and has suggested that ecofeminists should “focus more intently on the specific relations and circumstances in which gender and nature are the connected subjects of ecoand feminist political thought and action” (“Ecofeminism on the Edge” 307). Since then, there have been various attempts to counter the essentialist accusations directed against the entire field. Stacy Alaimo, for instance, refutes the wholesale condemnation of ecofeminism as essentialist in her 2008 essay, “Ecofeminism without Nature?”: “The charge of essentialism has been leveled most vociferously against any feminist movement or writing,” she concedes, “that connects ‘woman’ with ‘nature’, which makes a certain kind of sense given that, historically, a litany of misogynies have relied upon that very connection” (299). A similar critique is endorsed by Greta Gaard in her most recent article, “Ecofeminism’ Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism,” where she provides an illuminating overview of ecofeminism’s historical development from its beginnings to the present day. Gaard also offers a convincing ecofeminist corrective while questioning the legitimacy of the still lingering essentialist condemnations:

The charges against ecofeminists as essentialist, ethnocentric, anti-intellectual goddess-worshippers who mistakenly portray the Earth as female or issue totalizing and ahistorical mandates for worldwide veganism—these sweeping generalizations, often made without specific and supporting documentation, have been disproven again and again in the pages of academic and popular journals, at conferences and in conversations, yet the contamination lingers. Ecofeminism in the 1980s was indeed a broad umbrella for a variety of diversely inflected approaches, some of which were rooted in (cultural) feminisms, just as others grew out of liberal, social, Marxist, anarchist, and socialist feminisms (Gaard 1993b, 1998; Merchant 1995; Sturgeon 1997), and in the 1990s, ecofeminist theories continued to refine and ground their analyses, developing economic, material, international, and intersectional perspectives. Misrepresenting the part for the whole is a logical fallacy, a straw-woman argument that holds up an “outlier” position and uses it to discredit an entire body of thought.

(32)

Indeed Gaard is correct in her statement that “The history of ecofeminism merits recuperation, both for the intellectual lineage it provides, and for the feminist force it gives to contemporary theory” (43). Since the time of its emergence in the 1970s to the last decade of the twentieth century— when it faced accusations for being essentialist—ecofeminism has made important contributions to ethics, philosophy, critical theory, literary criticism, ecocriticism, and social strands of ecological thought, and continues to do so under different labels.

Having found new conceptual frameworks, feminist scholars today offer auspicious accounts of how ecofeminist achievements have been compellingly translated into new models with new conceptual guides.

New Theories and Practices: Feminist Ecocriticism

Because of the unease about the usage of the name ecofeminism for its alleged essentialist transgressions that have foreclosed its path, many former ecofeminists have disavowed any debt or allegiance to ecofeminism and moved their gendered focus to new discursive areas of feminist research without abandoning their commitment to ending gender oppression and environmental degradation. Having thus distanced themselves from the ecofeminist label, they have proposed corporeal theories within which ecofeminism has been transformed into an ecocritical discipline with more theoretical rigor and stronger socio-political and ethical positioning, including material feminisms (Alaimo and Hekman 2008), queer ecologies (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010), trans-corporeality (...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Feminist Ecocritical Theory
• Part II Feminist/Postcolonial/Environmental Justice
• Part III Species, Sexualities, and Eco-Activisms
• Part IV Apocalyptic Visions
• Contributors
• Index