talking ecofeminist theory
Ariel Salleh and Meira Hansen, ’On Production and Reproduction, Identity and Non-Identity in Ecofeminist Theory’, Organization & Environment,
1999, Vol. 12, 207-218.
MH: One can point to common
themes in the subordination of women and nature - their inferior positioning
in Western thought and their common exploitation by the capitalist economy,
but I do not see how this gives women a better capacity to understand these
problems.
AS: Ecofeminists like to explain this in various ways. My own background is critical theory so
I am interested in the dialectical phenomenology by which people's
experiences in the world shape their perceptions and knowledges.
In contrast to the postmodern trend which sees every thing determined by
discourse, I believe - along with Marx (1973) - that while people find
themselves living in conditions that are not of their own making, they also
have a capacity to remake the world around them. Like Marxists, I call the
process 'labor', but place emphasis not just on factory work, for example,
but on the deeper anthropological sense of labor as a 'socially reproductive'
metabolic exchange with the environment.
The historical reality is that a majority of human beings
globally speaking, are engaged in work of this kind,
subsistence and care giving activities at the interface with 'nature', so
called. As such, they constitute a hither to unrecognized 'meta-industrial
class'. My book contends that this class holds insights and skills, which we
need to learn from to find our way out of the 20th
Century industrial catastrophe. - This is both an acknowledgement and a
defiance of Marx, who privileged the predominantly male industrial working
class as agent of social transformation. Most meta-industrials are women,
though not exclusively so.
MH: Central to your picture of domination
is the dualistic logic of identity and difference which negates object to
subject - a 1/0 relation - and along which lines the classic Man/Woman=Nature
divide is fashioned and perpetuated as instrumental reason.
AS: In Ecofeminism as Politics, I create this Man/Woman=Nature equation to parody the
reductive, dualist and positivist mindset that prevails in the West. It
summarizes how the dominant eurocentric culture has
for centuries seen masculine identity as belonging to the sphere of culture
and the feminine as identical with 'nature'. So men have established
institutions, which secure their status over and above 'natives', women,
children, animals, and the rest of 'nature'. Knowledges too, from religion to science, are contaminated by this polarized 'body
logic' and used to conserve masculine superordination.
One side of the M/W=N formula is accorded value as a properly human presence
(1) and the other is merely objectified as a labor and sexual resource (0).
The ongoing difficulties women face, even in our universities, are due to
this deep structural attitude which so many individual men unconsciously
bear.
While deconstruction of binarisms is
associated with Derrida (1977) and French poststructuralism,
feminists have always perceived oppositional thinking as typically
patriarchal (Irigaray, 1977; Lloyd, 1984).
Postcolonial scholars observe a similar set of structural relations creating
'difference' by race. Hau'ofa, for example,
comments on the conceptualization of Oceania (Pacific Islands) as either 'pre
or post contact' 1/0. Marxist development researchers innocently substituted
the sexualized term 'penetration' for the colonial encounter. Mahina too, notes that colonized peoples are relegated
passive roles as 'spectators and objects' 1/0, having 'no history' or
science, only oral traditions. The 1/0 thought habit is intrinsic to
masculine identity in the West. It enables capital accumulation by nullifying
the worth of those who possess what the entrepreneur wants. By this
instrumental reasoning, the 'other' - 'woman', 'native', 'animal' - is
reduced to an object of white middle class ends. The eurocentric sense of control is massaged further by media portrayals of Third World
populations as victims of disaster - flood, famine, tribal conflicts.
MH: You argue that this
instrumental logic underpins Marxism too, and is its main failing. Women
almost universally reproducing the conditions of production become a sort of
taken for granted 'natural infrastructure', sustaining production, but
treated as 'externalities' (0) whose value is omitted from Marx's
calculations.
AS: Economic calculations based
on the mathematized logic of identity (1), no
less...By the way, the notion of instrumental rationality was made popular by
Frankfurt School neo-Marxists, particularly Marcuse (1964). And while their
critical theory and poststructuralism are usually
read as competing paradigms, the latter can help explicate political economy. Baudrillard's (1979) ideology critique demonstrated
this. But getting back to your main point: true, I do see this
'nature-woman-labor nexus' as the deepest contradiction of capitalist
patriarchal societies, and a contradiction infecting Marx's analysis as well.
Based on this assumption, ecofeminism promises to
become a political economy in its own right and nothing less than a
fundamental re-think of socialist, environmental, and postcolonial politics
will do. But while there has been a lot of debate among our brothers in the
eco-socialist community about what should constitute the first and second
contradictions in a revised, ecology sensitive, Marxism, none of them have
yet brought gender into the mix.
I floated the 'nature-woman-labor nexus' as primary
contradiction back in O'Connor's anthology Is Capitalism Sustainable? (1995),
but not even book reviewers picked up on it. Things change very slowly. You
might say that we women are 'externalized' in theoretical production too! At
least the appearance of Barry's (1998) review essay on the emergence of ecofeminist political economy gives hope that men on the
Left are now paying attention to women's ideas.
My book is subtitled 'nature, Marx and the postmodern' because
it affirms the need for analysis of global capital on the one hand, but also,
the need to make shortcomings of the Marxist labor theory of value more
explicit. As I point out in Chapters 5 and 10, in conventional economic
theory, the negative term in the 1/0 regime really represents libidinal
energy, whose contribution is 'silenced by the / stroke'. Masculinist notions of value, capitalist and socialist alike, have always placed women's
restorative activities on the unproductive side of the M/W=N equation. An ecofeminist theory of value will use a libidinally informed economics joining together
socialist, feminist, indigenous, and ecological concerns. It will pivot on
the body and its metabolic exchange with/in 'nature': this is the implication
of my phrases 'as energy/labor flows' or 'working men, like nature need time
to heal'.
MH: You write that the objectivization of ecospheres in Western economics is a
form of terra nullius, 1/0, ignoring the dissipative structures which sustain
them. This is epitomized in the capitalist patriarchal project of
bio-prospecting and genetically engineering plant, animal, and human bodies.
AS: Yes, the exploitation of
indigenous peoples, women's bodies, and other 'nature' which is the basis of
contemporary economics is assisted by Western science and engineering -
mechanical and genetic. This is why political economy begs a psychosexual
analysis that understands the social - and indeed, bio-energetic - function
of 1/0 thought habits. Tech fixes are not going to work when our institutions
are libidinally overdetermined at a very deep structural level. But the men who are our politicians,
corporate decision makers, scientific researchers, have a huge personal stake
in keeping the system running along the way it is. If it is hard to shift the
gender complacency of radical comrades, it is even more of a challenge to get
under the skin of the brotherhood in suits.
Ecofeminists try to help people see how
political practices are fundamentally cathected by
body energies and drives. Acknowledging the dissociation of human identity
from 'nature' is a first step. I think this dissociation is what drives the
compulsively linear epistemology of the West - a civilization in constant
flight from itself.Ecofeminists such as Merchant
(1980) or Mies and Shiva (1993) eloquently expound
the violation of natural cycles that follows from technology transfer.
Dissipative processes cannot survive crudely engineered techniques designed
to make efficient only one factor in a complex relational web of energy
exchange. The resulting mess is not only biological, it is cultural. Look at
the outrageous attempt to patent DNA from a person of the Hagahai tribe, which would effectively render that New Guinea people the property of
the US Patents Office.
MH: But what is the point of
reference for women seeking a common identity without the background of Western
thought? In other words, what is the step that allows you to connect the ecofeminist project to a postcolonial agenda?
AS: In dealing with socially
reproductive labor, I start out by re-valuing mothering practices - since
part of why I wrote my book is to validate and honor real live women now. But
the argument is then broadened using the more generic term 'holding' which
lets us talk about kinds of sustaining labor regardless of gender role. To
suggest that this focus on meta-industrial activities turns the clock back,
as some urban based feminists, Leftists, and Third World elites like to do,
reveals how implicated their politics is with eurocentric technological domination and its evolutionist notion of progress.
For decades now, women from a diversity of cultures have been
drawing very similar political conclusions on the taboo topic of our human
identity with 'nature'. This insight arrives without any need for reading
Western thought or ecofeminism for that matter.
From my own participation in political movements and observation of other's
experiences, I judge this point of reference to be the moment of crisis when
women find themselves thwarted in their socially reproductive labors for
survival. Political awareness is born out of this critical disillusionment; a
moment of 'bifurcation', non-identity, and disengagement with 'what is'; a
turning point leading to the search for something that 'can be'. - Consider
how the women of Long Island moved from discovering themselves to be
individual breast cancer victims to taking on Congress over corporate
interference in science. Women in Bhopal went through a parallel
consciousness raising and mobilization. Bio-politics cuts across, race,
class, or age differences - and the postmoderns are
wrong to fear universal terms.
The sharing of this 'embodied' commitment to political change is
a very 'grounded solidarity'. Of course, the degree to which activist women
or men may think about what is happening to them in terms of abstract social
processes such as capitalist patriarchal economics or the eurocentric schism between humanity versus 'nature', will vary
enormously. Some people have a taste for reflection, others not. But at the
Earth Summit in Rio for instance, I certainly encountered indigenous people
from the Amazon challenging this Western dichotomy from their own world view,
just as Aboriginal Australians do.
MH: So what does it really mean
to talk about reconstructing our historically deleted human identity with/in
nature?
AS: Ecofeminists go beyond dualistic structures by recognising that
ecology and society form a relational web where everything flows
bio-energetically in/out of everything else. This ontology of internal
relations implies a both/and logic, which means that our epistemology will be
a dialectical one dealing with process and contradiction. The terms 'identity and non-identity' refer to moments in the ongoing
transformations of 'nature's' - always including our own - material
embodiment. Asking people to place themselves in a field of internal
relations like this, may get them thinking through the historical
contradictions that cross their lives.
To take one such contradiction: the phrase 'our historically
deleted human identity with nature'. This 'our' refers to the humanity versus
'nature' divided West in general, not women in particular. The humanist
identity is implicitly masculine and depends on being non-identical with
'nature'. Nevertheless, liberal or 'equality' feminists choose to join men in
deleting their material embodiment and embeddedness in 'nature'. On the other side, are ecofeminists and some indigenous peoples, who ‘perversely’ seem
to embrace their socially constructed identity with 'nature'. - Of course women in the North and peoples of the South come at this from
historically different niches. But nevertheless, both as colonized subjects
of white middle class men carry the discursive slur of being 'closer to
nature' (1/0).
Deep ecologists like Devall (1988) or Naess (1989) also move to identify with 'nature'. Here is
a grouping of radical white men who say they will give up their privileges as
former members of the 'humanity over nature club'. Indigenous men, on the
other hand, have never been fully accorded club membership in humanity. This
status is just beginning to be negotiated now through various UN conventions.
Even so, hopefully indigenous leaders will continue to assert their unique
cultural ties to land, keeping a distance from the gender and 'nature'
oppressive baggage that comes with the discourse on human rights.
Liberal equality feminists of the NOW variety move in the
opposite direction from deep ecological men. However, in a time of ecological
crisis, the feminist dilemma is that in forging a new 'fully human' identity
with the eurocentric hegemony, these liberated
women end up joining men at the cost of validating very rapacious economic
and political systems. Alternatively, ecofeminists argue that by daring to maintain an identity in/with 'nature', we can widen
notions of emancipation and find common political voice with other classes,
races, species. Ecofeminists thus carry the re-making of history further than mainstream feminists.
MH: Can a feminine identity
constructed in social circumstances of oppression and exploitation be
compatible with a point of reflection detached from these socially
constructed circumstances? How do we move from a contingent and diverse
embodied materialism to a point of non-identity? What knowledge/experience
can we draw on?
AS: Are you implying a kind of
conceptual leap in my argument between women's lived embodied materialism and
the critical turning point of non-identity? In Ecofeminism as Politics, this dialectic is explored under the rubric 'agents of
complexity', though probably nowhere near adequately. Perhaps I should back
track a bit... During the 80s, as an activist and teacher of 20th Century
European thought, I found Adorno's (1973) work on
the 'negative dialectic' a great help in making sense of my contradictory
life as feminist/mother, worker/environmentalist. My ecofeminist thinking grew intertwined with German critical theory and Kristeva's (1978) unique poststructuralism to a lesser extent.
One can argue that Adorno's philosophy was the
first embodied materialism - as I did in an early Thesis Eleven article (Salleh, 1982) comparing him with Kristeva.
An interest in questions of identity/non-identity means a
rejection of both dualist and positivist thinking. Activists need to
comprehend their subjectivities as forming and transforming in time. To take
an example: in the West, a socially constructed feminine gender prescription
has meant women inhabit a no-man's land between humanity and 'nature' - the
primary contradiction again. We women live our days always falling between
two non-identical stools, so to speak, and all the abusive practices which
fix our position as reproductive resources testify to this. The felt
contradiction is sharpened, when as women at the interface with so called
'nature', we become sensitized to our thwarted place in humanity.
This heightened sense of living in the fork of a contradiction
creates an experience of non-identity. It may be painful but also thoroughly
liberating. It is kind of liminality that can
happen when as feminists we become milch cows, when
as indigenous communities we are de-humanized by slavery, when as urban
workers we are literally treated like dirt on the receiving end of toxic
contaminants. Non-identity is the point at which we withdraw energy and
commitment from the hypocritical totality. Even so, our lives continue to be
materially embedded in its hegemony and it can be a daily struggle to
maintain political focus.
The notion of non-identity is not detached from embodied
material oppression at all, but exists in it. The experience of contradiction
creates anguish, but it is also the ultimate epistemological moment. Adorno talked about 'the somatic unrest that makes
knowledge move' (1973: 203). He, Kristeva, and
radical feminists, have each tried to bring the body back into thought in
defiance of the eurocentric canon. In addition,
what this dialectical reasoning enables us to do is investigate the space
that exists between idealized hegemonic constructs, facts, 'positivities' and the raw phenomenology of our days.
Discourse analysis alone, is too one dimensional, too blunt a tool for this.
MH: It is still not obvious to
me how you reconcile this universal viewpoint that you claim for ecofeminism with your denial of essentialism and
assumption of a fixed female nature.
AS: By definition, a
materialist argument is non-essentialist. My thinking about ecofeminism is informed by activism and framed as an
'embodied materialism'. As Mellor sagely points out in her recent book Feminism
and Ecology (1997), ecofeminism must be
materialist because the body is so central to its political agenda. The body
is after all, the living link between an artificially idealized humanity and
'nature'. The ongoing rejection of ecofeminism as
'essentialist' is a kind of knee jerk response, an excuse not to have to
think about things that disturb the comfort zone. But the knee jerk is really
a response not to ecofeminism, but to old and
oppressive masculinist discourses about an
idealized 'essential femininity' (0). It has nothing to do with the
ecologically creative material practices by which women continually re-make
their lives. This is why ecofeminists use the 1/0
code with irony. It typifies a world that most men take seriously, yet which
women know has little to do with the energetic reality of their days.
What is all but universal is that women across cultures are
delegated responsibility for the daily reproduction of social conditions. -
To lapse for a moment into the dualism of academic speak: this is a 'social
fact'; but since it may also involve childbirth, it can have a 'biological'
aspect as well. Nevertheless, my argument has always been that this all but
universal yet historically contingent positioning as 'reproductive labor',
affects women in two contradictory ways. They are disadvantaged in the formal
economic system, yet empowered by alternative knowledges and skills. Such an approach to ecofeminism asserts
that women globally tend to make up a specific economic or class base - a
meta-industrial one. This is a site of 'difference' that is shared with
postcolonial others. As such, it constitutes a new agenda for 'equality'
politics.
Women's socially reproductive labors are exploitively resourced at many levels in the capitalist patriarchal system. At a domestic
level and in subsistence farming they are unpaid. This in turn, is used to
justify low wages when they enter the industrial work force. Women's daily
re-generation of the conditions of production and their role in production of
a surplus is socially invisible. In the global economy most women's status
remains pre-human, object, resource. Despite the emergence of a handful of
professional women, this 'closer to nature' meta-industrial status exists in
both high tech and so called Third World societies and it is intensified by
free market globalization. To repeat: the catch phrase 'closer to nature'
describes a material outcome of masculinist practices. It is not an 'essentialist' statement about some innate
characteristic of women - to assume this would be to take the going 1/0
gender ideology at face value, which is exactly what ecofeminism is not about to do! Thinking through this is like discursive tight rope
walking: a dialectic in which analytically trained philosophers writing about ecofeminism, for example Warren (1994), sometimes
falter.
MH: I agree that a materialist
critique can relate to biological embodiment, which is not an essentialist
discussion of women's biological nature. However, though my terminology may
be wrong, I still have a problem identifying the universal appeal of your
critique. Upon reflection though, I think a conceptual distinction should be
made between biological embodiment and ecological embeddedness for this purpose...It would seem self-evident that a materialist critique be
focused on our biology and how this figures in an analysis of production and
reproduction, that is, the biological nature of the conditions of production.
In addition to this, one has the further element of the ecological embeddedness of production, that is, the place of
ecological resources and their use in a theory of production. This too should
be recognized as a universal condition of production which has been ignored
to date.
If amplification of this is your purpose, then it is a case of
correcting mistakes in socialist theory, perhaps adding a dimension to the
work of socialist feminists. This indeed would command a universal appeal as
the conditions of production are universal phenomena as such, though they
appear differently in different societies... But if all this goes to show
that a socialist critique offers a less than complete analysis of the
conditions of production, it does not suggest how ecofeminism can serve as more than critique, that is, as a source for reconstructing
socialist theory and theory in general from a feminist or 'womanist' perspective.
AS: In terms of offering more
than critique, Shiva's (1989) forest dwellers or the housewives at Harlem's
community gardens described by Hynes (1993) already model practical
ecological alternatives. The issue is whether these actions are visible and
nameable in mainstream political discourse. Meanwhile, a reformulation of the
labor theory value using a bio-energetic lens as suggested in Ecofeminism as Politics might add grist to
a theorization of economics beyond that provided by socialism and socialist
feminism. Certainly, a revised theory of value has to resonate with
ecological, indigenous, and feminist sensibilities, not just socialist ones.
MH: Well, it might be that
meta-industrial workers currently do the majority of reproductive work and
their contingent situation makes them the class base for an embodied
materialist critique. Or putting it another way: it might be that their class
interests contribute to the true interests of society in general. However,
while re-politicizing the body as biological could be an issue for feminist
theory, the question is to what degree does it come to bear on eco-political
theory, that is, how does a focus on biological identity contribute to the
re-construction of institutions which are ecologically embedded?
AS: The reason why ecofeminism goes further than already existing socialisms
and feminisms is that those paradigms remain pre-ecological. They are based
on the classic assumption of humanity as somehow distinct from 'nature', and
the body as somehow distinct from its environment. It is important to
challenge the Western reductionism, which would have these movements
representing distinct 'levels' of reality. We need to start thinking
socialism, feminism, ecology, etc, as one 'enfolded' politics.
MH: I follow your point on
making feminism ecological, but I am still bothered by the degree in which
your re-conceptualization of 'a barefoot epistemology' draws on knowledge of
an eco-political kind. What is the focus: is it specific environmentally
sustainable practices or is it your idea of re-conceiving an historically deleted identity based on the biological character of mostly
women's reproductive work?
AS: Both theory and praxis are
implicated.
MH: But if an alternative
epistemology is to be based on knowledge acquired through reproductive work,
merely affirming it says nothing about its qualities. It might be that as
suppliers of the conditions of production women bear the brunt of health and
ecological hazards, both in the 'North' i.e. asthma in children and the 'South'
i.e. polluted water supplies, but this does not say that there is something
in the 'knowledge' acquired in the process which is necessarily suitable for
an alternative, ecologically benign, epistemology.
AS: If we assume that good
theory grows out of practical engagement with the world, then I think it
does. My epistemological analysis of 'holding practices' spells out how the
temporal frameworks of hands-on labors dovetail more sensitively and
appropriately with complex ecosystemic processes
than mechanized labors can. The latter are distorted by highly abstract
instrumental reasoning and reductive 1/0 technologies.
MH: Can you say a bit more
about this meta-industrial wisdom?
AS: In Ecofeminism as Politics, the eroticized notion of 'holding' resonates at many levels.
In its most abstract sense, I have in mind an image of ecosystems as
holographic cycles of energy, in which fields we as material beings are
embedded. People who provision themselves through
subsistence farming or hunter gathering, manage the human interface with our
wider 'nature' in ways that 'optimize' sustainability for future generations.
Compared to the 'inconsequential' blundering of our high tech civilization,
this is no mean achievement - and it is one to learn from. In industrialized
societies, I see similar kinds of holding skills reflected in domestic
reproductive labors.
Readers who impatiently skim my book may assume the account of
mothering practices is straight biological determinism. Whereas I take pains
to talk about men's lot as a socially constructed role and to de-link care
giving and other meta-industrial skills from gender. Viz. 'a woman or a man';
'rural workers', 'subsistence dwellers'; 'peasant and indigenous men', 'Aboriginal
peoples'. More of the same in Chapter 11 where the argument unfolds from 'As
every campesino knows...' I like the generic term
holding better than the particular term mothering to describe the
quintessential skills of socially and ecologically reproductive work. In
principle, holding labors are carried out across species, races, and classes.
In principle, these are ungendered activities. But
historically, the human sustaining function has mostly fallen to women. To ecofeminist political organizers, that empirical
contingency is relevant to building a truly international grassroots
movement.
This is a materialist argument and so reaches deeper than the
'ethic' of care, which has interested some ecofeminists (Warren, 1994). The notion of holding labor bridges the 'ecological and
biological', usually treated as separate spheres following the
Man/Woman=Nature opposition. Here ecological time is biological time is
economic time. And that is the epistemological nub of my objection to the
Marxist labor theory of value.
MH: But surely, the work and
knowledge of indigenous cultures and many women in the 'South', focused as it
is on a local, subsistence, economy, differs in its 'ecological footprint' to
the consumption focused household of the 'North'. In fact, it is likely that
in many cases women in the 'South' mediate nature through their reproductive
activities for women in the 'North'. I also do not see how knowledge say of
subsistence farmers can be universally applicable with material and
ecological conditions being everywhere so different. Is not the issue for
subsistence farmers one of having a greater control of their means of
survival, whereas the issue for industrialized countries is limiting their
impact on the former?
AS: Agreed: although I think you
may be slipping inadvertently from an argument about 'reproductive' to
productive structures in making these points. Compared to the South, the
reproductive activities of most women in the North are much more intensively
colonized by industrialization with refrigerators, microwaves, etc. Though
interestingly, as Schwartz Cowan's (1983) research has made clear, these
gadgets do not save reproductive labor time for women. They only make more
profit for capitalist patriarchal men!
MH: What I am suggesting is
that analysis of the 'South' might require focusing on women's right to land
and improved economic and social status as contributing to sustainable
development (Sontheimer, 1991). Whereas in
'Northern' countries, this might require that work - reproductive or other -
be de-coupled from its income generating purpose and that necessary
reproductive work be shared equally by all as Ekins (1986) proposes. This would also imply disconnecting reproductive work from
mothering and making it the basis of the human economy rather than merely the
household.
While this requires that the importance of both biological and
ecological reproductive work be recognized, it is not enough to base an
alternative epistemology on the politicization of what has been historically deleted
as biological. Rather, should we not focus on those specific aspects of these
biological roles which might underpin human basic needs, and note how these
fit into an alternative political economy which is socially just, feminist
and environmentally sustainable?
AS: Yes, and it is just this
public transvaluation of reproductive labor that an ecofeminist political economy is aiming for.
MH: But not all reproductive
work is necessarily benign in terms of environmental sustainability - a
distinction between production and consumption is one point to reckon with.
AS: I think we may have to
agree to disagree about the extent to which class and other sociologically
labeled 'differences' in the experience of so called First and Third World
women are fundamental or superficial. Even emancipated career women spend
part of their lives as domestic or meta-industrial labor and many are also carers of young children or elderly parents. The shared
values created by these all but universal holding labors surface at
international gatherings of women - Habitat, Earth Summit, Beijing - despite
variations of language and culture. One thing that has to be taken on by ecofeminists is the ongoing patriarchal tendency to
divide and rule women, which undermines their solidarity by promoting
differences between them. The oldest trick in this book is age differences
between women, but class and ethnicity, or North versus South, are others. Postmodern feminism plays right into this
demoralizing strategy.
Moreover, in a world where only 8% of humans own a car, women
'as consumers' turn out to be a relatively small and atypical grouping. The
conventional economistic analysis used by Western
academics is not sufficient to understand the invisible structural status of
women as 'conditions of production'. This peculiar status will cut across
categories like production / consumption. Then again, an ecofeminist sociologist might ask: who designs how socially reproductive labors are
carried out? And what are the class, race, gender, and species
characteristics of those who benefit from that design? This inequitable
situation is precisely what ecofeminists seek to
destabilize.
MH: So it is at this point that
you see ecofeminists contributing as an ecopolitical movement - by providing a common framework
to environmental, peace, gender, socialist, and postcolonial concerns?
AS: Just so. Yet a lot of
people are simply unaware of women's contribution to ecopolitics,
others have old ideological ties to socialism or whatever and so are resistant
to the ecofeminist analysis as new kid on the
block. This is a shame, because in a time of global crisis, it is urgent to
pull the social movements together. Ecofeminism provides a common denominator for contemporary radical politics and in
particular, the opposition to neo-liberal globalization because women's
ecological actions simultaneously challenge exploitations of class, race,
gender, and species.
It shocks me that 3 decades after the advent of Second Wave
feminism in the late 60s, academics and movement theorists such as
eco-socialists, social ecologists, deep ecologists, for the most part speak
as if the problems facing us were ungendered ones.
Besides, in practical terms, women make up 52% of the world's population, so
they can be a force for change, far more powerful than the constituency of
any single issue movement.
MH: Summing up: in what way
does ecofeminism provide a contribution beyond
socialist feminism?
AS: As I said earlier, I think,
most other movements including socialist feminism, are framed by the eurocentric 1/0 and so remain
pre-ecological. But the history of ecofeminism is a
spontaneous emergence of global political agency from a diversity of women
across continents. It speaks a 'womanism' no longer
constrained by the tunnel vision of eurocentric theories like class analysis. As against earlier socialist feminist
formulations, ecofeminism shifts attention from
'the meaning of domestic labor' under industrial production, to socially and
ecologically generative 'meta-industrial labors' that transcend class, race,
gender, and species differences. In terms of feminism, the unique theoretical
contribution of ecofeminist women has been to risk
embracing the highly contentious notion of our human - material and
discursive - identity in/with 'nature'. Meanwhile, the work of ecofeminists in bringing gender awareness to ecology is
slow but sure: a new take on the libidinally loaded
'population question' being one very specific gain.
Shared ecopolitical understandings
could develop around the concept of 'holding' and a bio-energetic
reformulation of economic value. But then again, some of us are old enough to
remember high hopes at the time of the emerging Green parties. As ecofeminists say, 'you can lead a man to water, but'. The
readiness of indigenous peoples, feminists, socialists, and ecologists to
open out their single issue agendas into a big round reflexive politics like ecofeminism is yet to be seen. Although I must say that
the holistic attitude of the People's Global Alliance in response to
neo-liberalism and globalization looks very promising.
Beyond politics, 'holding' as epistemology and ethic nudges
forward some foundational rethinking of disciplines like economics, ethics,
the philosophy of science...
*Copyright: 9/1/99 Meira Hanson,
Political Science, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel and Ariel Salleh,
Social Inquiry, University of Western Sydney, Australia
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