Ecofeminism

Drawing on the insights of ecology, feminism, and socialism, ecofeminism's basic premise is that the ideology that authorizes oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology that sanctions the oppression of nature. In this collection of essays, feminist scholars and activists discuss the relationships among human begins, the natural environment, and nonhuman animals. They reject the nature/culture dualism of patriarchal thought and locate animals and humans within nature. The goal of these twelve articles is to contribute to the evolving dialogue among feminists, ecofeminists, animal liberationists, deep ecologists, and social ecologists in an effort to create a sustainable lifestyle for all inhabitants of the earth.Among the issues addressed are the conflicts between Green politics and ecofeminism, various applications of ecofeminist theory, the relationship of animal liberation to ecofeminism, harmful implications of the romanticized woman-nature association in Western culture, and cultural limitations of ecofeminism. Author note: Greta Gaard is Assistant Professor of Composition and Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

Mapping Women, Making Politicsdemonstrates the multiple ways in which gender influences political processes and the politics of space. The book begins by addressing feminism's theoretical and conceptual challenges to traditional political geography and than applies these perspectives to a range of settings and topics including nationalism, migration, development, international relations, elections, social movements, governance and the environment in the Global North and South.

At the heart of the green debate are a set of basic contradictions concerning beliefs and actions. This book reveals the problems associated with these contradictions, including adherence to decentralized political forms.

In Earth Muse, Carol Bigwood describes what she sees as a suppression of the feminine in Western culture, technology, and philosophy and opens a feminist postmodern space from which new differences may emerge. Drawing on the work of the later Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and significant alternative feminist thought (such as French feminism, maternal philosophy, and ecofeminism), she explores underdeveloped themes in American and Canadian feminism. Bigwood's style is self-questioning and descriptive; she (writes) plays on the margins between philosophy and literature, between serious analysis and humor.The author offers a deconstruction of the phallocentric dichotomies of nature and culture, self and other, and the concepts of power, action, and making. Affirming the deep relations between the oppression of women, the exploitation of the earth, and the oppression of people of color, Bigwood cautiously attempts to reconceptualize the natural cultural situation of human begins in a way that is not built on domination or essentialist structures. Between the chapters she describes and illustrates four monumental artworks that are "written with the body and are pregnant with poetic-philosophic depths." Author note: Carol Bigwood is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Toronto.

Two of the most important political movements of the late twentieth century are those of environmentalism and feminism. In this book, Val Plumwood argues that feminist theory has an important opportunity to make a major contribution to the debates in political ecology and environmental philosophy. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature explains the relation between ecofeminism, or ecological feminism, and other feminist theories including radical green theories such as deep ecology. Val Plumwood provides a philosophically informed account of the relation of women and nature, and shows how relating male domination to the domination of nature is important and yet remains a dilemma for women.