Mother Nature

For the first time, an anthology in French of ecofeminist texts is published in the collection “Sorcières” by Cambourakis editions, selected and presented by the philosopher Émilie Hache. If the term ecofeminism was introduced by a French woman, Françoise d’Eaubonne (1974), it is in the English-speaking world that the idea developed. A meeting of feminism and ecology, at once an activist movement, an intellectual, literary and political movement, ecofeminism emerged in the 1980s in the United States.

By having taken the side, in this anthology, of presenting American ecofeminist texts (with the exception of the text by Vandana Shiva) and not on ecofeminism, Émilie Hache shows that the connection that ecofeminists make between the oppression of women and the destruction of nature is not the result of scholarly and abstract reflection but that it is developed collectively and empirically during very diverse mobilizations: anti-nuclear demonstrations in Washington, women’s struggles against pollution in various American states, mobilizations against deforestation in India or even the experimentation of rural lesbian communities in Oregon.

The heterogeneity of mobilizations characterizes ecofeminism as much as the diversity of its writings, which the collection highlights. The choice of texts “of varied style and nature, spanning several disciplines, mixing theory, poetry, therapy, history, diction, politics” (p. 16) shows that far from being reduced to a single definition, from being a single doctrine or political project, ecofeminism is a plural movement that “draws its cohesion not from a unified epistemological point of view, but rather from a common desire of its supporters to resist the different forms of domination in the interest of human emancipation and planetary survival” (p. 321).

Ecofeminism and Essentialist Critique

Ecofeminists, by establishing a link between women and nature, are accused of essentialism, notably by feminists: “there is suspicion a priori with regard to the nature of the articulation which is made between women and nature”, the latter being suspected of reproducing “the dominant patriarchal discourse” which is based precisely on “the idea that women are closer to nature” (p. 29).

Indeed, for feminists, nature is above all a means of justifying the social domination suffered by women: they are reduced to their biological function and suffer discrimination simply because of their sexuality. Liberating women would therefore consist of tearing them away from nature, from the biological. Ecofeminists, far from serving the cause of women, would then contribute, for feminists, to perpetuating “patriarchal stereotypes based on the ‘innate’ biological characteristics of women” (p. 324). It is in this sense that one could read, according to these critics, the prose poem Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin (presented p. 59) or the text Staying Alive by Vandana Shiva (p. 183).

But are these suspicions well-founded? For Elisabeth Carlassare (p. 319), essentialist critiques are not legitimate insofar as the common objective of ecofeminists is precisely to emphasize, in order to better denounce it, that the link that ties women to nature is historically constructed. Carolyn Merchant (p. 129), ecofeminist and historian of science, demonstrates that the development of modern science, by relying on a new, mechanistic conception of nature, leads to thinking of nature and humanity as separate. Ecofeminism maintains that this modern dualism between nature and culture contributes, on the one hand, to making nature a simple resource to be exploited and, on the other hand, to making women, associated with nature, this dominated “second sex”. Ecofeminists strive to highlight the fact that

Within the hierarchically dualized Western culture, specific relationships are drawn between (naturalized) women and (feminized) nature. (p. 298)

Their use of the association between women and nature must therefore be understood, not as the affirmation of an essence, but as a form of constructivism or “strategic essentialism” (p. 328). This is how, for example, S. Griffin’s prose poem should be read:

Through the repeated use of the patriarchal voice that espouses essentialist arguments about “the nature of women” (…) this text shows how the essence of women has been historically built by the patriarchal scientific discourse as inferior to that of men. (ibid.)

Far from perpetuating patriarchal patterns in this way, ecofeminist discourse sheds critical light on the historically constructed identification between women and nature, considered external and entirely controllable.

Towards another culture of nature

The challenge for ecofeminists is then to escape from this modern dualism that leads to the domination and exploitation of women and nature. If it implies a deconstruction of the naturalization of women, this overcoming must not be done by turning one’s back on nature. But why return to nature and claim a link with it when ecofeminists are committed to denouncing such a link? Escaping identification with nature, in a culture that defines itself entirely in opposition to it, does not, for ecofeminism, involve the rejection of nature because that would reiterate the dualism between nature and culture that, precisely, they denounce and, thereby, fall into the same pitfall as feminists when they profess an antinaturalism. If the emancipation of women does not, for them, involve the rejection of everything that connects us to the biological or to nature, it is because the nature they speak of is not the one with which women have been historically identified. Ecofeminists therefore maintain that overcoming modern dualism can only be done by defending another conception of nature and by reappropriating “what has been distributed on the side of femininity since it is through this that women have been identified with nature” (p. 24). It is in this sense that the title given to the collection must be understood: reclaim “means both rehabilitating and reappropriating something destroyed, something devalued, modifying it as well as being modified by this reappropriation” (p. 23).

In the perspective of this reappropriation, ecofeminists consider that it is essential to encourage women to love and rediscover their bodies against the self-hatred encouraged by patriarchal culture, not to denigrate their menstruation or their power to give life. For Carol P. Christ (p. 83), the (re)discovery of the pre-Indo-European cult of the Goddess allows precisely to connect women with a non-patriarchal past in which they were equal to men, and to reaffirm the importance of the female body, its cycles as well as its processes, notably thanks to rituals centered around the Goddess. To overcome modern dualism, it is necessary, for ecofeminists, to conceive of humans as part of nature, with which they have relationships of interdependence.

This also means that nature issues are therefore not only about protecting wild nature (wilderness), as defended by mainstream environmentalism in the United States. By mobilizing against the dumping of toxic waste, women (mostly from the working class, black or native migrants) argue that pollution problems and public health issues are just as much environmental issues. If women are more willing to engage in environmental movements, it is not because they have a privileged relationship with nature but because they are often the first to be concerned and the most affected by situations of environmental degradation: “it is mainly women, through their traditional role as mothers, who make the link between toxic waste and the health problems of their children. They are the ones who discover the dangers of contamination by toxic waste: repeated miscarriages, birth defects, deaths from cancer” (p. 218). Through these popular environmental mobilizations (grassroots) feminine (p. 211), women then claim the inclusion of human collectives in nature, and an idea of ​​”nature as community”. The rural lesbian communities of Oregon, presented by Catriona Sandilands (p. 243) also propose another culture of nature by challenging private appropriation, considered as an individual relationship to dominated nature, by proposing to work the land in a non-industrial way and to live collectively another relationship with nature: it is not a resource to be exploited but a living world with which to coexist.

“Bringing ecology home”

One of the common threads of these various environmental mobilizations of women is the question of the care provided to the community, which leads ecofeminists to say that “ecology is a question of reproduction” (p. 51). The term “reproduction”, understood in the broad sense, designates the social, biological and affective conditions necessary to ensure the continuity of the community. To maintain that ecology is a question of reproduction is to want to reconnect what modernity has separated – production and reproduction – it is to “bring ecology home”. The home in question here, underlines Catherine Larrère in the postface of the collection, is not that of modern societies, “doubly delimited (because separated from the public but also from nature: it belongs to the social)”; it is “theoikos Greek, this house which is the common root of ecology and economy” (p. 376). In their mobilizations – whether as peasants (as in the Chipko movement) or as mothers (in the fight against the dumping of toxic waste) – these women recall the link between production and reproduction by bringing to the public stage concerns and feelings ordinarily confined to the private sphere, thereby denaturalizing them and giving them a political dimension. If women’s environmental mobilizations contribute to politicizing ecology, they are also a way for women to regain a power of change (empowerment). When they protest against military and ecological violence, “blocking entrances, weaving closed doors with wool and ribbons including everyday objects” (p. 319) or mobilize against the dumping of toxic waste in order to protect their living space, they find a power to act, make their position of vulnerability a resource and use “their experience of organizing family life as a source ofempowerment » (p. 223).

By thus subverting the boundaries (private/public, nature/culture) that assign a place to women, ecofeminists succeed, as Émilie Hache emphasizes, in turning “the negative association of women with nature specific to our patriarchal culture, which cuts us off from ourselves and from nature/earth, into an object of political protest and struggle that concerns everyone” (p. 25). This collection has the great merit of drawing ecofeminism out of the essentialism to which it is wrongly too often reduced – “still blocking access to the latter for a large number of people today” (p. 29) – to highlight the creative richness of the corpus as well as the political dimension of the movement.