Ecofemenism

What's in a Name? in Defense of Ecofeminism (Not Ecological Feminisms, Feminist Ecology, or Gender and the Environment): Or "Why Ecofeminism Need not be Ecofeminine—But so What if it is?"

Chaone Mallory

Ethics & the Environment, Volume 23, Number 2, Fall 2018, pp. 11-35 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/709692

ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT 23, no. 2 (2018), 11–35 Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/ethicsenviro.23.2.03

WHaT’S IN a NaME? IN dEfENSE Of EcofEminism (NOT ECOLOgICaL fEMINISMS, fEMINIST ECOLOgy, OR gENdER aNd THE ENVIRONMENT) or “wHy EcofEminism nEED noT bE EcofEmininE—buT so wHAT if iT is?”

CHaONE MaLLORy uNIVERSITy Of SOuTHERN CaLIfORNIa

Abstract This article examines early critiques of ecofeminism, including those usefully articulated by pathfinding ecofeminist philosopher Victoria Davion, and argues that concerns over essentialist tendencies in ecofeminism are misplaced. The arti- cle holds that the term “ecofeminism” performs theoretically and politically useful work by allowing us to think of feminism and environmentalism together—the term ought not be jettisoned in favor of other terms such as, for example, envi- ronmental feminism. While taking this stance, this article nonetheless explores in depth the productive effects and development of such critiques into the current era of ecofeminist writings and activisms, paying significant attention to the role Davion’s ovial 1994 essay “Is Ecofeminism Feminist?” and the other works it inspired have played in indelibly altering ecofeminism for the better, producing a

ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 23(2) 201812

more nuanced theoretical stance regarding gender and ecological degradation and oppression that is now, more than three decades later, shedding important light on specific environmental problems and how such problems are, as all ecofeminisms argue, conceptually and materially connected to social oppressions.

I. IntRODuctIOn

As I am composing this piece for this special issue on the life, work, and impact on the field of ecofeminism of pathfinding philosopher Victoria Davion, as well as her incredible impact on the people whose lives she touched, I am gazing out my window in the Eastern Sierra biore- gion of California. Normally the view is of the jagged, rocky profile of the Sierra Nevada mountains in sharp relief against a cerulean sky, with Mt. Whitney, which at approximately 14,800 feet makes it the tallest moun- tain in the contiguous United States, prominently visible. But not today, or yesterday, or for much of this summer, the summer of 2018. Instead a haze of smoke has settled over the Owens Valley, its acrid, burnt smell permeating both indoors and out, causing the view of Whitney and its sis- ter peaks to be completely obscured. Meanwhile, in email correspondence with Melissa Link, who worked with Vicky Davion for over ten years as managing editor of Ethics & the Environment, which Davion founded as the first journal in environmental philosophy to actively solicit arti- cles featuring feminist perspectives on the environment, tells me how “In the meantime here in Georgia [location of the Department of Philosophy which Davion lead for twelve years at UGA as the first woman to do so, and of course home of this journal] we’ve had a strangely cool, and vio- lently wet summer and are plagued by mold and mosquitoes and falling trees. My husband and I spent Wednesday evening huddled in the closet with our dogs waiting out a tornado warning. We’d be happy to send you some of our rain!” (M. Link, email correspondence, August 3 2018). Melissa’s report is corroborated by the many news reports and social media posts of my community on the east coast, where people and places are as of this writing being deluged in biblical proportions1 from Georgia to Maine, with more torrential rain predicted. All the while here in the arid west from where I am doing this writing, there are so many fires that the USDA Forest Service official fire map is one big splotch of red, with 68 uncontained wildfires currently engulfing parts of Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, and even Alaska.2 The U.S. west coast is burning while the east coast drowns.

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 13

So how do these current environmental extremes relate to ecofemi- nism, a field which Davion was pivotal in establishing, and bringing into the establishment of academe? As has been well-developed in the near half-century of writings and work of the many theorists who have sought to bring a feminist perspective to environmental exigencies, the basic the- sis of ecofeminism is that environmental and social oppressions are entan- gled, and must be addressed concomitantly. Davion succinctly explained in 1994, in the first scholarly ecofeminist text devoted to explaining ecofeminism from a philosophical perspective, Karen Warren’s ovial edited anthology Ecological Feminism, the way that ecofeminism works theoretically to elucidate how ecological crises such as the anthropogenic climate change producing these fires and floods is deeply connected to the same ideologies and systems of belief that serve to oppress women and other Earth Others.3 As Davion put it in “Is Ecofeminism Feminist?”, one of the first and one of the most well-known essays in ecological feminist philosophy:

Ecofeminists argue that any environmental ethic that fails to recognize important conceptual ties between the domination of women and the domination of nature cannot provide an adequate understanding of either. Therefore, ecofeminists argue that a feminist perspective contrib- utes to a fuller understanding of the domination of nature by human beings, and is necessary for the generation of a deeper environmental ethic. (Davion 1994, 9)

However, as much as Davion came in her many later writings to adopt and embrace the term “ecofeminism” as denotative of this posi- tion, in this much anthologized piece, widely-recognized as a precursor to important critiques of ecofeminism which enabled it to mature to the point that it is now, she incisively interrogated some putative ecofeminist positions. Davion asked whether all that which and all those who claimed to espouse an ecofeminist approach were truly ecofeminist, or actually ecofeminine due to an overgeneralization of what constitutes gender roles and “the feminine” in early ecofeminist writings and a propensity to con- struct an essentialized subject position for women, one in which women are presumed to have an automatic affinity with nature, and thus a priv- ileged affective and epistemic point of view toward the protection and restoration of the more-than-human world.4

Rather than re-cap Davion’s arguments in the highly influential afore- mentioned piece, for the remainder of this article, I will explore the effects and development of such critiques into the current era of ecofeminist

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writings, while paying attention to the role Davion’s ovial essay “Is Ecofeminism Feminist?” and the other works it inspired have indelibly played in altering ecofeminism for the better, producing a more nuanced theoretical stance regarding gender and oppression that is now, more than three decades later, shedding important light on specific environmental problems such as, but certainly not limited to, global climate change (e.g. see Glazebrook and Opoku 2018, this issue). I furthermore, as my title suggests, herein defend the term “ecofeminism” over such terms as “eco- logical feminism” and explain the kind of theoretical work that the lan- guage of ecofeminism does that is not captured, in my view, by other cognates, while still acknowledging the important critiques of earlier ecofeminist stances by such figures as Davion, Chris Cuomo, and others.

II. ecOFeMInISM AnD the FeMInISt bAcKlASh

In 1997, Noel Sturgeon, in her important genealogy of ecofeminist theories and activisms recounted and analyzed in her book Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory, and Political Activism retells a story told by Greta Gaard about an “establishment feminism back- lash” against ecofeminism that was contributing to the “invisibility” of ecofeminist theory in prominent feminist journals and conferences. Gaard argued that ecofeminism, in the eyes of other feminists, had (and in bad faith) become linked with “cultural” or “radical” ecofeminism, an iden- tification which then allowed academic feminists to dismiss all ecofemi- nism as essentialist, biologistic, and insufficiently constructivist. Sturgeon then went on to tell her own story about her internal struggle whether to label herself, and her scholarly work and activism, as “ecofeminist.” In Sturgeon’s words,

I certainly can attest to numerous occasions when, in presenting my work in academic feminist contexts, I was assumed to be making “essen- tialist” and therefore useless arguments just because I was writing about ‘ecofeminism.’ But it has also happened that the anti-essentialist aspects of my work have been objected to by feminist audiences who expected and desired essentialist ways of connecting women and nature. Dealing with my own objections to the essentialism of some ecofeminist argu- ments, and the effects on my work of a widespread assumption among my academic feminist peers that such essentialisms permanently and thoroughly tarnish ecofeminism as a political position, I have struggled with the question of whether I would want to identify myself and my work as ecofeminist. (Sturgeon 1997, 168)

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 15

In instantiation of the feminist credo that the personal is political, my own experience has mirrored that of Sturgeon’s. Nearly ten years after these remarks were published, I gave my first professional job talk, a talk which indeed resulted in my first position. The title of my talk was “(En) gendering Environmental Justice: Ecofeminism, Intersectionality, and Environmental Jurisprudence” and it offered an argument for what it is that environmental justice jurisprudence stands to gain from incorpora- tion of ecofeminist analyses of the material and conceptual intersections between the oppression of women, people of color, indigenous peoples, the poor, and other marginalized human groups and the degradation of natural places. I deliberately avoided defining ecofeminism in the course of my talk, preferring to assume that the audience that had invited me already knew the basics of ecofeminist philosophy (much as an audience of trained philosophers might be expected, no matter their specialty or interests, to be acquainted with the basics of Kantian ethics, the doctrine of idealism, or the work of Simone de Beauvoir). I knew full well that many in the audience wouldn’t actually be familiar with the tenets of ecofeminist theory, but (after all, they had brought me in for an interview for a position in my specialization) I chose to proceed as though we are at a point in philosophical history where I could assume those in attendance knew the outlines of the theory I was grounding my argument in, and we could get on to the more interesting work of determining whether or not it was relevant, useful, and so on. So, I delivered the talk, and outlined several reasons why environmental justice jurisprudence would be more impoverished and less efficacious if it didn’t heed ecofeminist positions and understandings. After my presentation, I hoped for (but didn’t expect) a spirited engagement with critical legal studies, intersectional analysis, realism vs. constructivism vs. pragmatism in law, the theoretical underpin- nings of the environmental justice movement, and the question of whether ecofeminism contributed anything to these inquires. But alas, for the first or second question from the audience, after polite applause followed by a bit of a silence, a rather skeptical-looking young woman (a grad stu- dent, as it turned out, which was rather intimidating since I was still one myself), raised her hand and asked in a critical inflection: “But who is the subject of ecofeminism?”

With this question, I knew what I was really being asked. I knew by the familiar tone, one that conveyed the sound of a raised eyebrow, the one that somehow dripped a poststructural cynicism, stated without words the need to evacuate politics and discourse of its attachment to individuated

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Enlightenment subjectivity: I was being asked whether ecofeminism assumed a stable subject-position, and furthermore, whether that stable (read: essentialized) subject-position was really a classless, raceless, het- eronormative, biologically-fixed “woman” who (so I was supposed to assume as an ecofeminist), “communed” with nature as a result of her female biological facticity. Sigh. Based on some of my own experiences as a “second wave”5 ecofeminist I realized that perhaps not much had changed since Sturgeon was first presenting her work in the early 90s. This prob- lematic reveals certain questions for ecofeminism, including the following:

• What responsibility do feminists who are attempting to inves- tigate and unpack in some way the connections between the oppressions of women and natural beings and entities have to familiarize themselves with self-identified ecofeminist work?

• How much have the ways that the charge of essentialism that caused some feminist environmentalists and environmental femi- nists, including Vicky Davion, to back away from the label in the 1990s continued to affect the reception of (consciously-labeled) ecofeminist positions today, well in to the 21st Century?

• Why is it any more acceptable to declare that ecofeminism isn’t necessary as a modifier than to declare, for example, that black feminism, or lesbian feminism, or feminist disability studies, are unnecessary modifiers, since (so the argument goes) just-plain “feminism” encompasses these critiques?

• What is in a name? Why is naming important? What reasons are there to retain and deploy the word ‘ecofeminism’? Is it indeed the case that the term ecofeminism carries such an unsavory taint that we might we just as well jettison a label that might have misleading and/or negative associations, in favor of other kinds of terminologies, such as, for example, “gender and the environment”?

• Depending on the answer to the first of the above questions, what is the work that the word and concept ecofeminism does? What good reasons are there for retaining the term ecofeminism?

• And depending on the answer to the second question, should we reject the term “ecofeminism” and use other terms instead?

• Finally, is there a disconnect between the way that ecofeminism is taken up and used (and criticized) in the academy and in activist worlds?

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 17

In this next section, I identify reasons, along with the rationale of some of their primary architects, that ecofeminism has met with resistance and even rejection by other feminists (I’m leaving aside in this piece the reasons ecofeminism is rejected by other environmental theorists—except to simply say what is so familiar to those who practice and teach F/femi- nism of any kind: because it has the “F”-word in it!). In what follows, I’ll respond to a few of these objections and urge the reader to keep in mind the example of Davion’s early critique of the ecofeminine to the evolu- tion of ecofeminist theory and in particular its response to the charge of essentialism.

III. PRObleMS WIth ecOFeMInISM: A bRIeF tAxOnOMIc hIStORy

In an earlier version of Davion’s pathbreaking article in the Warren anthology, with the slightly different title “How Feminist is Ecofeminism?,” which appeared in the anthology The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book, edited by Donald VanDeVeer and Christine Pierce (1994), she explained her project in the following way:

My project is not to question this thesis [whether or not a feminist perspective is necessary for a more complete and efficacious environ- mental ethic]; I agree with it. My project is to explore whether much of what is currently called “ecofeminist” is actually feminist. I will argue that at least some of the ideas coming from thinkers identifying them- selves as ecofeminists are, in very important ways, not feminist. Because these ideas are not feminist, they cannot be ecofeminist. The ideas I shall explore glorify the feminine uncritically and suggest that embracing a feminine perspective will help humans solve the ecological crisis. . . . I shall, therefore, argue that these views are better understood as ecofem- inine. (Davion 1994b, 278)

In light of this worry, one might summarize that the following are a few discernable reasons that ecofeminism is viewed as problematic by some.

A. Association with women’s spirituality (Spretnak 1994; Starhawk 1979; Christ 1994)

B. Irrationality in ecofeminism (Biehl 1991) C. Taint of essentialism (Biehl 1991; Cuomo 1998; Davion 1994) D. Rejection of things associated with “femininity” especially moth-

erhood and caregiving (MacGregor 2007; Sandilands 1999; Cuomo 1998; defender: Salleh 1997)

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E. Anthropocentrism in feminism (Mallory 2018, Spring 2010, Fall 2010, 2006)

F. Sexism in environmentalism (Feminist Earth First!ers; Judi Bari 1994; Women’s and Transgender Forest Collectives; Mallory 2006; Sturgeon 1997; all ecofeminists)

Let’s now explore these in more depth.

Spirituality:

I’ll address this controversy first, although what’s really at the root of this worry is the worry over essentialism such as expressed by Davion and others (as well as to a lesser degree a worry about the depoliticization of ecofeminism). I delve into this important concern in a later section. But since gynocentric earth-based spiritual practices represent a princi- ple site for the production of potentially damagingly essentialist beliefs about women (and nature) for many eco-and non-eco-feminists, as well as non-feminists, examining some of the debates over ecofeminist spiritu- ality provides a useful point of entry into this particular rationale for the rejection of ecofeminism.

The underlying premise of this article, I hope to have made clear, is that despite a thirty-plus year history of writings and a proliferation of movements worldwide so identifying as,6 ecofeminism remains a con- tested term—even within the very intellectual and praxical communities that advocate for a merger of environmental and feminist concerns, as typified by the prolific careers of Vicky Davion and her intellectually- aligned cohorts and colleagues in the profession.7 Defining what counts as “ecofeminist” or constitutes ecofeminist practice is a subject of much debate both within and outside of feminist environmental thought. Nowhere is ecofeminism more fraught and fractured than over the ques- tion of spirituality (e.g. Warren 2000, 193 and final chapter).

As those suspicious of ecofeminism have been quick to point out, the most prominent early ecofeminist texts published in the U.S. contain arti- cles that explicitly invoke the spiritual in their approaches to addressing environmental crises. Consider, for example, the two major anthologies Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, edited by Judith Plant and published in 1989, and Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, which came out in 1990. These two collections are widely held to have inaugu- rated ecofeminism’s arrival on the scholarly scene. In these originary texts,

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 19

the “spiritual” essays draw linguistic, affinitive, affective, and symbolic connections between the plight of what the authors understand to be patri- archally subordinated and exploited women and an anthropocentrically (for many, really an androcentrically ) oppressed and degraded earth. For such authors, the earth can be “healed” through a reclaiming of purported ancient value systems, religions, rituals and practices that find liberatory power in the historic, symbolic, and material associations between women and nature. This very assertion, however; that is, the claim (as it is under- stood by many) that women possess a “special” connection to nature that men do not, or that women have privileged epistemological access to an animate, enchanted, maternal earth, or that women’s reproductive bodies possess an ontological continuity with nature that surpasses that of men’s, is precisely what has periodically exiled ecofeminism from “serious” scholarly attention and analysis, by feminist and non-feminist scholars alike. Regardless, despite initial negative reactions to ecofeminism’s claim that environmentalism needs feminism, and vice-versa, its basic analysis that the liberation of women, nature, people of color, the poor, and other oppressed Earth Others must be undertaken together entered quickly into general environmental discourse and ecofeminism rapidly developed as a site of sophisticated scholarly analysis.8

Interestingly though, often the very scholars who represented ecofem- inist perspectives, and first engaged in the production of ecofeminist the- ory, after a time began to distance themselves from kinds of ecofeminism that was seen as overtly spiritual and in some cases ecofeminism itself. This distancing was mirrored in activist communities who disparaged what they saw as “mystical” and unanalytical responses to the twinned crises of ecological and gender oppression, especially if that spiritualism was understood to make claims that earth was somehow “feminine.”9

Reflective (and productive) of this growing disdain for spiritual ecofem- inisms, many ecofeminist activists and academics argued that spiritual practice, especially “pagan” or “earth-based” spiritual practice is apoliti- cal and “irrational”—tainted by a genealogical link to “cultural feminism” which critics argue asserts an unjustified claim of female superiority— the “feminism of uncritical reversal” as the renowned ecofeminist phi- losopher Val Plumwood calls it in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Plumwood 1993, 3).10 Thus the party line in academic ecofeminism presently is that “good” or “true” or “politically effective” ecofeminism must eschew essentialism (the belief in an inherent or “essential” link between women and nature), and affirm only historically and socially

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constructed woman-nature links that nevertheless make the liberation of both conjoined struggles. According to these “emphatic anti-essentialists” (as feminist philosopher Bonnie Mann (2006) calls them), any ecofemi- nism that does not wish to degenerate into a regressive, biologistic, and deterministic setback to decades of feminist work should take pains to disavow any claims, practices, or discursive colorations that suggest a non-historicized or non-contingent connection between women and nature.

Despite this general consensus that ecofeminism must repudiate any sort of spiritual expression if it is to serve as an intellectually tenable eman- cipatory theory, some ecofeminist theorists and activists persist in finding value in performing rituals, adopting symbols, and articulating through word and acts systems of belief that liken the earth to a living being who is responsive, sacred, and divine. For some ecofeminists, especially some radical ecofeminist activists in the women’s and transgender forest defense movement, as I have elaborated elsewhere (Mallory, 2010) this form of the sacred has feminine aspects, and/or a woman-centered spirituality of immanence is especially powerful in counteracting the most destructive aspects of the patriarchal values of domination, transcendence, power, and control. More about this is elaborated in my aforementioned published article “The Spiritual is Political: Gender, Spirituality, and Essentialism in Forest Defense” (2010) which takes a deeper look at the complex issue of ecofeminism and spirituality in the context of women’s and transgender environmental activisms, so I won’t say much more here except to note that this fact, the fact of a “re-claiming” of gynocentric, earth-based, and neo-pagan rituals and practices by some environmental activists is rele- vant to the following related critique: the critique from rationalism.

the critique from Rationalism

When ecofeminist writings began appearing in academic and pop- ular publications in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some conducted a thoroughgoing materialist analysis of the interlocking causes of the dom- ination of women (and other subordinated groups) and the exploitation of the natural world.11 Such accounts enumerated both physical places and sites embedded in the cultural imaginary of ways in which women, people of color, the poor, and nature were being simultaneously harmed through global capitalisms driven by anthropocentric, sexist, neo-colonial ideologies that legitimated the inferiorization of those persons and enti- ties thought to belong to the “lower” “lesser” realm of the body, nature,

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 21

emotion, etc. (see Shiva and Mies 1993; Plumwood 1993; 2002). Other early ecofeminist writings, such as a few of the articles published in the anthologies edited by Plant (1989) and Diamond and Orenstein (1990) embraced a more affective, less critical tone; invoking imagery that seemed to draw links between women and parts—or the whole—of nature; with essay titles such as “Mama Coyote Talks To The Boys” (Sharon Doubiago, 1989); “The Woman I Love Is a Planet; The Planet I Love Is a Tree” (Paula Gunn Allen, 1990); or “ “The Gaia Tradition and the Partnership Future: An Ecofeminist Manifesto.” (Riane Eisler, 1990). Such writings prompted reactions from other environmental theorists such as the following:

[E]cofeminism’s sweeping but highly confused cosmology introduces magic, goddesses, witchcraft, privileged quasi-biological traits, irratio- nalities, Neolithic atavisms, and mysticism into a movement that once tried to gain the best benefits of the Enlightenment and the most valu- able features of civilization for women, on a par with thinking and humane men. (Biehl 1991, 4)

So says the ecoanarchist, social ecologist, one-time ecofeminist, and longtime partner of social ecologist Murray Bookchin Janet Biehl, in her 1991 anti-ecofeminist polemic Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics. Biehl’s book seemed to have an inordinate amount of influence on ecofeminist scholars, judging by the way that nearly every ecofeminist text published between 1992 and, well, now (2018 as of this writing) contains some dis- claimer along the lines that the argument therein understands the connec- tions between women’s and the more-than-human world’s oppression to be historical, contingent, and constructed, not “natural”; and usually con- tains a critique of essentialism as well. Although Biehl claims to have been an early proponent of ecofeminism, she repudiates ecofeminism in her book, arguing that the position of social ecology serves as a better means of integrating social and environmental struggles. The impetus for Biehl’s book stems from her exposure to the already mentioned major antholo- gies Reweaving the World (Diamond and Orenstien, 1990) and Healing the Wounds (Plant, 1989); the two major anthologies with “ecofemi- nism” in the title available at that time. With words unparsed, Biehl terms ecofeminism “reactionary,” “anti-democratic,” “regressive,” “incoherent,” “dogmatic,” and “contradictory” (Biehl 1991, introduction). Originally seeing promise in a theory that combines the feminist goal of ending sex- ual hierarchies with an oppositional environmental movement dedicated to ending ecological destruction in the service of promoting human free- dom, Biehl quickly became disillusioned with “the ecofeminist imperative.”

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Thus, Biehl states, ecofeminism is to be rejected, as “Ecofeminism has also become a force for irrationalism, most obviously in its embrace of goddess worship, its glorification of the early Neolithic, and its emphasis on meta- phors and myths. It has also become irrational in another sense: that is, by virtue of its own incoherence” (Biehl 1991,2). Biehl’s book instead lionizes “Enlightenment rationality” as a superior tool for obtaining the liberation of both people and nature. Perhaps Davion’s worry over the ecofeminine vs. the ecofeminist is a cousin of this fear over the valorization of an essen- tialized “feminine essence.” In this way, Davion, but in a much more sym- pathetic—and thus, I would argue, more positive and productive way than Biehl—has helped ecofeminism to overcome some of these essentialist, regressive tendencies, especially as expressed in early ecofeminisms, expres- sions of ecofeminism which Davion was responding to in her early work, work done at the dawn of contemporary western ecofeminist philosophy.

essentialism or, Policing ecofeminism?

To take a different point of view however, and to return to the proj- ect of this paper, which is to defend the term “ecofeminism,” arguably, such rejection of ecofeminism because of worries over essentialism and anti-rationalism amounts to what theorist Elizabeth Carlassare identifies as the marginalization or “policing” of certain forms of ecofeminism. In Carlassare’s 1993 article “Essentialism in Ecofeminist Discourse,” she examines the way in which “social/ist ecofeminism” positions itself as superior to “cultural (or radical) ecofeminism” because the discourse of the former views itself as “literal and exact” while the latter is “poetic and allusive.”12 (It should also be noted here that “cultural eco/feminism” is most closely associated with gynocentric ritual and spiritual expression.) Carlassare then usefully asks,

To what extent does the criticism of cultural ecofeminism as “essen- tialist” by social/ist ecofeminists serve to privilege certain positions and discursive practices within ecofeminism over others, and polices what counts most in ecofeminist discourse? How does the criticism serve to privilege some ways of knowing over others? To what extent do these criticisms serve to maintain the very same dominant discursive practices and ways of knowing that voices within ecofeminism and feminism call into question? (1993, 226)

Other scholars are in agreement; and the work of feminist phe- nomenologist and philosopher of place Bonnie Mann reveals that the charge of essentialism in this century as well as the last still functions

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 23

to silence certain feminisms—especially feminisms that assert that gender and environmental oppressions must be examined together. In her 2006 book Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment, Mann incisively argues that both modernism and postmod- ernism relegate women and nature to the realm of corporeal necessity and not existential freedom, in a way that unmoors all humans from the natu- ral world in which we are embodied-ly embedded. Her analysis/critique of what she terms “emphatic anti-essentialism”—the way in which accusing any feminism of essentialism serves to exercise a “disciplinary force among feminists”—insightfully shows how such a criticism instantly shuts down much feminist debate and discussion. As Mann remarks in her book, and I echo here, “The philosophical and political stakes that made the question of essentialism such a charged one remai[n] largely unaddressed” (Mann 2006, 9). The important concerns raised by Carlassare and Mann call for critics of ecofeminism, whether their stance be rooted in rationalist, materialist/socialist, or postmodern traditions (such as that which may occur in the Harawayian “cyborg objection” [Haraway 1991, 149–81]) to consider the ways in which such critiques run counter to the valuation of alternate epistemologies and discursive practices generally embraced by liberatory theories such as feminism and environmentalism.

Before continuing on to examine the other reasons I’ve discovered throughout my years learning, teaching, speaking, and writing about ecofeminism for skepticism about ecofeminism, I want to take a moment to remark that Mann’s book is one of the cases-in-point of another issue regarding the treatment of ecofeminism by other feminists: the appropri- ation of ecofeminist ideas. Mann articulates very powerfully a “feminist philosophy of place” and a “feminist environmental politics” that makes no mention of either the past three decades of ecofeminist theorizing on these very subjects13 or even of the work done in environmental philoso- phy more broadly.

Let me make it clear: My point here is not to vilify or point fingers at any particular philosophers. I actually draw heavily on Mann, favorably, in another article on ecofeminist political philosophy that was published in Environmental Ethics14 (Mallory 2010). My point is to illustrate the effacement of ecofeminist work even by other feminist authors applying feminist understandings to environmental issues. Another example of this occurs in the works of ecologist and popular writer (that is, she writes for popular audiences) Sandra Steingraber, author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment

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(1997) about the environmental causes of cancer from the perspective of a survivor, and Having Faith: An Ecologists Journey to Motherhood (2003) a first person and empirical examination of the extremely deleterious effects on the most vulnerable of the human population—developing fetuses and infants—of the ubiquitous environmental toxins, mercury, PCBs, dioxin, and more that first enter children’s bodies through the bodies of their mothers in utero and then through breastmilk. Steingraber identifies as “a feminist and an ecologist” and her work as “feminist ecology” with an overtly political aim. However, she does not identify as an ecofeminist. And in fact, when Steingraber visited my university as our keynote Earth Day speaker in 2008, and I asked her, given her work on the connections between the material site of the maternal body and environmental toxic- ity, whether she identified as an ecofeminist, she responded that she was ignorant of ecofeminism as a theory and corpus of works.

caregiving or ‘Motherhood environmentalism’

“[E]cological feminism [is] a cluster of perspectives that constitutes a subcategory of the ecofeminist project. . . Where some ecofeminist proj- ects focus on similarities between the objects of oppression, say ‘women’ and ‘nature’, ecological feminists maintain that these similarities are philosophically and practically significant in so far as they evidence patterns of domination. For example, some object-attentive ecofemi- nists see both women and nature as inherently feminine and therefore oppressed by masculine or phallogocentric regimes of meaning and power. These ecofeminists tend to respond to cults of masculinity by upholding femininity as the superior mode of being. . . Ecological fem- inists point out that there is a logical inconsistency in some versions of ecofeminism, because ecofeminists who cling to femininity fail to ques- tion the dualisms which the ecofeminist project so vehemently rejects.”

Chris Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing (1998, 22–23)

In preparing this article I’ve been looking closely at Cuomo’s book and this objection has been nagging (to deploy a negatively-charged feminized and animalized term) at me, because at first I thought it was a manifestation of the anti-essentialist objection to ecofeminism. But since Cuomo, departmental colleague and long-time friend of Vicky’s, also has a nuanced and insightful look at the essentialism problem in/ for ecofeminism, similarly noting the way that critics have simplisti- cally lumped a variety of ecofeminist positions together (and not even

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 25

examining them in any depth), labeled them essentialist, and, as Cuomo puts it in her book, hit the button “reject”; in looking at this a little closer I wonder if some of the worry here—the reason for preferring the term ecological feminism, or “gender and the environment”—over ecofeminism isn’t actually about concern about what ecofeminist cultural theorist Cate Sandilands (1999) calls “motherhood environmentalism.” Sandilands takes particular ecofeminists—especially the Marxist-materialist ecofemi- nist Ariel Salleh (1997)—to task for what she sees as a tendency for some forms of environmental activism engaged in by women qua women as being insufficiently critical of the ways that the institution and material realities of motherhood are structured by patriarchal society in the ser- vice of the suppression of women’s complete development as social and political beings and the maintenance of male privilege. Such an analy- sis is developed even further by Sandiland’s student Sherilyn MacGregor, who in her 2006 book Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care asserts that much ecofeminism has appealed to this sort of motherhood environmentalism without looking to feminist-ly politicize the women who are engaging in environmental politics in their roles as mothers and caregivers (and MacGregor names Salleh and Love Canal heroine Lois Gibbs as a primary examples of such).15 So “mother- hood environmentalism” then is a form of ecofeminism that purportedly asserts that women have a privileged position vis a vis either their social assignment to, or biological ability to gestate, birth, and nurture children and otherwise take care of the of the oikos—wash the clothes and wipe the noses, rock the fussy kids to sleep, keep the homefires burning and just generally tend to the deprivileged, feminized realm of immanence and necessity.

But what is it about this that makes some feminists so uncomfortable? Are such views actually ecofeminine rather than ecofeminist as the early Davion might think? Personally, I wonder if lurking in this objection isn’t a lingering sense of devaluation of traditional “women’s work” and repro- ductive labor (which includes the reproduction of human life) as one of the markers of “the feminine” that many feminists have internalized. So when a nursing mother says that she is concerned over contaminants in her breastmilk because her body is literally connected with that of her child and furthermore this brings to vivid awareness the interconnectedness of our own regenerative, reproductive bodies, regardless of gender identification, to the rest of the planetary ecology, to the earth itself, and that is why she has been mobilized to act in the green public sphere to eliminate mercury

ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 23(2) 201826

from our food supply; is this really making an essentialist claim about women’s inherent closeness to nature? Does it truly represent an uncriti- cal acceptance of women’s “motherly” roles, or is it reflecting an embod- ied realization of the ecological fact that what poisons the earth poisons mothers and our children—and thus is an ontological connection that can be changed? If one says that “women” are like “nature” in that both provide a source of life and nurturance that become exploited, degraded, unacknowledged, and oppressed by white supremacist anthropocentric capitalist patriarchy16 and asks for a reclaiming of traditional “female” or “feminine” values and practices in order to protect women, natural beings and entities, and dependent Others, is this really insufficiently critical of the ways that this is a historically and socially-constructed connection? And to what degree does other feminists’ rejection of “motherhood environmen- talism” serve to unwittingly devalue caregiving work and the ethics and epistemologies that arise from it? More could be said about this as well, but for the purposes of this article, I’ll move on to the final objection to the term “ecofeminism” I have discerned in feminist literature, the most perni- cious one in my view, and the central problem addressed by environmental ethics and other environmental philosophies: anthropocentrism.

Anthropocentrism in Feminism

Moving on to my final section, I’ll remind the reader of the inten- tionally-provocative title of my paper, especially its subtitle. It’s not that I have particular theorists in mind to hold to the fire, rather I chose these names: ecological feminism, feminist ecology, gender and the envi- ronment, because they are typical and evocative of terms that appear in different scholarly sites and in different ways that seek to join envi- ronmental concerns with feminist analysis but avoid the dreaded term “ecofeminism.”

Let’s return to Noel Sturgeon’s struggle mentioned at the outset of this article, and her question of whether to identify her work as “ecofem- inist.” To answer her own question, she asks: “Why not ecofeminism? Why shouldn’t feminist theorists welcome a political discourse that inter- rogates the equation of women with nature and examines the political consequences of that equation not just for women but for nature as well?” (1997, 168). I have one remaining suggestion for why this might be the case. Dare I state that there may be some anthropocentrism in feminism, including feminist theory? In another paper focusing on the exclusion and

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 27

effacement of ecofeminism from prominent feminist phenomenological theories of embodiment, I argue that

It would behoove feminist theorists of all varieties to take seriously ecofeminist claims and familiarize themselves with ecofeminist argu- ments regarding the ways in which gender, race, class, and ecological exploitation are entangled. To put it baldly and perhaps boldly, fem- inist phenomenologists especially (since they are concerned with the political ramifications of embodiment and self-in-the-world) should be incorporating the insights and analyses of ecofeminism. The sup- pression of the possibility of subjectivity for the more-than-human world such as appears in phenomenological feminisms reveals, in my view, that despite the embrasure of embodiment and the identifica- tion of embodimentality for the possibility of subjectivity, that there remains a strong discomfort among most humans, including humans that happen to be feminist philosophers, in genuinely acknowledging the ontological, biological, ethical, and evolutionary interconnections between humans and non-humans. I maintain that this discomfort has its source in the same modernist, dualistic, oppressive discourses that have been shown to be oppressive to women, people of color, the non-heteronormative, (etc.), and nature. To locate humans, all humans, male, female, and otherwise, as embodied subjects would entail acknowledging the deep, irreducible continuities and similari- ties (as well as differences!) among ourselves and the other beings we share the planet with. To do this completely, in the feminist spirit of liberation for all, would mean relinquishing the privilege that we who designate ourselves as belonging to the species Homo sapiens allot for ourselves in our political practices. It would entail giving up the claim to superiority, the right to exercise mastery and control over the natural world, that human beings (including female human beings) now enjoy.

Since feminists have shown that “essences” are anything but that, that whenever attributes that privilege one set of beings over others are invoked they are inevitably political decisions masquerading as “nat- ural fact” to conceal the power-relations behind them, then to claim on the one hand that subjectivity is rooted in embodied, sensuous, extra-cognitive self-world relations but on the other to assert that only human beings possess subjectivity and are to be accorded the opportu- nity for self-representation in political praxis and social affairs, is to act contra to the basic liberatory project of feminism by illegitimately and oppressively effacing nature—the very nature that we belong to, and co-construct our subjectivity with. (Mallory 2018)17

ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 23(2) 201828

So I hold that one of the reasons that ecofeminism remains ignored in much feminist theory—the elephant in the living room, so to speak, is what I have just stated: that humans are reluctant to give up our position of species-privilege, since doing so will require a radical rethinking of ways of thinking and acting; and shake to the core our understanding of who we are, what kind of beings we are, our identity as that which is “more intelligent” “self-aware” “rational” or whatever and thus more morally considerable than the so-called “non-human,” and a radical rethinking of our locatedness on and place in the more-than-human world. Feminist humans are unfortunately not immune to this, just as feminists were (and are) not immune to unconscious or even conscious racism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, and so on. But fortunately the feminist commit- ment to internal consistency, self-examination, and loving critique in the quest for liberatory philosophies and politics positions feminism—and feminists—to be especially able to confront our own exclusions and to correct them. To finish Sturgeon’s statement,

But this still leaves the question: Why ecofeminism? Why not just call the feminist analysis of the interaction between sexism and environ- mental problems “feminism?” I believe that “ecofeminism” as a term, indicates a double political intervention; of environmentalism into fem- inism and feminism into environmentalism, that is as politically import- ant as the designations “socialist feminism” and “Black feminism.” (Sturgeon 1997, 168)

IV. cOncluSIOn: ecOFeMInISt AnD PRAxIcAl/theORetIcAl PRODuctIVIty

Now to conclude, I turn to a more explicit expression of the positive, productive work that I think the term ecofeminism does, and why ecofem- inism as the name for the field for which Victoria Davion is known as one of its earliest and most prominent scholars, should be retained.

The first concerns origins—recalling the histories and genealogies of ecofeminism is as important to bridging traditions and to recognizing the contributions to the development of feminism—contributions that have given us a nuanced sense of the connections between militarism, violence against women, and violence against animals and the earth as well as models for activism.

The second piece of work the term does is contained in the basic ecofeminist position that there are important connections between the oppression of women, other feminized groups, and the more-than-human

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 29

world. Ecofeminism may be a contested term within eco/feminisms, but the rest of the academic world (to the extent that it knows anything about it at all!) knows this as the term; and as the term with the most name- recognition. Therefore our positions will be associated with the linguistic terminology “ecofeminism” whether we like it or not. If one agrees that the oppression of women, people of color, the poor, and others are con- ceptually and materially linked to the degradation of the planet, and one wants to end this, then why not gladly, boldly, proudly claim to be an ecofeminist? If others have misconceptions of the term, then it is our task to correct them rather than flee from naming ourselves that because of some ill-founded notions that the title and thus the position it represents isn’t serious, or is something really bad like “essentialist” or especially, “feminist!”

In the term ecofeminism, both the planetary ecosystem and femi- nism are primary. Neither is subordinate to the other, and it allows us to think both feminism and ecology together, as we must. In the last (prior to the latest) edition of Rosemarie Tong’s Feminist Thought she wrote,

At the end of the first edition of this book, I wrote that I regarded socialist feminism as the most inclusive form of feminism. . . What I did not notice ten years ago, however, was the extent to which social- ist feminism did not emphasize issues related to racism, colonialism, and naturism. For this reason, I now think that ecofeminism is the most inclusive form of feminism, particularly the socialist-transforma- tive ecofeminism of Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva. Thanks to them, I now understand the extent to which all systems and structures of oppression interlock, reinforcing each other and feeding off each oth- er’s venom. (1998, 278.)

Tong has a more recent edition of her book that, while it still contains a chapter on ecofeminism, no longer makes this claim. I wonder what changed. But regardless, my point is not to tiff over claims to the “best” feminism. My goal here has been to figure out what the received view of ecofeminism within feminist theory is at the moment, discern what obstacles exist in provoking those committed to liberation for all to con- sider the more-than-human world as a part of their liberatory concerns, and to persuade feminists and feminism that all feminisms, whether named this or not, should in some sense, be eco. And this claim, I hold, is supported by the corpus of Victoria Davion’s prolific, pathbreaking, life and work.

ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 23(2) 201830

AcKnOWleDgeMentS

I wish to thank and acknowledge the Ethics & The Environment editorial staff, particularly editor Piers Stephens and managing editor Melissa Link for the invitation to participate in this important com- memorative volume. I also wish to acknowledge my great privilege to have had the opportunity to have interacted with Vicky directly, as well as through her writings. I had the honor of commentating on her paper at a panel she appeared on at the Eastern APA, and then again served with her as a co-plenary along with ecophilosphers Chris Cuomo, Lori Gruen, and Piers Stephens, at the conference “Environmental Justice and Ecofeminism: Ethical Complexity in Action,” a conference honoring the late Val Plumwood in 2009 at the University of Georgia. Like others with the fortune to have interacted with Vicky in person, I found her to be very enjoyably witty, lively, and personable; generous with her time, and of course to possess first-rate philosophical acumen. She is indeed greatly missed, and it is an honor to have been asked to contribute this article in honor of a philosopher whose writings and teaching has been so for- mative to so many. It is no exaggeration to say that if it were not for the encounter with Vicky’s work early in my graduate matriculation, that my own development as an ecofeminist philosopher would not have been possible. Thank you, Vicky.

nOteS

1 The author wishes to thank Michael Trimarco for suggesting this metaphor for the current environmental phenomena addressed here.

2 (https://fsapps.nwcg.gov/; accessed 8/4/18.) 3 This term is taken from the work of the late Val Plumwood, another ecofem-

inist pioneer. 4 This term is taken from the work of ecophenomenologist David Abram (1996

and continuing) and is now widely-used in ecophilosophical literatures. 5 By using the term “second wave” ecofeminist, I intend to mean that when

I studied and was trained in feminist and environmental philosophy there was already a scholarly literature I could draw upon (not that it was well- known or easy to locate, but it was out there); whereas those I identify as the “first wave”—e.g. Victoria Davion, Carolyn Merchant, Karen Warren, Chris Cuomo, Noel Sturgeon, Lori Gruen, Carol Adams, Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, Val Plumwood, et al—for the most part, did not.

6 For instance, ecofeminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether’s work details contemporary self-identified ecofeminist movements and actors in Africa, Latin America, North America, India, and Europe, as well as offers an analysis of strains of multiple extant world religions (e.g. Jainism, Buddhism,

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 31

Hinduism, Paganism, Christianity, and Judaism) that are developing through and from an ecofeminist ‘thea/logy’ (Ruether 2005).

7 See, for example, Chris Cuomo’s book Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing (1998), in which she endorses “ecological feminism” but repudiates the moniker “ecofeminism” because of the taint of essential- ism. Cuomo’s important view, a view clearly influenced by Davion’s worries about the distinction between the ecofeminine and the ecofemininist will be discussed more fully in the next section.

8 This is not to say that negative reactions to ecofeminism are not still pres- ent, nor that ecofeminism was universally rejected in the beginning. Rather, I am pointing out that like many transformative ideas that challenge the very foundations of our collectively-held systems of belief, it took some time for ecofeminist ideas to be regarded seriously in academic circles, including envi- ronmental ethics/philosophy.

9 For example, Earth First! co-founder Howie Wolk, in offering his reasons for leaving the group, mockingly derided the explicit merger of environmental and human liberatory concerns. In the Earth First! Journal he wrote, “I’m tired of being sidetracked by eco-feminism [sic], sanctuary, anarchy, woo- woo, coalition building, bleeding heart humanists against misanthropy, sexist animal lovers for gay rights, and all of the other egotistical fodder for human chauvinistic cause-lovers” (quoted in Sturgeon 1997: 54).

10 For accounts of ecofeminism as an outgrowth of cultural feminism, see Sandilands 1999: ch. 1; Tong 1998: ch. 8.

11 For one very good history from the perspective of a participant-observer of ecofeminist movements, actions, struggles within, and ecotheoretical engage- ments without, see Sturgeon 1997.

12 Here Carlassare is quoting the descriptors used by feminist political phi- losopher Alison Jaggar to describe the work of “cultural” (i.e. essentialist) ecofeminists Susan Griffin and Mary Daly in Jaggar’s well-known 1983 book, Feminist Politics and Human Nature.

13 Actually, Mann does have one footnote reference to Marie Mies and Vandana Shiva’s early ecofeminist text Ecofeminism (1993) which shows that she was at least aware that the field exists, which makes the omission in the rest of the book that much more egregious, in my opinion.

14 In the interests of full-disclosure, Bonnie Mann was one of my primary influ- ences both theoretically and pedagogically when I was a graduate student at the University of Oregon, and served on my dissertation committee.

15 Although I assume that the majority of the readership of this journal is familiar with the story of Love Canal, a brief recounting of this landmark environmental event, and how it relates to both ecofeminism and the envi- ronmental justice movement is as follows. In the early 1970s residents of a working class neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, a planned neigh- borhood knowingly built by the owners of the land originally purchased and developed for industrial purposes by William T. Love in the late 19th

ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 23(2) 201832

Century, land which had been used for years as the site for the disposal of multiple toxic substances, including those containing carcinogenic diox- ins, began noticing unusual health issues among the residents, particularly among children. Lois Gibbs, a self-described apolitical housewife, whose own son began experiencing anomalous health issues, began communicat- ing with her neighbors and received multiple anecdotal reports of health problems among her neighbors, including cancers, miscarriages, and neu- rological conditions. Suspecting that the residents’ health problems were somehow interrelated, Gibbs mobilized the residents of the neighborhood and demanded answers from government officials regarding previous uses of the land. Although initially government officials denied that there were chemical contaminants on the land, sexistly dismissing the the residents, including Gibbs as “hysterical housewives,” officials eventually, under pub- lic pressure including direct action in which mothers brought their children to public hearings to demonstrate who the victims of the environmental poisoning were, admitted that the land that the working-class neighborhood had been built upon had previously been used as a waste dump. In deploy- ing their identities as mothers, Gibbs and her activist neighbors, most of whom were women, were able to eventually get redress for their complaints, and in fact this event eventually lead to the creation of national environ- mental policy in the form of the passage of CERCLA (the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act—more colloqui- ally known as the Superfund Act.)

This event has been identified by some as an early example of ecofeminist action, precisely because of the connection between women’s activism, wom- en’s identities as mothers, and environmental degradation. Lois Gibbs, who had initially not considered herself to be aligned with either the Women’s Movement or the Environmental Movement, went on to found the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice (CHEJ), an environmental organization which continues to be on the forefront of the environmental justice move- ment, connecting environmental issues with social issues such as poverty, race discrimination, and gendered issues such as mothering.

16 I have adopted this term from the work of black feminist bell hooks, who uses the term “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” widely in her works. The addition of the term “anthropocentric” is mine, and bell hooks bears no responsibility for the appropriation of her phrase for ecofeminist purposes.

17 Although I don’t spend time arguing it here, it is worth at least mentioning that for many ecofeminists, particularly those associated with the feminist- vegetarian position such as Carol J. Adams and Marti Kheel, the backlash against ecofeminism is most prominently felt in the strong reactions, both feminist and non, to ecofeminist arguments against the eating and use of non-human animals.

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 33

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CHAONE MALLORy  is a Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. Previously she served in the Philosophy Department of Villanova University for ten years, achieving the

Chaone Mallory What’s In a name? 35

title of Associate Professor of Environmental Philosophy. She has taught extensively on environmental topics and published in journals such as Environmental Ethics; Ethics & The Environment; Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture; Capitalism and Nature; Ecopolitics; and The Journal of Environmental and Agricultural Ethics. She has also contributed several book chapters to environmentally-themed anthologies on topics related to ecofeminism, environmental ethics, and political and social thought. Mallory’s research and teaching focuses on questions of political participation and representation for marginalized groups, including women, communities of color, and the more-than-human world, by examining intersections of theory and practice in the service of socially just environmental sustainability. E-mail: [email protected]