The first text, "gender, the nonhuman world and social thought", presents the concept of eco-feminism by highlighting the links between environment, gender and social theory. The main movements within eco-feminism are explained with both their advantages and limits. The author chose three to summarize them in three movements: essentialist eco-feminism, materialist feminism and resistance eco-feminism. These schools share the idea that women and nature are linked but disagree whether this is a constructed analogy or not. The problematic of the will to overcome this association is the core question of eco-feminism, as eco-feminists wants to re-embed humanity in its environmental context. Disagreements emerge because of this paradoxical aim and of the definition of the so called "masculine" and "feminine" values.
[...] Even if the materialist approach includes North/South relations through the critic of the current economy and the focus on exploitation and dependence, a third movement was born in the “developing world”: the resistance eco- feminism. It stems from a more practical approach from the life conditions of women in the world, not only in the Western society. Their link with nature is stronger than in developed country and they are usually the first ones who suffer from ecological disasters and the destruction of the ecosystem. [...]
[...] Because of the shortcomings of the essentialist perspective that I pointed out, I rather agree with the materialist school, which is presented in the second part of the first text and in the text from Mary Mellor feminism and environmental ethics: a materialist perspective”. Indeed this approach is less dominated by biological facts and stresses instead the importance of socio-economic factors and of the social construction of androcentrism. According to M. Mellor, materialist eco-feminism tries to bring together deep ecology and Marxism in the “deep materialism”. [...]
[...] The focus of materialist eco-feminism is then on how the society deals with the connectedness of women with nature, how it takes account of the sexual differences in its organization, how it thinks the materiality and the immanence of all the humanity. In criticizing both deep ecology and Marxism and in taking the best of these two schools, materialist eco-feminism succeeds in bringing together usually opposite concepts. For instance, they argue that human is both natured and cultured. They also stress the fact that if anthropocentrism must be criticized, it doesn't mean that the Truth relies in Nature, adopting a moral standpoint. [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
