John Barry, social theory and the environment, London: Routledge, 1999, chap.5 "Gender, the nonhuman world and social thought" & Mary Mellor, "Eco-feminism and environmental ethics: a materialist perspective", in Michael E. Zimmerman (ed.)

Résumé du document

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.

Extraits

[...] The Western society makes women responsible for what's linked with the biological time, providing the impression that our society is autonomous in ecological terms. The focus of materialist ecofeminism 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 ecofeminism succeeds in bringing together usually opposite concepts. [...]

[...] Even the words linked to the nature are gendered ones. That is the reason why ecofeminists, whatever which movement they belong to, explain that we can't examine the Western society, in particular its relation to nature and women, without a gendered prism. The problem of ecofeminism lays in the approach of the gendered terms and of the dualisms. It is difficult to critic the current androcentric Western society without adopting a moral viewpoint. That is the main weakness of ecofeminism, in particular of essentialist ecofeminism. [...]

[...] 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 “ecofeminism 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 ecofeminism tries to bring together deep ecology and Marxism in the “deep materialism”. [...]

[...] 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. That way, resistance feminists pretend that some environmental issues are de facto gendered. Besides, they agree with the materialist perspective in blaming the Western socio-economic model. This movement is therefore more included in a global resistance movement that takes place in the developing world against the unilateral way of development proposed by Western countries. [...]

[...] As critics are pointed in the text, one shouldn't confuse biological characteristics with gendered social roles, because admitting that our roles are determined by our sexual characteristics would imply that biological factors could legitimize a social hierarchy. What's more, wanting only a reversion of the dualisms doesn't enable us to overcome them and to find the way to a peaceful and equal society in harmony with nature. Besides the confusion between feminine and feminist characteristics leads to use the sexist definition of “feminine” and “masculine” values, without taking a criticizing look at their construction. [...]