It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with;
it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with.
It matters wherehow ouroboros swallows its tale, again.
Donna Haraway
[…]
Feminist theoretical elaboration has questioned the deep-seated logic of patriarchy – its archetypes, structural mechanisms and recurring patterns – especially since the 1970s . This research, through the critical use of the tools of philosophy and psychoanalysis, has first of all identified a pattern of vertical hierarchy of opposing pairs. That is, Western culture tends to divide everything that decodes our experience into two “families”: nouns, adjectives, concepts, imagery. Two genders, the concepts of femininity and masculinity and the whole cultural construction that goes with them are divided into the two families. This structure is in addition placed on a hierarchical scale of importance, which places in first place and considers superior everything that belongs to the “Man” family and in second place, inferior, everything that is in the “Woman” family. Thus matter is inferior to thought, Nature to Culture, sensibility to rationality, family to society, mother to father… but animals are also inferior to humans, black men to white men, “disabled” to “able-bodied”, and so on.
[…] The danger lies in the inherent and unspoken monologicity. In constructing knowledge based on a particular worldview that one wants, pretends, loudly declares, to be universal, consequently delegitimising or cancelling all other interpretations and worldviews, considered “non-objective”. The temptation of the neutral is the temptation to believe that one’s idea, vision or theory is not rooted in a space-time, a determined living, but that it applies universally, always the same.
[…]One of the most recurrent meanings of the Uroboros, a very ancient symbol, is to represent the dynamic whereby power devours and regenerates itself cyclically. So it is for the most deeply rooted structures of our culture, the concepts, the imaginaries that seem to wane only to resurrect unnoticed in new guises, remaining the same at their core.
Ecofeminism – the facet of which would rather dictate speaking in the plural – is commonly divided into two macro-areas: the cultural and spiritual and the social or critical. The critical current of the movement is rooted in the recognition of common logics and historical parallels between control over women and domination over nature. Carolyn Merchant in Death of Nature. Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution of 1980 analyses modern constructions of the concepts of “woman” and “nature” in Western culture since the scientific revolution. In the same period, unprecedented violence was unleashed on the bodies of women who did not rigidly conform to the patriarchal female model. Independent, powerful, irreverent, revolutionary women, often bearers of herbal or spiritual knowledge, witnesses of a metaphysical nature quite different from the matter of science, are persecuted and killed in one of the greatest Western genocides: the witch hunt.
Economics and politics have also intertwined patriarchy with the organisations of new forms: liberalism, capitalism, colonialism have rooted themselves on the same logic of cleavage and hierarchy, building their profit in the name of progress on the exploitation and erasure of what is “inferior”, be it women, the working classes or non-European peoples and their resources. In Caliban and the Witch (2004), Silvia Federici argues that the process of capitalism’s original accumulation was founded, in modern times as well as today, on the distinction between “productive” and “reproductive” work – both generational and of daily regeneration through food, cleaning, housework, care -, defining the latter as a natural “talent” and an innate “task” of women, to be considered therefore as a natural resource in turn, excluded from the world of recognised and paid work. In short, capitalism encloses women within patriarchal roles of reproduction and exploits them as a natural resource, appropriating their labour and erasing it at the same time.
In this interweaving of planes, according to Ariel Salleh:
Ecofeminism is the only political interpretative framework I know of that can describe the historical links between neoliberal capitalism, militarism, multinational science corporations, labour alienation, domestic violence, reproductive technologies, sex tourism, child abuse, neo-colonialism, Islamophobia, extractivism, nuclear weapons, toxic industry, land and water appropriation, deforestation, genetic engineering, climate change and the myth of progress.1
[…] It is therefore not surprising that the most powerful voices of the movement come from the so-called Global South: the Chipko women’s movement in the central Himalayas, the Green Belt Movement founded by Wangari Maathai in Kenya, Vandana Shiva and Bina Agarwal in India, the Movimiento de Mujeres Campesiñas (MMC) in Brazil. It is from these places, where global capitalism now seeks to impose its productive disciplines, that the strongest confrontation and resistance comes.
[…]
- A. Salleh, Foreword in Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, Ecofeminism, Zed Books, London & New York 1993. ↩︎
Originally published as:
C. Diotto, Ouroboros. Ecologia, Femminismo, Ecofemminismo, in B. Bonato, R. Kirchmayr, La filosofia e la crisi ecologica, Mimesis, Milano 2023
Caterina Diotto 