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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Salleh
"The “double whammy” of capitalist patriarchal impacts that women face, enjoins another doublet—sex/gender. It’s politically correct these days to speak as if differences between men and women were simply socially constructed overlays upon two androgenous kinds of body. In North America, liberal and poststructural feminists each emphasize this discursive shaping of personal identities. Certainly, conventional masculine domination of the feminine is a learned style, and not necessarily a direct expression of the sexed body. But the current fashion for totalising social construction only makes sense in a high-tech economy, where people can design their lives in ways that bypass their sexed biology.
Taking a global perspective, it is ethnocentric nonsense to infer from our own opportunities for self-transformation that only acquired gender conditioning is relevant to our work for political equality. Thinking internationally about justice, women make up a majority of the global population according to the sex/gender category. Or using another sociological lens, they constitute half of any class or indigenous grouping. Whichever way you look at it, women are the global majority. And the majority of women are oppressed, both as gendered feminine and as sexed female bodies. Moreover, the two conditions may be mutually reinforcing. In any event, an ecofeminist deepening of eco-socialist thought will acknowledge biological sources of social domination as much as discursive ones. Both natural and cultural realities interact with each other and with class identity, translating into material effects like poverty and social disadvantage." (p.11)
"Women’s position as mediators of nature is a prior condition for the transaction that takes place between capitalist and laboring men. Mary Mellor describes this work as putting in biological time for men. Silvia Federici recounts the history of breaking and taming the female body and how men have been complicit with capital in this. In a related vein, Terisa Turner points to what she calls the male deal, struck by Western colonizers and local men, as they build economic development on the backs of Third World women.
I have suggested that the nature-woman-labor nexus is a foundational contradiction of the capitalist patriarchal system, wherein women are neither full political subjects, nor full labor. Ecosocialists need to grasp this unstated but originary contradiction, because it penetrates the very heart of their political analysis. As reproductive labor, women bear the main cost of World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization policies and capitalist wars. However, as primary care givers and community food producers, women are also the quintessential experts in precautionary wisdom and practitioners of sustainability. These experiences educate them—whether they are housewives, peasants, or indigenes—for global leadership. Moreover, the ambiguous attribution and denial of humanity to resourced and sacrificed people charges their political sense.
In the old bones of capitalist patriarchal logic “men are culture, women are nature”—a perfect rationale for economic externalization of “the other half.” Consequently, in the androcentric discourse of Western economics, the material surplus generated by women’s labor remains unspoken in much the same way that indigenous labor, and nature itself, has zero value. Moving to a deeper level of abstraction like the nature-woman-labor nexus, or putting it another way, moving to an embodied materialism, enables ecosocialists to acknowledge oppressions beyond that of the working class. It offers a framework for an integrating politics, helping ecosocialists theorize resistance to capital in a way that is not only socially fair, but ecologically sensitive. There has been too much emphasis by the Left on the emancipatory potential of the urban industrial proletariat and too little on other oppressed folk. Today as the corporate stranglehold intensifies, ecosocialists need to deepen their analysis in order to broaden their alliances. Especially important at this conjuncture is communication with a very diverse alternative globalization movement. As I see the shared goal of ecofeminism and ecosocialism, it is to draw the separate movements together—workers’, women’s, indigenous’ and ecological struggles—in a way that integrates while holding on to diversity. As the global political response to neoliberalism flourishing at Porto Alegre and Mumbai shows us, it is not urban industrial labor, so much as meta-industrial labor—mothers, small farmers, hunter-gatherers on the fringes of capital— who know most intimately the meanings of economic justice, social equity, cultural autonomy, and ecological sustainability. This is not to dismiss Marx’s economic analysis, but to adapt it to our time. It demands a closer study of the complex dimensions of reproductive labor by ecosocialists ; and it begs a reading of that great 19th century transformative program, which can support inclusive futures. One proposal that simultaneously embraces economic justice, social equity, cultural autonomy, and ecological sustainability is the subsistence perspective, developed by ecofeminists Maria Mies, Ellie Perkins, and others. This pre-figures an ecopolitical commons that could be at once, post-gender, post-colonial, and ecologically sound." (pp.12-13)
"Ecofeminists are asking ecosocialists to join them in a more fully amplified account of how capital degrades the “conditions of production.” Unravelling the nature-woman-labor nexus is central to this work—not least, the distinction between “women” and “conditions” as such. The exploitation of women’s reproductive labor powers goes on—from mothers in late-capitalist superstates like the EU to food growers in poor African communities. And in the public mind, this economic extraction is still naturalized in the ideological fog of “man is culture, woman is nature.” In evolving an ecofeminist-ecosocialist partnership, let’s not lose sight of the originary contradiction and its volatile displacements. As Ynestra King says, it’s important to focus on the pre-gendered reality that women and men are both part of nature. The secret is for ecosocialists to reclaim that embodiment—and its meanings— remembering how all our energies ebb and flow with the earth." (p.14)
-Ariel Salleh, "Moving to an embodied materialism", Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2005, 16:2, 9-14.
"Postmodern feminism accords primacy to discourse analysis, attending to the social construction of texts and the origin of assumptions concealed within them. But postmoderns often appear indifferent to the precarious ecological condition of 21st century societies. In large part, this is because they are paralysed by a kind of angst over the everyday use of universalising categories. The overarching scholastic question is whether terms like ‘nature’, for example, or ‘woman’ should be used by feminists at all. However, by ecofeminist reckoning, this methodological preoccupation simply leads to an impasse that sabotages both justice and sustainability as political goals. So the inward intellectual spiral of postmodern feminism becomes political conservatism by default. This is very apparent in classic North American anthologies like Linda Nicholson’s Feminism / Postmodernism, for example. There is little indication here of imminent environmental collapse brought on by indiscriminate industrial development and militarism no talk of deforestation and global warming or depleted uranium and leucemias in children." (p.201)
"US theorist Donna Haraway, one of the most creative representatives of the postmodern tendency, is not unsympathetic to the idea of an ecofeminism. And her most famous book Simians, Cyborgs,and Women, does touch base with the word from time to time. Haraway also seeks a usable doctrine of objectivity, although in line with her immaculate social constructionism, she is reluctant to agree to any epistemology inscribed in the daily experience of women and men.
However, her rejection of embodied feminist standpoints as ‘naive empiricism’ seems to cancel her own celebration of ‘permeable’ discursive boundaries between the materialisms of ‘biota’, ‘technologies’ and ‘texts’. Significantly, Haraway actually cites with approval Evelyn Fox Keller’s radical feminist ‘need to hold to some non-discursive grounding in ‘sex’ and ‘nature’...’. Is this a momentary admission on Haraway’s part, that some things might be immediately known by the senses ; that discourse might not be total, as social constructionists so often imply ?3 Again with ecofeminists, Haraway talks about new and possibly utopian forms of political subjectivity resisting ‘metaphysical closure’. But in her own account, this implies a poststructuralist ‘death of the subject’– and even of the ‘organism’." (p.202)
"Haraway’s social constructionism is unusual, in that it blends what is fundamentally an hermeneutic method with trappings of the positivist epistemology of 1950s science, and even scientific socialism. Rehabilitating the famous hierarchy of the sciences, she argues:
There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic...
But by this ostensibly neutralist logic, if machines are simply extensions of ‘man’s body’, innocent prostheses, then a nuclear installation is as benign as an ant hill." (p.202)
"Haraway tends to regard standpoint theory as equivalent to an old time Hegelian metanarrative. But the reflexive, ‘situated’, historically contingent aspect of standpoint clearly distinguishes it from absolute idealist claims." (p.203)
"In pursuing their project of ‘de-naturalising otherness’, Bryld and Lykke focus on ‘the network of meanings circulating between Technology-Science-Modernity-Whiteness Masculinity". And they discover a consistent pattern of metonymic substitution going on in the discourses of rocket science, dolphin studies, and astrology. They judge the function of this displacement to be a subconscious libidinal relief for modern men from acknowledgment of the mother’s body and its fundamental role in producing the species. Each discourse– Technology-Science-Modernity-Whiteness-Masculinity supplies ‘disembodied origin stories that veil, fake and lie about the active role of matter and (female) bodies’. In this way, technoscience serves to protect the masculine sense of mastery from what is apparently an overwhelming and even threatening aspect of the originary ‘m/other’.
Bryld and Lykke observe a form of psychodynamic projection in the scientific discourse on gravity as an emblem of the ‘imprisoning mater/matter’; they see more projection in the time-honoured imagery of Mother Earth as an unpredictable, hysterical woman. Yet they argue that the originary hysteriais buried deep inside Eurocentric masculinity and sublimated by its latest venture, technoscience. Traditionally, the Judaeo-Christian religion served to compensate men for their marginal role in species creation by installing them as stewards of nature and women as their chattels. The late-industrial command control paradigm perpetuates these same masculine self-enhancement strategies. But the field of command– military, environmental,domestic–operates by means of a confused amalgam of meanings. Thus, just as ‘woman’ has been sacralised as a Madonna, she is at the same time, sexually cannibalised as a Whore. So too, green nature andoceanic wombs are by turn, romanticised, sequestered and resourced.
Bryld and Lykke do not mention Elizabeth Dodson Gray’s thesis in Green Paradise Lost, a pioneering ecofeminist reading of the Judaeo-Christian ethic and its Great Chain of Being ideology. However, their study of parallels between, racism, sexism, and speciesism in scientific research amplifies Dodson Gray’s original diagnosis of the Western hierarchy of white menover women, natives, children, animals, and other ‘natural resources’. They describe the sad plight of dolphins, whose labour and undervalued bodies were exploited by both the US and Soviet military in underwater mine clearance. Today, post-Cold War, the dolphins have been sold off ; now employed by New Age therapists to swim with disturbed humans in the profitable business of realigning sick auras.
Bryld and Lykke occupy a theoretic space between postmodern discourse analysis and ecofeminist politics, and rather more comfortably than do Braidotti et al. For the latter’s ongoing focus on ‘regulative variables’ like gender, class, and race, demonstrates a certain ‘human chauvinism’.9 For ecofeminists, on the other hand, a wholistic conceptualisation embracing other species and ‘nature’ at large is important. This ecocentric break with anthropocentrism is what distinguishes ecofeminist thinking from other feminist paradigms. And as Ynestra King points out, even the multifactorial ‘socialist feminist’ standpoint theories of Alison Jaggar and Nancy Hart sock, which synthesise a position from which women can make special historical claims– and in a way that is not biologically determinist– ‘do not treat the domination of nature as a significant category’." (p.204)
"Haraway’s strategy is to eject troublesome words and make up new ones: hence, the ‘cyborg’: her name for our postmodern condition as technoscientific human-machine hybrids. This manouvre, distancing feminist theory from the libidinally ‘charged symbolic and social status of mothers’ may win the hearts of teenage students, but its political effect is to push ‘speaking women’ and their biological realities underground. Braidotti et al.’s feminist discussion of the ‘intersection between natural and cultural’ spheres likewise remains abstract and disconnected from any coherent epistemological grounding in experience. Against this static, synchronic, linguistic analysis of texts– if not indeed, of life itself as ‘text’– an ecofeminist political standpoint is processual, connecting embodied energies with ongoing historical situations.
While not itself an ecofeminist text, Sandra Harding’s Whose Science ? Whose Knowledge ? supplies an impressive argument for the relevance of feminist standpoint epistemologies at this moment in capitalist patriarchal time. Harding insists that now is precisely the moment for women to enlighten the repressed shadow of history. Women’s contradictory location as both inside/outside of the public sphere sharpens their perceptions. And since women’s differently socialised activities shape thinking and feeling, women may bring a fresh view of things. As virtual strangers, mostly marginal to the political system, women in unpaid care giving labour are likely to be highly objective observers of it. As an excluded and oppressed group, they have no vested interest in papering over corrupt social structures. As the bearers of work roles that mediate nature and culture– whether by domestic work in the economic North or subsistence farming in the economic South, women’s skills, knowledges, and values, are indispensable to citizen debates about social justice and ecological sustainability.
What could be more satisfying to the capitalist patriarchal meta-narrative than the postmodern feminist deletion of ‘woman’ and her replacement by a cyborg ? In a sense, the move is already well underway through corporate research into reproductive technologies. Yet this desexed/degendered utopia is precisely what Haraway seeks. In the collection Feminism/Postmodernism, Judith Butler writes that we barely know what it is we mean when we use the category ‘woman’. This decontextualised linguistic reasoning has intimidated a generation of younger scholars, who now drop the term ‘woman’ from the feminist lexicon altogether. Gayatri Spivak came to the rescue for would-be activists, but again, with a typically dissociated postmodern solution, advising them to use an ‘operational essentialism’ for political purposes. This academic gymnastic expresses the same schizoid methodology as Haraway’s injunctions do. What is perhaps even more troubling is the fact that some would-be feminist scholars are unable to discern when words like ‘woman’ or ‘nature’ are being used strategically, or operationally, or ironically, or literally.
When ecofeminists interogate subjectivity, and subsidiary constructs like ‘woman’ or ‘man’, it is to ‘re-situate’ these within anecological framework. This is partly why the term ecofeminism –an ecology as much as a feminism– represents a dialectical identity. [...]
Describing gender as merely a ‘truth effect’ of discourse, a ‘performance’, Butler’s postmodern feminism comes to echo the Parsonian role functionalism of 1950s US sociology. However, Butler claims a genealogy in Lacanian poststructural psychoanalysis. Consistent with Haraway’s cyborg philosophy, Butler believes the notion of ‘woman’ to be regressive, denoting aprematureforeclosureof futurepossibilities. She points out that in the capitalist patriarchal West, subjecthood is not open to a body that is sexed ‘woman’. Rather, subjecthood is ‘always already masculine sexed’ requiring a hierarchy of sustainers– invariably womanly ones." (pp.205-206)
"The happy consciousness of Haraway’s high tech move from ‘reproduction’ to ‘genetic replication’, loses an opportunity to discuss the deeply flawed and misogynist foundations of Western science in its corporatist phase. Moreover Haraway puts aside Merchant’s ecofeminist historical research into the systematic witch hunting of women’s knowledge of natural processes; a purge that made possible the capitalist patriarchal Enlightenment and its peculiar model of science. As if continuing this same tradition, Haraway’s postmodern technoscience strives for a complete break with ‘organicism’, and with utopian visions that draw on Amer-Indian or Afro-American ways of knowing." (p.206)
-Ariel Salleh, "The dystopia of technoscience. An ecofeminist critique of postmodern reason", Futures, 41, 2009, 201–209.
"Continued capital accumulation and the expanding hegemony of transnational operations deepens nature's and women's subjection. This is not to say that capitalism has been the only source of such oppression, nor to argue that capital does not also exploit men. Rather, it is to make visible something largely unspoken in existing theoretical analyses by pointing to what is unique about women's environmental responses." (p.22)
"Formulated as an embodied materialism, ecofeminist politics gets at the lowest common denominator of oppressions. As such, it opens up new possibilities for dialogue between classes and social movements resistant to capital." (p.23)
"Even U. N. figures cannot hide the global scandal of feminine marginalization, for women own less than one percent of all property and do two-thirds of the world's work for five percent of all wages paid." (p.23)
"A housewife in the "developed" world often puts in at least 70 unsalaried hours a week—almost twice the standard working week of 40 hours. Using subsistence skills, she produces "use value" by cooking, sewing clothes, cleaning, house maintenance, gardening, and so on. Nonmetropolitan women in the South grow the bulk of their community's food. Then there are the intangible obligations of women's open-ended labor role: tending children, comforting the aged and sick, providing ego repairs and sexual relief for the man in their lives, and possibly the labor of childbearing consequent to that. [...]
The unpaid services—"labors of love"—that women give out under capitalism can, in principle, be remunerated: examples are prostitution, fast lunch counters, professional laundry. This shows that there is no natural necessity to organizing the economic system in this way, only capitalist patriarchal convenience." (pp.24-25)
"By introducing the nature-women-labor nexus as a fundamental contradiction, ecofeminism affirms the primacy of an exploitative, gender-based division of labor, and simultaneously shifts the analysis of all oppressions toward an ecological problematic. While liberal feminists may be content with receiving nothing more than equality alongside men in the existing system, ecofeminists are concerned about global sustainability as much as gender justice: in fact, they see the two as intrinsically interlinked." (p.26)
"Ecofeminists have long argued that an identification of women with nature defines women's work in the North as well as the South. Take the complex of tasks that housewives perform under capitalist patriarchy: providing sexual satisfaction, birthing and suckling children, carrying the young about, protecting their bodies and socializing them, growing and cooking food, maintaining shelter, sweeping floors, washing and mending clothes, dealing with garbage—and these days recycling it. The common denominator of these activities is a labor "mediation of nature" on behalf of men, which function continues despite legal recognition of "female equality" by nation states." (p.28)
"In European mythology, discourses on produced wealth, nature, and labor take their distinctively modern shapes from around the 17th century, as medieval religious thought is transposed into a secular view of nature. Land is seen as the mother of wealth, and labor as its father." (p.29)
"While women's bodies under capitalism have never come to obtain a rent as land does, they are nonetheless "resourced" for free by capital to provide ever new generations of exploitable labor. [...]
In addition to being a "natural resource," women using hands and brain in caring labor become subsumed under capitalist patriarchy as "conditions of existence," in the sense of oikos or habitat, necessary for creative human productivity to take place. Women's bodies are utilized by working men to provide a taken-for-granted daily infrastructure, enabling performance of the male work role. The fact that men are bothered rather more by the loss of a wife than by the level of their wage demonstrates a wife's value as a "condition of production"— sexual, psychological, and economic. At the same time, since women are "not quite labor," they find themselves existing in contradiction with "labor as such," and this is so even when they become paid workers themselves. The tensions between women and "formal labor" erupt within the family and at the workplace." (pp.29-30)
"Women also "make goods," for use in domestic shadow labor, and for exchange in peasant agriculture, or as commodities in piecework or factories. Yet these commodities too are usually taken away by men— husbands, middlemen, or transnational management." (p.30)
"Socialism until now has tended to place too much emphasis on a theory of the proletariat, so backgrounding different forms of social exploitation." (p.31)
"While a careful deconstruction of conventional essentialist thought categories is needed, what is undeniably given is the fact that women and men do have existentially different relationships to "nature" because they have different kinds of body organs. But to say this is not to say that women are any "closer" to nature than men in some ontological sense. Rather, it is to recall Marx's teaching that human consciousness develops in a dialectical way through sensuous bodily interaction with the material environment. Just as someone who has no organ of sight may develop a unique awareness, so men and women, differently abled, come to think and feel differently about being in the world as a result of how they can act on it, and how they experience it acting on them, in turn. Here we are talking about a kind of knowledge that is shaped by body potentials.
However, people never know this potential in any pure sense, since bodily activities including labor are mediated by language and the ideological constructions embedded in it. Accordingly, women's sensuous interchange with habitat gets to be shaped in a second-order sense, by assigned roles that force them to "mediate nature for men." (p.33)
"Under capitalist patriarchy, women find themselves lodged inside/outside relations of production in a way that is contradictory and unlivable. Daily they are broken on the contradiction that has them "closer to nature." Women are human, but they are still treated by the social system as simple reproductive sites, or as commodities, made use of and exchanged like any other "natural resource." Being "not quite labor," they achieve neither financial nor ideological equality in the work force. Having "no subjectivity to speak of," their voices remain unheard, unless to chorus the masculinist discourse with its dogmatic dualisms, thereby affirming their own diminutive role.
How does a women ever find her way out of this double-bind, let alone come to act for social change? I have argued elsewhere that it is through crisis and moments of nonidentity that she glimpses new meanings in her situation, a hidden political potential behind what is given. This "negative dialectic" rests on a distinction between essence and appearance, where the positives of perception—immediate facts— are merely temporary manifestations, even distortions of an immanent reality or essence yet to be explored." (p.35)
"Sexual abuse and domestic battery, economic and cultural marginalization—these things are enough to fracture a woman's identity. Invalidated by contradictory significations in a world that preaches love but practices exploitation, the feminine object/subject decathects somatic energies that tie her to existing social relations. Becoming free from her historically ascribed "otherness," as a subject in-process she may begin to predicate an alternative relation to the totality. To paraphrase Kristeva: when the fragile equilibrium of consciousness is destroyed by the violent heterogeneity of contradiction, the body returns to a state of difference, heavy, wandering, dissociated. However, moments of annihilation and decomposition of the sense of subjective unity, moments of raw anguish and disarray, can yield up a new productive unity, so reaffirming the subject as active signification in-process. It is this kind of personal transmutation that usually grounds an ecofeminist epistemology, though women vary in awareness of such inner processes.
Always in the front line of environmental impacts, eroded as nature is, a woman's dis/location may eventually shatter the taken for granted perception of capitalist patriarchy like a phenomenological laser. But the freewheeling chora with its insurgent energies and multiple significations offers new possibilities for dealing with masculinist erasure. From this place of nonidentity, ecofeminists boldly reframe the nature-woman-labor nexus, revaluing what has been problematic in a one-dimensional order so as to confront its stagnant totalization. Some liberal feminists and even some socialists, still speaking from the unreconstructed side of the Woman/Nature contradiction, fail to see the dialectical shift here, and so they call ecofeminist thought "essentialist." This is not surprising, since the scientific hegemony of capital cannot handle irony, the moment of tension when a signifier is suspended between two competing senses. Further, the power of bourgeois realism is such that the very term "essence" itself is captured by positivism, losing its negative, unmasking function." (p.36)
"Ecofeminists propose that:
• Nature and history are a material unity.
• Nature, women, and men are at once active subjects and passive objects.
• The woman-nature metabolism holds the key to historical progress.
• Reproductive labors guided by care are valuable models for sustainability." (p.37)
"Ecofeminism is about a transvaluation of values; in particular, it is about listening differently to the voices of women who love and labor now." (p.39)
-Ariel Salleh, "Nature, woman, labor, capital. Living the deepest contradiction", Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1995, 6:1, 21-39.
"Realism per se, posits nature as an expression of complex internal relations - some being general processes like thermodynamic principles, and others contingent factors like seasonal variability. A "critical realism" accepts this, but on the understanding that a sui generis nature is mainly known through the medium of socially constructed languages - often elaborate disciplinary ones.4 A critical realist approach to the humanity-nature question must be prepared to cross these socially constructed disciplinary boundaries - physics, biology, sociology. Moreover, it will track back and forth between degrees of abstraction within disciplines, viz the movement in sociology between individual and social structure. [...]
Such an explanation articulates general processes and particular contingencies that converge in any concrete outcome; and also, forces at different levels of abstraction which actively determine that same conjuncture. Like dialectics, this kind of theory making relies on a notion of complex causality or over-determination and it moves constantly between abstract and concrete forms. Such knowledge is described as tacit when the apprehension of internally related forces is not put into a language. Lay knowledge, often confused with tacit knowledge, is sometimes said to remain concrete. But by my own ecofeminist conjecture, it is political interests which constrain the further articulation of lay knowledges." (p.62-63)
"Marxism identifies various forms of individual alienation and, at another level of abstraction, these can be read as contradictions or structural crises destabilizing capitalist societies. The most often discussed contradiction occurs between social relations of production versus forces of production. For example, since profits are generated by labor, the displacement of jobs by new technologies may undermine future profit. Another contradictory moment occurs between conditions of production versus social relations of production. For example, since workers' health is often damaged by factory conditions and local pollution, this may undermine their future function as productive labor. Yet a further contradictory moment occurs between forces of production versus external nature. For example: since the material base of industrial provisioning is ecosystemic, damage by ongoing resource extraction may undermine the availability of future inputs.
An ecofeminist perspective is readily compatible with this materialist analysis, but it seeks to re-frame these contradictions using a different lens. In this respect, Maria Mies' classic text Patriarchy and Accumulation was path breaking. Like many other new social movements, ecofeminism privileges a politics of the body focused on sexuality, race, and environmental habitat. In this, it engages directly with the humanity-nature problematic. Marxist analyses of nature's commodification also deal with this interface, but there is a shift in ecofeminism away from production towards reproduction in its several senses." (pp.63-64)
"But where exactly does gendered reproductive labor stand in the big picture ? During the 1970s feminists engaged inconclusively with this question in what became known as "the domestic labor debate.','' Ecofeminist thinking broadens that earlier emancipatory agenda by integrating ecopolitical concerns - equality, cultural diversity, and sustainability. In fact, the constructionist aspect of ecofeminism interrogates the very foundations of historical materialism, with its supposedly transhistorical concepts of history, nature, and labor. Offering a transcendent critique, it asks whether there are not yet deeper causal structures, general processes and particular contingencies, formative of older gender innocent Marxist understandings. An ecofeminist lens addresses reproduction as a priori to production, and the implications of this flow on to Marxist concepts of class and contradiction." (pp.64-65)
"Ecofeminists view the humanity versus nature dualism, and the split between productive versus reproductive labors, as reflecting a profound alienation embodied in the social construction of masculine gender identity and the social construction of its thought products. With this gender critique, ecofeminism comes forward as a corrective transitional politics, appropriate to a certain historical conjuncture. It reads beneath the alienations which keep new social movements fragmented and single issue. And it invites ecopolitical activists and theorists of eco-Marxism, social ecology, or deep ecology, to be more reflexive about how they absorb and reinforce profoundly gendered forms of alienation. In undertaking this task, ecofeminism becomes a sociology of knowledge." (p.65)
"Dialectics provides a very helpful model for thinking about process and change. In contrast to the static positivist "cat is a cat" mindset, dialecticians trace the emergence and retreat of entities. This involves studying the interplay of meanings - immanent and transcendent, active and latent. For example, an activist or reader of ecofeminism as a transformative project, will be aware that terms such as "reason," "women," and so on, carry both an immanent, lay, ideological usage, and a transcendent, abstract, critical one. On the other hand, sometimes the abstract usage is ideological and the lay one fosters critique. As Ashis Nandy has written in the context of a postcolonial politics:
I like to believe that each such concept in this work is a double entendre: on the one hand, it is part of an oppressive structure; on the other, it is in league with its victims.
Another illustration of immanent and transcendent meanings occurs in the analysis of ecofeminist politics This is because ecofeminists tread a zig-zag course between (1) their liberal and socialist feminist task of establishing the right to a political voice; (2) their radical and poststructuralist feminist task of undermining the very basis of that same validation; and (3) their properly ecological feminist task of demonstrating how most women - and thence men too - can live differently with nature. Now each phase of strategy implies different senses of woman, politics, nature, reason, and so on, but an understanding of context and intention makes clear which sense is active and which is latent. This dialectical openness or indeterminacy, indicates that ecofeminism is not an essentialist theory." (p.66)
"[women's] relation to nature, and therefore to "capital" and "labor," is constructed, and constructs itself, differently to men's relation to nature in several ways. A first difference involves experiences mediated by female body organs in the hard but sensuous labors of birthing and suckling. A second difference follows from women's historically assigned caring and maintenance chores that serve to "bridge" men and nature. A third difference involves women's manual work in making goods as farmers, cooks, herbalists, potters, and so on. The fourth difference involves creating symbolic representations of "feminine" relations to "nature" - in poetry, in painting, in philosophy, and everyday talk. Through this constellation of lay labors, the great majority of women around the world are organically and discursively implicated in life-affirming activities, and they develop gender-specific knowledges grounded in this material base. As a result, women across cultures have begun to express political views that are quite removed from men's approaches." (p.67)
"German ecology activist Ulla Terlinden spells out the tacit dialectical epistemology behind domestic reproduction. Housework requires of women [or men] a broad range of knowledge and ability. The nature of the work itself determines its organization. The work at hand must be dealt with in its entirety .... The worker must possess a high degree of personal synthesis, initiative, intuition and flexibility.
Contrast this total engagement with the fragmented industrial division of labor and the numb inconsequential mindset that it gives rise to." (p.69)
"Sociologist Barbara Adam offers yet another sensitive analysis of human engagement with the interlocking cycles of nature. When the material substrate of life is processed by manufacture and put up for a price, the socially contrived focus on "things" misses the myriad of exchanges and reverberations which hold nature as matter together. Adams describes how people's sensitivity to nature's implicate timings is colonized by the clock of capitalist production and its administering state. Citizen consumers are disempowered by this one dimensional landscape and only able to grasp "what is," in contrast to "what can be." In other words, appearance subsumes essence or the unrealized potential of nature.
Each of these ecofeminists describe a non-alienating way of objectifying natural human energies in labor. An embodied materialist sociology highlights the relational logic of this labor form and a sensibility that has been marginalized, censored, and repressed by the vanities of modernity. But meta-industrial labor as a general process of human partnership with nature is not necessarily gender specific. Rather, the gendering is an historically contingent aspect of industrialized societies. Conversely, ecological holding is found in both genders among indigenous peoples. By custom, Australian Aboriginal workers practice a kind of holding, nurturing sustainability as they move through the country. Thus the hunter gathering mode of production is really "reproductive" in that it does not take more than it needs ; does not splice and package land in legal title for fear of losing it. Rather, the seasonal walk is made in the knowledge that each habitat will replenish and provide again on the return." (p.70)
"To label meta-industrial labor "traditional," is to lose sight of the fact that food growing and domestic maintenance are mediations of nature which will remain essential under any historically contingent mode of production. Again, ignoring the worker's necessary embodiment in a sustaining material ground, David Harvey maintains:
For Marxists there can be no going back, as many ecologists seem to propose, to an unmediated relation to nature (or a world built solely on face to face relations), to a pre-capitalist and communitarian world of non-scientific understandings with limited divisions of labor.
The lynch pin of this assertion is the word "unmediated." And it reveals a typically modernist and masculinist idea of a somehow "unreproduced," autonomous labor, one that is inevitably technologized. Moreover, the tacit knowledges which enable the face to face reproductive sphere are reified by Harvey, and rejected as "pre-scientific."." (p.72)
"The present essay, joins meta-industrial skills and insights to abstract conceptualizations like sociology and ecology. But it also asserts that lay knowledge contains a rationality in its own right." (p.73)
"In Marx's materialism, humanizing nature" means re-making it, whereas through an embodied materialism, nature is humanized in partnership." (p.74)
"The problem that besets hitherto existing sociology is that a theoretic reconfiguring of the historically deleted human identity with nature requires new modes of abstraction. My argument therefore, is that the nexus where reproductive labor and its knowledges mediate humanity and nature is the most promising vantage point for an ecologically literate sociology. At this site, ecopolitical strategies for ecology, feminism, postcolonial, and socialist movements can also find common ground." (p.74)
-Ariel Salleh, "Ecofeminism as Sociology", Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2003, 14:1, 61-74.
"The “double whammy” of capitalist patriarchal impacts that women face, enjoins another doublet—sex/gender. It’s politically correct these days to speak as if differences between men and women were simply socially constructed overlays upon two androgenous kinds of body. In North America, liberal and poststructural feminists each emphasize this discursive shaping of personal identities. Certainly, conventional masculine domination of the feminine is a learned style, and not necessarily a direct expression of the sexed body. But the current fashion for totalising social construction only makes sense in a high-tech economy, where people can design their lives in ways that bypass their sexed biology.
Taking a global perspective, it is ethnocentric nonsense to infer from our own opportunities for self-transformation that only acquired gender conditioning is relevant to our work for political equality. Thinking internationally about justice, women make up a majority of the global population according to the sex/gender category. Or using another sociological lens, they constitute half of any class or indigenous grouping. Whichever way you look at it, women are the global majority. And the majority of women are oppressed, both as gendered feminine and as sexed female bodies. Moreover, the two conditions may be mutually reinforcing. In any event, an ecofeminist deepening of eco-socialist thought will acknowledge biological sources of social domination as much as discursive ones. Both natural and cultural realities interact with each other and with class identity, translating into material effects like poverty and social disadvantage." (p.11)
"Women’s position as mediators of nature is a prior condition for the transaction that takes place between capitalist and laboring men. Mary Mellor describes this work as putting in biological time for men. Silvia Federici recounts the history of breaking and taming the female body and how men have been complicit with capital in this. In a related vein, Terisa Turner points to what she calls the male deal, struck by Western colonizers and local men, as they build economic development on the backs of Third World women.
I have suggested that the nature-woman-labor nexus is a foundational contradiction of the capitalist patriarchal system, wherein women are neither full political subjects, nor full labor. Ecosocialists need to grasp this unstated but originary contradiction, because it penetrates the very heart of their political analysis. As reproductive labor, women bear the main cost of World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization policies and capitalist wars. However, as primary care givers and community food producers, women are also the quintessential experts in precautionary wisdom and practitioners of sustainability. These experiences educate them—whether they are housewives, peasants, or indigenes—for global leadership. Moreover, the ambiguous attribution and denial of humanity to resourced and sacrificed people charges their political sense.
In the old bones of capitalist patriarchal logic “men are culture, women are nature”—a perfect rationale for economic externalization of “the other half.” Consequently, in the androcentric discourse of Western economics, the material surplus generated by women’s labor remains unspoken in much the same way that indigenous labor, and nature itself, has zero value. Moving to a deeper level of abstraction like the nature-woman-labor nexus, or putting it another way, moving to an embodied materialism, enables ecosocialists to acknowledge oppressions beyond that of the working class. It offers a framework for an integrating politics, helping ecosocialists theorize resistance to capital in a way that is not only socially fair, but ecologically sensitive. There has been too much emphasis by the Left on the emancipatory potential of the urban industrial proletariat and too little on other oppressed folk. Today as the corporate stranglehold intensifies, ecosocialists need to deepen their analysis in order to broaden their alliances. Especially important at this conjuncture is communication with a very diverse alternative globalization movement. As I see the shared goal of ecofeminism and ecosocialism, it is to draw the separate movements together—workers’, women’s, indigenous’ and ecological struggles—in a way that integrates while holding on to diversity. As the global political response to neoliberalism flourishing at Porto Alegre and Mumbai shows us, it is not urban industrial labor, so much as meta-industrial labor—mothers, small farmers, hunter-gatherers on the fringes of capital— who know most intimately the meanings of economic justice, social equity, cultural autonomy, and ecological sustainability. This is not to dismiss Marx’s economic analysis, but to adapt it to our time. It demands a closer study of the complex dimensions of reproductive labor by ecosocialists ; and it begs a reading of that great 19th century transformative program, which can support inclusive futures. One proposal that simultaneously embraces economic justice, social equity, cultural autonomy, and ecological sustainability is the subsistence perspective, developed by ecofeminists Maria Mies, Ellie Perkins, and others. This pre-figures an ecopolitical commons that could be at once, post-gender, post-colonial, and ecologically sound." (pp.12-13)
"Ecofeminists are asking ecosocialists to join them in a more fully amplified account of how capital degrades the “conditions of production.” Unravelling the nature-woman-labor nexus is central to this work—not least, the distinction between “women” and “conditions” as such. The exploitation of women’s reproductive labor powers goes on—from mothers in late-capitalist superstates like the EU to food growers in poor African communities. And in the public mind, this economic extraction is still naturalized in the ideological fog of “man is culture, woman is nature.” In evolving an ecofeminist-ecosocialist partnership, let’s not lose sight of the originary contradiction and its volatile displacements. As Ynestra King says, it’s important to focus on the pre-gendered reality that women and men are both part of nature. The secret is for ecosocialists to reclaim that embodiment—and its meanings— remembering how all our energies ebb and flow with the earth." (p.14)
-Ariel Salleh, "Moving to an embodied materialism", Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2005, 16:2, 9-14.
"Postmodern feminism accords primacy to discourse analysis, attending to the social construction of texts and the origin of assumptions concealed within them. But postmoderns often appear indifferent to the precarious ecological condition of 21st century societies. In large part, this is because they are paralysed by a kind of angst over the everyday use of universalising categories. The overarching scholastic question is whether terms like ‘nature’, for example, or ‘woman’ should be used by feminists at all. However, by ecofeminist reckoning, this methodological preoccupation simply leads to an impasse that sabotages both justice and sustainability as political goals. So the inward intellectual spiral of postmodern feminism becomes political conservatism by default. This is very apparent in classic North American anthologies like Linda Nicholson’s Feminism / Postmodernism, for example. There is little indication here of imminent environmental collapse brought on by indiscriminate industrial development and militarism no talk of deforestation and global warming or depleted uranium and leucemias in children." (p.201)
"US theorist Donna Haraway, one of the most creative representatives of the postmodern tendency, is not unsympathetic to the idea of an ecofeminism. And her most famous book Simians, Cyborgs,and Women, does touch base with the word from time to time. Haraway also seeks a usable doctrine of objectivity, although in line with her immaculate social constructionism, she is reluctant to agree to any epistemology inscribed in the daily experience of women and men.
However, her rejection of embodied feminist standpoints as ‘naive empiricism’ seems to cancel her own celebration of ‘permeable’ discursive boundaries between the materialisms of ‘biota’, ‘technologies’ and ‘texts’. Significantly, Haraway actually cites with approval Evelyn Fox Keller’s radical feminist ‘need to hold to some non-discursive grounding in ‘sex’ and ‘nature’...’. Is this a momentary admission on Haraway’s part, that some things might be immediately known by the senses ; that discourse might not be total, as social constructionists so often imply ?3 Again with ecofeminists, Haraway talks about new and possibly utopian forms of political subjectivity resisting ‘metaphysical closure’. But in her own account, this implies a poststructuralist ‘death of the subject’– and even of the ‘organism’." (p.202)
"Haraway’s social constructionism is unusual, in that it blends what is fundamentally an hermeneutic method with trappings of the positivist epistemology of 1950s science, and even scientific socialism. Rehabilitating the famous hierarchy of the sciences, she argues:
There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic...
But by this ostensibly neutralist logic, if machines are simply extensions of ‘man’s body’, innocent prostheses, then a nuclear installation is as benign as an ant hill." (p.202)
"Haraway tends to regard standpoint theory as equivalent to an old time Hegelian metanarrative. But the reflexive, ‘situated’, historically contingent aspect of standpoint clearly distinguishes it from absolute idealist claims." (p.203)
"In pursuing their project of ‘de-naturalising otherness’, Bryld and Lykke focus on ‘the network of meanings circulating between Technology-Science-Modernity-Whiteness Masculinity". And they discover a consistent pattern of metonymic substitution going on in the discourses of rocket science, dolphin studies, and astrology. They judge the function of this displacement to be a subconscious libidinal relief for modern men from acknowledgment of the mother’s body and its fundamental role in producing the species. Each discourse– Technology-Science-Modernity-Whiteness-Masculinity supplies ‘disembodied origin stories that veil, fake and lie about the active role of matter and (female) bodies’. In this way, technoscience serves to protect the masculine sense of mastery from what is apparently an overwhelming and even threatening aspect of the originary ‘m/other’.
Bryld and Lykke observe a form of psychodynamic projection in the scientific discourse on gravity as an emblem of the ‘imprisoning mater/matter’; they see more projection in the time-honoured imagery of Mother Earth as an unpredictable, hysterical woman. Yet they argue that the originary hysteriais buried deep inside Eurocentric masculinity and sublimated by its latest venture, technoscience. Traditionally, the Judaeo-Christian religion served to compensate men for their marginal role in species creation by installing them as stewards of nature and women as their chattels. The late-industrial command control paradigm perpetuates these same masculine self-enhancement strategies. But the field of command– military, environmental,domestic–operates by means of a confused amalgam of meanings. Thus, just as ‘woman’ has been sacralised as a Madonna, she is at the same time, sexually cannibalised as a Whore. So too, green nature andoceanic wombs are by turn, romanticised, sequestered and resourced.
Bryld and Lykke do not mention Elizabeth Dodson Gray’s thesis in Green Paradise Lost, a pioneering ecofeminist reading of the Judaeo-Christian ethic and its Great Chain of Being ideology. However, their study of parallels between, racism, sexism, and speciesism in scientific research amplifies Dodson Gray’s original diagnosis of the Western hierarchy of white menover women, natives, children, animals, and other ‘natural resources’. They describe the sad plight of dolphins, whose labour and undervalued bodies were exploited by both the US and Soviet military in underwater mine clearance. Today, post-Cold War, the dolphins have been sold off ; now employed by New Age therapists to swim with disturbed humans in the profitable business of realigning sick auras.
Bryld and Lykke occupy a theoretic space between postmodern discourse analysis and ecofeminist politics, and rather more comfortably than do Braidotti et al. For the latter’s ongoing focus on ‘regulative variables’ like gender, class, and race, demonstrates a certain ‘human chauvinism’.9 For ecofeminists, on the other hand, a wholistic conceptualisation embracing other species and ‘nature’ at large is important. This ecocentric break with anthropocentrism is what distinguishes ecofeminist thinking from other feminist paradigms. And as Ynestra King points out, even the multifactorial ‘socialist feminist’ standpoint theories of Alison Jaggar and Nancy Hart sock, which synthesise a position from which women can make special historical claims– and in a way that is not biologically determinist– ‘do not treat the domination of nature as a significant category’." (p.204)
"Haraway’s strategy is to eject troublesome words and make up new ones: hence, the ‘cyborg’: her name for our postmodern condition as technoscientific human-machine hybrids. This manouvre, distancing feminist theory from the libidinally ‘charged symbolic and social status of mothers’ may win the hearts of teenage students, but its political effect is to push ‘speaking women’ and their biological realities underground. Braidotti et al.’s feminist discussion of the ‘intersection between natural and cultural’ spheres likewise remains abstract and disconnected from any coherent epistemological grounding in experience. Against this static, synchronic, linguistic analysis of texts– if not indeed, of life itself as ‘text’– an ecofeminist political standpoint is processual, connecting embodied energies with ongoing historical situations.
While not itself an ecofeminist text, Sandra Harding’s Whose Science ? Whose Knowledge ? supplies an impressive argument for the relevance of feminist standpoint epistemologies at this moment in capitalist patriarchal time. Harding insists that now is precisely the moment for women to enlighten the repressed shadow of history. Women’s contradictory location as both inside/outside of the public sphere sharpens their perceptions. And since women’s differently socialised activities shape thinking and feeling, women may bring a fresh view of things. As virtual strangers, mostly marginal to the political system, women in unpaid care giving labour are likely to be highly objective observers of it. As an excluded and oppressed group, they have no vested interest in papering over corrupt social structures. As the bearers of work roles that mediate nature and culture– whether by domestic work in the economic North or subsistence farming in the economic South, women’s skills, knowledges, and values, are indispensable to citizen debates about social justice and ecological sustainability.
What could be more satisfying to the capitalist patriarchal meta-narrative than the postmodern feminist deletion of ‘woman’ and her replacement by a cyborg ? In a sense, the move is already well underway through corporate research into reproductive technologies. Yet this desexed/degendered utopia is precisely what Haraway seeks. In the collection Feminism/Postmodernism, Judith Butler writes that we barely know what it is we mean when we use the category ‘woman’. This decontextualised linguistic reasoning has intimidated a generation of younger scholars, who now drop the term ‘woman’ from the feminist lexicon altogether. Gayatri Spivak came to the rescue for would-be activists, but again, with a typically dissociated postmodern solution, advising them to use an ‘operational essentialism’ for political purposes. This academic gymnastic expresses the same schizoid methodology as Haraway’s injunctions do. What is perhaps even more troubling is the fact that some would-be feminist scholars are unable to discern when words like ‘woman’ or ‘nature’ are being used strategically, or operationally, or ironically, or literally.
When ecofeminists interogate subjectivity, and subsidiary constructs like ‘woman’ or ‘man’, it is to ‘re-situate’ these within anecological framework. This is partly why the term ecofeminism –an ecology as much as a feminism– represents a dialectical identity. [...]
Describing gender as merely a ‘truth effect’ of discourse, a ‘performance’, Butler’s postmodern feminism comes to echo the Parsonian role functionalism of 1950s US sociology. However, Butler claims a genealogy in Lacanian poststructural psychoanalysis. Consistent with Haraway’s cyborg philosophy, Butler believes the notion of ‘woman’ to be regressive, denoting aprematureforeclosureof futurepossibilities. She points out that in the capitalist patriarchal West, subjecthood is not open to a body that is sexed ‘woman’. Rather, subjecthood is ‘always already masculine sexed’ requiring a hierarchy of sustainers– invariably womanly ones." (pp.205-206)
"The happy consciousness of Haraway’s high tech move from ‘reproduction’ to ‘genetic replication’, loses an opportunity to discuss the deeply flawed and misogynist foundations of Western science in its corporatist phase. Moreover Haraway puts aside Merchant’s ecofeminist historical research into the systematic witch hunting of women’s knowledge of natural processes; a purge that made possible the capitalist patriarchal Enlightenment and its peculiar model of science. As if continuing this same tradition, Haraway’s postmodern technoscience strives for a complete break with ‘organicism’, and with utopian visions that draw on Amer-Indian or Afro-American ways of knowing." (p.206)
-Ariel Salleh, "The dystopia of technoscience. An ecofeminist critique of postmodern reason", Futures, 41, 2009, 201–209.
"Continued capital accumulation and the expanding hegemony of transnational operations deepens nature's and women's subjection. This is not to say that capitalism has been the only source of such oppression, nor to argue that capital does not also exploit men. Rather, it is to make visible something largely unspoken in existing theoretical analyses by pointing to what is unique about women's environmental responses." (p.22)
"Formulated as an embodied materialism, ecofeminist politics gets at the lowest common denominator of oppressions. As such, it opens up new possibilities for dialogue between classes and social movements resistant to capital." (p.23)
"Even U. N. figures cannot hide the global scandal of feminine marginalization, for women own less than one percent of all property and do two-thirds of the world's work for five percent of all wages paid." (p.23)
"A housewife in the "developed" world often puts in at least 70 unsalaried hours a week—almost twice the standard working week of 40 hours. Using subsistence skills, she produces "use value" by cooking, sewing clothes, cleaning, house maintenance, gardening, and so on. Nonmetropolitan women in the South grow the bulk of their community's food. Then there are the intangible obligations of women's open-ended labor role: tending children, comforting the aged and sick, providing ego repairs and sexual relief for the man in their lives, and possibly the labor of childbearing consequent to that. [...]
The unpaid services—"labors of love"—that women give out under capitalism can, in principle, be remunerated: examples are prostitution, fast lunch counters, professional laundry. This shows that there is no natural necessity to organizing the economic system in this way, only capitalist patriarchal convenience." (pp.24-25)
"By introducing the nature-women-labor nexus as a fundamental contradiction, ecofeminism affirms the primacy of an exploitative, gender-based division of labor, and simultaneously shifts the analysis of all oppressions toward an ecological problematic. While liberal feminists may be content with receiving nothing more than equality alongside men in the existing system, ecofeminists are concerned about global sustainability as much as gender justice: in fact, they see the two as intrinsically interlinked." (p.26)
"Ecofeminists have long argued that an identification of women with nature defines women's work in the North as well as the South. Take the complex of tasks that housewives perform under capitalist patriarchy: providing sexual satisfaction, birthing and suckling children, carrying the young about, protecting their bodies and socializing them, growing and cooking food, maintaining shelter, sweeping floors, washing and mending clothes, dealing with garbage—and these days recycling it. The common denominator of these activities is a labor "mediation of nature" on behalf of men, which function continues despite legal recognition of "female equality" by nation states." (p.28)
"In European mythology, discourses on produced wealth, nature, and labor take their distinctively modern shapes from around the 17th century, as medieval religious thought is transposed into a secular view of nature. Land is seen as the mother of wealth, and labor as its father." (p.29)
"While women's bodies under capitalism have never come to obtain a rent as land does, they are nonetheless "resourced" for free by capital to provide ever new generations of exploitable labor. [...]
In addition to being a "natural resource," women using hands and brain in caring labor become subsumed under capitalist patriarchy as "conditions of existence," in the sense of oikos or habitat, necessary for creative human productivity to take place. Women's bodies are utilized by working men to provide a taken-for-granted daily infrastructure, enabling performance of the male work role. The fact that men are bothered rather more by the loss of a wife than by the level of their wage demonstrates a wife's value as a "condition of production"— sexual, psychological, and economic. At the same time, since women are "not quite labor," they find themselves existing in contradiction with "labor as such," and this is so even when they become paid workers themselves. The tensions between women and "formal labor" erupt within the family and at the workplace." (pp.29-30)
"Women also "make goods," for use in domestic shadow labor, and for exchange in peasant agriculture, or as commodities in piecework or factories. Yet these commodities too are usually taken away by men— husbands, middlemen, or transnational management." (p.30)
"Socialism until now has tended to place too much emphasis on a theory of the proletariat, so backgrounding different forms of social exploitation." (p.31)
"While a careful deconstruction of conventional essentialist thought categories is needed, what is undeniably given is the fact that women and men do have existentially different relationships to "nature" because they have different kinds of body organs. But to say this is not to say that women are any "closer" to nature than men in some ontological sense. Rather, it is to recall Marx's teaching that human consciousness develops in a dialectical way through sensuous bodily interaction with the material environment. Just as someone who has no organ of sight may develop a unique awareness, so men and women, differently abled, come to think and feel differently about being in the world as a result of how they can act on it, and how they experience it acting on them, in turn. Here we are talking about a kind of knowledge that is shaped by body potentials.
However, people never know this potential in any pure sense, since bodily activities including labor are mediated by language and the ideological constructions embedded in it. Accordingly, women's sensuous interchange with habitat gets to be shaped in a second-order sense, by assigned roles that force them to "mediate nature for men." (p.33)
"Under capitalist patriarchy, women find themselves lodged inside/outside relations of production in a way that is contradictory and unlivable. Daily they are broken on the contradiction that has them "closer to nature." Women are human, but they are still treated by the social system as simple reproductive sites, or as commodities, made use of and exchanged like any other "natural resource." Being "not quite labor," they achieve neither financial nor ideological equality in the work force. Having "no subjectivity to speak of," their voices remain unheard, unless to chorus the masculinist discourse with its dogmatic dualisms, thereby affirming their own diminutive role.
How does a women ever find her way out of this double-bind, let alone come to act for social change? I have argued elsewhere that it is through crisis and moments of nonidentity that she glimpses new meanings in her situation, a hidden political potential behind what is given. This "negative dialectic" rests on a distinction between essence and appearance, where the positives of perception—immediate facts— are merely temporary manifestations, even distortions of an immanent reality or essence yet to be explored." (p.35)
"Sexual abuse and domestic battery, economic and cultural marginalization—these things are enough to fracture a woman's identity. Invalidated by contradictory significations in a world that preaches love but practices exploitation, the feminine object/subject decathects somatic energies that tie her to existing social relations. Becoming free from her historically ascribed "otherness," as a subject in-process she may begin to predicate an alternative relation to the totality. To paraphrase Kristeva: when the fragile equilibrium of consciousness is destroyed by the violent heterogeneity of contradiction, the body returns to a state of difference, heavy, wandering, dissociated. However, moments of annihilation and decomposition of the sense of subjective unity, moments of raw anguish and disarray, can yield up a new productive unity, so reaffirming the subject as active signification in-process. It is this kind of personal transmutation that usually grounds an ecofeminist epistemology, though women vary in awareness of such inner processes.
Always in the front line of environmental impacts, eroded as nature is, a woman's dis/location may eventually shatter the taken for granted perception of capitalist patriarchy like a phenomenological laser. But the freewheeling chora with its insurgent energies and multiple significations offers new possibilities for dealing with masculinist erasure. From this place of nonidentity, ecofeminists boldly reframe the nature-woman-labor nexus, revaluing what has been problematic in a one-dimensional order so as to confront its stagnant totalization. Some liberal feminists and even some socialists, still speaking from the unreconstructed side of the Woman/Nature contradiction, fail to see the dialectical shift here, and so they call ecofeminist thought "essentialist." This is not surprising, since the scientific hegemony of capital cannot handle irony, the moment of tension when a signifier is suspended between two competing senses. Further, the power of bourgeois realism is such that the very term "essence" itself is captured by positivism, losing its negative, unmasking function." (p.36)
"Ecofeminists propose that:
• Nature and history are a material unity.
• Nature, women, and men are at once active subjects and passive objects.
• The woman-nature metabolism holds the key to historical progress.
• Reproductive labors guided by care are valuable models for sustainability." (p.37)
"Ecofeminism is about a transvaluation of values; in particular, it is about listening differently to the voices of women who love and labor now." (p.39)
-Ariel Salleh, "Nature, woman, labor, capital. Living the deepest contradiction", Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1995, 6:1, 21-39.
"Realism per se, posits nature as an expression of complex internal relations - some being general processes like thermodynamic principles, and others contingent factors like seasonal variability. A "critical realism" accepts this, but on the understanding that a sui generis nature is mainly known through the medium of socially constructed languages - often elaborate disciplinary ones.4 A critical realist approach to the humanity-nature question must be prepared to cross these socially constructed disciplinary boundaries - physics, biology, sociology. Moreover, it will track back and forth between degrees of abstraction within disciplines, viz the movement in sociology between individual and social structure. [...]
Such an explanation articulates general processes and particular contingencies that converge in any concrete outcome; and also, forces at different levels of abstraction which actively determine that same conjuncture. Like dialectics, this kind of theory making relies on a notion of complex causality or over-determination and it moves constantly between abstract and concrete forms. Such knowledge is described as tacit when the apprehension of internally related forces is not put into a language. Lay knowledge, often confused with tacit knowledge, is sometimes said to remain concrete. But by my own ecofeminist conjecture, it is political interests which constrain the further articulation of lay knowledges." (p.62-63)
"Marxism identifies various forms of individual alienation and, at another level of abstraction, these can be read as contradictions or structural crises destabilizing capitalist societies. The most often discussed contradiction occurs between social relations of production versus forces of production. For example, since profits are generated by labor, the displacement of jobs by new technologies may undermine future profit. Another contradictory moment occurs between conditions of production versus social relations of production. For example, since workers' health is often damaged by factory conditions and local pollution, this may undermine their future function as productive labor. Yet a further contradictory moment occurs between forces of production versus external nature. For example: since the material base of industrial provisioning is ecosystemic, damage by ongoing resource extraction may undermine the availability of future inputs.
An ecofeminist perspective is readily compatible with this materialist analysis, but it seeks to re-frame these contradictions using a different lens. In this respect, Maria Mies' classic text Patriarchy and Accumulation was path breaking. Like many other new social movements, ecofeminism privileges a politics of the body focused on sexuality, race, and environmental habitat. In this, it engages directly with the humanity-nature problematic. Marxist analyses of nature's commodification also deal with this interface, but there is a shift in ecofeminism away from production towards reproduction in its several senses." (pp.63-64)
"But where exactly does gendered reproductive labor stand in the big picture ? During the 1970s feminists engaged inconclusively with this question in what became known as "the domestic labor debate.','' Ecofeminist thinking broadens that earlier emancipatory agenda by integrating ecopolitical concerns - equality, cultural diversity, and sustainability. In fact, the constructionist aspect of ecofeminism interrogates the very foundations of historical materialism, with its supposedly transhistorical concepts of history, nature, and labor. Offering a transcendent critique, it asks whether there are not yet deeper causal structures, general processes and particular contingencies, formative of older gender innocent Marxist understandings. An ecofeminist lens addresses reproduction as a priori to production, and the implications of this flow on to Marxist concepts of class and contradiction." (pp.64-65)
"Ecofeminists view the humanity versus nature dualism, and the split between productive versus reproductive labors, as reflecting a profound alienation embodied in the social construction of masculine gender identity and the social construction of its thought products. With this gender critique, ecofeminism comes forward as a corrective transitional politics, appropriate to a certain historical conjuncture. It reads beneath the alienations which keep new social movements fragmented and single issue. And it invites ecopolitical activists and theorists of eco-Marxism, social ecology, or deep ecology, to be more reflexive about how they absorb and reinforce profoundly gendered forms of alienation. In undertaking this task, ecofeminism becomes a sociology of knowledge." (p.65)
"Dialectics provides a very helpful model for thinking about process and change. In contrast to the static positivist "cat is a cat" mindset, dialecticians trace the emergence and retreat of entities. This involves studying the interplay of meanings - immanent and transcendent, active and latent. For example, an activist or reader of ecofeminism as a transformative project, will be aware that terms such as "reason," "women," and so on, carry both an immanent, lay, ideological usage, and a transcendent, abstract, critical one. On the other hand, sometimes the abstract usage is ideological and the lay one fosters critique. As Ashis Nandy has written in the context of a postcolonial politics:
I like to believe that each such concept in this work is a double entendre: on the one hand, it is part of an oppressive structure; on the other, it is in league with its victims.
Another illustration of immanent and transcendent meanings occurs in the analysis of ecofeminist politics This is because ecofeminists tread a zig-zag course between (1) their liberal and socialist feminist task of establishing the right to a political voice; (2) their radical and poststructuralist feminist task of undermining the very basis of that same validation; and (3) their properly ecological feminist task of demonstrating how most women - and thence men too - can live differently with nature. Now each phase of strategy implies different senses of woman, politics, nature, reason, and so on, but an understanding of context and intention makes clear which sense is active and which is latent. This dialectical openness or indeterminacy, indicates that ecofeminism is not an essentialist theory." (p.66)
"[women's] relation to nature, and therefore to "capital" and "labor," is constructed, and constructs itself, differently to men's relation to nature in several ways. A first difference involves experiences mediated by female body organs in the hard but sensuous labors of birthing and suckling. A second difference follows from women's historically assigned caring and maintenance chores that serve to "bridge" men and nature. A third difference involves women's manual work in making goods as farmers, cooks, herbalists, potters, and so on. The fourth difference involves creating symbolic representations of "feminine" relations to "nature" - in poetry, in painting, in philosophy, and everyday talk. Through this constellation of lay labors, the great majority of women around the world are organically and discursively implicated in life-affirming activities, and they develop gender-specific knowledges grounded in this material base. As a result, women across cultures have begun to express political views that are quite removed from men's approaches." (p.67)
"German ecology activist Ulla Terlinden spells out the tacit dialectical epistemology behind domestic reproduction. Housework requires of women [or men] a broad range of knowledge and ability. The nature of the work itself determines its organization. The work at hand must be dealt with in its entirety .... The worker must possess a high degree of personal synthesis, initiative, intuition and flexibility.
Contrast this total engagement with the fragmented industrial division of labor and the numb inconsequential mindset that it gives rise to." (p.69)
"Sociologist Barbara Adam offers yet another sensitive analysis of human engagement with the interlocking cycles of nature. When the material substrate of life is processed by manufacture and put up for a price, the socially contrived focus on "things" misses the myriad of exchanges and reverberations which hold nature as matter together. Adams describes how people's sensitivity to nature's implicate timings is colonized by the clock of capitalist production and its administering state. Citizen consumers are disempowered by this one dimensional landscape and only able to grasp "what is," in contrast to "what can be." In other words, appearance subsumes essence or the unrealized potential of nature.
Each of these ecofeminists describe a non-alienating way of objectifying natural human energies in labor. An embodied materialist sociology highlights the relational logic of this labor form and a sensibility that has been marginalized, censored, and repressed by the vanities of modernity. But meta-industrial labor as a general process of human partnership with nature is not necessarily gender specific. Rather, the gendering is an historically contingent aspect of industrialized societies. Conversely, ecological holding is found in both genders among indigenous peoples. By custom, Australian Aboriginal workers practice a kind of holding, nurturing sustainability as they move through the country. Thus the hunter gathering mode of production is really "reproductive" in that it does not take more than it needs ; does not splice and package land in legal title for fear of losing it. Rather, the seasonal walk is made in the knowledge that each habitat will replenish and provide again on the return." (p.70)
"To label meta-industrial labor "traditional," is to lose sight of the fact that food growing and domestic maintenance are mediations of nature which will remain essential under any historically contingent mode of production. Again, ignoring the worker's necessary embodiment in a sustaining material ground, David Harvey maintains:
For Marxists there can be no going back, as many ecologists seem to propose, to an unmediated relation to nature (or a world built solely on face to face relations), to a pre-capitalist and communitarian world of non-scientific understandings with limited divisions of labor.
The lynch pin of this assertion is the word "unmediated." And it reveals a typically modernist and masculinist idea of a somehow "unreproduced," autonomous labor, one that is inevitably technologized. Moreover, the tacit knowledges which enable the face to face reproductive sphere are reified by Harvey, and rejected as "pre-scientific."." (p.72)
"The present essay, joins meta-industrial skills and insights to abstract conceptualizations like sociology and ecology. But it also asserts that lay knowledge contains a rationality in its own right." (p.73)
"In Marx's materialism, humanizing nature" means re-making it, whereas through an embodied materialism, nature is humanized in partnership." (p.74)
"The problem that besets hitherto existing sociology is that a theoretic reconfiguring of the historically deleted human identity with nature requires new modes of abstraction. My argument therefore, is that the nexus where reproductive labor and its knowledges mediate humanity and nature is the most promising vantage point for an ecologically literate sociology. At this site, ecopolitical strategies for ecology, feminism, postcolonial, and socialist movements can also find common ground." (p.74)
-Ariel Salleh, "Ecofeminism as Sociology", Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2003, 14:1, 61-74.
Dernière édition par Johnathan R. Razorback le Jeu 23 Mai - 19:40, édité 2 fois
