Ecofeminism

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As Ecofeminism social and political movements and philosophies are referred to the environmental issues and concerns with feminist combine analysis. Ecofeminist movements emerged in the mid-1970s as part of the international environmental , peace and women's movements and as a reaction to various environmental disasters. Ecofeminist approaches are based on the structural similarity between the control of nature and women or the female reproductive capacity and productivity.

history

A decade before the term and the ecofeminist movement existed, Rachel Carson published her book The Silent Spring (1962). Carson was not an explicit feminist, but is considered a pioneer of ecofeminism, especially in American literature.

In the United States, in March 1980, as a result of the nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the first eco-feminist conference, organized by Grace Paley and Ynestra King , took place in Amherst (Massachusetts) with the title Women and Life on Earth . In West Germany, the campaigns against the stationing of medium-range missiles formed an initial focus of eco-feminist activities. After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster , feminists led by the party of the Greens and from the autonomous women's movement at the international congress Women & Ecology. Against the mania for feasibility 1986 in Cologne basic debates on ecofeminist positions. At the congress, Maria Mies developed her utopian design outlines of an eco-feminist society , which was derived from a feminist differential criticism of modernity .

In the 1970s, environmental movements had already emerged in the Third World that were initiated and predominantly supported by women, such as the green belt movement founded by Wangari Maathai in Kenya and the Chipko movement in India, which were linked to western ecofeminists such as Maria Mies .

In the US, ecofeminism switched from an academic to a popular movement in the late 1980s. One of the reasons for its popularization is the essay by Ynestra King What Is Ecofeminism? The essay was published in 1987 in the weekly magazine The Nation .

Positions

Ecofeminists argue that there is a relationship between the oppression of women in patriarchy and the exploitation of nature with the consequence of environmental degradation , which affects women worldwide (e.g. as mothers, as small and subsistence farmers in the Third World ) in a special way give. In view of the ecological challenges, individual emancipatory approaches have their limits. Feminist theory must include an ecological perspective and, conversely, the solutions to ecological problems must include a feminist perspective. The ecofeminist utopia aims to end dominance over nature and women. The international ecofeminist movement, however, has no unified theoretical or philosophical basis. In the early days, writings critical of science by authors such as the science historian Carolyn Merchant and Evelyn Fox Keller were influential . In more recent writings, ecofeminist theorists uncover commonalities between a destructive approach to nature and sexism, racism, neocolonialism, and class and species discrimination.

The current of cultural ecofeminism, which was particularly popular in the USA, assumes a positive relationship between women and nature due to the female biological ability to give birth and advocates specific female values ​​based on the assumption that all women have a special approach to nature and be more caring than men with it. Prominent representatives of this trend are, for example, Susan Griffin , Mary Daly and Starhawk . Cultural ecofeminism is about a holistic view of the world and people that includes body, intuition, feeling and spirituality.

Another current, known as social ecofeminism, criticizes the relationship between women and nature as socially conditioned and historically developed, which is constantly being re-established from the potential reproductive capacity of the woman's body. "Women gain more knowledge and experience in dealing with nature due to the gender hierarchy of labor." ( Christine Bauhardt ). This flow is u. a. Represented by the British social scientist Mary Mellor , by Janet Biehl , the Indian scientists Bina Agarwal and Vandana Shiva , and in the German-speaking world by the sociologist Maria Mies, who in their writings theorize the oppressive relationships between women and nature and develop strategies for action. Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies in particular expanded ecofeminism to include an international perspective and developed and concretized concepts that brought together social and ecological concerns from a feminist perspective.

What all ecofeminist approaches have in common is the demand for a fundamental redefinition of the concept of nature. Barbara Holland-Cunz specified the term ecofeminism in 1994 as follows:

"When I [...] speak of 'ecofeminism', this must be used as an abbreviation for the entire breadth of natural-philosophical, socio-theoretical, scientific-critical and historical approaches that, from a feminist point of view, deal with ecological crisis, social nature - and deal with gender relations and possibilities of their practical solution. "

- Barbara Holland-Cunz

In the 1980s, feminists also began to develop political and scientific criticisms of gene and reproductive technology. A classic on this subject is the book by the American journalist Gena Corea The Mother Machine from 1985, which was published in 1986 in German translation under the title MutterMaschine and in which Corea described the new reproductive technologies as a “war against the womb”. Feminist analyzes of the availability via the female body through new technological methods (such as embryo transfer, prenatal diagnostics) and approaches of a feminist-ethical position on bio- and reproductive technology were discussed from different perspectives by theorists such as Barbara Duden , the feminist medical ethicist Janice Raymond and Maria Mies .

Due to the diversity and diversity of ecofeminist approaches and the differentiation of feminist theories in the 1990s, the term ecofeminism is hardly used today. Ecofeminist theories and approaches are, however, taken up and further developed in socio-ecological research in the fields of gender and environment / globalization / sustainability . "What these approaches have in common is that they distinguish themselves from the essentialist assumption of greater closeness to nature of women qua biological gender and start from a socially constructivist understanding of" gender "."

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karen Warren et al. a .: Ecofeminism. Women, Culture, Nature. Indiana University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-253-21057-7 , p. 273.
  2. ↑ Axel Goodbody: Ecofeminist Debate and its Presence in Literature. In: Axel Goodbody, Berbeli Wanning (Ed.): Water - Culture - Ecology. V&R unipress, 2008, ISBN 978-3-89971-417-3 , pp. 241f.
  3. ↑ Women and Ecology. Against the mania for feasibility. Documentation for the congress from October 3rd to 5th, 1986 in Cologne , published by Die Grünen in the Bundestag AK Frauenpolitik, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-923243-29-4 .
  4. ↑ Heidi Hofmann: The feminist discourses on reproductive technologies. Positions and controversies in the FRG and the USA. (= Campus research). Campus Verlag, 1999, ISBN 3-593-36225-2 , p. 145.
  5. ↑ Ilse Lenz : The new women's movement in Germany. 2nd, updated edition. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011, ISBN 978-3-531-17436-5 , p. 854.
  6. ↑ Kathryn Miles: Origins of ecofeminism , Encyclopedia Britannica
  7. ↑ Heather Eaton: Ecofeminism and Globalization. Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2003, ISBN 0-7425-2698-4 , pp. 208.f
  8. ^ After Holland-Cunz, 1994.
  9. ↑ The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980)
  10. ↑ For example: Gender and Science (1978)
  11. ↑ Axel Goodbody: Ecofeminist Debate and its Presence in Literature. In: Axel Goodbody, Berbeli Wanning (Ed.): Water - Culture - Ecology. V&R unipress, 2008, ISBN 978-3-89971-417-3 , pp. 241f.
  12. ↑ Barbara Thiessen: From "Ecofeminism" to "Cyberfeminismis". In: Becker, Kortendiek: Handbook women and gender research. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010, ISBN 978-3-531-17170-8 , p. 39.
  13. ↑ About Mary Mellor, Leuphana University Lüneburg
  14. ^ Eva Kreisky , Birgit Sauer (Ed.): Gender and Stubbornness: Feminist Research in Political Science. Böhlau, Vienna a. a. 1998, ISBN 3-205-98621-0 , p. 70.
  15. ^ Barbara Holland-Cunz: Social subject nature. Nature and gender relations in emancipatory political theories. Campus, Frankfurt / New York 1994, p. 40, quoted in: Heidi Hofmann: The feminist discourses on reproductive technologies. Campus Verlag, 1999, ISBN 3-593-36225-2 , p. 144.
  16. ↑ Gena Corea: The mother machine: reproductive technologies from artificial insemination to artificial wombs. Harper & Row, 1985 (reprint 2008)
  17. ↑ Review: Reproductive Futures: Recent Literature and Current Feminist Debates on Reproductive Technologies. In: Feminist Studies. Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988)
  18. ↑ Waltraud Schoppe on the feminist non-fiction book "MutterMaschine" by Gena Corea, DER SPIEGEL 37/1986
  19. ↑ a b Barbara Holland-Cunz : The old new women's question. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-12335-1 , pp. 147f.
  20. ^ Feminism and the Environment. In: Brennan, Andrew and Lo, Yeuk-Sze, "Environmental Ethics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
  21. ↑ Christine Bauhardt : Feminist Economy, Ecofeminism and Queer Ecologies - feminist-materialist perspectives on social relationships with nature . gender politics online University of Berlin April 2012, ISSN  2192-5267