ILLUSTRATIVE OPPOSITION
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hand. For instance, early ecofeminist activists practiced a nascent form of
illustrative opposition in the Women’s Pentagon Action of the early 1930s.
Beginning with an initial focus on the crisis of nuclear power, ecofeminists
illustrated a wider social and political picture, drawing out broader issues of
racism, capitalism, nationalism, militarism, male violence, and state power.3
Illustrative opposition must be specific enough to be meaningful, yet
broad enough in order to deepen political consciousness. Had the Women’s
Pentagon Action presented too wide a focus, both participants and media
would have been bombarded by the interconnecting issues of social and
ecological injustice. However, had they focused too narrowly, say, on the
ecological devastation of the earth by nuclear technology, they would have
missed the opportunity to illustrate the widest implications of the nuclear crisis.
The Women’s Pentagon Action was successful in broadening an understanding
of the necessary conditions for creating a nuclear-free society. Through
theatrical demonstrations and written media, these early ecofeminists helped
others to explore a range of necessary conditions pertaining to the spheres of
the social and the State by demanding an end to racist and masculinist state
practices in regards to nuclear energy and militarism, and by confronting
capitalist production of nuclear technologies.
However, while the Women’s Pentagon Action presented an extensive
critique of the spheres of the social and the State, like most movements of the
New Left, they failed to extend their critique to the political sphere. By linking
a critique of social and state institutions to a demand for direct democratic
control over social and political life in general, the Women’s Pentagon Action
would have presented a sufficient condition for a nuclear free society.
In this way, illustrative opposition is a practice of holistic picture-making
in which one brush stroke serves as an invocation to bring an entire picture to
fullness. The idea of holism, inherent within the idea of illustrative opposition,
conveys that a whole is not just the sum of its parts. For instance, in the case of
the pot of boiling water, the whole, or the boiling pot of water, is not reducible
to the pot, to the water, or to the heating element. Accordingly, it is insufficient
to simply throw the necessary parts together in a room, expecting to bring
water to a boil. As we have seen, it is the specific and irreducible relationship
between the parts that gives the whole its particular form and function. It is the
specific and irreducible relationship between individual forms or parts of
oppression, which gives the whole oppressive system its form and function as
well. Hence, the goal of illustrative opposition is to focus on one part of a
larger system of oppression to depict a whole which is appreciated in its
interconnected complexity.