THE ECOFEMINIST DESIRE FOR NATURE
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cellular structure from which would emerge a national and international
movement.
These institutions were designed to give women freedom from particular
bodily harms such as rape, battering, and abuse from the male medical
establishment. Indeed, projects such as women’s health centers, rape crisis
centers, and shelters for battered women constituted an institutional expression
of the radical feminist demand for freedom from male control of women’s
bodies.
Yet, in addition to representing a demand for freedom from bodily harm
and oppression, there was a tendency within radical feminism to demand the
freedom to enjoy the body as a site of liberation, passion, and pleasure.
Recognizing the degree to which their sexuality, creativity, and intelligence had
been shaped by men, feminists realized that they could rethink their own
bodily experience. Women began to create a new aesthetic based on an
affirmation of sexuality, intuition, spirituality, art, and health. The arrival of
innovative forms of “women’s” literature, music, art, theater, dance, and ritual
signaled the construction of a ‘Universal woman” who could forge a new
identity based on self-love, power, and creativity.
The implicit ecological impulse within radical feminist body politics, then,
reflected an emerging social, rather than individualistic, desire for a quality of
everyday life infused with bodily freedom, safety, and pleasure for ‘all women’.
Citing ‘patriarchy5, or male dominated hierarchy, as the cause of women’s
oppression, radical feminism sought to establish a new set of cultural practices
defined in opposition to what women often described as a body-hating society.
Within this implicit ‘desire for nature’, stood a demand for more than abstract
values of ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ that marked many of the student movements
of the New Left. Instead, we see an attempt to ground questions of freedom in
everyday social relationships and cultural practices that reflected values of
collectivity, sensuality, health, and sefr-determination.
Tk DisEMbodiEd Body: TIhe EMERqENCE Of CuIturaI Feminism
It is here, however, that the social desire for a new embodied sensibility took a
risky turn. Moving from concrete issues of health, safety, and institutional
structure to more abstract questions of cultural practice and meaning, radical
feminism ventured into the pleasurable yet problematic realm of the symbolic.
Questions of how to represent new understandings and practices such as
health and spirituality, questions of how to symbolically unify ‘women’ into a
‘universal’ category that would ‘stand for’ the cultural feminist subject, became
paramount as a movement of predominantly white, middle-class women
lpoked to ‘other’ cultures for inspiration. These ‘cultural feminists’ attempted to
represent new embodied cultural practices of (heir own everyday lives by