ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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deploying new symbols, meanings, and images that they often borrowed’ from
the symbols, times, and places of other cultures.2
Rejecting patriarchal and hierarchical approaches to spirituality, medicine,
and aesthetics, radical cultural feminists sought practices intended to empower
‘all women’. This search for new cultural practices was again marked by an
ecological sensibility as feminists turned to ‘nature based’ cultures that had their
roots in pagan, Neolithic, Eastern, indigenous, Native American, and African
traditions. However, this turn to the ‘old’ to reconstruct the ‘new5 is often
characterized by the tendency toward abstraction and romanticization: the
desire for an idealized ‘golden age’ expressed by women who drew inspiration
from cultures of the past believed to be free of gendered hierarchy and
ecological injustice.
The failure of many radical feminists to problematize the process by
which they cultivated symbols to represent and routinize feminist nature-based
cultural practices contributed to the problem of essentialism within ‘cultural
feminism’. That many women of color did not identify with symbols that white
women deemed ‘universal’ women’s symbols, and that many indigenous
women criticized the appropriation by white women of symbols and practices
of their own cultures, reflects the failure of white radical feminists to be
sufficiently self-conscious about the social and political contingencies that
constrain the ways in which feminists reconstruct past and present categories
of gender and culture. Indeed, in Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘‘An Open Letter to Mary
Daly,” Lorde inquired why Daly used symbols from pre-capitalist Western
Europe to represent an empowering cultural image of Women’. Lorde asked
herself, ‘Why doesn’t Mary deal with Afrekete as an example? Why are her
goddess images only white, western European, judeo-christian? Where was
Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa?”3
The radical potential of early feminism, then, was undercut by problems
of symbolic representation and cultural practice; problems that reflected deeper
issues of institutional racism within the movement. By the mid-1980s, radical
women of color had confronted the feminist movement on its inadequate
analysis of race, class, and ethnicity, illustrating that the ‘unified body1 of the
body politic mirrored only a small minority of the diverse world body of
women. The 1987 publication of the anthology 'This Bridge Called My Back■"
edited by Gloria Anzaldua and Cherri Moraga, signaled an era in which
women of color transformed the politics of representation forever. This Bridge
created a forum in which women who previously had no voice in the feminist
movement were able to write critically about issues of race, gender, culture,
and power.4
Other feminist writers of color during this time challenged as well an
analytical framework predicated on a binary between domestic and public