ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
46
murdered, or assaulted as exist for white women. These are statistical
facts, not coincidences nor paranoid fantasies.^
Audre Lorde was one of the first radical feminists to bring to body politics an
understanding of the relationship between race, health, class, and gender. In
her ground breaking work, The Cancer Journals; Lorde examined the specific
social context in which she had been exposed to toxins at home and at work.7
In addition, she articulated the specific social contexts in which she faced her
own medical crises and recovery. Lorde’s perspective anticipated the struggles
of women of color in the environmental justice movement of the 1980s; a
struggle to bring questions of race and class into an ecologically oriented body
politic.
Thus the body politics5, which offered a potential ‘organic5 ground for
radical feminism, was constrained by a tendency toward abstraction and
romanticization. Indeed, degrees of immediacy and historicity were lost in the
translation as white women began to extrapolate from their own lives a politics
of representation that often either appropriated or excluded the experience of
women of color. And as we shall see, this problem of how to engender new
meanings surrounding categories of non-hierarchy, body, gender, and nature,
persisted as a nascent desire for nature continued to emerge within radical
feminism.
Yet despite these limitations, by framing issues of health, sexual freedom,
rape, and battering, as political issues, radical feminists began to move toward
a social, rather than individualistic, desire for nature, expressing a collective
desire for a more healthful, pleasurable, and “natural55 expression of everyday
life free from social oppression. In turn, the nascent anarchist impulse (hat
marked the cooperative structure of feminist organizations speaks to the
revolutionary potential within feminist body politics.
Body-Ecobqy: TNe Emergence Of EcofEMiNisM
To explore the movement of radical feminist body politics into an explicit
desire for nature, we will return briefly to the earlier days of the movement.
Here, once again, we witness a set of mostly white, middle-class activists for
whom ecological questions will represent an attempt to make sense out of
abstract understandings of categories of nature and gender: understandings that
will reflect their own identities.
The WITCH movement represents one of the first feminist actions that
expressed an explicit ecological sensibility. At this time, feminists began to
articulate moments of resonance between the idea of a new ‘embodied5
political culture and the culture of witches in pagan Europe hundreds of years
ago.
Beginning on Halloween, 1968, radical feminists formed a series of
autonomous
‘covens5
across
(lie
country.
The
group
was
explicitly