ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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reflected in WomanEarth’s conference “Reconstituting Feminist Peace Politics”
held in Amherst, MA, in June of 1986, a conference in which fifty women (half
women of color, half women of European descent) met to discuss a range of
issues relating to questions of race,
class, and feminist peace politics,
WomanEarth signaled an important shift within ecofeminism. Responding to
critiques of racism within the feminist movement as a whole in the mid-1980s,
women such as Ring understood that ecofeminism had to prioritize the
question of racism if the movement was to achieve political validity and
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integrity.
WomanEarth, as an ecofeminist project, emerged out of radical feminist
body politics that sought to particularize the general question of ecology by
addressing issues of ‘nature5 along with those of gender and social justice.
Initially, the nuclear issue brought out the most concrete, social, and historical
dimensions of the “nature question” within ecofeminism. Departing from
mainstream environmentalism’s tendency to privilege abstract notions of a
pristine and “people-less” wilderness to be protected, these early ecofeminist
activists generally expressed their “desire for nature” by showing the concrete
connections between public and domestic acts of militarism and male violence,
pointing to the ecological and social implications of such issues. Again,
although early ecofeminist activism tended to reproduce the problematic
domestic/public framework, they were able to ground their politics in a social
and material analysis of ecological questions.
Thus, in the early 1980s, radical feminism had given rise to an
increasingly social approach to ecological questions that grew out of a body
politics grounded in the concrete dimensions of women’s everyday lives. This
body politics was predicated upon the ability of radical feminists to link
questions such as health and sexuality to systems of male dominated hierarchy,
reflecting a nascent, and sometimes explicit, anarchist impulse. And as we have
seen, this nascent anarchism within body politics finds expression within early
ecofeminist claims regarding the connection between ecological degradation
and questions of social domination and oppression in general.
SociAl Ecoloqy AncI EcofEMiNisivi
At this point in the narrative, it would be helpful to take a few steps back to
explore a key political and theoretical context in which Ynestra King, a major
figure in the early years of ecofeminist activity, developed ecofeminist theory
and activism. King’s approach to ecological theory and politics both informed,
and was formed by, another desire for nature that unfolded simultaneously
with the radical feminist movement. That desire for nature is social ecology.
Social ecology is a branch of the radical ecology movement that surfaced
in (lie U.S. during the 1960s. Since its inception, social ecology has played a