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ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
theorists such as Nancy Chodorow, Gayle Rubin, and Sherry Ortner, examining
the historical implications of the Western nature/culture dichotomy for the
construction of gender.
For Ring, the woman/nature analogy was a social, rather than biological,
construction that she sought to historicize and appropriate as a way to develop
a feminist critique of the epistemological foundations of Western society.
According to Ring, this analogy was directly linked to a “nature/culture split”
which was in turn, tied to the domestic/public dichotomy discussed by white
feminists during the late 1960s and early 70s21 Again, departing from de
Beauvoir, Ring called for women to analyze the historical construction of that
dichotomy as a way to understand men’s alienation from “domestic” realms of
nature and the body, rather than for women to join men in the project of
“transcendence” over nature. However the failure of King (and of many white
feminists at the time) to problematize the domestic/public split itself, left early
ecofeminist theory vulnerable to critiques of essentialism that continue today.
As already stated, the tendency among white feminists during those years to
focus on the domestic/public dichotomy reflected unexamined assumptions
regarding the universality of the structural causes of women’s subordination.
Again, as theorists such as bell hooks pointed out, poor women of color in the
U.S. had always been forced into the “public” sphere of work—without
“transcending” their oppression as women.
Yet while retaining this problematic domestic/public framework, Ring’s
approach to ecofeminism was profoundly radical in a variety of ways. Social
ecology had provided an explicitly revolutionary, anarchist, and ecological lens
through which Ring analyzed questions regarding objectivity raised by feminist
psychoanalytic theorists, scientists, and anthropologists. Offering a way to
‘ecologize’ the Hegelian dialectic between self and other, social ecology
articulated the need for society to create a relationship with the rest of die
natural world marked by degrees of cooperation, complementary, and ever
greater levels of freedom. Social ecology’s discussion of "unity in diversity’ also
provided a way to reconcile the relationship between self and other by
articulating the possibility for recognizing both the differences and connections
between organic phenomena. Within the ‘ecologized’ dialectic of social
ecology, the self could be both related to, and distinct from, the other.
Ring drew out the feminist implications of social ecology, exploring
non-hierarchical and anarchic ways of approaching self/other relationships in
domains of political and ecological organizing and theory. In addition to
teaching at the ISE, Ring went on to create the first body of writing to be called
explicitly “ecofeminist,” creating an innovative synthesis of theories including
social ecology, radical feminist body politics, feminist critiques of science,
feminist peace politics, and critical theory.22 Yet while Ring sought to integrate