Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action

by Noel Sturgeon

Book Overview

Examining the development of ecofeminism from the 1980s antimilitarist movement to an internationalist ecofeminism in the 1990s, Sturgeon explores the ecofeminist notions of gender, race, and nature.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415912504
• ISBN13: 9780415912501
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Theoretically astute and scrupulously fair--a page-turner!

Noel Sturgeon's Ecofeminist Natures is a very welcome addition to the growing body of work on ecofeminism. As both a cultural critic and an activist in the women's peace movement, Sturgeon is ideally positioned to provide a thorough, informative history of ecofeminist theory and practice while also critically examining both the problems and potential of different strands within the many-faced, oppositional movement known as ecofeminism. In particular, she is concerned with the current "political stalemate between the tropes of essentialism and anti-essentialism within feminism" (11), a stalemate she sees as unnecessarily and unfortunately dividing ecofeminist theory from practice and ecofeminism from feminism. While Sturgeon makes the necessary point that critics have exaggerated ecofeminist tendencies toward essentialism, she makes an even more valuable contribution by insisting that the essentialist tendencies which exist "must be explained as well as resisted" (59). She takes up this task by examining ecofeminist theory and activism within its historical and political contexts, both in the US and internationally. Sturgeon emphasizes that when ecofeminism is viewed as a political intervention into male-dominated discourses such as deep ecology or United Nations discussions of environment and development, certain seemingly essentialist symbols and language can be seen as products of an urgent need for political alliances among women of profoundly different racial, class, and national backgrounds; these "essentialist moments" help create a shifting, strategic relationship between "women" and "nature" for political purposes (11). Sturgeon also critiques certain essentialist constructions of racial difference within ecofeminist practice (the WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute) and theory (the discourse of "indigenous women" as the "ultimate ecofeminists"), while also acknowledging them as real efforts to confront the implications of race for ecofeminism. Finally, Sturgeon examines numerous recent academic texts in which feminists create typologies that charge ecofeminists with essentialism, or in which ecofeminists use typologies to resist such charges. She compares these texts, which often ignore the efforts of feminists of color and tend to oppose feminist theory and activism, to other, less diverse typologies and perspectives, including the work of Donna Haraway. Ultimately, she concludes that "the most vital radical political theories develop in tandem with radical movement practice" (195). Much recent work on ecofeminism touches on the importance of attending to the movement's shifting, multiple nature and to the ways race affects women's relationships to nature and ecofeminism. Sturgeon's book is notable not only for providing a new perspective on the much-traversed terrain of essentialism, but also for making these concerns central to its content and method. And, because Sturgeon so e

Very informative book with a rather disappointing conclusion

Essential problems with EcofeminismNoël Sturgeon. Ecofeminist Natures; Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action. New York: Routledge, 1997. 260 pages. In her book, Ecofeminist Natures, Noël Sturgeon deals with the highly problematical branch of feminism: ecofeminism. She defines ecofeminism as "... a feminist rebellion within male-dominated radical environmentalism" (25) and in the introduction she says: "The ecofeminist movement I examine, and in some ways construct throughout this book, is a fractured, contested, discontinuous entity..." (3). This latter description illustrates the problematicality of the movement and in the book, Sturgeon addresses the various problems with respect to five different aspects of ecofeminism: history, ethnography, sociology, politics and theory. The major part of the introduction is devoted to explaining essentialist theory which will come back time and again throughout the book as ecofeminism's ally, but also its biggest enemy. The most prominent and seemingly inescapable problem that plagues ecofeminism, which effects all the aspects that Sturgeon is examining, is the opposition between constructionism and essentialism. The dualism of ideas is illustrated by Sturgeon giving both the constructionist and essentialist answer to the question why women are connected to the environment. Sturgeon explains how this dualism came into the movement: "... the theoretical inconsistencies found in these various ecofeminist positions is a result of the strategic and dynamic qualities of the formation of ecofeminism as a political location within specific historical and political contexts." (58). Despite the presence of many constructionist ideas within ecofeminism, the movement's use of essentialist rhetoric leads to an enormous amount of critique from feminists outside the ecofeminist movement, which in turn leads to lack of critique within the movement creating a stalemate where neither side is willing to change their position. Feminists who concern themselves with issues involving women and nature do not want to be labelled as ecofeminists because of the 'useless' essentialist rhetoric it sometimes employs. Sturgeon illustrates the extent of criticism from "established feminism" (167) by mentioning that 'mainstream' feminists are trying to give ecofeminism as little publicity as possible. There are, for instance, hardly any articles dealing with ecofeminism in renowned feminist journals and if there is one it focuses on the 'bad' aspects of ecofeminism, like essentialism, which then seem to represent the whole ecofeminist movement. These facts make reading the book very interesting and exciting because the reader has the feeling they are being let into previously unexplored and unknown terrain for people outside the (eco)feminist movement. Although Sturgeon points to the fact that essentialist rhetoric might sometimes be useful in certain contexts (strategic essentiali