Ecofeminism

The Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights created this bibliography to provide a guide to the landscape of academic literature on ecofeminism, although there is also a brief final section of non-academic sources.

This bibliography includes foundational texts in the field, critical discourse on the field, and exploration of fields in conversation with ecofeminism, including: ecological feminism; feminist environmentalism; critical ecological feminism; critical feminist eco-socialism; gender and the environment; queer ecologies; global feminist environmental justice; and ecowomanism, which “centers the perspectives of women of African descent and reflects upon these women's activist methods, religious practices, and theories on how to engage earth justice. As a part of the womanist tradition, methodologically ecowomanism features race, class, gender intersectional analysis to examine environmental injustice around the planet” (Harris 2016). With a few exceptions, this bibliography does not cover ecofeminist literary criticism, nor does it cover the ecofeminist animal rights discourse. The Consortium has produced a separate bibliography on the interrelated fields of Feminist Political Ecology and Feminist Ecological Economics.

The ecofeminist movement is generally thought of as having originated in the mid-1970s, gaining traction in the 1980s and 1990s, and experiencing renewed interest in recent years. Though there have been a range of ideological differences over the course of ecofeminist thought – including cultural ecofeminism and social ecofeminism (encompassing materialist and Marxist ecofeminism) – the movement is rooted in identifying the systemic links between the oppression of women and the degradation of the planet. The early ecofeminist movement was critiqued as essentialist and lacking intersectionality, but contemporary ecofeminism exposes, rejects and devises alternatives to the patriarchal, capitalist and colonialist binaries that construct, reproduce and justify the subjection of both nature and marginalized groups. While incorporating a diverse range of trends and orientations, this evolution of ecofeminist thought broadly centers on the premise that the domination and exploitation of women and nature is historically, materially and symbolically linked.

This bibliography was created by the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, as part of our Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet (FRSPP) project. The FRSPP focuses on the transnational economic actors and processes that tend to deepen the inequalities that underlie armed conflicts and to undermine the prospects for peace that is both politically and environmentally sustainable. Its goal is to provide: forward-looking expert knowledge of those processes; analyses of their impacts on gender relations and other structural inequalities underlying armed conflicts; and recommendations for how to engage and modify those processes to be more supportive of the societal transformations critical to building gender-equitable, sustainable peace. Topics addressed in the FRSPP include, inter alia: the economic recovery policy prescriptions of international financial institutions; extractive industries and natural resource policy; land rights, large scale land acquisition and land grabbing; infrastructure reconstruction; and climate disruption.