Women

Citation:

Gaard, Greta. 2010. “New Directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17 (4): 643-65.

Author: Greta Gaard

Annotation:

Summary:
"In both Simon Estok’s provocative essay, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia” (2009), as well as Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic’s “The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism” (2009), we are offered two readings of ecocritical history, suggesting real or desired relations among various ecocritical perspectives. In these discussions, feminism is variously referenced—sometimes it is implied or addressed, other times it is backgrounded, omitted, or even distorted. Similarly, in the two book-length introductions to ecocriticism to date, Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005) and Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism (2004), the retelling of ecocritical roots and developments marginalizes both feminist and ecofeminist literary perspectives. Such presentations (and misrepresentations) of feminist scholarship by collegial ecocritics warn of a larger potential for misreading or omission by broader audiences, hence the importance of both correcting the historical record and actively contributing to the future of ecocriticism. In this essay, I would like to suggest at least seven new directions, or continued developments, for ecofeminist and feminist ecocritics" (Gaard 2010, 643).

Topics: Environment, Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Women, Race Regions: Americas Countries: United States of America

Year: 2010

Citation:

Diamond, Irene, and Gloria Feman Orenstein, eds. 1990. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Authors: Irene Diamond, Gloria Feman Orenstein

Annotation:

Summary:

Essays by leading ecofeminist scholars, poets, activists, spiritual teachers, and artists who envision a restoration of harmony in a global environment damaged by a devaluation of nature and women. Includes writings by poets, novelists, scholars, scientists, ecological activists, and spiritual teachers. Many were first presented at the conference "Ecofeminist perspectives : culture, nature and theory," held at the University of Southern California, in March 1987 (Summary from WorldCat).

Table of Contents:

Histories and Mysteries: In the Beginning 

1. Ecofeminism: Our Roots and Flowering
Charlene Spretnak 

2. How to Heal a Lobotomy
Brian Swimme 

3. The Gaia Tradition and the Partnership Future: An Ecofeminist Manifesto
Riane Eisler 

4. The Origins of God in the Blood of the Lamb 
Sally Abbott 

5. The Eleusinian Mysteries: Ancient Nature Religion of Demeter and Persephone 
Mara Lynn Keller 

6. The Woman I Love Is a Planet; The Planet I Love Is a Tree 
Paula Gunn Allen 

7. Rethinking Theology and Nature 
Carol P. Christ 

Reweaving the World: Reconnecting Politics and Ethics 

8. Power, Authority, and Mystery: Ecofeminism and Earth-based Spirituality 
Starhawk 

9. Curves Along the Road 
Susan Griffin 

10. Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory
Carolyn Merchant 

11. Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and the Nature/Culture Dualism 
Ynestra King 

12. Ecofeminism and the Politics of Resistance 
Lee Quinby 

13. Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology: Reflections on Identity and Discourse 
Marti Kheel 

14. Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism: The Emerging Dialogue 
Michael E. Zimmerman 

15. Searching for Common Ground: Ecofeminism and Bioregionalism 
Judith Plant 

Healing Ourselves: Healing the Planet 

16. Toward a Womanist Analysis of Birth 
Arisika Razak 

17. The Place of Women in Polluted Places 
Lin Nelson 

18. Development as a New Project 
Vandana Shiva 

19. Babies, Heroic Experts, and a Poisoned Earth 
Irene Diamond 

20. Goddess in the Metropolis: Reflections on the Sacred in an Urban Setting 
Irene Javors 

21. Women, Home, and Community: The Struggle in an Urban Environment 
Cynthia Hamilton 

22. The Evolution of an Ecofeminist 
Julia Scofield Russell 

23. Daughters of Growing Things 
Rachel L. Bagby 

24. Women Against Wasting the World: Notes on Eschatology and Ecology
Catherine Keller 

25. Perspective or Escape? Ecofeminist Musings on Contemporary Earth Imagery 
Yaakov Jerome Garb 

26. Artists as Healers: Envisioning Life-giving Culture 
Gloria Feman Orenstein 

Topics: Environment, Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Women

Year: 1990

Citation:

Clara, Evy. 2018. "Transformative Ecofeminism Movement in Empowering Indonesian Women." PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences 4 (2): 581-98. 

Author: Evy Clara

Abstract:

This research has a purpose to analyze Women’s Journal Foundation as an organization of women who performs the environmental movement and the empowerment of women (ecofeminism) through the Journal. This research used a critical paradigm, a qualitative approach and phenomenological designs. The research locations were held in Jakarta, Salatiga, and Klaten, and took time for 23 months (August 2013 - June 2015). The result showed that: (1) Women Journal Foundation was founded in 1995 by Gadis Arivia with the goal of advancing gender equality; (2) it initially lied on feminist ideology, a courage to build women’s awareness through women journals as the essential movement media; (3) instrument of Women Journal Foundation movement is Friends of Women Journal, performing financial strengthening while providing ecofeminism awareness, and raising ecofeminism in the practical level; and (4) the implications of the movement Women Journal Foundation are the growth of ecofeminism awareness that manifests itself into empowerment of women who care about garbage (Garbage Bank) in Salatiga and natural dye used for batik in Klaten.

Keywords: transformative ecofeminism movement, empowering, Indonesian women

Topics: Environment, Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality Regions: Asia, Southeast Asia Countries: Indonesia

Year: 2018

Citation:

Agarwal, Bina. 1998. “Environmental Management, Equity and Ecofeminism: Debating India’s Experience.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 25 (4): 55–95.

Author: Bina Agarwal

Abstract:

There is today a widespread recognition that for effectively managing local forests and commons, we need the active involvement of village communities. But what shape should community institutions for environmental management take? Many favour the revival or replication of traditional ones. But what would this imply for social equity? Indeed are even the newly emergent institutions challenging traditionally unequal social relations? While the issue of appropriate institutions for environmental management is still being debated, there is a striking absence of a gender perspective within the debate. This neglect of gender continues in the face of a substantial parallel literature (and movement) that has grown under the banner of ‘ecofeminism’. Why has ecofeminism failed to provide a corrective? To what extent can it so serve? It is argued here that rather than challenging traditional inequities and revivalist tendencies, the historical representations, premises and prescriptions of ecofeminism (especially its Indian variant) could, in specific contexts, strengthen institutions that entrench gender inequalities. The experience of environmental management institutions in India bear this out. To transform gender relations, and relations between people and nature, will need enhancing the bargaining power of women vis‐a‐vis men and of those seeking to conserve the environment vis‐a‐vis those causing its degradation. Although illustrated from India's experience, conceptually these arguments would have wider relevance. 

Topics: Environment, Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: India

Year: 1998

Citation:

Adams, Carol J. 1993. Ecofeminism and the Sacred. New York: Continuum. 

Author: Carol J. Adams

Annotation:

Summary:

This collection explores a wide variety of religious stances concerning how women affect and can be affected by ecology and spirituality. Through Ecofeminism and the Sacred (1994), Adams provides a valuable collection of works from key thinkers in an eclectic but important field (Summary from Science and Theology News).

Table of Contents:

1. Ecofeminism: Symbolic and Social Connections of the Oppression of Women and the Domination of Nature
Rosemary Radford Ruether

2. Sin, Nature, and Black Women's Bodies
Delores S. Williams

3. Talk about the Weather: the Greening of Eschatology
Catherine Keller

4. Tacting with Compassion: Buddhism, Feminism, and the Environmental Crisis
Stephanie Kaza

5. Feminist Judaism and Repair of the World
Judith Plaskow

6. An Earthly Theological Agenda
Sallie McFague

7. Ganga: Purity, Pollution, and Hinduism
Lina Gupta

8. A Feminist Philosophical Perspective on Ecofeminist Spiritualities
Karen J. Warren

9. Ecofeminist Consciousness and the Transforming Power of Symbols
L. Teal Willoughby

10. The Good Mother: From Gaia to Gilead
Ellen Cronan Rose

11. For all Those Who Were Indian in a Former Life
Andy Smith

12. Toward an Ecofeminist Ethic of Shamanism and the Sacred
Gloria Feman Orenstein

13. Ecology is a Sistah's Issue Too: the Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Ecowomanism
Shamara Shantu Riley

14. Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral: the Sacred Connection
Carol Lee Sanchez

15. Nuclear Power and the Sacred: or Why a Beautiful Woman is Like a Nuclear Power Plant
Jane Caputi

16. New Moon Over Roxbury: Reflections on Urban Life and the Land
Rebecca Johnson

17. Earthbody and Personal Body as Sacred
Charlene Spretnak

18. Natural Resources: a Conversation Between Byllye Avery and Mary E. Hunt

19. Taking Life or "Taking on Life"?: Table Talk and Animals
Carol J. Adams and Marjorie Procter-Smith

20. Ecofeminist Education: Adolescence, Activism, and Spirituality
Zoe Weil

Topics: Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Women, Religion

Year: 1993

Citation:

Anjum, Tasneem. 2020. “Ecofeminism: Exploitation of Women and Nature.” International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences 5 (4): 846-8.

Author: Tasneem Anjum

Abstract:

Ecofeminism fuses ecology and feminism into one and seeks to draw parallels between the exploitation of the environment and the exploitation of women. It believes that the earth is interconnected, and nature does not recognize human boundaries. It holds that one of the reasons for the destruction of the Earth is that patriarchy only values the masculine traits of conquering and dominance and devalues the ‘feminine’ traits of life-giving and nurturing. The patriarchal culture has been habitual to see women and nature as ‘objects’.

Keywords: environment, ecology, exploitation, feminism

Topics: Environment, Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Femininity/ies, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy

Year: 2020

Citation:

Strauss, Helene. 2020. “Energy Archives: Of Rocks, Rubbish, and Feminist Feeling in Aliki Saragas’s Strike a Rock.” Subjectivity 13 (4): 254–80. 

Author: Helene Strauss

Abstract:

Taking the film Strike a Rock (dir. Saragas 2017) as a case study, this paper attends to the affective charge of rocks and rubbish—in their material, symbolic, aesthetic and archival forms—as a feminist challenge to violent extractivism’s intergenerational echo. Set in Nkaneng, a township adjacent to the Lonmin Platinum mine in Marikana, where in 2012 the South African police opened fire on a group of striking miners, the film traces some of the means by which local women have been negotiating enduring forms of political and economic impasse in their communities. This paper tests an anthrodecentric approach to extractive capitalism’s historical exploitation of mineral, mechanical, muscular and psychic energies as a means to accelerating resistance to forms of violence at once human and ecological. It identifies in Strike a Rock’s documentary aesthetics an energy archive that animates resistant, regenerative political modalities of post-apartheid feminist affect.

Keywords: capitalism, extractives, resistance

Topics: Extractive Industries, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Infrastructure, Energy Regions: Africa, Southern Africa Countries: South Africa

Year: 2020

Citation:

Barragán Romano, Rossana. 2020. “Women in the Silver Mines of Potosí: Rethinking the History of ‘Informality’ and ‘Precarity’ (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries).” International Review of Social History 65 (2): 289–314. 

Author: Rossana Barragán Romano

Abstract:

Underground mining in Potosí was a male sphere. Nevertheless, women were actively involved in the early stages of silver mining in Potosí, when traditional technologies were still in use. They also played an important role in the local ore market. After the introduction of new technology and the reorganization of the labour force, the process of refining ore was much more complicated. Women then participated in some stages of the process: in selecting the ores and sieving. This implies that mining is a complex process with a labour and gender division that has been underrated and underestimated. More importantly, women became owners of rudimentary mills (trapiches) where the ore was processed, selling different amounts of silver to the Spanish authorities, making their living in this way.

Topics: Extractive Industries, Gender, Gender Roles, Women, Livelihoods Regions: Americas, South America Countries: Bolivia

Year: 2020

Citation:

Pérez de Perceval Verde, Miguel Á., Ángel Pascual Martínez Soto, and José Joaquín García Gómez. 2020. “Female Workers in the Spanish Mines, 1860–1936.” International Review of Social History 65 (2): 233–65. 

Authors: Miguel Á. Pérez de Perceval Verde, Ángel Pascual Martínez Soto, José Joaquín García Gómez

Abstract:

This article analyses female labour in Spanish mines during the golden age of the sector in Spain between 1860 and 1936. Although they were a small percentage of total employment, women accounted for a significant share of the workforce in certain Spanish districts. On the one hand, the study quantifies work performed directly by women, who were mostly engaged in preparation and concentration of the minerals, as well as the extent of female child labour. This has been done by using official statistics, analysing the share of women employed for each type of mineral extracted, the mining area where this activity took place, and other variables. In the article, the authors seek to identify possible causes of such a heterogeneous distribution of female labour in the mining industry in Spain. This situation was common in the sector throughout the world. On the other hand, the article analyses attitudes of institutions, unions, and the like that limited employment opportunities for women in mining (banning them from performing underground tasks and other activities) and even proposed excluding them altogether, responding to workers’ demands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We examine the objectives pursued by these institutions, which in some cases related to protection (physical and moral) of female workers but overall aimed mainly to preserve the social role of women (particularly reproduction) and exclude them from the workforce. The pressure on female workers was the most pronounced in the workplace. These factors gave rise to a global setback in female employment, especially among the youngest workers. Given this situation, the quantitative data used, together with information drawn from different sources, reveal that women resisted giving up these jobs, particularly in the districts with a larger share of female workers.

Topics: Extractive Industries, Gender, Gender Roles, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Hierarchies Regions: Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Spain

Year: 2020

Citation:

Tyagi, Niharika, and Smriti Das. 2020. “Standing up for Forest: A Case Study on Baiga Women’s Mobilization in Community Governed Forests in Central India.” Ecological Economics 178 (November). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106812.

Authors: Niharika Tyagi, Smriti Das

Abstract:

The forest history in India is fraught with struggles between the forest dwelling communities and the state. While the state usurped power over forests, excluding the communities and privileging commercial interests; the alienation of communities from their own land and homes resulted in mobilization across different sites. The movement for protection of forest commons assumed significance through the decade of 1970s that saw the famous Chipko movement in Uttarakhand and other forms of resistance across the country. The demand upon the forests that had intensified with subsistence, commercial and urbanization pressures, further enhanced with pressures of globalization. The consequent environmental degradation and dispossession of the communities of their resources resulted in varieties of environmentalism. In the arena of environmental conflict, Central India has been a hotbed of contest with forcible evictions, increasing base of extractive industries and steady militarization. The tribal communities in Central India faced serious threat from a monolithic state as it prioritized ‘national development’ goals over social equity and environmental justice. Rooted in this inequity was widespread discontent and social mobilization across the forested landscape. The local mobilization in Baiga Chak area of Central India clearly marked recognition of their socio-cultural embeddedness in their natural setting, particularly forest. What was unique in this movement was the uprising of Baiga women to assert their rights over the forest contrary to their traditionally defined role. It gradually led to collectivization of demand for recognition of Baiga communities’ historical relationship and claims over forest resource. Using the framework of Feminist Political Ecology, this paper examines Baiga women’s movement against Forest Department’s unlawful practices in Baiga Chak region of Central India. Using a case-based approach, the paper addresses the following questions: What factors led to the feminized grassroots environmental movement? How have women’s bargaining power and gender relations evolved at the local level consequently? What effect does women’s resistance have on community governed forest systems? In response to state usurpation that threatened the livelihood and household well-being, Baiga women collectively struggled to regain control over local forest resources. The analysis of this gendered environmental movement establishes an intersection between local structural, economic and ecological concerns and signals possibility of several gendered social movements in contested resource geographies.

Keywords: women's movements, feminist political ecology, gender roles and relations, forest commons

Topics: Environment, Extractive Industries, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Gender Roles, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Indigenous, Land Grabbing, Livelihoods, Rights, Indigenous Rights, Land Rights Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: India

Year: 2020