Ecofeminism

Ecofeminism is a social and political movement which points to the existence of considerable common ground between environmentalism and feminism, with some currents linking deep ecology and feminism. Ecofeminists argue that important experiential, theoretical, and linguistic parallels exist between the oppression and subordination of women and nature in Western cultural tradition through the transformation of differences into culturally constructed conceptual binaries and ideological hierarchies that allow a systematic justification of domination ("power-over power") by subjects classed into higher-ranking categories over objects classed into lower-ranking categories (e.g. man over woman, culture over nature). Beyond these nature/culture, male/female dualisms, ecofeminists posit that the Western cosmology dichotomizes all aspects of perceived reality; in examples without a cultural "opposite," the category "x" is split into "x" and "not-x" or the absence of "x." Ecofeminists also explore the intersectionality between sexism, the domination of nature, racism, speciesism, and other characteristics of social inequality. In some of their current work, ecofeminists argue that the capitalist and patriarchal systems that predominate throughout the world reveal a triple domination of the Global South (people who live in the Third World), women, and nature. This domination and exploitation of women, of poorly resourced peoples and of nature sits at the core of the ecofeminist analysis.