Month: January 2020

 

Looking at ecofeminism for the first time feels daunting.  For me, it was a strange amalgamation of two subjects I cared about, mixed with a bit of theological flavor.  Now that I’ve got a better grip on it, I think that an interesting way to begin understanding and looking at ecofeminism, is to look at the use of the word “exotic” when talking about women of color.  

Backing up, it’s important to establish the framework to reach the problematic conclusion with the word exotic In Warren’s Introduction to Ecofeminism, she breaks down eight ways to use ecofeminism to think critically.  One of these is “Symbolic Connects”, which is looking at symbols throughout culture and how they effect culture today.  Warren describes this by stating that “Documenting such connections and making them integral to the project of ecofeminism is often heralded as ecofeminism’s most promising contribution to the creation of liberating, life-affirming, and postpatriarchal worldviews and earth-based spiritualities or theologies.”  Looking at symbolism throughout history, when considering spiritualities and theologies, exotic is typically used to describe something foreign and gaudy.  Considering this quote and the word exotic, we can move into analyzing the problem.

Looking at Autumn Whitefield-Madrano’s blog, Thoughts On A Word: Exotic, Autumn writes a fairly freeform piece about the word exotic, and how the way that the word is used is problematic when describing women.  She states, “The shift of exotic from describing costume to describing skin color and features runs roughly parallel to women’s shifting roles in America. If the beauty myth rose to make sure that newly liberated women didn’t get too much actual power and were left pecking around for crumbs, the use of exotic morphed to make sure that women of color didn’t tap into their share of the crumbs.”  The way that the word exotic has been morphed into a misogynistic and racist way to harass women is clearly an issue, but not one I can identify with some of the more traditional feminist schools of thought, which is where ecofemisinism comes in.  

Finally, we can use ecofeminism to analyze the word exotic, and other types of racist labels, as seen in Hobgood-Oster’s Ecofeminism: Historic and International Evolution.   “By confronting systems of patriarchy, ecofeminism broadens the scope of the cultural critique and incorporates seemingly disparate but, according to ecofeminism, radically connected elements. Combining feminist and deep ecological perspectives — in and of themselves extremely varied ways of thinking about reality — is a complex, transgressive process that is often in flux.”  (pg 2) The important phrase here is “cultural critique”, as the blog explained, the word exotic is a product of culture and historical context, so using ecofeminism’s cultural critique, we can identify these root problems to understand why the word exotic is problematic.  

Ecofeminism is a valuable part of feminism that allows for a different form of analysis than other branches of feminism, through understanding critiques rooted in unconventional ideologies.