English Literature

1. Ecofeminism
Presented by –
Hinaba Sarvaiya

2. • Paper Name:- Contemporary Western Theories and
Film Studies
• Roll number:- 09
• Submission by:- Department of English, MKBU.
• Email id:- hinabasarvaiya1711@gmail.com

3. Ecofeminism
-Ecofeminism, also called ecological feminism, branch of feminism that examines the
connections between women and nature.
-Its name was coined by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974.
-Ecofeminism uses the basic feminist tenets of equality between genders, a revaluing of
non-patriarchal or nonlinear structures, and a view of the world that respects organic
processes, holistic connections, and the merits of intuition and collaboration.
-To these notions ecofeminism adds both a commitment to the environment and an
awareness of the associations made between women and nature.

4. Ecofeminism had Begun Two Distinct Schools
of thought:-
• Radical ecofeminism and Cultural ecofeminism.
• Radical ecofeminists contend that the dominant patriarchal society equates
nature and women in order to degrade both.
• Cultural ecofeminists, on the other hand, encourage an association between
women and the environment. They contend that women have a more
intimate relationship with nature because of their gender roles (e.g., family
nurturer and provider of food) and their biology (e.g., menstruation,
pregnancy, and lactation).

5. A Root of Ecofeminism:-
• Ecofeminism as a movement has indeed come into its own in the United
States in 1990s.
• Ecofeminist historians have most often given credit for its intellectual and
theoretical spadework to a Frenchwomen writing in the early 1970s.
• D’Eaubonne, coined the word ecofeminism.
• Ecofeminism involves activism as well as ideology and that both of these
aspects of Ecofeminism arose simultaneously worldwide.

6. D’Eaubonne Claimed...
“knows that today the two most immediate threats to survival are over
population and the destruction of our resources, fewer recognize the complete
responsibility of the male system, in so far as it is male in these two dangerous,
but even fewer still have discovered that each of the two threats is the logical
outcome of one of the two parallel discoveries which gave men their power
over fifty centuries ago. Their ability to plant the seed in the Earth as in women
and their participation in the act of reproduction”

7. Susan A. Mann ideas for ecofeminism:-
• How women of different classes and races addressed environment concerns
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their involvement
in the municipal housekeeping movement and early conservation/
preservation movement.
• She notes that most of these early nectionsbamong gender, class, and racial
oppression and environmental issues.
• Mann advocates that in reviewing our feminist history, we need to ensure
that the experiencesband contributions of marginalized people are included.

8. The Indian ecofeminist discourse:-
• Vandana Shiva, a prominent Indian ecofeminist thinker and activist. According to
Shiva, women and nature have an intricate and intimate relationship, as well as a
shared history on the grounds of a common experience of exploitation,
degradation, and domination by an androcentric attitude.
• The exploitation of nature, women are deprived of their main activity, inspiration
for creativity and sanctity of life, and they struggle to conserve their subsistence
base. In this context, Vandana Shiva gives the example of Chipko, the first epoch-
making movement, in which the women of the Garhwal district in the Himalayas
protested against the commercial felling of trees by hugging the trees; this
movement has gained much popularity and recognition worldwide.

9. • Agarwal (1992) is another representative of Indian ecofeminism, with a
perspective different from that of Shiva’s.
• According to Agrawal, women cannot be considered a homogeneous group,
differing on the basis of class, race, culture, and caste. She argues that gender
domination cannot be isolated as the sole cause of the degradation of
women and nature, without attending to the political, social, and economic
factors inherent in domination.

10. Conclusion:-
• Women as women have a special relationship with nature as ecofeminists
argue,is proved wrong when one analyses the various protest movements.
• Women’s interaction with nature and their responses to environmental
degradation must be analysed and located within the material reality of
gender, caste class and race- based division of labour, property and power.
• Women are victims of environmental degradation as well as active agents in
the regeneration and protection of the environment.

11. References:-
• Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Vandana Shiva". Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Nov.
2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vandana-Shiva. Accessed 6 October 2022.
• GATES, BARBARA T. “A Root of Ecofeminism: Ecoféminisme.” Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and Environment, vol. 3, no. 1, 1996, pp. 7–16. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/44085413. Accessed 5 Oct. 2022.
• Miles, Kathryn. "ecofeminism". Encyclopedia Britannica, 9 Oct. 2018,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/ecofeminism. Accessed 6 October 2022.
• Ropers-Huilman, Rebecca. “Editorial Introduction: Ecofeminism.” Feminist Formations, vol. 23,
no. 2, 2011, pp. Viii–xii. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41301653. Accessed 5 Oct. 2022.
• Sharnappa, Patil Sangita. “Reconstructing Ecofeminism: A Study of Kamala Markandaya’s
Nectar in a Sieve.” Cogent Social Sciences, vol. 2, no. 1, 2016, p. 1243772.,
https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2016.1243772.