Should we rethink or retire the nature/culture binary? Material ecofeminism,essentialism and coloniality

Abstract

From the moment the material turn was launched as a new style of thought in feminist theory, it has offered itself as a highly pertinent rethinking and transgression of several deep-seated habits of thought in that domain. Above all, in and through its injunction to ‘take matter seriously’, it has called for a deeper exploration and affirmation of the corporeality of the (human) body that does not reduce it merely to a passive inscriptive surface for cultural norms. Hearkening back to the tradition of ecofeminism that developed throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the shadow of a constructivist orthodoxy writing it off as hopelessly (gender) essentialist, material feminism has also called for an ethico-political, decolonial awakening to the more-than-human world comprising non-human animals and environments. Emphatically endorsing these two tenets of material ecofeminism, this article nevertheless – or rather, on that account – takes issue with the notion that material feminists are under an obligation to ‘rethink’ and ‘transvalue’ nature and to transgress the so-called nature/culture binary that previous generations of feminist thought are routinely criticized for having bought into. Taking its point of departure the widespread acknowledgement that this whole conceptual apparatus is deeply embedded in the history of European colonialism, the article proposes retirement rather than rethinking as the treatment most appropriate to it and shows how the core tenets of material ecofeminism could be clarified and enhanced in virtue of such treatment. The strategy proposed consists, first, in an elucidation of the heterogeneous issues at stake in what has unhelpfully been described as a ‘flight from nature’ in traditional feminism. In addition, it draws on canonical ecofeminist sources suggesting that the very idea of ‘nature’ as a domain of phenomena to be addressed in environmentalist thought and practice is itself part of the problem to be addressed.

Introduction

At the moment of its emergence, the so-called material turn in feminist theory was indeed a veritable turn in several important respects. ¹ To begin with, the then-dominant paradigm of feminist analysis – social constructivism in various forms – was challenged for its failure to address the ways in which the very materiality of the living/lived body is implicated in all the regimes of normative ‘construction’ or ‘inscription’ to which it is supposedly subjected. Language and discourse had been granted too much power too long, as Karen Barad put it (2003: 801), and now it was high time we began asking ‘not only how human bodily contours are constituted through psychic processes but how even the very atoms that make up the biological body come to matter, how matter makes itself felt’, lest we ‘cheat matter out of the fullness of its capacity’ (810). Added to this reorientation ‘downwards’ towards the material world, there was also a reorientation horizontally towards certain other ‘others’ who had been given short shrift by the constructivist orthodoxy, particularly non-human animals and environments. Citing and echoing earlier ecofeminist work (such as by Val Plumwood and Catriona Sandilands), the editors of the Material Feminisms anthology (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008a) insist that (hetero)sexist, racist, ableist and colonial regimes of oppression and exploitation are structurally interlinked with the violence against non-human animals and environmental devastation perpetrated under global predatory industrialism, which therefore have to be addressed and resisted together (cf. also Alaimo, 2008; Haraway, 2008, 2016; Tuana 2008). For many of these scholars, then, the material turn had to include an ecological turn. From this point of view, to be a material feminist – that is, someone how ‘takes matter seriously’ (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008a: 6) – is to be a material ecofeminist, that is, someone committed to building and protecting livable worlds for both human and non-human Earth-dwellers of multiple kinds and who is attentive to the material forces conducive to or endangering such worlds. ²

In at least one key respect, however, the material turn has remained loyal to the tradition of thought it so adamantly claims to supplant, namely in its preoccupation with the nature/culture distinction. That is, the ceremonious castigation of previous generations of feminist theory for their failure to ‘transgress the nature/culture division’ has typically served as a lead-up to the proposal that we need to ‘rethink’ or ‘rework’ that very conceptual apparatus. When Barad (2003), for example, claims that we must abandon the belief that ‘nature is (. . .) a passive surface awaiting the mark of culture’ or that ‘nature is mute and immutable and that all prospects for significance and change reside in culture’, lest we ‘reinscribe the nature-culture dualism that feminists have actively contested’ (p. 827), it seems that it is merely the content of these terms and the logic of their interrelation, not the nature/culture vocabulary itself, that is hereby contested. It is thus implied that the nature/culture distinction can and should be reworked with a different construal of the terms and their interrelation (e.g. nature as active, signifying and dynamic in a non-dualist relation with culture). The same goes for the Material Feminisms editorial team: The conclusion to be drawn from the sobering histories of (hetero)sexism, racism, colonialism, animal cruelty and environmental devastation to which the nature/culture dualism is privy, Alaimo and Hekman (2008a: 4, 12) suggest that ‘nature itself’ must be thoroughly ‘reconceptualized’ and ‘transvalued’. In this, they echo Haraway’s (1992) tragic concession that, ‘excruciatingly conscious’ of its rootedness in historical violence of such proportions, ‘we nonetheless find in this problematic, ethno-specific, long-lived, and mobile concept [of nature] something we cannot do without, but can never “have”’ (Haraway, 1992: 296). Angela Willey’s (2017: 139) remark that ‘[f]rom Beauvoir to Butler, and now in new materialisms, the nature/culture opposition has served as a central analytic and problematic for feminist theory’ therefore seems an apt characterization of the state of the discourse on this front. ³

In this article, I contend that such attempts to rethink the nature/culture conceptuality beyond its (hetero)sexist, colonialist and industrial-predatory horizons may be a less effective strategy for pursing material ecofeminism’s goals – a materially robust anti-essentialism about (human) corporeality and a resolutely anti-colonialist approach to the animal and environmental crises of the Earth – than simply retiring it. By this term, I intend the act of putting something out of work. What I am suggesting more specifically regarding the nature/culture vocabulary is to retire it, not from everyday usage (as in ‘the nature of the case’, ‘consumer culture’ and the like) – which would be a pursuit as hopeless as it would be pointless – but from theoretical usage, that is, as terms for some purported ontological domains of objects, beings, states, qualities and processes operating according to principles or forces of some sort or other, which is how they are effectively used in contemporary calls for a rethinking of nature and a reworking of the nature/culture division. If the very concept of nature – along with its distinction (in one form or other) from culture – has indeed such an awful track record as an ideological prop in ‘the histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and class domination of many kinds’ (Haraway, 1992: 296) as is customarily claimed, one would need strong reasons indeed for continuing to use, in one’s theoretical work, these terms in one’s attempt to come to grips with such histories if one could help it. As I aim to show in what follows, Haraway’s judgement on this front – that ‘we’ (presumably, we Western academics of a certain leftist-progressive political persuasion) see in the concept of nature something we cannot help desiring, albeit fruitlessly – is not entirely borne out, at least not regarding the central tasks to which material ecofeminism is devoted. That is, not only is it possible to pursue those objectives meaningfully short of any attempt to rethink ‘nature’ and ‘culture’; retiring rather than rethinking such concepts might even be of aid in that pursuit.

My argument for these claims proceeds as follows. In general, I try to show how claims about which ways of relating to nature are regressive and destructive (of which nature/culture dualism is the paradigmatic one), and which may open more hopeful futures, can profitably be parsed and rephrased in more concrete terms that vitiate the need to invoke the nature/culture vocabulary. When the issues at stake have thus been more precisely formulated, we also get a clearer sense of just how material ecofeminism has been and continues to be a timely challenge to outmoded, Eurocentric and colonialist habits of thinking. In the first section, I try to show this with respect to the long-standing battle in feminist theory against essentialism and other (hetero)sexist and racist modes of thinking about gender. On this front, according to Stacy Alaimo (2000, 2008) and many others advocating the material turn, constructivist-leaning feminists have pursued an ultimately self-undermining ‘flight from nature’, thus implying that a new approach to nature is needed. I respond to such claims by pointing out the heterogeneous senses in which those traditional (including postmodern) feminists are thus said to flee from ‘nature’, indicating a heterogeneity in the sorts of materialist countermoves that may be called for in these regards. Second, I take up the issue of ‘nature’ in the sense at stake in environmental and animal welfare activism – which is a sense quite different from the ones in which traditional feminists were said to ‘flee nature’. On this front, I turn to and draw on ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s (1993) canonical analysis of the dualist logic of colonial mastery and exploitation (whether of human or non-human others), emphasizing her point about the role of homogenization in this logic and expanding on her own remark in passing that the very term ‘nature’ partakes in that logic (70). Again, the lesson to be learned is the importance of acknowledging heterogeneity, which in turn may attune us to the concreteness of the beings, places and environments that so direly requires our caring attention – in line with the foregrounding of the ethics of care in material ecofeminism (cf. Adams and Gruen, 2022: 39–42).

Is gene to environment as animal is to human?

As already noted, the material-ecofeminist call to ‘rethink’ nature, culture and their interrelation is typically advanced as the conclusion to a critical review of previous generations of feminist theory in which their typical approach to such foundational concepts and issues have been found lacking. Emblematic and forceful in this regard is Stacy Alaimo’s (2000, 2008) suggestion that mainline feminism has historically pursued a ‘flight from nature’ that now must be abolished in favour of a more affirmative and explorative approach, a claim I should now like to consider in more detail.

In her recounting of feminism’s long struggle with ‘the historically tenacious entanglements of “woman” and “nature”’, Alaimo (2000: 2–13) explains how those entanglements involve two senses of nature ‘converg[ing] at the site of woman, fixing her in a vortex of circular arguments’ (3). On one hand, as proposed by Sherry Ortner (1974) in her classic paper ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’, there is the idea – supposedly shared by all cultures, past and present – of woman’s ‘proximity to nature’ which, when combined with the devaluation of nature in relation to culture (perceived as an eminently masculine order), yields the practice of devaluing women. On the other hand, however – ‘in a dauntingly impermeable formulation’ (Alaimo, 2000: 2) – the inferior status symbolically encoded in this woman/nature association is treated as but an outcome of the inexorable workings of ‘nature’. Woman being thus defined as that which is ‘mired in “nature’’’, Alaimo (2000) finds little reason to wonder why feminist theorists have struggled so hard to ‘extricate her from this quicksand’ (p. 4). That is, she finds it understandable that feminist theorists have wanted (like Ortner) to transfer women from the debased category of nature into the elevated one of culture and insisted (like Astell, Wollstonecraft and Beauvoir) that ‘nurture, not nature, created woman as she is’ (4–5). Such moves are understandable but, in Alaimo’s view, counterproductive in so far as they aim at little more than just keeping nature at bay, ‘repelled – rather than redefined’ (Alaimo, 2000: 4). Until a serious attempt is made to redefine nature and, by the same token, to question the nature/culture dichotomy always invoked even in the most brilliant social-constructivist accounts, the misogynist conception of nature ‘remains dangerously intact’ and reconfirmed as ‘the repository of essentialism and stasis’ (6). The solution proposed by Alaimo, then – one she would later (as co-editor of Material Feminisms) reaffirm as a central task for material ecofeminism – is to ‘redefin[e] nature itself’ and, in so doing, to ‘[d]isrupt the opposition between nature and culture’ (10).

Given Alaimo’s diagnosis of the problem inherited from traditional feminisms, her recommended solution goes almost without saying. Yet her very diagnosis hints at nuances that make that solution seem less plausible, calling instead for an approach that skips the detour around reconsiderations of ‘nature itself’ while, nevertheless, remaining in line with core material-feminist tenets. The clue to this alternative approach is found in Alaimo’s (2000) reference to ‘[t]he dual meanings of nature converging at the site of woman’ (p. 3), that is, to two senses in which ‘nature’ has greatly preoccupied both feminists and anti-feminists in arguments about female inferiority. Once we get this duality of meanings more clearly in view, we can also see that there is no circularity involved in invoking both senses in one and the same anti-feminist argument, nor is the latter undermined by a redefinition of ‘nature itself’. Instead, what we have on our hands are two independently contestable premises that we need to take a stand on independently, because they relate to two logically heterogeneous issues. ⁴

Rejecting versus reclaiming human animality

The first sense of nature involved in Alaimo’s diagnosis of mainstream feminism’s ‘flight from nature’ is hinted at in her referencing of Ortner’s (1974) analysis of patriarchal ideology as the belief that woman is somehow ‘closer to nature’ than is man, paired with a hope for a future in which woman is ‘aligned with culture’ on a par with men. By Ortner’s (1974) own lights, she’s here concerned with ‘“nature” in the most generalized sense’ as the entity that fits the description as ‘[that which] every culture devalues, something that every culture defines as being of a lower order of existence than itself’ (p. 72). On a closer look, however, it is clear that she has something more specific in mind and that the order of existence supposedly devalued by every culture is that of animals, as opposed to that of humans. This comes out in Ortner’s proposed explanation for why woman is seen as closer to nature, as I will now try to show in somewhat more detail.

To begin with, Ortner (1974: 74–76) cites, expounds at length and endorses Beauvoir’s controversial thesis, in The Second Sex, that woman is (to a much higher degree than man) ‘enslaved by the species’ (de Beauvoir, 2011: 268) in virtue of such reproductive functions – purportedly exclusive to ‘females’ – as monthly cycles, pregnancy, childbirth and lactation. On account of such features, according to Beauvoir (seconded by Ortner), ‘[woman’s] animality is more manifest’ (de Beauvoir, 2011: 268); she appears ‘riveted to her body, like an animal’ (75). According to Beauvoir (again seconded by Ortner), the constant cycle of pregnancies and births fatefully assigned to prehistoric woman the role as the sex that brings forth life; this made for a stark contrast to the hunting and warring males, who could claim for themselves the exclusive rank as those who risk life for the sake of a higher good (e.g. the prosperity or prestige of the horde), hence as those who ensured the metaphysically charged leap by which ‘man raises himself above the animal’ (de Beauvoir, 2011: 74). The same reproductive functions that supposedly rivet woman to her body like an animal (more clearly than in the case of men, at any rate) also ‘naturally’ rivet her to the company of certain creatures – children – who are more like animals than proper humans: ‘like animals they are unable to walk upright, they excrete without control, they do not speak’ (78). Finally, regarding woman’s psychology, Ortner suggests that culture might be seeing the ‘relatively unmediated, more direct’ style of woman’s relationships as ‘more “like nature”’ than man, who ‘often relates more consistently and strongly to the mediating categories and forms than to the persons or objects themselves’ (82). This consideration, it seems to me, again assumes an interpretation of ‘nature’ as animality, insofar as being ‘immanent and embedded in things as given’ (82) would seem to describe the animal mode of immersion in an environment, as assessed from a complacently human point of view. The features cited by Ortner as the source of the cultural (mis)perception of woman as somehow being ‘closer to nature’ thus seem to suggest the idea that the true ideological core of patriarchy is the notion of woman’s special ties to animality.

On a closer analysis of Ortner’s epochal analysis of patriarchal ideology, then, the underlying theme of this analysis is not woman’s positioning with respect to some generalized nature/culture opposition, but rather the more specific human/animal opposition. In this regard, Ortner takes up and carries along a humanist, ethnocentrically European philosophical anthropology that positions the human as in some way ‘above’ – hence as more dignified and deserving of more respect than – the animal. In terms of such a humanism, Ortner’s feminist hope for a future in which ‘women [are] seen as aligned with culture’ becomes an appeal to a universal recognition of women’s humanity – that is, of woman’s entitlement to be seen as something more than a ‘mere animal’. In effect, it would be much more to the point to say of this strand of feminist theory that it has been engaged in a flight from animality rather than in one from nature. Putting the matter this way allows us to see more clearly in what way material ecofeminism is a timely challenge to this line of thinking and why it is not about rethinking and transvaluating ‘nature’.

To start with, it is a matter of embracing the Darwinian insight that all human beings are (and remain), in the final analysis, animals of a certain type (namely, a certain species of primate), hence that any difference that may obtain between humans and other types of animals one might want to compare them with is a difference of degree in some respect and not of kind. This is an eminently materialist move in so far as it acknowledges that the reign of material forces – so clearly manifest and acutely felt in the worlds of animals generally – does not end at the doors of humanity (no matter how much we might believe ourselves exempt from it). Taking the animality of humanity seriously is quite simply to take matter seriously in our theorizing about issues of more immediate concern, such as the workings of power in social reality (Frost, 2016; Grosz, 2011). In line with the strong focus on animal cruelty in contemporary ecofeminism (cf. Adams and Gruen, 2022), moreover, this also suggests that a life lived in and with dignity is something that is due to us in virtue of being animals of a certain kind, not in virtue of being something more or other than animals (cf. Crary and Gruen, 2022). As disability scholar and animal rights advocate Sunaura Taylor (2017) has pointed out apropos her own case as a disabled person, this may apply just as well to non-normatively embodied subjects, who may find an unexpected source of dignity and connection in and through an affirmatively reclaimed animality (115).

How well such efforts to reintegrate animality in our conception of humanity speak to decolonization and anti-racist concerns is still, however, an open question. As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2020) has argued (drawing critically, as a Black feminist scholar, on a predominantly white Anglo-American body of material-feminist and posthumanist theory, including that of Barad), current scholarship on the human/animal binarism has tended to push a one-sided narrative according to which ‘race is a by-product of prior negation of nonhuman animals’ (12). Her own account, by contrast, seeks to show that ‘the categories of “race” and “species” have coevolved and are actually mutually reinforcing terms’ (12), and that ‘racialized formations of gender and sexuality are actually central rather than subsidiary to the very human-animal binarism recent scholarship seeks to dislodge’ (14). Jackson unearths the tightly interwoven co-constitution of the notions of ‘humanity’, ‘animality’ and ‘blackness’ in the modern European world largely as a legacy of the American institution of slavery, in and through which the black person came to embody the zone of plasticity mediating between ‘animal’ and ‘human’ on account of being subjected to the arbitrary power of the slave-holder. ‘“The animal” as symbol, as trope, as locus of possibility’, Jackson argues in effect, ‘must be rethought and transformed’ (53). My point is not that the effort to dislodge the human/animal binarism has no problematic assumptions that need to be scrutinized. Rather, it is that it moves us closer to the heart of a matter to be resolved than further brooding over the nature/culture binarism and how to disrupt it.

Genetic versus social–environmental determinism

The second sense of ‘nature’ in which mainline feminism has been claimed to flee from nature is hinted at by another reference in Alaimo’s diagnosis, namely Gayle Rubin’s (1975) The Traffic in Women. In a key passage of this work, Rubin hypothesizes that the (en)gendering of men and women as, respectively, masculine and feminine must be occurring through something like a culturally sanctioned repression of personality traits that are cross-sexually equipotential to begin with:

Far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities. It requires repression: in men, of whatever is the local version of ‘feminine’ traits; in women, of the local definition of ‘masculine’ traits. (Rubin, 1975: 180)

The sort of question addressed by Rubin here is that of why, in the course of ontogenetic development, some individuals turn out different (or similar) to certain other comparable individuals in some trait(s) of interest (gender identity, in Rubin’s case); more specifically, whether the trait in question is innate or acquired – a question fatefully designated in mainstream discourse as the ‘nature vs nurture’ issue. With respect to how such a trait as ‘exclusive gender identity’ develops, Rubin seeks to depose the conventionally innatist story according to which it is due primarily to developmental factors present inside the individual at birth (e.g. DNA sequences, gonads, brain circuitry, etc.). In its place, she – like the bulk of feminist theorists both before and after her – proposes a social–environmental story according to which the direction in which the trait develops is determined largely by factors present in the individual’s (social) environment (e.g. restrictive gender norms).

Now, in so far as Rubin’s social–environmental story amounts to a straight-up denial that genetic factors play any significant role in the development of (exclusive) gender identity, it is clearly at odds with the material-feminist tenet of taking matter seriously, given that genetic factors are material factors no less than social–environmental ones. As several scholars associated with the material turn have indicated (cf. Hird, 2004: 43–49; Frost, 2016: 23–24; Roy, 2018: 102–103), the properly material-feminist challenge to the social–environmental story is not a return to the innatism the latter sought to refute, but rather some version or other of developmental systems theory. As explained by Susan Oyama (2000: 96–114), this theory argues that the developmental process cannot be factored into two major sources of causal influence on the developmental outcome – genes and environment – each producing its effects independently of and merely adding itself to those of the other. Rather, the way any given developmental factor operates at a given stage in the life cycle of an individual is modulated by the way other such factors operate. In effect, the question as to how much is down to genes and how much is down to the environment in the development of a given trait no longer makes any sense (cf. Keller, 2010: 9). Instead, we are left with more sensible and ultimately empirical questions, helpfully explained by Evelyn Fox Keller (2010) thus:

[T]o what extent is any given trait (more or less) fixed at particular points in development? ‘More or less’ is crucial here, especially for behavioral traits, for we now know that almost nothing in the brain is totally fixed at any point of development, although heroic efforts may be required to produce change. So perhaps we should rephrase the nature-nurture question, and ask, instead, how malleable is a given trait, at a specified developmental age? (Keller, 2010: 75)

There certainly are resonances between the effort to reintegrate animality into our understanding of the human and the systems-theoretical approach to developmental biology suggested by Oyama, Keller and others. But these issues – that is, of how to conceive of the place of animality in human existence on one hand, and how to conceive of gene/environment interactions in ontogenetic processes on the other – are logically heterogeneous with respect to one another. Hence, the progress that has been made on them so far has been made by acknowledging that heterogeneity, not by any attempt to rethink or transvalue ‘nature itself’. ⁵

Is nature an ecofeminist issue?

In the preceding analysis, I showed that what is at issue in cases ceremonially cited as instances of mainstream feminism’s long-standing ‘flight from nature’ is no such thing: Nature is not what has been at issue, but rather two logically heterogeneous, much more specific issues, at least one of which is partly subject to empirical adjudication, and in relation to which it becomes much clearer how the material turn amounts to a fresh intervention in the discourse. Such considerations, I claim, warrant the conclusion that we should retire rather than go on trying to rethink the concept of nature (and its associated distinction with that of culture). It remains, however – as indicated in the introduction – that the most considered vision for the material turn in feminist theory is the one that seeks a revival of ecofeminism and works to reintegrate the latter’s concerns and style of thinking into the material-feminist outlook, in effect working towards a material ecofeminism. According to a prominent scholar of ecofeminist philosophy, if one were to coin a phrase that may serve as a slogan for ecofeminism, it would probably be ‘Nature is a feminist issue’ (Warren, 2000: ch. 1; 2015). From this perspective, an ecofeminism that retires the concept of nature – an ecofeminism without nature – would seem almost a contradiction in terms (cf. Alaimo, 1998). How, then, could a material ecofeminism that no longer bothers with the concept of nature or the nature/culture distinction be made to cohere with this seemingly indispensable tenet of ecofeminism?

My proposed response to this challenge draws on two considerations, ⁶ one of which is a rather trivial point while the other engages deeper questions. The trivial point takes its point of departure in the fact that, in Karen Warren’s own understanding of the slogan for ecofeminism, the term ‘nature’ means ‘animals, plants and ecosystems’ (Warren, 2000: 1) and can be used interchangeably with ‘the environment’ (Warren, 2015). In other words, she’s not here concerned with nature in the sense of whatever properties humans have in common with other animals (or whatever it is about other animals that makes for a difference with humans), nor with nature in the sense of developmental factors present within an individual at the time of its birth as opposed to those present in its environment (to link up with the discussion above). Rather, she’s concerned with what Kate Soper – another ecofeminist philosopher – calls nature in the ‘lay’ sense of ‘a domain of observable phenomena and directly tangible forms’ (Soper, 1995: 180), such as various types of landscape and habitat with their flora and fauna. It is nature in this sense that is invoked in environmentalist struggles, namely ‘the nature we love and revere, by which we are inspired, and with which we commune . . . the nature we have lost, polluted and destroyed, and which we are ever more insistently enjoined by the ecologists to conserve or preserve’ (Soper, 1995: 180). Not least, this is ‘nature’ in the same sense that ‘we’ have always – although, for the most part, fruitlessly – been insistently enjoined by Indigenous peoples to conserve or preserve, out of respect for sacred sites, concern for the ecological health of the land on which both native and non-native communities depend, and the sense that it is simply part of basic decency to treat the land we inhabit and live from, not (merely) as property (the only mode in which modern states recognize land) but as a partner in a two-way give-and-take relationship (Gilio-Whitaker, 2019: esp. ch. 7).

What we are enjoined to conserve and preserve in such appeals, then, is not ‘nature’ in some generic sense or some parts of ‘the natural world’. ‘Nature’ is not a genuine addressee for our efforts at conservation and preservation, as it is not something we can genuinely claim to care about, and this is because, as Tim Ingold (1996) so succinctly puts it, ‘a world can only be “nature” for a being that does not belong there’ (p. 93). In other words, a world (or, as one might also put it, an environment) can show up as ‘nature’ only for a being who withdraws from it in order to intellectually abstract from its concrete and variegated sensible properties so as to contemplate some mysterious ‘essence’. It seems much more to the point to call attention instead to the kind of place whose integrity is under threat in the given case, such as a mountain, a valley, a plain, a forest, a wetland, a river, a coral reef and so on, as well as to the communities of inhabitants living, reproducing and flourishing in such places. To care for such environments, and ultimately for the Earth itself (the environment of any environment in which life as we know it is livable in any real sense), we need to be present there through our senses, affects and imagination, responding and resonating with our animal bodies to the concrete modes and rhythms of existence that are found there. In this regard, trying to ‘rethink’ and ‘transvalue’ an intellectual abstraction – and an ethnocentrically European one at that – like ‘nature’ begins to look more and more like a red herring.

A related, yet deeper consideration in favour of the same conclusion takes its point of departure in a line of thought developed by Val Plumwood (1993) in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, one that more directly connects the preceding remarks with the issue of coloniality. In this ecofeminist classic, Plumwood proposes an analysis of dualist thought as ‘the logic of colonization’, according to which dualism – including the colonial dualism of humanity versus nature – consists in five operations performed on the subordinate term in a dichotomous pair: backgrounding, radical exclusion, incorporation, instrumentalization and homogenization (Plumwood, 1993: 47–55). Regarding homogenization, Plumwood offers a lively illustration referencing nationalist discourse prevalent in Australia during her adolescence:

I well remember homogenisation as an Australian teenager of English-speaking background in the post-war years. It was part of the contempt with which non-English ‘foreign’ immigrants were treated. Their differences denied, they were all dismissed as ‘aliens’, ‘wogs’, or ‘reffos’ (refugees); the multiplicity and dignity of their cultures and languages ignored, they were seen as ‘just jabbering away’, much like animals [sic!]. (Plumwood, 1993: 53)

Following Nancy Hartsock, Plumwood argues that homogenization ‘is a feature of the master’s perspective’, from which differences among members of the subordinated group count for nothing and are preferably left out of the picture, as they would threaten the superiority-bolstering stereotypes: ‘To the master, all the rest are just that: “the rest”, the Others, the background to his achievements and the resources for his needs’ (Plumwood, 1993: 54). In a later chapter, Plumwood (1993) brings this analysis to bear on the ‘nature’ part of the humanity/nature dualism: ‘The term “nature” itself partakes of all these problems, homogenising in the sweep of the “the rest” things as diverse as seals, waves and rocks, oysters and clouds, forests, viruses and eagles’ (p. 70).

To my mind, this last remark is a strong recommendation against further reliance on the term ‘nature’ to do theoretical ecofeminist work, if it can be avoided (which I believe it can, as already suggested) – even though it was ultimately not the path followed by Plumwood herself. To homogenize (in thought, talk and practice) as ‘nature’ that whole multiplicity of lifeforms and their respective habitats that we so urgently need to engage with – affectively, ethically, politically and otherwise – is not only implicitly to assert one’s non-belongingness to the world one confronts (as Ingold reminds us): It is also to discount the dignity, integrity and consideration due to such diverse beings and places and to assert one’s own unilateral right to dominate and exploit them. This is the very stance towards both human and non-human others that has made the history of modern Europe and of the West more generally one of continuing colonial conquests. If this analysis has anything going for it, the prospects of coming to terms with that history might look better once we abandon the still ongoing attempt to salvage the nature/culture conceptuality by rethinking it and instead retire it altogether.

Conclusion

I have tried to defend a material ecofeminism that no longer has any need to ‘rethink’ or ‘transvalue’ either (the concept of) nature or its supposed (conceptual) distinction from culture, but that rather retires that whole conceptual apparatus – and even ends up better off for it. In defence of this claim, I have marshalled two main sorts of considerations. First, the much-touted story of traditional feminism’s ‘flight from nature’ and of material feminism’s entry on the scene as an effort at disrupting traditional nature/culture binarisms by ‘rethinking’ and ‘transvaluing’ nature ends up, ironically, hiding from view the real issues at stake. When we follow the references provided in that story (by Stacy Alaimo), we see that the material-feminist challenge to traditional feminism is both much more nuanced and more decisive than the ‘rethink nature’ narrative makes of it. On one hand, it is a matter of eschewing metaphysical dualisms of human versus animal assumed as axiomatic in traditional feminisms, through a systematic effort at reintegrating animality in our understanding of humanity. On the other hand, it is a matter of eschewing developmental dualisms of innate versus acquired assumed by traditional feminisms in their one-sidedly social–environmental understanding of how such a trait as (exclusive) gender identity is developed, by rethinking the ‘interaction’ part of so-called gene/environment interactions. There is no attempt here to rethink ‘nature’ and thereby to disrupt ‘nature/culture binaries’, nor is any such thing called for. Second, there are considerations derivable from ecofeminism – the other main pillar of material ecofeminism – that also suggest we should give up our attempt to ‘rethink’ and ‘transvalue’ nature. Seeing non-human beings, communities and habitats as ‘nature’ is to homogenize a diversity of others as ‘the rest of the world’ – a stance that has fuelled colonialist oppression and exploitation of non-human others on a par with human ones throughout European history. Perhaps our commitment to decolonize our relationship with those beings, communities and habitats may require of us that we stop seeing them as ‘nature’.