Curiosity and Imagination in a Patriarchal World

Rosemary Radford Ruether is a curious feminist. Indeed, her slim volume, Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions, demonstrates curiosity about, and insight into, an impressive array of theories, ethics, religious and spiritual worldviews, and resistance movements. Hers is a sweeping analysis of the theory and theology of ecofeminism, and the ways and extent to which major world religions have addressed both global ecology and gender politics. For Ruether, these are valuable resources to mine in the struggle against what she calls "corporate globalization" (ix). While her vision of this struggle affords an important role to resistance and movement politics, these must be guided by alternative spiritual and social visions, which can help us to "reimagine" a new global society (160). By contrast, while Ruether focuses on the big picture, Cynthia Enloe's latest book, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, seeks to remind us, yet again, of the need to be curious about the details, the everyday, and the mundane. Indeed, we even need to be curious about our lack of curiosity, because that can help us to understand why power structures—including capitalism, racism, militarism, imperialism and, importantly, patriarchy—are so often seen as unproblematic. Unlike Ruether's tightly organized analysis, The Curious Feminist is a collection of previously published and new work that includes articles and book chapters, interviews and, delightfully, poetic reflections. For those already familiar with her work, this volume reminds us why we need to reread Enloe often; for new readers, it offers a highly readable introduction to the ideas of a path-breaking scholar.

Although radically different in their feminist starting points and their styles of analysis, both of these books force their readers to confront the grim realities of contemporary global politics, and the often-daunting challenges feminists face. Specifically, Ruether and Enloe demonstrate that although new threats have arisen recently, old ones have not gone away. For decades, feminists have been insisting that environmental degradation, militarism, and economic "restructuring"—global problems with gendered faces—are products of masculinist and patriarchal worldviews. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, feminists must not only continue to face these challenges, but they must do so in a context of heightened insecurity for women worldwide. While neoliberal ideology continues to threaten women's economic security, the "world fundamentalist backlash" against "modernization" uses women as symbols and pawns, reinstating strict patriarchal norms for family and society (Ruether, 27). Meanwhile, the growth of this fundamentalism in Islamist societies, and the terrorism associated with it, has led to massive remilitarization; U.S. military expansion, moreover, is at the heart of the new American imperialism, characterized by what Ruether calls, in no uncertain terms, "American apocalyptic messianic nationalism" (x). This new imperialism, however, shares many features with old imperialism, including the importance of masculinity as an "essential tool" wielded in the "many-pronged process of empire-building" (Enloe, 304).

Neither of these books is interested in celebrating the advances made by women or the inroads made by feminism. On the contrary, the overwhelming yet implicit message of these two books is that the always already gendered nature of the contemporary world order is now even more dangerous, more insecure, and more deeply gendered. That said, these authors counsel neither fear nor surrender in the face of male domination and patriarchal exclusion. Rather, they emphasize the urgent need to be curious—to excavate, expose, and challenge—and to see past the distortions of patriarchy in order to find alternatives, sometimes in unlikely places, to these dominant, destructive, and masculinist worldviews.

For Ruether, those places, or sources of imagined alternatives, lie at the intersection between ecofeminism and world religions. For many Western, secular feminists, these are unlikely places indeed. Ecofeminism, according to Ruether, "sees an interconnection between the domination of women and the domination of nature" (91). This domination derives from the...