Necrophilia and Voyaging: Some Curious Connections

I’d like to thank Naomi Goldenberg for introducing me, as a graduate student, to the writings of Mary Daly. I was fortunate to hear the Furious Woman herself speak at an AAR national meeting many years ago. In that overflowing room, Daly spoke about the horrible things we do to animals, describing chickens jammed together in cages, unable to move, beaks cut off, reduced to the state of egg-laying machines. In hearing that talk I first made the connection between the mind-set that authorizes violence toward women and violence to other living creatures and the earth. In this year of her passing, I returned to her work titled Gyn/Ecology to see what response her words there call forth from me now, almost three decades after first having read them, given my scholarly interests in gender issues in Muslim societies and the environment.

In that work, Daly describes the state of servitude of women in a phallocentric world as robotitude, or “the reduction of life in the state of servitude to mechanical motion,”¹ while men participate in what she refers to as “necrophilia.” Necrophilia is an “attraction/need of males for female energy . . . not in the sense of love for actual corpses, but of love for those victimized into a state of living death.”² Suggesting that men have a parasitic relationship to women, Daly states: “The male ‘mother’s’ spiritual ‘fecundity’ depends on his fetal (fatal) fettering of the female to whom he eternally attaches himself by a male-made umbilical cord, extracting nutrients and excreting waste (as he does also with ‘Mother Earth’).”³

As ecofeminists have been at pains to point out, a connection exists between the abuse and exploitation of women and that of the earth’s resources. Daly identifies both as stemming from the necrophilic impulse, arguing that necrophiliacs (“the fathers’ fetishized ‘fetuses’ [re-productions/replicas of themselves], with which they passionately identify”) “are fatal for the future of this planet.”⁴ It is worth quoting her in full:

Nuclear reactors and the poisons they produce, stockpiles of atomic bombs, ozone-destroying aerosol spray propellants, oil tankers “designed” to self-destruct in the ocean, iatrogenic medications and carcinogenic food additives, refined sugar, mind pollutants of all kinds—these are the multiple fetuses/feces of stale male-mates in love with a dead world that is ultimately co-equal and consubstantial with themselves. The excrement of Exxon is everywhere. It is ominously omnipresent.⁵

Continuing with her assertions that patriarchy is necrophilic and sadomasochistic, Daly adds that it is also self-destructive. Robert Oppenheimer’s invocation of a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, a profoundly influential Hindu text, as he watched the atomic explosion in 1945, in which Krishna announces, “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds,” leads her to note that scientists are priests of patriarchy, performing the last rites. Typically, the justification for the atomic bomb in the 1940s was “to end the war.” Translated, this means, to end the world.⁶

There is no question that the marriage of scientific research and neoliberal market capitalism’s global institutions are leading to climate change, environmental degradation, species extinction, and creating any number of environmental- and social-justice issues while challenging the earth’s capacity to continue sustaining life at present levels. Furthermore, the consequences of neoliberal economic globalization for women have brought to the forefront both the fetal—that which views women as instrumental to its own needs— and supermom—those who control biological mothers⁷—aspects of what Daly identified as patriarchal necrophilia. While women are promised the benefits of globalization through additional jobs, the “fetal” aspect draws upon the labor of women for increasing corporate profit, masking the poor working conditions and increased burdens on women to meet the failures of the state in providing social services and making do with less. Meanwhile, the supermom aspect manifests itself in growing surveillance of women by moralists, whether they belong to right-wing political parties or fundamentalist movements, as women are subjected to greater scrutiny in matters of dress, morality, and control of their bodies.⁸

Thus...