The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy, and: Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing (review)

The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy by Catriona Sandilands. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 244 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper.

Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing by Chris Cuomo. New York: Routledge, 1998, 170 pp., $20.00 paper.

The Good-Natured Feminist by Catriona Sandilands is quintessential reading for anyone who usually thinks of ecofeminism as attempting to link "woman" (often equated with "mothering") and "nature" in an essentializing way. In the first of the book's two parts, Sandilands discusses early ecofeminist tendencies to prioritize such ontological claims over political ones. She argues that the ecofeminist focus on an ontology of woman/nature identity is actually a political attempt to expose the traditional connection between domination of women and nature. Ecofeminists have used identity to gain access to the public arena in the same way cultural feminists did. Likewise, she argues, ecofeminists have tried to establish an identity for nature in an effort to expose the root causes of domination and denial of political representation of the environment in the same way environmental philosophers did. However, Sandilands recognizes that, along with feminists in general, some ecofeminists are beginning to realize the limits of identity politics and are further realizing that delimiting the woman/nature connection to a very particular characterization can never fully capture the range of women's experiences. In addition, it restricts nature to representation as a domesticated feminine subject. Sandilands invites us to consider that any subject in the political realm, whether it be woman, nature, or other, is inevitably more than any singular form of representation can capture. Attempts at identity politics, no matter how well intentioned, marginalize those who do not fit the descriptions that are produced, and speaking for all women and/or nature is authoritarian and undemocratic. Identity politics is inevitably limited in its ability to lead to democracy. Sandilands maintains that this is why ecofeminism needs to move beyond its initial focus on woman/nature identification to questions of political construction.

Feminism and Ecological Communities by Chris Cuomo also addresses the claim that ecofeminism, at least in its inception, overemphasized the ontological connection between women and nature. Cuomo's work ranges serendipitously and broadly in the first four chapters of the book over the context from which ecofeminism emerged. Here she generally outlines the relations between ecofeminism, feminism, and environmental philosophy. She describes the goal of ecofeminism as the desire to expose the causes of all oppressions, and emphasizes that ecofeminism is more capable of engaging in that project than feminism or environmental ethics. Cuomo also considers the limitations of traditional ethical theories, although she finds Aristotelian ethics an intriguing prospective model for what she imagines an ecofeminist ethic of "flourishing" will become.

In the second half of the book, Cuomo emphasizes the need for ecofeminism to be committed to understanding various forms of oppression in order to resist portraying a static identity for women and/or other oppressed humans, or the rest of nature. Similarly to Sandilands, Cuomo critiques the essentializing of the woman/nature connection. In the later chapters, Cuomo emphasizes the importance of non-dualist, non-reductionist, flexible understandings of the social production of identities. She then considers critiques of ecofeminism, asserting that many such criticisms have been overly simplistic. She defends early ecofeminism as non-essentialist and differentiates ecofeminism from the feminist ethics of care. In the final chapter, Cuomo raises, but does not answer, the question of how ecofeminism is and should be related to sociopolitical activity. She briefly notes at the end of the book that "close links between theory and political activism are necessary for ecofeminism's vitality" (146), but she closes without addressing the related philosophical questions (e.g., what are those activities and how is ecofeminism going to confront and then perhaps even...