AbstractsWomens Studies

This thesis interrogates how Western approaches to ecofeminism have been constructed. Western approaches to ecofeminism, primarily socialist and cultural ecofeminism, have largely been posed by analysts, such as Carolyn Merchant, as oppositional and mutually exclusive. I explore how socialist and cultural ecofeminist approaches have been posed as such around two particular areas of thought— essentialism/social constructionism and spirituality/politics. The problem with the way socialist and cultural ecofeminist approaches have been posed is that they assume essentialism and social constructionism and spirituality and politics are incompatible frameworks. Moreover, the two approaches do not account for how many ecofeminist analysts actually engage with these frameworks.I begin my argument by describing how socialist and cultural ecofeminist approaches have been posed as oppositional and mutually exclusive and explore some of the reasons why this is problematic. “Slippage” is a term that I use in order to describe how different ecofeminist analysts escape the either/or approach to essentialism and social constructionism and spirituality and politics that socialist and cultural ecofeminism have been constructed to adopt. I go on to look in depth at how Vandana Shiva, a Third World feminist, engages in such slippage in her use of both essentialism and social constructionism in Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development.. I then look more “comprehensively” at the occurrence of slippage in ecofeminist texts by exploring how several Western ecofeminist authors have, similarly, interwoven spirituality with politics. I conclude that while the various conceptual approaches to ecofeminism can be useful to a certain extent that they must be engaged with carefully. Such engagement ought to occur with an awareness of how such approaches can function in a way that creates limitations for ecofeminist scholarship and ought to allow for the ability to draw on and/or interconnect ideas from multiple approaches to ecofeminism.