Women, Ecology, and the Environment: An Introduction

[Catriona Sandilands]'s essay, "Mother Earth, the Cyborg, and the Queer: Ecofeminism and (More) Questions of Identity," is an application of postmodern queer theory to ecofeminism. Since ecofeminism is a coalition between feminism and environmentalism, it requires what the author calls "new coalitional myths" that deconstruct not only "woman" but "nature" as well. Fixed identities, like static political positions, do not lend themselves to coalitions but in fact defeat them. The old identity politics, Sandilands argues, only return us to conventional relationships between women and nature, in which nature is used as a rationale for sexism (as the "origin" of repressive social categories like gender) or for an essentialist claim to women's special relationship with nature that Sandilands disavows. Even "strategic" essentialism -- the political rather than metaphysical claim by some feminists of women's identification with nature -- is, she claims, "never simply `strategic'" (28) but always threatens to reinscribe patriarchal discourse. Instead, she maintains, postmodern identities -- unstable, indeterminate, ironic -- are prerequisites to an emancipatory politics for women and for nature. The "new" feminist identities modeled on the "queer" or the "cyborg," especially as articulated by Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, are, for Sandilands, the most productive grounds for merging poststructuralist feminism with ecological feminism; in their fundamentally parodic and performative relationships to patriarchal discourse, queer and cyborg identities "open up different subject positions to the possibility of influence by others" (24). This "influence," she believes, is only possible in conditions of radical contingency and requires what she calls "performative affinity" -- a term that combines Butler's idea of gender as performance with Haraway's " politics of affinity" to describe a subject position that both breaks the patriarchal identification of woman with nature and maintains a postmodern, feminist connection with nature, based not on "matriarchal" reversals of patriarchal representations but in playful parody of them. In the section called "The Culture of Nature," [Linda Vance] raises a series of questions she thinks are central to a feminist analysis of wilderness. Wilderness, she maintains, is "the part of our environment that is idealized as `perfect nature,'" nature in its "pure" form (62). Why, she wonders do we believe that the "best" nature is that w