Visiting Anarcha-Ecofeminism

A few days ago on Mastodon, I quipped "Anarcha-ecofeminism, please and thank you," but I left that pile of morphemes there to germinate untended. Today I want to place that sprout in the soil and explain what I mean, so that it may eventually take root—because I don't want to leave this particular set of speech sounds to fester into meaninglessness.

Living in the so-called United States—where "feminism" is a functional shorthand of "white feminism" and where intersectional feminism is being rapidly coopted by "woke" white liberals—I feel distinctly compelled toward ecofeminism. Even before I knew the term "ecofeminism," my feminism has never been solely about making space for gender equality within preexisting systems. Instead feminism can be a vehicle for understanding the structure of gendered inequality and learning to deconstruct those oppressions and reorder our social consciousness for increased and pervasive freedom. And if patriarchy bases itself in domination, control, and power, why can't we look at other forms of oppression and domination and deconstruct them with the tools of feminism? In that way, ecofeminism shows us how easily feminist analysis can revolutionize both our relationships with each other as humans and with our environments.

Ecofeminism is about looking at ways we have gendered and exerted dominion over planet-wide ecosystems. It's about taking that understanding further and codifying ways that we can rebuild healthy, reciprocal relationships in these spaces.

An anarcha-ecofeminist approach, then, builds off the anarcha-feminist philosophy that resisting gendered hierarchy and the hierarchy of the state are intrinsically related and asserts that political and social liberation must necessarily be accompanied by the abolition of any hierarchy that places humans as outside of or separated from their environments.

As we live amid a culminating apocalypse, I don't think this point can be argued. These fights can't be unentwined.

Preliminary reading: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer; The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. Yes, I know I've already told you to read both these books nervous grins