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As a matter of fact, Anthony, it gets a little boring for you only coming over here to make insulting remarks. What I know about ecofeminism strikes me as foolishness. As a matter of fact, however, my daughter is a vegan and I respect her decision. What's the point of your demeaning speculations about what other people do and do not believe, except that you have some felt need to insult people?
Sounds to me like you don't actually know anything about ecofeminism, other than that you think it's silly. (Let me guess, so is being a vegetarian?)
What are we talking about when we talk about ecomfeminism. Geographer David Harvey has a one paragraph summary of ecofeminism in Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Harvey, btw, rocked my world when I was in grad school). He briefly identifies two strands one that centers around patriarchy (which is to my mind the sillier Mary Daly type) and another that is a "feminist environmentalism." This I find more compelling. It leads to some phenomenal work such as Valrie Kuletz's "The Tainted Desert" and Laura Pulido's "Environmentalism and Economic Justice" (title?).
Oscar, I don't think that either KC or I said that ecofeminism is a "huge threat." I take both environmentalism and feminism seriously, but there are people in the academy who speak of ecofeminism without a smirk on their faces. You can do a simple Google search and find places where they apparently think it is something important. As far as I'm concerned it is shorthand for the soft and decaying side of the left academy.
Ralph,
I don't know any works. I don't even know how to define the field. Are any feminists who are also environmentalists eco-feminists? Are proponents of the Gaia hypothesis fellow travelers?
All I do know comes from short snippets like the one KC posted, which are selected by people like KC who don't like it.
Then you make a statement that indicates a serious body of bad scholarship and teaching exists, to whit: "Eco-feminism is about as close to the heart of the decay in the left academy as you can get."
So I'm asking you and anyone else who might chime in, does this really pose such a threat, or are we looking at relatively isolated cases of sloppy thinking that have been blown out of proportion.
Oscar, I'll defer to you and ask you to name some significant works of eco-feminism that you think are credible.
Ralph, Those are major charges. Please name some names and give some writings as examples.
David, I'm afraid that I disagree with you about this. Eco-feminism is about as close to the heart of the decay in the left academy as you can get. You simply can't build a field of study or a disciplinary approach when there's nothing more than a metaphor at the heart of what you're doing. That the eco-feminists activate themselves around a hurricane that, by happenstance, gets a female name is indicative of the intellectual bankruptcy of the whole enterprise.
I agree with Anthony, the post started poorly and got worse. All it did was pick the silliest quotes off of a list serve to show that feminists are silly. Except that, a) list serve discussions are hardly where people do their best writing b) anybody who is going to do good work on a feminist analysis of Katrina isn't going to post their stuff on a discussion list except perhaps to point people towards resources and c) the quotes are all anonymous and therefore likely to be the bottom dwellers of academia. Am I wrong to think that a prominent scholar would have been named if they said something silly. So the whole point of the piece becomes "look, feminists are silly!" Are some feminists silly? Yes, but that isn't the argument here. And she's telling me that the people who tried to march out of N.O. on the overpass and were turned back by armed police weren't victims of racial discriminiation because of skewed media coverage? Finally, econfeminism need not involve paens to "Tierra Madre." Ecofeminists have been very prominent in the environmental justice movement (you know, Erin Brockovich type stuff) particularly women of color in the South.
Thanks for teaching me that there isn't any conservative I could respect.
Anthony, You really ought not go dumb-divining. You've got more than your share of it -- like the time at The Weblog when you were mourning the death of Rehnquist as "the kind of conservative" you could respect. You hadn't bothered to inform yourself about his work as a lawyer to disqualify blacks and Hispanics from voting. After that, it takes the nerve of the genuinely Ignorant to come over here and call what anybody else says "dumb."
Oh, sorry, maybe it was the "this is not a joke" or the dismissive tone that lead me to my conclusion. I should have mentioned those too. Hate to say it, but it was a dumb statement to begin a piece with and I'm not going to play the liberal game of pretending that anyones voice needs to be heard in the "debate" over whether or not race was involved in New Orleans. It doesn't because she's wrong. I know, it's just ideology, we need to all have the objectivity of history, and the right history at that!
Anthony, There is no assertion in the dependent clause you respond to, so far as I can tell. Or, perhaps you understand the way the English language works better than I do. Or, is it that you see the name KC Johnson and know beforehand that you must say something negative?
Stopped reading after this line, "If you thought the racial politics of Katrina were absurd, wait till you see the gender spin." Yeah, no racial politics involved at all...