Ecofeminist Natures by Noel Sturgeon

Author:Noel Sturgeon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317959007
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 1997-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

4 The Nature Of Race

Indigenous Women and White Goddesses

DOI: 10.4324/9781315865874-5

While WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute was focused on U.S. racism in binary terms that tend to emphasize white and African American relations, there is another set of ecofeminist discourses about racial difference operative in the same time period (the latter half of the 1980s) that center on the idealization of “indigenous” women as symbolic representatives of ecofeminism. By putting indigenous in quotes here, I am pointing to the conflation of three ecofeminist discourses on racial difference that partake of the same form and function: that of creating an image of “the ultimate ecofeminists” as idealized tribal peoples. These three discourses of racial difference are those about Native American women, about Third World women (in which certain Asian Indian women tend to stand in as generalized Third World women), and about pre-Christian European pagan women. I will argue that the conflation of these three categories into a symbolic indigeneity is ironically a form of antiracist discourse that, like the binary discourse in WomanEarth of white women and women of color, ends up, despite good intentions, reconstituting white privilege. One way this occurs is through the racial essentialism of the idea of the indigenous, which erases all difference between and within the categories “Native American” and “Third World” and constitutes them as racialized Others to a white Self that is Western, modern, and industrialized. Though these first two categories contain within them many different kinds of women, white ecofeminism in the late 1980s and early 1990s has been most concerned with those women in these categories that are involved in cultural and economic practices, usually that of subsistence agriculture or hunting and gathering, that are seen as “sustainable” and “ecological.” These practices are often defined as ecological for ecofeminists (and other U.S. radical environmentalists) simply by contrasting them to industrialized, commodity-based economic practices (which are, through this move, also essentialized as always already anti-ecological as well as “white”).

The logic of this preference for indigenous cultures is deeply implanted in ecofeminist theory. The ecofeminist critique of the hierarchical dualism of culture/nature at the heart of Western science and ideology therefore privileges those cultural and economic arrangements that are seen not to divide culture from nature, and that do not think of culture as superior to a degraded, inferior nature. This pervasive, and in many respects persuasive, critique of Western Enlightenment rationalism directs ecofeminists to non-Western cultures for examples of ecofeminist politics, culture, and economy. Further, in line with ecofeminist analyses of the interdependent relation between Western culture/nature dualism and sexism, such “indigenous” cultures are seen as possible examples of more feminist societies. The term “indigenous” thus primarily signals for many white U.S. ecofeminists the extent that these cultures are nonindustrialized and therefore, from this perspective, more ecological; secondarily, it symbolizes the extent to which these cultures may be more egalitarian in their gender relations. 1

I am critical of this logic on a number of grounds. The cultural imperialism embedded in this discourse of racial difference has been criticized by others besides myself, including other white ecofeminists.

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