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GAARD 2011 New Directions For Ecofeminism Toward A
GAARD 2011 New Directions For Ecofeminism Toward A
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2010) volume 0, number 0, pp. 1 –23
doi:10.1093/isle/isq108
# The Author(s) 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the
Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email:
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2 I S L E
beef on rye” (217). In the near future, ecofeminism and feminist eco-
criticisms will need to articulate an interspecies focus within ecocriti-
cism, bringing forward the vegetarian and vegan feminist threads
that have been a developing part of feminist and ecological feminist
theories since the nineteenth century. Feminist ecocriticism’s method
may adapt the five operations Val Plumwood describes as creating
the Master Model, an alienated identity of dominance that is at the
core of western thought: backgrounding, radical exclusion, incorpor-
ation, instrumentalism, and homogenization (42 – 56). In ecocritical
readings, this interspecies feminist ecocritical perspective could ask
questions such as the following: how does this text handle the
problem of speaking for other species? Does the text depict other
animal species as passive agents who need human saviors, or does
Conclusion
Resisting the desire to invite all ecocritics to the next ASLE confer-
ence in Bloomington, where we can hold hands and sing
“Kumbayah” around a minimum-impact campfire (Hampton and
Cole), I nonetheless propose that we move forward as a community
practicing a more informed awareness of “all our relations”
(LaDuke), one that articulates a common civility, and persists in
advancing all ecocriticisms’ shared commitment to praxis. I am con-
cerned with the ad feminam claims that ecofeminist and feminist eco-
critical perspectives are “strident,” “anachronistic,” or “parochial.”5
Such name-calling generally functions to denounce the theorist
without substantially engaging with her theory, and is not conducive
NOTES
from the “wave” narrative and these perspectives provide ground for further
ecocritical developments.
4. For example, Peggy McIntosh’s classic model, “Interactive Phases of
Curricular Revision: A Feminist Perspective” (1983), describes disciplinary
transformation in five stages, using the field of history as an example: phase
1, “womanless history,” is the standard straight white elite male canon; phase
2, “woman IN history,” gives us the exceptional and elite women who
become tokens in an otherwise dominant narrative. In phase 3, “woman as a
problem, absence, or anomaly in history,” the transformative influence of
including women has begun to reshape the canon and redefine the discipline;
race, class, gender, and sexuality must now be considered. By phase 4,
“woman AS history,” special courses, texts, seminars, and terminology focus
exclusively on women (and by extension to ecocriticism, on queers, writers of
color, working class writers, etc.); and the goal is phase 5, “history revisioned
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