Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature

Vakoch, D. (ed.) (2012). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Vakoch’s collection explores ecofeminism, which seeks to link the subordination of women to the degradation of the natural environment and to foster new modes understanding and ‘liberatory alternatives’ (pp. 11-12). The work takes a pluralist approach to ecofeminism, and each chapter, focused on different literary works, explores its different aspects: from investigating themes of relationality, comparing individualism with intersubjectivity, collapsing dichotomies and dualisms, moving beyond the binary of a passive object and active subject to grant new agency to nature, articulating a feminist ethics of care, to locating knowledge and ‘thinking’ within marginal, border spaces. The collection concludes with an afterword by Jeffrey Lockwood which provides a critique of the collection by arguing that ecofeminism is an ‘ironic philosophy,’ one which is full of contradictions and incoherences. Lockwood then attempts to connect ecofeminism to a larger intellectual tradition stretching from Rachel Carson’s male predecessor Aldo Leopold to Darwin, Galileo, and Aristotle and seeks to ground its thinking in Classical ideas of eudaimonia and Greek virtues like Aristotle’s moderation; however, in the process he undermines ecofeminism’s very own liberatory project which seeks to locate new modes of ‘seeing’ and to challenge the hegemonic binaries of the Western tradition. Lockwood leaves room for more radical classical engagement with ecofeminism and its modes of thinking: to gird its liberatory project and find alternative modes of ‘seeing’ within classical writing rather than to subsume innovative feminist scholarship to an existing hegemonic Western canon.