Should we rethink or retire the nature/culture binary? Material ecofeminism, essentialism and coloniality

What the paper says

From the moment the material turn was launched as a new style of thought in feminist theory, it has offered itself as a highly pertinent rethinking and transgression of several deep-seated habits of thought in that domain. Above all, in and through its injunction to ‘take matter seriously’, it has called for a deeper exploration and affirmation of the corporeality of the (human) body that does not reduce it merely to a passive inscriptive surface for cultural norms. Hearkening back to the tradition of ecofeminism that developed throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the shadow of a constructivist orthodoxy writing it off as hopelessly (gender) essentialist, material feminism has also called for an ethico-political, decolonial awakening to the more-than-human world comprising non-human animals and environments. Emphatically endorsing these two tenets of material ecofeminism, this article nevertheless – or rather, on that account – takes issue with the notion that material feminists are under an obligation to ‘rethink’ and ‘transvalue’ nature and to transgress the so-called nature/culture binary that previous generations of feminist thought are routinely criticized for having bought into. Taking its point of departure the widespread acknowledgement that this whole conceptual apparatus is deeply embedded in the history of European colonialism, the article proposes retirement rather than rethinking as the treatment most appropriate to it and shows how the core tenets of material ecofeminism could be clarified and enhanced in virtue of such treatment. The strategy proposed consists, first, in an elucidation of the heterogeneous issues at stake in what has unhelpfully been described as a ‘flight from nature’ in traditional feminism. In addition, it draws on canonical ecofeminist sources suggesting that the very idea of ‘nature’ as a domain of phenomena to be addressed in environmentalist thought and practice is itself part of the problem to be addressed.