The essentialist problem within ecofeminism and working towards a new vision of environmental feminism.

Why do we constantly personify the environment as feminine? Just think about it, when we envision the environment as human, we see a green haired goddess called mother nature. Mother nature is viewed as a nurturing force that reproduces and sustains all life. The characteristics we assign to nature we also attribute to femininity, viewing women as more nurturing and caring just like nature. This association has even been proven psychologically. A study by Reynolds and Haslam proves that people more often associate nature with women (Reynolds and Haslam, 2011). Why do we think like this? Are these two groups actually similar, or do we just think of them as such?

In addition to viewing women and nature as sharing several traits, we see a second similarity between the groups, both nature and women have been oppressed, and dominated. Women have long lived under patriarchal systems that undermined their rights. In many countries women were barred from voting, opening bank accounts and driving. Even though (for the most part) these forms of gender inequality have been corrected women still are subjugated today. We see through things like the gender pay gap, lack of political representation, women being more likely to be impoverished and countless other examples. When we look to the environment, we also see the same theme of domination. Since the industrial revolution, humans have exploited the earth’s resources for their own benefit. Humanity’s shabits have put the earth in danger. Due to humans burning of greenhouse gases, climate change has had detrimental harms through rising sea levels, more droughts, longer wildfire seasons and so many other risks that harm our planet (NASA, 2022). Due to human waste and overconsumption, the plant has become polluted. After seeing widespread harm to the environment about women; what should we do about it? As we see similarities between the groups should we solve the issues together? Ecofeminism a feminist movement focused on stopping the oppression of women and the environment, has attempted to solve these issues. In this article, I will outline ecofeminism contributions and the issue of gender essentialism within the movement. Then I will explain how we can resolve this tension using a new strain of ecofeminism.

         Before we get into the issue of gender essentialism within ecofeminism, we must first understand the movement’s origins and core tenets. There have been many ecofeminist movements across the globe , emerging in multiple areas of the world in the 1970s. In Kenya Wangari Maathai started the Green Belt Movement, which worked to solve the issues of environmental harm that hurt both women and the environment. Specifically, the Green Belt Movement worked to combat women being impacted by droughts, lack of food and water, and poor living conditions from an ecofeminist standpoint. The movement worked with local people to plant trees and provide education on the environment (Ekim,2023) . Women in the Chipko movement in India used nonviolent tactics that were Gandhian like to save trees from logging. The women of Uttar Pradesh hugged trees so they would not be chopped down. This ecofeminist movement also spread to other parts of India and grew in its activism (Shameer, 2015). In England in 1981 the women of Greenham Common began the longest running women’s protest against nuclearism, and its harms on women and the environment (Gaard, 2011).

         Although ecofeminism has had many political movements, it also also been a movement of intellectual critique. To explore the beginning of ecofeminist theory, we must first look to the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne. D'Eaubonne, inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, began publishing work on essays dedicated to questioning sexual norms in France. She then began her work on ecofeminism through publishing the foundational Feminism or Death, an early ecofeminist text. D'Eaubonne writes about a connection between how men in the patriarchy dominated women, and how Western countries have dominated other parts of the world through colonization. From these connections she came up with foundations of ecofeminism and theorized how men exploit both the environment and women (Goldblum,2022)

D'Eaubonne thesis forms what many ecofeminists have agreed upon. The core belief is that women and the environment have been exploited in similar ways. The main ideas of most ecofeminist theories usually follow these ideas: 1) Women and the environment are associated with each other historically and socially. 2) The patriarchy and other systems like capitalism have oppressed both women and the environment. 3) To solve both groups’ oppression, we need to have movements that take account of environmental harm and gender-based oppression together. 

Gender essentialism is the idea that biological sex informs a person’s traits and gender roles. It argues that binary gender roles are fixed and unchangeable. Gender essentialism has been a force that has long sustained the patriarchy. Gender Essentialism led to strict gender roles for women that have put them in inferior positions, through allowing people to argue that biologically women belonged in those positions. Essentialism has also precluded individuals who identify outside the gender binary from being recognized, since it does not allow for other possibilities of gender beyond biology. Key figures such as Judith Butler, and Simone de Beauvoir have contributed to dispelling the myth of gender essentialism. They argue that rather than gender being purely biologically fixed, gender roles are more so informed by societal expectations. Ecofeminism has been criticized for echoing some essentialist notions. The essentialism of ecofeminism has certainly dampened the movement and has recreated the issues that it has critiqued.

At times ecofeminism has gone too far through inaccurately overemphasizing connections between women and the environment. Some ecofeminists argue that there is a shared role between women and the environment to be mother’s and caretakers. Ecofeminists have also relied on ideas that there is a feminine essence, and that women are more nurturing (Systematic Alternatives, 2016) . Not all ecofeminists have relied on essentialism, but many have. In Janet Biehl’s Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics, she outlines the issue of essentialism. Biehl problematizes ecofeminists' tendency to regard personality traits about women as innate and fixed. Biehl criticizes ecofeminists who embrace psycho-biological stereotypes about women, which popularizes patriarchal stereotypes about women and lends them credence (Biehl,1991) Due to ecofeminism’s essentialism the theory has recreated the patriarchal systems it seeks to criticize. Ecofeminism’s attachment to gender essentialism and its solutions through biology recreates the patriarchy. If we believe that women should be tied to traits surrounding motherhood, we recreate those same patriarchal systems, reducing women’s capabilities.

         After hearing about how ecofeminism has been tied to gender essentialism, how can we have feminist environmental politics? Can we still theorize ecological harm from a feminist perspective?After all, women are still more likely to be affected by harms done to nature such as climate change (United Nations, 2025) , and it is true that systems like capitalism and the patriarchy have impacted both groups. 

Within their book Queer ecofeminism Asmae Ourikya works to fix the essentialism within ecofeminism, to create a movement that moves beyond those issues. Ourikya acknowledges that ecofeminism is correct about how the environment and women face the same oppression, while simultaneously recognizing the need to fix the essentialism within the theory. They instead propose queer ecofeminism which works to reject dualisms and essentialism within ecofeminism. The theory also expands ecofeminism’s reach, ecofeminism has mainly focused on how women have been oppressed due to stereotyping surrounding nature. Ourikya drawing from Greta Gaard to explain how ecofeminism has also excluded queer individuals, when thinking about binaries that oppress people. Therefore due to ecofeminism’s flaws Ourikya proposes that in feminist environmentalism we should take a post gender and a post humanistic perspective. Ourikya explains we should recognize how gender is socially constructed and move beyond the ways that gender restricts us to solve gender-based oppression. In terms solving environmental domination Posthumanism advocates we move away from thinking of nature in terms of binaries (ie. Nature/culture binary). These binaries lead to humans distancing ourselves from nature justifying exploitation and conquest. If we then move beyond these binaries and acknowledge our interdependence with the environment we can end our ways of exploiting it.

Even though ecofeminism had the issue of essentialism within the past, that is not the way the movement has to continue going forward. Through queer ecofeminism we see an alternative vision for ecofeminism that works past the issues of essentialism. 

 

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