UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Ecofeminism is an emerging field. For me ecofeminism is a political and philosophical stance that recognizes the connections between women’s rights and environmental ones and, conversely, finds in the subjugation of women and the denigration of the environment a similar patriarchal and hierarchical paradigm. Given the history of gendered images of nature and “natural” conceptions of women it is understandable that some critics fear an essentialism in ecofeminism. However, ecofeminist work, as I understand it, challenges the conflation of women and nature whilst simultaneously asserting the connections, the continuums.