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Ecofeminism K
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***ECOFEMINISM K***
***ECOFEMINISM K*** ................................................................................................................................ 1
1NC ................................................................................................................................................................ 3
1NC (1/3) ................................................................................................................................................... 4
1NC (2/3) ................................................................................................................................................... 5
1NC (3/3) ................................................................................................................................................... 6
Links .............................................................................................................................................................. 7
Foreign Policy ............................................................................................................................................ 8
Hegemony ................................................................................................................................................. 9
Nuclear War ............................................................................................................................................ 10
Omission ................................................................................................................................................. 11
Post Modernism ...................................................................................................................................... 12
Science .................................................................................................................................................... 13
Science .................................................................................................................................................... 14
Sovereignty ............................................................................................................................................. 15
Space Exploration.................................................................................................................................... 16
Space Exploration.................................................................................................................................... 17
Space Tourism ......................................................................................................................................... 18
Treaties ................................................................................................................................................... 19
Impacts........................................................................................................................................................ 20
Borders .................................................................................................................................................... 21
Oppression .............................................................................................................................................. 22
Environment ........................................................................................................................................... 23
Colonialism .............................................................................................................................................. 24
Racism ..................................................................................................................................................... 25
Hidden Violence ...................................................................................................................................... 26
Outweighs ............................................................................................................................................... 27
Alternative .................................................................................................................................................. 28
Ecofeminism Key ..................................................................................................................................... 29
Ecofeminism Key ..................................................................................................................................... 30
Ecofeminism Key ..................................................................................................................................... 31
Ecofeminism Key ..................................................................................................................................... 32
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Ecofeminism Key ..................................................................................................................................... 33
Ecofeminism Key ..................................................................................................................................... 34
Ecofeminism Key ..................................................................................................................................... 36
Feminism Key .......................................................................................................................................... 37
Narratives................................................................................................................................................ 38
Narratives................................................................................................................................................ 39
Narratives................................................................................................................................................ 40
Answers ....................................................................................................................................................... 41
Framework .............................................................................................................................................. 42
Framework .............................................................................................................................................. 43
Framework .............................................................................................................................................. 44
Framework .............................................................................................................................................. 46
Framework .............................................................................................................................................. 47
Framework .............................................................................................................................................. 48
Framework .............................................................................................................................................. 49
Perm ........................................................................................................................................................ 50
Perm ........................................................................................................................................................ 51
Perm ........................................................................................................................................................ 52
Perm ........................................................................................................................................................ 53
Essentialism............................................................................................................................................. 54
Essentialism............................................................................................................................................. 55
Essentialism............................................................................................................................................. 56
Essentialism............................................................................................................................................. 58
Essentialism............................................................................................................................................. 59
A2: You don’t go far enough ................................................................................................................... 61
A2: You prioritize nature ......................................................................................................................... 62
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1NC
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1NC (1/3)
Space exploration prioritizes masculinity over femininity
Joseph & Lewis, 86 [Gloria I. & Jill. Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist
Perspectives, 1986. Pg. 131-132.]
American society in reality never made family survival a priority. The priorities were private and
corporate interests, not the daily-life needs of people surviving on the wages for their labor. Industrial
production and technological development produced outer space exploration and a multi-billion-dollar
nuclear armament industry and military complex in a society where millions have little or no access to
adequate health care and the infant mortality rate is still shockingly high. The institutional framework
and the organization of daily life into polarized areas of paid labor versus family nurturance and
survival, along with ideas of competition, possessiveness, and individualism, placed "the family" in
the crossfire of exploitation, authority, and power. Images and notions of femininity (embodying
fragility, dependency, obedience, and passivity) versus masculinity (embodying strength, authority,
autonomy, and activity) flowered in and around the daily reality of most women's lives, which both
confirmed and contradicted them. Sdf
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1NC (2/3)
Domination of nature justifies the domination of others based on race, class, and
gender because it strips subjectivity
Plumwood, 93 [Val: Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University.
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Pg. 4]
Thus it is also exclusion from the master category of reason which in liberation struggles provides and
explains the conceptual links between different categories of domination, and links the domination of
humans to the domination of nature. The category of nature is a field of multiple exclusion and
control, not only of nonhumans, but of various groups of humans and aspects of human life which are
cast as nature. Thus racism, colonialism and sexism have drawn their conceptual strength from casting
sexual, racial and ethnic difference as closer to the animal and the body construed as a sphere of
inferiority, as a lesser form of humanity lacking the full measure of rationality or culture. As Vandana
Shiva points out (1989, 1991). It Is not only women's labour which traditionally gets subsumed 'by
definition' into nature, but the labour of colonised non-western, non-white people also. The
connections between these forms of domination in the west are thus partly the result of chance and
of specific historical evolution, and partly formed from a necessity inherent in the dynamic and logic
of domination between self and other, reason and nature. To be defined as 'nature' in this context is
to be defined as passive, as non-agent and non-subject, as the 'environment' or invisible background
conditions against which the 'foreground' achievements of reason or culture (provided typically by the
white, western, male expert or entrepreneur) take place. It is to be defined as a terra nullius, a resource
empty of its own purposes or meanings, and hence available to be annexed for the purposes of those
supposedly identified with reason or intellect, and to be conceived and moulded in relation to these
purposes. It means being seen as part of a sharply separate, even alien lower realm, whose
domination is simply 'natural', flowing from nature itself and the nature(s) of things. Such treatment,
standard in the west for nature since at least the Enlightenment, has since that time been opposed and
officially condemned for humans (while all the while normalised for marginalised groups such as women
and the colonised).
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1NC (3/3)
Alternative: Reject the 1AC in favor of ecofeminism
Must reevaulate humanity within feminism or else an infrastructure of domination
will always reappear
Plumwood, 93 [Val: Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University.
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Pg. 22-23]
The framework of assumptions in which the human/nature contrast has been formed in the west is
one not only of feminine connectedness with and passivity towards nature, but also and
complementarity one of exclusion and domination of the sphere "of nature by a white, largely male
elite, which I shall call the master model. But the assumptions in the master model are not seen as
such, because this model is taken for granted as simply a human model, while the feminine is seen as
a deviation from it. Hence to simply repudiate the old tradition of feminine connection with nature,
and to put nothing in its place, usually amounts to the implicit endorsing of an alternative master
model of the human, and of human relations to nature, and to female absorption into this model. It
does not yield, as it might seem to do at first, a gender-neutral position; unless the question of relation
to nature is explicitly put up for consideration and renegotiation, it is already settled—and settled in
an unsatisfactory way—by the dominant western model of humanity into which women will be fitted.
This is a model of domination and transcendence of nature, in which freedom and virtue are
construed in terms of control over, and distance from, the sphere of nature, necessity and the
feminine. The critique of the domination of nature developed by environmental thinkers in the last
twenty years has shown, I think, that there are excellent reasons to be critical of this model of
human/nature relations. Unless there is some critical re-evaluation of this master model in the area of
relations to nature, the old female/nature connection will be replaced by the dominant model of
human distance from and transcendence and control of nature. Critical examination of the question
then has to have an important place on the feminist agenda if this highly problematic model of the
human and of human relations to nature is not to triumph by default. If the model of what it is to be
human involves the exclusion of the feminine, then only a shallow feminism could rest content with
affirming the 'full humanity of women without challenging this model.
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Links
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Foreign Policy
US foreign policy is militarized and masculine
Enloe, 04 [Cynthia: professor at Clark University, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New
Age of Empire, p. 122-124]
The militarization of any country’s foreign policy can be measured by monitoring the extent to which
its policy: is influenced by the views of Defense Department decisionmakers and / or senior military
officers, flows from civilian officials’ own presumption that the military needs to carry exceptional
weight, assigns the military a leading role in implementing the nation’s foreign policy, and treats
military security and national security as if they were synonymous. Employing these criteria, one has
to conclude that U.S. foreign policy today is militarized. A feminist analysis can help reveal why U.S.
foreign policy has become so militarized— and at what costs. Since 1980, due to the growth of the
women’s movement, it has become almost commonplace in many domestic U.S. policy circles to ask:
“Will this proposed solution have disproportionately negative impacts on girls and women?” and “Does
this policy option derive from unspoken assumptions about men’s employment, men’s health, or men’s
supposed abilities?” Notable strides have been made in domestic policy arenas, even if there is still a
long way to go before such intelligent questioning produces equally smart policy outcomes. By contrast,
in foreign policy, progress toward a more sophisticated— realistic— understanding of the causes and
costs of policy options has been sluggish. In the 1970s and 1980s women activists and feminist analysis
did help drive popular protests against U.S. wars in Southeast Asia and Central America. Yet, generally,
U.S. foreign policy has been tightly controlled by the president and Congress, limiting a genuinely
public debate. Stalling progress toward bringing feminist analyses into foreign policy decision-making
processes has been the conventionally naive belief that international affairs— trade, immigration,
hightech weapons sales— have nothing to do with gender. They do. Feminist foreign policy analysis is
not naive. It derives from a systematic, eyes-wide-open curiosity, posing questions that nonfeminists
too often imagine are irrelevant or find awkward to ask. For starters: Are any of the key actors
motivated in part by a desire to appear “manly” in the eyes of their own principal allies or adversaries?
What are the consequences? Which policy’s option will bring women to the negotiating table? Does the
alleged reasonableness of any foreign policy choice rest on the unexamined assumption that women’s
issues in the target country can be addressed “later,” that it is men’s anxieties that must be dealt with
immediately?
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Hegemony
Hegemony rests upon negation/patriarchy. Awareness of negation key to overcoming
hierarchic structure of hegemony
Agnew & Corbridge, 95 [John & Stuart. Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International
Political Economy, 1995. Pg. 212-213]
Metaphorically, Hegel’s model of lordship and bondage is the frame of reference in which
conventional understandings of international political economy operate. But it is not the essential
equality of the selves that has received most attention. Rather, it has been the assumed naturalness of
an enduring hierarchy. In a world of competitive states, or a competitive world economy a ‘singular’
appropriation of power and wealth is taken as a natural feature of a world in which individual
states/persons/firms objectify everything that they see as other, and where they view other
states/persons/firms as little more than obstacles in their path.There is a point of connection here
between this conception of the mastering of others-elsewhere implicit in the logics of previous
geopolitical discourse and practice and a feminist reading of Hegel’s dialectic. From this point of view,
to accept the unchanging polarity of man and woman in the lordship-bondage relation is to succumb
to a structure of male domination. Hegemony can be seen as resting in both cases as much upon
negation as upon positive recognition for its dynamic force. And, ‘The more negation can be inscribed
in silence, the more binding it will be, for the explicit denigration of women [or others] constitutes an
act of naming that permits differing views about the strength of the tie between name and thing,
between sign and referent’ (Fox-Genovese 1991, 237). Awareness of this negation, therefore, is the
first step out of the polarity upon which coercive hierarchy relies for its material and discursive power.
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Nuclear War
Fear of threats to existence such as nuclear war justify oppression of women and land
Collard '89 [Andree: Professor at Brandeis University. Rape of the Wild. Pg. 46]
However my purpose is not to understand hunters but to situate hunting in the culture that spawned it.
Hunting is the modus operandi of patriarchal societies on all levels of life – to support one level is to
support them all. However innocuous the language may sound – we hunt everything from houses to
jobs to heads – it reveals a cultural mentality so accustomed to predation that it horrifies only when it
threatens to kill us all, as in the case of nuclear weapons. Underlying all this hunting is a mechanism
that identifies/names the prey, stalks it, competes for it, and is intent on getting the first shot at it.
This is blatantly done when the prey is named woman, 34 animal, or land but it extends to whatever
phobia happens to seize and obsess a nation, whether this be another nation or a race other than that
of power holding groups.
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Ecofeminism K
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Omission
Leaving animals out of discussions of violence undermines anti-violence
agendas
Deckha ‘10 (Maneesha: Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. “It’s time to
abandon the idea of ‘human’ rights,” The Scavenger, December 13, 2010.)
Yet, the discourse around (hu)man violence against animals is muted in mainstream debates about
violence, vulnerability and exploitation in general. More common is a concern with violence against
humans and how to eliminate it and make humans less vulnerable. This theorizing largely proceeds
through affirmations of the inviolability or sanctity of human life and human dignity, establishing
what it means to be human through articulation of what it means to be animal. The humanist
paradigm of anti-violence discourse thus does not typically examine the human/nonhuman boundary,
but often fortifies it. The failure to address this boundary and its creation and maintenance of the
figure of the subhuman undermines anti-violence agendas.
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Ecofeminism K
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Post Modernism
Postmodernism dissolves accountability and autonomy of feminism
Webster, 00 [Fiona: Co-editor of Asia-Pacific Review. “The Politics of Sex and Gender: Benhabib and
Butler Debate Subjectivity,” Hypatia, 15.1, 2000.]
Benhabib claims that the critique of identity categories raised by postmodern theory gives rise to an
"identity crisis" for feminism. She is by no means alone in making such a claim. 2 She argues that this identity
crisis "may eliminate not only the specificity of feminist theory but place in question the very
emancipatory ideals of the women's movement altogether" (Benhabib 1995a, 20). Her argument is
based on the claim that, in its strong form, postmodern theory promotes a dissolution of the subject
which in turn dissolves the concepts of intentionality, accountability, self-reflexivity and autonomy
(1995a, 20). Postmodern theory has debilitating implications for feminism precisely because the ideal
of the autonomous, self-directing subject is replaced with a fractured, opaque self (1992, 16). Given
that women's sense of self is already fragile, that their history has been written by others and that
they have not been able to fully control their lives, Benhabib claims that this fractured, opaque self of
postmodern theory can only provide women with a more fragmented and fragile vision of themselves
and their future (1992, 16). As such, it is a particularly damaging account of subjectivity and one which
does not further the emancipatory objectives of the feminist movement. The norms of autonomy, choice,
and self-determination in the legal, moral, and political arenas are vital, Benhabib claims, for women's struggles to
be successfully voiced and acted upon (1992, 16). Indeed, she claims that the project of female emancipation is
unthinkable without recourse to a regulative principle on agency, autonomy, and selfhood (1995a, 21).
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Science
Science comes from a standpoint regardless of how much you can claim otherwise.
This pushed women into a categorization that allows them to be the target of
masculine violence.
Harding, 04 [Sandra: an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology,
research methodology and philosophy of science. Hypatia vol. 19, no. 1, 29-32]
The women’s movement needed knowledge that was for women. Women had long been the object of
others’ knowledge projects. Yet the research disciplines and public policy that depended upon them
permitted no conceptual frameworks in which women as a group became the subjects or authors of
knowledge; the implied “speakers” of scientific sentences were never women.7 Such subjects were
supposed to be generic humans, which meant men, or even, as Donna Haraway famously put the
point, God: science was to perform the “God trick” of speaking authoritatively about everything in the
world from no particular social location or human perspective at all (Haraway 1989). Yet feminists
pointed out how the conceptual frameworks of the disciplines and of public policy never achieved
such a transcultural perspective; they clearly represented easily identifiable social interests and
concerns, and these were rarely women’s. Worse, these conceptual frameworks often represented
interests counter to those of women. This particular kind of cultural specificity ensured systematic
ignorance and error not only about women’s lives but also about men’s lives, in all their diversity, and
about how any particular society’s gender relations worked. In the dominant accounts it remained
mysterious through which processes women’s life choices became so restricted, albeit in different ways
in different classes, races, sexualities, cultures, and historical eras. How did it come about that violence
against women in every class and race in modern Western societies—usually committed by men from
within their own social groups that women were supposed to be able to trust—was persistently
interpreted by legal systems as women “asking for it” and “deviant men” doing it? How did it occur that
a double day of work, one unpaid, was regarded as normal and desirable for women but not for men?
How come women who were going through such expectable biological life-events as menstruation,
birthing, or menopause were treated by the medical profession as if they were ill? What social processes
made reasonable the belief that women made no contributions to human evolution?
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Science
Science has subjective elements
Talshir, 04 [Gayil. “The role of environmentalism: From The Silent Spring to The Silent Revolution,” Liberal
Democracy and Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism?” Marcel Wissenburg & Yoram Levy, 2004. Pg.
14-15]
This attitude, nevertheless, ignores the fact that scientific knowledge is contested and that in order for
environmental problems to be addressed politically they have to compete with other issues on the
limited public agenda, economic resources and political concerns. Thus, the nature of environmental
issues is different from that of other social subjects, but ecological problems inevitably become
subjected to representation. Unfortunately, environmental changes could hardly be noticed without
scientific research on the one hand, and political awareness on the other. While ecological problems
have an ontological dimension, the epistemology of ecology is crucial for grasping these problems and
handling them. The politicization process of environmental problems, despite the naive call for realism,
begins in the science of ecology.
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Sovereignty
Nature exists as bare life under sovereignty
Hudson ‘8 (Laura. “The Political Animal: Species-Being and Bare Life,” Mediations, 23.2, Spring 2008.)
The rise of environmentalism, deep ecology, and animal rights can be seen as effects of this inability
of law, or the Law, to distance the “natural world” as a state outside itself. Natural objects reappear
within the political realm not as political actors but as markers of bare life. Sovereignty, in seeking to
establish a political life separate from the state of nature, produces both political life as the life proper
to the citizen (the “good life”) and bare life, which occupies a space in between bios and zoē,
evacuated of meaning. The state of nature is not separate from political life but a state that exists
alongside political life, as a necessary corollary of its existence. Political life is alienation from an
imagined state of nature that we cannot access as human beings because it appears only in shadow
form as bare life. The state of exception is that which defines which lives lack value, which lives can be
killed without being either murdered or sacrificed. Agamben’s examples of the inextricable link
between political and bare life focus on the limit cases of humanity rather than the ideal, providing an
analysis of precisely the cases that prove problematic in Ferry’s liberal humanism. The exception, as that
which proves the rule, cannot be avoided. It is necessary to look to the figure of the refugee, the body of
the “overcomatose” or the severely mentally impaired, and, under the Third Reich, the life of the Jew to
see how the law fails in the task Ferry sets for it. These cases demonstrate the zone of indistinction that
Agamben elaborates as the zone of “life that does not deserve to live.” The refugee demonstrates the
necessity of a link between nation and subject; refugees are no longer citizens and, as such, lack a claim
to political rights: “In the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man
show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take
the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state.”15 Confronted with the figure of the refugee, human
rights are faced with their hidden ground in national origin, where, as Agamben notes, the key term is
birth: men are born free, invoking the natural codes from which law was to separate us. This freedom is,
in actuality, a function of citizenship and incorporation in the nation-state rather than a fact of being
human: “citizenship names the new status of life as origin and ground of sovereignty and, therefore,
literally identifies … les membres du souverain, ‘the members of the sovereign.’”16 This makes the link
between that which is proper to the nation and that which is proper to the citizen the determinant of
the zone of sacred life: those who do not fulfill the role of the citizen are no longer guaranteed
protection or participation in political life, their so-called human rights void in the absence of national
identity. The refugee or refugees as a group have a claim only to bare life, to being kept alive, but have
no political voice with which to demand the rights of the citizen. Agamben, while noting the same trend
toward politicizing natural life that concerns Ferry, demonstrates that this politicization is already
contained within the structure of politics itself. This corresponds to the position of animals in human
society: the exemplar of the limit case, they have always existed in the state of exception that founds
the political. There is thus a connection between the plight of the refugee and that of the animal:
neither participates directly in the political, though both are absolutely subject to political decisions in
which they have no voice. The establishment of a realm outside the political, where lives have no
value and thus may be killed, is marked by the difference between the human and the animal.
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Space Exploration
Space exploration reflects a mentality of violence and domination
Collard '89 [Andree: Professor at Brandeis University. Rape of the Wild. Pg. 39-40]
The solution, then, is to make ‘the best’ of a bad situation. Lorenz suggests ‘dangerous undertakings,
like polar expeditions and, above all, the exploration of space’ in which nations could fight each other
in hard and dangerous competition without engendering national or political hatred’. 22 Such
solutions reflect the mentality of violence and domination that are so much a part of a rapist culture.
They are instances of rape of the wild where nature again is objectified, probed, used, and brought
under control of man’s futile attempt to redirect his ‘aggression’ to ‘better’ ends. Of course, these
theorists do not consider such attempts as futile. They construe what is actually violence as progress,
and continued violation of the integrity of being as achievement. In this sense, ethologist Richard
Dawkins believes that ‘modern man’ has outgrown his prehistoric past and has the ability to modify not
only his environment but his genetically programmed behavior. 23 Now that ‘we’ have acquired
enough knowledge of ourselves, ‘we’ can control those destructive traits that brought us to the brink
of extinction. And yet, looking at the direction of science, reading about men’s futuristic visions, we
see more and more control exercised by fewer and fewer individuals over the many, through
cybernetics, mood and ‘achievements’, together with the nuclear and chemical threats to the
environment, the robotisation of work, the desensitization to life, the chemicalisation of foodstuffs,
the proliferation of iatrogenic diseases, the extinction of animals and plant species, the increasing
rigidity of the political structure, the impoverishment of imaginative life – all give reason to think that
if this represents the optimum in human evolution, the hunters who are shaping are insane.
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Space Exploration
Expansion without reflecting upon the relationship between environmental
destruction, technology and speciesism will inevitably result in the problems that
cause us to need to get off the rock, and we’ll destroy those planets too.
Kochi & Ordan, 08 [Tarik: Queen’s University; Noam: Bar Ilan University. “An Argument for the
Global Suicide of Humanity,” borderlands, 7.3, 2008.]
In 2006 on an Internet forum called Yahoo! Answers a question was posted which read: “In a world that
is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?”
The question was asked by prominent physicist Stephen Hawking (Hawking, 2007a). While Hawking
claimed not to know ‘the solution’ he did suggest something of an answer (Hawking, 2007b). For
Hawking the only way for the human race to survive in the future is to develop the technologies that
would allow humans to colonise other planets in space beyond our own solar system. While Hawking’s
claim walks a path often trodden by science fiction, his suggestion is not untypical of the way humans
have historically responded to social, material and environmental pressures and crises. By coupling an
imagination of a new world or a better place with the production and harnessing of new technologies,
humans have for a long time left old habitats and have created a home in others. The history of our
species, homo sapiens, is marked by population movement aided by technological innovation: when
life becomes too precarious in one habitat, members of the species take a risk and move to a new
one. Along with his call for us to go forward and colonise other planets, Hawking does list a number of
the human actions which have made this seem necessary. [1] What is at issue, however, is his failure to
reflect upon the relationship between environmental destruction, scientific faith in the powers of
technology and the attitude of speciesism. That is, it must be asked whether population movement
really is the answer. After all, Hawking’s suggestion to colonise other planets does little to address the
central problem of human action which has destroyed, and continues to destroy, our habitat on the
earth. While the notion of cosmic colonisation places faith in the saviour of humanity by technology
as a solution, it lacks a crucial moment of reflection upon the manner in which human action and
human technology has been and continues to be profoundly destructive. Indeed, the colonisation of
other planets would in no way solve the problem of environmental destruction; rather, it would
merely introduce this problem into a new habitat. The destruction of one planetary habitat is enough
– we should not naively endorse the future destruction of others. Hawking’s approach to
environmental catastrophe is an example of a certain modern faith in technological and social progress.
One version of such an approach goes as follows: As our knowledge of the world and ourselves
increases humans are able to create forms of technology and social organisation that act upon the
world and change it for our benefit. However, just as there are many theories of ‘progress’ [2] there
are also many modes of reflection upon the role of human action and its relationship to negative or
destructive consequences. The version of progress enunciated in Hawking’s story of cosmic colonisation
presents a view whereby the solution to the negative consequences of technological action is to create
new forms of technology, new forms of action. New action and innovation solve the dilemmas and
consequences of previous action. Indeed, the very act of moving away, or rather evacuating, an
ecologically devastated Earth is an example at hand. Such an approach involves a moment of reflection –
previous errors and consequences are examined and taken into account and efforts are made to make
things better. The idea of a better future informs reflection, technological innovation and action.
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Space Tourism
Tourism assumes a gaze and mobility – must be reflexive to standpoint
Phillimore & Goodson, 04 [Jenny & Lisa. “From Ontology, Epistemology and Methodology to the
Field Reference,” Qualitative Reasearch in Tourism: Ontologies, Epistemologies and Methodologies,
2004. Pg 127]
Indeed there is a sense in which both mobility and sight are deemed to be prerequisites for engaging
with tourism as conventionally constructed by the leisure and tourism industry and leisure and
tourism studies. This emphasis on mobility to sites and ability to see sights is evident in the research of
many leisure and tourism scholars. Urry, for example, has focused on 'touring cultures' and the 'tourist
gaze' signifying the importance of sight and mobility within tourism. It is clear that tourism studies and
tourism research can benefit from engaging with the sorts of debates initiated through and by
standpoint epistemologies. To do so would require tourism studies and research to look through varied
different standpoint 'spectacles' (that is, take 'post'-standpoint perspectives) at phenomena under
examination. The tourism researcher examining the impact of tourism on particular destinations
would benefit considerably from asking pertinent questions about the lived experiences of local
marginalised or minority groups, their environment and how they interrelate. 5 This suggests that
tourism researchers need to engage minority groups collaboratively in their research and to take a
reflexive approach to their research, critically reflecting upon their own gender identities, ethnicity,
nationality, and so forth.
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Treaties
Treaties become a masculine contest in order to appear manly within their own
culture
Enloe, 04 [Cynthia: professor at Clark University, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New
Age of Empire, p. 122-124]
However, when Defense Department officials have weighed in on a given policy question, Congress
and the administration have shied away from feminist analyses. Consequently, the U.S. government
either has invested energy in watering down new international treaties designed to roll back
militarism, or has refused outright to ratify such agreements as, for instance, the treaty to ban land
mines, the UN convention acknowledging the rights of children in war, and the treaty establishing the
International Criminal Court (the first permanent international war crimes tribunal).
In each instance, it has been the Pentagon’s ability to persuade civilian officials that the military’s own
goals would be compromised— its desire to maintain land mines in South Korea, its desire to recruit
those under age eighteen, and its prioritizing the protection of American soldiers stationed abroad when
they are charged with criminal acts— that has carried the day in Washington. Civilian representatives’
repeated privileging of military concerns over other important U.S. international goals is due in part to
the nervousness that many male civilian executive and congressional officeholders feel when confronted
with military resistance. This is not about hormones. It is about the male politician’s angst over not
appearing “manly.” This, in turn, is about American political culture.
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Impacts
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Borders
Control over ecological resources create a history that determines control over land
Goldman & Schurman, 00 [Michael and Rachel A: Professors at University of Minnesota. "Closing
the 'Great Divide': New Social Theory on Society and Nature. Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26. p.
569]
Along the first of these lines, Rocheleau and Ross (1995) analyze the roles of trees as “tools and text.”
They show how different social groups in the Dominican Republic utilized the Acacia tree, as well as
ideas about Acacia trees, in their efforts to establish claims to land and other productive resources.
Similarly, Donald Moore’s (1996) work on environmental struggles in Zimbabwe emphasizes the
symbolic aspects of peasant land claims. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams, Moore
contends that symbolic struggles effect material transformation, and that “cultural meanings are
constitutive forces, that is, shapers of history, and not simply reflections of a material base” Moore,
pg. 127). A number of scholars have interrogated the gendered nature of struggles over meaning (e.g.
Carney 1996, Bassett 1999, Rocheleau &Ross 1995), showing, for instance, how men and women
mobilize differing cultural understandings to justify their claims over particular resources. The
inspiration for many of these analyses of ideology, symbolism, and the cultural construction of meaning
was Nancy Peluso’s (1992) pioneering study of the struggle between the Indonesian State and forest
dwellers over the Indonesian teak forests. Building on the works of E.P. Thompson and James Scott on
Cultures of resistance, Peluso shows how the Indonesian State sought to maintain control of the
forests through a certain conception of property rights and an ideology of criminality, and how forest
dwellers challenged those conceptions by engaging in “criminal behavior” and developing a counterdiscourse on what is a fair, legal, and legitimate use of the forest.
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Oppression
Domination over nature justifies exploitation
Birke, 94 [Linda: Biologist and Women's Studies Professor @ University of Warwick. Feminism, Animals
and Science: The Naming of the Shrew. Pg. 11]
Another area in which we might make more connections between our theorizing about science and
other politics and social movements concerns environmental issues, and there has been a surge of
interest in ecofeminism in recent years. How western culture constructs its relationship to nature is, as
many critics have argued, deeply problematic. It focuses on notions of dominance over and
exploitation of nature that are causing widespread environmental havoc (Shiva 1989; Cox 1993).
‘Nature’ in this context of dominance is partly non-human nature – the other species of animals, the
plants, the microorganisms, the geological structures of our earth – but it is also significantly much of
humanity. Western imperialism and global exploitation assumes that it can appropriate nature’s
resources without significant consequence; those resources may be other peoples, or they may be
directly affected by western destruction of their local environment. It is in that vein, that, for example,
the Women’s Environmental Network in Britain has investigated the chocolate industry, which not only
destroys the environment but also has repercussions on human lives.
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Environment
Patriarchial Domination is the Cause for Environmental Domination
Mack-Canty, 04 (Colleen, NSWA Journal, Volume: 16 No. 3, Fall, Pg 171, AMC)
Feminists who take the historical and causal approach to explain the interconnected subjugations of
women, other suppressed people, and nature, suggest that the ubiquitousness of androcentrism with its
accompanying phenomenon, the patriarchal domination of women and nature, is the source of
environmental degradation. Riane Eisler (1988) and Carolyn Merchant (1980) are examples of feminists
who present varying accounts of this approach. They explain how and approximately when societies
that previously had been living essentially in concord with nature and with each other became
subjugated by patriarchal domination. Societies, in these accounts, then become disharmonious in
their relationships.
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Colonialism
Speciesism justifies colonialism more than racism
Kochi & Ordan ‘8 (Tarik: Queen’s University; Noam: Bar Ilan University. “An Argument for the Global
Suicide of Humanity,” borderlands, 7.3, 2008.)
One dominant presumption that underlies many modern scientific and political attitudes
towards technology and creative human action is that of ‘speciesism’, which can itself be
called a ‘human-centric’ view or attitude. The term ‘speciesism’, coined by psychologist Richard D.
Ryder and later elaborated into a comprehensive ethics by Peter Singer (1975), refers to the attitude by which
humans value their species above both non-human animals and plant life. Quite typically humans conceive
non-human animals and plant life as something which might simply be used for their
benefit. Indeed, this conception can be traced back to, among others, Augustine (1998, p.33). While many
modern, ‘enlightened’ humans generally abhor racism, believe in the equality of all
humans, condemn slavery and find cannibalism and human sacrifice repugnant, many still
think and act in ways that are profoundly ‘speciesist’. Most individuals may not even be
conscious that they hold such an attitude, or many would simply assume that their attitude
falls within the ‘natural order of things’. Such an attitude thus resides deeply within
modern human ethical customs and rationales and plays a profound role in the way in
which humans interact with their environment. The possibility of the destruction of our
habitable environment on earth through global warming and Hawking’s suggestion that we
respond by colonising other planets forces us to ask a serious question about how we value
human life in relation to our environment. The use of the term ‘colonisation’ is significant
here as it draws to mind the recent history of the colonisation of much of the globe by
white, European peoples. Such actions were often justified by valuing European civilisation
higher than civilisations of non-white peoples, especially that of indigenous peoples. For
scholars such as Edward Said (1978), however, the practice of colonialism is intimately bound up
with racism. That is, colonisation is often justified, legitimated and driven by a view in which
the right to possess territory and govern human life is grounded upon an assumption of
racial superiority. If we were to colonise other planets, what form of ‘racism’ would
underlie our actions? What higher value would we place upon human life, upon the human
race, at the expense of other forms of life which would justify our taking over a new habitat
and altering it to suit our prosperity and desired living conditions?
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Racism
Species thinking creates racial demarcations. The reason violence happens after the
othering process is because people are dehumanized
Deckha ‘10 (Maneesha: Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. “It’s time to abandon
the idea of ‘human’ rights,” The Scavenger, December 13, 2010.)
One of her primary arguments is that race thinking, which she defines as “the denial of a common bond
of humanity between people of European descent and those who are not”, is “a defining feature of
the world order” today as in the past. In other words, it is the “species thinking” that helps to create
the racial demarcation. As Razack notes with respect to the specific logic infusing the camps, they “are
not simply contemporary excesses born of the west’s current quest for security, but instead represent
a more ominous, permanent arrangement of who is and is not a part of the human community”. Once
placed outside the “human” zone by race thinking, the detainees may be handled lawlessly and thus
with violence that is legitimated at all times. Racialization is not enough and does not complete their
Othering experience. Rather, they must be dehumanized for the larger public to accept the violence
against them and the increasing “culture of exception” which sustains these human bodily exclusions .
Although nonhumans are not the focus of Razack’s work, the centrality of the subhuman to the logic of
the camps and racial and sexual violence contained therein is also clearly illustrated in her specific
examples. In the course of her analysis, to determine the import of race thinking in enabling violence,
Razack quotes a newspaper story that describes the background mentality of Private Lynndie England,
the white female soldier made notorious by images of her holding onto imprisoned and naked Iraqi men
with a leash around their necks. The story itself quotes a resident from England’s hometown who says
the following about the sensibilities of individuals from their town: To the country boys here, if you’re a
different nationality, a different race, you’re sub-human. That’s the way that girls like Lynndie England
are raised. Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season
here you’re hunting something. Over there they’re hunting Iraqis. Razack extracts this quote to illustrate
how “race overdetermined what went on”, but it may also be observed that species “overdetermined
what went on”. Race has a formative function, to be sure, but it works in conjunction with species
difference to enable the violence at Abu Ghraib and other camps. Dehumanization promotes
racialization, which further entrenches both identities. It is an intertwined logic of race, sex, culture
and species that lays the foundation for the violence.
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Hidden Violence
Violence against nature is hidden in order to make it acceptable
Deckha ‘10 [Maneesha: Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. “It’s time to
abandon the idea of ‘human’ rights,” The Scavenger, December 13, 2010.]
According to Richard Bulliet, professor of history at Columbia University, part of what characterizes
postdomestic society in the United States is the invisibility of violence against animals. Contrary to the
seemingly insatiable appetite for animal blood sports several centuries ago, postdomestic sensibilities
against this type of bloodletting have become the norm due to an aversion to viewing animal
slaughter despite the acceptance of slaughterhouses and the knowledge of the hidden and routine
violence against animals that occurs there. Postdomestic societies brutalize animals, but hide the
brutality. Thus, anti-cruelty laws cover these blood sports today, but not much else beyond basic
sustenance and shelter. “Cruelty” typically only extends to protection from “unnecessary” suffering
and excludes all forms of current or “postdomestic” institutionalized violence against animals. It is not
that postdomestic societies are any less violent than predomestic ones. Rather, only the “excessive”
violence against animals, i.e., that which is not related to any culturally mainstream profitable or
recreational practice, is outlawed while a multiplicity of institutional violence venues are kept hidden or
filtered from full view. This approach to animal “protection” is compatible within a legal regime that
classifies all nonhuman beings as property rather than persons and is premised on a species divide
that is foundational for western cultures in general. Statutes outlawing cruelty co-exist with the
slaughterhouse. It is a mistake though to assume that the slaughterhouse is an “animal rights” issue of
no consequence to humans beyond the working conditions for the slaughterhouse workers.
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Outweighs
The most pervasive kind of violence is violence against nature
Deckha ‘10 [Maneesha: Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. “It’s time to
abandon the idea of ‘human’ rights,” The Scavenger, December 13, 2010.]
One of the most violent places imaginable is the modern day slaughterhouse. The rate of killing inside
is swift and of unprecedented proportions. In the United States alone, around 9.5 billion animals are
killed per year. To put that in perspective, that amounts to 250 cows per hour and 266 chickens per
second. This figure does not account for all slaughter of animals for food in the United States, merely
the extent of killing of land farm animals. The overwhelming number are born, raised, and killed for
consumption making the violence against farm animals the most pervasive form of institutionalized
violence against animals. These statistics also fail to capture the suffering animals endure while in the
slaughterhouse, where they are raised for slaughter.
Violence against animals is central to how we perform violence against each other
Deckha ‘10 [Maneesha: Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. “It’s time to
abandon the idea of ‘human’ rights,” The Scavenger, December 13, 2010.]
While the intersection of race and gender is often acknowledged in understanding the etiology of
justificatory narratives for war, the presence of species distinctions and the importance of the
subhuman are less appreciated. Yet, the race (and gender) thinking that animates Razack’s argument
in normalizing violence for detainees (and others) is also centrally sustained by the subhuman figure.
As Charles Patterson notes with respect to multiple forms of exploitation: Throughout the history of our
ascent to dominance as the master species, our victimization of animals has served as the model and
foundation for our victimization of each other. The study of human history reveals the pattern: first,
humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animas and do the same to
them. Patterson emphasizes how the human/animal hierarchy and our ideas about animals and
animality are foundational for intra-human hierarchies and the violence they promote. The routine
violence against beings designated subhuman serves as both a justification and blueprint for violence
against humans. For example, in discussing the specific dynamics of the Nazi camps, Patterson further
notes how techniques to make the killing of detainees resemble the slaughter of animals were
deliberately implemented in order to make the killing seem more palatable and benign. That the
detainees were made naked and kept crowded in the gas chambers facilitated their animalization and,
in turn, their death at the hands of other humans who were already culturally familiar and comfortable
with killing animals in this way.
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Alternative
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Ecofeminism Key
The only way to overcome competition over scarce resources is ecofeminism
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 2-3]
It is now common knowledge that rights-based ethics (most characteristic of dominant-culture men,
although women may share this view as well) evolve from a sense of self as separate, existing within a
society of individuals who must be protected from each other in competing for scarce resources. In
contrast, Gilligan describes a different approach, more common to women, in which "the moral
problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its
resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This
conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the
understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties
moral development to the understanding of rights and rules." 4 Similarly, Karen Warren's "Toward an
Ecofeminist Ethic" describes eight boundary conditions of a feminist ethic; that is, conditions within
which ethical decision making may be seen as feminist. These conditions include coherence within a
given historical and conceptual framework, an understanding of feminism as striving to end all systems
of oppression, a pluralistic structure, and an inclusive and contextual framework that values and
emphasizes humans in relationships, denies abstract individualism, and provides a guide to action. The
analyses of Gilligan and Warren indicate that ecofeminism, which asserts the fundamental
interconnectedness of all life, offers an appropriate foundation for an ecological ethical theory for
women and men who do not operate on the basis of a self/other disjunction.
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Ecofeminism Key
Any attempt at liberation requires investigation into oppression of women and nature
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 1-2]
Ecofeminism is a theory that has evolved from various fields of feminist inquiry and activism: peace
movements, labor movements, women's health care, and the anti-nuclear, environmental, and animal
liberation movements. Drawing on the insights of ecology, feminism, and socialism, ecofeminism's basic
premise is that the ideology which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender,
sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature.
Ecofeminism calls for an end to all oppressions, arguing that no attempt to liberate women for any
other oppressed group will be successful without an equal attempt to liberate nature. Its theoretical
base is a sense of self most commonly expressed by women and various other nondominant groups - a
self that is interconnected with all life. In their analyses of oppression, socialists, animal liberationists,
ecologists, and feminists each distinguish between privileged and oppressed groups, where the
privileged are upper- or middle-class, human, technologically and industrially "developed," male, and
the oppressed are poor or working-class, nonhuman animal, "undeveloped" nature, and female,
respectively. Ecofeminism describes the framework that authorizes these forms of oppression as
patriarchy, an ideology whose fundamental self/ other distinction is based on a sense of self that is
separate, atomistic.
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Ecofeminism Key
Feminism recognizes the privilege of the scientization of society and its objectification
of women and nature
Goldman & Schurman, 00 [Michael and Rachel A: Professors at University of Minnesota. "Closing
the 'Great Divide': New Social Theory on Society and Nature. Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26p. 571572]
Some find the origins of universalized oppression of women and nature rooted in the Enlightenment
and the (Western) scientization of society, with its consequent objectification of nature as the formal
object of dispassionate (read: male, scientific) inquiry (Merchant 1980, 1992; Shiva 1989; Mies & Shiva
1993). Others are less convinced by this macrostructural rigidity, yet maintain a strong critique of
dominant scientific practices and related oppressive effects for objects of science, such as nature, and
for subjects excluded from the scientific professions, such as (until recently) women (Haraway 1991,
1997b; Martin 1994; Ginsburg & Rapp 1995; Downey & Dumit 1997). Nonetheless, the shared project of
destabilizing common myths around what is nature, culture, and biology, is yielding some of the most
fruitful scholarly work in social theory today. Two substantive areas stand out: gender and the
environment, particularly in developing countries; and biotechnology and the politics of the body
(human and nonhuman). These areas overlap and cross-pollinate intellectually, with scholars borrowing
from and contributing to each other’s work. Through multiple lenses, feminists walk the tightrope of
explicating what biological/ecological traits are meaningful for whom, and which are used as
weapons. For example, an assumed promise of late capitalism is that we humans all have the
potential of transcending the biological limits of nature: to produce food without soil, prolong human
life with techno-surrogate body parts, and consume more than the earth can sustain. Environmental
feminists recognize that the promise of limitless consumption exists, but only for the most privileged,
for whom “[the] limits are borne by others, including the earth itself” (Mellor 1997, p. 190). They
contend that biology does matter and, moreover, that it is a contested zone in which constructed
gender, race, class, nationality, and species differences have significant consequences. In contrast to
the notion of transcendence, which underlies Enlightenment thought on society’s relationship to nature,
environmental feminists theorize social-natural relations in terms of ecological embeddedness and
biological embodiment(Mellor 1997, Salleh 1997). This alternative perspective is associated with the
idea of immanence, or a reflexive awareness of one’s position in nature.
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Ecofeminism Key
Ecofeminism’s deconstructive methods key to solve psychotic avoidance of sexism
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 42-43]
Radical environmentalists find much common ground with regard to the sort of societies they would like
to live in. However, ecofeminism. Differs from Manstream theory when it comes to strategy, or how to
get there. The Liberalist and Leftist (non-Marxist) approaches in green thought call for changing
people's values through reason, education and/or spirituality in order to bring about social change but
deny the significance of sex and gender in personal motivation. Put more emphatically by Sharon
Doubiago: "Because of sexism, because of the psychotic avoidance of the issue at all costs, ecologists
have failed to grasp the fact that at the core of our suicidal mission is the psychological issue of
gender, the oldest war, the war of the sexes." S1 A strategy based on denial is insufficient to achieve
social change. Ecofeminist strategy, in contrast, suggests that a deconstructive process is also
necessary. Ecofeminists would defuse the ideological and psychological pressures upon the masculine
ego that fuel the abuse of power. Manstream green strategy, on the other hand, often fails to deal
with problems of politics-as-usual, liberalism, mysticism, identification, power seeking and sexism,
and co-optation. In the discussion below, I focus on the Liberalist position, but some points apply to
Leftists as well. Again, "Liberalist" refers to strategies for social change that begin from the individual - it
is not to be confused with liberal ideology.
History proves that domination is not inevitable. Feminism solves conflict.
Kheel, 08 (Marti: writer and activist in the areas of animal liberation, environmental ethics and
ecofeminism. Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective. Pg. 209)
One goal of placing the exploitation of women and nature in historical context is to provide a basis of
hope for change in existing attitudes. If domination has historical roots, the argument for its
inevitability is called into question. Ecofeminists thus delve beneath surface actions and ideas to
challenge the prevailing assumptions about human nature that underlie modern Western society.
While most theorists in the modern Western ethical tradition presume the inevitability of egoistic
impulses and then offer abstract principles and constructs to control them, for many ecofeminists the
overridingethical question is, rather, how and why compassion and moral conduct toward nature have
failed to be sustained. Philosopher Alison Jaggar speculates on what would occur if liberals were to
rethink their assumptions about human nature: “Instead of community and cooperation being taken
as phenomena whose existence and even possibility is puzzling, and sometimes even regarded as
impossible, the existence of egoism, competitiveness and conflict would themselves become puzzling
and problematic.”5
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Ecofeminism Key
Only ecofeminism takes the extra step to relinquish “inherent” human power over
nature
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 133-134]
Seen in this light, ecofeminism, rather than being a poor relation of the feminist and ecology
movements, is a synthesis, the sibling connection between that which is fundamental to both
movements. The ideology of ecofeminism demands opposition to domination in all its forms,20 and a
rejection of the notion that any part of the world, human or nonhuman, exists solely for the use and
pleasure of any other part. This is a deceptively simple-sounding assertion; but if you contemplate it for
a moment, you will realize that it has the entire weight of the Western cultural tradition against it. Until
the last two decades, even the most radical environmentalists accepted the idea of human superiority
over nature; they urged only that we be responsible, that we not abuse our rights to shape nature to
human ends.31 Ecofeminism goes further, and relinquishes all claims to inherent human powerover.32
Problems of nature and humanity must be considered by feminists because it
intersects with other forms of oppression
Plumwood, 93 [Val: Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University.
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Pg. 26]
The key concepts of rationality (or mentality) and nature then create crucial links between the human
and the masculine, so that to problematise masculinity and rationality is at the same time to
problematise the human and, with it, the relation of the human to the contrasted non-human sphere.
As we shall see, however, these concepts also form links to other areas of exclusion, for it is not just
any kind of masculinity which is usually involved here, but a particular kind which is formed in the
context of class and race as well as gender domination (which I have called the master model). The
western rationalist ideals of the human embody norms not only of gender exclusion but of race, class
and species exclusion. The view that women’s humanity is unproblematic mistakenly takes the
concept of the human to be unproblematic and fails to observe these biases and exclusions. This
connection is then another reason why the issue of the traditional connection of women and nature
cannot simply be ignored, why the problems raised must be considered by feminists.
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Ecofeminism Key
Ecology can only prevail under a feminist framework because of its recognition of
interconnectedness of oppression
Plumwood, 93 (Val: Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University.
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Pg. 17)
If social ecology fails to reconcile the critiques because it cannot understand that human relations to
non-humans are as political as human relations to other humans, deep ecology as articulated here also
suppresses the potential for an adequate political understanding of its theme of human/nature
domination, although it achieves this suppression of the political by a different route. Thus dominant
forms of deep ecology choose for their core concept of analysis the notion of identification,
understood as an individual psychic act rather than a political practice, yielding a theory which
emphasises personal transformation and ignores social structure. The dominant account is both
individualist_(failing to provide a framework for change which can look beyond the individual) and
psychologistic (neglecting factors beyond psychology). A similarly apolitical understanding is given to its
core concept of ecological selfhood; here the account, while drawing extensive connections with various
eastern religious positions, seems to go out of its way to ignore the substantial links which could
fruitfully be made with feminist accounts of the self and with feminist theory (Warren 1990; Cheney1987; 19 89). :The result, as largue -in chapters 6 and 7, is a psychology .of - . : .••• incorporation, not a
psychology, of mutuality. Fox suggests that selfishness in the form of excessive personal attachment,
which he conflates with psychological egoism, is the fundamental cause of 'possessiyeness, greed,
exploitation, war and ecological destruction' (Fox 1990:262). An analysis which exhorts us to consider
nature by transcending the egoism of personal attachment matches in its depth of political insight the
sort of social analysis which exhorts us to resolve problems of social inequality through acts of individual
unselfishness. Such an analysis also uncritically assumes an account of personal attachment as
antithetical to moral life which has increasingly and deservingly come under attack recently, especially
from feminists (chapter 7). This form of deep ecology makes a good religious or spiritual garnish for a
main political recipe which eschews radical critique and treats green politics in terms of a warmed-over
'green' liberalism. Deep ecology, like social ecology, fails in its current form to present a coherent
liberatory perspective (Elkins 1989). Given these points it seems that both deep ecology and social
ecology, as they are currently articulated, are unsuitable for providing the basis for an adequate green
theory. Social ecology stresses environmental problems as social problems, arising from the
domination of human by human, but has little sensitivity to the domination of nonhuman nature,
while deep ecology has chosen a theoretical base which allows its connection with various religious
and personal change traditions but blocks its connection to the critiques of human oppression. It
seems then that an ecologically orientated feminism is the most promising current candidate for
providing a theoretical base adequate to encompass and integrate the liberatory concerns of the
green movement. The domination of women is of course central to the feminist understanding of
domination, but is also a well-theorised model which can illuminate many other kinds of domination,
since the oppressed are often both feminized and naturalized. The ecological feminism of writers such
as Rosemary Radford Ruether has always stressed the links between the domination of women, of other
human groups and of nature.10 ‘An ecological ethic’, she writes, ‘must always be an ethic of ecojustice
that recognizes the interconnection of social domination and the domination of nature’ (1989: 149).
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Ecological feminism provides an excellent framework for the exploration of such interconnections. I
attempt her to provide some of the philosophical basis for such an account.
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Ecofeminism Key
Ecofeminism is more accessible than other kinds of feminism
Alaimo, 94 [Stacy. “Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism.
Feminist Studies,20.1, 1994.]
The social organization, communicative actions, and "personality" of animals makes blurring boundaries
between people and animals much easier than crossing the broader human-nature divide.23 How
should an ecologically conscious feminism engage nature? Ecofeminism, as Carolyn Merchant explains,
valorizes both women and nature: "The radical form of ecofeminism is a response to the perception
that women and nature have been mutually associated and devalued in western culture and that both
can be elevated and liberated through direct political action."24 Parallel to the way Luce Irigaray
reverses the values of traditional femalemale oppositions, ecofeminism recognizes that women and
nature have long been linked in Western systems of thought, and instead of trying to break the ties
that many would argue keep women oppressed, ecofeminists reaffirm them in order to fight for both
women and nature. They accept the ideological terrain, complete with its Victorian throwbacks of
woman as nurturer. Even when ecofeminists strive toward a nonessentialist connection between
women and nature, they still describe women primarily as mothers and homemakers: "Women who are
responsible for their children's well-being are often more mindful of the long-term costs of quick-fix
solutions. Through the social experience of caretaking and nurturing, women become attentive to the
signs of distress in their communities that might threaten their households."25 Despite its shortcomings
from a poststructuralist feminist perspective, ecofeminism would seem a productive oppositional
discourse for contemporary U.S. culture. In Ynestra King's words (paraphrased by Judith Plant), it is a
"strand of feminist thought that, indeed, was not interested in an equal share of the same old
carcinogenic pie."26 Ecofeminism's conception of ordinary "female" activities and experiences as the
basis of planet saving could attract women who feel left behind by what they perceive as a feminist
movement that is only concerned with women achieving "successful careers." The potential for
ecofeminism to attract women who define themselves in traditional roles could benefit both the
environmental and feminist movements.
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Feminism Key
We shouldn’t put up with the oppression of women. The negative supports a more
violent form of politics to keep women in place. As long as these hierarchies remain
unquestioned politics is useless. Need to prioritize the oppressed in discussions
Ellison ’96 [Marvin Mahan. Erotic Justice: A Liberating Ethic of Sexuality, 1996. Pg. 9-10]
An ethic of sexuality must realistically assess what poor women, women of color, and other
disenfranchised people are up against in this culture. The fact that many women "put up with" abuse
and degradation tells us volumes, if we can hear, not about any purported female desperation to seek "love"
at any cost, but rather about the devastating absence of justice and well-being in most women's lives
and in the lives of their children. Those lacking social power stay in dehumanizing, often lifethreatening
situations not because of personal inadequacies but because there are few, if any, social alternatives
that justify taking the risks of leaving an abusive but familiar situation, especially because men
typically escalate their violence to keep "their" women in place. 9 Liberalism's moral guidance about
sex and family life will never be useful if it leaves unquestioned the power hierarchies of husband
over wife, parent over child, white over black, able-bodied over disabled, and so forth, or if it
naturalizes these relationships as beneficial to all parties. "The best theorizing about justice," feminist
philosopher Susan Moller Okin writes, "is not some abstract 'view from nowhere,' but proceeds from the
carefully attentive consideration of everyone's point of view."10 The strength of Okin's statement is that
she insists that moral reason is concretely situated, but her claim, as it stands, is not strong enough to make a real
difference in a stratified, conflicted world of power inequities. From a postliberal perspective, theorizing about
sexual injustice must proceed by listening to and giving priority to those who are subjected to sexual
oppression and who manage against all odds to resist its indignities. Listening can become justicebearing only as the conversation is recentered and democratized. The voices of socially powerful,
privileged people need to be heard, but their voices must no longer monopolize the discussion. Moral
traditions can correct past distortions and become more humanizing, but only if we pay special
attention to the voices and moral wisdom of women, gay/lesbian/bisexual people, survivors of sexual
violence, and others without social status and power. By incorporating these voices from the margins,
the liberal theological tradition can also be transformed. Perspectives from "the underside" enrich the
ethical analysis, as well as stretch the vision of the moral good. The feminist and gay liberation
movements, especially as they maintain a strong commitment to race and class diversity, are shaking the
foundations by their insistence on a reordering of social power toward equality, including all sexual relations.
Transformative moral wisdom emerges from the collective insights of social movements as they seek, over time, to
reconstruct power dynamics and renew cultural traditions. Religious communities, whether they recognize it or
not, are indebted to the feminist and womanist movements and to the gay/lesbian/bisexual liberation movement
for keeping alive a vision of justice within personal life. The impetus for rethinking the sexual system is
coming not from established insiders but from social justice movements on the margins.
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Narratives
Narratives provide alternative forms of knowledge for ecofeminism
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor.of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 129-130]
Many ecofeminists therefore find greater satisfaction in stories of the past that acknowledge the
intangible, the magical. And many of us want more from history than a cautionary reminder of what
we already know. We want inspiration and alternative ways of knowing. For that reason we
sometimes turn to more admittedly conjectural histories than those which purport to portray the past
"objectively", gleaning knowledge from reports of archeological findings, oral traditions, remnants of
earlier cultures, intuitive readings of myth and ritual, and sheer speculation. Particularly popular in this
respect are histories of matriarchal or matrifocal cultures in which women enjoyed positions of equality
or superiority vis—vis men, and nature was seen as a collaborator or benefactor, not as a foe to
conquer. 2s In the past ten years, there has been an abundance of work in this area, both scholarly and
popular, and it seems to have attracted a wide following. Within the academy, such histories are of
course suspect, since they rest heavily on icons portraying women and animals as deities or symbols
of fertility and abundance, and tend to ignore the fact that female idolization/idealization seems quite
able to coexist with actual low status (see the chapter by Stephanie Lahar in this volume). But this is no
reason to dismiss them. All history is conjectural and subjective; complete pictures are virtually
impossible. The value of speculative histories is that they offer a sense of possibility, a sense that
what might have been might also yet be. And because they draw on myth and ritual, they offer
models of consciousness that help us to create cosmologies and rituals for our own time.
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Narratives
Narratives create alternate histories for ecofeminism
Vance, 95 [Linda. "Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots" Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical
Explorations by Carol J. Adams & Josephine Donovan, Pg. 176-177]
Storytelling is by definition an act done in community. When I tell you, or my students, or my friends
the story of the frog pond, or stories like it, I am engaging in a form of ethical discourse, modeling, as it
were, my beliefs about human/nature relationships. Mv stories shape others' stories; their stories
shape mine. Imagine, then, the power of conscious narrative, of myths and tales intentionally
constructed and repeated that would inform and instruct us in "proper" attitudes toward nature. This
is not so different from the type of storytelling that has emerged from feminism over the past twenty
years. We have told each other our stories, have discerned the patterns that emerge from them, have
chosen the patterns that seem best suited to a liberated future, and have repeated those again and
again, with appropriate modifications and variations, until a relatively clear "feminist ethos" of caring,
relationship, compassion, and attentiveness has been called into existence. It is no wonder, then, that
ecofeminists would advocate a similar approach to the creation of a new environmental ethos. For
Karen Warren, first-person narratives can "give voice to a felt sensitivity often lacking in traditional
ethical discourse, namely, a sensitivity to conceiving of oneself as fundamentally 'in relationship with'
others"; they can express "a variety of ethical attitudes and behaviors often overlooked or
underplayed in mainstream Western ethics"; and thev can suggest "what counts as an appropriate
solution to an ethical situation" ( 135 - 36J. These consciously chosen narratives, Jim Cheney suggests,
rightfully extend out to include "not just the human community but also the land, one's community in
a larger sense." What we want, he says, ; ...is language that grows out of experience and articulates it,
language intermediate between self, culture, and world, their intersection, carrying knowledge of both,
knowledge charged with valuation^and instruction. This is language in which, in Paul Shepard's.words,
"the clues to the meaning of life [are] embodied in natural things, where everyday life [is] inextricable
from spiritual significance and encounter." (Nature and the Theorizing of Difference, 9)
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Narratives
Stories about ecological limits solve
Vance '95 [Linda. "Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots" Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations by Carol
J. Adams & Josephine Donovan. Pg. 179-180]
Similarly, it is inappropriate to craft narratives that present the world as an unlimited storehouse of
resources awaiting human use, or which posit human ingenuity as the single driving force behind
change, or which, for that matter, extol the virtues of human manipulation of the natural world. The
tale of human progress, whether strictly linear or dialectically unfolding, has outlived its usefulness, if
indeed it ever had any. And while declensionist narratives may seem too overwhelming, too fatalistic, or
too much a manipulative stage setting for salvation fantasies, it does us no good to avoid the
unpleasant truth: there are ecological limits. So let's tell the stories of dammed and polluted rivers,
disappeared ecosystems and species, plains and prairies and tundra ravaged by inappropriate
agriculture and grazing, forests leveled for exports, the unnecessary slaughter of millions of animals.
But at the same time, let's also tell the stories about how we could live in harmony with the rest of
nature. Our narratives could remind us of the integrity and complexity of the natural world, and the
need to embrace limits with joy and humility. They could be models of ecologically responsible and
respectful interactions, both among animals and between humans and animals. They could inspire us
to see beauty and feel delight in natural forces. None of these stories require that we ignore "the
facts," or turn away from elements of the natural world that seem harsh or cruel, like predation, or
starvation, or natural disaster, or competition. Our narratives about nature, about animals, about
ourselves — all must ultimately be judged by their credibility; we must therefore tell stories that are
as accurate as we can make them.
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Answers
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Framework
Policy Making doesn’t change the minds of people because it doesn’t exist in a
vacuum. Our approach avoids this “politics as usual” approach and is key to retooling
politics outside of Patriarchy and Humanism
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 43-44]
This Liberalist strategy contains vestiges of the dominant liberal political and economic paradigm that,
it says, contributes to the environmental problem. Mainstream liberals assume that simply changing
people's values will lead to different voting and behavior patterns. Their reasoning is this: values make
people prefer certain lifestyle or political alternatives; therefore, political change can be achieved bv
persuading others to adopt one's own beliefs. This logic is perfectly reasonable - but only in a vacuum
unaffected by the media, corporate advertising, a liberal orthodoxy. Patriarchal social conditioning,
linguistic patterns, and so on. This is because mainstream liberal philosophy is premised on an image of
Man as an autonomous individual, separate from His context. Many Liberalist greens eschew liberalism,
yet share its context-free logic, which does not acknowledge the full extent to which our mental
processes and values are shaped by the superstructure and infrastructure of our social institutions.
Thus, although many Manstream green writers are themselves political activists, the approach is
essentially "politics as usual" because it relies ultimately on traditional pressure Politics and
"numbers" for radical change. They are essentially only advocating public pressure for better goals
and policies. However, corporate power is above governments and largely dictates who gets elected
and what they do. The Liberalist strategy does not undermine the props or address the emotional
"needs" of the powerful. There is a certain irony in a position that recognizes that the competitive
global economic system creates environmental problems but then proposes a solution that is
essentially market-based, reiving on consumers to change their values and lifestyles. This is analogous
to approaching the drug problem by persuading people to "just say no," when we are dealing with
something that is profitable precisely because it operates outside the market. The resource extraction
and pollution industries do not pay the replacement costs of public resources. Like the illegal drug
business, they are lucrative because they do not pay the real costs and they create markets. Likewise,
the Green consumer/voter-based strategy encourages us to place a kind of moral responsibility on the
victim, distracting attention from the profiteers. ^Although people demand goods, they do not, for
example, demand that these goods be made with new toxic materials and processes that merely replace
natural ones. People have not actually been given these kinds of choices. Recent events illustrate that
educating consumers is less urgent than retooling our technocratic, political, and corporate decisionmaking arenas. Consumers would surely not object, for instance, if their creature comforts were
provided via solar energy. In fact, public enthusiasm for recycling centers, environmentally friendly
products, and recycled paper has outstripped the supply, yet recycling centers have had to close in
Australia. Industry has not been buying the material simply because, in our distorted economy, live
trees are cheaper than used ones. This phenomenon is a function of power relations that shape
institutions, laws, and economic and planning methods, and only partly a function of chauvinism
toward other animals.
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Framework
Policy-making leads to the destruction of the environment for the sake of economic
growth
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 14]
The other superficial ground for optimism is the burgeoning number of environmental professionals
whose role is to advise government and industry. Environmental specialists are multiplying in all
professions, and we now have “environmental” economists, scientists, administrators, lawyers, and
planners promoting marginal reforms. The decision-making methodologies these professions use,
however, are heavily influenced by concepts derived from the mainstream liberal paradigm and are
biased against the preservation of species and ecosystems. For example, because they are geared to
analyzing the costs and benefits of development alternatives, they balance off public needs to meet
private wants over the long term. Even more fundamentally, an instrumentalist and anthropocentric
ethic – whereby human and natural “resources” are construed to have value to the extent that they
can be used for human purposes – is endemic to the technocratic methodologies, decision-making
processes, and regulatory schemes. This ethic is a natural outgrowth of a “power complex” that is so
deeply ingrained in the modern psyche that planners and decision makers who consider themselves
environmentally aware continue to make decisions that facilitate the exponential destruction of the
nonhuman environment by incremental trade-offs of environmental quality for economic growth.
Feminist approaches expand debate in useful ways
Simson ‘5 (Rosalind S. “Feminine Thinking” Social Theory and Practice. Vol 31. 2005)
2. Feminine Thinking, Knowledge, and Rationality The examples cited above are strong evidence that,
contrary to the historically popular belief that feminine thinking is ill-suited to intellectual pursuits,
feminine ways of thinking in fact expand the domain of rational thought and human knowledge
beyond the bounds mapped out by masculine approaches. These examples, moreover, are but the tip
of the iceberg. In the last fifteen or so years, feminine ways of thinking have been applied to an everexpanding variety of areas: law, corporate management, pedagogy, nursing, international relations, and
many others. (34) Of course, reasonable people may disagree about the persuasiveness of specific
claims made by Gilligan, Noddings, McClintock, Oakley, and the many others who use feminine
approaches, but there should be consensus that in general these approaches expand debate in useful
ways. Feminine types of thinking suggest new topics for investigation, alternative methods for
gathering evidence, additional hypotheses for consideration, and further factors to take into account
in deciding whether hypotheses have been confirmed.
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Framework
Naturalized notions of politics are imbued with calculation/rationality, and eliminates
localized perspectives. Bad for environment.
Goldman & Schurman, 00 [Michael and Rachel A: Professors at University of Minnesota. "Closing
the 'Great Divide': New Social Theory on Society and Nature. Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26. p.
576-577]
Whereas some look at the production of scientific knowledge from the perspective of political interests
(e.g. Tyalor & Buttel 1992), others take a different approach by considering how particular culturalsocial values become naturalized and diffused beyond the intentions of any particular interests
(Mackenzie 1995; Escobar 1995; Luke 1997; Goldman 1998, 200; Darier 1999). These scholars deploy a
Foucauldian analysis of power/knowledge (Foucault 1980, Burchell et all 1991) for which exercises of
power and the accumulation of (environmental) knowledge are co-constitutive, producing power
relations and scientific discourses that rare intentional yet nonsubjective. These power/knowledge
relations are imbued with calculation, rationality, and a productive influence on global norms of
ecological and social governance (i.e. what constitutes the eco-rational citizen or state). Hence, we find
globalizing discourses of environmentalism, reproduced by nonstate international institutions—e.g.
NGO, intergovernmental, and scientific networks—that energetically push to establish universalizing
norms, behaviors, and procedures to regulate the security of the environment. These
power/knowledge incursions elide heterogeneity and conflict and instead represent the world as
rational, consensual, and easily molded for sustainability. For example, tools such as environmental
impact assessments and green cost-benefit analyses are now commonly used by public and private
agencies around the world, and they are, in fact, often requirements for governments seeking
international debt relief and financial support from institutions such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. Yet despite their practice in vastly different settings (e.g. Laos, Lesotho, or
Lithuania), environmental impact assessments and cost-benefit analyses rarely reflect localized
cultural forms and norms, but, rather, newly contrived universal norms and models of sustainability,
resource valuation and degradation. These kinds of questions this knowledge/power literature asks
include the following: What specific micro-technologies of power do these new methodologies and
sciences engender? What perspectives, issues, and questions get disguised, buried, or eliminated (i.e.
subjugated knowledges) in the production and circulation of these universal scientific tools and
models (i.e. elite knowledge)? Scholars working from this perspective have begun to theorize naturesociety relations in Foucauldian terms of biopolitics and biopower (Dean 1994, Burchell et al 1991). For
example, Arturo Escobar’s (1995) analysis of development discourse deconstructs the concept of
sustainable development as deployed in the South by Northern-based institutions. Playing with Carolyn
Merchant’s trenchant analysis of the Enlightenment, Escobar argues that these institutions have
brought about the semiotic “death of nature” and replaced it with the “rise of the environment,” a
discursive strategy rooted in the destructive processes of post-World War II development and the
proliferation of new governing strategies of nature. Everything in nature that is useful for increased
industrial production falls under the rubric of the environment; all else disappears. Moreover, localized
forms of knowledge become useful only in as much as they serve the new disciplinary mechanisms of
local “participation” and global integration. The new scientific discourses of economism and ecologism
coalesce under new regimes of power that, Escobar concludes, do more to undermine ecological-social
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balances around the world than to sustain them. Studying the changing agrarian landscape in rural India,
Akhil Gupta (1998) argues that new technological innovations in biotechnology, intellectual property
rights, and bioengineered seeds and food products are factors in the respatialization of sovereignty, that
is, who controls what farmers can grow on what land and the reconfiguration of socio-ecological
relations. Gupta contends that new global environmental regulations emanating from the 1992 Rio
Earth Summit and other global accords have given birth to new technologies of government unhitched
from the nation-state and found in the realm of transnationality (cf Ong 1999). In his work on the World
Bank, Michael Goldman (2000) uses the term eco-governmentality to denote the rapid diffusion of
power/knowledge technologies that simultaneously operate on the levels of the individual, society, and
the state. These practices are at the center of new political battles over what counts as nature and
environmental problems and what constitutes an eco-rational citizen. According to these scholars, this
type of green knowledge production has become prolific, controversial, and hegemonic. Its “ways of
seeing” have poured through the arteries of popular, political, and economic networks that have as their
mission the accumulation of knowledge for the control of nature’s value. It is a process that frames
current discourses of sustainability, and disguises the engines of capitalist expansion as liberalizing
and rational. In short the production of green knowledge should be understood as internal to, and
constitutive of, new and existing exercise of power.
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Framework
Environmentalism is more about reshaping politics than working within it
Wissenburg & Yoram ‘4 (Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism?”
Marcel Wissenburg & Yoram Levy, 2004. Pg. 4)
Environmentalism is traditionally not only concerned with the capability of existing political
arrangements and institutions to successfully address the environmental challenge. It also entails or
suggests a different conception of the good society. In addition to solving environmental problems,
environmentalism is also, maybe even primarily, concerned with an analysis of the nature of such
problems. In addition to a concern with acting effectively within a given political institutional context,
environmentalism is also engaged in redefining and reshaping that context. And in addition to its
concern with institutional design, environmentalism is also engaged in specifying and defining the
environmental goals those institutions should promote, goals like the preservation of a self-sustaining
nature or natural biodiversity. In other words, prior to its instrumental dimension environmentalism
has a normative and moral dimension determining the way in which the whole environmental issue
makes sense to us - if at all. It is with regard to this dimension that we ask whether environmentalism
has come to an end. The empirical approach cannot answer this question, since, by its very nature, it
treats the normative and moral dimension as a given.
Nature is political
Talshir ‘4 (Gayil. “The role of environmentalism: From The Silent Spring to The Silent Revolution,”
Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism?” Marcel Wissenburg & Yoram
Levy, 2004. Pg. 23)
Furthermore, the environment was instrumental in challenging the boundary of the political as the
environment was, par excellence, the non-political issue. The Enlightenment ethos of progress,
dependent on the exploitation of nature and advancement of science and technology, was rarely
challenged before on these grounds. Nature was never a subject in the moral or political sense. The
realization that natural problems are political, that economic growth - advocated by left and right alike
- encroaches upon Earth's limited resources, and that national systems can hardly address ecological
issues, challenged the underlying assumption concerning the political arena.
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Framework
Need an entirely reconceived notion of politics – Current one is super destructive
Talshir ‘4 (Gayil. “The role of environmentalism: From The Silent Spring to The Silent Revolution,”
Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism?” Marcel Wissenburg & Yoram
Levy, 2004. Pg. 18)
The third option I want to pursue here is the linkage between environmentalism and 'new politics' - the
argument that environmental politics is not merely about the preservation of nature, but entails a
different conception of what politics is, and how political research should be conducted. For
environmental exploitation has always been an integral aspect of human activities in the world, a
natural part, as it were, of people's way of life. Indeed, the radical transformations in demographic,
geographical and socio-economic patterns, maturing in the late nineteenth century, led the western
industrialized nations to rely heavily on global natural resources for their rapid growth. World
resources were gradually incorporated into one central pool of capital, managed largely through
international market mechanisms, resulting in a rapid depletion of resources on a world-wide scale. It
took recovery from two world wars for relatively affluent and stable advanced industrial democracies
to settle into the bipolarity of the cold war, a balance of power which set in motion environmental
problems, leading to their introduction onto the political agenda. By far the most profound experience
that led environmental awareness to take root in western societies was the real prospect for a global
destruction through nuclear war. The current fear of the use of weapons of mass destruction being
used on innocent populations is the most recent appearance of the same basic worries. The culmination
of global threat and personal anxiety in the name of national interest led to a popular realization that
a thorough assessment of environmental issues is fundamental for a humane future. Nuclear war, the
disposal of nuclear waste, atomic, biological and chemical (ABC) weapons, an accelerated arms race
and the threat of the development of weapons of mass destruction comprise, however, only the tip of
the iceberg of environmental problems threatening to overwhelm the global village.
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Framework
Standards for objectivity and rationality within a community for the insiders without
alternative perspectives means that that neutrality can’t ever be achieved and
discriminates against those who are already oppressed within that system
Harding ‘6 [Sandra: teaches philosophy in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA.
“Two Influential Theories of Ignorance and Philosophy’s Interests in Ignoring Them,” Hypatia, 21.3, 2006.]
Feminist standpoint theorists identify the epistemological underdevelopment of mainstream epistemologies and
philosophies of science as well as of the popular and disciplinary conceptual frameworks through which they gain
widespread influence.5 These arguments are now familiar, though often misunderstood. Prevailing standards
for objectivity, rationality, and good method, as well as for appropriate topics for scientific inquiry,
are constituted in ways that make them oblivious to their own limitations. Scientific standards and
forms of social rule, of governance, co-constitute each other. Paradoxically, even tragically for the
dominant philosophies of science, research that rigorously obeys disciplinary methodological rules for
meeting these standards will be unable to satisfy them. For example, "the scientific community"
simultaneously directs scientific research to identify all social elements of a research project, yet also
tells the researcher there is no need to seek criticisms and perceptions from outside its "consensus."
Attempts to achieve value neutrality by repeating observations across disciplinarily legitimated
observers, whether individuals or research teams, block the possibility of recognizing cultural and
political values and interests that are both shared by all such observers and tend to become visible
[End Page 24] only from "outside" the groups of whoever counts as disciplinarily legitimated observers
(Harding 1993, 2003). Feminist standpoint theorists have made this kind of argument explicit; it appears
also in the writings of other social justice movements. Values and interests such as androcentrism, white
supremacy, Eurocentrism, heteronormativity, and ableism have highly shaped what have been
regarded as the very best, most highly confirmed theories in the disciplines. They were able to do so
because they were widely shared across the disciplines and among dominant groups in the
surrounding social order. Consequently, such research discriminates against those already oppressed
and devalued.
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Framework
Fiat bad - imagining total inclusivity is good so long as you don’t make it concrete,
otherwise it becomes exclusionary. This is especially true for a feminist politics.
Vasterling ’99 [Veronica: Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and the Center of Women
Studies of the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. “Butler’s Sophisticated Constructivism: A Critical
Assessment,” Hypatia, 14.3, 1999.]
Butler nevertheless offers radical inclusivity as a positive political ideal. But she does this in the context of
a critical political diagnosis of the world we live in: a world in which hegemonic conventions determine
who is to count as a subject and who is not. In this context, to strive for total inclusivity means to
strive for a radical democratic world, that is, a world no longer regulated by hegemonic conventions,
in which everyone is entitled to the status of subject. Yet, even though hers is a positive political ideal,
Butler is wary of presenting radical democracy simply as an achievable goal. To become an achievable
goal, the ideal of radical democracy has to be translated in a political program or movement: the
abstract, as it were, empty universality of total inclusivity is translated into a concrete, meaningful
universality, such as the concrete universality of human rights. Though inevitable if the ideal is to be effective,
the translation has its price for it cannot fail to be exclusionary and contestable. If radical democracy is simply
taken as an achievable goal, ideal and translation get conflated. What gets lost in the conflation is the
irreducible and critical distance between abstract and concrete universality, between the idea(l) of
total inclusivity and its inevitably exclusionary and contestable translation. Because of the lack of
critical distance the translation becomes self-evident, uncontestable, in short, hegemonic, and the
violence of its exclusions will be ignored, be excused, or most likely, remain invisible. In other words,
without the critical distance between ideal and translation, the ideal [End Page 34] of radical democracy,
like any other ideal of a perfect world, may turn into its opposite. 19 To prevent the conflation of ideal
and translation, radical democracy should be taken not as an achievable goal but as a regulatory idea
in the Kantian sense. As such it enjoins us both to act as if total inclusivity is realizable in the future and,
at the same time, to contest here and now any (violent) exclusions effected in its name. Feminist
politics can draw a valuable lesson from the general argument concerning radical inclusivity. In so far as
feminist politics invokes the category of "women," it seems to face a dilemma. On the one hand, it cannot but rely
on this category if it is to have a basis for solidarity and empowerment. On the other hand, not even the most
politically correct, multiculturalist specification of identities can fulfill the promise of inclusivity this category holds
out. On the contrary, if anything, politically correct identity politics evokes rather than assuages recriminations of
exclusion and lack of recognition. Instead of empowerment and solidarity, a "politicing of identity" (Butler 1993,
117) is the result. We are confronted with the dilemma of either giving up the category of "women" and
hence the basis of feminist politics or resigning ourselves to proto-totalitarian identity politics.
However, if we take the category of "woman" as a regulative idea(l) rather than an actual
representation of all women, the dilemma is resolved. This means that we have "to learn a double
movement: to invoke the category and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same
time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest" (Butler 1993, 222). Only if we do not
forget that the idea of total inclusivity is not realizable as such and hence that the category of
"women" is permanently open to different interpretations, can the invocation of this category enable
solidarity and empower feminist politics.
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Perm
Ecological degradation is inevitable under the existing legal system
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 13]
Radical green philosophy is premised on the conviction that the sources of the environmental crisis are
deeply rooted, in modern culture, and therefore fundamental social transformation is necessary if we
are to preserve life on earth in any meaningful sense. This follows from the realization that we cannot
rely on patchwork reforms through more appropriate economics, technology, and regulation, or
better policies gained through green electoral politics. Our public choice mechanisms and technocratic
methods are inherently biased against environmental preservation and conflict prevention. 1
Therefore, the gradual attrition, degradation, and biological impoverishment of the natural
environment are inevitable under the existing system. To save a wilderness area is to hold a finger in a
bursting dam: it only buys time.
Working within the system can’t change our relationship to the environment
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 14-15]
Thus, while it is important to work for electoral success, environmental consciousness, better policies,
and more scientific research, these cannot change the deeply rooted behavior patterns and structural
relationships that led to the environmental crisis in the first place. Nor can these change the nature of
the decision-making methods and processes that support business as usual. If we value life, then we
must transform the cultural and institutional infrastructure 3_— our frameworks of thinking, relating,
and acting. The question is, how do we get from here to there? This is where green philosophies divide.
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Perm
Cooption in the political process is inevitable
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 14]
There is another problem with political "success." Pressure politics is a matter of power, and while
power attracts new talent, it also can divide and corrupt. We are beginning to see this in the green
movement in Australia. Many "nouveau greens" seeking positions in the public arena lack a deep
analysis or an ethical commitment sufficient to prevent the compromise of principles or a latent
agenda of personal power. The process of cooptation has begun: a pluralist environmental movement
is gradually being transformed into a structure of corporatist representation and mediation. 2 The
legitimation of environmental interests by incorporation into existing decisionmaking structures, as
has happened with the labor movement, cannot resolve the underlying psychological and behavioral
causes of environmental or social conflict.
Your narrative is not a good narrative
Vance, 95 [Linda. "Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots" Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical
Explorations by Carol J. Adams & Josephine Donovan. Pg. 178-179]
I think we must learn to be discriminating about narrative, at least the narrative that we put forward
as what Cheney calls "ethical vernacular" ( Postmodern Environmental Ethics, 134). It is always true that
narrative may offer insights into the psychology of the storyteller, or the worldview of the culture from
which she speaks, and in that sense all narrative has value. But insights alone do not make it good
narrative. Good narrative — that is, narrative that can form the basis of an ethic that recognizes both
individual and general others — requires more. If we are to propose the creation of intentional
narratives, myths to live by, we must also establish criteria by which to judge them. The kind of
narratives we want, I think, should satisfy four criteria: (1) they should be ecologically appropriate to a
given time and place: (2) they should be ethically appropriate in that time and place; (3) they should
give voice to those whose stories are being told; and (4) they should make us care. I'll expand on each
of these criteria separately.
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Perm
Law doesn’t solve
Deckha ‘10 (Maneesha: Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. “It’s time to
abandon the idea of ‘human’ rights,” The Scavenger, December 13, 2010.)
One of the organizing narratives of western thought and the institutions it has shaped is humanism
and the idea that human beings are at the core of the social and cultural order. The cultural critique
humanism has endured, by way of academic theory and social movements, has focused on the failure
of its promise of universal equal treatment and dignity for all human beings. To address this failing, a
rehabilitative approach to humanism is usually adopted with advocates seeking to undo humanism’s
exclusions by expanding its ambit and transporting vulnerable human groups from “subhuman” to
“human” status. Law has responded by including more and more humans under the coveted category
of “personhood”. Yet, the logic of the human/subhuman binary typically survives this critique with
the dependence of the coveted human status on the subhuman (and the vulnerabilities it enables)
going unnoticed.
Violence against animals is legitimated by the very law that “protects” them
Deckha ‘10 (Maneesha: Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. “It’s time to
abandon the idea of ‘human’ rights,” The Scavenger, December 13, 2010.)
All of this infliction on animal bodies is perceived as legitimate violence because of the nonhuman
status of the species involved. The law buttresses this cultural acceptance. Animals are the property of
corporate and human owners; theirs is a near universal status in western legal systems, which
facilitates their instrumental use and exploitation for human ends. Due to the humanist parameters of
our typical framings of violence, when we do think of violence against animals, it is only certain forms
of violence that enter the realm of legal sanction. The protection that animals receive in western
common law systems extends to protection from “cruelty”. Yet, “cruelty” only covers a fraction of the
violent activities against animals and even then is designed to protect owners’ property interests,
rather than recognize any inherent interests of animals themselves.
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Perm
Must recognize the way humans have altered the environment – can’t be through
policy
Talshir ‘4 (Gayil. “The role of environmentalism: From The Silent Spring to The Silent Revolution,”
Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism?” Marcel Wissenburg & Yoram
Levy, 2004. Pg. 13-14)
Human society has always lived off the environment, changed and influenced it. Clearly,
environmental changes have to be considered as dangerous or endangering in order for them to
qualify as ecological problems. They can threaten either natural ecosystems, or human health or
quality of life. The process of realization itself is not an ecological but a social one. The very
problematization of certain phenomena - the extinction of species, the disappearance of wilderness,
rising levels of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect - is predicated on empirical changes which the
environment underwent. Recognizing the role of man-made influences on the environment is
fundamental for developing environmental awareness. Actual ecological processes underlie
environmental consciousness; natural reality is mediated through scientific and social discourse.
Moulding environmental knowledge is relevant to this discussion, but, crucially, the actual condition
of nature is a constituent part of it. Several things should be noted at this level. The first is that some
ecological problems are not immediately apparent: one cannot always actually see water, air or soil
pollution; the process by which acid rain produced in Britain, say, finds its way to Norway is not easy to
understand; or that global warming influences the sea level and that coastal cities might be flooded. In
other words, grasping ecological problems and their possible effects already requires complicated and
abstract thinking. Second, ecological processes are gradual and take a long time - they are therefore
difficult to assess vis-à-vis urgent economic needs (for example, even if a factory produces polluting
substances which might cause lung cancer in its employees in ten years time, the workers would still be
reluctant to lose their jobs and be unemployed today because of possible consequences in the long run).
Third, politically, the discourses of interests and representation are foreign to ecological issues.
Ecological problems rarely speak for themselves - they need to be explained and therefore require
second-order representation (Talshir 1997).
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Essentialism
Ecofeminism affirms cultural diversity, violence against women is a universal in
patriarchal societies
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 21]
The misunderstanding that ecofeminism is dualistic probably derives from the ecofeminist suggestion
that alternatives to Patriarchy are possible, as evidenced in women's and tribal cultures. That is, some
mistakenly construe ecofeminism as conceiving of women as a "homogeneous whole" (in opposition
to men) without making adequate distinctions between different races, nationalities, classes, and so
on. This, of course, would run counter to the affirmation of cultural diversity by ecofeminists -- and by
most greens, for that matter. The notion that women could have some similarities in experience and
consciousness across national and class boundaries, due to certain shared conditions, is especially
troublesome to those who reduce social problems to the existence of classes. 18 This is ironic, as the
idea that workers in different industries, cultures, or nations could have a similar consciousness is
essential to a class-based analysis. 19 The reality is that men of all classes use and take for granted
power over women within their class, workplace, political party, or family structure, even --or
especially— when power in the public arena is denied to those men. This is evidenced by the fact that
violence toward women is fairly universal in Patriarchal societies and does not differ significantly
across class boundaries.
Your claim that ecofeminism is essentialist is a construct of patriarchy
Gaard, 93 [Greta Claire: Associate Professor of Humanities, Fairhaven College at Western Washington
University. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Pg. 22-23]
The major attack against ecofeminism, however, has been that it allegedly claims that women possess
an essential nature -- a biological connection or a spiritual affinity with nature that men do not. 21
While perhaps some women believe this, it is not a concept relevant to ecofeminism as such. In the first
place, "essentialism" would be inconsistent with the logic of ecofeminism, let alone mainstream
ecology. After all, as Ynestra King and others have explained, since all life is interconnected, one group
of persons cannot be closer to nature. 22 The assertion of "difference" is based on the historical
socialization and oppression of women, not biologism. If gender is shaped by culture, ideology/and
history, and how one experiences nature is culturally mediated, then gender conditioning would tend
to shape our experience of nature. Of course, the diversity of women and their experience is certainly
not denied by ecofeminists. In fact, this diversity is celebrated and seen as a cause for optimism:
diversity is vital in the effort to bring about social change. The accusation that ecofeminism is
essentialist, I believe, results from a Patriarchal wav of thinking. That is, it presupposes the legitimacy
of the Patriarchal construct that sees nature as separate from culture. As Joan Griscom explains, "The
question itself is flawed. Only the nature/history split allows us even to formulate the question of
whether women are closer to nature than men. The very idea of one group of persons being 'closer to
nature' than another is a 'construct of culture.' " 23
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Essentialism
Ignoring biological determinism renders the body useless
Birke, 95 [Lynda: Biologist and Women's Studies Professor @ University of Warwick. "Sexist Words,
Speciesist Roots" Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations by Carol J. Adams & Josephine
Donovan. Pg. 17]
Partly, too, setting humans apart from other animals has been implicitly part of our opposition to
biological determinism. In doing so, we have objected to the ways in which biologically determinist
arguments have been used to justify women's oppression; we have also emphasized the myriad ways
in which gender can be seen to be socially and culturally constructed. Yet this emphasis on social
construction has its drawbacks. For example, it has left little space for bodies and their functions: it is
almost as if our bodies were not part of our selves. Instead, the body becomes "a blank page for social
inscriptions including those of biological discourse" (Haraway 1991, 197). Emphasizing social
construction has also cut us off from the rest of the animal kingdom, thus reinforcing the view that
humans are hot animals. In criticizing biological determinism, feminists have objected to the idea that
human behavior and capabilities are the product of some underlying biological urge. We have also
objected to the ready extrapolation from animals to humans, which is characteristic of so much
biological determinism.
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Essentialism
Feminine and masculine apply more to ideas than people. Erasing the category of
feminine makes the conditions that create oppression invisible
Simson ‘5 (Rosalind S. “Feminine Thinking” Social Theory and Practice. Vol 31. 2005)
Despite the considerations just discussed, some feminists have been loath to endorse the concept of
feminine thinking because they are suspicious of sex-correlated categories. Although, as I noted earlier,
there is no serious debate about whether all women think in feminine ways or about whether all
feminine thinkers think exactly alike, some writers worry that simply using the label "feminine" serves
to overemphasize similarities and underemphasize differences among groups of women and
invariably takes Western, white, middle-class, heterosexual women as the standard for all. (48) In
addition, several authors have pointed out overlap between thinking styles that are labeled
"feminine" and those generally characteristic of people of color and of people in various non-Western
cultures. Calling a way of thinking "feminine," these authors caution, may obscure reasons other than
sex or gender that may be responsible for the kinds of thinking common among non-white and
nonwestern women. (49) Moreover, it may falsely suggest that it is somehow possible to separate out
aspects of women's thinking that may be the result of sex and gender from aspects that may be due
to racial, cultural, or other influences. One response to these various concerns is to find a label for the
modes of thinking that I have called "feminine" that could apply equally well to the thinking of nonWesterners and any others who might be found to think similarly. Some writers have taken this
approach, substituting for "feminine" the terms "relational" or "connected" and substituting for
"masculine" the terms "separate" or "abstract." (50) A different response is to eschew labels
altogether. This approach seeks simply to detail, but not to categorize, the spectrum of thinking styles
that result when the wide array of influences on thought patterns intersect. (51) On the whole, I am
quite sympathetic to these concerns about categorization. It is certainly true that the research subjects
used to study modes of thinking have disproportionately been privileged, Western, and white. I also
acknowledge that the many formative influences on thinking interact with one another, and so the
aspects of people's thinking that can be attributed to sex and gender cannot be separated out from
aspects attributable to racial, cultural, and other factors. As I indicated earlier, furthermore, I believe
that the adjectives "feminine" and "masculine" are best understood as applying directly to types of
thinking and only indirectly to people. And lastly, I recognize that the contributions that different
thinking styles make to human knowledge can be appreciated independently of any sex or gender
associations they might have. Nevertheless, for several reasons, I am reluctant--at least at the present
time--to adopt either of the approaches described above and essentially give up on the category of
feminine thinking. First, the empirical studies that suggest the existence of sex-correlated differences
in thinking have hardly been limited to privileged Western whites. Various of the studies that I cited in
section 1.a took care to include people of differing classes, races, and ethnicities among their research
subjects. (52) In addition, some of the studies that suggest that women tend to think femininely have
focused on people of color--for example, the respective analyses that I discussed earlier by Patricia Hill
Collins and Jane Duran of African-American women and Chicanas in the American Southwest. Moreover,
these are not isolated examples. For instance, in a study of poor and working-class inner city U.S. public
high school students of varying cultural backgrounds, psychologist Niobe Way concluded that although
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these girls and boys had equally strong desires for intimate, supportive friendships, the girls were
generally more likely than the boys actually to find and maintain such friendships. (53) Similarly, in a
study of identity development in the adolescent children of black Caribbean immigrants in New York
City, sociologist Mary Waters found that boys were more likely than girls to make dichotomous choices
between an American identity and an ethnic identity, whereas girls were more likely than boys to be
bicultural--that is, to see the boundaries between American and ethnic identities as "fluid and
permeable." (54) And lastly, in a study of thinking styles in eight societies around the globe, Jane Duran
detailed the lingering effects of strong cross-cultural tendencies, particularly among peoples with long
traditions of written language, to exclude women from the kinds of abstract religious and philosophical
theorizing that traditionally has been one of the hallmarks of masculine thinking. (55) The suggestion
that women in general tend to think femininely does not imply that the thinking of all subgroups of
women falls within the cluster concept of feminine thinking. Nor does it imply that all feminine
thinking is produced by the same confluence of factors. A great deal of research is yet to be done-particularly research by investigators from a broad range of backgrounds that compares the thinking
styles of females and males in non-Western cultures. Further study may make clear the scope and
limitations of the notion of feminine thinking and conceivably might reveal that the idea of feminine
thinking, even as a cluster concept, is fundamentally flawed. My point here is that, at present, the claim
that there is a significant correlation between sex and modes of thinking, though hardly conclusively
established, does have notable multicultural support. Perhaps I might be more inclined to urge waiting
for more evidence before using the concept of feminine thinking if the alternatives outlined above were
more appealing. Both, however, have substantial drawbacks. On the one hand, I resist substituting
terms like "connected" and "separate" for "feminine" and "masculine" because, as I have already
suggested and explain further below, I believe that people's tendencies to think in particular ways is
due at least in part to their societal situations. By decontextualizing and treating as abstract sets of
traits that most likely arose in very situated ways, these terms encourage one to overlook the social
significance of different modes of thought. Moreover, by grouping "feminine," "non-Western," and
other thinking styles under one general label, these terms serve to obscure ways in which these
thinking styles may differ from one another. On the other hand, my difficulty with rejecting
categorizations and instead treating every intersection of formative factors as distinctive is that it makes
unavailable to feminists various strategies for improving the situations of many women. If there are in
fact observable tendencies in women's thinking, then as I argued earlier, women in general stand to
benefit from the recognition that this is so. Moreover, as history suggests, overlooking these tendencies
can operate to the detriment of large numbers of women. (56) Finally, in response to concerns that the
label "feminine" may blind theorists to the influences of race, culture, and other factors on women's
thinking, I underline that I am not suggesting that "feminine" is the only classificatory category that can
or should be used. I have focused on "feminine thinking" as a category because, as I have argued, I
believe that it provides a useful lens for achieving various insights that are important for epistemology
and for social justice. Other classificatory categories can no doubt be used to similar advantage. For
example, it may well be a source of equal, if not greater insights, to examine the thinking styles of
African-American women in terms of the category "African-American modes of thought" and of the
intersectional category, "feminine African-American thinking." Using multiple classificatory categories
to analyze thinking styles seems to me to offer the best means of identifying and understanding the
significance of differences and similarities among modes of thinking. (57)
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Essentialism
Preconceived notions of what human, animality or objects close off what any of those
things actually are
Soffer, 96 [Gail. “Heidegger, Humanism and the Destruction of History,” The Review of Metaphysics,
49.3, 1996.]
Yet as commonplace as its association with Heidegger has become, the equation of humanism with
essentialism is not to be found in Heidegger's central statement on the subject, the "Letter on
Humanism." Indeed, nowhere does Heidegger reject the view that man has an essence. To the
contrary, his criticism of humanism is always that it has incorrectly or "metaphysically" determined
the essence of man; that it conceives of man as animal rationale, and hence on the basis of a
preconceived notion of `nature' or `animality' or `objects'. His claim is that such preconceptions close
off the question of the relation between human existence and Being, thereby blinding us to the true
human essence.(3) Heidegger himself is clearly concerned to provide a glimpse of this true essence, and
it is for this reason that he faults humanism for not determining the essence of man "high enough." Thus
the entire debate surrounding the early Heidegger's alleged humanism or anti-humanism presupposes
an equation of humanism with essentialism which is not Heideggerian, but Sartrean or MarxianAlthusserian.(4)
Butler agrees, have to use the categorical term “woman” to resignify it
Webster ’00 [Fiona: Co-editor of Asia-Pacific Review. “The Politics of Sex and Gender: Benhabib and Butler
Debate Subjectivity,” Hypatia, 15.1, 2000.]
The curious point to note, however, concerning Butler's contribution to this issue is the sense in which
she ultimately confesses the imperative, in the reality of political life, "to set norms, to affirm
aspirations, to articulate the possibilities of a more fully democratic and participatory political life"
(1995c, 129). Indeed, she suggests, for example, the strategic and political importance of retaining the
category of "women," a category which she has brought into question, in order to make particular
political claims (1993, 222; 1995b, 49). Whenever this is necessary, she argues, we must simply be aware
that such categories are not fixed or determinate but always sites of contest (1993, 221; 1995b, 50). She
therefore wants to claim that in problematizing that category she does not want to prevent it from
being used in order to serve particular ends, but rather to open it up to the possibility of
resignification and transformation. Indeed, for Butler, the problematic character of the category
ultimately enables such resignification and transformation.
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Essentialism
The redefinition of the term “woman” is where agency is derived from
Webster ’00 [Fiona: Co-editor of Asia-Pacific Review. “The Politics of Sex and Gender: Benhabib and Butler
Debate Subjectivity,” Hypatia, 15.1, 2000.]
How can we understand Butler's critique of identity categories and her critique [End Page 9] of identity
politics in relation to this ultimate appeal to the norms and requirements of the political arena? Butler
provides very little material which directly addresses the programmatic implications of her critique of identity
categories. 9 Indeed, part of the difficulty we have in assessing her work is working out precisely what her
programmatic vision for a feminist politics might be, given the theoretical imperatives which guide her work. 10
Nevertheless, given the criticisms which such theorists as Benhabib raise against her work, it seems
imperative that we question what possible direction a feminist politics would take on the basis of the
various critiques she makes of identity categories and identity-based politics. Does Butler, as Susan
Hekman claims, ultimately give up the basis for a feminist politics (Hekman 1995a, 156)? To address this question,
let us return here to some claims Butler does explicitly make concerning the strategies we might employ
as feminists addressing the concerns of "women" in the political arena. Despite being insistently
critical of the descriptive force of the category "women," Butler endorses strategic use of that
category to serve particular political ends. She claims that "to understand 'women' as a permanent site
of contest, or as a feminist site of antagonistic struggle, is to presume that there can be no closure on
the category and that, for politically significant reasons, there ought never to be. That the category
can never be descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy" (1993, 221). As in the case of her
account of agency, we can see here the sense in which Butler understands categorical instability to give rise to
political efficacy. That is, insofar as the category "women" is always open, always a site of contest, the
possibilities for transformation and resignification, both within that very category and in its
deployment in the political arena, are never-ending. 11 Butler's claims here are critically informed both by
her theory of performativity and by her analysis of Slavoj Zizek's analysis of political signifiers as "empty signs
which come to bear phantasmatic investment of various kinds" (Butler 1993, 191). Butler claims that
understanding the category of "women" as a political signifier in this way affirms the sense in which
that signifier unifies the category it seeks to represent and, simultaneously, constitutes that very
category. The performative power of the political signifier therefore lies in "enacting that which it
names" (1995a, 150; 1995c, 134). The critical force of the political signifier consists in its failure,
ultimately, to fully or comprehensively describe or represent that which it names. It is precisely this
open-ended character, this inability to ever fully establish or describe the identity to which it refers
which, Butler claims, constitutes the possibility of an "expansive re-articulation" (1993, 218) of that
identity. So, in summary, the performative character of the signifier is the very condition of its agency.
"Agency" is therefore located by Butler in the performative character of the political signifier. It is not
an attribute or "power" of subjects, through which they assert control or "authorship" over action or
signification. Indeed, Butler [End Page 10] is highly critical of an account of agency which implies that the
subject is somehow the exclusive "origin" or "owner" of action or signification (1993, 227). The subject,
for Butler, is constituted in and by a signifier (such as "woman"), where "'to be constituted' means 'to
be compelled to cite or repeat or mime' the signifier itself" (1993, 220). Agency is located in this very
action of at once being brought into being by and repeating or miming the signifier it-self. 12
Possibilities for "agency," and therefore for change and transformation, lie in the very activity of
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repetition and identification. Furthermore, such activity is not, for Butler, entered into deliberately or
voluntarily but rather is a process which subjects are compelled to enter into insofar as they are
constituted in and through relations of power in society.
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A2: You don’t go far enough
Ideas about what Nature should be are what lead to ecological destruction and
fascism.
Hudson ‘8 (Laura. “The Political Animal: Species-Being and Bare Life,” Mediations, 23.2, Spring 2008.)
Seeing Nature as essentially innocent, deep ecology suggests that humanity is an evolutionary
mistake, “a fatal disease of nature” that must be contained.5 Deep ecology argues that nature is in
need of salvation or recuperation from the insatiable drives of the human world that infect nature’s
body like a cancer. But this presupposes that the natural world is whole and complete prior to the
introduction of human beings as an alien, destructive force. Nature becomes a romantic illusion when
we forget the role that human beings play in shaping the world, or forget that we are a part of the
natural world as well as apart from it. Any attempt to “return to nature” is doomed: our concepts
concerning the natural world necessarily reflect the social relations of the time when they emerge. We
cannot separate the concept of Nature from the social form in which it functions. Nature exists as an
“outside” to the modern world because culture and society exist as the claustrophobic “inside”:
Nature is not a static object but a dynamic category whose meaning has evolved in intercourse with
human beings. The necessity of saving Nature only makes sense in the midst of a period of ecological
destruction that threatens not the natural world, which will continue in some form regardless of what
we do, but rather our ideas about what the natural world should be. Nor can our ideas about nature
be separated from our ideas about human nature. Any time a desire to save the earth, or save the
animals, is asserted, what is truly to be saved is our version of the earth, or our concept of the
animals, both of which are deeply implicated in our ideas about ourselves. It is because humanity
begins to seem like a disease or pathogen that the natural world becomes increasingly innocent and
idealized. It is our own salvation, our own human world, our own tainted innocence we want to
redeem through projecting it onto the natural world. If we follow deep ecology to its logical conclusion,
the salvation of Nature would be best accomplished by the removal of the corrupting force of human
beings: “if humans are the problem, then killing most of them would be the solution.”6 Indeed, some of
the deepest green of deep ecologists invoke the imagery of the “population bomb” and argue for
limiting or massively reducing human population, demonstrating the irony that the salvation of
humanity seems to require the destruction or restriction of a large number of its members. The
confusion of deep ecology seems to end up either, as Ferry argues, invoking a thinly veiled fascism
where an enlightened few dictate the tenets of appropriate interaction with the natural world,
including the potential depopulation of the earth, or emptying itself of any content through according
intrinsic value to everything “natural,” making the weighing of decisions or options against one
another murky at best. The very idea of intrinsic value depends on concepts of value inculcated by
capitalism, even if only in a reactionary way. In valuing the concrete, material world where everything
is invested with intrinsic value, deep ecology challenges the abstraction of capitalism where value is
only produced through the system of exchange. Yet, if everything has intrinsic, natural value, then
what reason is there to value one form of life over another? Why bother trying to save humanity at all?
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A2: You prioritize nature
The choice between humanists, speciesists, and eco-fascists is a false one and should
be rejected
Kochi & Ordan, 08 [Tarik: Queen’s University; Noam: Bar Ilan University. “An Argument for the
Global Suicide of Humanity,” borderlands, 7.3, 2008.]
Finally, it is important to note that such a standpoint need not fall into a version of green or ecofascism that considers other forms of life more important than the lives of humans. Such a position
merely replicates in reverse the speciesism of modern humanist thought. Any choice between the
eco-fascist and the humanist, colonial-speciesist is thus a forced choice and is, in reality, a non-choice
that should be rejected. The point of proposing the idea of the global suicide of humanity is rather to
help identify the way in which we differentially value different forms of life and guide our moral
actions by rigidly adhered to standards of life-value. Hence the idea of global suicide, through its
radicalism, challenges an ideological or culturally dominant idea of life-value. Further, through
confronting humanist ethics with its own violence against the non-human, the idea of global suicide
opens up a space for dialectical reflection in which the utopian ideals of both modern humanist and
anti-humanist ethics may be comprehended in relation to each other. One possibility of this conflict is
the production of a differing standpoint from which to understand the subject and the scope of moral
action.