Ecofeminist Echoes in New Materialism?

Abstract

Do ecofeminism and new materialism share common features? In ecofeminist literature’s concern for the nonhuman, one could foresee feminist theory’s “material turn” that would eventually lead to new materialist feminisms. In this paper, I argue that they indeed share some common interests and features; they both want to rethink the environment and what constitutes it, but from different angles. On the one hand, ecofeminism is more oriented towards understanding structural oppression of women and nature, including animals, while new materialism wants to reconceptualize agency precisely by looking at the posthuman and the transhuman. I present a wide scope of common features between both fields as well as their mutual tensions.