The driving force behind the XXI century ecofeminism

* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
03 December 2023 Sunday 15:33
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The driving force behind the XXI century ecofeminism

* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia

The appearance of patriarchy, as the historian Gerda Lerner suggests, began to take shape during the Neolithic and the appearance of the first great civilizations, which through the creation of private property, agriculture and the domestication of other animals, such as As a consequence of the transition from the nomadic to the sedentary stage, they laid the foundations for the separation between culture and nature.

Hence, the origins of patriarchy, based on domains of power, such as androcentrism and anthropocentrism, have built a type of masculinity of domination, which through wars and the formation of hierarchical systems of oppression has inferiorized to anyone who was not considered part of the culture of men.

It is from these bases of patriarchal domination, that with colonization since 1492, the birth of capitalism, extractivism and unbridled technological and industrial expansion, that the idea of ​​Anthropocene is raised, as a new geological era, sustained by an idea of ​​growth. unlimited economic, on a planet with finite limits, through the discourse of progress and development.

For the same reason, women, generic sex dissidents, indigenous people, blacks, crazy people, children, were put in a place of inferiority and savagery, because they were closer to nature, and their bodies were seen as a territory to be conquered, as well have been raised by different ecofeminist and anticolonial authors, such as Vandana Shiva, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Yayo Herrero, Maristella Svampa, Esperanza Martínez, Silvia Federici, Tatiana Roa, Francisca Fernández Droguett and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui.

What it has done, as feminist and masculinity studies show us, is that women are in charge of the care and reproduction of life, while we men live detached from the natural, the emotional and collaborative work. with others, focusing on values ​​such as success, wealth, competition and war.

Faced with this, the idea of ​​androcentric detachment proposed by the researcher and member of the Institute of Masculinities and Social Change, Lucho Fabbri, proposes to denaturalize and problematize oppressions based on gender and sexuality, which is fundamental, but must also be accompanied by anthropocentric, colonial and capitalist oppression, since violence against women and generic sexual dissidence, as ecofeminism has taught us, are totally linked to violence against territories and nature.

Consequently, the emergence of dissident and anti-patriarchal masculinities becomes crucial for a different type of coexistence, which prioritizes care above all else, but not only with other human beings, but also with other non-human beings, which allows for depatriarchalization. territorialized, not immune to fierce extractivism in the region, which conquers territories and displaces communities.

In other words, as the researcher and also a member of the Institute of Masculinities and Social Change, Daniel Jones, states, what it is about is having a new idea of ​​deconstruction, one that is not self-centered or merely individual, but that means that we have losses personal and privileged, so that other people's bodies are no longer at our disposal, nor are territories and nature.

This is also considering the onslaught of the denialist extreme right and masculinism in the world, with the arrival to presidential power of figures like Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina, who only seek to discredit feminist demands, environmentalists and human rights, from an angry and hateful masculinity.

For this reason, the bet is to expand the idea of ​​dissident and anti-patriarchal masculinities, to an idea of ​​men for good living, that takes the ecofeminist criticism of many colleagues and joins different sustainable and pluriversal struggles and experiences, that put in the center the care of life and the Earth.

Given this, as men we have an enormous responsibility in current times, to leave behind a history from many centuries ago, plagued by domination of all kinds and by the imposition of totally unsustainable economic models, which have us on the verge of socio-environmental collapse.