The politics of women and nature: affinity, contingency or material relation?

Ecofeminism asserts that there is a relationship between the subordination and oppression of women and the exploitation and degradation of the natural world. Ecofeminists who draw on radical/cultural feminism tend to see this relationship as a near essentialist affinity between women and nature. Those who draw on social constructivist models of feminism see it as a historical and socially contingent relationship. This paper argues that the division between these two views can be overcome by seeing the relationship between women and the natural world as a material one and that ecofeminism provides the basis of a new radical social theory as well as a political movement.