Catriona Sandilands

Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature Toward a Queer Ecology

Queer ecology is a cultural, political, and social analysis that interrogates the relations between the social organization of sexuality and ecology. As a part of this analysis, this article explores the ideas and practices of lesbian separatist communities in southern Oregon. It considers that separatists have, since 1974, developed a distinct political-ecological culture to challenge the heterosexual, patriarchal, and capitalist organization of rural North America. Although lesbian separatism was founded on essentialist constructions of gender and nature, the Oregon communities have developed, over time, a blend of lesbian principles and local environmental knowledge. This has produced a complex tradition of lesbian ecopolitical resistance. Organizing threads of this tradition include opening access to land and transforming relations of rural ownership, withdrawing land from patriarchal-capitalist production and reproduction, feminizing the landscape ideologically and physically, developing a gender-bending physical experience of nature, experiencing nature as an erotic partner, and politicizing rurality and rural lesbian identity.

Raising Your Hand in the Council of all Beings: Ecofeminism and Citizenship

Etude du theme general de la relation entre democratie et citoyennete du point de vue de lecofeminisme et de la pensee environnementaliste. En reference a la conception de laction et de la vie publique chez H. Arendt, fondee sur une approche de la modernite comme possibilite dun monde commun, lA. defend une conception eco-feministe de la citoyennete qui fait place a la pratique dune ethique du souci et a la communaute morale des animaux et autres etres non-humains, en vue dune nouvelle forme de communication entre les personnes et le monde.

Wild democracy : Ecofeminism, politics, and the desire beyond

As we radicalize our view of nature, we radicalize our view of culture; soon the concept of natural law in its reductionist form will become anachronistic, and we will replace the political structures legitimated by a hierarchical view of nature with a politics derived from a participatory view of nature.

Making Kin, Making Trouble: Donna Haraway’s Critical Ongoingness

The announcement of a recent screening of Fabrizio Terranova’s new film Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival at the Tate Modern Gallery (April, 2017) calls Haraway ‘one of the most imp...

Globalization and Its Discontents: Ecofeminism and the Dilemma of ‘Universal’ Politics

This chapter is part of a larger work in which I explore several interrelated tensions that appear in ecofeminism when viewed through the lens of democratic theory.1 As a whole, the work seeks to hold ecofeminist theory accountable to the radical democratic project articulated by (among others) Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,2 in order to reveal both the strengths and the weaknesses of the budding praxis of ecofeminism and in order to show the importance of ecofeminism in ongoing conversations about the future of democracy. In this chapter, I explore the specific tension between universality and particularity with the agenda of showing ecofeminism’s significance — and limitations — as a democratic politics in the context of globalization.