Ecofeminism: Transforming Patriarchal Masculinities for Women's Rights, Gender, and Climate Justice
By Rossella Forlè
I have the honour to be part of the UN Women UK delegation for the Commission on the Status of Women 66. In the last three days I have been attending talks, round tables, and conversations analysing the relationship between climate crisis, gender discrimination, gender-based violence and women exploitation around the world.
Our societies have mostly been organised to maximise capitalist accumulation for the benefit and privilege of elites and corporations, through the commodification of Nature and our territories, the control over women and their bodies and the appropriation of women’s and workers’ labour force.
This historical and ongoing exploitation is possible through the reproduction of mutually reinforcing structures of oppression: patriarchy, capitalism, class oppression, racism, (neo)colonialism and heteronormativity.
Patriarchy is the system that benefits men as a social group through the oppression and exploitation of women that is founded, to a large extent, on the sexual division of labour and nurtured by the biological determinism of socially constructed gender roles.
The sexual division of labour organizes women’s work in the private sphere (home) and also in agricultural and urban production and markets. Women workers are concentrated in areas of work that are an extension of care work (such as health and education) and that are low paid, precarious and informal, or for which they are paid less than men for the same work.
Women’s work and Nature
In the parallel exploitation of women’s work and Nature, both are seen as infinite and elastic resources – free, readily available, to be appropriated without resistance. At the same time, patriarchy relies on women’s time, energy and (re)productive capacities to ‘make up for the destruction and privatization of Nature.
This is especially true in times of crises and austerity when women’s unpaid physical and emotional labour is essential for family and community, and when Nature and the commons are commodified, privatised and extracted on a scale that is catastrophic to the environment, natural cycles and ecological functions, and the communities whose livelihoods depend on it.
In the same way that transnational corporations, industrial agriculture and dirty energy systems control and exploit Nature and our territories, women’s rights over their bodies, lives and work are controlled by regressive laws, traditional practices and societal institutions (including education, family, religion and the judiciary).
Due to their perceived “natural” role, women are disproportionately affected by social and environmental injustice and the multiple interconnected crises, such as climate change and hunger. This is especially so for women of colour, and indigenous women, migrants, working-class and LGBTQ people.
We have to work harder and longer hours to produce sufficient food, maintain livelihoods, and protect our territories. And yet we often don’t even have the right to own the land we work. Women’s wisdom and identities as food producers and practitioners of agroecology are attacked and denied by the capitalist system.
Despite this, women are fighters, not victims. Largely because of our historical connection to the production and reproduction of life in the territories in which we live and struggle, women are collectively taking the lead in grassroots environmental justice struggles to challenge the unjust economic model and standing at the front lines of resistance and defence of Nature. Women are protagonists in the defence of our territories and the fight for autonomy over our bodies – our primary territory – lives and work.
Dismantling patriarchy, delivering justice
The fight to dismantle patriarchy and all structures of oppression within our own organizations, structures and societies are crucial to the system change needed to face the current deep-rooted and interconnected social and environmental crises affecting climate, food and biodiversity.
System changes mean creating societies based on peoples’ sovereignty and environmental, social, economic and gender justice.
A system seeks freedom from patriarchy and all forms of oppression that exploit and devalue women, people and the environment, towards a radical transformation of our societies, of relationships between people, and of the relationship between people and Nature.
Grassroots, anti-capitalist feminism is key to this transformation, both as a conceptual-ideological-political framework and as collective praxis and movement.
Feminism can and is constructed from the grassroots up, that it is relevant to all women and men who resist oppression, and that it is representative of regional diversity and different realities. Grassroots, anti-capitalist feminism has a class perspective and is rooted in women’s collective experiences in societies in which our bodies are marked by mutually reinforcing oppressions.
Dismantling patriarchy internally and in the wider world is only possible if we build a shared understanding of its nature and how it operates with other structural oppressions to organize society.
How and why we continue our fight
Challenging the power structures is the key in a world where violence and the threat of violence are used to control women who challenge their socially constructed (but promoted as biologically determined) responsibility for unpaid, invisible care and domestic work. In this same world, women’s productive work remains invisible, undervalued, and lower paid, and women’s millennial knowledge of ecological cycles, of seeds, of medicinal plants, of how to nurture biodiversity and the forests are unrecognized and ignored.
Challenging ourselves and supporting each other to collectively recognise the power relations that we reproduce and, in this way, to transform our societies, it’s the solution.