Month: February 2023

This week, I’d like to highlight the facet of our innate and inseverable connection to the non-human animals that we share the Earth with. Now, you might’ve read that sentence and thought to yourself, “Why doesn’t she just say animals? Why does she have to complicate things and include “non-human” beforehand?”

Throughout the ecofeminist readings that I consumed this week, I was asking that same question at first. Theorists kept using “non-human animals,” and it was popping up too frequently to be a one-off notion. And then I realized that this distinction purposefully emphasizes the fact that humans are animals too. Although so many of us falsely believe that we are inherently superior to all other animals, ecofeminists strive to break down this widespread belief. Just as activists will stand up and fight for the rights of human animals being oppressed, non-human animals are just as worthy of fair treatment.

This ties into how vegetarianism and the perception and treatment of non-human animals are inseparable from ecofeminist theory. If the ecofeminist goal is to garner compassion and empathy for all other living non-human beings to then, in turn, pave the way toward compassionate relations within ourselves and each other, non-human animals are a crucial part of this equation.

It’s a smaller leap for humans to recognize the validity of animals because of their apparent sentience than it would be for an ignorant person to recognize the intrinsic value of plants, the environment, or the planet. Baby steps are necessary to open minds instead of close them. And we can point to the fact that even with a basic understanding of non-human animals’ sentience, we justify their horrific mistreatment.

We use them for labor like hunting or guardianship; we use them for entertainment in zoos; we use them to fulfill our need for companionship in keeping domestic pets; we use them for their reproductive processes like milk and eggs; we use them for experimenting on to ensure that new human innovations are safe for our bodies at the expense of theirs; we use them for the very meat and bones that make up their body. We use and use and use for personal gain, which is an unfortunate consequence of the “dog-eat-dog” world perpetuated by androcentric patriarchal hierarchies that are ever in play in our society.

Ecofeminist Greta Gaard articulates the complications of the human / non-human animal relationship in her article “Ecofeminism on the Wing: Perspective on Human-Animal Relations.” She dives deep into the “linkage between sexism and speciesism…[and] the connection between speciesism and classism” (20). Ecofeminists recognize this slippery slope—how the unjust oppression of animals reflects the patriarchal oppression of women, POC, LGBT individuals, and so on.

Although this connection may seem convoluted at first, it’s so intrinsic that its effects can even be tied to our linguistics—our colloquial language. Gaard points out that “animal pejoratives” (20) are used as dehumanizing, derogatory descriptors for all those who do not fit into the pedestalled androcentric Anglo-European mold. Women are referred to as “‘sow,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘pussy,’ ‘chick,’ ‘cow,’ ‘beaver,’ ‘old-bat,’ ‘bird-brain,’” and the list could go on and on. The “linguistic association with animals has also been a method of demeaning Jews and people of color, as Nazi propaganda equated Jews with ’vermin,’ and Blacks have been called ‘coons’ or ‘jungle bunnies’” (Gaard 20). Animals are demonized as a way to “shield ourselves from our own complicity in a system of inter-species domination” (Gaard 21).

The fact of the matter is that our society’s patriarchal hierarchy is inherently a capitalistic one, with emphasis placed on oppression as a viable means of climbing higher on that ladder. Gaard highlights how racism, classism, sexism, and speciesism are all forms of oppression that include “exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence” (20). All of which non-human animals endure at humans’ hands. “Any one of these experiences would be sufficient enough to indicate a group’s status as oppressed. Non-human animals experience all five aspects of oppression” (Gaard 20). We justify this oppression because “humans believe their own economic interests [are] in opposition to [non-human animals’] well-being” (Gaard 20) — providing the bare minimum to ensure non-human animals’ access to a healthy and happy quality of life is seen as “too much work, too much time and [too much] money” (Gaard 20). 

Ecofeminist Deana Curtin approaches the human – non-human animal relationship in a contextually ethical way in her piece “Contextual Moral Vegetarianism.” She acknowledges the necessity of animal consumption in dire circumstances, like in geographical locations where it’s impossible to grow food or in a survival situation where the choices are to eat an animal or starve (1). What she works to highlight is the affluent West’s oppressive perspective on non-human animals.

 She writes, “vegetarianism…is for economically well-off persons in technologically advances countries…[for the] persons who have a choice of what food they want to eat; they have a choice of what they will count as food” (Curtin 2). We have the choice and capabilities not to harm non-human animals, and yet we still pack them into factory farms as close together as sardines in a can, to live in filth and squalor, and to endure their powerlessness and mistreatment. Billions of animals are killed every year for food in the United States (Curtin 2), and it doesn’t just stop there. They’re experimented on, “genetically engineered and chemically infused to grow faster and come to market sooner” (Curtin 2). 

In the West, we aren’t satisfied by just oppressing non-human animals. We don’t stop at exploitation, marginalization, inflicting powerlessness, and violence. We maximize their suffering.

Take a look at this image. It illustrates the way that we are never satisfied by just inflicting maltreatment. We overdo it to cement our position in the patriarchal hierarchy. The meat, the non-human animal, in this photo has already been detained throughout its life for the non-essential purpose of human consumption. And once it’s been killed, butchered, and cooked, the mistreatment doesn’t stop there. The figure that’s carved into this meat is wearing a chef’s hat, indicating that this animal’s body is destined to be commodified and served for capitalist gains. And the figure isn’t just slicing into the meat; there’s another knife stabbed into the non-human animal’s body, emphasizing the unnecessary violence that we subject these beings too.

It’s impossible to ignore the connection between our mistreatment of non-human animals and the mistreatment that those who don’t fit into the androcentric Anglo-European patriarchal mold face as well. We’ve already discussed how tying women, POC, and LGBT individuals to the villainized perception of non-human animals serves to disenfranchise them and justify men’s superiority over them. Men are strong; they’re conquerors.

They’re always portrayed as eviscerating a bloody steak or a fatty, juicy burger. They’re associated with strong liquor that burns on the way down. Masculinity has become synonymous with pain infliction. “The connection between meat and masculinity…articulates the hidden connections between meat eating and patriarchy” (Eisenberg).

While women are seen as weak and only worthy of frivolous consumption like a triple fruit daiquiri or a light salad— extra cucumbers and tomatoes hold the dressing. Women, too, become the meat whose sole “use” is to satiate men’s appetites. 

In order for Ecofeminist theories to enact lasting change, we must first begin by dismantling our justification and infliction of oppression. We can start by restructuring our mindset around non-human animals and their right to live; that’s just as essential as our own. This will open doors and open minds for others to see that same intrinsic value within our planet and within each other. Again, it’s baby steps that will open more minds than close them. So we need to keep having these conversations to raise even more awareness and unveil our patriarchal society from its complacent ignorance and empower each and every individual around us—both human and non-human. 

I’ve explored the women – non-human animal correlation in a previous post surrounding SH Sadler’s iconic and thought-provoking photography. You can check it out here!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these issues in the comments below! Have you ever thought of non-human animals in the context of feminist issues? Was it shocking to see the inherent connection? What’s a way forward that you see working for humans and non-human animals and the planet to come into a respectful and equally distributed power interplay?

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Works Cited

Curtin, Deane. “Contextual Moral Vegetarianism.” Animal Rights Library, 1991.

Eisenberg, Zoe. “Meat Heads: New Study Focuses on How Meat Consumption Alters Men’s Self-Perceived Levels of Masculinity.” HuffPost, HuffPost, 13 Jan. 2017, huffpost.com/entry/meat-heads-new-study-focuses_b_8964048.

Gaard, Greta. “Ecofeminism on the Wing: Perspectives on Human-Animal Relations.” Academia.edu, 2001.

 

Our sense of place, where we come from—the exact patch of land that we call home—shapes us as individuals and as a society. Terry Tempest Williams put it best when she wrote, “Each of us belongs to a particular landscape, one that informs who we are, a place that carries our history, our dreams, holds us to a moral line of behavior that transcends thought” (Williams). 

Williams believes that the pathway toward conservation must include conversation. The best way to open minds instead of close them is through conversation—through story. “Story offers a wash of images and emotion that returns us to our highest and deepest selves, where we remember what it means to be human, living in place with our neighbors” (Williams). And so, I’d like to start off by sharing with you the place that I belong to, the one that has grown me and shaped me irrevocably. 

I’ve grown up in the same tiny beach town on the Jersey Shore virtually my whole life. Other than a 1-year excursion where I road-tripped halfway across the country to briefly settle in Dallas, TX— the home state of my girlfriend. After convincing my dad to fly out to Texas to drive the U-Haul Truck back to NJ, I returned to where I started.  

I’m surrounded by the same overpopulated and overpriced suburban streets. The same strip of Main Street with pizza places on every corner and the bagel shop where I worked my first job.

If you walk far enough down the bustling main road, your feet will eventually hit boardwalk and then sand. 

On warm summer nights, the boardwalk is packed with locals and tourists alike. The children are sticky with sugar and screaming on the rides. Large families sit on splintery picnic tables digging into a shared large pie—their skin sunburned and tight, their hair still dripping from the countless plunges they reveled in at the waterpark across the street. 

The lights are colorful and flashing, the rides scrape and whirr, and the whole stretch smells like funnel cakes and zeppoles with powdered sugar, then boardwalk fries with vinegar, then pizza, then inevitably, even more fried food. You can stand on the old planks of the boardwalk, still warm from the sun’s rays, and take in the beauty of NYC; all lit up in lights just across the bay. 

Even through all the crowds of locals and tourists alike, all the excitement of the water slides, games, and amusements—it’s the unique fingerprint that the nature of my home has left on my heart. It’s the Waackaack Creek that runs through so many backyards leading toward the expanse of the Raritan Bay. This creek carries the namesake of the Native Americans who once populated this same land, this same place that is written into my DNA—the creek that carries the namesake of the street that I was born on: Creek Road. 

In her meditation titled “Knowing Our Place,” Barbara Kingsolver writes, “It’s a privilege to live any part of one’s life in proximity to nature. It is a privilege, apparently, even to know nature is out there at all…More than half of all humans now live in cities.” I don’t quite live in the wilderness, but I do live amongst a wildness. Sometimes, on eerily quiet nights, I can hear the waves from my back deck or smell the sea-salty spray on a muggy, dark, and rainy morning. I’m one short jaunt through a bustling town center away from a sea that meets the horizon. And yet, I can’t help but notice how disconnected my friends, neighbors, family, and especially myself are from nature. 

We’re so populated that there are hardly any pockets of nature left. Aside from the inescapable coastline, there is one tiny forested park in my town. Houses are divided into multiple apartments, and there are people living above the shops. Most of the strip of the shore is lined with subsidized housing, with the families packed as close together as sardines in a tin. 

Terry Tempest Williams warns, “As the world becomes more crowded and corroded by consumption and capitalism, this landscape of minimalism will take on greater significance, reminding us…just how essential wild country is to our psychology” (Williams).

I’m living in a place where backyards are consumed by concrete fire pits and in-ground pools. There isn’t any room left for nature…not even for a garden. We are the Garden State—but look out across our neighborhood, and the only green you’ll see is a front yard’s sterile, well-maintained patch of grass. 

There’s no farmer’s market with organic, locally, and sustainably grown produce. There’s no community garden to teach our low-income population how to alleviate their dependence on ever-inflating grocery prices and unhealthy but cheap fast-food restaurants. In that same piece, Kingsolver tells her own anecdote about the growing disconnect between people and our food system. She writes, 

“…the astonished neighbor children…huddled around my husband in his tiny backyard garden, in the city where he lived years ago, clapping their hands to their mouths in pure dismay as he pulled carrots from the ground.”

So many of us don’t even know how the fruits and vegetables at the grocery store are grown. We don’t know what a zucchini plant looks like when it’s growing or how seeds are produced. We’ve all become so dependent on the instant gratification and false reliability of the corporations that clothe us, feed us, shelter us, etc., that we’ve almost completely lost our connection to nature. 

 

  Kingsolver muses, “I wonder what it will mean for us to forget that food, like rain, is not a product but a process.” We call our fruits and vegetables “produce,” for goodness sake! And we all sit idly by and let the commodification further sever our intrinsic link with nature and ensure our dependence on greedy capitalist endeavors. 

 

Bell Hooks, another ecofeminist author, examines the inarguable connection between the Earth and ourselves through a Black Historical lens in her piece “Touching the Earth.” In her writing, she lays out a compelling argument for how the Great Migration negatively affected the collective Black psyche and consequently left a gaping vulnerable hole for white supremacists to fill with contempt, loathing, and false assumptions of Blackness. 

She writes, “Growing food to sustain life and flowers to please the soul [Black individuals] were able to make a connection with the Earth that was ongoing and life-affirming.” Then approximately 6 million Black people migrated from the American South in search of work in the industrialized and capitalist North between the 1910s and 1970s in what is known as The Great Migration. Hooks continues, 

“Without the space to grow food, to commune with nature, or to meditate the starkness of poverty with the splendor of nature, black people experienced profound depression. Working in conditions where the body was regarded solely as a tool (as in slavery), a profound estrangement occurred between mind and body. The way the body was represented became more important than the body itself…Estrangement from nature and engagement in mind/body split made it all the more possible for black people to internalize white supremacist assumptions about black identity.”

It’s evident that a disconnect from nature can not only breed self-loathing but also leads to callous disregard for other people and the world around us. “When we love the Earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully” (Hooks).

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I’ve felt displacement, obviously not even in the realm of the same effects that Hooks describes as altering the Black psyche. But, when I left my hometown, the place that I belonged to, and moved to Texas, I became so homesick. The weird part is that it wasn’t an all-encompassing missing for my family or friends, but instead for the place that I came from. I remember crying over how brown everything was—the light brown concrete tollways of Dallas bled into the pale brown sidewalks that met the dry and crispy grass. I missed the green of NJ. I missed the landscape that shaped me, and I felt like I was losing myself, too. 

And then, I stumbled upon a YouTube video from Roots & Refuge Farm. It was a garden tour. A woman named Jessica Sowards was taking a camera up and down the rows of raised garden beds that she had just planted on her little homestead in Arkansas, and I was enraptured. Jess continues to be my all-time life role model in the way that she sees the world, the relationship that she seeks to build with nature, and the community that she is building with sustainability and self-sufficiency at its heart.

From that one video, I had an entire perspective shift. I began consuming homesteading content like my life depended on it, and at the time, it felt that way. I filled our patio with pots and plants and started filling our apartment with them as well. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t glamorous, and I was killing more than I was growing, but I kept reminding myself that sometimes all I’ll harvest is a lesson. 

It was this new concept of self-sufficiency that led me to feel more grounded and confident within myself. And looking back now, that absolutely affected how I thought of the nature around me. All of a sudden, I was trying to live a low-waste lifestyle. I was passing up produce bags at the grocery store, and I was learning about the harmful effects of pesticides and herbicides on our planet and within our food system—it was a snowball effect. I still love heirloom gardening, and I do so in my (still-cramped and not pretty) backyard. 

“These lands have been here for millions of years, and they will certainly outlast us by another million years or more. But they will not remain ecologically intact without our vigilance, without our willingness to protect what is wild” (Williams). This was a lesson that I learned through my exploration of homesteading and self-sufficiency. The “Wilderness…reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully” (Kingsolver).

When we distance ourselves from the land we live on, from the agriculture that could uphold a healthy interplay between sustaining us and sustaining the planet, we grow dependent on others. We grow dependent on companies that commodify human necessities like food, water, and land/shelter. Since when did growing food, sustenance necessary for human life, become radical?

It’s our responsibility to take responsibility for the land that we belong to. It’s in each of these places that “home work is required, a participation in public life to make certain all is not destroyed under the banner of progress, expediency, or ignorance. We can not do it alone. This is the hope of a bedrock democracy, standing our ground in the places we love, together” (Williams).

 

So, start that backyard garden, or that front yard one, or the one that’s made up of 2 pots of herbs on your balcony. Start to learn self-sufficiency skills, because this will only empower you and create healthy self-efficacy. Again, Hooks drives home the basic foundation of ecofeminist theory: “When we love the Earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully.”

 

 

Works Cited:

Hooks, Bell. “Touching The Earth.” Orionmagazine.org.

Kingsolver, Barbara. “Knowing Our Place.” School of Visual Arts.

Williams, Terry Tempest. “Home Work.” UMass Dartmouth.

After completing more readings and research after last week’s “What is Ecofeminism?” post, I’ve gained more of an understanding of the differences that complicate a Western Ecofeminist lens vs. an Eastern one. Vandana Shiva, an Indian physicist and social activist, offers a view that bridges this gap between these two viewpoints of ecofeminism. Agarwal credits Shiva with taking Eastern ecofeminist principles “further than the Western ecofeminists in exploring the links between ways of thinking about development, the processes of developmental change, and the impact of these on the environment and on the people dependent upon it for their livelihood” (124). Inherent in this linear progression lies the difference between Western and Eastern ecofeminist perspectives. 

A Western lens focuses on the disparity between privileged women and men in a capitalistic society. Take Shiva as an example; she is a woman who has the unique viewpoint and exposure to highlight the differences between Eastern and Western ecofeminism. Shiva asserts that “the structures of exclusion are more systematically built up in American society, for example, so that young girls interested in science eventually lose their confidence over time. The structures of exclusion work against them” (Shiva 2). While the women in the West concern themselves with the unfair treatment instituted by patriarchal hierarchies within education, the workplace, and society as a whole, the women in the Global South or East are more concerned with pressing matters of domination and survival under the thumb of these same hierarchies.

Take water, for instance. In a post created by UN-Water, the United Nations identified that “without safely managed water, sanitation, and hygiene services, women and girls are more vulnerable to abuse, attack, and ill-health”(UN-Water). In the West, it’s not something that would cross most people’s minds, women included. A vast majority of the West has access to unlimited uncontaminated water on demand through faucets, showers, public drinking fountains, and countless other sources. However, this is not the case for so many other women, especially those in the Global South. These women “usually have the responsibility of fetching water… a dangerous, time-consuming and physically demanding task [which] can leave women and girls vulnerable to attack and often precludes them from school or earning an income” (UN-Water).

This is a danger that most women in the West don’t ever have to think about. Shiva articulates this point better than I ever could, and her viewpoint doesn’t just apply to the East, but also to the Global South. In an interview with Scott London, Shiva argues that for “people who are dependent on natural resources, on biodiversity, on the land, the forests, the water… nature is their means of production. So for them, ecological destruction is a form of injustice. When the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities, it is a question of survival for these people” (Shiva 3-4). The fact of the matter is that the Eastern view of ecofeminism has a lot more at stake than the West. Western ecofeminists focus on the oppression that they face but do not take into consideration the different and unique obstacles that women in less fortunate countries struggle against.

Agarwal writes that it is “the growth of a market-oriented culture [that] undermine[s] the image of an organic cosmos with a living female earth at its center. This image [gives] way to a mechanistic worldview in which nature [is] reconceived as something to be mastered and controlled by humans” (122). This is when the greed and dominating capitalistic principles of the West seep into the East by means of wealthy companies and corporations who seek to monetize more and more of nature and more and more of people who they view as for the purpose of utilization only.

On the other hand, Agarwal summarizes Shiva’s argument for Eastern ecofeminism in that it prioritizes the “special dependence” that ‘Third World Women’ have on nature and, in turn, the “special knowledge” that they have of nature (Agwarwal 124). It is this dependence that creates an unreplicable respect for the earth. Since women in the Global South or East are assigned more nature-based responsibilities than women in the West, like being the ones to fetch water in the village (UN-Water), they form an interconnectedness with the earth that is both inherent and assumed by dominating patriarchal hierarchies that are distanced from nature. 

It is this interconnectedness, this unreplicable familiarity, and “knowledge [that] has been systematically marginalized under the impact of modern science” (Agarwal 124). This is the patriarchal “myth of progress” and the resulting “detrimental effects on the human-nature relationship” that Hobgood-Oster mentions in her piece Ecofeminism: Historic and International Evolution. This perpetuated myth pushes the quantifying of our advancement as humans in the terms of scientific progress, even when those advancements are nothing more than greedy schemes. 

So often, patriarchal and capitalist scientific endeavors (like the patenting of seeds to ensure the Southern or Eastern dependence on Big Agriculture corporations like Monsanto) are institutionalized globally by these powerful and money-hungry corporations who dress up their exploitation of women, indigenous cultures and practices, and nature as a scientific advancement. They say that that will feed or house more people, but in reality, the goal is to form a monopoly to economically dominate an entire people. In an interview with Dr. Vandana Shiva, interviewer Scott London summarizes Shiva’a point discussing this idea by saying, “We’ve tended to justify these monocultures in the name of growth and human development” (Shiva 5) —and that’s just not true at all. Instead, it is this “noble” pursuit that’s nothing more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing; it’s a way for those placed in power by the androcentric hierarchies in play to justify domination.

On the flip side, Western ecofeminism seeks to distance itself from instrumentalist thought that embedded itself in its culture from the time of Genesis in The Bible. The Eastern perspective of ecofeminism doesn’t fully situate the earth as having intrinsic value. Instead, nature is viewed as having “gifted…rich biological diversity to us. [And that is why] we [should] not allow it to become the monopoly of a handful of corporations” (Shiva 7). Eastern ecofeminists focus more on people’s (especially women’s) dependence on nature to grow food, build shelter, and provide a means of production. They view the means as nature’s offerings, but this idea is still inherently instrumentalist in that the earth is meant to offer us anything, that it is to support humans, and the consumption of humans, if not solely, then as a priority.

After exploring both the Western and Eastern views of ecofeminism, I think my definition would fall somewhere in the middle. I see how Western ecofeminism is a privileged form of feminism that doesn’t take into account the nuanced and dangerous oppression that befalls those in other countries, especially ones less fortunate than ours.

However, I don’t agree with the inherent instrumentalist thinking that underlies Eastern ecofeminism in believing that we are gifted things by nature—like water or seeds. I don’t think anything that is encompassed by nature is an offering to us. What I do believe is that these resources shouldn’t be monopolized by companies and instead should be available for respectful, conscious, and sustainable use. We must dismantle the indoctrinated patriarchal thought that things are anthropomorphic and for human benefit. We must move away from this fractured viewpoint that has “pitted equity against ecology and sustainability against justice” (Shiva 5). Ecofeminist principles could instead work to set the foundation for respectful harvesting, foraging, and agricultural practices so that we all can learn to leave the Earth better than how we found it. 

No longer should the planet’s resources be exploited for capitalist gain. By learning how to have compassion for nature around us, we can then begin to have compassion and empathy for each other, a kind of mutual respect that can transcend gender, race, culture, and any other characteristic that has previously driven a wedge between us all as an interconnected society who inhabits and must care for the earth we share. 

What do you see as the most pressing obstacles for ecofeminists to tackle? Do you agree more with the Western or Eastern perspective of ecofeminism?

Comment below; I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Works Cited

Agarwal, Bina. “The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India.” Feminist Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1992, pp. 119–158., https://doi.org/10.2307/3178217.

Hobgood-Oster, Laura. “Ecofeminism: Historic and International Evolution.” Systemic Alternatives, 18 Jan. 2016, systemicalternatives.org/2016/01/18/ecofeminism-historic-and-international-evolution/.

Shiva, Vandana, and Scott London. “In the Footsteps of Gandhi: An Interview with Vandana Shiva.” Global Research, GlobalResearch.ca, 3 Feb. 2016, https://www.globalresearch.ca/in-the-footsteps-of-gandhi-an-interview-with-vandana-shiva/5505135.

UN-Water. “Water and Gender: UN-Water.” United Nations, United Nations Water Organization, unwater.org/water-facts/water-and-gender#:~:text=Without%20safely%20managed%20water%2C%20sanitation,public%20spaces%20support%20gender%20equity. 

 

Ecofeminism isn’t a theory that neatly fits into a single category. Instead, it is a theory that’s always in flux, dependent on timely connections that range from environmental to political to social. Hobgood-Oster masterfully wrangles this wide-ranging theory in her piece “Ecofeminism: Historic and International Evolution.” Hobgood-Oster writes, 

“Ecofeminism asserts that all forms of oppression are connected and that structures of oppression must be addressed in their totality. Oppression of the natural world and of women my patriarchal power structures must be examined together or neither can be confronted fully.”

This isn’t only relegated to women and patriarchal oppression but also to all intersectional oppression, gender essentialism, forced hierarchies, and other forms of domination. At its most basic components, Ecofeminism conveys that the damaging Western view of instrumentalism (that the natural world and the earth itself are for human use) seeps into the very foundations of our society. 

Once we justify that the planet we live on’s sole purpose is for our use, we can justify similar exploitation of the people and animals around us—especially those deemed “less than.” In our inherently patriarchal society, everyone and everything that isn’t a cisgender, heterosexual white male is seen as a pawn to be dominated by that institutionalized hierarchical binary system. 

Women, men, people, animals, plants, Earth—we are all living and natural beings and, consequently, are all forced into this perpetuated hierarchical scheme. Basically, you’re either on the top of this food chain or you’re not. 

. . .

I came across this editorial campaign by photographer and artist SH Sadler that captured women slathered in beauty products and packaged up like animal meat at the grocery store. The project is called Fresh Meat, and its message correlates with ecofeminist values. 

Ecofeminism encapsulates animal rights activism within its message. Hobgood-Oster points to  Carol. J. Adams’ ecofeminist study, The Sexual Politics of Meat, she paraphrases, “Adams has made explicit links between androcentric, patriarchal treatment of other-than-human animals, particularly focusing on the meat producing industries of the United States, and the exploitation of women.” 

This is exactly what SH Sadler is conveying with her Fresh Meat series. Women are so often regarded as pieces of meat for men to feast on when they want, where they want, and however they want, regardless of consent. The same goes for animals’ bodies and how we cage them and use them for profit and consumption. 

The women depicted in these images are labeled with a price tag. Their bodies are for sale.

There are undeniable correlations between patriarchal, or as Val Plumwood puts it in her writing, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, master-slave dynamics, and our global inclination toward domination and oppression. Just as slaves were dehumanized and sold to other humans at auction, the women in these images are painted to the highest standard of beauty and sold for consumption; whether that be consumption by the eye or mouth is up for you to decide. Animals are raised and slaughtered for that same consumption and profit. Pieces of land are bought and sold all across the globe for human monetary gain. How are we selling things that don’t belong to us?

. . .

This isn’t the only work from SH Sadler with an Ecofeminist theme. You can check out more of their work here.

. . .

Ecofeminism’s goal is to dismantle hierarchical thinking and eliminate relationships of domination across all environmental, ecological, natural, societal, political, and racial realms. Through transforming our relationships with each other, the world around us, and the other-than-human beings that inhabit the Earth alongside us, we can cease environmental degradation.

Ecofeminism “simultaneously [serves] as an environmental critique of feminism and a feminist critique of environmentalism” (Hobgood-Oster). So, just as a shifting of perspective and values surrounding our environment will affect the way that we treat not just women but all members of our society and the animals that we share the earth with, it goes both ways—vice versa. 

What do you think about SH Sadler’s work? How does it make you feel? I’d love to hear your take in the comments below! 

. . .

Works Cited

Hobgood-Oster, Laura. “Ecofeminism: Historic and International Evolution.” Systemic Alternatives, 18 Jan. 2016, systemicalternatives.org/2016/01/18/ecofeminism-historic-and-international-evolution/. 

Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 2015.