Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism

Greta Gaard’s essay is at once a history of ecofeminism and an argument about how intellectual traditions are remembered. It returns to the field’s growth in the 1980s, the debates and criticism of the 1990s, and the later tendency to relabel work at the intersection of feminism and the environment as “feminist environmentalism,” “gender and the environment,” or other approaches. Gaard does not claim that all criticism was mistaken: she accepts that some ecofeminist writing did equate women with nature and reproduce gender essentialism. Her objection is to treating that strand as the whole tradition, then using the resulting caricature to dismiss a much more varied body of scholarship and activism.

The historical examples make that variety concrete. Gaard describes feminist peace and environmental organizing, and anthologies that put nuclear militarism, women’s health, food security, forestry, work, colonial development, race and animal relations into conversation. These were not simply different topics collected under a fashionable label; together they challenged the divisions that made environmental harm seem separate from gendered labor, racialized exposure, imperial power or violence against other species. Her account also shows how a field can become less legible when it abandons its name in response to hostile shorthand: readers may then encounter its arguments as if they had no feminist history.

One of the essay’s most useful distinctions is between rejecting essentialism and rejecting ecological analysis. Gaard takes seriously Bina Agarwal’s critique that “women” cannot be treated as a single group: access to land, water, forests and other resources is shaped by class, location and political power. Celebrating women as natural guardians of the environment can romanticize unpaid care, transfer more work onto women, and leave control of resources unchanged. This is not a minor qualification. It changes the question from whether women have a special bond with nature to how specific people are materially positioned in relation to environmental resources, whose labor sustains them, and who has authority over decisions and benefits.

Gaard extends that material analysis beyond human social categories. She argues that feminism loses explanatory power when it examines human bodies and social hierarchy but treats animals, species relations and ecological systems as apolitical background. The point is not that every comparison between women and animals is sound, or that different histories of oppression are interchangeable. Rather, the essay asks how domination can be normalized through linked hierarchies—human over nonhuman, culture over nature, and the powerful over those whose labor, land or bodies are made available for use. The examples she surveys, including disputes over food production, animal advocacy, environmental health and speciesism, show why an intersectional approach must be contextual: alliances require attention to uneven histories and competing claims, not a universal moral template.

Her discussion of public reception is also pointed. In the case of Ms. magazine, Gaard traces how material that had been presented through the explicitly political language of ecofeminism later appeared in narrower “health” framing. That shift matters because individualized health advice can make pollution, industrial production and unequal exposure look like private lifestyle concerns rather than questions of policy and power. Gaard reads the broader pattern as a marginalization of feminist ecological analysis, including the loss of credit for ideas later taken up in adjacent fields. This is a forceful interpretation, not proof that every later scholar deliberately erased an intellectual lineage; the distinction matters when using the essay as a history of contested recognition rather than as a blanket accusation.

The article’s geographic scope should remain visible. Gaard identifies her historical survey as focused on North American ecofeminism, while acknowledging influences and movements beyond it. It therefore cannot stand in for the full global history of feminist environmental thought, nor does it resolve every tension among Indigenous sovereignty, animal ethics, environmental justice and differently situated communities. Its value lies elsewhere: it asks readers to recover a usable history without romanticizing it, to keep valid critiques in view, and to resist a feminism that becomes “less essentialist” only by narrowing its field of concern to human social relations.

The essay offers a way to ask two linked questions of any environmental issue: which social relations determine who is exposed, who performs the work and who controls resources; and which bodies, species or places are treated as expendable in the process? The full article is available through the author-uploaded paper; the journal issue record confirms its publication in Feminist Formations 23.2 (2011), pages 26–53.