Ecology vs. Patriarchy: Women Artists and the Environment, 1962-present

On September 27, 1962, Rachel Carson published the foundational text of the environmental movement: Silent Spring. In it, she advocated on behalf of the vitality of the natural world, bringing attention to the interconnectedness of all biological systems. Criticism of her work was visibly gendered, with critics establishing a direct opposition between her seemingly effeminate appeal to the life of the planet and the paternalistic principles underpinning the chemical-industrial complex, the ‘all-American diet,’ and nuclear armament. “Isn’t it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs!,” one reader wrote. “As long as we have the H-bomb everything will be O.K.”

This panel takes seriously this opposition between ecology and patriarchy. It imagines environmentalism as a salve to the forces that have shaped our world since Carson’s writing, such as carboniferous capitalism; Baconian conceptions of scientific knowledge and “progress;” and militarism, especially when its result is ecocide. In this view, ecology is conceived not—or not only—as a field of study addressing the way that organisms inhabit the natural world, but as a relational approach by which the ego reabsorbs into the relational systems on which it depends, whether interpersonal (microcosmic) or global (macrocosmic). Taking its cues from ecofeminism, which posits that the oppression of women is motivated by the same forces driving the exploitation of the natural world, the panel specifically asks how women artists have articulated the problems facing the second half of the 20^th century, as well as posited solutions.