'Subject to the laws of nature': Ecofeminism, representation, and political subjectivity

This dissertation effects an engagement between the disciplines of environmental philosophy, feminism, political theory, and law. Through focusing on questions of political representation, subjectivity, and inclusion for women, communities of color, and the natural world, it considers ways ecofeminist theory can aid in transforming legal and political practices that marginalize subordinated groups. It also explores ways that philosophical debates over political representation are relevant to ecofeminist political projects, including ecofeminist envisionings of democracy. The four substantive chapters are independent articles that each, differently but relatedly, investigate contributions ecofeminism can make to particular liberatory political projects: feminist phenomenology, women's environmental activism, the environmental justice movement, and feminist jurisprudences. In chapter two feminist phenomenological accounts of embodiment are interrogated for their helpfulness in linking subjectivity to embodied responsivity to a more-than-human world as well as their exclusions and effacements of the non-human. Women's forest activism is examined in chapter three as a material site where ecofeminist theory and praxis converge. Chapter four argues that ecofeminism and critical race theory contribute a more efficacious approach to environmental justice struggles. Chapter five synthesizes feminist critiques of legal liberalism and the assumption of ontological separatism that underlies masculinist legal theory with ecofeminist understandings of the ways in which humans are embedded in ecosocial environments, in order to gesture toward a legal theory that would enable better means of representation for women and nature. Taken as a whole, the dissertation intends to raise and provide contingent answers to the following: What is the political status of the more-than-human world? How can law be deployed to resist and contest the systems of power that construct nature as subordinate? How can liberatory theories (e.g. critical race theory, queer theory, feminism) contribute to the ecological project of ending anthropocentric domination of the natural world? How might our political institutions and practices be reconfigured to acknowledge and include the more-than-human as something(s) with political subjectivity? How can/do theory and praxis intersect to effect this reconfiguration?;This dissertation includes my previously published "Ecofeminism and Forest Defense in Cascadia: Gender, Theory, and Radical Activism" (Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 17.1 (March 2006)).