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2013 20: 361European Journal of Women's StudiesChristine Bauhardt

economics, queer ecologies and resource politicsRethinking gender and nature from a material(ist) perspective: Feminist

  

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EJWSRethinking gender and nature from a material(ist) perspective: Feminist economics, queer ecologies and resource politics

Christine BauhardtHumboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

AbstractAfter the cultural turn, it has become necessary to reconsider society’s relations to nature. This article provides a theoretically sound basis for feminist interventions in global environmental policies drawing on feminist economics and queer ecologies to theorize material(ist) perspectives on gender and nature. This is the starting point for rethinking social and gender relations to nature from the resource politics approach. Beyond the feminization of environmental responsibility this approach aims at an understanding of human life embedded in material and discursive processes – without putting the potential (re)productivity of the female body on the ideological pedestal of heterosexual maternity.

KeywordsEcological crisis, environmental policies, gender and sustainability, naturecultures, social relations to nature

Dealing with questions of nature means living a life of danger. The topic ‘nature’ is always associated with non-emancipatory, even reactionary tendencies. ‘Back to nature’ sounds musty, narrow-minded and politically suspect – and rightly so. Gender research is even more concerned with ‘nature trouble’. It is a narrow divide between theoretically sound scholarship and the abyss of essentialism. Particularly in gender research, how-ever, a critical appraisal of the nature/culture dualism is a fundamental epistemological issue. Nature as the Other of culture and rationality, nature as the opposing pole to

Corresponding author:Christine Bauhardt, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Philippstr. 13, Haus 12, Berlin, 10115, Germany. Email: christine.bauhardt@gender.hu-berlin.de

471027 EJW20410.1177/1350506812471027European Journal of Women’s StudiesBauhardt2013

Article

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urbanity and modernity, nature as a rationale for legitimizing gender differences and gender orders – these hierarchizations express value judgements: social progress is based on the emancipation from nature and natural conditions.

For me, this raises the following questions: Does a feminist perspective, i.e. a perspec-tive that challenges power structures, allow for a positive conception of nature, a concep-tion that does not allot nature an inferior, negatively connoted role? How can we think about social relations to nature without using nature to legitimize the social devaluation of women and their achievements? Can nature be conceived in a way that neither dramatizes nor idealizes our existential dependency on natural-material resources, which includes ‘classical’ natural resources as well as women’s reproductive work? In my attempt to answer these questions in this article, I hope to contribute to feminist-emancipatory environmental research that neither naturalizes social conditions nor negates nature as the basis of all life.

Introduction: Feminist environmental debates after the cultural turn

The central point of departure for my argument is the materiality of economic conditions and of social relations to nature. I am interested in exploring how we can develop a femi-nist perspective on social relations to nature that illuminates the contradictory relation-ship between a deconstructivist understanding of gender, on the one hand, and the materiality of nature and environmental phenomena in light of the materiality of the ecological crisis, on the other. By ecological crisis I mean the deterioration of natural resources, e.g. the loss of arable land because of droughts and floods due to climate change, the decline of biodiversity and the pollution of air and water through industrial emissions. This is closely connected to another important question: Can there be a politi-cal debate that takes into consideration both economic questions surrounding the access to and use of resources and the limitedness of natural resources?

Traditionally these questions are politically constructed as opposites: distributive jus-tice can only be achieved through further economic growth because we cannot assume that living standards in developed societies can be scaled back and because the middle classes in the growing economies of the Global South regard this model of prosperity as a benchmark. This is the mainstream approach to sustainable development and the so-called green growth (OECD, 2011; OECD et al., 2012):

Green growth means fostering economic growth and development while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies. To do this it must catalyse investment and innovation which will underpin sustained growth and give rise to new economic opportunities. (OECD 2011: executive summary: 9)

Growth, however, depends on the further exploration and unchecked exploitation of natural resources in order to enable precisely this broad participation in global prosperity. Examples of this are increasing energy demands for industrial production and private households, changing eating habits such as the rising consumption of meat, or unbridled automobilization. Feminist scholars and activists specialized in environmental research

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and politics have been criticizing this technocratic and economically biased perspective for a long time (cf. Braidotti et al., 1994, Brú Bistuer and Aguëra Cabo, 2004). The final statement of the Women’s Major Group on the Outcomes of Rio+20 in June 2012 reads as follows:

Thousands of peoples’ right to a healthy environment are being disrespected. The Women’s Major Group is dismayed and alarmed that there is no reference to radioactive pollution and its devastating impact on our health and our environment, including rivers, aquifers, food and air. … Further, the critical connection between climate change and gender is not mentioned at all. This is unacceptable and contrary to women’s daily experiences. Women, children, indigenous peoples and the impoverished (the majority of whom are women) are the most heavily impacted by increasingly direct consequences of climate change. Equally critical is the huge potential contribution to climate mitigation and adaptation that could be made by women, yet their essential role in leading and participating in desperately needed climate solutions is not mentioned. … We believe that a ‘green economy’ will be no more than ‘green washing’ if it is not firmly planted in a legally binding implementation of the precautionary principle. (Women’s Major Group United Nations Rio+20 Summit, 2012)

But how can we have a political and scholarly discussion that challenges power struc-tures, particularly the ideology surrounding the inseparability of economic growth and social prosperity, and does not romanticize social-material relations to nature? For me, this is the central challenge for feminist environmental debates and policies. We cannot develop an emancipatory concept of our relationship to the environment and to nature without deconstructing the age-old intertwining of nature and femininity discourses and thematizing the analogy between the productiveness of both nature and the female body.

Currently the feminist environmental discussion is in deadlock. It is politically weak1 and wears itself out in an antagonism similar to the one described above: either distribu-tive justice or environmental protection and resource preservation. But these alleged contradictions must be conceptualized in their mutual dependency and combined with a feminist-emancipatory perspective. I believe one reason for the current weakness of feminist environmental movements is that the mediation between a deconstructivist understanding of gender and a materialist understanding of nature is as yet theoretically and practically difficult to grasp. A feminist conception of environmental policies faces the challenge of conceiving the relationship between humans and nature as a material relationship without perpetuating the discourse of women’s more intimate connection with nature.

In this article I address these questions by combining feminist economic critique with current feminist approaches to the materiality of nature and the environment. These questions are by no means new – for many years feminist environmental and social sci-entists have been researching the relationship between gender relations and social rela-tions to nature (cf. Braidotti et al., 1994; Buckingham-Hatfield, 2000; Holland-Cunz, 1994; Mellor, 1997; Nebelung et al., 2001; Schultz and Weller, 1995; Weller et al., 1999). It seems important to me, however, to critically reconsider the significance of the mate-riality of gender relations and of social relations to nature after the cultural turn. Nature discourses and gender discourses are closely intertwined, and yet nature is not only discourse – it defines social and economic living conditions in a very material way.

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The combination of feminist economic critique and the queer ecologies approach is a promising theoretical framework for my understanding of resource politics. I have devel-oped this perspective in the course of my critical examination of global climate policy (cf. Bauhardt, 2009, 2012). This approach should be understood primarily as a response to the concept of natural resource management. Natural resource management is con-cerned with the sustainable management of natural resources and allots women a special role as important actors in this process. Feminist environmental and sustainability research has criticized this approach as the ‘feminization of environmental responsibility’ (Schultz, 1993; Weller, 2004; Wichterich, 1992). Hence, the resource politics approach is also an attempt to combine critical feminist analysis with policy options.

My article is divided into three parts. First I offer an overview of central aspects of feminist economic critique as it has emerged in its interactions with and further develop-ment of the critique of political economy (cf. Bauhardt and Çağlar, 2010). Central to this is the category of social reproduction and its interaction with market production. In this context, the transition to ‘productivity’ or ‘(re)productivity’ (Biesecker and Hofmeister, 2006, 2010a, 2010b) marks a terminological and conceptual change concerning repro-ductive work. Second, I introduce the queer ecologies approach, a perspective that has developed in the context of environmental research and critique of the natural sciences, and is embedded in the discursive field of material feminisms (cf. Alaimo and Hekman, 2008b; Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, 2010b). By drawing on the contributions of both strands of feminist debate I develop the resource politics approach, which in my understanding enables an integration of feminist economic critique and queer-deconstructivist perspectives on social relations to nature, and opens up political options for feminist environmental policies.

Feminist economic critique

A central category of feminist economic critique is social reproduction, which is norma-tively located in the private sphere and empirically carried out by women. The time budget studies of various countries show just how economically relevant these dimen-sions are. For Switzerland,2 see the calculations of the economist Mascha Madörin:

In Switzerland, the preparation of meals accounts for one third of overall unpaid work. This is the equivalent of almost 45 billion Swiss francs or 90 percent of the gross value of the entire wholesale and retail sector. Women alone, with their unpaid care work for children and adults requiring care, have generated a ‘gross value’ comparable to that of the entire Swiss financial sector … – and this in Switzerland! [she adds in a footnote]. (Madörin, 2010: 96, emphasis in the original; see also Madörin, 2006)3

So if we are talking about women’s unpaid work in the area of so-called private care and providence, we are actually talking about macroeconomics, not social romanticism – as the economic mainstream assumes because no monetary transactions are involved.4

Feminist economists aim at an understanding of ‘economics as if all people mattered’ – hence the subtitle of Lourdes Benería’s (2003) influential book, in which she analyses the global economy from a critical gender perspective. For feminist economists, central

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points of criticism are the laissez-faire belief in the self-regulation of markets, the con-cept of the homo economicus as a competitive labour monad solely interested in pursuing its own interests, and the analytical separation between the economic and the social. In this model, rational calculation and the maximization of individual benefit are the driv-ing forces of action in the economic sphere, whereas love rules the social sphere.

Since the late 1970s, feminist economic critique has developed into a complex aca-demic and practical field. It encompasses micro- as well as macroeconomic perspectives and brings together liberal and (neo-)institutional as well as Marxist approaches (cf. Bakker, 1994; Ferber and Nelson, 1993, 2003; Peterson, 2003; and the journal Feminist Economics; for a contemporary overview, see Bauhardt and Çağlar, 2010). The most important point for my discussion of social relations to nature is the way nature and reproductive work is addressed in feminist-economic approaches.

Reproductive work, considered as house- and care work carried out by women free of charge and as a ‘labour of love’, differs systematically from marketed wage work. It is also intrinsically different in the responsibilities, emotional ties and immediate urgency it entails. The feminist analysis of neoclassical economics shows that in the latter’s con-cept of an economy based on free trade in an open market, where everything has an exchange value, women’s work is treated as boundless and gratuitous. Hence, reproduc-tive work attains the status of a natural resource:

Ecofeminist political economy sees a connection between the exploitation of women’s labor and the abuse of planetary resources. Women and the environment are both marginalized in their positions within the formal economy. As economists have long recognized in theory, but often not in practice, the economic system often views the environment as a ‘free’, exploitable resource while it ignores or undervalues much of women’s lives and work. (Mellor, 2005: 123)

This approach, as explicated here by Mary Mellor, owes its inception and further devel-opment to ecofeminism (cf. Mellor, 1997; Merchant, 1996; Mies and Shiva, 1993; Plumwood, 1993). In the introduction to her book Feminism and Ecology (1997), Mellor offers the following definition:

Ecofeminism is a movement that sees a connection between the exploitation and degradation of the natural world and the subordination and oppression of women. … Ecofeminism brings together elements of the feminist and green movements, while at the same time offering a challenge to both. It takes from the green movement a concern about the impact of human activities on the non-human world and from feminism the view of humanity as gendered in ways that subordinate, exploit and oppress women. (Mellor, 1997: 1)

The ecofeminist perspective thus regards the exploitation of nature and the disadvan-taged social role of women as interdependent causes and manifestations of destructive social relations to nature. In order to end these conditions of inequality and exploitation, the domination of nature and women must end.

Ecofeminist positions are often faced with the accusation of reproducing the dichoto-mous distinction between masculinity and femininity and hence the identification of women with nature. Ecofeminism is said to essentialize the social construction of gen-der differences. In order to differentiate between various ecofeminist approaches, the

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literature often distinguishes between ‘cultural’ and ‘social’ ecofeminism (see, for exam-ple, Buckingham-Hatfield, 2000: 35ff.).

Cultural ecofeminism positively highlights women’s close relationship to nature based on their child-bearing capacities. Menstruation and pregnancy, for example, are considered to give women privileged access to the natural rhythms of living processes. Based on these experiences, women purportedly develop a greater sense of responsibility not only for others, but also for nature (e.g. Daly, 1978; King, 1990; Merchant, 1996). Social ecofeminism, on the other hand, criticizes women’s alleged proximity to nature as a social ascription informed by prevailing power hierarchies. In this view, women’s greater knowledge about and experience with nature is rooted in women’s positions on the labour hierarchy, which releases men from the responsibility for living processes such as caring for weak or dependent members of the family and society.5

Bina Agarwal (1992) is an exemplary proponent of this latter position. In this pivotal article, she develops her concept of ‘feminist environmentalism’ in contrast to essential-ist ecofeminism. She describes the different positions of women within the social hier-archy, which makes it impossible to maintain the idea that all women have privileged and unmediated access to nature and the environment. Agarwal assumes that the rela-tionship between human beings and nature is grounded in the material realities of men and women:

Hence, insofar as there is a gender and class (/caste/race)-based division of labor and distribution of property and power, gender and class (/caste/race) structure people’s interactions with nature and so structure the effects of environmental change on people and their responses to it. And where knowledge about nature is experiential in its basis, the divisions of labor, property, and power which shape experience also shape the knowledge based on that experience. (Agarwal, 1992: 126)

The author thus proposes an understanding of gender as a power relationship that over-laps with class, caste, or racial hierarchies. The distribution of labour, power and owner-ship according to gender, class, caste and racial inequalities structures social relations to nature. Depending on one’s position in this intersecting power field, knowledge about and experiences with nature are defined in different ways.

In the German-language realm,6 most prominently Adelheid Biesecker and Sabine Hofmeister advocate an environmental and sustainability research that combines eco-logical perspectives with feminist economic approaches. However, they also clearly dis-tance themselves from essentialist tendencies within ecofeminism.7 In their book, Die Neuerfindung des Ökonomischen. Ein (re)produktionstheoretischer Beitrag zur Sozialen Ökologie [The Reinvention of the Economic: A Contribution to Social Ecology from the Perspective of (Re)productive Theory] (2006), the authors expound: ‘(Re)productivity is a category that encompasses productivity as a whole’ (Biesecker and Hofmeister, 2010a: 69). This implies nature’s productivity as well as the ‘social (re)production of human life through the caring activities assigned to women’ (Biesecker and Hofmeister, 2010b: 1707). With their (re)productivity concept, they aim to overcome the distinction between and hierarchization of production modes that are monetarily valued and production pro-cesses in nature and society that are not recognized in monetary terms, and to broaden the

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analytical scope to embrace the economy as a whole: ‘It is only a conception of labor broadened to encompass activities neglected until now by economic theory that would open our eyes to the fact that productivity is inseparable from “reproductivity”, even when it comes to people’s day-to-day activities’ (Biesecker and Hofmeister, 2010b: 1707).

In short, in feminist economics the central research focus is social reproduction, and thus women’s relationships to natural life processes. Women’s normative responsibility for life processes and other persons is at the core of the dispute about a feminist under-standing of social relations to nature. In this context, women’s care work and their (re)productive capabilities are either used as a source of their caring and responsible approach to the environment and nature (as in cultural ecofeminism), or the essentialization of these competences – construed as feminine – and their hierarchical attribution to women is criticized (as in social ecofeminism or social ecology research).

Queer ecologies

The queer ecologies approach is part of the wider field of contemporary feminist theory on materiality (cf. Alaimo and Hekman, 2008b; Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, 2010b). This research perspective is based on the thesis that feminist epistemology after the linguistic turn has reached stalemate and no longer generates new theoretical and practical insights. Especially the nature/culture dichotomy has not been made obsolete by postmodernists – as they are wont to claim – but rather reinforced. In the pointed words of the editors of the comprehensive collection Material Feminisms:

In short, postmodernism has not fulfilled its promise as a theoretical grounding for feminism. Although postmoderns claim to reject all dichotomies, there is one dichotomy that they appear to embrace almost without question: language/reality. … In their zeal to reject the modernist grounding in the material, postmoderns have turned to the discursive pole as the exclusive source of the constitution of nature, society, and reality. Far from deconstructing the dichotomies of language/reality or culture/nature, they have rejected one side and embraced the other. Even though many social constructionist theories grant the existence of material reality, that reality is often posited as a realm entirely separate from that of language, discourse, and culture. (Alaimo and Hekman 2008a: 2ff.)

This criticism does not imply that we should throw overboard the findings of postmodern language philosophy or reject social constructivism as idealistic. Rather, the aim is to overcome the epistemological deadlock of postmodern theorization in favour of a femi-nist theory of action which recognizes language and materiality as being of equal value. It is certainly no coincidence that Susan Hekman, a political scientist, is at odds with the cultural turn:

The dichotomy between construction and reality is untenable. Privileging reality over construction, the modernist settlement, is not preferable to privileging construction over reality, the social constructionist alternative. What we need is a conception that does not presuppose a gap between language and reality that must be bridged, that does not define the two as opposites. We have learned much from the linguistic turn. Language does construct our reality. What we are discovering now, however, is that this is not the end of the story. Language interacts with

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other elements in this construction; there is more to the process than we originally thought. What we need is not a theory that ignores language as modernism did, but rather a more complex theory that incorporates language, materiality, and technology into the equation. (Hekman, 2008: 91ff., emphasis in the original)

One central point of reference for this debate on the relationship between materiality and discourse is the concept of ‘posthumanist performativity’ coined by Karen Barad (2008 [2003]), and what she terms ‘agential realism’8 (Barad, 1998). In her discussion of Butler’s performativity concept, which she criticizes as anthropocentric, and in reference to Donna Haraway and quantum physicist Niels Bohr, she develops posthumanist per-formativity as incorporating material and discursive, social and techno-scientific, human and nonhuman, natural and cultural factors (Barad, 2008: 126). The author9 proposes an understanding of matter that is not passive and static, but rather active, self-acting, and subject to historical change:

Matter, like meaning, is not an individually articulated or static entity. Matter is not little bits of nature, or a blank slate, surface, or site passively awaiting signification; nor is it an uncontested ground for scientific, feminist, or Marxist theories. Matter is not a support, location, referent, or source of sustainability for discourse. Matter is not immutable or passive. It does not require the mark of an external force like culture or history to complete it. Matter is always already an ongoing historicity. … That is, matter refers to the materiality/materialization of phenomena, not to an inherent fixed property of abstract, independently existing objects of Newtonian physics. (Barad, 2008: 139, emphasis in the original)

I find these observations quite fruitful and inspiring for feminist debates on social relations to nature. They provide the opportunity to combine poststructuralist theories on the power of language with the power of matter. Such a project could help build ‘a new epistemological framework that calls into question the dualisms of object/subject, knower/known, nature/culture, and word/world’ (Barad, 2008: 137).

Feminist epistemology owes a considerable debt to Donna Haraway who introduced the concept of ‘naturecultures’ (2003), thereby getting to the heart of the equiprimordi-ality of nature and culture. Hers is a productive approach to dissolving the binary oppo-sition between the two constructs and expressing their intrinsic connection. Feminists have long questioned this dualism, and in Barad’s interpretation the binary opposition ‘word/world’ is a continuation of the culture-over-nature hierarchy rooted in European modernity:

Nature is neither a passive surface awaiting the mark of culture nor the end product of cultural performances. The belief that nature is mute and immutable and that all prospects for significance and change reside in culture is a reinscription of the nature/culture dualism that feminists have actively contested. … Feminist science studies scholars in particular have emphasized that foundational inscriptions of the nature/culture dualism foreclose the understanding of how ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are formed, an understanding that is crucial to both feminist and scientific analyses. (Barad, 2008: 145)

The queer ecologies approach must be understood in this wider context. Queer ecolo-gies rely on the concept of ‘naturecultures’ in order to deconstruct popular assumptions

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and scientific assertions concerning the nature of gender and sexuality as cultural con-structions rooted in the heterosexual matrix. On the basis of zoological and behavioural findings, Bruce Bagemihl (1999) documents in his more than 700-page reference book homosexual, bisexual and transgender sexual behaviour in animals, the spectrum of their sexual practices, as well as biological exuberance and abundance in nature that entirely escapes the heteronormative view – or rather, is explained away by it.10 Similar to Roughgarden (2004), Bagemihl’s approach reverses the perspective from the cultural construction to the material basis of dynamics and processes and from this position disproves the supposed ‘naturalness’ of human heterosexuality – an exclusive claim that is invariably legitimized by references to nature:

Sexual and gender variance in animals offer a key to a new way of looking at the world, symbolic of the larger paradigm shifts currently underway in a number of natural and social sciences. The discussion is rooted in the basic facts about animal homosexuality and nonreproductive heterosexuality. (Bagemihl, 1999: 6)

At the core of Bagemihl’s criticism is the naturalization of ‘sex’, heterosexuality and reproduction, which goes hand in hand with a critique of the body of knowledge pro-duced by the natural sciences on ‘natural’ sexual and reproductive behaviour. As phrased by Noël Sturgeon:

[How] we reproduce – whether we are reproducing people, families, cultures, societies, and/or the planet – is politicized in several layered and contradictory ways. Ironically, given the extreme consequences of certain human models of reproduction for the environment, appeals to the ‘natural’ are one of the standard ways this politicization of reproduction is obscured. And embedded in contemporary appeals to the natural status of reproduction are deep attachments to political positions with serious economic and environmental consequences: to dominance of the Global North over the Global South, to sexism, to heterosexism, and to unfettered exploitation of environmental resources by corporations and social elites. (Sturgeon, 2010: 103ff.)

In this view, natural reproductivity and its social organization and interpretation are understood as a complex and mutually dependent phenomenon. Referring back to ‘the nature’ of heterosexual reproduction as an unquestionable given is a political strategy to cover up the negative consequences of human modes of reproduction for the environ-ment. Moreover, this assumption legitimizes power relations between the Global North and the Global South as well as the unbridled exploitation of natural resources. From a queer-ecological perspective, these power relations are closely connected with sexism and heterosexism.

Resource politics

In reaction to global environmental policies, and especially based on my criticism of the androcentric rationality of climate discourse (cf. Bauhardt, 2009, 2012), I have developed the approach of resource politics. This approach combines the theoretical perspectives of feminist economics and queer ecologies and applies them to environmental policies. The idea of (re)productivity from the feminist critique of political economy offers a

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constructive point of reference for the further development of this concept, and the queer ecologies debate about the equiprimordiality of ‘naturecultures’ allows us to transgress the heterosexual connotations of (re)productivity and to reconceive it in terms of materiality.

My resource politics approach comprises the access to resources, the use of resources and the governance of resources. The term resource in this understanding includes natu-ral resources in the classical sense (i.e. water, land, plants and raw materials) and wom-en’s reproductive work, which should not be regarded as a quasi-natural precondition of economic processes, but rather as a cultural and social construction in a heteronormative gender hierarchy. Resource politics should be understood in contrast to resource man-agement, which is a very popular concept both in environmental research and environ-mental policies. Integrated water resource management, for example, implies that the natural resources water and land should be cultivated in a way that reconciles people’s economic and social welfare with ecological sustainability (cf. Cap-Net and UNDP, n.d.). Particularly in the field of global water policy, it has repeatedly been pointed out that women play a crucial role in the sustainable use of water and water-based resources since they are on the one hand responsible for family hygiene, health and maintenance, and on the other hand often disadvantaged in their access to water.

Feminist ecological movements have introduced the demand to include the category gender in resource management concepts into global discourse (cf. Cap-Net et al., 2006; UNIFEM, 2005). This demand arises from the inequality in the distribution of natural resources, for example in cases where women do not have access to water due to unequal land rights, or ethnic/social barriers ban them from using springs or wells (cf. Bennett and Zwarteveen, 2005; Joshi and Fawcett, 2005). Political decisions in favour of large infrastructure projects such as the building of mega dams or the privatization of water supply on a global scale, however, make a mockery of these claims, since they literally drain off the water supply for women as well as peasant agrarian and subsistence farming structures. This produces even greater constraints for women in their struggle to acquire water and increases their workload, since they often have to compensate drying up springs by long marches to the next-nearest water source. Or, as Leila M Harris (2006, 2008) has shown in her analysis of the mega dam project in southeastern Anatolia, the basis for women’s contributions to the domestic economy is destroyed and their work is degraded to mere support work for the male provider.

In the wake of global policy decisions and the alliance between powerful political and economic actors, natural resources are further being diminished and women are being exploited in the sustainable management of these diminishing resources – the (re)pro-ductivity of their work is utilized as if it were a natural resource itself. This is how resource politics should be understood: as a critique of the exploitation of women’s labour as a quasi-natural resource, and as a political strategy that analytically and practi-cally combines feminist economics and queer ecologies.

(Re)productivity as the conflation of previously separate spheres that are assessed in very different ways – the so-called economic and the so-called social, the public and the private, rationality and desire, culture and nature – is a ‘staple’ that can help to dissipate these binary oppositions. This concept enhances Haraway’s ‘naturecultures’ by intro-ducing the economic sphere into the equation. Although my understanding of resource politics is based on (re)productivity, it also aims to embrace the critique of power and

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domination inherent in the heteronormative two-gender model which implies hetero-sexual relations of social reproduction.

Mary Mellor’s article ‘Nature, gender and the body’ (2001) was very stimulating for my considerations. The author somewhat trenchantly distances herself from postmodern feminist theoretical perspectives, but this does not diminish the quality of her argument. She assumes the materiality of the body and detaches the argument over ‘sex’ and ‘gen-der’, over ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ from reproduction: ‘Certainly sex/gender is important in relation to the particular embodiment that relates to sexed bodies, but that is by no means the whole story of humanity’s relationship to biology/nature’ (Mellor, 2001: 131). Mellor thus emphasizes the embeddedness of human existence into material-physical processes and substantiates this view with ecofeminist arguments, but she also ties in with the queer ecologies approach. For her, the body is first and foremost materiality, and desire is not forced into the corset of the heteronormative order.

The proponents of queer ecologies speak of ‘nonhuman animals’ and ‘nonhuman creatures’ (Alaimo, 2010) in order to underscore the embeddedness of human and non-human bodies in creatural processes:

[The] question of whether nonhuman nature can be queer provokes larger questions within interdisciplinary theory regarding the relations between discourse and materiality, human and more-than-human worlds, as well as between cultural theory and science. In short, we need more robust, complex ways of productively engaging with materiality – ways that account for the diversity and ‘exuberance’ of a multitude of naturecultures, ways that can engage with science as well as queer studies. (Alaimo, 2010: 52)

This leads us back to the body’s materiality, and the concept ‘body’ also encompasses non-human animals here – there is no distinction between human and animal. Such a distinc-tion would reproduce the dichotomy between culture (human) and nature (animal).

Hence, it is ‘bodily materiality’ (Mellor, 2001) or corporeality (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, 2010a) that breathes life into ‘naturecultures’. (Re)productivity in this sense is a building block of resource politics that recognizes the materiality of bodies and their embeddedness in natural processes without defining the conditions of social repro-duction exclusively within the heterosexual matrix. Without doubt, however, as long as materiality, or ‘bodywork’, as Mary Mellor11 calls it, is connoted as feminine and ascribed to the realm of women’s responsibilities – not all women, but exclusively women – the binary gender hierarchy will remain intact.

In conclusion, I have tried to combine reflections from feminist economics and from queer ecologies in order to theorize material(ist) perspectives on gender and nature. Queer ecologies enable us to suspend natural materiality and social reproduction from the female body. The concept of ‘naturecultures’ allows an understanding of human life embedded in material and discursive processes – without putting the potential (re)pro-ductivity of the female body on the ideological pedestal of heterosexual maternity. In my view, feminist-ecological politics can draw upon these strands of thinking to develop for fresh perspectives. Global environmental policies should also be able to expect many more insights from feminist enquiry than the natural resource management approach allows today. The resource politics approach enhances policy options far beyond the responsibility of women caring for humans and the planet and this is as it should be.

372 European Journal of Women’s Studies 20(4)

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. The just quoted statement is one of the examples showing that feminist voices have lost the small but interesting impact on global governance they had gained 20 years ago within the Agenda 21 (see, for example, Bretherton, 2003).

2. For a European comparison, see McGinnity and Russell (2008) for Ireland, BFSFJ and Stat. BA (2003) for Germany, Carrasco and Recio (2001) for Spain, for a methodological approach Apps (2003), for an international comparison Budlender (2007).

3. ‘In der Schweiz nimmt das Zubereiten von Mahlzeiten ein Viertel der gesamten unbezahl-ten Arbeitszeit in Anspruch und entspricht einem Wert von knapp 45 Mrd. Franken, was ungefähr 90 Prozent der Bruttowertschöpfung des gesamten Groß- und Detailhandels entspricht. Allein Frauen haben mit ihrer unbezahlten Care-Arbeit für Kinder und betreu-ungsbedürftige Erwachsene eine ‘Bruttowertschöpfung’ erzielt, die ungefähr der gesa-mten Bruttowertschöpfung des Finanzsektors in der Schweiz entspricht’ – ‘und das in der Schweiz!’

4. Time budget studies are relevant from a gender perspective because they do not employ mon-etary transactions as an indicator of value creation, but rather invested time. With this indica-tor, the expenditure of labour can be calculated independently of the distinction between paid (male) and unpaid (female) labour. Thus, these studies treat care work and wage work on an equal footing.

5. In the German-language literature, this approach is part of a broader discussion in social-ecolog-ical research (cf. Balzer and Wächter, 2002; Schäfer et al., 2006; Schultz and Weller, 1995).

6. For an English treatment of the (re)productivity approach, see Biesecker and Hofmeister (2010b).

7. Among others, see the publications of Netzwerk Vorsorgendes Wirtschaften [Network Caring Economy] (e.g. Biesecker et al., 2000; Jochimsen, 2003).

8. Barad describes the political and epistemological context of agential realism as follows: ‘Agential realism is an account of techno-scientific and other practices that take feminist, antiracist, poststructuralist, queer, Marxist, science studies, and scientific insights seriously, building specifically on important insights from Niels Bohr, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Vicki Kirby, Joseph Rouse, and others’ (Barad, 2008: 129).

9. Barad is a professor of feminist studies, philosophy and the history of knowledge at the University of California (Santa Cruz) and holds a PhD in particle physics.

10. Chapter 4 of his book is entitled ‘Explaining (away) animal homosexuality’ (Bagemihl, 1999: 122–167).

11. In her article ‘Nature, gender and the body’ (Mellor, 2001) Mary Mellor defines her under-standing of ‘bodywork’ within the section ‘Bodywork as women’s work’ as follows: ‘Women’s work is not valued because it is bodywork, the work associated with the most basic needs of human existence. Women’s work is the basic work that makes other forms of activity pos-sible, by nurturing the human body and the community. … It is the work for the human body and its basic needs. Maintenance and sustenance through the cycle of the day and the cycle of life (birth to death) in sickness and in health. … The key issue for ecological sociology there-fore is not sex–gender difference but the gendering of human societies through the failure to address embodiment as a social issue’ (Mellor, 2001: 133).

Bauhardt 373

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