************WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT THIS BOOK************
ECOFEMINISM AS POLITICS: nature, Marx and the postmodern
by Ariel Salleh,
London: Zed Books, 1997 and New York: St Martins Press, 1998;
pp.208; index; ISBN 1-85649-400-4 (paper).
"A nascent political economy", "a unique and powerful explanatory
position": UK political scientist John Barry, editor of the Green
Politics Newsletter writing in Environmental Politics, Autumn 1998.
"I place Ariel Salleh's scholarship in the front rank with work of
socialist ecofeminists such as Vandana Shiva or ecofeminists
generally like Rosemary Ruether and Susan Griffin": USA philosopher
Max Oelschlaeger, editor of Postmodern Environmental Ethics and
author of Caring for Creation.
"The book engaged me - it is passionately written, well researched
and sweeping in theoretical scope...there is something refreshing
about Salleh's inclusionary politics": USA feminist Betsy Hartmann,
author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs writing in The Women's
Review of Books, October 1998.
Ariel Salleh's book Ecofeminism as Politics: nature, Marx and the
postmodern does what we all need to do in these times - integrate our
thinking about Ecological, Social Justice, Feminist, and Indigenous
concerns. An exemplar of complexity theory, her political synthesis
is developed as an embodied materialism. Salleh judges the libidinal
economy of contemporary politics, sexuality, and science to be born
of denial and thus blindly destructive or inconsequential.
The author's lateral reasoning carries us through globalisation and
Green ideologies, gendered science and gene technology, aboriginal
land rights, the population debate, and critical reflections on neo-
liberalism and on
Marx's theory of value. The book has been adopted in environmental
studies, history and philosophy of science, ethics, politics,
sociology, cultural and women's studies. Social movement researchers
will find here a useful broad brush history of a popular globalising
resurgence.
In the search for sustainable futures, Salleh's grassroots
alternative goes global, building shared ground for women and men,
North and South. Her class analysis invites us to democratise our
theoretical models by learning from the reproductive labour skills
and insights of meta-industrial workers - housewives, peasants,
indigenous peoples. Honouring usually invisible ways of knowing
nature, she finds the precautionary principle already practised by
this global majority, whose labours minimise risk, reconcile
differences, and hold complex living - social and ecological -
systems together.
Ecofeminism as Politics is designed to destabilise the eurocentric
denial that separates mind from body, Humanity from Nature. An
activist and sociologist of knowledge, the author uses passion,
playful irony and forceful trans- disciplinary argument to
interrogate fixed assumptions and to re-embody economic thinking
within bio-energetic fields. Salleh grounds ecofeminist political
awareness in the painful material contradiction of living as both
human self and natural resource. And this phenomenology of
exploitation and bifurcation in her epistemic standpoint silences
criticism of ecofeminism as an essentialist position.
Dr Ariel Salleh's gender critiques are published in New Left Review,
Environ- mental Politics, Science as Culture, Economic and Political
Weekly, Hypatia, Environmental Ethics, and Social Alternatives. She
teaches in Social Inquiry at the University of Western Sydney,
Hawkesbury; was Visiting Professor of Women's Studies at St
Scholastica, Manila in 1998; and visiting fellow in Environmental
Conservation Education at New York University, 1992.
ORDERS
Zed Books, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF UK
Tel 44-171-837-4014 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
St Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 USA
Tel 1-212-982-3900 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Astam Books, 57 John Street, Leichardt, NSW 2040 Australia
Tel 61-2-9566-4400 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[Also order from the New International Bookshop - Trades Hall, Melb]
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