Breakthrough Dialogues

Many ecofeminists contend that women have a "mystical" connectedness with the earth. But as Jennifer Bernstein argues, this idea conflates women with the biophysical environment, taking women's agency away from their own bodies.  In this episode, Jennifer, lecturer at the University of Southern California, tells us about the ways in which environmental discourse is still highly gendered. We talk about the “white guy problem,” naturalizing ideals of the farm, and how cloth-diapering signals a particular kind of environmentalism. These issues are structural, but “proximate possible” solutions point a way forward: what can we do, given what we have right now? For more on this topic, here is Jennifer’s essay in the Breakthrough Journal: “On Mother Earth and Earth Mothers.”