Body Hate is a Form of Ecocide ( Part 3 - a much delayed addendum)
Reclaiming our bodies in the midst of the backlash
My best intentions to finish three unfinished essays went out the window last month with multiple crises to attend to and an identity that is reassembling itself daily. Unexpectedly, a much-needed vacation manifested, allowing the deep comfort of reconnecting with old friends on the East Coast. I was encouraged to “put down the pen” and JUST BE. Of course, this is the hardest thing for a workaholic to do, even with the seductions of warmth, sun, and good company. Writing has become my emotional anchor during these years of grieving, and I was very reluctant to take a break from word-smithing, even for a few days. I am happy to report that I did succeed at not opening up my laptop for a few days (yes, the London Writer’s Salon’s community zoom spaces where we write in silence have been an addiction).
When I did return to the screen, to offer me comfort amidst the overstimulation of NYC, I discovered that my faithful muses did NOT go on strike. I was full of ideas and phrases, but nothing could be completed. Now with many of the onerous tasks of caregiving taken off my plate and the steadiness of my writing desk, I am back at it, with determination to find my flow.
Now back to the topic at hand: I received some useful feedback from a respected friend in response to my first two posts about the body and ecocide. After some reflection, I felt that I might go a little deeper into the topic, leaning into a deeper discussion about patriarchy and the current backlash against women’s rights.
To review, ecocide is the conscious and sometimes unconscious destruction of our ecosystems, all those interwoven and fragile threads that support life for the human and the more than human. The extraction and exploitation economy fueled by capitalism and its endlessly greedy desire for profit has been trampling recklessly on all of our life support systems since the beginnings of industrialization. This period of rampant ecocide is often referred to as the Anthropocene. This Guardian article provides some context.
The drive to destroy or support the systems that support life can start early, as my 1991 audio installation, REMOTE CONTROL, attempts to uncover. The audience visiting this project was invited to write down on the “black boards” ways that their education helped them feel connected to the web of life or ways that it made them feel disconnected from the web of life. The walls were full of potent commentary. It gave people a good place to vent, given that President George Bush, Sr, was saying, at the time, that his administration was focused on improving education and the environment.
Installation view of “REMOTE CONTROL” an audience-participatory audio installation (Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, 1991) that addresses how our education system helps us connect to ecosystems or reinforces our disconnection from the latter. The desks with plaster on them housed soil and real plants inside and the desks covered with tracing paper had text on them (see below). The planter desks represent the students who survived the indoctrination of standard schooling.
These desks with text represent the damaged students and they are fragile; the surface is taut like a drum. This one says, “I will not think about ugly things” repeated several times. Other desks say things like: “I will keep my desk neat and tidy” or “My president never lies.” Each fragile desk has a small pile of dirt covering the bottom of one leg to imply that they will, over time, heal with the power of nature.
There’s been claims made that humans have always behaved this way (as the Guardian article above suggests), sullying their nests, aggressively abusing each other and their environment, but those claims have become specious in light of more recent archaeological and anthropological research. We are a complex species, and if we only read histories written by white men invested in a colonial perspective, everything is skewed in a direction that does not acknowledge the deep wisdom of indigenous ways. Read David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity to get more a more expansive view (they are white male authors who have veered from the pack, offering a portal, and not an overly romantic one, to other ways of viewing human history). Another book that I’ve just begun reading may be helpful for folks who need help imagining more expansive paradigms that have emerged from aboriginal cultures: The Dreaming Path: Indigenous Ideas to Help Us Change the World by Paul Callaghan and Uncle Paul Gordon. Click this link to watch a video with one of the authors.
As a side note, last week, in a jet-lagged haze, I made myself watch Dune #1 (why? you may ask, and I don’t have a good answer except that some of my younger friends recommended it). I was not surprised to see that Hollywood’s version of this science fiction novel is deeply engaged in replaying this idea of extracting and abusing a planet while oppressing the local indigenous folks. It’s so depressing that our entertainment industry is so caught up with various versions of this apocalyptic paradigm, another intensely patriarchal rendition of the future. We really need a team of cultural workers to turn one of Ursula LeGuin’s or Octavia Butler’s novels into films so we can step into futures with other possibilities.
Because theories and practices of social ecology explore how social justice issues are intricately interwoven with ecological ones, this arena of thinking and doing gives us a framework to understand how patriarchy and misogyny impact and inform ecocide. With a social ecology lens, we can see how “body hate” is not just something inflicted by the individual living in that body, or by families and friends, the popular media or the diet industry. Fatphobia, either internalized or foisted upon us, is just one form of systemic control, but if we expand our perspective we can see how patriarchy in collusion with capitalism includes the controlling of the female body through laws and restrictions about reproductive rights and the continuing violence against women.
plate from One Size DOES NOT Fit All , 1992
The backlash against women’s right to choose has alarmed many of us, and what may have appeared (to some) to be a slam/dunk achievement, offering my generation possibilities that had not previously existed (safe, low-cost abortions and birth control) has been steadily eroding state by state. This is profoundly discouraging, as the tide towards fascism increases here and abroad. Still I want to highlight the fierce and courageous energy of groups like Shout Your Abortion who have been working to remove the shame and stigma about making such a choice. I published my story with them anonymously when they first started out collecting stories and published their first Zine on the topic. Since the rolling back of Roe Vs Wade, I hope more women feel empowered to speak their truths, as complex as they may be.
plate from One Size DOES NOT Fit All , 1992
plate from One Size DOES NOT Fit All , 1992
I was born into a very privileged era, with the great freedom offered by birth control and the rights to an abortion, a freedom that others fought for, and to whom I am most grateful. When my birth control failed at age 27, while I was in an unhealthy and complicated relationship, I was able to get a safe & low-cost abortion at a community clinic in NYC, and continue on with my life. That will not be case for so many women today in so many places. I know that there are movements to reclaim the right to choose, but in this very chaotic and polarized time, it will likely be a slow process.
On top of the backlash against women’s rights and the violence against women has become increasingly alarming; it may be hard to comprehend or to look at if you’ve been living a protected life safe from such violence. I did experience a few sexual assaults, once in my early teens, again in my early twenties, and once in my late twenties, but my marriage to a compassionate, peace-loving, feminist man gave me an 34+ year experience of what a truly collaborative partnership could be, and that is, sadly, not a reality for many women, no matter what generation they are in. Now as a widow, living alone in my house, I’m aware of my vulnerability in new ways. I’ve been advised to put in a home security system (which I am inquiring about), but other than working out with weights and locking my doors, I don’t want to get too invested in paranoia as a past time.
The word “widow” gives me pause. It has an aura that is foreboding, and it’s no wonder given its history. In many societies, even today, widows are regarded with suspicion, perceived as dangerous (we might steal your husband or wife) or as superfluous members of the community. During the witch burning times, widows were among those first to be accused, often because they had inherited property or wealth from their husbands that church elders and other powerful men wanted to benefit from. Silvia Federici writes in her book, “Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women” that the rise in witch hunts came about with the development of capitalist accumulation and the many damaging aspects of the modern world that include land enclosure, the demise of communal property, the shift in agricultural practices, new & harsh forms of taxation, and the demonization of those who protested these increasingly oppressive actions by the powers that be.
Book cover design by Josh MacPhee, founder of Just Seeds, a graphic artist collective that features political art.
While many of us may think that the days of attacking women as witches are over, Federici details in one of her essays how this form of persecution persists in areas of the developing world where extraction industries are hard at work to destabilize and displace communities. Attacking women, widows and others, is one of the strategies for that process. Federici makes it clear that we need strategies for confronting the people who do the witch hunting and that will take some powerful organizing in ways that do not attract the attention of the witch hunters.
When things look grim, as they do daily right now, we need “reconstructive visions” (a term coined by Murray Bookchin) to guide us through the dire situation that humanity is contending with at the moment. This may mean looking for examples of emergent strategies, projects that are embodying the progressive values we want to see in the world. It may take generations to push back patriarchy’s renewed grip on our political climate, but we can plant subversive seeds by learning about projects that are inviting in a new paradigm and sharing what we learn with others.
To that end, the reimagining of a patriarchal society so that women are in positions of leadership and making decisions that benefit the collective, I want to share this report written by Arthur Pye about the revolutionary project that began in Rojava (a Kurdish region of Syria).
“This libertarian socialist experiment, established in the middle of one of the world’s most brutal and politically complex war zones, has tried to build a new social order rooted in feminism, ecology, direct democracy, and cooperative self-management of industry. It has survived confrontations against two separate forms of fascism and the evolving schemes and counter-schemes of the imperialist great powers that dominate the region. AANES provides a home for refugees and an island of stability in a country torn to pieces by the civil war that followed President Bashar al-Assad’s suppression of the 2011 Arab Spring revolution in Syria. But the revolution is not without its problems and limitations, which Pye will explore in a series of essays exploring the war front, the deliberative councils, the feminist spaces, the military, the factions, and the economy of this nascent society beyond the state where millions of people have lived under a form of revolutionary self-government for over ten years.”
Arthur Pye writes that this revolutionary process has had many hindrances, and is filled with contradictions, but we need to learn from this so that our expectations about what we can achieve by planting revolutionary seeds to dismantle patriarchy and heal ecocide are modest ones. Or as Bayo Akomolafe says: The times are urgent; let’s slow down.
“Reconstructive visions” I have never heard that concept put into words before. Believe it or not, you are a reconstructive vision to me. I was sanctified as your student many years ago, and as I have struggled off and on over the decades, I would literally considered often, how you would suggest I approach my latest deep or high dive.
Sharing your truth and vulnerabilities in these writings, causes me to want to continually thank you, protect you, nurture you and cheer you on. I find that I face ecocide more calmly and slowly since we've reconnected. Thank you for that and everything else like introducing me to Just Seeds (wow!!) and Bayo Akomolafe.