Anthropocene Feminism: A Feminist Essay On Human Impact On The Environment.

Synthesis Paper and Presentation This final writing assignment is meant to build on your learning and the resources made available in the course. You will be invited to take up two concepts central to contemporary anthropological theory that we have examined throughout the semester and demonstrate how they shape your thinking about an ethnographic site that you care about. 

Human influence and its impact on the environment

Anthropocene is based on a range of significant historical events and their ecological development (Grusin, 2017). Anthropocene marks the appearance of an era when the human influence substantially impacts the lithosphere of earth, including its upper mantle and crust. The human influence on earth not only induces climatic alterations but also elevates the risk of the 6th extinction. The feministic perspectives reveal the devastation of the feminized earth by the human population (based on masculine preferences and authority) (Grusin, 2017).

This devastation is based on the human infiltration across the diverse natural resources that eventually disrupts the natural equilibrium to a considerable extent and makes the human life more problematic and cumbersome across the earth’s surface. Feminism in the presently implemented anthropological does not embrace the natural male domination and rather considers the requirement of an equilibrium between male and female culture/empowerment to effectively maintain the geological forces of nature (Grusin, 2017). The ecofeminists consider male domination as the greatest contributing factor that not only enforces women oppression but also facilitates the consistent exploitation of significant natural resources. Anthropocene considers the human population in terms of the independent geological planetary and climatological forces whose influence on nature is irrespective of the human desire, will, and belief (Grusin, 2017). However, the scientific community advocates the use of human-centered and masculinist approaches that initially disrupted the environmental equilibrium while creating dramatic geoengineering-based imbalances between energy resources and carbon emissions.

The reuse of these resources to streamline the ecosystem and climatic alterations is the probable strategy that several anthropologists continue to emphasize along with few feminist advocates (Grusin, 2017). The proponents of feminism have developed the concept of ‘Anthropocene Feminism’ in the context of devising contemporary strategies while concomitantly utilizing scientific experimentation and philosophical theories to reduce the pace of the ongoing ecological devastation (Grusin, 2017). The feminist theories consistently advocate the anthropogenic influence of the male population across several environmental and climatic dimensions. However, the critics of feminism consider this approach as anti-humanist and directed towards the decentralization of geological equilibration. The Anthropocene feminism in many circumstances also facilitates the implementation of ontological relationality to modify the ongoing environmental disruptions (Wildman, 2006). Resultantly, this approach beliefs in the establishment of ontologically fundamental relationships between the human beings irrespective of their identity. This approach will apparently alleviate the female exploitation and male dominance to facilitate meaningful improvements in the human culture and environment.

Feminist perspectives on the impact of human influence on the environment

The Anthropocene feminism advocates the development of geontological power to facilitate the destabilization of the male dominant culture to reduce the pace of adverse ecological, climatic, and environmental manifestations (Grusin, 2017). The feminist conventions do not radically deny human dependence on vitalism or the theory of life. Anthropocene feminism considers the ecological and psychedelic apprehension of the human beings (the male-dominated society in particular) as the potential cause of their aesthetic and scientific mediation across the underwater biochemical reserves (Grusin, 2017). This type of human invasion, according to Anthropocene feminism, leads to the destruction of underwater shells and acidification of the significant natural resources. The human invasion not only disturbs the significant water reserves but also challenges further exploration of sea life due to the rapid extinction of the underwater creatures (Grusin, 2017). With these facts in view, Anthropocene feminism approaches advocate the requirement of implementing the feminist model of political and ethical engagement to downgrade the sustained male dominant destruction of the entire ecosystem.

The ecofeminists and patriarchy feminists nurture the belief of dismantling the entire male-dominated structure of the human society. Anthropocene feminism demands the disconnectedness of the male-dominated conventions/culture with scientific rationalism and capitalism (Stevens, Tait, & Varney, 2018, pp. 120-130). The feminist anthropologists utilize discursive approaches that continue to challenge a range of significant scientific theories and inventions formulated through male intervention. The perceived differences between males and females in human society adversely impact their dynamic relationship pattern.

The desire for freedom and liberation through the substantial dismantling of the existing social norms, conventions, and procedures is the core focus and objective of the present-day feminist anthropologists. The speculative feminism is based on the individualized perceptions of females and proponents of Anthropocene feminism across the community environment (Haraway, 2015). These individuals acquire a state of indecisive agitation that impacts their thought process and vision regarding the male-dominated culture, societal conventions, and scientific research. The assessment by (Shapiro, 2015) advocates the need to minute body modifications to resist a range of corrosive events that contaminate the home environment to a considerable extent. The feminist anthropologists disgrace the male-dominated interventions that unidirectionally engage the human interaction with the world of chemicals. The assessment by (Masco, 2004) reveals substantial extinctions of whole ecosystems and species under the impact of natural catastrophes. The extinction of species is indeed directly related to the emerging technologies that assist in configuring a novel ecosystem and promote activities like hunting, domestication, and relocation (Bull & Maron, 2016).

The concept of Anthropocene Feminism

Human activities continue to impact the microorganisms’ divergence in a manner to disrupt the homeostasis of various species. This resultantly elevates the extinction rate and biodiversity of various species. The feminine anthropologists consider male domination as the only significant factor that brings the unfavorable outcomes to the entire ecosystem. The feminist anthropologists focus on the unsettlement of the individualized boundaries marked under the impact of presently implemented political beliefs and cultural conventions. The exaggerated aspirations of the anthropologists regarding power attainment transform their strategies to tactical measures that facilitate the surge for bringing a radical change across the human culture and society (Richard, 1991, pp. 466-479). Eventually, their beliefs and perceptions regarding the climatic changes focus on the gender-based thoughts and opinions that motivate them towards creating an equilibrium between the male and female genders in the context of stabilizing the ecological and climatic changes across the globe.

The entangled cultural constructions impact the social knowledge of individuals while disrupting their formulaic expressions, speech genres, and cultural voices to a considerable extent (Kathleen, 2004). Feminists also experience the impacted of these deteriorated cultural constructions and develop their ideology with the core objective of developing a feminist culture to bring positive changes in climate and ecosystem. The subordination of females across the male-dominated spheres reflect their cultural virtues including humility, perseverance, modesty, and shyness. These cultural attributes indicate the feminine submissiveness and passivity.

The restricted socialization of women in the male-dominated culture has downgraded their agendas, concerns, and interest to a considerable extent. Women participation in the selected social movements could not bring a radical change in their social status and rather facilitated the internalization of their false consciousness and patriarchal conventions. History reveals the use of religious traditions by women in the context of implementing their personal agendas and interests while safeguarding their identity and value across the community environment (Mahmood, 2001). The religion-based practical and conceptual resources prove to be the significant resource for the women agencies across various regions of the world. The analysis by (Strathern, 1989) reveals Anthropocene feminism as a destructive approach that promotes parasitic attitude in females rather than motivating them for hosting the society. This might be the reason for the non-establishment of women interest across the male-dominated society. Feminist anthropologists across the globe attempt to disintegrate the male phallocentric discourse through their deconstructive practices (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008, pp. 5-6). The results in the socio-political contamination of feminists in circumstances where the concerned feminists fail to subvert this contamination through their individualized vision and capacity. The environmental feminists advocate the requirement of considering the materiality of the world over and above the conventional human perspectives. The feminist anthropologists consider various coordinated human activities and scientific concepts in terms of social and masculine constructions (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008). The feminine epistemologies, opinions, and perspectives persuasively challenge the scientific theories formulated under the influence of extended male engagement.

Challenges to Anthropocene Feminism

Anthropocene feminists in many scenarios attempt to acquire empirical and material solutions without completely isolating the social construction approach. Some of the Anthropocene feminists critically analyze the concepts of neuroscience along with the cultural perspectives with the objective of constructive new, innovative, and comprehensive approaches to overcome the masculine dominance and its environmental implications (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008). The Anthropocene consider the entire world as the exploitation material where the impoverished, poor, vulnerable, and stratified sections of the human society continue to experience the patriarchal influence. Indeed, history reveals the adverse impact of capitalism and colonialism of the lives of the underprivileged people. However, the feminists consider these colonial and capitalist activities as the direct outcome of masculine domination across the community environment. The object-oriented feminists do not merely explore the interiority but also attempt to evaluate the outdoor environment while identifying the everyday practices and rights of people. The Anthropocene feminists evaluate the masculine influence on the scientific objectivity that in their opinion impacts the autonomy of human and non-human objects to a considerable extent.

Feminists evaluate non-human and human objects in the context of political urgency and consider their physical realist form of the non-subjective attributes. History reveals the Anthropocene feminist activities that continue to target and critique the female marginalization and objectification by the male-dominated society. The feminists also facilitate the relational assessment of the psychoanalytic interventions and non-anthropocentric male practices that objectively influence material world, including its society and environment. The object-oriented Anthropocene feminists believe in the requirement of experimentation to validate their perspectives and hypothesis in a range of real-time scenarios (Behar, 2016). Other feminists speculate the ontological perspectives without their material engagement with the real world. They attempt to explore the political formations and abounding animism not merely through speculation but through scientific evaluation of human and non-human objects. Feminists of this type evaluate the human-made things/objects and their naturalness/purity through an appropriate scientific inquiry. They also evaluate humor and involve themselves in various experiments to simplify the feminist concepts and publicly reveal them in front of the common masses (Behar, 2016). These findings indicate the closeness of object-oriented Anthropocene feminism to various realities. However, variations in the feminist truth claims make them the subject of prospective evaluation by the scientific community and social groups.    

Anthropocene visualizes a hybrid world composed of significant natural and social elements (Lorimer, 2015). The multi-natural instincts of Anthropocene make it a subject of research and exploration by the social scientists. The feminine anthropologists believe in the wildlife conservation through a sustained reduction in various masculine activities. The Anthropocene feminists in many circumstances exhibit a conservationist attitude with the sole purpose of restoring the environmental configuration while equilibrating the male and female activities across the community environment (Lorimer, 2015). The wildlife is composed of various significant elements including the urban ecologies, animals, feral plants, gut flora, and other microbial constituents. The wildlife also extends its boundaries across the post-natural world. The Anthropocene feminists believe in the impact of human movements’ rhythm, duration, intensity on wildlife modification and resultant deterioration (Lorimer, 2015). They acquire an environmentalist approach to challenge the existing political/binary settlement of the present-day society. They eventually advocate the requirement of minimizing the masculine intervention in wildlife to reduce the risk of species’ extinction and resultant environmental imbalance. Indeed, the female anthropologists in many situations become the victim of plagued debates between natural and social sciences (Lorimer, 2015). This not only deconstructs their claims related to nature but also questions their realist ontology and interdisciplinary status to a considerable extent.

Empowering women to bring about change

The posthuman Anthropocene feminism advocates the need for safeguarding the individuals from the bioengineered atrocities to effectively restore their sanctity and dignity (Neimanis, 2017, pp. 9-20). The posthuman feminists resist the defragmentation of the cultural and natural human bodiedness because they consider the human body as an assembly of natural-cultural worlds, hybrid assemblages, genders, and races. They determine this assembly in terms of a technological framework that requires maintaining its equilibrium to minimize the risk of its disintegration. These feminists consider gender biasing as a significant factor that disrupts the entire internal and external equilibriums between humans and their environments. This feminist ideology substantially challenges the male universalism, androcentrism, colonial drive, and racist conventions while attempting to implement Eurocentric transcendentalism across the community environment (Neimanis, 2017).

Their approaches significantly advocate the need for improving the self-reliance and autonomy of females in the context of equilibrating the human society. The feminism intervention in the non-human world in many situations gives rise to substantial resistance within the advocates of feminism. This resistance occurs in situations when the Anthropocene feminists fail to scientifically critique the real-time scenarios and eventually acquire a defensive attitude to retain their ideology and perspectives (Neimanis, 2017). This not only downgrades the overall feminists’ approaches but also reduce the intensity of their social justice movements and anti-violence campaigns. The reduction in the gravity of feminists’ approaches eventually deteriorates their claims for autonomous control and restrict their social movements to their individual entities. The feminist movements that attempt to revolt against the perceived social and environmental injustice in many scenarios surpass the fundamental requirements conductive for the existence and sustainability of the human population (Neimanis, 2017). These findings substantiate the requirement of rearticulating the wagered feminist theories in the real-time environment. This increases the scope for exploring the range of possibilities to reconstruct the Anthropocene feminism approaches and revamp the crucial disagreements regarding posthumanism and ecological/environmental alterations (Neimanis, 2017).

Many female anthropologists utilize a blend of ontologies and metaphysics approaches to anticipate the human extinction process and presume the existence of a non-human world after the complete human extinction (Grusin, 2018). The Anthropocene feminism does not radically delineate the tenets of the categorical segregation between the non-humans and humans or nature and culture. Resultantly, the female anthropologists explore a midway to reveal their standpoint regarding the true impact of human (or human masculine) interventions on the material world (Grusin, 2018). The female anthropologists attempt to rationalize the extinction of the human culture in relation to its deterioration under the impact of masculine invasion.

The need to consider the materiality of the world

The feminists in this manner describe the extinction of public institutions, operating systems, technologies, media, artisanal skills, craft, traditions, customs, and languages. This theory not only alienates the human, social, and natural scientists but also questions the authenticity of male-dominated scientific exploration of the current world (Grusin, 2018). Anthropocene feminists predict the future of humans and non-humans in accordance with their theorized subordinates. Their sense of extinction representation reciprocates with the historical episodes of male-dominated imperialism, colonialism, and racism. Some of the feminine anthropologists explore and correlate the impending environmental and climatological disaster with entangled humanism/extinction events that could further induce the de-extinction of the deteriorated world (Grusin, 2018). This perception provides some hope for the emergence of a new world after the complete extinction of the existing human and non-human objects and creatures. The Anthropocene feminism explores the material deterioration of the world in the context of the human sexual difference (Sharp & Taylor, 2016). Feminists perceive materiality in the cultural context that reveals the substantial impact of the immaterial processes on the material human and environmental attributes.

The oppression of women in the in the present-day world disrupts the cultural equilibrium that directly impacts the environmental and climatic attributes and resultantly increases the risk of species extinction (Sharp & Taylor, 2016). The Anthropocene feminists exhibit the tendency to philosophize the debunked attributes of philosophy to rekindle and frame new objectives for bringing a radical transformation in the human society. The feminists also nurture/inculcate the discarded signs and worn out ideas with the objective of discouraging the human stereotypical attitude, perspectives, notions, systems, and considerations that badly impact the environmental attributes and associated outcomes (Sharp & Taylor, 2016). For example, the female anthropologists utilize the worn-out philosophical perspectives including intuition, social discourse, race, life, material body, and gender while improvising women authority and access to the philosophical discipline. This feminist tradition of welcoming the discarded signs and ideas is not always welcomed by the scientific community that believes in the empirical assessment of facts and attributes through observation and experimentation (Sharp & Taylor, 2016). This eventually neutralizes the voice of female anthropologists and increases their surge for scientific and evidence-based exploration to justify their perspectives and viewpoints regarding the impact of male-dominated culture and interventions on the environmental outcomes.

The feminist material critiques potentially facilitate gender politics and attempt to challenge/dismantle the viewpoints of environmentalists and social scientists (Åsberg & Braidotti, 2018). The inclination of the feminist philosophers towards nature has disgraced their human attributes and transformed their existence to the non-human creatures of forest and mud. The social constructionist approaches do not identify women in terms of their cultural identity and attempt to dismantle/dislodge their identity categories and gendered conventions. The feminist postculturalism approach defines women in terms of performative, provisional, and restrictive entities that require resisting the culture opposition for bringing the desired change in the human society (Åsberg & Braidotti, 2018). The critiques/opponents of Anthropocene feminism advocate the requirement of segregating feminism from nature/environmental attributes with the core objective of bringing social justice and equality for women across the globe. Biological essentialism in a variety of ways continues to overshadow the feminine interests and rights across the community environment. However, numerous ecofeminists continue to advocate the alignment and orientation of women towards nature. These dual feminine perspectives substantially barricade their psychological/socioeconomic growth and development in the male-dominated society (Åsberg & Braidotti, 2018).

The impact of capitalism and colonialism on the environment and society

These contrary philosophical outcomes neither favor the radical distancing of women from nature nor advocate the uncritical endorsement of their probable linkage with the attributes of nature. The Anthropocene feminists, therefore, require considering various humanist transcendence pathways along with nature, animality, biology, corporeality concepts to effectively transform their ideology regarding the male-dominated human culture and its role in bringing a substantial extinction of the human and animal species (Åsberg & Braidotti, 2018).

Conclusion:

The female anthropologists will require revisiting the postmodernist and poststructuralist feminist theories from the scientific viewpoint and transform/interrogate the nature perceptions while minimizing their focus on gender-based ideology. The reconsideration and recasting of the Anthropocene feminism concepts/philosophy are therefore highly required with the core objective of expanding their thoughtful implications over and above the boundaries of identity, class hierarchy, race, and gender subversion.  

References:

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