In 2001, Wilma Dunaway wrote that the “tentacles of the world-system are entwined around the bodies of women.” Yet her literary analysis revealed a profound silence about the role of women in reproductive labor, subsistence households, and commodity chain analysis. Dunaway characterized this omission as, “the greatest intellectual and political blunder” in her field.
Nearly ten years later, Ariel Salleh has answered this unspoken call with the resounding voices of seventeen feminist scholars who address transdisciplinary issues of global political ecology. The anthology Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology brings together authors from multiple theoretical frameworks to address why the regenerative activities of humans and nature have been devalued, as well as how various forms of resistance could reclaim their centrality in theory and practice. Salleh offers both “deconstructive critique and reconstructive remedy” with impressive clarity and comprehensiveness, allowing the collection to achieve Salleh’s ambitious goal of providing context for both people’s struggles and academic relevance. As an extension of her earlier work in Ecofeminism as Politics (1997), Salleh continues to advance the field of materialist ecofeminism by promoting the idea that gender and class are crucial in the struggle against ecological collapse and social inequality.
Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice offers an expanded understanding of ecological/embodied debt, the social relations of subsistence, and a Marxist conception of metabolism.
Ariel Salleh, ed., Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology (New York: Pluto Press, 2009), 324 pages, $34.00, paperback.