ABSTRACT
This chpater explores the US context in order to consider the deployment of ecofeminist conceptions of race and gender within a transnational context. It describes their political results within a particular historical, disciplinary, and political context in the early 1990s in order to explore the conditions under which "strategic essentialisms" operate, and to generate ways of assessing their effects. The chapter argues that a specific historical condition, ecofeminism has been an important international political location at the intersection of environmentalism and feminism. It becomes a globalized space for political demands by women in many countries who might not otherwise have had a voice or an opportunity to create coalitions. A less reductive story is told of the interweaving of ecofeminism and development discourse approaches by several books on women and development. The ecofeminist intervention into UN processes creates a network, a space for debate, a mechanism not just for the intervention of feminism, environmentalism, and anticolonial scholarship into policymaking.
