ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the responses of ecofeminism, new materialism, posthumanism and Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) in order to explore how feminist concerns come together with and encounter environmentalist concerns. There is an expanding variety of feminist scholars who include environmental concerns in their feminist theory. Ecofeminism is concerned with intersections of gender, socio-economics and the environment. Many feminist theorists describe how during the enlightenment, the mind became associated with reason and masculinity, while the body was linked to an irrational female nature. As the approaches discussed in this chapter have shown, feminist theory is an important contribution to the current debates about the Anthropocene, exposing the differently layered power dynamics at play in environmental issues. Analyses of environmental issues therefore benefit from an intersectional and feminist approach that avoids essentialism, challenges power relations and explores agency among different actors. Another approach that links feminism and environmentalism is offered by FPE.
