ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on assessing problems involved with essentialist constructs of nature as well as gender and race identity within ecofeminism as a social movement. It explores ecofeminism from a number of different angles, as an oppositional political discourse and set of practices imbedded in particular historical, material, and political contexts. The book examines the ecofeminist movement is a fractured, contested, discontinuous entity that constitutes itself as a social movement with a particular place in a tradition of US radical social movements. It suggests that one way to understand solutions to what the author see as a political stalemate between tropes of essentialism and anti-essentialism within feminism is to carefully theorize feminist activist practice and to see the theory in that practice.
