https://youtu.be/y7dm5CCPwN0
Greta Gaard is one of the world’s foremost vegan ecofeminist scholars. Today a Professor of English and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, she entered the field when she became a PhD student at the University of Minnesota. Her all-male committee, she recalls, denied her ecofeminist dissertation project in the 1980s. She then approached Toni McNaron “the notorious lesbian feminist on campus,” who agreed to take her on, but insisted Gaard take on a women’s studies minor to develop the tools for this directional shift. The dissertation explored the politics of women’s anger:
What is it about women’s anger that is so threatening? Because anger is the one emotion that men are allowed to have in heteronormative gender roles and it’s the one emotion that emotional women are denied, so it must be very important.
“Women really can’t be heard if they’re angry”, Gaard clarifies, adding that this is unfortunately all the truer for Black feminists. Subsequently, she suggests that philosophy has served as a necessary compromise for channeling feminist outrage. “If we’re calm and we’re just putting forward evidence, then we can be heard,” she laughs.
Although Minnesota was deeply formative, Gaard’s journey to ecofeminism began much earlier: “Like many of us that were drawn to this work, I was a child who preferred the company of plants and other species to the company of other children.” She spent a lot of time as a child observing plants, birds, and insects, she recalls, adding: “when I first saw that the red liquid on our dinner plates at home was someone’s blood, I thought my parents were cannibals.”
Sadly, Gaard was punished for refusing to eat animal flesh. Her parents threatened that she would have to eat on the floor with the family dog if she didn’t comply with the lesson that “real humans ate other animals.” Sometimes she did choose to share the floor with the dog (Pookie), but sometimes she would take her meals into the television room to eat along with Star Trek (which she credits for developing her ecofeminist consciousness with its message of multispecies diversity and respect). “My mind was thinking about things that their minds were not,” Gaard explains, “they could not… the species barrier was like being in a bomb shelter for them. You could not go outside and survive.” It was a profound experience, she explains, to conceive of these multispecies relations so differently from her parents.
As for her feminism, she credits all manner of influences including her self-determination, spirituality, sexuality, diet, and, of course, her studies at Minnesota. Her awakening to the intersection between anti-speciesism and feminism, she supposes, followed her reading of Aviva Cantor’s “The Club, the Yolk, the Leash,” a Ms. Magazine piece on multispecies intersectionality. When she distributed the essay among her feminist colleagues and received no response, Gaard was crushed: “like one end of a teeter-totter slowly descending as I waited for the profusion of feminist joy that never arrived [….]. I felt Aviva Cantor gave us language for these ideas, that feminism and multispecies justice are, like, integral. [….] I thought everyone would be thrilled.” Things have little improved, she adds. The 50 Years of Ms. edited compilation, for instance, is devoid of both ecofeminism and animal issues, despite at least six ecofeminist contributions over the years Gaard reckons, many from Feminists for Animal Rights: “They refused to look at Feminists for Animal Rights, they refused.” “If I hadn’t met Marti Kheel at the National Women’s Studies Association 1990 Convention,” she concludes, “I wouldn’t’ have learned about Feminists for Animal Rights, because academic feminism was only for humans, it wasn’t for the earth, air, water, or other species. And I have to say, it still is.”
Not only was feminism uninterested in animal rights, she bemoans, but the animal rights movement was not interested in feminism either. Indeed, she remains very proud of her work on the board of Feminists for Animal Rights (FAR), an organization that struggled for nearly 20 years to redress this intersectional failure. Today, she is particularly moved by fellow ecofeminist Lisa Kemmerer’s research that documents the structural sexism in animal rights organizations: “They’re primarily headed by men, but all the work is done by women [and] any rebellion is sort of silenced by ‘commitment to the animals’ and ‘let’s not get sidetracked from the main issue, which is working for the animals’.” “This is why a feminist animal liberation movement is so important,” she exclaims, “and why it’s been so resistant, because of internalized sexism on the part of women and because of male supremacy. It’s all connected!”
Gaard has spent the better part of her career combatting these missed connections. For example, she collaborated with Marti Kheel and Noel Sturgeon to organize the first ecofeminist panel for the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), “and the room was packed,” she recalls, “there was standing room only.” Following this success, they formed the NWSA Ecofeminist Caucus but found no support from the NWSA. “The feminist antipathy to opening the lens is legendary,” she muses. Gaard supposes that, given the predominance of white middle class women in the field, they were “just so overburdened having to deal with race so they just could not do anything else.”
Releasing privilege involves revising your self-concept. […] Privilege twines around our thinking in such a way that it connects with our self-identity.
Feminism characteristically calls for a “mutual gaze” and rejects the “objectifying gaze,” yet “feminism, for all of its work on the gaze and objectification hasn’t chosen to pursue the really dangerous stuff,” she charges. Gaard acknowledges the collaborative difficulties presented by identity politics and subsequently envisions a relaxing of rigid identity boundaries. Perhaps, then, it may be possible to respect difference while also celebrating shared experiences and connections in such a way as to build alliances effectively.
Gaard, who formed the Minnesota Green Party, has also grown somewhat disillusioned with green politics. Early on, the Green Party, she reports, quickly ceded territory to marginalized men’s issues and feminism was sidelined. “I pretty much gave up on the Greens,” she admits, “they were not able to open the lens […] of the mind to include what needed to be included quickly and addressed quickly.” Gaard has also organized a number of other important actions for environmental justice. As a professor at Fairhaven College/Western Washington University, Gaard took students in her Feminism & Science course to the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle 1999. By way of another example, she took her environmental justice students to the city council upon learning of a plan to construct a water treatment plant on a burial site of a local Indigenous community.
Nonetheless, Gaard concedes: “Ultimately I felt that electoral politics and global governance were end of the pipeline, end of the conceptual pipeline.” Subsequently, from around 2008, she has focused on teaching, writing, and idea generation. If more people can access the ideas, she feels “it would go directly to the heart, body, minds of our companions we most want to reach.” The derision of feminism and veganism, however, means that this task has not proved easy. “In a way, climate change is a problem for communication scholars,” she suggests, given that openly discussing issues around women and animals so easily shuts down conversations for effective change.
Indeed, Gaard has given quite a lot of thought to the terminology used to encompass these interconnected values. She is concerned that some choices might turn off the uninitiated: “What term could be used to help people, like, feel safe to bring forward values that they already have?” “Vegan ecofeminism” and “multispecies solidarity” are terms she feels more comfortable with: “To me, multispecies ecofeminism is vegan feminism. […] When I hear the term vegan feminism, I worry, ‘what happened to the eco?’” Using the word “vegan” on its own could draw too much focus to what must be given up:
It’s about loss rather than gain. In what way is the term that we use going to communicate to people that this term allows you to uncover to reclaim or to gain connections that have enriched your life all along had they been visible to you. What term would it be?
Rights language, she worries, is also problematic, and using this in vegan ecofeminism could mean that it is “just being included in the same corrupt order, so why do you want that? You want to transform the order.” Gaard calls for a consideration of how patriarchy not only shapes language, but more fundamentally, our collective consciousness as humans. She is critical of Cartesian rationality which has required Western societies to “cut off family,” that being a wider kinship with plants and animals:
Think about that, it’s a really high cost. So, returning to family doesn’t mean that we give up our rationality, it means that we place it in relation to the many ways of thinking, that we are cultivating ways of thinking in community and thinking with our family. I think it makes us two-fisted, and more ready for the struggle as allies and as animals.
Gaard is the author of dozens of books and academic articles on the topic of intersectional ecofeminisms including Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Temple University Press 1993), Ecological Politics (Temple University Press 1998), The Nature of Home (University of Arizona Press 2007), and Critical Ecofeminism (Lexington Books 2017). Find out more about Gaard’s work on her Academia.edu website.