Watersheds in Marxist Ecofeminism

Watersheds in Marxist Ecofeminism

Pamela Odih

Language: English

Pages: 466

ISBN: 1443866024

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The neoliberal environmental governance of river conservation, coupled with the organizational modernization imposed and sustained by the European Union’s water directives, engenders Other Spaces of feminist ecological alignment. The riparian landscapes of urban cities are manifestations of political and ideological rationalities operating under the constraints of capitalist markets, and are saturated by the contradictions of neoliberal environmental science. Neoliberal rationalities configure river waterways as "sites", the dimensions of which are analogous to Michel Foucault’s account of spatial heterotopias as polymerous relations of propinquity between junctures. Many of the modernising initiatives instituted by the European Union’s Water Framework Directive can be discerned as biopolitical neoliberal regimes governing local river spaces, through the enfolding into "spaces of emplacement" and the "sites" of programmatic calculation, financialisation of the domestic sphere, and market-based neoliberal environmental science. Primarily informed by organizational ethnographies, extensive interviews and ethnographic observations of river restorations, this book empirically examines how the relationally embodied heterochronies of ecological activism challenge the programmatic rationalities of the European Union’s river "government", namely its shifting assemblages of formal and informal agencies, practices and institutions that variously and differentially align the self-regulating ability of subjects with the design, objectives and scope of the European Union’s neoliberal regime of river governance.

This book’s analysis of the complex inter-governmental networking eliding the local governance of rivers with voluntary sector community-outreach and European Union directives identifies new locations of ecological activism precipitated by political affinities, which have become simultaneously public and private. The capacity of river heterotopias to intersect the public and private spheres of urban cities emphasises the intrinsic reproductive labour time of river restoration; for, as Foucault suggests, the heterochronies of urban heterotopia are one and the same time "outside of time", while also constituting "a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place". The book shows that the intersecting heterochronies of the urban river space confirm this Other Space as an intriguing gendered heterotopia.

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(McCarthy 2003:19). While for Democritus the atom’s form “begins and ends with its materiality”, for Epicurus the essence of the atom exists in spiritual form (ibid). To this end, Epicurus discounts and refuses to preference material conditions over subjective representations and appearances. Neither the atom nor its anarchic declinations are the determined outcome of empirical conditions indexed to an objective material world. Rather, Epicurus postulates that we enquire into the subjective

especially if interbasin transfers are involved” (ibid). According to Shiva (ibid) it is the tendency of capitalism that “A shift in water allocation most often generates interstate conflicts, which rapidly escalate into disputes between central governments and states”. It is a principal observation of Shiva’s polemic, that neither national nor international water laws are sufficiently designed to address the extreme conflicts presented by water disputes. Shiva presents the intriguing observation

manage’- able to ‘do the right thing’” (ibid:239). Clarke (1998) provides a means of framing patterns of reengineering that are taking place in the public sector and also third sector of state funded voluntary organisations. It is worthwhile detailing Clarke’s (ibid:239-240) distinction between managerialism and managerialization: Managerialism is: x an ideology centred on expanding the right to manage in the pursuit of greater efficiency in the achievement of organizational and social

iconographic depiction of the River Thames as Old Father Thames is in keeping with its cultural historical, quintessential Englishness. Indeed, analyses of rivers and the formation of nationalism identify the nineteenth century as a significant era in which “The growth of nationalism…created a demand for the creation and representation of national landscapes in which rivers provided significant points of reference” (Cusack 2007:101). Rivers have historically been associated with rejuvenation and

against the environment” for ecofeminists have perceived this “almost physically as an aggression against our female body” (Mies and Shiva 1993:14). This book aligns with the ecofeminist materialist perspective; it formulates a theory of environmental degradation based on the materiality of capitalist exploitation with regards to the female body and the contours of reproductive labour. The central objective of this book is to theoretically formulate and empirically engage the ecofeminist

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