Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

What is the relationship between women, development, and the environment? What is the reason for women’s oppression within the capitalist economic system? Since the 1970s, representatives of the eco-feminist world have tried to answer these questions in various ways. The number of contributions on these subjects has grown considerably in terms of quality and quantity of studies both in the north and – for 20 years now – also in the south. The perspective of development imagined by Latin American ecofeminism differs from the ecofeminism that we are accustomed to know and recognize in Europe because of two distinctive features: the return to the ancestral culture of nature as a mother and of the interdependence between man, woman, and environment; the struggle for liberation understood as the reaffirmation of values denied by the logic of the free capitalist market economy such as self-sufficiency, cooperation, respect for all living beings, creativity, the joy of work, a moral economy that overcomes the current sexual division of labour, and violence against women. Therefore, my contribution intends to offer a reading of the importance of Latin American ecofeminism within the global movement and to shed light on its most interesting theoretical-social results.