Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/Mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts.
This essay brings the work of Isabelle Stengers into the fold of feminism to propose a feminist politics of the earth that disrupts the fantasy of human exceptionalism underpinning much Anthropocene discourse. I begin by situating Stengers’s political use of Gaia theory in current debates on the Anthropocene. Next, I show how Stengers’s reworking of Gaia helps in reconsidering the relations between two bodies of feminist theory—Deleuzian feminism and Marxist ecofeminism—that are rarely brought into conversation. On this basis, I explore what a feminist politics of composition with the earth might look like.
This essay discusses Paolo Virno's anchoring of the common in the linguistic faculties of Homo sapiens. It explores how Virno's figure of the anthropos intersects the hegemonic model of Man that largely underwrites the Anthropocene concept. In particular, it suggests that Virno engages species thinking without sufficiently addressing how it emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within global circuits of exploitation that shaped the categories of human and nonhuman in exclusionary ways. In order to further complicate Virno's anchoring of the common in properly human capacities, the essay discusses his use of Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of individuation. Building on Simondon's concept of preindividual, it reworks the common as a formation that requires the interplay of many kinds of beings, not all of which are human. At stake is not just the introduction of difference within human nature but a reflection on organizational forms capable of making present the geological and ecological forces that provide the conditions for the making of the common.
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