feminisms at a millennium || building a new dream with gaia?

Building a New Dream with Gaia?Author(s): Hilary RoseSource: Signs, Vol. 25, No. 4, Feminisms at a Millennium (Summer, 2000), pp. 1125-1128Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175498 .

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Hilary Rose

Building a New Dream with Gaia?

o how am I to read this word millennium: as signifying a date in a taken- for-granted calendar whose cultural and religious roots we know but

dismiss or as part of a persistent evangelism still recruiting the world around a Christian project? With Islam the new demon for the West, I want to go on complaining about such compulsory Christianizing, even while feeling more than a little sympathy for those believers whose sacred calendar is once more appropriated for a commercial opportunity. Multi- culturalism has to be built every day, for history is too powerful to casu-

ally ignore. But even treating the "M" word as a modest dateline, the problem re-

mains that I find thinking about feminisms today basically impossible. How can even an Emily Dickinson brain hold simultaneously a recognition of the exhilarating cultural achievements of feminisms together with the agony and poverty of so many women and their children in so much of the world? My pleasure in the intellectual and cultural achievement of the diversity of feminisms is not just aesthetic, or even just about "us," that

group with whom I identify in loving quarrel, or even about the feminist books, paintings, music, and plays and the sciences that we create and de- bate. Most of all, even though there is rather little agreement among "us," I read the poly-epistemic sieges laid by feminists and our allies against the monolithic hegemony of the old knowledges as critical for our survival.

My sense of who and what is included in that our has also undergone a profound transformation over the past three decades. Today I include both human and nonhuman entities. It is shorthand, but culturally and politi- cally not only women but also nature have become historical subjects. In this new feminist political ecology, either both survive or neither does. Seventies feminism--with the exception of some of our finest science- fiction writers--was primarily focused on women and our relations with men. The nature that we fought to defend against a hugely capitalized biomedical assault, which claimed, of course, to be in our best interests, was that of our own bodies.

The environment was merely a backdrop for most of the struggles of 1970s feminists; we were indeed our bodies ourselves. Feminism fought

[Sins: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2000, vol. 25, no. 4] ? 2000 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2000/2504-0022$02.00



1126 I Rose

biology's misogynist representations of women's nature and also simultaneously struggled to expose biology's linguistic conjuring trick of claim-

ing complete correspondence between the study of life and life itself. The

struggles within industrialized countries where white feminists fought for the right to choose while black feminists battled an ongoing eugenic history have their global counterparts. The issue of survival of the "race" both for black feminisms and for the feminisms of the South meant that they were first to recognize that the defense of the environment was identical - at least for the great mass of women if not for the elites-with the struggle for life itself. While strict Lovelockeans may flinch at the thought of Gaia

demanding suffrage, it serves well as a metaphor for the necessary political space required by and for the socioecosystem. The Gaia hypothesis, ini- tially proposed by Nobel laureate James Lovelock, sees the entire earth as one living system, but the idea has since been picked up and used much more evocativelv bx the environmental movement. Whereas first-wave feminism fought for the vote for women at the opening of the century, at its close, Gaia too demands a vote.

While it is widely recognized that the feminisms of North and South are necessarily different, it is increasingly common to speak of Euro- American feminisms. Here I want to insist that the specificity of the geo- historical experiences of Europe and North America maintains important differences among the twro continents and cultures. Although individuals move about with extraordinary fluidity, taking our histories with us, the structures of space and time still shape and frame us. We homogenize them at our intellectual and political peril, for false homogeneity makes it impossible to see situated danger. Europe is, for many reasons, much more politi- callv exercised than the United States about Monsanto, the Clinton admin- istration's love affair with the biotechnology industry, and the World Trade

Organization. Gaia may have been called into existence by the South, but now Europe welcomes her too.

Although I see this as a huge struggle being played out globally with

biosocial survival as the stakes, the immense political and intellectual en-

gagement of feminist activists and scholars in biopolitics has changed the

constructions of the macropolitical agenda. In this still emerging agenda, feminism is increasingly coming into a synergistic relation with environ-

mentalism. Of course this optimistic reading sets to one side those harsh

private struggles with the embodied self (e.g., the cult of thinness or, for that matter; healthism as a consumerist response to the public problem of a sickness-producing biosocial environment). But it is a mistake to cast

private and public struggles in permanent opposition; the boundaries be-

tween personal consumerism and the pursuit of public objectives are the

subject, rather, of permanent negotiation. Thus the consumer demand that



S I G N S Summer 2000 I 1127

food be adequately labeled celebrates the ideology of the market by increasing choice to the individual consumer and also offers the possibility of mass consumer resistance to products deemed unsafe or unethical.

Increasingly a number of these struggles that start in the private end up on the state's doorstep. In Europe, consumer resistance to genetically modified foods forms the paradigmatic case. Typically, the state faces both ways: it both fosters the biotechnological industry as a major wealth pro- ducer and has the responsibility to regulate the industry to protect public health and the environment. Nowhere is this private-public connection more evident than in the challenges the new genetics brings to our most intimate lives. Even leaving aside the serious issue of the emergence of an

unemployable, uninsurable genetic underclass, the proliferation of genetic tests for would-be parents and pregnant women shapes how we think not only about ourselves but also about the kind of children we should permit to come into existence. To date there is not one genetic therapy that works, and the only therapy available is the abortion of an affected fetus. The old state eugenics is for the most part dead, replaced by a pervasive consumer

eugenics. That confusing, confused, intimate moment when someone says to herself, "I want to have a baby," is the site of tremendous pressure to receive genetic information and choose responsibly. The new medical ideology of informed choice rests with special weight on the shoulders of pregnant women, and its very intimacy makes it extraordinarily hard to resist. Indeed, coping with the new genetics requires a more or less hereti- cal move against the legacy of the Enlightenment that even the most post- modern among us may find hard to take. It is to question the idea that knowledge, in this case genetic knowledge, is necessarily desirable. Choos- ing when not to know is part of a new cultural struggle to defend our personal freedom not to be policed inside our own heads by biomedical constructions of normality.

Nonetheless, global shifts in the structuring of production have given a footloose capital immense powers over a global workforce in which women and children hold weak positions. The loss of collectivity and the growth of individualism have contradictorily witnessed the assertion of new rights against male violence and abuse, yet ironically many of these gains are being made in countries where a large minority of women and their children are increasingly relegated to lifelong poverty. Even the Scan- dinavian welfare states, which took women's equality and the state's contri- bution to child care most seriously, are rolling back, leaving women and their dependents exposed to market forces. Britain, whether governed by Thatcherism or New Labor, energetically rows itself across the Atlantic away from the European welfare capitalism of its common past, eager to embrace the hard U.S. model. It is sad to watch young newly elected Labor



1128 I Rose

women in parliament who grew up within the women's movement and mouthed feminist values offer little or no defense against their own govern- ment's assault on lone mothers.

It is not only the rise of poststructuralist feminisms but also the collapse of the Soviet system that have been part of a loss of a sense of solidarity, a

weakening of that imagined community of women worldwide. That fos-

tering of solidarity between intellectual and activist feminists and working- class and poor women common to the projects of radical and socialist feminism is now seriously eroded. Today, feminist bourgeois careerism, replete with networking and mutual support within the group (an unholy echo of the old boy's network) celebrates its success, pretty much indifferent to the social pain and exclusion of less advantaged women.

But what do I do with the bitter knowledge that, despite the material and cultural advantages of some, most women live increasingly meager lives in the advanced capitalist countries or are dying prematurely of hun-

ger and war in the developing world? I am part of that generation who

grew up believing that the death camps marked the nadir of civilization and that we (meaning all decent people) would never again tolerate this, only to find, from Rwanda to Bosnia to Kosovo, that liberal democratic

governments can and do tolerate genocide and mass rape. Sure, there were

picket lines, and it was some comfort to stand with the Women in Black, but never for a moment was there the same mass moral outrage in the United States and Europe as against the Vietnam War. These places and

people were all far away, their deaths were those of the Other in an Other

place. Not really our problem. Our governments seem to be more con- cerned not to break a single infantry soldier's fingernail than to stop the

killing. But where were we? Was all that stuff about multiculturalism, di-

versitr, and antiracism basically a cultural shift and a politic trapped within

the iron cage of the nation-state, within fortress Europe, or even within our academic feminist communities? And can the recognition that the en-

tire biosocial system is at increasing risk help us build not the old dream

of a global sisterhood but a new dream with a new Gaian sense of "us"?

Best of all, since I wrote the first draft of this essay, the last year of the old

millennium provided an inspiring augury that the answer could be yes! At Seattle in 1999, the nongovernmental organizations improbably and

gloriously defeated the corporate power of the World Trade Organization. What a great start for whatever we call the dateline.

Sociology Department City University



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