The personal and the political

There is one understanding of feminism that has both the end of the world and its redemption at its heart. This world is unjust and must be otherwise. Yet if one thinks of feminism as radically other than this world problems ensue: the sense of entitlement that these struggles of gender may outflank or erase all others, or the long-familiar problem of essentialism, where the appeal to “woman” would allow something like “the world” to be reduced to the monochrome history of patriarchy. In such redemptive or world-restoring forms of feminism, “man” is intertwined with the negation of nature, the attachment to disembodied mind, and a valorization of autonomy that can never reckon with the ecological complexity of life.