bell hooks and a Liberating Eco-feminism

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by Brooke Kuhnhausen

Recorded by author

I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose – to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center – but rather of a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourished one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.  ~bell hooks (1990, p. 150)

Black and Indigenous, female, queer, and non-binary leadership is a powerful offering of a mountain view, illuminating all that may be possible as we imagine a world of liberation…

Reading bell hooks’ words again, I feel struck and expanded by the power of her vision.  I’m reminded of how it feels to come around the tree-thick switchback corner of a mountain trail, and suddenly see a wider vista into wilderness valleys, a panorama of sight, lungs gasping, heart pounding, and eyes slowly absorbing immense vast beauty.  So much is possible from here, and yet only visible from this vantage point.  Black and Indigenous, female, queer, and non-binary leadership is a powerful offering of a mountain view, illuminating all that may be possible as we imagine a world of liberation from oppression and domination and come to expand what may fuel our liberation work and who is understood as leading the way. To honor this perspective values what can be seen from the margins, and yet resists glamorizing or trivializing the suffering enacted by dominator culture. As somatic activist Prentis Hemphill (2021) powerfully shared: “To live our imaginations in this world and not only be reactive inside another’s creation.  Trauma and the ongoing traumas of oppression can keep us hypervigilant, limiting our ability to dream and vision.  Believing we can conjure new worlds is part of how we heal our relationship to imagination and creation.”

The healing of patriarchy isn’t merely a battle for female freedom, it is a liberation for all from oppression

Reading hooks and other Black intersectional feminists such as Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, adrienne maree brown, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, I’m reminded that the healing of patriarchy isn’t merely a battle for female freedom, it is a liberation for all from oppression

Feminism without this intersectional vision has often tragically functioned as a battle for particularly White women’s rights in the United States at the great cost of women and non-binary people of color.  White feminism often brutally denied women of color from full recognition of their personhood as well excluded their clarity and imagination from the suffragette and feminism movements, making this social movement both harmful to many women as well as vulnerable to being a hollow replication of White male dominance in White women’s bodies.  

In this time of the Great Turning, a Black, Indigenous, and queer eco-feminism is vital to heal these past harms. Intersectional eco-feminism is a movement devoted to liberatory possibility and partnership with racial equity, disability inclusion, and trans and non-binary safety and belonging as well as all other liberation movements towards freedom and joy and fullness for all living beings.   Black, Indigenous and queer feminism live at the center of this beautiful revelation. As a White cis-gender hetereosexual woman, I am re-located and transformed by expansive contact with these currents.  In these movements, adrienne maree brown (2021) writes that “true love is non-negotiably bound up with nurturing, relating, with liberation, with growth toward justice…It’s clear enough to echo across love teachers from every background and timeline: Love is a practice that doesn’t have room for abuse or injustice.”  

This clarity of vision is a chance for more people to be awakened from the trances of painfully normalized oppression, domination, and false perception of scarcity in our shared earth home.

I take a deep breath reading these words and feel it all the way down from my lungs to the four corners of my feet thinking about a world where those who have experienced the full force of oppression are able to be deeply free and safe at a body level as well as finally understood as visionary leaders into our new way of being together.  This clarity of vision is a chance for more people to be awakened from the trances of painfully normalized oppression, domination, and false perception of scarcity in our shared earth home.  It reminds us it is not true that only some of us can be intact, at the great cost of other humans, living beings, and the earth, but rather that all of our liberation is indeed woven in with one another.  

While men (particularly White able-bodied, cis-gender, heterosexual, and wealthy men) do indeed benefit greatly from an unexamined top position in hierarchical systems, the cost to them is great at a soul and body level – they must surrender connection to their tender, collaborative, feeling, embodied, and related selves and thus to live separate from that which links us deeply to earth and one another. It is this way of being that helps us feel alive, grieve with courage, trust our intuitive knowing, and empathize with others. Dominance can never replace living in flow with the vivid current of life inside earth’s heartbeat. It is powerful to realize that to gaze at a hummingbird, to let tears roll down our faces, to be known deeply by another, to place a hand on a tree in deep reverence, to trust vulnerability and emotional presence is to be deeply and fully human.  

bell hooks  (2004) knew this deeply, writing, “When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent, but it will frame all relationships as power struggles…  Patriarchy is destroying the well-being of men, taking their lives daily” (p.115, p. 118) In Feminism is for Everybody, she writes, “I believe if [men] knew more about feminism they would no longer fear it, for they would find in the feminist movement the hope of their own release from the bondage of patriarchy” (p. xiii).  

…taking apart the white-cis-hetero patriarchal constriction is fueled by a loving desire to heal, melt, and alchemize the traumas done by oppressive and annihilating culture…

There is poignant resonance to read artist and father Austin Kleon (2019) express, “I wish that more people understood that feminism is a way out from being a man … My ideas of art and feminism have gelled for me personally. It has been the gift of my later career to discover great women artists to look up to. They’ve been a way out of the bro-macho nightmare.” From this vantage point, taking apart the white-cis-hetero patriarchal constriction is fueled by a loving desire to heal, melt, and alchemize the traumas done by oppressive and annihilating culture inside and between people, and move into a more expansive way of being and relating for all of us.  

ALOK Vaid-Menon, a trans activist, is one such healing visionary articulating expansive maps.  In a powerful interview from the Man Enough podcast, Vaid-Menon was asked by a host how men could help the trans community.  Vaid-Menon pushed back on this premise of unilateral help, saying, “The reason you don’t fight for me is because you don’t fight for yourself fully. Any movement trying to emancipate men from the shackles of hetero-patriarchy, or women from traditional gender ideology has to have trans and non-binary people at the front because we are actually the most honest, we are tracing the root, where do these ideas come from.”  Vaid-Menon  (2020) writes in their book Beyond the Gender Binary,  “This is not about erasing men and women but rather acknowledging that man and woman are two of many—stars in a constellation that do not compete but amplify one another’s shine” (p. 60). 

For that reason, many thinkers and activists no longer rely on just “the feminine” as a primary healing corrective or compass.  While it may be a potent and corrective start to undo patriarchal imbalances in which the feminine has been both narrowly defined and devalued, I hope over time we can expand into a deeper, more tender, beautifully varied, and inclusive humanity as our map, learning and welcoming the incredible spectrum of what it means to be human.  And beyond even our human multiplicity, we could be nourished and mentored by the rich and evocative variation exemplified by our living earth and our more-than-human kin who live in a stunningly intricate dance of expression, difference, and interconnectedness.  

As Black queer feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2020) writes so powerfully:

I’m standing out here listening to whales and bacteria, being able to actually perceive our connection to everything and feel how powerful that is….We certainly wouldn’t tolerate all the forms of oppression that keep us repressed if people, all the time, felt that profound connection. What I see in marine mammals is what I saw as a child and preteen in Black feminism. I see the salvation of the world in it. If a person could really learn how to live and learn in interconnectivity, and if we meaningfully did that, so much would be possible. This liveable, lovable world would be possible.

And to quote Sophie Strand, a self-described “neo-troubador animist”:

The opposite of Anthropocentrism is not the Divine feminine.  The opposite of Anthropocentricism is Everything.  The reason I have begun to shy away from the Divine Feminine is its unfortunate identification with gender and, more importantly, its over-identification with humans and their myopic classifications generally….I’m not throwing her out. I’m throwing her IN.  Melting her down.  Mixing her into the messier, polytemporal animacy of everything I touch, change, and become….Animacy is slightly plushier, springier.  More moss-like.  It seems a soft spot to rest on while I try to understand and explain how very sentient the world is to me these days….

As I continue to massage and reinvigorate myths and folktales and stories about the masculine, I want to gently cushion this attempt in an animacy that is not just human.  It is a verb.  A mycorrhizal system sewing together a whole forest.  A shared breath.  A midsummer celebration where everyone is invited.

I believe we will find that, in bell hooks’ powerful voice once more, “To tend the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom and our hope”

I feel deep fertile seeds of invitation, pleasure, and transformation hearing and reading all of these visionary offerings. I want to melt into this kind of forest, meadow, fungi, and root system, and be part of the composting for the beauty of the whole. As Rowen White, an Indigenous seedkeeper, activist, and educator names, “A seed holds memory across the ages and is like an unwritten record of this co-evolutionary relationship between plants, humans, the elements, and the land – all in this teeny little cosmic bundle.” It is hard to imagine a more joyful and radical possibility than this — and yet, I know that a living and interconnected liberation contains the potential to give emergence to an even richer and more expansive vista. I can’t wait to move together in collaboration with many, and come around the mountain edge with wide open sight.   In this way, I believe we will find that, in bell hooks’ (2009) powerful voice once more, “To tend the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom and our hope” (p. 117) 

References 

Baldoni, J., Heath, J., & Plank, L. (Hosts). (2021, July 26). The urgent need for compassion with  guest ALOK Vaid-Menon. [Video podcast episode]. In Man Enough Podcast. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/Tq3C9R8HNUQ

Boscaljon, D. (2019, May 20).  Five questions with author Austin Kleon. Retrieved from  https://littlevillagemag.com/five-questions-with-author-austin-kleon/.  

brown, a. m. (2021, Feb 14). This Valentine’s Day, celebrate love as growth and liberation. Retrieved from https://truthout.org/articles/this-valentines-day-celebrate-love-as-growth-and-liberation/

Factora-Borchers, L. (2020, Sep 17).  Alexis Pauline Gumbs: everything that made us still belongs to us. Retrieved from https://www.guernicamag.com/alexis-pauline-gumbs-everything-that-made-us-still-belongs-to-us/

Gumbs, A.P. (2020). Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from marine mammals. AK Press. 

Hemphill, P. (Host). (2021, May 24). Seeds, grief and memory with Rowen White [Audio podcast episode]. Finding our way podcast. Retrieved from https://www.findingourwaypodcast.com/individual-episodes/s2e6

Hemphill, P. [@prentishemphill)]. (2021, August 31). Visioning is a capacity we can recover and it’s so necessary for us to get out of these relational and structural dead ends we are in. More of us to dream, to create, to try, to fail, to learn. [Instagram photo]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/CTPYgX0gq1l/

hooks, b. (1990). Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness. Yearning: Race, gender,   and cultural politics, pp. 145-53. South End Press. 

hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: passionate politics. South End Press.

hooks, b. (2004).  Will to change:  Men, masculinity, and love. Atria Books.

hooks, b. (2009).  Belonging: a culture of place. Routledge. 

Strand, S. (2021, April 14).  Melt divine feminine into divine animacy. Retrieved from  https://creatrixmag.com/melt-divine-feminine-into-divine-animacy/

Vaid-Menon, A. (2020).  Beyond the gender binary. Penguin. 


 

Brooke Kuhnhausen PhD, is a clinical psychologist, graduate faculty, racial and gender equity advocate and follower of the Work that Reconnects. She is part of a number of climate intersectional feminist collaborations with visual artists, including a public talk Feeling in the Anthropocene, imagining how a liberation lens might root us more  deeply in resilience and solidarity in these potent and possible times.  Brooke lives on Kalapuya land in Portland, OR near many dear living beings, including kindred friends, family, beloved waterways, wild roses, and rich loamy earth.

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