The human concept carries masculine bias because gender and nature dualisms intertwine

Evidence

What is at issue here is not the distinctions between women/men, and human/nature, but their dualistic construction. The concept of the human has a masculine bias (among others) because the male/female and human/nature dualisms are closely intertwined, so much so that neither can be fully understood in isolation from the other. The dualistic distortion of culture and the historical inferiority of women and nature in the west have been based, as we have seen, on a network of assumptions involving a range of closely related dualistic contrasts, especially the dualism of reason and nature, or (in a virtually equivalent formulation), of humanity and culture on the one side and nature on the other. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 140

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the whole argument: what’s at stake is dualistic construction, not bare distinction — core definition for the ecofeminist critique.
• XREF: connects to: Grammatical gender made nature feminine across European languages — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 71; Resolving nature dualism needs reconceiving humans as more natural and nature as more mindlike — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 465; Rejecting nature-culture dualism improves feminist accounts of reproduction — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 162 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Resolving nature dualism needs reconceiving humans as more natural and nature as more mindlike #responds-to (0.80) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 465
• Rejecting nature-culture dualism improves feminist accounts of reproduction #corroborates (0.78) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 162
• Men’s perspective passes as neutral truth while women’s is read as gendered #exemplifies (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 53
• Grammatical gender made nature feminine across European languages #expands (0.72) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 71
• The mechanistic worldview sanctioned domination of both nature and women #contradicts (0.70) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 64