Women’s closeness to nature is neither purely conventional nor biologically determined

Evidence

Second, the connection might be considered a non-conventional one to the extent that women’s historical treatment as aligned with nature has been associated with a different set of social abilities and based on a different position of power and role in society. This has shaped the characteristics of women’s difference, but women’s role in reproduction has not been irrelevant to it. Differences between men’s and women’s concerns and kinds of selfhood (identity) are real, and although not necessarily inherent in biology are not just conventional either. Even if they have arisen from the difference in the experiences, concerns and areas of life each sex has been taken as responsible for (from the kinds of lives they have tended to lead as Jean Grimshaw argues [1986:254]), they may still not be just arbitrarily connected to differences in male and female bodies, but result from the social meanings inscribed on or interwoven with bodies (see Irigaray’s concept of the morphology of the body [Irigaray 1977:64; Grosz 1989:111]). — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 754

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets out the three-option taxonomy of women-nature connection (conventionalist, non-conventional-social, biological essentialist) that structures the chapter’s whole argument.
• XREF: connects to: Women-nature identifications are historical constructions, not biological essences — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 49; Woman’s apparent naturalness is itself a product of history

Broader Connections

• Women-nature identifications are historical constructions, not biological essences #corroborates (0.95) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 49
• Woman’s apparent naturalness is itself a product of history #corroborates (0.92)