Val Plumwood — Feminism and the Mastery of Nature

137 published claims from this book.

• A single reason-over-nature dualism structures every domain of Plato’s philosophy
• Abortion conflict turns on whether women are instrumentalized, not on foetal status alone
• Alienated identity developed over millennia, intensifying at the Enlightenment.
• Alternative logical systems already express otherness as nonhierarchical difference
• An ethics of care can serve regressive as well as progressive ends
• Being defined as nature means being passive, non-agent, and claimable land
• Biocentrism denies intrinsic value to nonliving landscapes
• Both assimilation to self and total alienness are dualistic errors about nature.
• Care for particular places and creatures sustains rather than blocks global concern
• Caring for another’s flourishing need not displace one’s own interest.
• Choosing consciousness as mind’s mark guarantees a human-superiority result
• Claiming to merge with another is itself an arrogance of master consciousness
• Classical logic’s negation models the master’s account of otherness as lack
• Colonial peoples were naturalised alongside their land as savage nature to be tamed
• Colonialists freeze sociological differences into fixed biological natures to bar change
• Colonizers only value the colonized when they conform to the master norm
• Columbus’s renaming of land exemplified incorporating difference into the empire of same
• Conflating consciousness with reason lets Descartes deny animal sensation
• Contemporary beauty norms reproduce a Platonic dualism of body as lack to be mastered
• Counter-mythology keeps colonised identity defined in relation to the coloniser
• Critics of anthropocentrism conflate rejecting superiority with denying human distinctness.
• Critiquing western nature-devaluation need not mean romanticizing nature
• Cultural domination by the master, not material scarcity, explains oppression
• Deep ecology’s core notion of identification is apolitical and individualist.
• Deep ecology’s rejection of ethics proves unstable and inconsistent
• Defining the other as lack incorporates it into the master’s self, precluding real recognition
• Denying dependence on nature sustains non-sustainable resource use.
• Descartes relocated the Platonic devaluation of nature from virtue into consciousness
• Difference-based feminist critique aims at less dualistic culture, not traditional roles
• Dualism arises from denied dependency on a subordinated other.
• Dualism demands hyperseparation achieved by magnifying differences and denying shared qualities
• Dualism makes equality and mutuality literally unthinkable.
• Dualism renders the lower order a mere resource excluded from the moral sphere
• Dualistic blind spots structurally prevent the master culture from perceiving ecological peril
• Ecofeminism revalues a women-nature connection the west historically devalued to oppress women
• Ecological selfhood must challenge public instrumentalism, not stay a private practice
• Economic-man identity drives endless escalating consumption of commodities
• Ending gender dualism needs both continuity and difference recognition.
• Environmental despair proves human interests are essentially connected to nature’s flourishing.
• Environmental disaster turned nature into a recognized collective political good.
• Environmental ethics should centre identity, emotion, and particularity
• Escaping each dualistic feature requires a corresponding reformation of nonhierarchical difference
• Escaping moral dualism needs both rules and particular relationship, not either alone
• Expanding the self is needless once sacrifice gives way to relationship
• Expanding the self to include others still denies their distinctness
• Feminised and naturalised status links the domination of women to other oppressions.
• Gender can be distinguished from sex and nature without dualism
• Gender content is not exhausted by the powerlessness that shaped it.
• Genuine rationality would treat the earth as a sustaining other rather than a resource
• Human rights law recognizes only suffering to natural being, not civil harm
• Human-nature relationship admits the same negotiated conflicts as human relationships
• Hyperseparation from nature is healed by neither secession nor boundary dissolution
• Hyperseparation from the feminine makes others only contingent means to self-contained ends
• Hyperseparation’s basis is the concept of the authentic human, not a bad boundary
• Impartiality frameworks breed indifference to concrete need
• Indigenous identity is essentially connected to land, unlike the instrumental western model
• Instrumentalism treats the other as mere means without any limiting agency
• Intentionality gives nature continuity with mind without collapsing difference
• Interests are relational and can include other beings without ceasing to be one’s own.
• It is not Plato but Bordo’s account that makes the world-soul female.
• Kantian universalisation secretly depends on empathy and cannot stand alone
• Locke’s labour-mixing argument licenses annexation by assuming nature has no own value
• Masters both rely on the dominated and deny that dependency through backgrounding.
• Materialism never resolves but only disguises nature dualism by a truncated reversal
• Mechanism removed the moral barrier that had made controlling nature seem impious
• Mechanism’s dead nature results from stripping intentional description, not from lack of spirit
• Mechanistic erasure of nature’s agency foreclosed whole dramas of human exchange
• Mechanistic reduction extends nature’s instrumentalisation to humans rather than ending dualism
• Medieval soul theory ranked beings by reason, excluding animals from moral law
• Mental capacities distribute across life along a differentiated web, not a rank
• Metaphysical unity with nature justifies exploitation no less than conservation
• Mind-as-consciousness is an on-off concept excluding intermediate degrees
• Mind’s spread into nature implies weak, not strong, panpsychism
• Modern replacements for otherworldly religion remain hostile to nature
• Modernity preserved the opposition to nature while discarding the afterlife
• Modernity recodifies Plato’s form-change hierarchy as a hard-soft gendered division
• Moral respect applies wherever autonomous teleology exists
• Nature is a political category defined by exclusion from reason
• Nature is backgrounded through systematic moral exclusion, denial, and not-seeing.
• Nature-domination’s roots precede the Enlightenment in earlier rationalism and Christianity.
• Nature’s kinship is affirmed in difference, not only by mirroring the self
• Newly empowered groups often secure status by denigrating those they just left.
• Nurturance may be empowered caring or servile ego-massaging.
• Old oppressions stored as dualisms pave the way for new ones.
• Otherworldly salvation defines the human self as oppositional to nature
• Place-based kinship duties anchor indigenous refusal to relocate
• Plato ranked species by how little reason they exercise
• Plato ranks changeless Forms over the world of nature as Appearance
• Plato’s devaluation targeted internal nature for discipline, not external nature for control
• Plato’s earth-mother myth promoted militarism, not environmentalism.
• Plato’s otherworldly identity framework was engineered to cancel death
• Plato’s otherworldly identity serves the master, not only the slave
• Plato’s subordination targets the feminine as a category, not actual women
• Platonic self-harmony is achieved through internal colonization of nature by reason
• Plumwood adopts Keller’s dynamic objectivity as the non-dualistic mode of observation
• Polarised traits like cleanliness are imposed to mark slaves as nearer to animals
• Process philosophy claims mind and nature share one substance of events
• Reason’s dominator identity is master, not masculinity alone
• Reducing the master to simply male obscures real needed changes.
• Reductionism grounds itself in a body emptied of all mindlike attributes
• Reductive mechanism’s emotional distance normalises modern warfare and machine-economy harms
• Rejecting nature-culture dualism improves feminist accounts of reproduction
• Rejecting reason-nature dualism must not banish the mechanical to a new lower class
• Rejecting the women-nature link without renegotiating nature’s status installs the master model by default.
• Resolving nature dualism needs reconceiving humans as more natural and nature as more mindlike
• Respect for nature is an act of individuation, not of boundary-drawing
• Reversal that revalues the subordinated identity without restructuring it stays trapped in dualism
• Reversing valuation traps liberation theory inside the dualistic structure it flees
• Reworking gender needs both transcendence and affirmation of identity.
• Reworking human identity beyond exclusion of the feminine is now survival, not justice
• Rights-based ethics apply to domestic but not wild nature
• Rights-based inclusion admits others only insofar as they resemble the dominator
• Self forms through recognizing an other both alike and different
• Self-maintenance criteria for moral worth fail to set defensible boundaries
• Social ecology inherits the very colonising assumptions it claims to overcome.
• Social identities empower even when shaped by oppressive power relations.
• Technological mastery extinguishing nature and cultures is dominated by men by design
• The concept of nature is a dumping-ground defined purely as reason’s excluded opposite.
• The ethics boundary contains nihilism within nature to protect the human sphere
• The human concept carries masculine bias because gender and nature dualisms intertwine
• The instrumentalizing self cannot hold alikeness and difference together at once
• The master relates to others as interchangeable class members, never as particular individuals
• The master’s belief in the slave’s inessentiality is an illusion masking real dependency
• The truism humans are animals is revolutionary because western culture denies it
• The warrior-hero’s choice of honour over life structures Plato’s devaluation of nature
• Treating the dominated as homogeneous fuels forced tribal congregation and cultural destruction
• Uniting gender, race, class, and nature critiques could shake all oppression
• Universalising environmental ethics is ethnocentric, not a mark of human progress
• Virtue ethics of care extends to nonhumans more readily than universal rights
• Virtue ethics persists only in women’s private sphere under modernity
• Western identity practices, not being human, cause nature’s destruction
• Wilderness ethics fails whether it stresses continuity or independence alone
• Women are praised only when they avoid power
• Women cannot safely let themselves be defined by the caring voice
• Women must both rebuild subordinated identity and shed master identity.
• Women’s closeness to nature is neither purely conventional nor biologically determined
• Women’s traditional labour mirrors nature as mere enabling background to male achievement.