There surely is what Sandra Harding has called a "curious coincidence" between the epistemological and discursive roots of modern patriarchy and modern racism, and Carolyn Merchant and others also add the domination of nature to the list as well. And then we add the role of these epistemological and discursive factors in the rise of capitalism and associated ideologies, the relation of these forms of domination and exploitation in the rise of capitalism, the timing of it all, and there is certainly to my mind something there that can't be easily dismissed.
But Doug may be getting at something, which people like Ynestra King have been saying for a long time, that accepting the dualisms and simply reversing the judgement of what is "good" and what is "bad" is still buying into the false dichotomies, is still being locked intiot eh very framework one is trying to critique. I agree with this.
Mat
> How different is Hegel's (or the Mars/Venus) position from Jill Johnston's
> classic 1960s "men do/women are" binary, or this, from Vandana Shiva? Sure
> there's a masculinist component to accumulation and imperialism, but for
> VS, capitalism seems explained entirely as patriarchy - as if there was no
> patriarchy in precapitalist society, and no resistance to patriarchy under
> capitalism.
>
> Doug
>
> ----
>
> [from Vandana Shiva's "Women's Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity
> Conservation, chapter 11 of Ecofeminism, by Shiva and Maria Mies]
>
> Gender and diversity are linked in many ways. The construction of women as
> the 'second sex' is linked to the same inability to cope with difference as
> is the development paradigm that leads to the displacement and extinction
> of diversity in the biological world. The patriarchal world view sees man
> as the measure of all value, with no space for diversity, only for
> hierarchy Woman, being different, is treated as unequal and inferior.
> Nature's diversity is seen as not intrinsically valuable in itself, its
> value is conferred only through economic exploitation for commercial gain.
> This criterion of commercial value thus reduces diversity to a problem, a
> deficiency. Destruction of diversity and the creation of monocultures
> becomes an imperative for capitalist patriarchy
>
> The marginalization of women and the destruction of biodiversity go hand in
> hand. Loss of diversity is the price paid in the patriarchal model of
> progress which pushes inexorably towards monocultures, uniformity and
> homogeneity In this perverted logic of progress, even conservation suffers.
> Agricultural 'development' continues to work towards erasing diversity,
> while the same global interests that destroy biodiversity urge the Third
> World to conserve it. This separation of production and consumption, with
> 'production' based on uniformity and 'conservation' desperately attempting
> to preserve diversity militates against protecting biodiversity, It can be
> protected only by making diversity the basis, foundation and logic of the
> technology and economics of production.
>
> The logic of diversity is best derived from biodiversity and from women's
> links to it. It helps look at dominant structures from below, from the
> ground of diversity, which reveal monocultures to be unproductive and the
> knowledge that produces them as primitive rather than sophisticated.
>
> Diversity is, in many ways, the basis of women's politics and the politics
> of ecology; gender politics is largely a politics of difference.
> Eco-politics, too, is based on nature's variety and difference, as opposed
> to industrial commodities and processes which are uniform and homogeneous.
>
> These two politics of diversity converge when women and biodiversity meet
> in fields and forest, in and regions and wetlands.
>
> DIVERSITY AS WOMEN'S EXPERTISE
>
> Diversity is the principle of women's work and knowledge. This is why they
> have been discounted in the patriarchal calculus. Yet it is also the matrix
> from which an alternative calculus of I productivity' and 'skills' can be
> built that respects, not destroys, diversity.
>
> [end Shiva]