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International Feminist Journal of Politics

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Beyond Sex and Gender ?

Anne Elvey
a a

Monash University, Australia Version of record first published: 04 Mar 2011.

To cite this article: Anne Elvey (2004): Beyond Sex and Gender ?, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 6:3, 436-453 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461674042000235609

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Beyond Sex and Gender . . . ?

TOWARDS AN ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO SEXED EMBODIMENT 1

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ANNE ELVEY Monash University, Australia

Abstract
This article addresses the challenge that feminist critiques of sex and gender present for an ecofeminist strategy of afrming the materiality of bodies and earth. As a starting point for thinking about human embodiment, earth is taken to be a community of interconnected constituents, both human and other-than-human. The article presents an understanding of the material givenness of earth and bodies as at any moment in transformation: as the matter of interrelationships between a plurality of earth constituents. It is argued that a notion of the agency of the material given can underpin an ecological feminist thinking of sexed embodiment that need not be essentialist. Read critically both science and certain traditions of spirituality suggest modes of knowing that offer only partial access to the material given. The emphasis on the material given is not a return to a pre-feminist understanding of the naturalness of sex and gender, justly criticized by many feminist theorists. Rather it is a turn towards earth necessary for an ecological feminist politics engaged with the mutual ourishing of women and earth. This turn afrms a feminist deconstruction of the categories of sex and gender in the context of a reafrmation of sexed bodies produced as part of the material given.

Keywords
ecology, embodiment/the body, feminism, materiality, sex and gender, sexuality/sexed bodies

In being transcended through certain forms of western discourse and practice, bodies and earth have been critically endangered. In the context of this endangerment, an ecological feminist politics and ethics seeks to afrm the materiality of bodies and earth. At the same time, however, feminist critiques of sex and gender present a challenge to the strategy of afrming materiality.
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 6:3 September 2004, 436453 ISSN 14616742 print/ISSN 14684470 online 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1461674042000235609

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Nevertheless, in speaking about materiality and embodiment, a certain ecological feminism rightly discerns a link between the oppression of many women and the destructive domination of the wider Earth community.2 But feminisms that have sought to move beyond sex and gender are understandably suspicious of any reclamation of the material that might signal a return to a biological or social constructivist view of women and bodies, gender and sex. Is it simply retrograde, then, an example of a regressive feminism, to speak of materiality in the context of an ecological feminist politics and ethics? How might ecological feminisms address the theoretical questions posed by feminist critiques of gender and sex? Central to the questions I address here is the problem for feminists of what Val Plumwood (2001: 6) calls the historical web of identication of oppressed groups with nature. As she argues:
. . . this inclusion of the category of nature is rarely just a matter of innocent misclassication. The invocation of nature in such contexts often serves to suggest inevitability and exclude socio/cultural explanations and remedies, functioning in colonizing frameworks to naturalize inferior treatment. (2001: 6)

One feminist response to the naturalizing of women in particular has been a kind of nature-scepticism focusing on the agency of culture in constructing human experience and knowledge of the material.3 It has become a commonplace of feminist discourse, for example, that we cannot have direct access to nature unmediated by culture. The problem with this perspective, however, is an unacknowledged partiality overemphasizing the agency of culture and continuing the colonialist strategy of hiding or forgetting the agency of nature (Twine 2001: 37). This hiding or forgetting occurs within a framework of colonialist discourse and practice that distorts the interplay between human and other-than-human agencies by over-emphasizing one or the other. Within these colonizing frameworks is a complex interplay of types of naturalizing and over-humanizing (Plumwood 2001: 1920). As Plumwood describes these, one mode of naturalizing works by effacing human agency and allowing the appropriation of nature without reference to the humans whose labour has shaped it. This is typied in the colonialist designation of Australia as terra nullius, a land empty of people supposed by European colonizers to be unmarked by the living and work of its Aboriginal inhabitants (see Reynolds 1989: 678). Another form of naturalizing identies certain human groups as nature in order to render natural their subordination and oppression. Related to these is a form of overhumanizing that in emphasizing human agency either implicity or explicity denies the agency of nature. The backgrounding of nature that occurs when human agencies and interests are over-emphasized discounts the agency not only of nature but also of indigenous peoples and women, who have been identied as nature. Plumwood (2001: 1920) argues that to counter the colonialist impact of modes of naturalizing and over-humanizing, it is necessary

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to identify clearly the interplay and relative weight of human and non-human agencies in specic processes and contexts that have been otherwise partially constructed as either solely natural or solely cultural. This is not only or even foremost a question of theoretical accuracy about the interplay in particular cases of the agencies of what western thought distinguishes as culture (the human sphere) and nature (the non-human sphere). More critical is the question of the relationship between culture and nature, that is, between humans and the more-than-human matrix sustaining human life and within which humans are already embedded.4 The language we use in addressing the question of the relationship between culture and nature is critical, because discourse is one of the key processes through which we construct the agency or non-agency of the other and create structures that allow or disallow that agency.5 Moreover, these structures in turn support certain discourses of agency in preference to others. As Plumwood (2001, 2002) argues, not to attend closely to the dynamics of the relationship between culture and nature and to the ways in which we describe that relationship, is to risk human species survival as it already risks the survival of many non-human others as well as many human individuals and groups.6 In the context of ecological endangerment, this article focuses on the complex interplay of human and non-human agencies and the ways in which we can understand human sexed embodiment.7 I want to argue here that a notion of the agency of the material can underpin an ecological feminist thinking about sexed embodiment. Such thinking may then offer a point of meeting between deconstructive feminisms which rightly suspect a linking of women, bodies and matter that devalues all of these and an ecological feminism that requires that we revalue the materiality of bodies and earth in order to transform the processes by which western domination in particular has devalued and damaged them. To begin with I want to revisit the question of the agency of nature in shaping sex and gender. In the introduction to Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz (1994: 21) writes: It is not adequate to simply dismiss the category of nature outright, to completely retranscribe it without residue into the cultural . . . Instead, the interimplication of the natural and the social or cultural needs further investigation. . .. Here Grosz begins to suggest that the category of nature is relevant to feminist and critical thinking about the social constructedness of sex and gender. She goes on, however, to characterize the promising notion of the interimplication of the natural and the social or cultural by way of what she describes as the hole in nature that allows cultural seepage or production (21, emphasis added). This hole, Grosz writes, must provide something like a natural condition for cultural production (21). Turning this idea around she suggests also that, the cultural . . . must be seen in its limitations, as a kind of insufciency that requires natural supplementation (21). In her complex interweaving of nature and culture in her thinking about the body, Grosz characterizes both as lack. Nevertheless Groszs comments point to a
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kind of interrelationship between nature and culture in which each requires the other.8 Katherine Hayles (1995: 49) writes of this interrelationship between nature and culture as a condition of ux. She emphasizes human embodiment as determining the nature of our interactions with the world (49). Two principles are critical: the principles of interactivity and positionality. For humans the ux comes into being through processes of human interaction with a morethan-human world. These processes of interaction are mediated by the parameters and capacities of human embodiment, including binocular vision, vertical posture, bilateral symmetry, apprehension of that portion of the electromagnetic spectrum we call light (49). But they are also mediated by the particular social, cultural and historical contexts of human individuals (49). Further, Hayles (578) opens a space for recognizing the different embodiments and contexts of non-human others, such as frogs, as mediating their experience of the ux differently. Underlying this understanding of ux, which emphasizes interactivity and positionality as conditions of knowing and which does not assume humans as the only or primary knowers, is a recognition of human interconnectedness with and embeddedness in a more-than-human world. Writing on ecology, gender and society, Susan Grifn imagines sexed embodiment within this wider context of connectedness to existence:
As with all experience, sexual experience is vast, not only in its possibilities but in the resonance of even the simplest sensation. Desire, longing, pleasure, passion, orgasm, move the body into states of being which defy all denitions, not only those of gender or sexuality but of the boundaried way European culture perceives existence. . . . Apart from any bond or relationship between lovers, in sexual experience an erotic connection to existence is kindled. (1995: 60)

Like Grifn, Grosz calls into question the boundaried way European culture perceives existence. She describes the body as a threshold or borderline concept at the boundary between the binary classications of public/private; self/other; natural/cultural; psychical/social; instinctive/learned; genetically determined/environmentally determined (Grosz 1994: 23). But the dual lacks, which inform her thinking about the body, are troubling. Does the notion of holes in nature and culture to be lled by the other remain infected by the boundaried way European culture perceives existence or does it open a space for thinking the distinction between nature and culture differently? One of the metaphors Grosz (1994: 192210) uses in writing about sexed bodies is that of uidity and ows. In this context the notions of holes and seepage has a resonance with Hayles consideration of the interaction between humans and nature as a kind of ux. The dynamic quality of the metaphors of ow and ux suggests an interactivity between nature and culture in which distinctions while necessary are not absolute. It is possible to make

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distinctions between humans and non-humans without assuming what Plumwood (2002) identies and critiques as a hyper-separation of human and non-human spheres and without implying that the human is superior to the non-human. A conceptual framework for rethinking sexed embodiment from an ecological perspective, therefore, needs to suppose a structure of dynamic interactivity between culture and nature that does not suppress the differences between them either by over-humanizing or by naturalizing.9 Within this framework in what ways is it possible to think of human embodiment, and the categories of sex and gender, in a way that afrms what Grifn describes as an erotic connection to existence? I want to note at this point, however, that the trajectory of the quotation from Grifn moves from (human) sexual experience toward the kindling of an erotic connection to existence in broad terms. I propose another movement, which, while afrming a complex interplay between culture and nature, considers human embeddedness within a wider earth community as the basis of human embodiment. As a starting point for thinking about human embodiment, therefore, I take up the now fairly commonplace notion of earth as a community of interconnected constituents. This community includes humans, other animals, plants, rocks, soil, water, air, trees, rivers, oceans, forests, hairy-nosed wombats, viruses, kangaroo apples, hermit crabs, amoeba and so on, connected by way of a complex sociality marked by plurality, particularity, diversity, interdependence and sometimes violence, oppression and indifference to the other.10 What if this earth, however we might know earth, is understood as a material given that precedes and resists but also underpins and gives space to our cultural constructions of it? This space is given not as a hole to be lled but in the manner of hospitality or to borrow a term from Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) of being toward.11 What if this understanding of earth is given precedence in our thinking about the questions of sex and gender? What if the questions of sex and gender are considered within the context of the materiality of human beings as constituted within the wider materiality of a plural and diverse earth community? These questions raise other questions, not only about a rethinking of sex and gender, but about whether such thinking is possible, what is necessary for such rethinking and what is at stake here from feminist and ecological perspectives in particular. Beginning with these questions I want to map out a partial framework for a rethinking of sex and gender from an ecological perspective, returning at the end to a suggestion of two modes of knowing which might be helpful for such a rethinking.

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IS SUCH THINKING (IM)POSSIBLE? The theorizing of sex and gender as socially constructed is an example of a critical theoretical approach that calls into question assumptions about a precultural condition outside of culture (see, for example, Butler 1990). Thinking
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about materiality as constituted by discourse also calls into question the meanings we give to matter. As Pheng Cheah points out, for Butler there is an interplay between discourse and the materiality it produces, which tends to privilege the agency of culture with respect to a passive nature (Cheah 1996; cf. Butler 1993). Can feminist theorists engaged with(in) western discourses, instead understand the social as a function of a natural world whereby the social becomes interactive and inter-agential with nature, together producing what we know as nature (see Hayles 1995)? Already within the matrix of western science we tell ourselves stories about evolution and the extinction of the dinosaurs, for example, conceiving of an earth chronologically before humankind. Within the matrix of western culture some of us imagine a complex earth community of interdependent socialities existing without or before human culture and out of which human beings and cultures emerged. The fact that human cultures now shape earth in complex and sometimes destructive ways, as a world or a plurality of (sometimes competing) worlds, does not take away from the logical force of the chronological before. Moreover, the experience of mortality suggests to us an earth community continuing beyond the death of the individual. While my death may be reincorporated into earth as a kind of compost, the experience of the mortality of the other from which I infer my own mortality implies that there will be an earth beyond my constructions of earth. Further, the recognition or belief that the human species and earth have nite spans of existence implies that a certain materiality will outlive human cultures and therefore our socio-cultural constructions of materiality. So while our stories of a before and an after of human existence and culture are cultural products, the stories themselves suggest a materiality that not only precedes and exceeds, but also underpins such culture. Is this to imply that such a materiality is static, that it can be known in itself, or that it is immune to the effects of human culture and the discourses produced therein? For ecofeminist Mary Mellor (1997) it is not the cultural construction of nature that makes knowing a pre-cultural nature impossible. Rather, it is human embeddedness in the natural world that renders human knowledge about that world partial (Mellor 1997: 186; cf. Hayles 1995). The uncertainty with respect to precisely how human societies and cultures are inter-agential with and within the wider earth community implies, therefore, that something but not everything can be known about the natural matrix of human sociality. In the examples given above, the ways in which we extrapolate from the present to a pre-human past and a possible post-human future are approaches to such partial knowing.12 Can we make similar partial approaches to understanding the agency of earth in shaping human sexed embodiment? WHAT IS NECESSARY? A reconsideration of sexed embodiment requires rst a rethinking of what it means to be one earth species among many.13 Virginia Scharff (1999: 323)

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warns of the way in which the notion of species frequently underpins biologistic and social constructivist notions of gender and sex. Since humans propagate sexually, our species includes at a minimum men and women and moreover is dened with reference to sexual division according to humans function in biological reproduction (32, emphasis in original). A distinction between species-life and species-being, found in Marx and de Beauvoir, and taken up more recently by Gayatri Spivak, may however be of use here (Spivak 1993: 14850; cf. de Beauvoir 1953 [1949]: 5213; Marx 1975 [1844]: 277). Species-life is that which is proper to the species as species. Species-being is the quality of being that enables an individual to be known or recognized as a member or representative of this species and not another. Theories of sex and gender, therefore, need to consider in what ways sexed embodiment is proper to the human species, that is, whether and in what ways sexed embodiment is part of human species-life. At the same time, they need to note the ways in which social constructions of sex and gender seem to be incidental with respect to human species-being. For example, while in western thought, the human species has been fairly narrowly represented by elite white males, a common-sense understanding of a document such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would suggest that any human being, of any class, race or gender could stand alone as a representative of the species.14 Second, it is necessary to recognize where feminisms are anthropocentric and to afrm an ecological feminism that does not assume the human as the focus of feminist discourse. Such an ecological feminism, for example, as practised by eco-philosopher Val Plumwood (1993, 2002) rethinks patriarchy and colonialism within the matrix of a wider earth community. Through structures of radical exclusion, homogenization or stereotyping, backgrounding or denial, incorporation or assimiliation, and instrumentalism, the anthropocentric framework of western thought systematically constructs nature as other, to be a passive instrument serving human interests (especially the interests of human elites), in such a way that human dependence on nature is effaced and human inuence on nature is at best misconstrued (Plumwood 2002: 1069). In this rethinking, the ecological is identied as an area of oppression interrelated with the oppressive structures of race, class, gender and what Greta Gaard identies as an erotophobia through which feminist theorizing must be rethought (Gaard 1997; cf. Lee and Dow 2001).15 For Gaard (1997: 12032), this erotophobia, encompassing but broader than homophobia, is constitutive of the oppressive structures of western domination and is inextricably linked with the western colonization of lands and seas, indigenous peoples, women and their bodies (1997: 12032). Ironically devaluation of nature goes hand in hand with a naturalization of oppressive assumptions about gender and sexuality that support this fear of the erotic. While sex-role stereotyping, for example, and the narrow version of heterosexuality that accompanies it are considered natural and therefore proper, this stereotyping relies on and supports an identication of women and
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nature that devalues both. At the same time homosexual as well as some heterosexual practices are considered unnatural and hence improper. The irony is that while the natural is valorized at the expense of the unnatural, nature continues to be devalued. But Gaards critique of erotophobia and of certain constructions of the natural and the unnatural on which it relies is insufcient for an ecological approach to questions of sex and gender. Such an approach needs to recognize that the ecological forms the matrix within which all feminist theories and practices are engendered (see Grifn 1997).

WHAT IS AT STAKE?

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The type of ecological feminist approach I am advocating, therefore, has two critical aspects. First, what is commonly called nature is seen as the morethan-human matrix of human life and thought. Second, there is an afnity between women and nature in the sense that the structures of dualism in which women have been construed as the other of man are part of a complex web of colonialist domination in which nature has been construed as the other of the human and more particularly of reason (see Plumwood 1993, 2002). At stake in articulating such an ecological feminist approach, is the concern raised by some feminists that afrming an afnity between woman and nature even in this critical sense might signal a return to an identication of woman and nature that reinscribes problematic patriarchal and colonialist constructions of indigenous peoples, women, bodies, sex, gender, animals and earth. But as I have argued in relation to the work of Plumwood, this ecological feminist approach is already based on a critique of the processes of naturalizing and over-humanizing that support such a problematic identication of women and nature. Also at stake in such an approach, however, is the promise of or aspiration towards openness to the ethical claims of human embeddedness in earth. The question becomes one of what it is to be human. If I am to afrm with Mellor that [h]umanity [is] part of a dynamic interactive ecological process, then I must question any approach that ontologically prioritizes humanity (Mellor 1997: 185). Approaches that describe only the cultural-constructedness of sex and gender prioritize humanity in such a way as to suggest that human beings, while not independent of human culture, are, however, independent of a natural world. But far from being the tabula rasa on which culture makes its mark, this natural world is a complex matrix of agencies that makes possible human cultures among many other forms of sociality. Therefore, although constructions of sex and gender are implicated in oppressive structures, practices and discourses, it is necessary to consider critically the extent to which the categories of sex and gender themselves also refer to more-than-cultural sexed embodiments of the human species.16 In this respect the sexed embodiments of humans are both the referent for and in excess of the social constructions of gender and sex. What do sexed

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embodiments indicate about human embeddedness in and relationship to a wider earth community? What do feminist critiques of the categories of sex and gender imply about the complexity and diversity of sexed embodiments that the categories themselves at best mask and at worst render subject to oppression, denial and sometimes the surgeons knife?

SPEAKING OF EMBODIMENT If feminists are to speak of sexed embodiments, we are in some senses returning to a problematic notion of the biological body. Writing that the sex/gender distinction was originally intended to dispute the biology-isdestiny formulation, Butler (1990: 6) argues that the distinction itself is false. The distinction, which considers gender as a social construction mapped onto a sexed body, masks the manner in which the construction of gender is the discursive/cultural means by which sexed nature or a natural sex is produced and established as prediscursive, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts (7, emphasis in original). Rather, for Butler, sex is as culturally constructed as gender (7). The construction of bodies as sexed and gendered produces material experiences of sexed embodiment. In turn, in a reinforcing movement, these material experiences inuence the constructions of sex and gender. Nevertheless, as Butler (145) indicates, the injunction to be a given gender which produces and relies on a constructed limit of two possible sexed embodiments produces necessary failures, a variety of incoherent congurations that in their multiplicity exceed and defy the injunction by which they are generated. The enforced dualism of human embodiments that are sexed and gendered as woman and man, female and male, feminine and masculine, is part of a discursive structure interwoven with the dualistic frameworks of domination criticized from an ecological perspective by Plumwood (1993, 2002), Gaard (1997) and others. As feminist biologist Lynda Birke (1999: 21) writes, however, there is a risk in critiques of the constructedness of bodies as gendered and sexed: in rejecting biologism, the embodied subject and the biological body seemed to be forgotten. Birke writes of a tendency within feminist accounts of the social construction of sex and gender to characterize the body as surface and to ignore the complexity of the bodily inside. Ironically this focus on the surfaces of bodies can also be found in scientic representations (of which feminist theorists are justly critical) depicting spaces rather than complex organic coherences within the bodily container. Both approaches fail to deal with the complexities of bodies. In common with most scientic approaches, moreover, feminist accounts of the social-construction of gender and sex tend to veil the western context of their own production and, despite emphasis on the lived body, rarely refer to the experience of embodiment.
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We can make cultural choices in the West to pierce our bodies or to undergo cosmetic surgery, to make our bodies different, precisely because we can take so much of the biological necessities of living, of maintaining bodily integrity, for granted. (Birke 1999: 27)

Birke also explains that:

it is much rarer to read in these theoretical accounts about what it is (or might be) like to experience the body with ripped muscles or concave belly. The body, rather, becomes a passive recipient of cultural practices, denied even the agency of experience. (1999: 34)

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What is the force of this agency of experience for an ecological feminist politics? While always a matter of and for interpretation, experience has agency in that it can be said to shape our subjectivities (Scott 1992). The experience of the lived body offers a particular example of the agency of experience. In pregnancy and childbirth as well as in illness, the lived body challenges my illusions of control (Diprose 1994: 103). During an illness, for example, my bodily experience is foregrounded in such a way that the interplay between nature and culture in the processes of my lived embodiment cannot be reduced to a simplistic notion of the cultural construction of bodies or nature. So, for instance, as I shiver from a fever, my sinuses ll with mucus and my head and muscles ache, there is an immediacy to my experience of embodiment that I may interpret through my cultural matrix as symptoms of a virus, but that feels nevertheless as though the virus is in some senses constructing or deconstructing me. In what ways, then, can experience of the lived body critically supplement feminist understandings of the cultural constructedness of sexed embodiments? In her discussion of sexual politics, Kate Soper (1995) makes a useful (yet I think over-simplied) distinction between cultural transmutation and cultural construction. Bodies and geographical terrains having a natural physicality prior to culture can be said to be transmuted by culture, whereas technological artefacts such as telephones and aeroplanes can be said to be constructed by culture from materials appropriated from nature (136). She writes:
The distinction here is not between forms or entities that have or have not been culturally affected, but between those forms or entities that are natural in the sense that we have no choice but to experience them in some form prior to whatever form we impose upon them, and those that we literally bring into being. (1995: 1367)

Underlying the distinctions Soper makes is the sense of a quality of givenness to the so-called natural world and the human bodies, which are part of that

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natural physicality. She describes two forms of cultural impact on bodies and landscapes: rst, the productive transformation of bodies and landscapes through cultural practices such as depilation and agriculture, for example, and second, the reproduction of bodies and landscape in discourse (137). The givenness of bodies and landscapes, however, refers not to a passive nature to be inscribed by cultural production and discourse. Rather, what I call the material given refers not only to the underlying materiality of bodies and earth, but also to the continual transformation of that materiality as the matter of interrelationships between a plurality of earth constituents (see Elvey 2003). In their transformative content, these interrelationships constitute at any moment the material given. It must be noted, however, that human cultures represent some, highly inuential, but not the only modes of interrelationship between humans and earth others. Understood in the above context, the biological body is a material given. As such the biological body participates in a complex process of what Grosz (1994) calls embodied subjectivity or psychical corporeality. Through this process bodies are produced other than as things to be controlled; they act as agents in their production and re-production (see Diprose 1994).

. . . AN EROTIC CONNECTION TO EXISTENCE . . . This bodily agency can be seen as part of a wider network of agencies that affects the production and reproduction of bodies. For Grosz (1994: 22) the body is not singular; rather the body is produced as part of a multiple eld of possible body types . Natural as well as cultural agencies, which are already interimplicated, together map the range of this eld. The variety of meanings afforded the term environment in popular scientic discourse suggests something of the complexity of this inter-agency of culture and nature in the production and reproduction of human bodies. In popular ecological discourses the environment often refers to an idea of nature dened in opposition to the human (still quite commonly designated as man).17 But in other popular scientic discourses where a distinction is made between genetically determined and environmentally determined, environment refers not to a pre-cultural natural environment out of which certain genetic determinations producing the human species might have arisen, but to a socio-cultural locatedness in which the embodied subject is produced. In view of this crossing over of meaning, the term environment has the potential to suggest the way in which the material given challenges the nature/culture split at the same time as it suggests that our locatedness affects our embodiment. A further challenge to the nature/culture split in this context of embodiment comes from a consideration of the labour of mediation of nature. As ecofeminists have argued, the construction of a split between culture and nature within much western thought relies on a problematic western identication of
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women and nature. This identication in turn creates the circumstances for a material relation between women and nature that brings together the biological and social aspects of human embodiment (Mellor 1997: 101). Concerning what Mellor calls the social aspects, most women and many others subordinated on the basis of race, class or ethnicity do the labour of mediation of nature, such as growing and harvesting food, shopping for basic needs, cooking and cleaning.18 The work of mediation, which associates these subordinated groups with an immanent natural world, allows a few others (mostly elite white men) to transcend the body and nature. As Mellor notes, however:
White western women may mediate biological time for their family, but exploit the labour of others, the resources of the South and the sustainability of the earth. The world is not clearly divided into mediators and the mediated: many people stand in complex networks of mediation, on the basis of race, class, gender or ethnicity. (1997: 190)

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Within these complex networks of mediation, the Marxist distinction between production and reproduction breaks down (Scharff 1999: 401). While some activities such as those related to food preparation have an immediacy as works of mediation of nature, all work involves activity that is reproductive and transformative of what is at any moment the material given (cf. Scharff 1999: 41). Moreover, the work of mediation of nature, which reproduces and transforms the material given, sustains, supports and sometimes endangers human bodies. Further, this work has a particular link to the question of bodies as gendered and sexed, since sexed embodiment is a factor affecting [w]omens disproportionate responsibility for human embodiment (Mellor 1997: 184). While acknowledging that this responsibility for human embodiment must be extended beyond its traditional labour base (see Ruether 1992), it may be useful also to consider in what ways the labour of mediation itself shapes sexed embodiment. Notably the kinds of mediation of nature that appear to be more immediately related to sustaining human embodiment reinforce the connectedness of the (frequently female or marginalized) human labourer with and within the wider earth community (see Salleh 1997). The gendering of the labour of mediation of nature becomes an example of the complex interplay between culture and nature in shaping human experiences of sexed embodiment. WAYS OF (UN)KNOWING: MODES OF PARTIAL ACCESS TO THE GIVEN In this nal section, I want to consider two ways (not the only ones) that can offer partial access to the material givenness of sexed embodiment, especially

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for understanding the agency of earth in the production of sexed bodies. First, taking into account eco-philosophical and feminist critical appraisals of western science (see Birke 1999; Plumwood 2002: 3861), I think feminists need to re-imagine the sciences as ways of ecological knowing about embodiment. Thus we might consider the effects on our sexed embodiment of consumption of, for example, aphrodisiacs, contraceptives, oestrogens and pseudo-oestrogens, those which are derived from plants and animals and those which infect nature through chemical pollution (see Birke 2000; Roberts 2000). For example, afrming both the cultural constructedness of biology and the reality of the biological body and its transformability, Birke (2000) looks critically at the discourses surrounding, and the possible importance for, feminist politics of so-called gender-bending chemicals. Elsewhere, critiquing popular representations of a dictatorial DNA, she considers the way in which genes act in context, within the dynamic changes of development in the organism (1999: 1501). From this perspective [o]rganisms . . . are more than just strategic assemblages of cells/information: they are self-actualising agents (151). Birke notes that the notion of self-actualising agents could support a problematic individualism. Instead she locates this agency not in the individual organism alone; rather it is an agency in relation, emerging out of the engagement of the organism with its surroundings (152). In this context, sexed bodies are continually being shaped and re-shaped both internally and externally through processes which are partly material and partly social/experiential, and these processes are inseparable (152). Further complicating factors for this question of the agency of earth in relation to sexed embodiment are suggested by evolutionary theory. In an article where she proposes some ways in which Darwins theory of evolution might have relevance to feminism, Grosz (1999) writes of the open-endedness of the system of evolution. Here [c]hance erupts at both the level of random variation and at the level of natural selection, and perhaps, more interestingly, in the gap or lag that commonly exists in their interaction (39). Considering the play of chance in possible interrelationships between racial and sexual difference, Grosz notes the way in which natural selection is mediated through sexual selection by way of the expression of the will, or desire, or pleasure, of individuals (37). But will or desire may also be at work in other ways. Addressing the interrelated problems of a critical disavowal of science and an exclusive emphasis on human language as constructing experience, Vicki Kirby (1999: 28) suggests that science not only shapes my experience of nature but that the so-called objects of science may in fact shape science: Scientists might have to question the implicit humanism of their practice and consider that perhaps the objects that have drawn their attention are, indeed, attracting that intention, subjecting themselves to mutual inspection and reexive involvement. Moreover, Kirby suggests that by way of its literacy and numeracy skills
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DNA has much in common with the complexities of writing, text and code (26). In a similar way Grifn highlights a resemblance between a Derridean concept of the production of meaning within language systems and the processes that constitute an ecosystem (Grifn 1997). What is important in both cases is the way in which the (so-called) natural system has a certain priority which is masked by the cultural systems it resembles, but which could with a slight turn be said to give shape to them. Just as the sciences propose some modes of knowing which adopted critically can offer partial access to these prior systems, some spiritual traditions again considered critically may also offer modes of knowing which are helpful in this context. I am thinking in particular of the double movement of contemplation. Contemplation is a practice of attentiveness to the other, which begins with a movement of unknowing and through a practice of openness is followed by a movement of partial and provisional knowing. The deconstruction rst of the category of gender and then of sex by writers such as Butler is I think a movement of unknowing. It is a critical letting go of cultural and individual assumptions about sexed embodiment as naturally produced in ways that turn out to be oppressive of women and nature, and which are part of what Gaard identies as a constitutive erotophobia that denies the lived embodiment of lesbians, gay men and many others (Lee and Dow 2001). The second movement towards a partial and provisional knowing requires an attentiveness to what might be called the more-than-cultural otherness of sexed embodiment that may also be shaped by climate, geography and relationships to non-human others. This sexed embodiment calls into question my illusions of control, through experiences such as pregnancy, birth, menstruation and menopause, ageing, uctuations of libido and unexpected attractions. What kind of feminist and ecofeminist knowledges will emerge from such attentiveness to the ways in which human interconnectedness with a morethan-human natural world shapes sexed embodiment? What kinds of feminist and eco-feminist politics does this imply? What I am suggesting is not so much a return to a question of the naturalness of sexual reproduction for humans, which discourses of human cloning aside, seems to require two sexually differentiated partners. While signicant, this is a small part of my question, a part that must be read in the light of problematic constructions as unnatural of any sexual experience and sexuality that is not sexually reproductive. Instead I am suggesting that in our thinking of sex and gender we consider not only the notion of evolution of human beings as a species for which sexual rather than asexual reproduction is the norm (for reproduction rather than for sexuality per se), but more particularly that the complexity of human experiences of sexed embodiment of sex and gender, sexuality and sensualness be considered as formed within the social matrix of earth in ways we may not yet have come to understand. Politically this is not a return to a pre-feminist understanding of a naturally en-gender-ed sexual

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difference, but a turn towards earth as the complex matrix within which we are sexually embodied. This turn towards earth, which is necessary for an ecological feminist politics engaged with the mutual ourishing of women and earth (cf. Cuomo 1998), afrms a feminist deconstruction of the categories of sex and gender in the context of a reafrmation of sexed bodies as produced within the dynamism of the material given. As noted earlier the material given is at any moment in transformation as the matter of interrelationships between a plurality of earth constituents. In the context of this dynamic givenness, an ecofeminist politics and ethics afrms the agency not only of women of diverse backgrounds and experiences, but also of bodies and more particularly earth, since the plural and diverse community of earth is both the matrix within which our politics are enacted and the referent for our political ethics and activism. Anne Elvey Centre for Womens Studies and Gender Research School of Political and Social Inquiry Monash University VIC 3800 Australia E-mail: anne.elvey@arts.monash.edu.au

Notes
1 Versions of this article were given in the Womens Studies lunch-time seminar series at Monash University on 31 July 2002 and at the Womens Studies Network (UK) conference Beyond Sex and Gender: The Future of Womens Studies?, in Belfast on 21 September 2002. 2 I refer here to a certain ecological feminism and elsewhere to an ecological feminism recognizing that there are many ecological feminisms just as there are many feminisms. I am interested primarily in ecological feminist approaches that take as a conceptual framework a critique of the dualistic and colonizing structures of western thought, such as that set out by Plumwood (1993, 2002). 3 I borrow the term nature-scepticism from Plumwood (2001: 3). 4 The term more-than-human used in this context for a natural world that includes the human among its plurality of constituents is taken from Abram (1997: 24). 5 I am grateful to an anonymous reader for alerting me to the importance of language in this regard. 6 It is beyond the scope of this article to repeat the complex arguments which Plumwood makes about the way in which western thought, in particular the splitting or hyper-separation between humans and nature, which values reason and denies nature, is implicated in the current levels of environmental destruction and its related impacts on many subordinated groups of humans (Plumwood 1993, 2002).
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7 It would be interesting to look beyond this question to the question of the sexed embodiment of non-humans, but this is not within the scope of the current article. 8 I am grateful to an anonymous reader for alerting me to this point and to the important contrast between a dualistic reading of a distinction between nature and culture as lack and a necessary presentation of distinctions as implying both difference from and relationship to others. 9 Along with Hayles notions of ux and cusp, Teresa Brennans understanding of energetics and Pheng Cheahs analysis of dynamism suggest possibilities for developing this notion of dynamic interactivity between culture and nature further (see Hayles 1995; Cheah 1996; Brennan 2000; see also Caputi 2001). 10 Here and later in this article I am deliberately extending the range of the terms sociality and socialities to include non-human others. I wish to emphasize a kind of sociality situated in the interdependence not only between humans but also between human and non-human others. For a similar usage, see Hart (1999). 11 I intend hospitality, here, to include the resonances of both hostility and radical openness that Jacques Derrida nds in the term (see Dufourmantelle and Derrida 2000). 12 Here I am using post-human to suggest a time when the human species itself is extinct. I am not using post-human in the sense sometimes used to refer to imagined human futures which involve elements that we do not currently consider normative for the human species, such as for example, ectogenesis or male pregnancy (see Squier 1995). 13 We need to note, however, that the language of species is not as transparent as it might at rst appear (see Borjesson 1999). 14 I refer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations General Assembly resolution 217A(III) adopted 10 December 1948; see http://www.un.org/ Overview/rights.html (accessed 4 April 2004). 15 While afrming Gaards insight into the links between fear of the erotic and western systems of domination of indigenous peoples, women and nature, Wendy Lynne Lee and Laura M. Dow, however, point out the way in which Gaards sketching of a queer ecofeminism continues to maintain the invisibility of lesbians. They argue that a lesbian erotic offers a particular mode of creative disruption of the dualistic systems Gaard describes (Gaard 1997; Lee and Dow 2001). 16 I use more-than-cultural in a parallel sense to the use of more-than-human to refer to that which includes but exceeds the cultural; see note 4. 17 For a discussion of the way in which the opposition between man and nature continues to infect environmental discourses with anthropocentric assumptions that are thoroughly androcentric, see Scharff (1999). 18 I include in this list shopping for basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter as a form of mediation, because for many people such shopping forms part of a chain of human mediation of nature. This is not to deny that in consumerist economies shopping even for basic needs is extremely problematic, in that very often the structures of shopping outlets not to mention the advertising that is associated with consumerism serve to hide human dependence on and interdependence with nature. This occurs through a variety of processes of remoteness which are described well by Plumwood (2002).

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