Women in critical realist environmentalism: subaltern to the species?

Ecosocialism is developing in more and less anthropocentric directions, both of which make emancipatory claims, but arguably lack an adequate treatment of gender differentiation and inequality. The stimulus for this paper is the questionof whether bioethics, or non-anthropocentrism, is compatible with feminism and it is interrogated through looking at the gender implications of green critical realist theorizing of the concepts of species-being and species-life, alienation and ontological insecurity. It is argued that critical realism has yet to engage with feminist insights into the political dangers of naturalisms, the gendered and multiple identities of human subjects, the politics of domestic labour and reproduction, alienation theses and evolutionary models of social development. Taken together these suggest fundamental problems with the explanatory and emancipatory claims of critical realist environmentalism.