Salomé Lamas — Ecofeminism

Stemming from a common principle of intimate connection between the human and natural worlds, feminism and ecology share conceptions and purposes, often converging in practices that transcend and dismantle systems of domination and hierarchical dualisms. These non-exploitative approaches to social, environmental, and interspecies relationships underpin “ecofeminism,” which seeks to overturn imaginaries of oppression and alienation in order to foster new relationships between humans and other forms of life. Guided by this ecofeminist perspective, the Contemporânea Film(e) session curated by artist Salomé Lamas at the Batalha Centro de Cinema explores new, fairer, more ethical forms of understanding where ecology and feminism come together to challenge oppressions linked to gender, class, race, and species.

Ecofeminist thought was influenced by feminist movements of the 1970s, themselves partly shaped by the environmental and pacifist currents of the 1960s. The term “ecofeminism” was first conceptualised by Françoise d’Eaubonne (1920–2005) in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974), where she argued that women were particularly well-positioned to spark an ecological revolution capable of fostering a new relational structure between humanity and the environment. Within this framework, ecofeminism draws on two primary lines of thought: essentialist ecofeminism and constructivist ecofeminism. The former operates upon a supposedly irreducible feminine essence, positing that women are ontologically more attuned to preserving nature due to intrinsic attributes tied to life-giving and caregiving; in contrast, the latter rejects such a naturalisation of feminine traits, instead arguing that concepts of gender and nature are shaped by historical and social circumstances. This perspective was particularly advanced by philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), who famously stated in The Second Sex (1949) that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” For Beauvoir, then, femininity is not confined to a biological destiny, and ecological sensitivity depends on various socio-historical factors.

Barbara Hammer’s (1939–2019) film Dyketactics (1974) faced criticism upon its release for its apparent essentialist bent. Whilst the first part of the film indeed shows several nude women wandering through a natural landscape, the acting of these female bodies challenges the cultural objectification typically associated with such imagery. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), critic Laura Mulvey (1941) coined the term “male gaze” to describe a masculinist, heterosexual perspective rooted in voyeurism, scopophilia, and narcissism, shaping a cinematic portrayal of women as mere objects of male pleasure. In Dyketactics, the female bodies resist this gaze, disrupting voyeurism through a fragmented, fast-paced visuality of the female body. Hammer pioneered experimental queer and feminist cinema, creating a ground-breaking body of work that sought to empower women’s bodies and obliterate taboos surrounding lesbian sexuality and identity. In this regard, Dyketactics serves an an exemplary case of a feminist approach to aesthetics, desire, and identity, intertwining perception with touch and conveying what the artist terms as a “dyketactic”: a tactile aesthetic intervention which links sensuality and sensation to vision.

Engaging similarly with the female body, Vivienne Dick’s (1950) Augenblick (2017) examines themes of ageing, sorority, ecology, and temporality. The film opens with digital images of a melting rock, glacier, and waterfall, before transitioning to the Enlightenment-era writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and later depicting an intergenerational and interracial group of women debating literature, diet, philosophy, and cannibalism. Vivienne Dick, a key figure in the avant-garde no wave movement, produced a pioneering, deeply personal body of work tied to New York’s underground punk scene and radical explorations of gender politics. Augenblick thus reflects both Dick’s artistic universe and the core ecofeminist focus on the more-than-human or beyond-human world—an existence encompassing an array of relationships within struggles across race, gender, and sexuality.

Whilst the intersection of environmental and female oppressions is a central tenet of ecofeminism, it is equally important to note that the shared global experience of environmental destruction is not felt uniformly across all regions, since climate change penetrates and intensifies the asymmetrical patterns of discrimination already present around the world. In the northern hemisphere, debates largely revolve around issues such as productivism and overconsumption, whereas in the south they are often centred on basic human rights, including food security, clean water, sanitation, and viable means of subsistence. Building upon this ecological disparity and continuing an artistic practice deeply rooted in research and fieldwork in remote locations investigating the ecologies of oil, ice, forests, and water, Ursula Biemann’s Deep Weather (2013) addresses the direct impact of human actions on the planet’s complex systems. The film opens with aerial shots of a vast industrial extraction site in the tar sands region of Alberta, Canada, portraying a landscape devastated by aggressive mining; and then shifts thousands of kilometres away to Bangladesh, where a monumental communal effort unfolds as thousands join forces to construct protective dykes, striving to shield their communities from rising water levels. The film visually aligns two locations which, though on opposite sides of the planet, bear the brunt (albeit unequally) of the same harmful actions endured by our planetary cycles.

In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), philosopher Val Plumwood (1939–2008) argues that the root of the ecological crisis lies in what she terms the "dominant dualist model": the notion, entrenched in Western culture, that human identity has been defined in relation to the male gender. Plumwood critiques this hierarchical system of meaning, which polarises and irreconcilably opposes binaries such as man and woman, or human and nature. For this philosopher, in order to refute this dualism, difference should not be erased but rather emphasised, thereby creating space to confront the polarisation and hierarchy inherent in identities. She consequently asserts that ecofeminism is profoundly integrative, as it weaves together various practices of social awareness. Such is the inclusive framework underpinning Who Is Afraid of Ideology? (2017–2020), a trilogy by artist and researcher Marwa Arsanios (1978) in which the structural concepts of collectiveness and resistance frame an ecological activism tied to women’s struggles and the rights of Indigenous lands. Through female experiences in Kurdistan, Colombia, and Lebanon, Arsanios confronts political and socio-economic systems of oppression and exploitation, advocating for alternative, collaborative, and self-defensive approaches in response to the capitalist exploitation of land. The trilogy’s third instalment, Part III: Micro Resistances (2020), focuses on a group of Indigenous women farmers from Tolima, Colombia, dedicated to protecting and preserving native seeds through their ancestral knowledge of cultivation and care, as they defend their land against transnational corporations. This film is notable for its portrayal of the link between land and Indigenous bodies, whether through native knowledge of natural elements or the violence of a murdered body merging into the earth, as reflected in the film’s opening depiction of how the boundaries between the corpse and the soil dissolve through shared bacterial cultures. At its core, there is invariably a form of resistance—not only by communities resisting political and economic pressures on their land, but also by the bodies themselves, resisting as memories embedded within it.

Arsanios’s trilogy thus calls for considering the possibility of collectively resisting patriarchal capitalistic exploitation, which frequently reduces women to objects of consumption, means of production, and exploitable resources. This trajectory of female subjugation is also partly explored in Silvia Federici’s (1942) Caliban and the Witch (2004), spanning the transition from the so-called feudal period to capitalism. The historian examines how, during the European Middle Ages, women performed roles later deemed masculine, wielding significant social power through control over reproductive activity and knowledge of medicinal plants. However, the rise of capitalist patriarchy led to women being expelled from communal lands and excluded from market-based labour, stripping them of access to means of subsistence and rendering them economically dependent on men. Federici argues that, alongside colonisation and globalised slavery, this diminishing of women’s power contributed to the emergence of the Anthropocene, as it suppressed autonomous forms of knowledge about nature and non-human relationships.

The destructive consequences of capitalism are also enacted in Hito Steyerl’s (1966) In Free Fall (2010), a film that reconstructs the harmful circularity of economics, violence, and entertainment in the age of globalised capitalism. A filmmaker, artist, and writer, Steyerl examines themes including technology, the global circulation of images, and postcolonial and feminist critiques of representation. In In Free Fall, she weaves together a series of works—After the Crash, Before the Crash, and Crash—set in an aircraft scrapyard in California’s Mojave Desert, evoking the financial crisis of 2008. The scrapyard’s owner explains that airlines store planes there during economic downturns, when flying them becomes unprofitable: "The economy is in a vicious place, explosive," he adds, describing the aircrafts as "all ghosts." The key paradigm of the film is the Boeing 4X-JYI, an aircraft originally purchased by director Howard Hughes for TWA, and later used by the Israeli Air Force, which eventually ended up in the Mojave Desert, where it was blown up in the blockbuster Speed (1994). The representation of the post-mortem existence of these machines becomes a symbol of economic decline, revealing capitalism’s cyclical adaptation to changes in the status of commodities whilst hinting at the possibility of an alternative future.

Committing to alternative and relational forms of interpreting the world, ecofeminism wields the emphatic power to refocus on and activate relationships and perspectives of respect for nature, which often stem from collaborative work or interspecies coalitions. As such, these films foster the co-construction of a possible new world where practices of domination are dismantled to cultivate what Donna Haraway, in Staying with the Trouble (2016), describes as becoming-with.