Ecofeminism in Latin America.
McManus, Kathleen
ECOFEMINISM IN LATIN AMERICA. By Mary Judith Ress. Women from the
Margins. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2006. Pp. xii + 243. $28.
Ress provides an invaluable and engaging analysis of the
ecofeminism movement in Latin America. A North American by birth, she
has lived and worked in Latin America since 1970 in a variety of
capacities, including as a founding member of Con-spirando, a
women's collective in Santiago, Chile, that works in the areas of
ecofeminism, theology, and spirituality. R.'s methodology is shaped
by women's narratives in conversation with the diverse intellectual
streams informing the current shift to ecofeminist consciousness. We
quickly gain a comprehensive view of the ecofeminist landscape and an
understanding of the schemas of its two most influential theologians,
Elsa Tamez and Ivone Gebara. And we learn about the current conflicted
status of Liberation Theology and its relationship to emerging
ecofeminist thought.
Ecofeminism is defined as a radical remembering of who we are as
earthlings in a universe constituted by the interdependence of all
things. R. effectively draws the reader into this
"remembering" by juxtaposing diverse sources such as ancient
wisdom traditions, the new cosmology, indigenous cosmologies, deep
ecology, feminist anthropologies, Jungian feminism, and North American
ecofeminism. This background reveals the roots of the diversity that
constitutes Latin American ecofeminist theology.
The book culminates in interviews with twelve Latin American women
theologians, documenting their shifts in self-understanding,
understanding of the divine, and beliefs about life and death. These
shifts, rooted in the epistemological shift to the body as locus of
understanding, raise profound doctrinal questions, especially in the
areas of Christology and eschatology. The book's main weakness is
R.'s failure to probe the latent ecofeminist potentialities of
precisely these doctrines reworked in a postpatriarchal paradigm. That
reworking, however, may be left to others who read this eminently
worthwhile study.
KATHLEEN MCMANuS, O.P.
University of Portland, Oregon
