Ecofeminist Art: Using Creativity for Social Justice
Art is an extremely powerful medium for expressing literally any experience that human beings go through, from emotions to ideology. Throughout its history, art has been used to communicate ideas in a non-literal way, enabling the direct communication of emotion. Through this focus on emotion, art has had a kind of persuasive power that is unrivalled by any other means of public communication, such as political speeches, pamphlets, and documentaries. Art makes people think in a completely different way by engaging multiple sensations such as sight, sound, emotion, and reason.
When it comes to the history of art in the context of social movements, it has always played an important role and has always been concerned with giving a chance to voices that get left out of the mainstream. Be it the queer rights movement, Black Lives Matter movement, anti-war movements, art has always come to the fore as a key means of communication and engagement. Art also has a far greater potential for subversion in fascist countries, for it can be subtle enough to avoid censorship and still communicate to the people what the people needed to understand.
Ecofeminism as a movement upends conventional hierarchies of man and nature, woman and submission, and lets people think in an entirely new way about how we relate to the environment. It doesn’t let feminism get co-opted by capitalism by ensuring that the anti-capitalist and pro-environment thrust of the movement stands. After all, a fight against the oppression of women is not enough if the environmental degradation and climate change brought on by man’s greed and capitalism do not leave a world for women or men to live in.
Using art to drive home ecofeminist concerns has been done by several artists such as Jackie Brookner and Ana Mendieta. They have challenged hierarchies in their art, playing with the perceptions of people about what the role of women should and how women as well as nature are commodified for the benefit of men. A key push of ecofeminists has been towards a more diverse, mutually sustainable and co-habitable community. We as a society have reached a point where such a community sounds counterintuitive. To ensure that people accept these ideals of human dignity and co-operation as their own, they would have to be re-educated and ecofeminist art can help a lot with that.
