Miriam Tola

This essay explores the ambivalences of care while developing conceptual links between social and ecological care. Drawing on contemporary ecological activism as well as feminist and anti-racist perspectives, it shows how theories and practices of care focusing on interdependence as well as inequality problematize the Anthropocene narrative that foregrounds the impact of an undifferentiated human species on planetary processes. The essay contributes to rethinking care as a way of engaging in the world to make it habitable again.

This essay focuses on the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. We show that neoliberalization and the dismantling of community health services played a major role in turning Northern Italy into a shattered “lazaret”. Moreover, considering Italian activists’ responses to the pandemic, we suggest that they point toward a reinvention of reproduction along two main axes. First, they bring feminist insights to bear with the ecological crisis that created the conditions for COVID-19. In so doing, they direct attention to reproduction as a multidimensional matrix of power relations involving both social and ecological aspects. Second, activists have strived to build infrastructures for the redistribution of care from below. Creating and developing mutual aid networks, activist groups designed a feminist logistics, that is central for creating alternatives to prevalent neoliberal models of circulating care whose flaws have fully emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts.

This essay brings the work of Isabelle Stengers into the fold of feminism to propose a feminist politics of the earth that disrupts the fantasy of human exceptionalism underpinning much Anthropocene discourse. I begin by situating Stengers’s political use of Gaia theory in current debates on the Anthropocene. Next, I show how Stengers’s reworking of Gaia helps in reconsidering the relations between two bodies of feminist theory—Deleuzian feminism and Marxist ecofeminism—that are rarely brought into conversation. On this basis, I explore what a feminist politics of composition with the earth might look like.