Ecofeminism in Avatar

The other day the assignment for www.women.com was to watch Avatar, keeping in mind the sources e-mailed to us by Dr. Maluso concerning ecofeminism. The first source she sent to us was an article called "Ecofeminism: Women and the Environment" for the most part this article is talking about the rising rate of breast cancer and how products that we use daily can be dangerous for us - specifically cosmetics and plastics. The article was interesting, but most importantly it defined ecofeminism as "a feminist approach to environmental ethics." I actually didn't know what ecofeminism was  - I mean, I could have guessed it through a basic understanding of the English language, but it was good to have it written in stone.

The other source we were supposed to look at was "How Ecofeminism Works" which is great, because I love How Stuff Works pages. This page went into a little more detail about how feminism and ecology are connected. The article emphasized how women were connected to the earth, and how the oppression of the planet was similar to the oppression of women. You can definitely see how this idea of women and nature has been developed through history. Demeter was the goddess of the harvest, and she was said to be the being that brought fertility and life to the Earth. If you think of it that way women and the earth are definitely connected,  because they both bring life and sustenance. That's a pretty powerful statement, to connect the oppression to the environment with oppression to women, but it seems to fit. I've never heard her called "Father Earth" after all.

So anyways, bringing this back to Avatar, there's definitely examples of ecofeminism throughout the story line. The most obvious example of this is Neytiri, who was so comfortable in her skin and so at ease with the environment. She showed Jake Sully how to manipulate his body and the earth so that they would work together. Neytiri is an extremely powerful woman and she is constantly shown as being connected to nature.

The other woman in this movie who is an example of ecofeminism is Grace. She is so interested in this world and so connected to them - she is by far the expert on the tribe, and for some time she seems extremely powerful. However, when money and greed become more important to the men on her team, she gets pushed aside as they seek out to destroy the Na'vi tribe.

When you look at this movie from an ecofeminism perspective it seems like the men have no right to the land because it's part of the women - so therefore they have to take it and oppress both the women and the environment. I'm overdoing it a little bit here, but it gets poetic the longer you think about it I swear!