2022 Theses Bachelor's

Feminism, Nature, and Humanity: A Critique of Difference and Domination

Rodriguez, Megan Catherine

This paper seeks to apply a method derived from feminist scholarship about normative gender differences to the ecotheory concept of the relationship between humans and animals. This method, the dominance method, was employed in this thesis to demonstrate how the method can be transferred from the feminist realm to the ecological realm, as well as analyze how humans dominate animals across various case studies. The two case studies that I chose to focus on in my work were humans eating animals and the human destruction of the natural habitats of animals. Through engaging these case studies with the dominance method, I found that this method offers insight into how normative views on presupposed species differences are artificially and arbitrarily constructed in order to maintain human domination over nature. I also found that despite the dominance method being derived from feminist scholarship about men and women, the issue of inequality based on difference and domination is a subject that transcends merely gender, making the dominance method readily applicable to ecotheory.