Johanna Oksala, "Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology" (Northwestern UP, 2023)
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What motivates Johanna Oksala’s turn to eco‑feminist and Marxist feminism?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver. I'm co-host of the channel along with Kerry Figdor, Robert Talese, and Malcolm Keating. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Johanna Axala, Arthur J. Schmidt Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, Her book, Feminism, Capitalism and Ecology, is just out from Northwestern University Press. Can capitalism be made ecologically sustainable? Can it be good for women? What theoretical approaches help us to grapple with these questions in ways that offer us strategies for how to proceed?
Have we already become lost in some sort of gender essentialism to ask these questions together? In Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology, Axala brings the resources of ecofeminism and Marxist feminism to these questions, arguing that capitalism cannot be made sustainable, nor can it do without the expropriation of bodies that produce new laborers and consumers. By attending to the rise of biocapitalism, Oxala further develops analytic resources for diagnosing the fundamental problems of an economic system predicated on profit, consumer choice, and endless growth. She also gives us theoretical tools for discerning strategies that will help us create a world beyond capitalism. Johanna Oxala, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Thanks, Sarah. It's great to be here. Well, let's jump in. There's so much to talk about. Will you start by telling us a bit about yourself, about your background as a theorist and how you got interested in this project and the importance of feminism and ecology for Critiques of Capitalism?
I want to say that it's a bit of a surprise that I became a feminist philosopher, at least to me and perhaps to some of my professors, because I was initially a very bad student. And I try to remind myself of that when I get annoyed with my own students. I was that student who came to early class with a terrible hangover and then kept falling asleep in the back row. I think, you know, the problem was that I felt that a lot of the issues and material that we were studying were just very abstract and not really relevant in terms of what I thought was going on in the world or in my life. But then I started doing a minor in gender studies And I was a student in the 90s, so Judith Butler's Gender Trouble had come out, and there was a lot of exciting stuff going on in that field.
And once I started working there, then very quickly I became a very good student. And I wrote my MA thesis on Foucault and feminism. And feminist philosophy has really ever since been a key strand in my work. And this book is now an attempt to, again, address some questions in feminist philosophy that I take to be particularly pressing at the moment.
Yeah, and you connect two really big issues, ecological devastation and gender oppression, really through, as I read it, the invisibilization of modes of expropriation. And that those modes of expropriation are, further you're arguing, necessary for the functioning of capitalism. Which you then say, we need a feminist eco-politics because we need economic systems that aren't based on profit, consumer preference, and economic growth. That these are fundamental to capitalism and also require these modes of expropriation. So let's talk about how Marxist feminists helps us understand the link between ecological devastation and gender oppression and avoid the pitfalls. Because when I hear ecofeminism rant, I hear essentialism.
So that's the worry there, I think, especially for those of us who remember the debates and what was important about the 90s in feminist debate. Why do we need an ecofeminism, I guess? And how does Marxist feminism help us?
Right. As you said, a key claim of my book is that ecofeminist critiques must be connected systematically to critiques of capitalism.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What motivates Johanna Oksala’s turn to eco‑feminist and Marxist feminism?
0:01–7:46
2
How does Oksala link ecological devastation to gendered expropriation?
7:46–18:11
3
Why does Oksala argue that capitalism cannot be made ecologically sustainable?
18:11–26:57
4
What is the ‘iceberg’ metaphor for capitalism’s hidden expropriation of nature and care work?
26:57–38:36
5
How does the book reconceptualise gestational surrogacy as gendered and racialised expropriation?
38:36–50:30
6
Why does Oksala claim that paid housework cannot be solved by individual moral choices alone?
50:30–1:00:40
7
What role do post‑structuralist theories of subjectivation play in her critique of commodification?
1:00:40–1:10:44
8
How does Oksala envision a feminist eco‑politics that reshapes both economic structures and our very selves?
1:10:44–1:19:41
Speakers
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