Gina Stamm (The University of Alabama)
October 24, 2024
Scott Nygren Scholars Studio
Library West Room 212
3 PM
Françoise d’Eaubonne (1920–2005) was by all accounts a pioneer both in her intellectual and political life, and in the last decade she has begun to receive the recognition she clearly merits. She seems in many ways less complicated than other midcentury feminists – an antiracist and staunch ally of the LGBT movement, she coined the term écoféminisme [ecofeminism] to express an activism based in the ways both women and the nonhuman environment are victims of patriarchal and capitalist exploitation. While D’Eaubonne’s focus on overpopulation and a lack of family planning opportunities as the mechanisms of this exploitation may be explained in the context of her time (before a rising emphasis on culturally– and geographically-relative environmental factors), she risks playing into damaging narratives of necessary birth limitations in developing countries: viz., a new “liberal” Malthusianism. As such, the uncritical celebration of d’Eaubonne in current ecofeminist circles is somewhat worrying.
Reading d’Eaubonne’s utopian Trilogie du losange [Lozenge Trilogy] along with her theoretical work, Professor Stamm will examine the ways in which d’Eaubonne’s imagined future can be seen as consonant with an intersectional feminist perspective, and how elements of her writing demonstrate classic pitfalls of dominant feminist or other social revolutionary movements.
This event is free and open to the public.
About the Speaker
Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Stamm is currently completing a monograph with the working title of Freeing the Material Unconscious: Surrealism and Posthumanist Environmental Thought, and has also published translations of Russian-French speculative fiction writer Antoine Volodine’s novels Mevlido’s Dreams (2024) and The Inner Harbour, forthcoming in fall 2025 from the University of Minnesota Press.
“Bad (Eco) Feminist?” is sponsored by Imagining Climate Change, the George A. Smathers Libraries, and the France-Florida Research Institute.