Dear Feast,

A couple of months ago I received a small flurry of inquiries about an article that was then forthcoming, and is now out.  The article is "What Should Feminists Do About Nature?" and appears in an online German Studies journal, Konturen.  I am providing the web address for the article (scroll down and look on the left and there is a button that allows you to convert it to PDF).  Thanks to all those who expressed interest, and if I sent you the unpublished version, please replace it with this one.

http://konturen.uoregon.edu/vol2_Mann.html

Bonnie Mann
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

Here is the abstract:  Feminists, including this one, have two problems with nature: a special problem which is a historical and
political problem, and an ontological problem that we share with everyone else (our metabolism with
the earth). My claim is that the first problem is so acute that it tends to make us forget the second.
The fundamental division in contemporary feminist thinking can be described as that between feminists
who are interested in deconstructing, all the way down, the notion of natural differences between
women and men as pre-social, and feminists who are interested in recuperating, re-affirming or
asserting some version of originary sexual difference. By returning to Simone de Beauvoir, we find that
even at this early moment in contemporary feminist thought a more complex account of nature was
already articulated. Beauvoir helps us understand how structures of injustice are parasitically entangled
with general features of human existence, even those that seem most “natural.” At one founding
moment of contemporary feminist thinking, then, deconstructive and descriptive engagements with the
question of nature, far from being opposed, are co-necessary features of feminist thought.