Hollywood Utopia

Merchant’s ideas contrast with Leopold’s ‘extensionist ethic’, in which the
community is extended to encompass non-human nature, whereas:
partnership ethics recognises both continuities and differences between humans
and nonhuman nature. It admits that humans are dependent on non-human nature
and that non-human nature has preceded and will post-date human nature . . . and
recognises humans now have power/ knowledge/ technology to destroy life as we
know it today
(ibid.: 217).
In spite of carefully outlining the various, often confused, nuances of feminist
discourse, Merchant finally hopes that there is more to unite the various
contradictory strands of eco-feminist thought than there is to divide them.
Marxist feminists assume that non-human nature is the material basis of all of life
and that food, clothing, shelter, and energy are essential to the maintenance of
human life . . . Nature is an active subject, not a passive object to be dominated, and
humans must develop sustainable relations with it
(Merchant 1995: 6).
Ecological critics have to overcome this divisive ideological and gender polarisation
of positions and to establish non-instrumental relationships with nature, where
both connection and otherness become the basis of interaction. 23 Merchant
remains optimistic regarding the links between feminist and ecological politics and
claims that:
Both movements (eco and women’s movement) have been liberatory and democratic
in their outlook and reformist or revolutionary in their politics. Yet both pose a
threat to reinforce traditional forms of oppression
(Merchant 1995: 139).
New feminist discourse is setting the tone for a more ‘transgressive’ form of
utopianism, which effectively counters many of the concerns of an ideological
critique. In particular, Lucy Sargisson, a critical optimist, reclaims the radical
importance of utopian thought and affirms that it:
1 Hollywood Utopia 33