Separate or Relational and Truly Rational? A Few Notes on Gender, Nature, and Modernity’s Patriarchal Heritage

Mar 1, 2023 | Jan-Olav Henriksen
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Everything that lives is constituted by relationships with everything else. Accordingly, it is of profound importance if we understand ourselves as conditioned by, dependent on, and participating in such relationships; or if we try to dissolve them, disentangle ourselves from them, or objectify and control them as something fundamentally other than ourselves. The attitude by which we relate to that on which we are dependent may not only be restricted to one area in life. It may be grounded deep in our psychologies and affect how we relate to that which is different from us in general: for men, it means how men relate to women, but it may also impact on how men, and humans in general, relate to nature. In this short article, I will point to possible connections between patriarchal structures aiming at controlling women, and the ways in which human in general have related to nature over the last centuries.