MARÍA XOSÉ AGRA ROMEROImages of Nature: Ecofeminist Variations

Photograph: Maria Durão, O que pode um corpo? (2022)

The conceptual frameworks and images of nature have changed historically. Organicist, mechanists, materialist, or spiritualist theories support images of nature as a living, wild and uncontrollable organism, like a nurturing mother, or images of passivity, of a nature to be dominated, controlled, tortured, or exploited. Theories and images associated with the female gender, feminize nature or naturalize women, establishing a link between the domination of women and the domination of nature. We will look at the critical variations of ecofeminist philosophy around this link and at the forms of thinking by oppositions (Nature/culture and their associates), approaching ecofeminisms, beyond apocalyptic or romantic visions, as a perspective that places us on one of the axes of current reflection, questioning nature as an analytical and political category and its understanding as a tectonic plate.

María Xosé Agra Romero, PhD in Philosophy, is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Santiago de Compostela (retired). She was coordinator and is collaborator of the research group Xustiza e Igualdade at USC; founder and member of the Center for Feminist Research and Gender Studies (CIFEX) at USC; elected member of the Plenary and Coordinator of Equality at the Galician Culture Council and Academic Visitor at the Gender Institute of the London School (2005). Her lines of research focus on issues of contemporary political philosophy (eco-feminism, citizenship, multiculturalism, violence, vulnerability) and in particular on theories of justice and feminist critical theory, on which she has published, among others: (Ed.): Ecología y Feminismo (1998); ¿Olvidar a Clitemnestra?Sobre justicia e igualdad (2016); introductory studies to: Hobbes: Leviathan (Clásicos do pensamento universal USC/BBVA, 2018); Ursula Hirschmann: Nosotros, sin patria (Bellaterra ediciones, 2019). More recently: “Pensando políticamente la igualdad,” in J. Valdivielso (ed.): Democracia en estado de alarma (Plaza y Valdés, 2022); “Estructura básica e igualdad,” in J. Rodríguez Zepeda, Gustavo Leyva, Paulette Dieterlen, Faviola Rivera Castro (Coords.): Razones de justicia. A medio siglo de Una teoría de la justicia (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Gedisa, 2023). Agra, Mª Xosé/Concha Varela: “Heredada, comprada, regalada: la biblioteca ‘propia’ de Emilia Pardo Bazán,” in Agora.Papeles de Filosofía, 43 (2) (2024).

Thought-images

Thought-images gives the title to this cycle of conferences opening a space in Sismógrafo’s program to think images and through images. The purpose of these conferences is to unite the discursive and the image, to confront them, to recognize the potential of an image, of a fragment, rescuing vital experiences threatened in an uncertain present. This age, a turbulent and disturbing age, an age of pandemic, ecological, financial, political and social crises, these times of “post-truth” and "alternative facts” are "interesting times", to use the expression popularized by Eric Hobsbawm. Interesting times especially for thinking. Thinking is already contributing to a change. This cycle calls for a cooperation between the expressive strength of art and the precision of philosophy. Without a language that embraces images, images can blind us or say nothing. With these conferences, Sismógrafo seeks to take care of what Alexander Kluge calls a “garden of cooperation”, a place that preserves the moments when word and image converge in order to produce something new, a space for discrepancy and cooperation in the face of cacophonies of information, in the face of industrial manipulation and enslavement of feelings. In difficult times, times of divisions and segregations, cooperation presents itself as an antidote to tribalism (Richard Sennett). To open this garden, this space for debate and polyphony in the city, Sismógrafo has invited speakers linked to philosophy, aesthetics, art criticism, fine arts and cinema who, at different times and from different perspectives, will try to present a diagnosis of the present.