Thinking from the Crisis: Ecofeminist Dialogues with Feminist Political Economy beyond the Anthropocene

This paper proposes an ecofeminist engagement with Feminist Political Economy (FPE) to address what can be understood not merely as an environmental or economic crisis, but as a civilizational crisis. While the Anthropocene has become a dominant frame to describe the entangled ecological, economic, and social breakdowns of our time, its universalizing and depoliticizing narrative often obscures the gendered, racialized, and colonial dynamics at the heart of these processes. Drawing on ecofeminist thought, this paper argues that the notion of civilizational crisis provides a more precise and politically meaningful diagnosis of the present conjuncture, as it foregrounds the structural interdependencies between patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and the destruction of nature. Engaging with FPE’s long-standing concern with social reproduction, the paper suggests that ecofeminism can enrich this tradition by reorienting it around what can be called the reproduction of life in its broadest sense — human and more-than-human, material and affective, ecological and planetary. In doing so, it articulates four ecofeminist “turns” — depatriarchalizing, de-anthropocentrizing, decolonizing, and demilitarizing — as a theoretical and methodological toolkit for rethinking the foundations of political economy from the standpoint of interdependence and vulnerability. Methodologically, the paper reflects on what it means to “think from the crisis.” It argues that facing the current polyhedral crisis requires not only new analytical categories, but also epistemological and ethical shifts: from production to reproduction, from domination to care, from abstraction to situated knowledge, and from extractive research practices to relational methodologies. By bringing ecofeminist epistemologies into conversation with feminist political economy, the paper aims to contribute to a broader feminist reimagination of the political and the economic, one that takes the sustainability of life — rather than growth, accumulation, or resilience — as the organizing principle of our collective futures.