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Abstract
This article draws on three ecofeminist theorists (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway) in order to criticize the dominant model of globalization, which oppresses humans and the natural environment, and propose an alternative globalization grounded in planetary love. Rather than affirming or opposing the globalization, planetary love acknowledges its complicity with the neocolonial tendencies of globalization while aiming toward another globalization, a more just, peaceful, and sustainable globalization. In this context, love is characterized by non-coercive, mutually transformative contact, which opens spaces of respect and responsibility for the unique differences and otherness of planetary subjects (humans and nonhumans).
Notes
1. This strategic deployment of generalizations is related to what Spivak (Citation1988) terms “strategic essentialism” (205). Long-term efforts for promoting ecological and social justice must take the risk of deploying essentialist determinations found in names like “nature,” “woman,” and so on. The task of strategic essentialism is to make these strategies critically self-conscious so that they do not fall into oppressive tendencies whereby essentialisms efface difference and alterity. “The strategic use of an essence as a mobilizing slogan or masterword like woman or worker or the name of the nation is, ideally, self-conscious for all mobilized. This is the impossible risk of a lasting strategy” (Spivak 1993, 3).
2. Drawing on the etymology of the word “complicity” (which is related to “complexity”), Spivak (Citation1999) suggests that to be in a “complicitous” relationship is to be “folded together” (361).
3. For further explorations of the increasingly productive relationship between theologians and Spivak's work with planetary love, see the collection of essays in Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology (Moore and Rivera Citation2011).