Alicia Puleo

Alicia Puleo holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid and is a Profesora Titular (associate professor) of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Valladolid.

She is a member of the latter university's Council of the Chair of Gender Studies, and of the Council of the Complutense University's Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas (in English: Feminist Research Institute).[2]

She directed the Chair of Gender Studies at the University of Valladolid for a decade (2000–2010) and has coordinated several seminars at the Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas, including the Discurso sobre la sexualidad y crítica feminista (Discourse on Feminist Sexuality and Criticism) and Feminismo y ecología (Feminism and Ecology).[3]

Puleo has combined her teaching career with research and the publication of numerous books and articles on inequality between men and women, gender, and feminism.

She was a finalist for the National Essay Award for the book Dialéctica de la sexualidad. Género y sexo en la Filosofía Contemporánea (Dialectic of Sexuality: Gender and Sex in Contemporary Philosophy; 1992).

In 2004, she coordinated editing of the book Mujeres y Ecología: Historia, Pensamiento, Sociedad (Women and Ecology: History, Thought, Society), which included the relationship between the environmental movement and the feminist movement and different experiences in Spain and the international arena.[3]

In 2011 Puleo published Ecofeminismo para otro mundo posible (Ecofeminism for Another Possible World), a work in which in addition to collecting the history of ecofeminism and analyzing the contributions of the feminist movement to the environmental, not always recognized, she develops her proposal of what she has called a critical or enlightened ecofeminism.[1]

In September 2014 she assumed the direction of the publisher Editorial Cátedra's Feminism Collection.[4]

In 2015, she published the collective book Ecología y género en diálogo interdiciplinar (Gender and Ecology in Interdisciplinary Dialogue), in which the socio-cultural frameworks that weave relationships between bodies and the ecosystems they inhabit are analyzed.[5]

Puleo's work is articulated around the concern for inequality between men and women. She analyzes the socio-cultural mechanisms that prevent overcoming this inequality and the means that feminist philosophy offers to defuse them.[6] In some of her studies on the French Enlightenment she examines the roots of this pending subject of modern democracies. The works dedicated to the evolution of the concept of sexuality in Arthur Schopenhauer's contemporary philosophy to Georges Bataille are configured as a critique of the legitimizing theories of violence to which she has referred with the concept of "transgressive eroticism".[7][8]

Her work has bridged the gap between different currents in feminist theory. In her essay "For a Better World: Alicia Puleo's Critical Ecofeminism", UCLA professor Roberta Johnson writes, "In moving beyond the polarizing division between equality and difference feminism that has characterized Spanish feminist theory in the 1980s and 1990s, Puleo has found ways to combine equality feminism's reason and difference feminism's affect."[9]

Puleo is recognized as one of the most relevant ecofeminist thinkers today. Roberta Johnson characterizes her as "arguably Spain's most prominent explicator-philosopher of the worldwide movement or theoretical orientation known as ecofeminism."[10]

Puleo's proposal of what she has called a critical or enlightened ecofeminism can be considered a new nonessentialist form of environmental ethics in terms of gender.[11] She does not consider that women are in a kind of symbiosis with nature, but is of the conviction that we live in an era of unsustainable growth that makes the link between feminism and ecology inevitable. She maintains that the mutual enrichment of both perspectives would allow building a culture of equality and sustainability.

My position is rooted in the enlightened tradition of analysis of oppressive doctrines and practices. It claims the equality and autonomy of women, with particular attention to the recognition of sexual and reproductive rights that in some forms of ecofeminism could be eroded in the name of the sanctity of life. It accepts the benefits of scientific and technological knowledge with prudence and vigilant attitude. It promotes the universalization of the values of the ethics of care, avoiding making women the saviors of the planet. It proposes intercultural learning without undermining the human rights of women and affirms the unity and continuity of Nature out of evolutionary knowledge, the feeling of compassion, and the will for justice towards non-human animals, that Other ignored and silent, but capable of yearning, loving, and suffering.

— Alicia Puleo, Ecofeminismo para otro mundo posible[12]

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