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Syllabus: Ecofeminism is ‘idea that women and the more-than-human world share a political fate’
A course titled “Ecofeminist Poetry & Poetics” being taught this spring at the University of Virginia has students “listen” to plants and animals to better understand how “settler colonialism” and slavery “thrive off of the intrinsic interconnectedness between species.”
However, the president of an alumni group told The College Fix that “politicized” courses such as this stray away from the university’s founding ideals.
The class is being taught by English Professor Brian Teare, according to the course syllabus. The College Fix received the syllabus through a public records request.
The syllabus defines ecofeminist research as “any mode of inquiry guided by critical ecological feminism, the idea that women and the more-than-human world share a political fate determined by a master model that divides up the world into unequal and antagonistic dualisms.”
The course description begins with a question: “‘How can we listen across species,’ asks Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, ‘across extinction, across harm?’”
It continues: “And how can the practice of poetry extend the senses, aid us in listening and speaking to, touching, and moving in ethical relation to the imperiled world?”
“Much ecofeminist poetry makes visible how chattel slavery, imperialism, industrialization, settler colonialism, and militarization take advantage of and thrive off of the intrinsic interconnectedness between species, ecosystems, humans, and human systems,” it continues.
To answer these questions, the syllabus states that “birds, goats, willow oaks, and lichen will accompany us through the semester as we too attempt to listen across species.”
“‘To see what happens,’ writes Gumbs, when we ‘rethink and re-feel’ our own ‘relations, possibilities, and practices’ in conversation with the more-than-human world,” it continues.
In a “learning outcomes” section, the syllabus states that the course will introduce students “to ecopoetics as a literary tradition and ecofeminism as a critical discourse, and to facilitate an understanding of how they intersect.”
Readings for the course include “feminist, literary,” and “postcolonial” works, as well as contemporary ecofeminist poetry. They include, but are not limited to, Ariana Benson’s “Black Pastoral,” Joan Naviyuk Kane’s “Milk Black Carbon,” and Madhur Anand’s “Parasitic Oscillations.”
The Fix emailed Professor Teare for comment twice over the past few weeks, asking what he would say to those who may argue the subject seems too ideological for a public university. He did not respond.
The university’s media relations office also did not respond when asked how many students are enrolled in the course and why the university decided to offer it.
However, the course attracted criticism from a leader of the Jefferson Council, an alumni network “committed to leading the University of Virginia back to Thomas Jefferson’s legacy of freedom and excellence,” according to its website.
Its president, John Gardner, told The Fix in a recent email that the course is “clearly viewing the world through a narrow predetermined politicized lens.”
“Courses such as this should not be supported by taxpayer dollars. The purpose of a public university is to educate, not indoctrinate,” he told The Fix.
When asked if there was anything in the syllabus he found particularly surprising, Gardner told The Fix both yes and no.
“It is surprising to the extent that such an inane and clearly agenda based politicized course could find its way into the curricula of any respectable institute of higher learning,” he told The Fix.
“Moreover, the course description itself would befuddle most rational individuals. It is a word salad of such utter foolishness as to make Kamala Harris look like an eloquent orator,” he said.
“It is not surprising to the extent that over the past decade or more the increasingly left wing politicized faculties of most universities have turned their curricula into woke fantasylands,” Gardner said.
The rotunda where the class is taught was designed by Thomas Jefferson, according to the university’s website.
Commenting on the significance of the location, Gardner told The Fix that “perhaps the Jeffersonian saying most often quoted at UVA concerning the founding of his university is — ’For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead.’”
“Mr. Jefferson (as we refer to him at UVA) founded UVA as a public institution to educate a broader segment of the population than what was then the current situation. He felt it was important to have an educated and informed citizenry to sustain a successful republic,” he said.
“Courses like this one are not meant to follow truth, but to advance a political/social agenda. It is more suitable to be a course taught in Orwell’s 1984 than at Mr. Jefferson’s University,” he told The Fix.
Gardner pointed out other examples of courses that he believes are concerning at UVA, including “Women and Gender in the Deaf World,” “Gender, Body Image, and Social Activism,” and “Queer Judaism.”
The last of the three included the following questions in its description, according to Gardner: “How might we radically reimagine what Judaism is, was, and could be through queer theory? How does Judaism queer our understanding of what ‘religion’ is? What if we approached Judaism as a queer religion?”
Gardner said these classes are just a few examples, and UVA is offering others that also concern him.
“There are many others with the common theme that they are mostly narrowly focused on allegedly marginalized ‘identity groups’ based on race, gender or ethnicity and are often intended to promote a predetermined agenda,” he told The Fix.
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