Narratives for urgent futures. Feminist keys and relationality facing the Anthropocene-Capitalocene scenario

Abstract

Starting from the proposal of this thematic issue, which calls for the intertwining of philosophy and feminisms from the present challenges, feminist contributions are made in their power to interrupt the necrotic scene of the Anthropocene, enabling the possibility of other narratives, disobedient to the dominant ones. Responding to the Anthropocene-Capitalocene, as a “limit-event”; that puts at risk the continuity of human and non-human life as we know it, requires a creative exercise that has an inescapable political scope. Such an exercise implies a onto-epistemic shift and an opening to other ways of being and doing. In this shift it is fundamental to think beyond anthropocentric and androcentric paradigms, and to challenge modern dualistic ontology. In this direction, it investigates proposals from feminist thinkers who agree on the political affirmation of relationality, ontological commitment that becomes necessary in view of the scope it has to design living worlds.

Within the debates on the Anthropocene, there are two dimensions to put in dialogue with feminisms: on the one hand, the ontological-political scope of the Anthropocene-Capitalocene and, on the other, the urgency to intervene in the dispute for the future. In relation to the latter the relevance of the concept of refuge is recovered, as key to think a policy of regeneration and recomposition, feminist and relational. Throughout the writing it is argued in order to place the axis of political and epistemic praxis in the reproduction of life, the network of interdependencies and the concomitant care of increasingly precarious threads, as key aspects for the emergence of future others.

In this sense, the article proposes to recover notions of feminist thought, understanding them as urgent narratives that dispute the conventional itineraries of debates on the Anthropocene, since they encourage other metaphors and categories to inhabit in another way the times that we have. In the first place, it ventures into the political affirmation of interdependence and struggles for the common according to the contributions made by Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Lucía Linsalata and Lorena Mina Navarro. Secondly, it is interesting to enter the world of strange kinships, affinities and multispecies alliances promoted by Donna Haraway (2019), to reconfigure ties and open the possibility of building other communities, not post-human, but compost.

Thirdly, in connection with the foregoing, the question arises of the non-anthropocentric care practices and the responsibilities that entails assuming ontological commitments with relationality, together with the contributions of María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, 2021). Also, by way of synthesis, some premises that they share from the multiple and diverse ecofeminisms are recovered (Herrero, 2017a), to insist on the link between patriarchy and planetary devastation. It is proposed to inscribe relational feminist narratives in a common horizon to imagine and narrate(us) a time and space that is developing beyond the Anthropocene, which Haraway (2019) names as Chthuluceno.