Call Your "Mutha'"

The ecocide and domination of nature that is the Anthropocene does not represent the actions of all humans, but that of Man, the Western and masculine identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that long has masked itself as the civilized and the human. In this book, Jane Caputi looks at two major "myths" of the Earth, one ancient and one contemporary, and uses them to devise a manifesto for the survival of nature—which includes humanbeings—in our current ecological crisis. These are the myths of Mother Earth and the Anthropocene. The former personifies nature as a figure with the power to give life or death, and one who shares a communal destiny with all other living things. The latter myth sees humans as exceptional for exerting animplicitly sexual domination of Mother Earth through technological achievement, from the plow to synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. Much that we take for granted as inferior or taboo is based in a splitting apart of inherent unities: culture-nature; up-down, male-female; spirit-matter; mind-body; life-death; sacred-profane; reason-madness; human-beast; light-dark. The first is valued and the second reviled. This provides the framework for any number of related injustices—sexual,racial, and ecological.This book resists this pattern, in part, by deliberately putting the dirty back into the mind, the obscene back into the sacred, and vice versa. Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice argue for the significance and reality of the Earth Mother. Caputi engages specifically with the powers of that Mother, ones made taboo and even obscene throughout heteropatriarchal traditions. Jane Caputi rejects misogynist and colonialist stereotypes, and examines the potency of the Earth Mother in order todeepen awareness of how our relationship to the Earth went astray and what might be done to address this. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American, ecofeminism, ecowomanism, green activism, femme, queer and gender non-binary philosophies, literature and arts, Afrofuturism, and popular culture images,Call Your "Mutha" contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence so much of Man's supremacy, but instead a sign that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is turning away, withdrawing the support systems necessary for life and continuance. Caputi looks at contemporary narratives and artwork to consider the ways in which respect for the autonomous and potent Earth Mother and a call for their return has already reasserted itself into our political and popular culture.

Caputi's book is a dynamic journey of connections, tracing from prehistory to the present the development of the Anthropocene and its wide and intersecting consequences. In charting and elucidating the Anthropocene, Caputi draws from a vital, vibrant entanglement of prose, music and poetry, of theory and dreamscape and art and activism., "[A] dynamic work of scholarship that seeks nothing less than to reverse ecocide and halt the death march of the Anthropocene by gathering a chorus of diverse voices to speak on behalf of Mother Nature-Earth., Jane Caputi looks at two major "myths" of the Earth, one ancient and one contemporary, and uses them to devise a manifesto for the survival of nature—which includes human beings—in our current ecological crisis. These are the myths of Mother Earth and the Anthropocene.... Caputi rejects misogynist and colonialist stereotypes, and examines the potency of the Earth Mother in order to deepen awareness of how our relationship to the Earth went astray and what might be done to address this. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American, ecofeminism, ecowomanism, green activism, femme, queer and gender non-binary philosophies, literature and arts, Afrofuturism, and popular culture images, it contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence so much of Man's supremacy, but instead a sign that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is turning away, withdrawing the support systems necessary for life and continuance., This book is nothing short of a total reimagining and upending of how we relate to the earth and to each other. Caputi artfully and radically envisions a world where we replace hierarchies, dominance, and binaries with messiness, interconnectedness, and collective renewal. We have a choice: one path leads to the intensifying and catastrophic consequences of misogyny and plundering of the planet, while the other offers a world of fanciful dreams, delightful collisions, and irrepressible world-building., Jane Caputi's Call Your "Mutha'" could not have arrived at a better time than now when we are feeling the detrimental effects of a global pandemic that climate change helped to foster. Caputi's urgent call to resist our Anthropocene age and return to our earliest worldview of Earth-Mother is a bold challenge to the postmodern feminists reducing this cosmology to gender essentialism. Of particular value is her generous citations of feminists of color who laid the blueprint for an inclusive, sustainable earth consciousness that we all now need to embrace.

Jane Caputi is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University. She is the author of The Age of Sex Crime; Gossips, Gorgons and Crones; and Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture. She has also made two educational documentaries: The Pornography of Everyday Life and Feed the Green: Feminist Voices for the Earth.