'Mother? Nature?': Germaine Greer, contemporary feminisms and new materialisms

Although Germaine Greer is best known for her often-controversial opinions on feminist issues, her interest in and engagement with the botanical sciences and environmental conservation dates back several decades. Greer has long-recognised a historical connection between women and the natural world as exploited, abused or undervalued in patriarchal societies. In this article I show how The Female Eunuch and White Beech might be better understood through contemporary feminist writing and the ecocritical theories often described as the "material turn" or "new materialisms," notable in the work of Jane Bennett (2010), Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010), Stacy Alaimo (2010), Karen Barad (2007) and others. This article considers how the early and more recent writings of Greer are concerned with critiquing the false similarities that Western science and philosophy have set up between women and nature. Further, I suggests that Greer explores what new materialists would now describe as the entangled agency of matter or "choreographies of becoming," to argue the need for a radical overhauling of human-human and human-nonhuman relations in Western cultures.