Thinking–Feminism–Place: Situating the 1980s Australian Women’s Peace Camps

Abstract

This chapter connects thinking, feminism, and place, to suggest a link between ecology and epistemology, between the environment in which we live our lives and the production of knowledge generated through those times, places, and lived bodily experiences. Val Plumwood’s encounter with a crocodile, for example, was transformational in her life and thinking, and symptomatic of the intimacy between the corporeal and the conceptual in feminist thinking. Interested in how ideas move, how we’re moved by ideas, and how social movements are made, Bartlett takes up the idea of situated knowledge and partial perspective as legacies of 1980s feminist thinking amid Cold War politics and feminist peace activism of that time. Specifically, she aligns them with her research into the 1980s women’s peace movement in Australia, especially the Pine Gap women’s peace camp that took place in the central Australian desert in the summer of 1983. Through this emblematic event, she argues for the ways in which embodiment, ecologies, and epistemology are entangled, and then renegotiates the currency of the 1980s thinking in relation to contemporary times and places. Thinking–feminism–place is conjoined to anticipate the potency of place, bodies, and ideas as mutually constitutive and transformational. Bartlett calls this an epistecology: an ecology of feminist epistemology.