2009 Theme:

The Nature of Mother Nature:
Women, Power, and the Environment

In Czech legend, the mother of all things Czech, prescient Libuse, stood on the Vysehrad ridge and foresaw a great city along the Vltava. Chosen by her father, Krok, to lead, she proved herself a gifted arbiter, but eventually was forced by the men of the tribe to choose a prince. She chose a common plowman, and thus the Premyslid dynasty began, and patriarchy was insured.

The gendering of the world is as old as language, as old as human intention. That fecundity should be linked to femaleness perhaps is only natural, except that what indeed is “natural” is as problematic as meaning itself, as the infamous Saussurean chasm between signifier and signified.

And yet a gendered world is the essence of myth, which is the essence of cultural meaning, such as it is. Civilization is rooted, as it were, in agriculture, in the control of nature, its ownership and manipulation. All physical boundaries—borders of private lands, principalities, nations, states, and all alliances thereof—begin in the fundamental and fundamentally patriarchal assumption of agriculture: I am a male and I have dominion over this piece of land and all who will be sustained by my labor. Male dominion over land is power over what is conceived essentially as female. Even the greatest of fertility gods, Dionysus, was not an embodiment of fecundity but an agent of it; his Maenads, his blood-lusty retinue of crazed women, embodied that over which the fey god exerted his power.

And “power” of course is gendered, as well. There is male power (agriculture and all that extends from it, which is to say civilization as such), and female power (“nature,” all things “natural”: precisely that which male power exists to subdue, control). Humankind’s effect upon the physical environment it requires to exist is the defining issue of the age; indeed, to reduce the fact of the deleterious effect of human activity on the environment to an “issue” is to minimize, soften the truly apocalyptic dimensions of that effect.

The 2009 session of the Prague Summer Program will explore the relation of feminist aspirations to ecological necessities. Proceeding on the assumption that the transition from planetary exploitation to stewardship will require nothing less than a re-imagining of the world, we will seek to understand better the gendered codes in the myths, legends, advertisements, fictional and non-fictional narratives in all forms, and the relation of those codes to individual and collective behaviors both nurturing and destructive.

Richard Katrovas, Director
Prague Summer Program