"All things clothed in the glory of superb equality". Two nineteenth-century United States concepts of biopolitics: Edward Payson Evans versus Voltairine de Cleyre

Abstract

This paper analyzes two contrasting contemporary concepts of biopolitics, from the late nineteenth century United States. The first, by Edward Payson Evans, recognized in works on ecology and animal rights as a pioneer against anthropocentrism and biocentrism. The second, by Voltairine de Cleyre, is excluded by the same literature. For these objectives, it interprets the texts of both on animals, nature and culture, law and justice using a transdisciplinary approach and a critical decolonial ecofeminist perspective. Methodologically, it deploys bibliography and tools from philosophy, political, intellectual, and legal history, history of science, biology and ethnobiology. It introduces the problem of the lack of context of Evan´s current, in order to address, in the second and third sections, his conception of animal politics, and of justice and law, respectively. In the fourth and fifth sections it studies the work of Voltairine de Cleyre on the same topics. The results are that Evans' biopolitics was a necropolitics, in contrast with de Cleyre, whose biopolitics was a non-essentialist ecofeminist one. It concludes by arguing that her perspective, like those of other silenced voices, needs to be included in ecological histories to sustain life on our shared planet.