Material elements: The matter of women, the matter of Earth, the matter of God Anne F. Elvey The matter of Earth – of air, water, soil, forests, stones, seeds, kangaroos, wattles, eucalypts, viruses, magpies, tiger snakes, creeks, humans, mosquitos, mountains and seas – and the matter of women’s lives intertwine in complex ways that cannot be reduced to a simple identification of woman with Earth. Nonetheless, ecofeminist theorists and theologians insist that women, bodies and Earth have each been treated as the ‘other’ within a framework of hierarchical dualism which celebrates the mastery of a particular, limited kind of rationality. 1 Val Plumwood clearly marks out several of the strategies by which this limited and destructive rationality operates: radical exclusion; homogenisation and stereotyping; backgrounding and denial; incorporation; and instrumentalisation. At the same time as continuing a socialist politics and ethics, she moves in recent work to claim a space for a materialist spirituality that affirms matter. 2 Aware of some of the difficulties in affirming matter in this way, in particular the problem which Plumwood 3 herself describes, of reinvoking through reversal the colonizing logic one seeks to unsettle, I want in this essay to explore the possibility of an ecofeminist material transcendence. That is, in the terms of this collection, to consider the possibilities and challenges for Christian theologies of a focus on matter not simply as a site of divine immanence. I propose that we consider matter as itself in 1 See, for example, Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, Zed Books, Kali for Women, New Dehli,1988; Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1992; Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, Spinifex, North Melbourne, 1993; Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge, London and New York, 1993 and Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, Routledge, London and New York, 2002; Mary Mellor, Feminism and Ecology, Polity Press, Cambridge,1997; Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern, Zed Books, London,1997; Chris Cuomo, Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing, London and New York, Routledge, 1998; Kate Rigby, ‘The Goddess Returns: Ecofeminist Reconfigurations of Gender, Nature, and the Sacred’, in F. Devlin Glass and L. McCreddin (eds), Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2001, pp.23–54. 2 Plumwood, 2002, pp. 218–35. 3 Plumwood, 1993, pp. 61–2.