“How Can We Prevent…?”: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas at the Time of Ecofascisms

This chapter attempts to achieve this goal by discussing ‘ecofascism’ as an oxymoronic concept through a critical lens offered by posthuman feminism, which functions as a synthesis of (some of the) different issues connected to this form of new fascism, including racism and environmentalism. To develop my discussion on how to respond to ecofascism, I rely on selected insights provided by a seminal text of anti-fascist thinking – Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) – while establishing a dialogue between it and recent episodes of ecofascism in New Zealand and the United States of America. More attentively, I rely on the notions of ‘home’ that Woolf sees as the starting point for contrasting fascism when one rethinks the discriminatory relational dynamics within the domestic environment of the Victorian family, which occurred at the detriment of women, by proposing alternative educational practices: the latter, Woolf affirms, allows for reconsidering the chauvinistic assumptions characterizing both patriarchal and fascist mindsets. Along this line, I argue that reassessing the pluralistic, inclusive stance of the notion of ‘oikos’ – the comprehensive household of human-nonhuman relationality – when discussing ecological principles, especially with young generations, represents a possible way out of the subtle penetration of (new) fascism in apparently harmless cultural manifestations, such as with environmentalism.