At a time when humans
must really radically change the
way our needs are met or face extinction, it seems really important to
incorporate ecofeminist insights
about the politics of care into a transition to a post carbon future.
And many ecofeminists are calling
for the kind of fundamental restructuring of society that entails organizing social
reproduction in the new way, in order to
make the work of our daily
survival less onerous and more
enjoyable and democratic than we have seen under
capitalism so far.
And these are not new demands - they've been made repeatedly and have been
made countless times over the decades,
precisely because ecopolitical thinkers
and activists don't bring an intersectional approach to thinking
about environmental justice.
Welcome
to the Ecopolitics Podcast.
A podcast series that tackles some of the big questions in the
field of environmental politics for university students in Canada.
I'm Peter Andrée from Carleton University,
cohost of the show, along
with Dr Ryan Katz-Rosene from the University of Ottawa, though he's
not joining us for this episode.
Today's podcast
is about pluralism, ecofeminism
and queer
ecology.
To introduce
this topic, I just want to talk a bit about my own
path into ecopolitics.
Towards
the end of my undergrad in the early 1990s, I was really taken by the big
question of How did we get into this environmental crisis in the first place?
And what does that mean for the work we need to do to respond to it?
As I wrestled with this question, I came to see that there are many
different ways of answering it from different perspectives, each of which
can carry some valuable insights.
My own thesis work led me to engage
with early ecofeminist writers,
like Carolyn Merchant, who wrote an amazing book called The Death of Nature.
I came to see that we can't make sense of the environmental crisis without
understanding the power and impact of
patriarchy in our lives.
That is the values, relationships and institutional
structures that have subordinated women to
men, which have also placed
the rest of nature in a subordinate position in relation to a very particular
instrumental and exploitative rationality
associated with patriarchy in Western history.
I won't go too much more into that now because I'm hoping our guests
can help unpack this a little bit over the course of this episode.
I do want to say though, that I came to realize that we all, regardless of our
gender and position, we've all paid a price for this patriarchal system we are
part of.
Though I fully recognize of course some pay a dearer price
than others.
A simple example can be
found in what Laurie Adkin said in another
episode in
this series, in which she pointed
out that there's a particular masculinity associated with focusing only on
drawing raw bitumen out of the ground in Alberta, and which refuses to see
as equal the potential economic and social benefits associated with jobs
in the energy retrofitting industry.
I believe we all have a lot to gain by getting clarity not only on how gender is
connected to environmental exploitation, but also racism and heterosexism for
example, how these things continue to shape the way that environment
is understood and engaged with.
So there's so much to learn and think through when taking these
issues seriously, as we try to make sense of environmental politics.
So I'm really excited about the conversation we're going
to have it today in this
podcast with Professor Catriona Sandilands and Dr Sherilyn MacGregor.
Catriona, or Cate, Sandilands
is a writer and scholar in the environmental humanities.
She's professor of environmental arts and justice in the faculty of environmental
and urban change at York University.
Her research sits at the intersection of feminist and queer theory, multi-species
studies, especially plant human relations and the interdisciplinary
environmental humanities.
She's
written or edited
several books,
among them: Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, co-edited
with Bruce Erickson.
Sherilyn McGregor is reader in environmental politics, jointly
appointed to the sustainable consumption Institute and the politics department
in the school of social sciences at the University of Manchester in the UK.
The focus of her research is the relationship between feminist politics
and environmental politics, particularly around issues of sustainability, justice,
citizenship, and unpaid care work.
She has written or edited a number of books, including
the 2017 Routledge Handbook
of Gender and Environment.
So as I said, one of the
things today's episode is about is taking
pluralism
seriously in ecopolitics,
a topic Ryan and I first introduced in our opening episode.
In that episode, we discussed the importance of recognizing that any
narrative in environmental politics is inevitably grounded in both the
positionality of the storyteller and an epistemology, a set of assumptions about
what counts as legitimate knowledge.
Sometimes positionality and epistemological assumptions are
foregrounded in the story, but often they're cleverly hidden within
relations to power
that seemed to predetermined whose voice has more authority than others.
So for the first question, I'm going
to turn to Cate Sandilands.
Cate, in one
version of your faculty profile at York University you stated that your primary
task as a teacher, writer, and researcher is the cultivation of plurality.
What do you mean by the cultivation of plurality?
Why do you think it's so important when it comes to efforts to address environmental
issues like climate change, for example?
Thank you very much for the question, Peter.
The idea of the cultivation of plurality begins in the assumption not only that
we all have different relationships to environmental issues such as climate
change or indeed issues such as COVID, but that there is a real merit to discussing
those issues in common in ways that
acknowledge, respect and
proceed from our very particular positionalities or situated knowledges in
the world as Donna Haraway would say.
Plurality is not the
same thing as Everyone has the right to their own opinion, which is in my
opinion, not a very sensible phrase.
An opinion is not something that one has a right to.
An opinion is something that is grounded in experience of
the world, everyday experience
of the world.
So I have a particular situation in relationship to climate change.
I see particular things.
I
experience different
particular things.
I'm affected in particular ways.
That's not the be all and end all of environmental knowledge.
As opposed to a model in which we are presented with
climate change as a fact, or a
process or in particular,
the idea that we are all somehow in the
same boat.
The idea of the cultivation
of plurality means that we start from our
individual understandings and bring
them to
the table in common, so
that we are
able to hold our different
knowledges of the world accountable to one another.
So in a way, the idea of the cultivation of
plurality is the idea
that we bring our situations to the table and discuss their
relationships rather, than
assume that we all proceed
to understand or act in relationship to environmental issues from some
kind of position of sameness.
Sherilyn, much of your scholarship focuses on gender and the environment.
For example, you've written a book
grounded in an ecofeminist analysis
entitled Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship
and the Politics of Care.
What does ecofeminism mean to
academics studying the relationship among people, and between people in the
environments they live and
work in/ and what has
adopting an ecofeminist position come to
mean in your own work?
Thank you, Peter.
It's great to be with you in this podcast.
By way of
introduction, I'd start by saying that ecofeminism is a body
of environmental political theory that has been developing over the past 40
years or so, first in environmental philosophy and ethics, and then expanded
and elaborated in various ways by scholars in different disciplines, sometimes
using different labels, such as feminist political ecology and feminist ecological
economics.
and I think
it's important to point
out that ecofeminist work in
the environmental social sciences is probably somewhat more relevant to
students of environmental politics, and it's also where I locate my work.
But I'd also want to know that there's a lot of
important ecofeminist work being
done in the environmental
humanities in English
and literary criticism, cultural studies, post humanist philosophy, and
so forth.
so that being said
I think also I think
I want to say that I'm
going to talk about
academic ecofeminism.
And it's
important to say here that
academic ecofeminism is very
diverse and transdisciplinary.
And what I'm presenting here is a view from the global North.
And I'd want to stress that many - that there are many
different interpretations and
practices of ecofeminism around
the
world.
So Indian ecofeminism
as
articulated in Vandana Shiva's
work for
example, or the ecofeminisms being practiced
by anti mining activist women in South Africa have very specific
histories and features that I can't cover here, but I think that listeners
should definitely be aware of.
That said, I
would explain ecofeminism as a critical
theoretical lens that focuses on the many ways that gender, as a construct,
shapes how people see and treat nature as well as people's interactions with their
environments.
ecofeminism takes
as a starting point the fact that humans are embodied beings embedded
in relationships who survival depends on other humans, other species,
and the more-than-human
world.
It's very
critical of the Enlightenment ontologies and epistemologies
that you spoke about in the introductory podcast, peter, when you referred to
the Cartesian move of treating mind and body as separate or as hierarchically
ordered.
And ecofeminist thinkers
see these binary structures of thought, mind and body, as well as the dualisms
of culture/nature and male/female as
root causes of the ecological failings of Western culture.
In a very early essay from around
1990, I think Ynestra King set
out some of the foundational
claims of ecofeminist political
theory and wanted really to define it as neither antisocial nor anti natural, but
fundamentally anti-dualistic.
So it's a perspective that understands humans as a species that emerged from,
and being embedded in
the material world.
And it calls for, in King's words, treating this ontology
as a ground for ethics.
And this leads not only to a radically different view
of humans, but also leads ecofeminists
to
advocate an interspecies
politics that recognizes nature as having agency.
Now you might want to say that a lot of
branches of ecopolitical
theory are critical of Enlightenment dualisms and the structures
that they make possible like capitalism, Technoscience, and
colonialism.
Ecofeminism is
certainly not alone in seeking more just inter-species politics, but
what makes ecofeminism specifically feminist and what ecofeminism
brings to ecopolitics that
no other approach brings.
I think, or
perhaps queer ecology also brings, is that it
makes visible the gender norms, relations and asymmetries that
shape human experiences of environmental processes and change.
It says that dominant gender norms of masculinity and femininity, and the
structure of patriarchy are intertwined and entangled with capitalism and
colonialism, and they must be treated as such and they must be analyzed as
such, not least because we won't be able to adequately tackle the root
causes of the current crisis, unless we understand how these crises are
interlinked and mutually reinforcing.
And here, of course, I'm thinking of the crises of capitalism,
climate, care, and now COVID-19.
Thank you, Sherilyn, I recognize
that was a really big question I asked you and I think you've done a really
nice job of sketching
out the broad contours of this
field of ecofeminist political thought.
And then also positioning
the particularities of it as a sort of a feminist
environmental political
theory.
I want to
turn back to Cate now.
Cate,
my understanding is that in your own scholarly development, the
notion of queer ecology
built on your
engagement with ecofeminism in the collection Keywords
for Environmental Studies.
You
begin your
introduction to Queer Ecologies by stating
that this term refers to a loose interdisciplinary constellation of
practices that aim in different ways to disrupt prevailing heterosexist,
discursive, and institutional articulations of sexuality in nature, and
also to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions and environmental
politics in light of queer theory.
So there's a lot to unpack in that one sentence.
That's why I put it out there for us to
think about.
For listeners,
just hearing this term for the first time, how would you describe the core
threads of queer ecology,
especially as they relate to what we broadly think about in this
series as ecopolitics?
The central tenets
of queer ecology are that experiences of sexuality and gender identity are
also influential in shaping one's relationship to the natural world.
In the
introduction to Bruce Erickson's
and my edited book, Queer Ecologies, we thought about that
in three ways in particular.
The first is that ideas of nature are very strongly influenced by
heterosexist and homophobic formulations.
So for example, although this is now beginning to change, and there are
many evolutionary and other biologists who are speaking about sexual
diversity in the more-than-human world, there was
for a very
long time an assumption
that the natural
form of, mammalian
at least, sexuality is
heterosexual and
anything other than that must be some kind of deviation or that the
display of non-heterosexual behavior or homosocial behavior must somehow
be part of the larger practice of heterosexuality in a given
species.
So in bonobos,
for example, a species of primate, there was a reading of female
homosocial behavior as, this must
be a way of cultivating cooperation among the females so that they
could choose which male they were
going to mate with.
That
sort of overwhelming assumption of the fundamental heterosexuality,
the importance of heterosexuality, completely overlooked the fact
that these Bonobos might actually be having fun with one another.
So the first key
tenet of queer ecology is
that heterosexuality and homophobia have been profoundly important in shaping
the ways that we think about nature.
The second is that heterosexuality and homophobia have been incredibly
important in shaping the institutions through which we experience nature.
One of the most obvious is the park.
Central Park was actually designed in a very particular way in
order for appropriate rituals of heterosexual courtship to occur.
And then what
happened in the other
parts of the park, which might not have
been so respectable at the time,
for example, places for sexual contact, were actually criminalized.
The parks were specifically organized to develop heterosexual behavior
and discourage homosexual behavior, which was then criminalized.
The
third tenet of queer
ecology is
that LGBTQ2+ writers are
actually able to not only get us to
challenge those heterosexual
mindsets and institutions through which we understand and experience nature, but
also that queer writers might be able
to show us of thinking
and behaving that are not so tightly tied to these heterosexist
ideas and specifically
institutions around family and inheritance and consumption that
go along with dominant models of the middle class, particularly middle class
nuclear family.
Although this is a
very complex topic and I don't mean to
suggest that queer ecology is
somehow anti-family.
The idea that that futurity might not be tied to inheritance, the idea that
consumption and amassing of wealth in the nuclear family might not be the best
way of thinking about property, about cooperation and thinking about family
is actually what - is actually a very
key insight that queer ecology
has brought to the world.
What does it mean to have intimate, deeply connected relationships with
a family that includes not just other human beings, particularly not just
biologically related human beings, but
also the more-than-human world.
Thank you, Cate.
I realized
that was also a very big question for you and thank you for really
laying out some of the key insights that have been emerging
from, by queer ecology,
particularly around how heterosexism and homophobia Has shaped our
understanding of nature, has shaped the way we build our cities and
institutions and parks as an example.
And then some of the insights that you were getting at in
the end, I think are really
interesting as we think
about the future and the
insights that queer ecology can bring to Who we are and who we need to
be moving forward,
hopefully as a more
inclusive
society.
I'm going
to turn back to Sherilyn.
Sherilyn, in a chapter you published in
the 2018 Routledge Companion to Environmental Studies, you
noted that just as the environment did not enter popular discourse until the
late 1960s, the importance of gender in human societies was popularized in
the global North only
as recently as the 1970s.
Notably both terms relate to movements for social change, environmentalism
and feminism, respectively.
Was there a larger cultural shift in perspective that these
terms are part of in your view?
Yes, I think it's good
to think of about a kind of cultural shift and that these movements are
part of a cultural shift and their key words, gender and environment are
part of this kind of discursive and
cultural kinds of shift.
You know,
thinking about it
through what Ulrich Beck has called reflexive modernization
which is a process or that he's certainly
theorized is a process
that
took place in the time
around the second part of the 20th century, where citizens started to
question and to doubt the idea of progress and the promised benefits
of modern science and technology.
It
became sort of, I mean, it became increasingly
apparent that human wellbeing and
conditions of ecosystem integrity, were under threat from some
of the very
things that were meant to
be the improvements in people's lives.
So like synthetic chemicals, pharmaceuticals, nuclear
technologies, and so on and so on.
So movements started to form to start
to challenge the
authority of hitherto trusted institutions
and to call them to account.
So people wanted to question the accumulation of chemical herbicides and
pesticides in the ecosystem for example.
They wanted to question the prescribing of drugs to healthy women by a largely
male medical profession with almost no understanding of women's bodies.
And it all started to make sense through social movements, through
politicizing these industries is professions and connections were made
right to profit, to power and ideology.
Of course these political movements mobilized to try to foreground
these connections and to make them
something that needed
to be challenged and eventually changed.
Of course it seems rather odd to
look back and celebrate people questioning
scientific expertise in
the current context.
But I've always thought that this reflexive
modernization narrative is quite helpful in thinking about the cultural
shift that gave rise to feminism and environmentalism in the sixties and
seventies in North America and Western
Europe.
And it's certainly I think better one
than the standard, and sometimes we think of quite flawed, post
materialism thesis.
Cate, I wonder
if you want to add
something to what Sherilyn's just been
saying.
Thank you.
This idea of reflexive modernization actually is possibly a useful way of
distinguishing queer ecology what our many
listeners might understand as the primary orientation
of a lot of recent gay
and lesbian politics advocating for example, for marriage equality.
On the one hand, we see what
some call a move toward homonormativity in which a rights-based
agenda for LGBTQ people is that we can have all the same rights as
heterosexuals.
So that we
can have the right to marry.
We can have the right to be the beneficiary on one another's
life insurance policies.
And while I don't want to negate the importance of those
basic rights, queer ecology is not necessarily
interested in having the
same rights, the same
institutions, the same
practices as heterosexual nuclear families as heterosexual
institutions.
Rather queer ecologies seeks to critique those institutions
for their environmental impact.
So queer here is deployed as a critical term rather than a
term that demands kinds of rights-based equality.
Thanks, Cate that's really
helpful.
And Sherilyn too.
I found it was really interesting, you know, to bring in reflexive modernization.
And then,
and then this point that Cate was bringing
up about the distinct positionality of queer
ecologies in perhaps bringing A stronger critique of the, the assumptions
one might hold about simply
wanting to make - open up the
heterosexist institutions and perhaps
make them not just heteronormative,
but also
homonormative.
And you know, that queer ecology is really fundamentally
wanting to challenge the assumptions about what it means to open up
and be a more inclusive society.
And so Sherilyn, I wanted to ask you, I mean, maybe you want to
respond to what Cate just said,
but also just to reflect on
how these social movements
have interacted over the almost a 50 years since.
And particularly do you think environmentalists and the
environmental movement and maybe environmental policies makers have
taken gender more seriously over
the years in their response
to environmental
issues.
And similarly
has the feminist movement become more environmentalist as
these movements have connected?
If you don't mind, I want to start by making my answer a little bit closer
to home, to what I, where I work, which is looking at academic environmental
politics circles, and then say something about the movements and policymakers.
The two have a pretty odd relationship.
And I actually wrote an article, I don't know, probably about 10 years
ago now, in which I call
them natural allies and
perennial foes.
and
you know, I think they would work quite
well together,or at least
I do because I work in a way that brings them
together.
But in reality, there is a lack of
engagement and a level of misrecognition that I've found quite frustrating
and baffling over the years.
If you
take environmental studies as an academic field, there's a well-documented
lack of attention to gender
and feminism in environmental
social science - certainly with, with environmental
politics as a discipline that
probably fares worst of
all.
And you can
actually look at journals
citations or sort of do a search of journal citations to sort of find evidence
for my claim.
There was a study in 2007, by Banerjee and Bell
who
presented results of a citation
index search where they looked for references to gender, sex, or feminism
in the top five environmental social science journals from 1980 to 2005.
And
they found just 3.9% of citations
in these journals had any references to these key terms
of gender, sex, or feminism.
And an exact rerun of
their study was done by
one of my
PhD students Joanna Flavell last year.
And she found that
that figure could be updated
to a whopping 4.4%.
So that's a
pretty shocking lack of attention to feminist insights,
feminist theorizing, feminist research within the environmental social sciences.
I've recently done my own search within Environmental Politics, which is the,
you know, one of the
top journals in our
field of ecopolitics.
And I've tried to look at, you know, what the situation is
there.
And actually Environmental Politics journal is celebrating
its 30th anniversary this year.
And if you look back over
30 years ecofeminism was first
introduced in
the journal in its first
- in volume, one issue two back in 1992.
A few years later, it was praised by
John Barry in an essay where he called it a materialist
theory that suggests nothing less than a fundamental rethink of green politics.
And yet since then, since about the late nineties, it has really faded into the
margins.
And I did a search about a year
ago through the back issues of Environmental Politics and
found a total of 11 articles
where ecofeminism is
central and about five where it is only mentioned in a kind of superficial way.
So the evidence of lack of engagement is pretty overwhelming.
Explaining why there's
a lack of
engagement is not something I'm able
to do.
I can
speculate, but I'd rather
do a bit more research to be able to explain, but it's
definitely worth pondering.
So that's the academic
situation.
There might
be a better level of
productive interaction and engagement between feminism
and environmentalism within social movement and policy circles.
But I would venture to say that a lot of a lot of work by feminists
has gone into putting gender and intersectional analysis on the
green agenda and that not a
lot of effort has been made on the part of
environments to go along
to feminist conferences
and protests and say,
you know, Hey, what about the
climate crisis?
Women's movement
organizations have tended not to focus a lot on environment and
climate, often because they've had more pressing strategic priorities
and a good idea example of this, just to illustrate this, is a couple
of months ago, I was invited to
give a talk on the gender
dimensions of the climate emergency to a South African feminist NGO
network.
And a few, like
a day after I was invited, they said, Oh, sorry, no, we're
going to cancel that because
we actually want to have
a talk on male violence during the pandemic lockdown because this
is far more
urgent for our members
and for our
practitioners and the different
NGOs in the network.
So that puts, you know, that puts the
politics of this into bold relief,
doesn't it?
I mean, women are being killed in their homes
every day while vast swathes of the
planet are on fire.
You know, how do you
prioritize?
so, you know,
in the world of academic feminism there has tended to be a lack of attention
to environmental issues in part due to choices to focus on different
sorts of gender related questions like
violence.
but and also in
part, perhaps due to almost outright avoidance of
environment, out of fear
of being seen as
essentialist or uncritically
aligned with biological nature.
And there's a whole critique of the feminist flight from nature
that Stacy Alaimo has written
about, which I think is
still worth understanding
and appreciating, even though we might want to be extremely critical of it.
And then there's a third part.
I
think of why feminists
have tended to not engage so much with environmental issues,
and that is possibly due to the
domination in some disciplines and fields by a brand
of liberal feminism that advances the narrow interests of elite women in ways
that just sustain capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and other isms.
And just very
quickly on the policy
piece of this, cause you
asked about the extent to which feminism and
environmentalism speak to each other in the policy terrain.
And I often think that that policy often seems farthest
- further ahead on gender and
environment than movements,
and certainly than academia tends to be, and here much of this as the
result of feminist activists who have fought really hard for some small
gains along the bumpy road towards transformative structural change.
And we could look at the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal, for example,
goal number five on gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.
We can look at the
UNFCCC, which has
recently adopted a gender action plan.
And various NGOs and governments
that are engaging in
what they call 'gender mainstreaming' or the mainstreaming of gender
as a concept into environmental
and climate policies.
So we can see some gains in that, those
respects, but that comes
with two really important caveats, however, and the first is that these
policies can be very instrumental.
They can treat women's empowerment as a
useful tool for system
sustaining responses to climate change.
And the second is that they really almost exclusively equate gender
with women to the complete
neglect of men in most cases and probably all cases.
I'm yet to find many examples where, where gender is treated as
the way that feminists would want to treat it, as an intersectional
idea, that is a spectrum
that includes masculinities as well as
femininities.
Thanks Sherilyn.
That was, I have to
say,
somewhat sobering to hear that the field
of environmental
politics has engaged so little with these very
important questions of gender.
And we heard
a similar analysis in
a
previous podcast looking at
environmental racism where the field of environmental studies
was not open to these questions of race until only very recently.
And yet, I mean, I just have to say, I'm so glad that we're including
these episodes in this particular
series and that students,
you know, hopefully the future will have more of this type of work taken seriously
in environmental politics, because it
certainly is for all the
reasons that we're talking about today, so important to making sense of the
environmental crisis and how we may
respond to it.
On this question of gender and
environment and how it's picked up, I'll just
turn back to Cate.
Sherilyn you've also
written
about this, that there's a substantial body of literature,
maybe not in environmental politics, but beyond that,
on women and environment,
but much less on men and
environment.
and that
this imbalance has also led to a rather simplified assumption that
when scholars and activists talk about gender and environment, we're basically
referring to women and the environment.
And one consequence of this simplification is that queer and two-spirited
LGBTQ+ people and
their experiences and perspectives on the intersection
between gender, sexuality, and
environment get very little attention.
Cate, for a number
of years, you've been teaching a course called Sex, Gender, Nature
to undergraduate environmental studies students at York University.
What are the core ideas that you hope students take away from this course
about sex, gender, and nature, maybe building on the ideas from the book
that you talked about earlier, and how do these ideas matter for how, why do
these ideas matter for how we address the environmental challenges of our time?
First I need to
say that my perspective, my work is
currently very strongly
grounded in the environmental
humanities rather than the environmental social sciences.
However I still write about politics.
I think it's very important to, to understand and emphasize that politics
is not limited to policy and that there are multiple sites for the enactment
of politics and engagement with
political work.
And the humanities
and the arts are actually deeply invested in thinking about the
cultivation of plurality that is
necessary to the development
of A real environmental political
consciousness.
So I'm also sobered by
the fact that we're still only 4% of
articles on ecofeminism, but I would
point to the proliferation of work in the arts and in literature that very
strongly articulate to gender and
environment.
One example that I can
think of off the top of my
head is Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy - Oryx and Crake, The
Year of the Flood and MaddAddam.
Throughout
these three novels, which are incredibly popular, there's a
very, very strong and deeply
political analysis
of the relationship between patriarchy and oppressive, gender relations,
sexual violence, and the destruction of the natural environment.
It's not framed in terms of policy it's framed
in terms of getting the reader to understand
between those two very large and violent sets of
processes through their
experience of a fictional world.
So in response to your specific question about the sex gender nature class.
Although I do teach an
interdisciplinary array of works including
policy, including social science and my fundamental orientation is getting
students, male and female and other, to understand through reading works of
literature to see, to
be able to see the world around them in
terms of these dense knots of gender
and environment.
So gender and environment is not just a relationship that is
articulated in a particular
set of places.
One cannot have a relationship to the environment without
being gendered in some way.
Gender and the
environment is an every day relationship.
So
how, how to see that?
How to understand that?
How to be
able to
recognize an everyday moment in which gender is
shaping one's relationship to the environment in a way that
might lead to - in a moment
that might actually act as a moment of transformation.
For example, Chris Cooper and his experiences of racism in relationship to a
white woman in Central Park.
You might
remember that
he is the birder
who filmed a woman accusing him of something that he didn't do simply because
he asked the woman to leash her dog.
And it blew up and it became a very powerful moment to
think about how Black men in this case,
a queer
Black man, How their experience
of space is so heavily organized by experiences
of race.
I would also
argue in that particular moment that you can see the operations of gender going on.
This is a moment
in which it's very
clear that racial politics
were going on, that racism
was going on, but you can also see very clearly that that racialized
interaction was also deeply gendered.
It's very important to speak about masculinity.
It's very important to speak about Black masculinity as an intersectional
relationship that clearly shaped
perceptions of and relationships to natural environments.
My
goal is to help us
create the analytical tools to show these very deeply political moments
in which it becomes absolutely obvious that these are having an effect on
the way that people are interacting with one another in and about the
natural world.
Thank you, Cate.
First
off, I really just want to say thank you for opening up
our conversation about what is
politics.
And I completely
agree with you that art literature films and the
everyday is the political
as well.
And I'm glad you're kind of opening that up for our
listeners in this ecopolitics podcast.
And I think your example of Chris Cooper in the end and talking about the
intersectionality to help analyze his experience
and for us all to
see that - yeah, it's
a great example.
And with that, I just want to turn to Sherilyn because you were using the word
intersectionality earlier on as well.
And I wonder if you could Maybe just talk a little bit about how you understand
intersectionality and what it means to bring an intersectional approach to your
environmental policy or activist work.
I think our listeners would be really interested in hearing about your recent
work on the proposed green new deal for the UK and at the international
level, through the Women's Environment and Development Organization.
This idea of a green new deal as a package of policies and programs designed
to address both the climate crisis and economic inequality is a topic we've
discussed previously in the podcast series
with Bob Paelhke, but with
a focus on the United States and Canada.
What does it mean for you to take an intersectional approach to
conceptualizing something like a green
new deal?
Well, maybe
I
can start like briefly
trying to
explain what an ecofeminist approach
to intersectional analysis looks like before going on to talk about
how we've tried to use it in our work, on the green new deal and the
feminist green new deal.
I guess I'd say that feminism is a Praxis that is striving for
social justice for gender justice.
And it understands power relations and injustices
as having material,
structural, normative, discursive
dimensions, and as operating
on multiple
levels and as being lived
expressed and reproduced through all sorts of social
practices.
So it's very complex, right.
And intersectionality
is a kind of way of naming and working with this complexity.
It's an analytical tool, really, that that's the way I think of it,
as an analytical tool that shows how structures of power emerge and
interact and feminists
theorists of many
different persuasions and approaches use intersectionality
as a way of analyzing specifically the interactions between gender, race, class,
sexuality, age and other categories of
difference in people's
lives and their social practices and institutional relationships and
arrangements in cultural
ideologies as well as sort of the outcomes of these
things and how in terms of
how power is distributed socially.
Of course, this concept
has origins in Black feminist
theory needs to be always attributed to the legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw
and shown that it builds on work by theorists, such as Angela Davis,
bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins and
all of us, including ecofeminists who work
in feminist theory, acknowledge the importance of this work
and showing that gender
is always raced and always classed.
It always
intersects with other axes of difference.
So
intersectionality is needed analytically and politically
in order to avoid simplistic and single axes understandings of gender.
But at the same time, I want to also say that
it should, it can and
should be used to understand the way axes of power and privilege intersect
to position some people as if they are completely unmarked by these categories.
So white, cisgender male, straight, affluent.
You know, this sort
of intersection of certain axes can actually be more relevant to
thinking about environmental problems and the causes of environmental
problems than thinking
about the socially marginalized, you know.
So I think it's wrong.
It would be wrong to think about intersectionality is
only about the intersections of different forms of oppression.
It's also about the intersection of different forms of power and privilege.
I would also
add that while ecofeminist
political theory analyzes the
intersections of identities and positionalities
of humans in the pursuit of social and environmental justice.
It also seeks to bring species, matter, culture, climate to the analysis and
that kind of intersectional analysis and
intersectionality has not necessarily been as normalized
in mainstream
feminism or ecopolitics, it's still
kind of very much under development.
And I mean, I think
that's what ecofeminism has always
tried to do, but actually using
the term intersectionality
and using it as an
analytical lens hasn't been developed as clearly.
And that's actually
a really excellent article that recommend.
One of the
few articles on
gender and ecofeminism that
was published in Environmental
Politics, by Anna Kaijser and Annica Kronsell that looks
at climate change through the lens of intersectionality.
And I think, you know, your listeners and students should definitely have
a look at that article to see how
intersectionality can be applied environmental
political issues more broadly.
Your other part of your question right.
Is okay, how do you bring intersectional approach to thinking about
this topic du jour, green new deal?
So for the
sake of time, maybe I could just flip that question on its head and
talk about what happens when green new deal plans and proposals are
developed without an intersectional
analysis.
and that's
where my
colleague Maeve Cohen and
I started when we wrote our paper on the green new deal in the UK,
which people can read online and maybe it'll have a link to it.
But we started
looking at the range
of plans for a green new deal that have been made by different
political parties and think tanks and just started asking questions.
What's missing here?
What assumptions underpin these policies?
And then we started to look at what's missing, ask those
questions and then start
to craft a response about what
a feminist green new deal would look like.
And we wanted to really show how key analytical insights into intersectional
power relations and questions about distribution of money, time, work,
and responsibility are rarely if ever addressed in green new deal proposals.
And as a result, there's every
chance that these green
new deal
proposals will result in a small number of winners and a great many
losers.
So asking who wins, who loses, who pays, who profits, who
does what work and for whom.
And what axes of oppression and privilege intersect to create these
winners and losers is really part of an intersectional approach.
The interlocking crisis of our time, right, climate, and now
COVID have shown us how capitalism utterly fails in times of crisis.
And it fails because it is really great at commoditizing
and exploiting life and
the
work that sustains
life and really bad at valuing and protecting life and the work
and the workers who sustain
life.
So this is important to make that point because in recent months, the green
new deal is being
rebooted to be
all about a 'just recovery',
right, 'building back better' after COVID.
And there are many
feminists and ecofeminists, especially
in the UK right now who are really United in their
argument that a just recovery
has to
be a care-led recovery.
And making those arguments we really
want to shift the focus of green new deal policymaking away
from its narrow obsession with
energy and you know, transition
via green technologies and jobs in these rather select construction and
engineering sectors, which by the way, happened to be dominated by white men.
The arguments that are being put
forward by ecofeminists and feminists
working
in this, and what we try
to put across in our policy document is that care work is green work, care
jobs, jobs in the care
sectors are green jobs.
And that this work is already being done disproportionately by women,
racialized women and racialized men, and is poorly paid and unpaid.
At the same time, it is absolutely essential for
the economy, for a good
quality of life and for the decarbonization agenda.
And the fact that care work has tended to be ignored in mainstream green new
deal visions is a result of a lack of an intersectional analysis, and that means
that they just really aren't very good.
Thank you Sherilyn.
Your examples really
show how an ecofeminist intersectional
lens, the value, it brings to policy work in the
same way that Cate's example previously showed how this intersectional
approach can really the politics of the day
to day to become apparent
to our
eyes.
Cate, before we
close, I'd also like to ask you a question about some of the
implications of what we're talking about today, bringing us back to
our opening discussion about pluralism.
What does
it mean to take the
insights of ecofeminism and queer ecology seriously in how we imagine
and operate public spaces like
Canada's national parks?
I'm
interested in thinking
about
public spaces and public
institutions and public
practices as sites in
which to highlight questions of
intersectionality - from my perspective, intersectionality is more of
a way of describing the complex embodiments of our daily
lives than it is an analytical
- than it is sort
of
an abstract analytical
construct.
How is it that public
texts, public institutions,
public spaces, such as, but not only national parks.
How, how is it that we can actually understand the specific relations that we
bring to those to those publics,
to those institutions?
And how is it that we can think about for forming
alternate publics that might.
enact perform, expose rebuild sites
of environmental conversation that are not
dominated by a cis white male perspective,
which of course never appears as a cis white male perspective.
It appears as a
universal.
National parks
in Canada, at least, and probably
in other settler colonial
States as well, are
institutions that again, in
which
certain kinds of public gets performed.
So in parks,
you're supposed to do particular
things, you're supposed to behave
in particular ways, you're supposed to learn certain kinds
of thingsabout the history of the city or the
nation, you're supposed to learn certain kinds of things
about nature.
And these these things
are
presented as, as universal
forms of knowledge, often very nationalist forms of knowledge.
So that the story that gets told about the nation in the national park is
actually designed to give people a certain idea of their citizenship.
But art and literature
and performance can, can
politicize those institutions and can show, in the case
of national parks, for example, the relationships of racism and
colonialism as well as
heterosexism and sexism, on which they're built.
The current recognition that national parks are actually nature institutions
that are built on the active
exclusion of first nations, of Indigenous folks in Canada is
actually highlighted by many recent
works of art by Indigenous
artists.
But just
to bring it very specifically
back to queer ecology I
wanted to just talk very briefly about a
performance piece by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan in Banff national
park called Lesbian National Parks and Services which I encourage
readers to Google because there are bits of the
performance available online.
Dempsey and Millan dressed in
wardens uniforms and they created a mock interpretive experience
that used the grammar of hark
interpretive guides as a way of
highlighting the invisibility of
queer history in the park
space.
So they were handing out maps that would show people the invisible
lesbian house and the unmarked sight of a particular sexual encounter.
They mocked and therefore politicized and opened up and
made visible the discourses
around sex, gender,
nature, race in which the
national parks
are steeped.
So again, back to the
point about politics does not only happen at the level
of policy, the vast
majority of politics
doesn't get codified
in
normative prescriptive documents.
Politics also critically
and crucially happens in everyday experiences in everyday encounters.
And that's
the kind of queer ecological work that I have
tended to
focus on.
And that many
queer ecological writers working in the humanities have also focused on.
I want to thank you
both for what's been
really stimulating conversation
for me.
And I'm trying
to think about some of the key takeaways that I'm taking from here.
One, you know, I really
appreciate Cate, the
multiple ways in which you encourage us to really open up
our conception of the political.
And yes, it includes art and literature and parks and the day to day
encounters that we have in our lives.
And you've really brought some great examples
forward to bring those points home.
Secondly,
this notion of
pluralism as critical to a fulsome democratic
discussion.
There are so many points of view that
need to be given credence and allowed to have their
voices participate in thinking through where we are at at this historical
moment in our catastrophe with the earth and how we need
to come out of this and how
we need to see ourselves
and this planet as we move forward.
And the viewpoints that came
forward today, and there
are so
many more, are so important
to those
discussions.
And so finally what I take
from both of you, but in
particular Sherilyn, is this call to action
within - by scholars and
students of environmental politics that we haven't taken
gender and intersectionality,
as that relates to gender,
race, class, sexuality,
we haven't taken it seriously enough yet in understanding the environmental
crisis and thus in thinking through how we are going to and how we are
responding to it through public policy through the economy.
And I think
you've brought that point home very clearly for me.
And I hope that
listeners Take heed and that the next generation
of environmental political work is going to look different from
what, some of what you've described
as the last, what's been
coming out in the last 20 years in this field.
I want to thank you both so much for being with us today.
And this wraps up another
episode of the Ecopolitics Podcast.
Don't forget to check out other episodes in the
series at ecopoliticspodcasts.ca.
And like us on social media, we're on
Twitter at @ecopoliticsp you can
also share your feedback with
us through the contact form
on the website.
Thanks once again to our guests.
And we'll talk to you in our next episode.