CHAPTER 1

Feminist theory for climate change

Introduction: Feminism for weathering together

Weathering together emerged from our research and our lives as feminists. Feminism’s insights and tools have pushed us both to think more closely about environment generally and climate change specifically. Our weathering practice asks us to grapple with questions of bodies, justice, solidarity and difference – feminist mainstays that confirm for us that weathering together is a feminist practice. This practice has reinforced our conviction that climate change is a feminist issue, too.

But the connections between feminism and climate change (and by extension, weathering) are not straightforward. This is partly because feminism’s meaning is contested. While feminism is a gender-aware theory and practice of justice, not everyone agrees on (or is even aware of) the fine print. This chapter, as the first of four chapters that lay out the conceptual foundations of the book, therefore has two aims. The first is to offer a more nuanced argument about the connections between weathering, climate change, and feminism. At a general level, this chapter shows that any climate actions without feminism would simply uphold many miseries of the present. More specifically it offers feminist tools and tactics for a robust, joyful and just climate change response.

The chapter’s second aim looks more closely at feminism’s fine print. Weathering, as we unfurl in the chapters to come, is attention and action towards redistributing shelter and vulnerability in a climate changing world. While we understand weathering as a feminist practice, we need a feminism fit-for-purpose. So what specific kind of feminism does weathering require? We have organized the chapter according to four related responses to this question. The first section of the chapter outlines why weathering’s feminism needs to be both antipolarizing and antifascist: this feminism takes a stand for some worlds and not others,1 even if we can’t decide in advance who’s with us or against us; our feminism can’t be an exclusive identity-based club. The second section argues that we need a feminism that isn’t afraid of nature. Western academic feminism has inherited (and sometimes perpetuated) a fraught relationship to nature, especially when gender inequality has long been seen as a ‘natural’ product of women’s ‘naturally’ different bodies, capacities and roles. Ecofeminism has often served as the fall guy for this anxiety, but as we discuss, rejecting a relationship to nature won’t serve us in a climate-changing world. Third, weathering needs a feminism that is grounded in an embodied politics of solidarity. This links to our commitment to antipolarization, and calls for a feminism that must also be anticolonial, antiracist, queer, gender expansive and multibeing.2 This feminism also acknowledges how power, desire, joy and contradiction are part of figuring out how to do embodied solidarity well. Part three of this chapter presents these commitments in the form of a listicle: necessarily partial and incomplete, and awaiting your additions and amendments.

Finally, weathering’s feminism understands that feminist theory is feminist practice. One of the challenges in writing this chapter has been accounting for all of the yeses, buts and on the other hands that thwart our attempt to be precise about the feminism we are describing. This futility underscores why we have also needed practice all along. Practice shows us where the theory is too blunt, or too blurry. Practice offers new insights or angles that are seeds from which revised theories grow. The concluding section of the chapter therefore describes the first illustrated Inset in this book (Lucky dip) to show how bringing together embodiment and imagination are at the heart of weathering’s feminist practice.

This book opens with a straightforward claim: climate change is a feminist issue. Clear evidence shows that environmental harms impact women in specific and often more severe ways than men (the research is mostly framed in binary-gender terms). More women than men die in climate disasters, such as hurricanes. This was well documented in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina,3 but was also the case both before4 and since.5 Domestic violence rates rise amid natural disasters,6 and sites of massive planetary damage (like man-camps at extraction sites) are also sites of heightened sexual violence.7 Even though climate change will affect us all, its drivers and impacts do not affect us all the same. We need feminism to help us explain and mitigate these disparities.

We also see a connection between climate change and feminism in how both call attention to the commodification and destruction of our bodies and the planet. Powerful men who are pussy-grabbers are often the same powerful men who are land-grabbers, where a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies and the earth’s resources go hand in hand. Opposition to reproductive justice and sexual rights aligns with support for Big Fossil Fuel. Both tend to align with antifeminist, authoritarian versions of masculinity, perhaps epitomized by the pro-extraction promise to ‘Drill, baby, drill!’8 Feminist concerns and climate concerns seem to simply line up.

Links between mastery over nature and heteropatriarchy are not new. Colonial land-theft has long been enacted through violent repression of Indigenous sexual, gender and kinship systems.9 Today, increasingly polarized cultural spaces of ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ politics mean that anti-environmentalism is often tethered to antifeminism in ways that seem both baffling and intractable. But, as Elizabeth Kolbert writes, ‘as a problem, climate change is as bipartisan as it gets’.10 Climate change denial won’t protect you from climate change’s devastating effects, but neither will feminist politics in the abstract. So while climate change action needs feminism, it needs a kind of feminism that can chip away at the entrenchment of positions. Instead of reinforcing polarization, it requires a feminism that is expansive and inclusive. Climate change affects everybody, but luckily, to quote bell hooks, ‘feminism is for everybody’.11 Simple.

But the connection between feminism and climate change is also complex because not all feminisms are the same. Indeed, as decolonial feminist Françoise Vergès has noted, ‘the term “feminism” is not always easy to claim’.12 While internal critiques of (academic) feminism’s whiteness and class privilege are many decades old, a more recent consolidation of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and other kinds of fascist13 ‘feminisms’ into what Sophie Lewis has named ‘enemy feminisms’14 makes it difficult to call oneself a feminist without qualification. In the context of colonial genocide, imperialists calling themselves feminists (sometimes also draped in a pride flag, whereby sexually liberated white feminists will claim to free brown bodies from sexual repression, even if it means bombing them) further frack the foundation of any residual notion of the global ‘sisterhood.’15 ‘Why call yourself “feminist,” why defend feminism’, asks Vergès, ‘when these terms are so corrupted that even the far right can appropriate them?’16

In specifically environmental terms, we also note that white feminism – or what Vergès calls ‘civilizational feminism’,17 that is at equal turns individualist (capitalist, neoliberal) and saviourist (racist, classist) – does not meaningfully redistribute power, or shelter, or vulnerability. Liberal feminists mobilize relative privilege to find political power inside patriarchal and colonial institutions that approve new coal mines and expand existing ones. Relatedly, renewable energy wind farms on stolen Indigenous lands beg the question of which women financially benefit from ‘a greener future’. These supposed feminisms are interested neither in difference nor weathering better, together. They are more congruent with econationalism and ecofascism than feminism. Here, any simple alliance between climate justice and feminism falters.

If we flip that alliance around, we also see that climate change activism and environmentalism are not always ‘feminist-forward’ in an inclusive and transformative sense. Consider this thought experiment: what is the point of making homes fully sustainable (say, with solar-passive, zero-waste renewable energy, with composting, with public and active transport commuter options), if there is no accompanying concern for systemic misogyny, private property regimes on stolen Indigenous lands, the gendered division of labour, deeply problematic policing and carceral systems, or the privatization of care? These homes might be green-star rated, and even (someday) more or less affordable, but they will still shelter a domestic violence crisis, exacerbate colonial dispossession18 and prop up the harms of consumer capitalism. Climate change and related environmentalisms without a commitment to inclusive feminisms will just make the miseries of the present more sustainable.

So weathering together needs feminism, and climate change is a feminist issue. But while the need for feminism in a climate-changing world is real and urgent (simple), all feminisms and environmentalisms do not automatically support a more inclusive and just future (complex). For us, any approach to climate change (research, teaching, art, activism, adaptation, policy and so on) that does not include a transformative, inclusive, justice-oriented, queer, anti-racist and decolonial feminist framework is destined to replicate the problems of the present. bell hooks also tells us that the practice of visionary feminism (even if it is potentially ‘for everyone’) has to become both ‘clearer and more complex’19 in response to a changing world. Becoming clearer requires making choices, and appraising and reappraising feminist tools as they emerge. ‘There are times when we have to stand for justice’, hooks writes, ‘and in standing for justice, there are times when we have to turn away.’20 For us this means turning away from things like trans-exclusionary feminisms which use ideas of nature to license hate, or ‘green’ techno-fixes that use the guise of sustainability to further capitalist expansion and colonial dispossession. As we have argued elsewhere, sometimes you need to break a relation in order to make a relation.21

Like Vergès, though, we are still committed to feminism. We need it! Specifically, our weathering project needs a feminism that can build a commons (antipolarizing) and navigate dangerous off-ramps into exclusionary and regressive feminisms and environmentalisms (antifascist). We need a feminism that holds both the simple and the complex.

1. 1.Feminism as an embodied politics of solidarity starts with bodies. Many different versions of feminism have argued that all theory – no matter how seemingly abstracted – begins in our bodies, and affects bodies in close and distanced ways. Any suggestion that theory is disembodied is another God Trick!46 Weathering as a feminist practice brings climate change to the scale of the body because that is how we live it, and that is how we, as different bodies, live it differently. As lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich encouraged us, ‘Start with the geography closest in – the body’.47 Feminist tools such as Rich’s politics of location allow us to account for our differences as anchors for practising an embodied politics of solidarity. Feminism also understands what’s at stake when bodies are deemed insignificant by a false masculinist hierarchy of rational minds over sensing bodies.
2. 2.Feminism as an embodied politics of solidarity supports Indigenous sovereignty and anticolonial futures. Acknowledging our own politics of location relates to what Max Liboiron calls ‘specificities and obligations’.48 This means not only listing our identity markers, but understanding our inheritances as specific obligations and commitments. As a material practice happening in real places, our weathering methodology has a specific commitment to Indigenous sovereignty. We are in a process of reckoning with what it means to be doing this work on stolen Indigenous land. We must work to undo colonialism in large and small ways, where both the feminist and the queer is intentionally oriented towards ‘undoing of the indoctrination’ of colonialism, as Anaiwan scholar and artist Gabi Briggs puts it.49 We unpack this more in Chapter 2, ‘Weather’, but flag it here as a non-negotiable part of an embodied politics of solidarity. There can be no climate solidarity without a commitment to Indigenous sovereignty.
3. 3.Feminism as an embodied politics of solidarity is about power, with a specific, but hardly exclusive, interest in cisheteropatriarchal power. It can examine how human systems of power are drivers of climate change. Power, though, has two meanings: it refers to power structures like patriarchy and colonial capitalism, but also to material power like fossil-fuelled energy systems. Feminism offers analyses that bring these kinds of power together – for example, exploring how extraction of resources like coal and oil connects to ideas of ‘powerful’ masculinity.50 Feminism can also meaningfully consider the power of non-human agents – say, a hurricane, or a parasite – that scramble existing power orders. These insights are important checks against a Western masculinist hubris that presumes a ‘mastery of nature’.51 But power can also be a ground for solidarity, as it imagines alternatives to omnicidal forms of power, and locates power in persistence,52 survival,53 anger,54 erotics55 and more. Feminism offers our weathering work different ways to think about and enact power for building new and different worlds as we dismantle some current ones.
4. 4.Feminism as an embodied politics of solidarity cares about your feelings. A Western (masculinist) separation of rational minds from feeling bodies privileges detached scientific objectivity as a way of dealing with crises. Still, even with access to lots of rational climate science, climate change is escalating (Kari Norgaard calls this the ‘myth of information deficit’).56 This shows why we cannot address the climate crisis just by stating facts and figures. Emotional orientation and how we feel about things matters in terms of changing minds and behaviours (and thus changing climates). Feminist research on affects and emotions gives us tools for examining why differences in feelings must be part of climate responses. For example, how people feel about their own gender identity helps explain why men recycle less (not rational!);57 how we feel about gender stereotypes more generally helps explain why hurricanes given ‘female names’ are (sometimes catastrophically) perceived as less dangerous than those with ‘male names’ (also not rational!).58 Feminists know feelings are political (where bad feeling is not an individualistic pathology59), and relational. We say more about this in Chapter 6 in relation to our weathering practices.
5. 5.Feminism as an embodied politics of solidarity notices and values difference. Different bodies (neurodiverse or neurotypical, childbearing or child-free, Black or white, sixteen or sixty-five …) experience climate change’s effects in different ways. Feminism notices how climate change exacerbates these differences. It is interested in how the unequal distribution of shelter and vulnerability shows up in insecure housing, harsher temperatures or lack of potable water. (We say lots more about this in the following chapters.) Feminism as an embodied politics of solidarity offers nuanced analyses of where differences come from: are they materially given, socially constructed, or (most often) both? We need to account for bodies as made up of both matter (skin, blood, carbon, water) and meaning (how they are shaped by cultural frameworks). Both influence how we will weather climate change. We analyse this at length in Chapter 3.
6. 6.Feminism as an embodied politics of solidarity desires. Feminism understands the ecological crisis as ‘a problem of desire’,60 where many kinds of environmentalism want to manage and curb our material desires. But queer feminists remind us that desire can also be a desire for abundant and flourishing non-human worlds.61 Moreover, in a context where climate change (plus cis-heteropatriarchy, colonialism and capitalism) is overwhelming and depressing,62 feminism maintains that desire can be a form of resistance and power, especially when your pleasure has been denied and unvalued by the structures that fuel climate colonialism.63 Sex positivity, careful consent and intimacies beyond heteronormativity can encourage environmental attachments rooted in desire and accountability. This kind of desire can lead to more ecological and less destructive relations.64 Moreover queerness, as poet Eileen Myles suggests, can be ‘a research tool’ for thinking more creatively about environments and climates. (Myles cheekily notes: ‘If you’re all buttoned up about sexuality, can you really think about climate?’)65
7. 7.Feminism as an embodied politics of solidarity is no stranger to contradiction and incommensurability. Desire can also be contradictory. Some desires do exacerbate climate change and uphold colonialism, while others are liberatory. Feminist praxis works to constrain some longings in hopes of a ‘climate-improved’ future, but holds on to joy along the way. A feminism fit-for-purpose for weathering together thus claims we need to both stoke and curb our desires. Two things can be true at once. We are fans of the conjunctive ‘both/and’. We appreciate ellipses that indicate there is always more to add … We don’t not like a double negative. This is also why we can say, despite problems with dominant science, that we are grateful for climate scientists who are sounding the alarm. This is why we can say that human rights, and now the rights of ‘nature’, despite some troubling Western liberal origin stories, are something we can’t not want.66 We need lots of levers, especially as most are imperfect or inadequate on their own.
8. 8.Feminism as an embodied politics of solidarity understands the complexity of ‘we’. Our feminist embodied politics asks how we can find solidarity because of, not in spite of, our differences. This is no easy feat in the shadow of the Western liberal universal subject and all of its violences. On the one hand, we earthly beings really are all in this together! But as Max Liboiron points out, ‘arguments that “we” are destroying the planet or “we” must all band together as One’ fail to describe how climate crisis burdens some groups of people disproportionately.67 While it is good to acknowledge the collective nature of the issue, Robyn Wiegman notes that the use of ‘we’ can also be ‘a masterstroke of white-woman speech’ that flattens other differences (especially race and class) in service of a liberal feminist agenda.68 With all these pitfalls, what’s a feminist to do? Wiegman, like other feminists, suggests we need to ‘inhabit the error’ and find ways of sticking with this false-but-necessary category. Such ‘inhabitation’ demands accountability. It requires what poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs has called a kind of ‘echolocation’ whereby all of us (not only whales and bats or other echolocating animals) have to send out signals across all kinds of bodies and species, and pay attention to what comes back – ‘humbly listening and learning to take responsibility for [our] frequencies’.69 In other words, our ‘we’ is not a free pass to a make-believe universalism. Solidarity is not easy. We cannot respond well to climate change without committing to the complexity of the ‘we’ who are in ‘this’ together.
9. 9.Feminism as an embodied politics of solidarity is also about gender. As we’ve noted above, climate change has gendered effects; climate change evokes gendered responses. But feminism also provides the opportunity to make this ‘simple’ point complex. Queer and trans feminist theories remind us that gender is not a matter of a simple binary: scientifically speaking, an organism can have thousands of possible genders, depending on how you understand that word.70 Mutability and proliferation of gender is also connected to climate change and environmental degradation (e.g. rising water temperatures and chemical inflows). Feminism can help us understand these changes not as pathologies to be eradicated, but as creative tactics for climate change mitigation and adaptation.71
10. 10.Feminism as an embodied politics of solidarity knows that different oppressions prop each other up. The climate crisis reveals the conjoined exploitation of some humans and non-human nature. As Claire Jean Kim puts it: ‘It may be that forms of domination – white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, human supremacy, mastery over nature and more – are so intricately woven together, so dependent on each other for sustenance, that they will stand or fall together.’72 We require a feminism that explains the logic and practice of mutual exploitation, and offers alternatives to the binary ‘Master model’ that divides the world in service of hierarchy and instrumentalization.73 As we write this book, genocidal violence continues in Gaza and elsewhere. We need a feminism that understands these violences as violence against people, against women, against queers, against animals, against trees, against Land, against water, against history and against the future. Our feminism sees these violences as connected, and approaches them as such.