Girls That (Can!) Shoot and Boys That (Don't!) Cry: Considering Gender and Sexual Performativity in Hunting Curricula, Pedagogy, and Practice

• In Event: 72.034 - Feminist Approaches to Animal-Focused Education: Illuminating the Intersections and Following New Tracks in Environmental Education

Abstract

Hunting consists of a diverse set of practices and rituals with varying connections to conservation history, ecological knowledge, and cultural traditions in the North American context. A group of environmental education scholars recently took on the task of revisiting hunting as a controversial yet central issue in considering ecological knowledge and human-animal relations (Pontius, Greenwood, Ryan, & Greenwood, 2013). While a gender-based analysis was not the focus of these authors, they do briefly reflect upon ecofeminist work, noting in particular that “women and men who draw on the literature of ecofeminism might, depending on their relationship to food, other hunters, and wild land, either decry or support the practice of hunting” (p. 81). Statistical data bears out that hunting wildlife is an overwhelmingly male-dominated activity although there is some evidence that these numbers are shifting and certainly there is diversity within the community of self-identified hunters that is often overlooked (Larson et al, 2013). I suggest that a continued, intersectional analysis of hunting as a set of cultural practices and knowledges geared toward wildlife conservation, eating, wilderness enjoyment, and/or recreation remains of vital concern to environmental education. This paper draws on theory in ecofeminism (Kheel, 1996; Plumwood, 2002b, 2008; Cerulli, 2010; Littlefield, 2010) and queer ecology (Gaard, 1997; Mortimer-Sandilands, 2005, 2010; Sbicca, 2012; Russell, 2013) to raise important questions about what “kinds” of ecological knowledge arise in hunting education, pedagogy, and practice, as well as “whose” hunting experiences are made central in various contexts and representations. With a particular emphasis on gender and sexuality, I suggest that hunting is not reducible to one kind of knowledge or set of practices toward the more-than-human (Abram, 1996). I employ Judith Butler’s (1990) notion of performativity to convey how gender and sexuality are portrayed in hunting “texts,” illuminating whose knowledges, behaviors, and attitudes are centered and whose are marginalized or erased. I also draw on several sources within environmental education and elsewhere that acknowledge an increased concern for non-human animal subjectivities, often referred to as the “question of the animal” (Fawcett, 2005; Oakley et al, 2010; Lloro-Bidart, 2016) to raise questions about humaneness, empathy, and ethics in hunting. I suggest that there are myriad ethical and political reasons to consider the potential marginalization of multiple subjectivities and perspectives within hunting education and practice. This paper also draws upon my ongoing research that explores children’s experiences of hunting and fishing. I examine in particular how various “texts” represent both children and non-human animals as participants in hunting practices. I critically explore how hunting videos shared on YouTube as well as various hunting materials (coloring books, toys, literature, magazines, and websites) aimed at children represent the hunting experience as well as the relational entanglements surrounding human adults, human children, non-human wildlife, and place (Timmerman & Ostertag, 2011). The resulting discourse suggests a continued need to think through the curricula, pedagogy, epistemologies, and ethics of “consumptive” practices such as hunting, fishing, and other recreational outdoor activities.

Author

• Joshua James Russell, Canisius College