Activism, Scholarship, and Reproductive Labor in Environmental History

• In Event: Ecofeminism, Reproductive Labor, and Gender in the Human and non-Human World: Merchant's Enduring Legacy

Abstract

I will discuss how Merchant's scholarship emerged from social movements in the 1970s that I study and that give me insights into their intellectual worlds. This scholarship-activism connection remains throughout her work. Second, her work asks us to consider the intersectional power relationships between production, reproduction, and ecology. Environmental historians often do not deal directly with reproduction and its relationship to economic power structures, the production of scientific knowledge, and how these map onto – and shape – gendered, racial social structures.
Merchant’s early work emerged simultaneously with the grassroots feminist ecological activists I study in the alternative technology (AT) movement. Women in AT tried to figure out what the relationships were between gendered power relationships, scientific knowledge, technological change, and ecological devastation. This activist foment was partly what Merchant responded to and supported. Her aim, throughout, included revealing the power structures of knowledge production that emerged from people’s embodied social positions. Merchant’s insistence on the relationships between scholarship and activism is integral to the ways I see her work.
Second, while Merchant is widely cited for her Death of Nature and the ways that book initiated the field of feminist science and technology studies, I am equally drawn to her work on the centrality of reproduction in understanding ecological change and gendered-raced power dynamics. Most EH scholars emphasize productive, rather than reproductive, labor. Merchant’s work should make us ask: Whose labor is worthy of research? What spaces should we study? What kinds of reproductive labor can environmental history grapple with? What kinds of historical materialist analysis can we bring to spaces not usually included in the field? I have come to see the home as a site through which to try to understand the relationships between ecology, reproduction, and production and the ways these intersect with gendered and racial power structures.

Author

• Emma Schroeder, Postdoctoral fellow, University of Maine