Global Patriarchies and Transnational Women and Feminists for Climate Justice

• In Event: Governing Environmental Inequalities: Towards a New Research-Action Framework on Agency, Power & Multispecies Justice – I: Agents, Power & Agency

Abstract

Scholars and international organizations have shown that climate change disproportionately affects women across the globe. Indigenous women and women in the Global South are especially impacted. In response Women and Feminists for Climate Justice are mobilizing transnationally and with unified demands towards a “feminist system change, not climate change” (Gorecki 2015). Drawing on five years of extensive multi-sited ethnographies and interviews, this paper maps and compares the narratives and experiences of Women and Feminists for Climate Justice activists from around the world. It asks, how do women and gender non-binary people across six continents invoke “good relations” of collectivity between them to enact shared rhetoric, advocacy, and international solidarities regarding climate and gender? In what similar and different ways does climate change burden them, and what do their responses to these questions reveal about the nexus between climate change and gender on a global structural level?

This paper is also grounded in theoretical questions regarding the relationship between Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy and the Environment (Robinson 1983; Pulido 2016). Many transnational and ecological feminists have affirmed that capitalism’s founding ideology of continuous growth has been necessitated by the coincident subordination of women, racialized and marginalized communities, and nature. They reference this interdependent subordination as the “Capitalist Patriarchy” (often reinterpreted as the “imperialist white supremacist cis-heterosexual capitalist patriarchy” within the movement) — a global “anti-woman” system founded on the exploitation of women’s power, bodies, labor and epistemologies through violent histories of colonialism and white supremacy. (Mies 1984; Gorecki 2020).

Author

• Julie Maria Gorecki, UC Berkeley