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Only Resist: Feminist Ecological Citizenship and the Post‐politics of Climate Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Sherilyn MacGregor
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Abstract

European political theorists have argued that contemporary imaginaries of climate change are symptomatic of a post‐political condition. My aim in this essay is to consider what this analysis might mean for a feminist green politics and how those who believe in such a project might respond. Whereas much of the gender‐focused scholarship on climate change is concerned with questions of differentiated vulnerabilities and gendered divisions of responsibility and risk, I want to interrogate the strategic, epistemological, and normative implications for ecological feminism of a dominant, neoliberal climate change narrative that arguably has no political subject, casts Nature as a threat to be endured, and that replaces democratic public debate with expert administration and individual behavior change. What hope is there for counter‐hegemonic political theories and social movements in times like these? I suggest that rather than give in and get on the crowded climate change bandwagon, an alternative response is to pursue a project of feminist ecological citizenship that blends resistance to hegemonic neoliberal discourses with a specifically feminist commitment to reclaiming democratic debate about social‐environmental futures.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Climate Change , Summer 2014 , pp. 617 - 633
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I am grateful to those who commented on versions of this essay that I presented at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) in 2010 and Monash University Prato Centre (Prato, Italy) in 2011, and to the special issue editors and anonymous referees for their suggestions for improving the arguments I have presented here.

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