Gender Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Academics and researchers find that gender, in relation to the environment, yields certain consistencies across cultures. For example, men and women participating in the Chipko movement found that their encounter with their environment was determined by their gender. While Chipko movement members all opposed forest commons’s transfer to commercial cultivation, Vandana Shiva noted that women and men had different ideas about the forest’s future development. Women wanted to maintain the trees they used for fuel wood and fodder; men wanted to plant commercial trees such as eucalyptus. In other words, women were interested in sustainability; men, in access to markets.

International nongovernmental organizations such as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) collect data on women’s and men’s differential access to natural resources. The current UNDP Human Development Report (HDR), “Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty, and the Global Water Crisis,” points out that states do not value investment in sanitation, so every day millions of women and girls collect water for their families’s use. Their unremunerated labors maintain gender inequalities in employment and formal education. For example, the HDR notes collecting and carrying water is a time burden that explains gender gaps in school attendance, since girls experience a direct trade-off between the time they spend collecting water and time they spend in school. The HDR’s researchers point out that school attendance levels in Tanzania are 12 percent higher for girls from homes within 15 minutes’s walk to water, than from homes located over an hour away from water; variation in boys’s attendance rates are not explained by distance to water sources. If the UNDP asserts that women and men encounter the natural environment differently, then how do the HDR’s researchers know this?

Many researchers affiliated with international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the UNDP are members of the International Association for Time Use Research, which was established to promote and sustain time use surveys. By the time use survey research method, a specialist follows an individual in order to mark how they spend their waking hours on a chart that divides each of the hours of the day into 15-minute increments. These charts serve as the basis for assertions regarding what percentage of a population’s laboring time is spent in common tasks. The time use survey method has proven to be a more accurate means of recording the ways women and men spend their labor and leisure time than selfreports, which tend to underreport the amount of time spent in such repeated or habitual tasks as domestic labor. Researchers developed time use surveys in industrialized countries to follow working men’s use of leisure time, including George Bevans’s How Working Men Spend Their Time (1913) and Maud Pember-Reeves’s Round About a Pound a Week (1913). The Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) is based in Oxford University’s Center for Time Use Research. UNDP-funded time use surveys in background papers served as the basis for the HDR’s general observations that girls’s and boys’s educations spend less or more time in the classroom, dependent on their proximity to water sources.

Metaphors for the Environment

Not only do women and men encounter the natural environment differently in ways that can be measured empirically, but gender also serves as a metaphor for the natural environment. Metaphors and other figures of speech serve as a convenient tool for thinking about women and nature; the two are frequently used as metaphors for one another. For example, Washington State University’s American Studies Program offers a course on gendering nature in literature and the visual arts. Premodern culture linked female-identified deities Demeter and Persephone to the earth. Goddess of the harvest, Demeter, took her revenge on humans when Hades abducted her daughter Persephone; Zeus restored order, leaving humans to suffer frosty, unproductive fields for only half the year. The woman/nature connection established in Mediterranean mythology became all the more closely linked with the emergence of modern legal and property relations during the Renaissance. Botticelli’s painting “Primavera” presents an allegory on the harmony between nature and humans. In this painting, female figures represent human values and virtues; but these female figures are barefoot, their feet rooted in the earth.

The gender metaphor for the natural environment is particularly potent under modern legal systems. In Britain, a series of Enclosure Acts extended the rule of law to property during the 18th and 19th centuries, transforming entire social classes’s relationships with the natural environment. During the same historical era, modernist citizenship developed to protect men’s experiences, until maternalist policies came to provide social rights for women in their domestic and reproductive capacities.

Carol Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988) discusses how modern concepts about political power grew from understandings of paternal power. The “state of nature” serves as metaphor for the rational choice individuals make to take on citizenship’s responsibilities. The key for her argument is the point that individuals encounter the law only in those aspects that have universalized masculine rationality. As Pateman writes, “The classic pictures of the state of nature also contain an order of subjection-between men and women.” Sexual difference becomes political difference, in that the law excludes those aspects of human experience that are specific or peculiar to women (whether their reproductive fertility or their domestic labor). Modernist citizenship establishes public categories for women’s equation with the nature that is beyond law.

The gender metaphor for nature is also particularly compelling for modern science. As one example, primate studies serve as the basis for understandings about relationships between human beings and the natural environment in natural history museums and zoos, on television programs, in advertising and science fiction, in cinema and on greeting cards. As Donna Haraway describes in Primate Visions (1989), “Monkeys and apes have a privileged relation to nature and culture for Western people: simians occupy the border zones between these potent mythic poles;” along this border, a view of nature is constructed and reconstructed in these animals, who serve as gendered and racialized surrogates for humankind. National Geographic magazine featured the photograph of a tool-making, omnivorous chimpanzee named David Greybeard, reaching to touch the hand of researcher Jane Goodall-the same year 15 African nation-states were admitted to the UN. For Haraway, such contribute to particularly compelling myths about gender, race, and belonging in the modern world. In this way, modern science studies have naturalized the equation between women and nature.

Dual Critiques

The ecofeminist movement appropriates the metaphor that conflates gender with nature for progressive ends. Ecofeminism emerged in French with prolific Francoise d’Eaubonne publication of Le Feminisme ou la Mort/Feminism or Death in 1974. During the following decades, a number of activists’s and scholars’s endeavors compliment one another as a feminist critique of environmentalism, or an environmentalist critique of feminism. Ecofeminists draw on feminist critiques of modernism’s dualistic hierarchies: mind/body, male/female, human/animal, culture/nature, white/nonwhite. Such binary categories serve as the basis for patriarchy, racism, and other oppressive systems in laws, markets, and societies. With feminist philosophers such as Rosi Braidotti, ecofeminists argue that individual and collective liberation cannot be accomplished within the modernism’s binary pairs. In other words, granting women the same political rights as men enjoy will not liberate them, since masculinity grants womanhood its meaning; likewise, the natural environment is defined in culture, and is unavailable for celebration outside of the terms in which it has already been set.

With its dual critiques of feminism and environmentalism, ecofeminism is poorly represented in the professional associations that sustain both. Rather, ecofeminist scholars have developed their discussions in specialized conferences, interest groups within professional associations, for example the 1980 conference, “Women and Life on Earth: Ecofeminism in the Eighties” held at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst; as well as the 1987 conference, “Ecofeminist Perspectives: Culture, Nature, Theory” at the University of Southern California. The ecofeminist movement appropriates the gender/nature metaphor to draw activist and academic commentators from different fields. Not confined to any one field of research, ecofeminism draws on historical, archaeological, theological, economic, and political studies. This diffuse group of methodologies and epistemologies sustain a series of discussions on biodiversity, reproductive technology, indigenous knowledge in the face of intellectual property systems based on the rule of law, militarization, and globalization.

Ecofeminist Collections

Ecofeminists also tend to publish in edited collections, rather than establishing a monograph series with a single press. Significant contributions include Rosemary Ruether’s New Woman/New Earth (1975, republished 1995), Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology (1978, republished 1990), Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature (1978), and Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980). Spinifex, a feminist press in Melbourne, published Ecofeminism, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva’s edited volume, in 1993. Recent contributions include Nancy Howell’s A Feminist Cosmology (2000), Peter Scott’s A Political Theology of Nature (2003), and Sherilyn MacGregor’s Beyond Mothering Earth (2006). Ecofeminist contributions appear on the pages of feminist journals Hypatia (published by Indiana University Press) and Signs (published by the University of Chicago), as well.

Ecofeminist works have drawn criticism from mainstream feminism and mainstream environmentalism. Third-wave feminists, in embracing perspectives that emphasize the performativity of gender, distance themselves from such essentialist positions as those within ecofeminism. And the environmentalist movement is, in general, much more comfortable with liberal democracies’s general emphasis on individuals’s capacities for political participation and transformation, to be comfortable with the ways in which ecofeminists are dedicated to finding patriarchal structures in multiple locations. Furthermore, with the social sciences’s commitment to diversity among researchers, some critics of ecofeminism note that it develops in predominantly industrialized countries, and perpetuates certain assertions regarding women and men of predominantly agrarian communities. For these and other reasons, ecofeminist work is better-represented within multinational institutions and the research they fund, than universities.

Bibliography:

Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (Routledge, 1989);
Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988);
Mark Somma and Sue Tolleson-Rinehart, “Tracking the Elusive Green Women: Sex, Environmentalism and Feminism in the United States and Europe,” Political Research Quarterly (v.50/1, 1997).