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Feminist Political Ecology, forthcoming in The International Encyclopedia of Geography, Wiley-
Blackwell & Association of American Geographers, Editor-in-Chief Douglas Richardson
Dr. Juanita Sundberg
University of British Columbia
juanita.sundberg@ubc.ca
Word Count: 5,888 words
Abstract
Feminist political ecology is a subfield that brings feminist theory, objectives, and practices to
political ecology, an analytical framework based on the assumption that ecological issues must be
understood and analyzed in relation to political economy (and vice versa). Feminist political
ecologists suggest gender is a crucial variable – in relation to class, race and other relevant
dimensions of political ecological life – in constituting access to, control over, and knowledge of
natural resources. In addition, research in feminist political ecology demonstrates how social
identities are constituted in and through relations with nature and everyday material practices.
Feminist political ecology (FPE) is a subfield that brings feminist theory and objectives to
political ecology, which is an analytical framework built on the argument that ecological issues must
be understood and analyzed in relation to political economy (and vice versa). Feminist political
ecologists suggest gender – in relation to class, race and other relevant axes of power – shapes access
to and control over natural resources. In so doing, FPE also demonstrates how social identities are
constituted in and through relations with nature and every day material practices. FPE builds bridges
between sectors conventionally kept apart – academia, policy-making institutions, activist
organizations – thereby connecting theory with praxis. In addition, FPE weaves threads between
sites and scales to produce nuanced understandings of the socioecological dimensions of political
economic processes. Rooted in feminist critiques of epistemology (the study of how knowledge is
produced and legitimized), FPE asks compelling questions about who counts as an environmental
actor in political ecologies and how ecological knowledges are constituted. As such, FPE has made
substantive, epistemological, and methodological interventions in political ecology, environmental
studies, and gender studies.
<A> Sites of Inspiration & Formation
FPE was forged out of feminist and women-centered scholarship and activism in environmental and
livelihood/quality of life issues. Inspired by feminist movements of the 1970s, many scholars and
activists began to approach nature-society issues with a feminist sensibility, characterized by a
persistent linking of the personal and the political. Such feminist environmental engagements
brought the feminist movement’s diverse political objectives to bear on the most intimate sites of
daily life including relations between humans and nonhumans, food consumption, and corporeal
wellbeing. Feminist scholarship in this vein both elaborated critiques of research excluding women
and advanced alternative theoretical framings to account for women (Haraway 1991; Seager 1993).
This now extensive and theoretically varied body of work asks fundamental questions about the
relationship between forms of oppression and the domination of nature as manifest in
environmental degradation, species extinction, industrial slaughter, toxic contamination, etc.
Feminists also advanced alternate ethical framings built on concepts such as relationality, care,
responsibility, and friendship (Cuomo 1988).
Feminist political ecology emerged from this arena of lively debate and theorizing. Three
bodies of work are particularly relevant to the consolidation of FPE as a sub-discipline:
ecofeminism, feminist science studies, and feminist critiques of development. Ecofeminists point to
links between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature, although how such links
should be analyzed and acted on is highly debated (for an overview, see Diamond and Orenstein
1990). Although some suggest women are closer to nature due to their biologically constituted
corporeal experiences, the majority of ecofeminist scholars turn to historical shifts in Europe,
including the scientific revolution, capitalism, and colonialism to demonstrate how and why women
in Western societies (and their colonies) are so frequently associated with nature (as well as how
nature is feminized) (cf. Merchant 1980). For example, environmental philosopher Val Plumwood
(1993) traces associations between women and nature in Western societies to oppressive material
relations – e.g. sexism, colonialism, anthropocentrism (a belief that humans are the most important
entities) – that have left their mark on epistemology (or ways of knowing) in the form of a network
of dualisms. Accordingly, the human has been framed in opposition to nature in Western thought, with
human capacity for reason and abstract thought as the grounds for transcendence and domination
of nature. In turn, reason is framed as masculine through its opposition to (and domination of) all
that is associated with nature, the body, reproduction, emotion, and ultimately the feminine.
Plumwood’s work demonstrates how such dualisms underpin oppression.
Postcolonial feminist scholars have criticized Western ecofeminism for its narrow focus on
the philosophical or conceptual dimensions of oppressive relations as well as its neglect of the
political economic arrangements – at multiple and intersecting scales – that constitute actual
ecological relations in particular places (see Shiva 1988 and Agarwal 1992). Debates in ecofeminism
continue to inform feminist political ecologists’ interest in how women and men’s relations with the
natural world in particular places play an important part in defining gender norms, such as notions
of appropriate femininity and masculinity.
An equally important arena of inspiration for the emergence of FPE is feminist critiques of
science and epistemology. Sandra Harding (1986), Donna Haraway (1991) and others argue that
patriarchal gender norms inform basic conceptions of who counts as a knowledge producer, what
counts as knowledge, and how knowledge is produced. Scholars in this vein demonstrate how
women and other marginalized groups are systematically disadvantaged by conventional scientific
practices that exclude them as knowers, while producing knowledge that renders their experiences
invisible or represents them as inferior. As such, feminist studies of science problematize the
concept of objectivity. Conventionally framed as a value-free view from nowhere, objectivity is
predicated on the assumption that the researcher’s mind is separate from his or her body, social
position, and geopolitical location. Feminists argue that historically, claims to objectivity masked and
protected what were actually the partial perspectives of dominant social groups, specifically
European or white, heterosexist, bourgeois men. Hence, the aura of objectivity is an achievement,
derived from denying or concealing the researcher’s embodied subject position. In addition to these
critiques, feminists introduced various alternatives to masculinist forms of objectivity. For instance,
Haraway’s (1991) concept of situated knowledge suggests knowledges emerge in relation to embodied
social locations. Harding’s (1986) proposal for partial objectivities takes subjective or local knowledges
seriously by developing methods to verify and validate them within specific contexts of shared
experience. Theirs are not calls for relativism but responsibility and accountability in practices of
knowledge production. Feminist political ecologists build on these conversations to address how
research practices are implicated in (re)producing and contesting power relations.
A third body of scholarship important to FPE is feminist critiques of development, which
demonstrate how women have been excluded from or exploited by (sustainable) development and
conservation projects (Shiva and Mies 1993). Feminist postcolonial scholars such as Chandra
Mohanty compliment this work, exposing how Western feminists leading development projects tend
to depict Third World Women as victims in need of Western help; such homogenizing portrayals deny
the diversity of women’s locations, experiences, and knowledges. Scholars working in this field
address the ways poverty is deepened and feminized when women are neglected as agents of
environmental transformation (e.g. as managers of natural resources) and environmental knowledge
bearers/producers. For instance, Judith Carney (1992) revealed how gender differences in land use,
labor obligations, and crop rights articulate with development in The Gambia, Africa. International
donor projects that introduced irrigation systems and improved rice production packages to male
household heads resulted in women’s loss of access to land and, in some cases, income. Richard
Schroeder’s (1999) research, also in The Gambia, centers on conflicts between men and women
sparked by international donors projects in the 1970s, which were designed to include women in
development by supporting women’s expansion of market gardening. When donor interests shifted
to environmental concerns in the 1980s, however, men were encouraged to engage in agroforestry on
the same plots of land as the gardens. Consequently, men and women’s crop production systems came
into conflict. Ultimately, scholars document, if development agency personnel and researchers
consult only men, then the relevance of particular resources, women’s specific knowledge of them,
and women’s livelihood strategies are made invisible. This, in turn, generates resistance among
women towards development and conservation interventions. The importance of this body of work
is evident in FPE’s ongoing emphasis on the potentially devastating consequences for women and
their dependents when gender differences in resource management and land use practices are
neglected.
Building on the three above-mentioned bodies of work and debates, Dianne Rocheleau,
Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari put forward feminist political ecology as an integrative
conceptual framework in the 1996 edited volume, Feminist Political Ecology. The book situates gender
as a crucial variable – in relation to class, race and other relevant dimensions of political life – in
shaping environmental relations. Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari (1996) suggest gender
norms result from social interpretations of biology and socially constructed gender roles, which are
geographically varied and may change over time at individual and collective scales. As such, the
editors shift away from essentialist (i.e. one-dimensional and universalizing) constructions of women
found in some ecofeminist work to treat gender differences and gender relations as constituted in
and through material political ecological relations. The book’s conceptual agenda advances three
primary areas of research: (1) gendered environmental knowledge and practices; (2) gendered rights
to natural resources and unequal vulnerability to environmental change; and (3) gendered
environmental activism and organizations. And, the editors outline an exciting call for research that
connects the local and global, urban and rural, North, South, East and West through close analysis
of everyday experiences and practices of gendered environmental risks, rights, and responsibilities.
Chapters feature case studies from across the globe rooted in collaborative and activist
methodologies. Authors address issues such as the struggles of women on the front lines of the
rubber tapper’s movement in Brazil, women in environmental justice organizing in West Harlem,
New York, as well as women dealing with industrial waste in Spain. Feminist Political Ecology marks a
noteworthy moment in environmental studies by demonstrating the analytical purchase of feminist
political ecology to identify how inequality is (re)produced when women’s environmental
engagements, knowledge, and activism are neglected. Recent work in feminist political ecology
continues to engage with the agenda and debates outlined in the book.
<A>Sites of Intervention & Contribution
Feminist political ecologists have produced a vibrant body of work that significantly enriches
understandings of the political-ecological nexus. Moreover, researchers’ substantive contributions
have prompted epistemological shifts and methodological innovation. Simply by engaging women as
political actors, agents of environmental change, and bearers/producers of environmental
knowledge, feminist political ecology revolutionized research in political ecology. While seemingly
straightforward, considering women has far reaching consequences for it is not possible to simply
add women to existing frameworks and proceed as is. Indeed, to disrupt conventional assumptions
about men as the primary environmental actors is to ask fundamental epistemological questions
about how knowledge is produced and legitimized. For instance, feminist political ecology
challenges claims to objectivity by pointing out that if researchers only engage men in any given site
(as if they represent the only or primary actor), then their results are partial rather than neutral or
unbiased.
Dianne Rocheleau and David Edmunds (1997) make this point by showing that women in
many rural areas manage spaces – along with specific natural resources – that are nested in or
between spaces controlled by men. Their analysis of the gendered dimensions of tree tenure around
the world sheds light on the complexity of customary laws that grant men and women differing
rights and responsibilities to multi-dimensional fields with distinct and overlapping species. For
example, women often have customary rights to species above, below, or between men’s crops or
trees; as such, they are subject to men’s decisions about changing the species they plant or tend (cf.
Schroeder 1999). As this research highlights, attending to women as resource managers reveals the
limitations of existing two-dimensional concepts of land and land ownership, which are based on
fieldwork with men only. These concepts do not account for the multi-dimensionality of species
management by men and women.
Likewise, the personal experiences of white middle class Western feminists/scholars may
restrict their interest in or attention to particular spaces or activities, which, in turn, has the effect of
shaping knowledge production. Maria Elisa Christie (2008) makes this point in relation to the
kitchen, which is often framed as a principal site of women’s oppression in Western feminism.
Christie’s close engagement with women’s kitchenspaces in central Mexico demonstrates the
importance of food preparation in the enactment of rituals and fiestas that sustain extended family
and kinship networks as well as unique skills and knowledge. In short, FPE demonstrates that
political ecological stories are implicated in power relations and researchers risk reproducing gender
inequalities if and when women are left out as agents of environmental change.
Accounting for women as actors brings about additional epistemological shifts. Since many
women around the world labor in social spheres that historically have been excluded from analysis,
addressing the particularities of their knowledges and practices requires asking questions about what
scales of political ecological life count as relevant. Building on feminist economics and feminist
geography, research in FPE draws attention to everyday intimate and embodied practices along with
household micropolitics. The scale of the everyday is where social reproduction takes place, where
subject identities and social orders are brought into being and contested. Attending to daily life
allows FPE to shed light on otherwise neglected dimensions of environmental engagements. For
instance, Shubhra Gururani’s (2002) research with women collectors of fuel and fodder in the
Kumaon Himalayas suggests forests are sites of emotion, memory, and meaning. Women engage the
forest as much more than simply a backdrop or site of resources where they meet livelihood needs,
Gururani argues; indeed, women’s everyday material engagements constitute but also challenge
culturally specific gender norms. As such, Gururani’s findings contest predominant utilitarian and
mechanistic assumptions of human-nature relations in political ecology.
Likewise, Farhana Sultana (2011) examines how natural resource access is mediated through
emotions, which are defined as inter-subjective (e.g. produced in relationships between people or
people and nature) rather than individual mental states. In rural Bangladesh, where drinking water
wells are contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic, women’s relations with water are saturated
and constituted by emotions, particularly suffering. Thus, Sultana suggests, women’s daily lives are
configured not solely by struggles to obtain safe drinking water for their families but also emotional
distress; these emotions, in turn, shape women’s decisions about how to negotiate the power
relations that constitute water access and control. As Leila Harris (forthcoming) notes, attention to
emotions allows feminist political ecologists to demonstrate that resource access is important for
livelihood and health but also people’s sense of dignity and belonging.
Even as FPE legitimizes the everyday as a significant scale of analysis, researchers also excel
at demonstrating how the intimate connects with other scales such as the nation or global political
economy. For instance, Yaffa Truelove’s (2011) research on women’s water collecting practices in
Delhi, India links the body to city and state. While city planners look to market mechanisms to fulfill
their vision of a modern city with efficient services, Truelove shows how the establishment of
metered water sources creates a whole range of “illegal” water practices. Such legal mechanisms
particularly affect women in slums without legal water connections, as they must engage in time-
consuming, dangerous, and illegalized activities just to procure water for daily needs. As a
consequence, young girls in marginalized communities are often kept out of school due to the
amount of time required to meet family water needs; this, in turn, limits their life opportunities but
also their sense of belonging in a city with global aspirations. For Harris (forthcoming), the
importance of research such as Truelove’s is to challenge existing claims made by state and non-state
actors (such as the World Bank) that the commodification of water leads to increased efficiency. As
Harris contends, addressing embodiment and the scale of the everyday serves to demonstrate how
capitalist logics privileging efficiency ignore non-productive needs and uses associated with health,
poverty reduction, or cultural and spiritual values (e.g. preservation of heritage seeds/crops).
Another important epistemological intervention stemming from the seemingly
straightforward act of accounting for women relates to how the subject or person is conceptualized
in political ecology. Historically, political ecologists have tended to assume that subject identities are
narrowly defined based on taken for granted or congruent notions of class position, sex, or race.
Juanita Sundberg (2004), Leila Harris (2006), and Andrea Nightingale (2006) draw from feminist
poststructural theory to outline anti-essentialist framings of the political ecological subject. Judith
Butler’s (1999) work is particularly significant here. Butler argues that gendering practices are not
simply built on sex difference; instead, bodies are gendered in and through the regulatory practices
of disciplining institutions such as the family along with medical, educational, and religious
institutions. In other words, gendered bodies have no natural foundation (in sex) but are constituted
in and through gendering practices that are reiterated or performed in daily life. For Butler, everyday
performances produce gendered subject positions rather than simply reflect them.
Sundberg, Harris, and Nightingale build on Butler’s work to insist there is no necessary or
pre-given relation between men or women and environment; rather, such relations are forged
through geographically contingent, power-laden practices. Sundberg (2004) analyzes how
conservation discourses, practices, and performances in Guatemala are instrumental in mapping
gendered and racialized ways of life. In the process, Sundberg also reflects on her research
collaboration with an Indigenous women’s group to highlight how research practices are constitutive
of gendered and racialized performances that (re)produce asymmetrical geopolitical relations.
Likewise, Nightingale (2006) treats gender as a process to show how performances of masculinity,
femininity, and caste are constituted in community forest management in Nepalese villages. Harris
(2006) demonstrates how differences between men and women are (re)cited and naturalized in
relation to new irrigation economies and ecologies in Turkey; gender comes to matter to irrigation
practices, she argues, through the regulatory insistence on difference.
Feminist critiques of knowledge production also prompt methodological innovations in FPE so
as to include previously excluded actors and account for their knowledges as well as how they come
to know their environments. Women and other marginalized groups may consider themselves or
their work to be unimportant and their life experiences may lie beyond those of researchers.
Moreover, as noted, women’s spaces of work are often nested in those controlled by men.
Examining what was made invisible or neglected requires methodological creativity. Many feminist
political ecologists work with feminist participatory or collaborative methodologies to enable
research that supports feminist political objectives. In this context, feminist scholars tend to conduct
qualitative research from the bottom up by privileging the experiences, spaces, and categories of
marginalized people. Along these lines, Louise Fortmann (1996) specifically addresses strategies for
ensuring that women’s distinct experiences with trees, plants, and animals are included in natural
resource mapping. For example, forming separate groups of men and women while undertaking
natural resource mapping helps to ensure women have the space to express themselves freely (see
also Sundberg 2004).
Some feminist political ecologists suggest qualitative methodologies need not be the only
ones appropriate to feminist research. Rocheleau (1995) pioneered the development of
methodologies to triangulate data derived from quantitative, interpretative, and visual methods. In
her discussion of research evaluating the results of a forestry and agricultural initiative in the
Dominican Republic, Rocheleau notes that gender-informed quantitative analysis contradicted
predominant assumptions of women as auxiliaries to men; in addition, counter-mapping – map
making that starts with rural people and their homes – produced images that resulted from the
mixing of local people and researchers’ specific skills and knowledge. Relatedly, Nightingale’s (2003)
study of a community forestry program in Nepal combined aerial photo interpretation with
ecological oral histories to analyze the effectiveness and sustainability of community forest
management. Each of these two methods is rooted in a distinct epistemological tradition and,
therefore, produces distinct kinds of knowledge. Working with Haraway’s concept of situated
knowledge, Nightingale (2003) treated both aerial photo interpretation and oral history collection as
partial yet internally valid methods of generating distinct stories about forest change. Rather than
triangulating data, Nightingale attended to the inconsistencies between the data, thereby producing
new insights about the pace and location of forest regeneration as well as how and why local people
claimed the community forestry program a success. In so doing, she also framed local people as
legitimate producers of environmental knowledge.
In short, research that accounts for women necessitated epistemological innovation and
feminist political ecologists have been at the forefront of developing new theoretical and
methodological tools. Nonetheless, the contributions of FPE tend to be assimilated into mainstream
political ecology with little explicit acknowledgment. Indeed, in the recent trend to canonize political
ecology through the publication of textbooks and edited collections, feminist political ecology is only
marginally addressed. And yet, Rebecca Elmhirst (2011a) suggests, political ecology owes an
epistemological debt to feminist theory for the range of fresh perspectives it offers. Nonetheless, many
scholars whose work articulates with the political and theoretical objectives of FPE do not identify
as such. Thus, a review of recently published research demonstrates that the field of gender and
environment is flourishing although few identify as feminist political ecologists, leading Elmhirst
(2011a) to ask if FPE is a disappearing subject. The response to her question is evident in renewed
attention to FPE along with debates about its analytical purchase.
<A> Sites of Challenge & Debate
In part, the apparent disappearance of FPE is due to the emergence of anti-essentialist framings of
gender, which have destabilized assumptions about who counts as the (natural) subject of feminist-
oriented research. In addition to Butler’s argument, noted above, postcolonial scholars have
challenged homogenizing views of women as a pre-given, coherent category that is studied using
similar theoretical frameworks the world over (cf. Mohanty 1991). Such critiques lead to a crucial
question: if women are no longer the organizing purpose of feminism and gender no longer its
central analytical category, then what is the point of FPE?
A new generation of feminist political ecologists responds to the destabilization of gender by
emphasizing intersectionality as the primary method of addressing how social subjects are constituted
in and through diverse and interlocking processes of differentiation such as gender, sexuality, race,
ethnicity, class, and livelihood. In other words, new FPE seeks to account more fully for the ways
systems of power articulate in time and place. Farhana Sultana and Andrea Nightingale advance the
concept of intersectionality by explicitly considering how subject identity is constituted in and
through material ecological relations. While FPE has long treated the natural environment as a
constitutive element of political subjectivity, this dimension is often neglected in feminist theory
more generally and is in need of further theorization. Sultana’s analysis of gender-water relations in
Bangladesh highlights how the geologic distribution of arsenic in the local aquifer plays a crucial role
in configuring gendered subjects. By and large, the contamination of water sources and the resulting
need to travel longer distances to fetch safe water has worked to entrench the notion that
masculinity is not compatible with water collection. Nightingale (2011) examines how imaginaries of
gender and caste boundaries are materially enacted in post-conflict Nepal. Normative femininity, she
notes, requires Hindu women of a particular caste to be spatially segregated during menstruation
because their bodies are considered polluting and therefore damaging to the environment. As such,
appropriate performances of femininity are enacted in and through such spatial moves. Nightingale
found the Maoist insurgency disrupted gender and caste performances by enacting shifts in
embodied spatial practices like sitting and eating in mixed-caste and gender groups.
Sharlene Mollett and Caroline Faria (2013) present a strident critique of new FPE, suggesting
researchers too often continue privileging gender without also giving full consideration to the ways it
intersects with race. Race is a crucial variable in subject formation, the authors suggest, while racial
thinking constitutes the very categories used to name and order the modern world (e.g. racial labels
such as “European” or “African” along with binaries like civilized/primitive, modern/traditional,
formal/customary). In other words, the environment and environmental politics are not raceless.
Mollett and Faria (2013) point to whiteness as an institutional factor that shapes the production of
knowledge in FPE; the predominance of white Anglo/Europeans in the Western academy works to
normalize the absence of critical race perspectives. Mollett and Faria (2013) call for a postcolonial
intersectional approach that situates patriarchy and racialization as entangled in postcolonial
genealogies of nation building and development.
Even with these critiques and reflections, some feminist political ecologists stress the
continuing relevance of gender as a key variable due to the persistence of masculinist forms of
objectivity and ongoing neglect of women as environmental agents. For instance, Aya Hirata Kimura
and Yohei Katano (2014) suggest performances of gender are at stake in times of crisis or disaster,
such as Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactor accident. Their study highlights how gender norms
informed perceptions of risk in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster. Political elites called on binary
constructs of appropriate masculinity and femininity to manage the disaster; in emphasizing the need
for patriotism, normalcy and safety, citizens concerned about radiation were feminized as irrational
or hysterical. For her part, Elmhirst’s (2011b) study of forests in Indonesia introduces queer theory,
which examines how normative gender categories are produced and contested. Elmhirst
demonstrates how the Indonesian state controls access to and control over natural resources by
privileging heterosexual conjugal couples. In other words, heterosexual marriage becomes an
important conduit for resource access, and therefore affects women as well as men. Elmhirst calls
on political ecologists to question the naturalness of categories such as conjugal relationships and
heterosexuality as they are deployed in the practices of knowledge production.
<A> Future directions in feminist political ecology
Even as feminist political ecologists clearly demonstrate the ongoing importance of gender relations
in natural resource struggles, feminists work on a range of topics wherein gender is not the primary
analytical variable. In other words, feminist scholarship is not restricted to analyses of gender. This is
evident in recent FPE scholarship centering on the body as the primary analytical category and site
of analysis (Sultana 2011; Truelove 2011). In this vein, Jessica Hayes-Conroy and Allison Hayes-
Conroy (2011) elaborate a political ecology of the body framework to account for the intersection of
material and affective/emotive practices. Intended to facilitate analysis of food-body relations,
especially how schools seek to promote healthy eating habits, the framework insists on considering
the articulation of variables at multiple scales: structural factors that (re)produce inequality and
therefore access to particular foods; discursive practices that constitute imaginaries of health and
good food; as well as the material interactions that shape the emotive and bodily experience of
eating. Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy’s framework is attuned to the unpredictability of bodily
dispositions and potentialities and, as such, makes space for explanations that are complex, partial,
and unfinished (as called for by feminist theories of knowledge production). In many ways, their
approach is in line with Harris’ (forthcoming) appeal for an FPE centered on the everyday, embodied,
and emotional aspects of society-nature engagements.
Another exciting new direction in FPE is evident in recent efforts to more actively consider
relations between humans and other-than-human beings such as animals. Here, two concerns found
in ecofeminism are given new life: the connections between different forms of oppression; and,
proposals for a feminist ethics of care. Building on work that registers the active presence of other-
than-humans in co-producing our world, as well as ongoing feminist concerns about who counts as
a political actor and what counts as politics, Kirsty Hobson (2007) argues for the inclusion of
animals as political actors in political ecology. As Hobson notes, political ecologists risk reproducing
oppressive relations between humans and nature by treating animals as mere objects over which
people struggle rather than living beings whose ecology, behavior, and wellbeing are caught up in
(shaping) political ecological outcomes. These concerns are taken up in Sundberg’s (2011)
elaboration of a more-than-human methodology to consider other-than-human beings as actors in
geopolitical processes. As Sundberg demonstrates, desert soils, thornscrub landscapes, and ocelots (a
small feline) constitute, inflect, and disrupt the United States’ enforcement of its southern boundary,
forcing state actors to call for more funding, infrastructure and boots on the ground. In so doing,
Sundberg tells alternate stories about the escalation of U.S. boundary enforcement strategies, stories
that refuse the US government’s narratives of mastery over borderland environments. With its
unique focus on oppressive formations, corporeality, and the politics of knowledge production, FPE
is ideally positioned to make innovative contributions to the shift away from treating nature as
backdrop and towards an understanding of agency on the part of other-than-human actors.
Finally, recent work suggests FPE is moving in the direction suggested by Rocheleau (1995)
over two decades ago: to undertake research touching on gender, class and other systems of
difference from a position of affinity as opposed to identity. If identity politics imply assuming women
share concerns as women, affinity politics entail situating ourselves and research participants in webs
of power and identifying research questions on the basis of issues of shared concern, such as
neoliberalization, environmental degradation, and imaginative geographies of distance and
difference. A useful template for the establishment of research collaborations across sites and scales
is Cindi Katz’s (2001) concept of counter topographies, which entails tracing lines between places to
show how they are constituted in and through the same processes of development or environmental
change. In this vein, Roberta Hawkins (2012) forges new ground in her critique of ethical
consumption campaigns that position Northern (female) consumers as saviors of (feminized) people
and environments in the Global South. Approaching consumption as a gendered and environmental
act that connects the intimate and global across geopolitical space allows Hawkins to chisel away at
entrenched binaries such as North/South and researcher/researched that continue to structure
political ecology.
Likewise, Harris (2014) considers the implications of Western models of environmentalism
in Turkey through a framework she terms imaginative geographies of green, which builds on postcolonial
and intersectional analytics. Harris examines how everyday narratives of environmental politics in
Turkey articulate differences between East and West and, in so doing evoke painful legacies of
colonialism. Harris calls on scholars to problematize what counts as appropriate environmental
politics so as to refuse the West as the primary or only legitimate point of reference and, thereby
initiate the process of decolonizing conceptualizations of green politics, citizenship, and
subjectivities. Research that begins from a position of affinity rather than identity promises to shift
political ecology away from studies that examine the concerns of distant and different others and
towards research that is accountable to the many ways in which scholars are entangled in and
complicit with the very webs of power, privilege, and oppression they seek to analyze.
As a style of research, FPE works with feminist concerns about how oppressive relations are
(re)produced at various scales of everyday life and, in so doing, makes significant epistemological
and methodological interventions in feminism and political ecology alike. Working at the nexus of
nature, power, and knowledge production, FPE promises to continue supporting broader feminist
political objectives for more equitable and ecologically viable futures.
SEE ALSO: Gender and Development; Identity; Feminist Geography; Bodies; Gender;
Intersectionality; Feminist methodologies; Scale; Environment and gender; Political ecology
References and Further Readings
Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Carney, Judith. 1992. “Peasant Women and Economic Transformation in The Gambia.” Development
and Change, 23 (2): 67-90.
Christie, Maria Elisa, 2008. Kitchenspace: Women, fiestas, and everyday life in central Mexico. Austin, Texas:
University of Texas Press.
Cuomo, Christine. 1998. Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing. Routledge:
London.
Diamond, Irene, and Gloria Orenstein, eds. 1990. Reweaving The World: The Emergence Of
Ecofeminism. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.
Elmhirst, Rebecca. 2011a. “Introducing new feminist political ecologies.” Geoforum, 42(2): 129-
132. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.01.006
Elmhirst, Rebecca. 2011b. “Migrant pathways to resource access in Lampung’s political forest:
Gender, citizenship and creative conjugality.” Geoforum, 42(2): 173-183.
doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.12.004
Fortmann, Louise. 1996. “Gendered Knowledge: Rights and Space in Two Zimbabwe Villages:
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Key Words: body; feminist theory and gender studies; gender and sexuality; human-environment
interaction; intersectionality; political ecology
