What Matters Most

It is time for us to consider what matters most.

Many working in the environmental humanities and ecological sciences might say that this is what we’ve been doing for decades – sounding alarms, blowing whistles, and waving signs as windows of opportunity close and sea levels rise. Many feel that we’ve not (just) been waving but drowning – in anger, fear, and disbelief. But waving isn’t always despairing; collectively, these signs of commitment and solidarity are the substance of tidal change. The image for the cover of this special issue is a photograph I took during the Climate Strike in Raleigh, North Carolina on September 20, 2019, when hundreds of thousands of students walked out of schools across the country and around the world to protest environmental policies and demand meaningful action to address climate change (part of the Global Week for the Future, 20–27 September 2019). For those in this crowd, from the elementary and middle school children to the Triangle Raging Grannies¹ and everyone in between, now is the time – there is still time – for us to speak and act on behalf of what matters most to us. This is also my position as editor of this special issue of position papers for the 50^th anniversary volume of Women’s Studies.

In the midst of overlapping, interconnected, and escalating social and environmental crises, Women’s Studies also still matters. Though it might go without saying for many if not most readers of this journal, the movement to study work on or by women, cis or transgender, is a corner stone of feminist thought and action. Feminism is not only the historical means to the end of gender and sexual justice, though that has been and remains its obvious and important goal. Feminism matters because all women, themselves, matter, and because this simple fact is still denied in so many places and by so many in power all over the world. The fundamental work of feminism is not only not over, in many places it has barely begun. The 2019–2020 UN Women Annual Report finds that while the world is currently very precarious for a great many people, “even more hangs in the balance for most women and girls. Gender inequalities and discrimination filter through every issue, whether a new pandemic or longstanding conflicts, deep-seated disparities in income or a lack of political voice. Women and girls confront additional risks and obstacles simply because they are women and girls” (United Nations, Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women). And the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ “The World’s Women 2020: Trends and Statistics” documents ongoing, widespread inequality, violence, and COVID-related setbacks, including the following, quoted below:

• While unpaid domestic and care work has intensified for both men and women during the COVID-19 pandemic, women continue to do the lion’s share. On an average day, women globally spend about three times as many hours on unpaid domestic and care work as men (4.2 hours compared to 1.7). In Northern Africa and Western Asia that gender gap is even higher, with women spending more than seven times as much as men on these activities.

• This lopsided distribution of unpaid domestic and care work prevents women from participating in the labor market. In 2020, only 47% of women of working age participated in the labor market, compared to 74% of men – a gender gap that has remained relatively constant since 1995. In Southern Asia, Northern Africa and Western Asia, the number is even lower, with less than 30% of women participating in the labor market. And the pandemic is expected to exacerbate these gender disparities, as many women work in the subsectors hardest hit by COVID-19 and lockdown measures, including in paid domestic work, accommodation and food services, and the retail trade. Women also make up over 70% of workers in the health sector, therefore facing higher infection risks than men in the workplace. …

• In political life, while women’s representation in parliament has more than doubled globally, it has still not crossed the barrier of 25% of parliamentary seats in 2020. Women’s representation among cabinet ministers has quadrupled over the last 25 years, yet remains well below parity at 22%. …

• During COVID-19 lockdowns, many women and girls have been isolated in unsafe environments where they are at heightened risk of experiencing intimate partner violence. Around one third of women worldwide have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner; and 18% have experienced such violence in the past 12 months. In the most extreme cases, violence against women is lethal: globally, an estimated 137 women are killed by their intimate partner or a family member every day. (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs)

These are disturbing, though hardly surprising, facts. It is heartbreaking that so little has changed for so many, though it helps knowing that we confront these realities as a community of thinkers, that this special issue joins a chorus of groups affirming that indigenous and people of color, the poor, the dispossessed, and disenfranchised globally matter – that the lives of women, men, and non-binary persons of all nations, creeds, religions, ethnicities, and sexual orientations matter. This special issue also affirms that nonhuman lives matter. And the living Earth matters most of all for all human life and for the present and future more-than-human-world.

Why “Most”?

Mattering is, inevitably, differential (just as harm and reparations for harm are also differential). Human beings are small, finite creatures, and everything and everyone in time and space cannot matter to us equally or all at once. I could quote Freud on this but, instead, I will quote philosopher Rebecca Goldstein’s 1983 novel The Mind-Body Problem, in which Princeton graduate student Renee Feuer (named, one feels, to integrate the Cartesian split she ponders²) expounds her philosophy of value:

[W]e differ over what matters. And who matters is a function of what matters. Here in Princeton what matters is intelligence, the people who matter are the intelligent, and the people who matter the most, the heroes, are the geniuses. … People occupy the mattering map, though they don’t happen to be present in my mental picture of it. The map in fact is a projection of its inhabitants’ perceptions. A person’s location on it is determined by what matters to him, matters overwhelmingly, the kind of mattering that produces his perceptions of people, of himself and others. … . One and the same person can appear differently when viewed from different positions, making interterritorial communication sometimes difficult. (22)

A 2017 issue of Free Inquiry devoted to her theory includes an article by Goldstein in which she writes that the polysemy of the word matter “provides the most succinct statement I know to give of the human condition. What we are, we humans, are creatures of matter who are determined to matter. We are matter that would matter.” We (are) all matter, in and of, for ourselves and others. To borrow Goldstein’s framing of ethics, “Mattering Matters,” and we may speak and write about, profess and argue for, what matters to us passionately without minimizing what matters to or for others because “mattering” is itself interconnected and interdependent. It is not merely a landscape but an ecology. And ecology is also the matter of this issue – ecosocial justice, pandemic politics, human and more-than-human suffering, and the more-than-human world.

While I was finishing this introduction Sicily hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe, two days after the new, 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report came out, headlined “Climate change widespread, rapid, and intensifying.” It confirms much of what we know and fear: “in the coming decades climate changes will increase in all regions. For 1.5°C of global warming, there will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons and shorter cold seasons. At 2°C of global warming, heat extremes would more often reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health … ” (“Climate Change”). As Carolyn Mimbs Nyce characterized it in a daily round-up for The Atlantic, “a damning climate-change report from the United Nations warned of Earth’s catastrophic warming. … Extreme heat is the human-rights issue that will define this century.”³

Collectively, we are in more danger than we were when the first issue of Women’s Studies was published. We are far more broadly, deeply, and finely ecologically interconnected than we knew five decades ago. And in this time technological and economic systems have made us increasingly interwoven, materially and socially; more humans and other animals have been exploited, and the environment more damaged, but our capacity to imagine other social and economic systems and languages of resistance have grown as well.

The papers in this special issue are evidence of this potential, of the desire to challenge forms of determinism and oppression and to cherish – to fight for – the multifaceted world. Beginning with Catriona Sandilands’s “Plants Matter” and ending with Priscilla Wald’s “Language Matters,” we see varied articulations of the importance of the contingency, the interconnectedness of the material and intellectual, the social and ecological, the human and the more than human. Several contributions, by Julie Sze, Patrick Murphy, Giovanna Di Chiro, and Cecilia Åsberg, reflect on origins – of research and writing, teaching and activism – to look toward a just, sustainable future. Sarah E. McFarland’s “Embracing Extinction” asserts the ecological and political value of acknowledging the end of human futurity, while Claire Colebrook’s paper reconsiders the “personal” and “political” as imperatives for what feminism is and “what it may be able to hope for.” Rachel Lewis’s contribution makes the turn from vulnerability to pleasure to think through nonhuman animal agency and our relations with animal-others, while papers by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Serpil Oppermann, and Margarita Carretero-González remind us of the immediacy, complexity, and primacy of empathy and care for all. The paper by Sandilands demonstrates that though we may be too much in the sun, photosynthesis is, still, breathtakingly miraculous or, as Joanna Mąkowska has it, entanglements are the poetry of existence. And, as Wald’s timely contribution on desire and history affirms, our language, our metaphors always matter – and now more than ever.

The Jewish principle of tikkun olam is a call to “repair the world.” These are the words that have intoned in the silences of my reading and writing over the last year and half. To me, tikkun olam isn’t only a matter of fixing something broken but of restoring and developing what matters most: healthy social and ecological relations. We cannot repair the world with words alone, but we cannot do so without them. We cannot make the world a multispecies home without raising our voices, for each other and all those who have been denied the right to speak or the capacity for speech. Triangle Grannies rage on.

Our words shift and define our senses of personhood and purpose. Who we are is bound up with how we position ourselves vis-à-vis mattering; positionality, intersectionality, is also another way of saying embedded and embodied in kinship and naturecultures. It is from these positions that we draw the strength to imagine and articulate a future for what matters most.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ You can see a video of the Triangle Raging Grannies performing at this strike on Facebook. “The Raging Grannies at the #TriangleClimateStrike.” 350 Triangle, Facebook, 22 September 2019, https://www.facebook.com/350Triangle/videos/738972369884986/. Accessed 3 August 2021.

² Renée was, of course, Descartes first name; it is derived from Renatus, meaning reborn and Feuer, comes from “German: metonymic occupational name for a stoker in a smithy or public baths, or nickname for someone with red hair or a fiery temper, from Middle High German viur ‘fire’. Jewish (Ashkenazic): ornamental name from modern German Feuer ‘fire’” (“Feuer”).

³ “Temperatures soared in tandem, as if to illustrate the point: Europe experienced maybe its hottest temperature on record, while nearly two-thirds of Americans currently live in places under an excessive-heat advisory.”