The embodied politics of climate change: analysing the gendered division of environmental labour in the UK

ABSTRACT

The intersection between gender and climate change action has received little scholarly attention. To facilitate a critical orientation towards the informal economies of social reproduction, the ways that the UK’s climate politics are rooted in masculinist discourses of a green economy are illustrated. Adopting an intersectional approach, it is argued that such a green economy perspective diverts attention from labouring bodies in climate politics, invisibilising the ‘who’ in the experience of climate solutions. Through critically engaging divisions of labour in climate policy, evidenced through a feminist critical discourse analysis, it is shown how a surface-level inclusion of gender perpetuates the labouring bodies associated with specific labour markets. In response, it is suggested that an intersectional approach to climate policy can account for these omissions and highlights the ways in which a more just, intersectional climate politics might be formulated.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change politics
• gender
• feminism
• intersectionality
• environmental justice

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Joyeeta Gupta for her support and encouragement in the early days of this project. We also thank Sherilyn MacGregor, Matthew Paterson, Jake Flavell, Peter Kraftl, Rosie Day, Irina Kuznetsova, Natasha Cornea, and Steve Emery whose thoughtful feedback and suggestions helped greatly improve this article. Finally, we thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers at Environmental Politics for their careful reading and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We recognise that such claims can be understood as generalisations, but our claims draw on a rich and diverse range of feminist scholarship which recognises the hegemony of masculinity in (global) politics, including climate politics (see Shepherd 2008, 2010, Enloe 2014, Pease 2016 and others).

2. Of course, we recognise that there are inherent complications when using ‘gender’ as a focus of study and recognise that there are indeed factors that make women more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Our objective here is not to unpack ‘gender’ in the context of climate change but rather to highlight the policy rhetoric and perceived or experienced injustices attributed to it. Having said that, we recognise that there is far too little research that focuses on LGBT or queer identities and climate change.