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Bebbington, Anthony and Bury, Jeffrey, (Eds.), Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of mining, oil, and gas in Latin America, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2013
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This article examines how the daily discourses, practices, and performances of conservation projects are instrumental in mapping ways of life that are gendered and racialized. With the goal of bringing a feminist approach to the study of conservation, I present an ethnographic account of identities‐in‐the‐making in three conservation encounters in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a protected area in northern Guatemala. In the first two encounters, I examine the ways in which gender and race are constituted in the relations between the Women’s Group for the Rescue of Itza’ Medicinal Plants and a United States‐based international environmental non‐governmental organization. The third encounter highlights the relations between the Women’s Group and myself, the researcher, to analyze how social‐science, through methods such as ethnography, is also implicated in (re)configuring social identities.
Most theorists understand gender geographies as highly differentiated and shifting, in terms of both time and space. If gender is historically and geographically contingent then the analysis of gender should be attentive to the particular conditions that materialize the very idea of gender, giving it the appearance of being fixed and natural. The physical landscape, or waterscape in the case of southeastern Turkey, is potentially central to the ways that gender is invoked and lived in particular settings, with important effects. Using case-study work on irrigation-related changes in southeastern Turkey, I consider gender in relation to livelihoods and work practices, landholdings, and ethnicity revealing that, in addition to conditioning differential outcomes for residents of the plain, these categories of social difference are themselves fundamentally renegotiated and recast in relation to waterscape change. I argue that explicit consideration of environmental conditions and practices is central to understanding the operation of gender in certain contexts, as well as to understanding the lived experiences of women and men, providing insights for gender theory and politics.
Current theorising in human geography draws attention to the relational emergence of space and society, challenging ideas of difference that rely on fixed identities and emphasising the importance of the everyday in the production of social inequalities. Similarly, feminist political ecology has emphasised the role of ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ in the production of subjectivities such that ideas of gender and nature arise in relation to each other. In this paper I build from these insights to explore the ways in which the embodied performance of gender, caste and other aspects of social difference collapse the distinction between the material and the symbolic. Symbolic ideas of difference are produced and expressed through embodied interactions that are firmly material. Through this kind of conceptualisation, I hope to push forward debates in geography on nature and feminist political ecology on how to understand the intersectional emergence of subjectivities, difference and socio-natures. Importantly, it is the symbolic meanings of particular spaces, practices and bodies that are (re)produced through everyday activities including forest harvesting, agricultural work, food preparation and consumption, all of which have consequences for both ecological processes and social difference. Through the performance of everyday tasks, not only are ideas of gender, caste and social difference brought into view, but the embodied nature of difference that extends beyond the body and into the spaces of everyday life is evident. I use ethnographic evidence from rural Nepal to explore the ways in which boundaries between bodies, spaces, ecologies and symbolic meanings of difference are produced and maintained relationally through practices of work and ritual.
Gender has long been recognised as important within environmental issues, but there has been considerable debate over how to conceptualise the gender-environment nexus. As feminist theorising around women and gender has changed, so have conceptualisations about gender and environment, leading to a key debate within ecofeminism and related literatures about whether there is an essential or a contingent relationship between women and natural environments. Within geography, most political ecologists work with the assumption that the gender-environment nexus is a contingent relationship, and thus investigate how gender relations are salient in the symbolic and material construction of environmental issues. In this paper I seek to build from this work and again raise the issue of how gender is conceptualised in relation to environment. I begin by briefly reviewing some of the work that has been done on gender and environment and then draw from poststructural feminism to suggest that gender itself has been undertheorised in work on environment. Once gender is reconceptualised as a process, the dynamic relationship between gender, environment, and other aspects of social and cultural life can be brought into view. What emerges is the need for political ecologists to examine gender beyond the household and community and the need to reconceptualise the gender-environment nexus. A case study of community forestry in Nepal is used to illustrate the importance of interrogating the processes by which gender relations become salient and are reproduced symbolically and materially.