Over the last few years, we’ve scaled up our work on envisioning and articulating a gender-just transition.
We’ve produced policy briefs and recommendations around a Just Transition within the UNFCCC and on the intersections of care work and climate action. We’ve also contributed to collective advocacy to bring feminist analyses of systems change into just transition dialogues and policymaking.
In addition to this advocacy work, we know key learnings can come from having rich conversations where we dive into tough questions and hear from experts across sectors and regions. To do this, we’re introducing a new Critical Conversations series, where we will host feminist dialogues and invite advocates to discuss specific aspects of a gender-just transition, from energy to critical minerals to agriculture, and beyond.
In the first of the series, we spoke with Dr. Cara Daggett, an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech and a Senior Fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany, where she researches feminist political ecology.
Focusing on the politics of gender and energy, she popularized a term called “petro-masculinity,” weaving together analysis of fossil fuel exploitation, white supremacy, and gender injustice to help explain the rise of authoritarian leaders and their reliance on anti-gender and pro-fossil fuel narratives.
The transcribed interview below has been edited for length and clarity.
WEDO: What do you mean by “petro-masculinity”? How does it bring together questions of gender, energy, and power?
Cara: The term petro-masculinity points to a relationship between gender hierarchies or gender domination, the exploitation of energy, and the way that they are connected to political power. I came up with this term in the first Trump administration because at the time, I was frustrated that the misogyny and anti-feminist gender politics of the right in the U.S. was mostly being analyzed and contested as very different from fossil fuel politics and climate denial. And it still is. That’s how it’s been presented to us.
I think it’s a liberal framing of a separation between so-called personal politics, which is often how gender is framed, and the economy. Petro-masculinity builds on a lot of work of eco-feminists, and feminists more broadly, to say that these questions about the economy and the way that the earth and nature get recruited into the economy are very much related to how our current gender order is structured. Energy powers the gender order, and the gender order upholds this system.
WEDO: One of the articles that first brought us to your work is the piece, “Toward feminist energy systems: Why adding women and solar panels is not enough.” There is this tendency for folks to come to women’s rights or feminist organizations saying, “If we just add gender to the pot and stir,” we get closer to gender justice. We know that’s not the case. We know a feminist analysis is a much deeper exploration of power. How do you see an explicitly feminist approach challenging this “just add women and stir” approach to thinking about energy?
Cara: The “just add women” approach is very dominant in how people think about both gender and climate, and gender and energy. It’s an approach about representation, meaning women are not represented very well in energy decision-making and so on.
The colleagues who wrote this paper and I had all studied different kinds of extractive fossil fuel systems and how they interacted with masculinity. We wanted to ask, “What would feminist energy mean?” and think more deeply about feminism as a way to understand power.
Feminists are experts in understanding how binaries and hierarchical ordering help to uphold power. The gender and sexual orders of what is gay and straight, and what is man and woman, reproductive and productive — these are powerful, long-lasting binaries that have upheld different kinds of hierarchical power. If you think about feminism more deeply, like how gender upholds systems of power and how our current way of working with energy and the natural world is also upholding a system of imperial hierarchies and capitalist power, then you have a different, much more holistic and radical understanding of what feminist energy would mean. Because feminist energy would mean challenging those deeper kinds of power inequities.
In the article, feminism offers insights into four dimensions of energy systems:
- Socio-ecological, the relationship between humans and non-human worlds.
- Economic, so-called care labor, which you’ve mentioned.
- Political, how political systems, especially nationalism and even the state itself, are founded upon gender hierarchy.
- Technological, refusing the idea that feminism or women means being anti-technology, and really questioning and thinking about technology as a way that you make change in the world — and for whom and for what is technology.
Our current systems of technology are very much not serving women. They’re not developed by people in the interest of people and serving the communities where they’re deployed. So that would, for example, be a feminist approach.
The purpose of the article was to explode the idea and say, look at all of these questions and focuses that you could have with a feminist lens. It’s not just about having women install solar panels — and I’m not against women installing solar panels — but to me, that is such a shallow and narrow addition of gender to the equation.
WEDO: In an economy that’s already built on the backs of care workers and trade, supply chain, and labor injustice, feminists know we need to really interrogate “work”: what is considered work, who are workers, what work powers our energy systems, and what work powers our lives. How does a feminist analysis or lens help you understand the labor component of the energy transition?
Cara: Energy is so tightly bound up with what we might think of as a Western work ethic and what other historians have called productivism. The definition of what is productive gets solidified, and then the preference and valuation of what is called productive. We see this in our lives deeply, even in so-called reproductive activities, telling us that the reproductive activities also should be more productive, more efficient, and so on. This is really tightly bound with the expansion of fossil fuel energy and ideas about what constitutes the good use of energy.
I’ve been really influenced by post-work movements, especially feminist critiques of work. Starting with “Wages for Housework”, but even Kathi Weeks’ book, “The Problem With Work.” Weeks’ and some of these other critiques of work don’t necessarily have an environmental angle, especially not until more recently. But the critiques that they have of work culture, I think, are really related to the study of energy. How do you not just have a value reversal where we’re saying, “Oh, we don’t like productivist, so we like reproductivist, or we don’t like dynamism, so we like stillness.” I think those are interesting questions, but how are these binaries already oversimplifying human life? What are other ways that we can talk about the meaning of the activities that we do in our life, getting outside of this productive, reproductive binary? Levers like wages for housework and care work are important tactics for recognizing the way our current system is working.
WEDO: With U.S. advocacy and energy specifically, we are thinking a lot about extraction, critical minerals mining, and how we resist having an energy transition on the backs of those in the Global South for the benefit of those in the Global North. How does internationalism fit into the energy transition, particularly within the contexts of national energy planning, economic growth, and economic opportunity? How is internationalism at the core of feminist energy justice, and energy justice broadly?
Cara: There are three narratives I’ve seen for how fossil fuels are advocated for: jobs, price, and independence. Independence is really interesting for feminists because a lot of feminist theory is about recognizing the fundamental dependency of all life. Life itself is about interdependency. What I notice is that these narratives of independence from fossil fuels are also mapped onto wind, solar, and green projects. There’s this promise or dream that the advantage of solar, for example, is independence. But solar panels and wind turbines are inherently part of global supply chains. We have a dependency on the non-human world as well. We are still very much in a globalized space, so for me, the insight is about dependency. What kind of work can we do politically when we recognize dependency as part of how we all relate to ecologies?
Learn more about Cara’s work.
