UC Berkeley

The climate emergency is wielding a gender bias. Scholars and international organizations have shown that climate change and environmental degradation disproportionately affects people of marginalized genders across the globe. Indigenous women and women in the global south are especially impacted. Affected women have organized the Women and Feminists for Climate Justice (WFCJ) movement—a transnational activist network composed of women and gender-marginalized participants for a “feminist system change, not climate change” (Gorecki, 2015). WFCJ seek to remedy the disproportionate effects of global warming on women by advocating that there can be “no climate justice without gender justice,” as stated by one of the movement slogans (Gorecki, 2015).

In the face of today’s climate emergency, this dissertation proposes a new theoretical framework for Ecological Feminisms through time spent with the transnational movement of WFCJ. This work is a critical discourse and concept analysis of the theoretical foundations of “Gendered Systemic Oppression,” which is grounded in the participatory action research (PAR) of international multi-sited ethnographies and interviews of WFCJ. I bring the former and the latter together to re-examine the root causes of climate change’s gender bias. Drawing on five years of qualitative PAR, including multi-sited ethnographies and interviews, my research maps and compares the narratives and experiences of WFCJ activists at the annual United Nations Climate Conference (COP) and at numerous miscellaneous global climate justice gatherings.

Yet, how do disparate women and gender-marginalized people from varying locations across the globe build solidarity to collectively foster common discourse, advocacy, and international demands on climate and gender in transnational climate justice arenas? More specifically, how do different women, from varying hemispheres of the globe and from differing political and socio-economic realities and histories gather in the same spaces to discuss, debate, and develop both divisions and solidarities about gender and climate change?

My work finds that solidarity is built amongst WFCJ through a common named resistance to some iteration of the global capitalist system. I refer to this global system, or common enemy, as The Racial Capitalist Climate Patriarchy— a global earth commodifying economic and socio-political system that has been historically uplifted and sustained through colonialism, imperialism, and an imposition of dominant cis-hetero subjectivities and social relations.

Within this overlying structure are a multiplicity of Racial Capitalist Climate Patriarchies. These Climate Patriarchies comprise a plurality of distinct and more localized, national, regional, or place-based manifestations of the larger global system, and are characterized by specific geographical locations, socio-political histories, and positionalities of gender, race, and class.

Chapter 1 revisits the foundational literature on Gendered Systemic Oppression to tend to the links between today’s climate emergency and its disproportionate burdens on gender-marginalized people across the globe. There, I identify two paradigmatic shifts that are fundamental to climate change’s structural impact on gender today. The inception of these two paradigmatic shifts occurred on parallel tracks without converging, thus creating a gap in the foundations of the literature. The first paradigmatic shift was put forth by original Ecological Feminist theories, which incorporated the domination of ecology as part of Gendered Systemic Oppression, but fell short on race. The second paradigmatic shift is an early form of intersectionality that showed structural racism to be “interlocked” with gendered and class oppression but did not elaborate on the domination of the environment (The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977).

Chapter 2 is devoted to a full analysis of the intersectional side of the gap. I trace the genesis of the intersectional side of the gap through a letter of critique written by Audre Lorde to Mary Daly in 1979. Thereafter, I identify three post-inaugural Ecofeminist works of systemic oppression that did acknowledge and incorporate the significant concerns about race and racism, as articulated by Lorde. A presentation of Black Ecological Feminisms follows a discussion of the intersection of Ecological Feminist and Intersectional Feminist perspectives, revealing the ongoing critique of Ecofeminism's white legacy. Lastly, this chapter explores the intersection of gender and ecology outside of academia, tracing gaps in scholarship and presenting early examples of women-led ecological resistance and activism on the ground

Chapter 3 explores the empirical findings and theoretical frameworks that underpin the global movement of WFCJ, elucidating how these disparate women build solidarity. As a result of my data collection, this dissertation suggests that what invokes collectivity between WFCJ is a shared recognition of naming two or more of the following global systems: capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, racial capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, and/or colonialism as the historical and current source that is responsible for disempowering and subordinating gender by causing and exacerbating climate change itself. These findings produce the empirical support for The Racial Capitalist Climate Patriarchy. Simultaneously, these observations were paired with a continual emphasis by WFCJ, on the geographic, racial, class, and gendered (in the case of further marginalized gender identities, such as LGBTQIA2++) disparities between the incredibly diverse women comprising WFCJ. The theoretical framework of The Racial Capitalist Climate Patriarchies are grounded within these latter observations and presented within this chapter.

Chapter 4 develops the concept of the Androcene. The Androcene is both a feminist approach to the Anthropocenic literature and the historical epoch which produced the structure of The Racial Capitalist Climate Patriarchy. The Androcene is an epoch defined by patriarchal social relations and structures, built from an interlinked subordination of gender, race, and nature.

This dissertation concludes by offering instances of ongoing resistance that visibilize Climate Patriarchies. As a primarily theoretical dissertation, this conclusion, therefore, looks toward future research into ethnographic case studies that interrogate the possibilities opened by frontline communities when Climate Patriarchies are dismantled. This, then, offers a hopeful look at a future heralded by revolution and feminist system(s) change for climate justice, and gestures towards the necessity of future research into these examples of “Climate Revolutions” (Sultana 2022).