ABSTRACT
This handbook presents the ‘state of the art’ of the academic field of gender and environment. One intention is to showcase the variety of perspectives, themes, and debates that have shaped the intellectual project of understanding the gender-environment nexus within the social sciences and humanities for over four decades. Another is to demonstrate that under the banner of ‘gender and environment’ sits a diverse, theoretically – sophisticated, and empirically grounded collection of approaches that have a common a set of concerns about gender injustice and the degradation of the natural environment. With some of its roots reaching into the fertile soil of activist movements, this scholarship – particularly within the tradition of ecological feminism – has been motivated by the pursuit of justice in the face of diverse and interlocking forms of oppression. But it has also contributed theoretical insights that in many cases were ahead of their time. Arguably, gender and environment scholarship was materialist and posthumanist before these concepts gained popularity in the mainstream of Western academia. An intersectional analysis of capitalism, rationalist science, colonialism, racism, (hetero) sexism, and speciesism has always been central to feminist environmental scholarship. And, contrary to popular opinion in many corners of environmental studies, this work has very little to do with the claim that ‘women are closer to nature than men’. In fact, much of it is aimed at questioning the very ideas of ‘women’ and ‘nature’ and at understanding the myriad ways in which gender (as a social category and power relation) shapes and is shaped by inter-human relations as well as human relations with other species and environments. Yet the idea that it is at base a simplistic narrative about women saving the planet persists in spite of the evidence. The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment aims to dispense with that caricature once and for all.
