Summer

Feminism & Environmental Racism

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Feminism

In summer of 2017, I bought a pair of running shorts with built-in absorption for running while on my period, and a hat from the same company that reads “MOIST” across the front. The company I bought these from, Thinx, employs mainstream white feminism and environmentalism as a marketing technique in its ad campaigns by featuring diverse models and catchy taglines such as the campaign for the new color “Ocean,” which they released for Earth Day 2019: “shrink your plastic impact — switch to Ocean. Nearly 8 billion tons of plastic, including disposable pads and tampons, enter our oceans each year. It’s time to rethink the way we period. Try Ocean, our *special edition* color for Earth Day. 🌊” Despite its “feminist” ad campaign, and its giveback mission toward corporate social responsibility, the company still uses greenwashing tactics in order to make a profit. Now that I think about it, “feminist ad campaign” is a bit of an oxymoron, isn’t it? According to an article in The Baffler, “The bond between Thinx’s feminist ideals and monetary success is only hardened by the company’s laser-like focus on galvanizing educated, affluent millennials with pro-female messaging.”

Not only is the company preying on the good intentions of its consumers, but Val Plumwood shows how white feminist consumers are in turn complicit in patriarchy by buying into them. She writes, “Western women may not have been in the forefront of the attack on nature, driving the bulldozers and operating the chainsaws, but many of them have been support troops, or have been participants, often unwitting but still enthusiastic, in a modern consumer culture of which they are the main symbols, and which assaults nature in myriad direct and indirect ways daily.” All this leaves those with a period and a commitment to sustainability in a tricky place. I stand by that disposable menstrual products are damaging to the environment, and since the FDA doesn’t regulate menstrual products, they could be potentially damaging to our bodies through endocrine disrupters. So until free-bleeding is totally chill, I’ve made use of some reusable alternatives.

I switched to a menstrual cup and period panties in January 2016. My suite of three menstrual management products, which I accumulated over a year and a half, cost me a total of $130. Most people who get periods however cannot afford this up-front cost, and this has much more to say about the pervasiveness of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism on women’s lives and choices than it does with periods. Women are more likely to live in poverty, earn lower wages for the work they do, have longer work days, and participate in more in unpaid labor such as childcare and housework than men, and this is just an economic aspect of how patriarchy affects women.

So let’s set menstruation aside for the time being. It is a nice segue, but not all women have the same sexual organs, and not everyone with a uterus or vagina or breasts is a woman. We might call the tendency to conflate someone’s biology with their identity “biological essentialism,” and that is something I want to avoid. While gender is not purely “natural,” it cannot be wholly abstracted to the realm of “culture” either, as both sides of this binary has women’s health and happiness at stake. Rather, an environmental and feminist ethic that takes into account nature, culture, and beyond! — such as Donna Haraway’s term “natureculture” or Stacy Alaimo’s idea of “transcorporeality” — is helpful in insisting on the importance of gender in environmental movements. The effects of climate change disproportionately affect women, especially women of color, Indigenous women, and women living in poverty. Patriarchy is a powerful force that can affect the body as well as the mind and spirit. It also has the power to limit women’s life choices, as, according to Pellow, “women are often physically and socially relegated to some of the most toxic residential and occupational spaces in communities and workplaces.” This kind of environmental injustice is heightened when taking into account race and class, and I talk about this later in the summer.

Much of the onus of consumerism and participation in capitalism placed on women as well. According to Peiss, with the advent of targeted advertising, “shopping was transformed from a functional activity of women into a form of leisure.” Given this, it’s no coincidence that women are overrepresented in the zero waste movement. The revolt against this “women as consumers” paradigm can be felt in the zero waste movement. Ariana Schwarz from the Paris To Go blog, has commented on the lack of men involved in zero waste, and quotes a fellow zero-waster saying, “a lot of things that create waste are marketed towards women.” She adds that social media, such as blogs or Instagram, are especially gendered spaces, and that might stop men who live zero waste from being represented online. The fact that eco-friendly behavior is coded as feminine may also contribute to the overwhelming representation of women in the zero waste movement.

And, as the primary consumers in most households — 79.4% of women identify themselves as the primary shopper in their home — women have been subjected to over a century of targeted advertising and marketing that has essentially told them the more stuff they buy, the happier they’ll be. This, coupled with Western liberal thought which centers on the individual as the arbiter of resistance and change, and white feminist thought which advocates choice and agency as the keys to women’s liberation, creates the perfect framework for the zero waste movement to flourish. The zero waste movement is based on the premise that a handful of individuals can can make an impact on a large-scale problem like plastic use and pollution. Zero-wasters also often make their own natural beauty products, channelling some ecofeminist vibes.

Gender is an important category to consider in most circumstances, and it comes up a lot in environmentalism. In the 1970s, a wave of feminists concerned with the environment rallied around ecofeminism as a way to address concerns of the oppression of women alongside the oppression of the non-human “natural world.” Ecofeminists are concerned with the impacts that environmental degradation can have disproportionately on women’s health. For example, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva has emphasized the harmful effects of the green revolution and genetically modified organisms on women and rural farmers. Ecofeminism emphasizes that the degradation of the environment goes hand in hand with the oppression of women in order to promote the liberation of both, this discourse however sometimes plays into the tradition of viewing women as more “natural” or “animalistic,” thus justifying their oppression.

Feminist theorist Val Plumwood explains in her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, “To be defined as ‘nature’ in this context is to be defined as passive, as non-agent and non-subject, as the ‘environment’ or invisible background conditions against which the ‘foreground’ achievements of reason or culture (provided typically by the white, western, male expert or entrepreneur) take place.” In this way, women are cast as non-man, and thus part of “nature,” and nature is cast aside entirely. At the same time, ecofeminism does the important work of considering the agency of the non-human beings that share the planet.

Other movements within feminism such as New Materialism — explored by Plumwood, Alaimo, and others — reclaim the importance of the material aspects of life lost in earlier post-structuralist arguments, such as Judith Butler’s revolutionary claim that gender is performative alone. These feminist movements take seriously the subjects (human, non-human, and non-living) with which they interact, which is important to environmental movements which attempt to protect ecosystems and all their parts. Indigenous feminist scholar Joanne Barker uses Biddy Martin’s work to explains another important factor in undermining dangerous hierarchies among sex and gender:

For instance, as Biddy Martin argues, much work has been done in women’s studies on separating anatomical sex (determinism) and social gender (constructionism). This separation has had consequences. First, it contributes to the notion of the stability and fixity of anatomical sex (what one is) and the malleability and performance of gender (what one does); the body and psyche are rendered virtually irrelevant to one’s identity and experience. Second, by reducing gender to one of two possibilities (man and woman), gender as a category of analysis stabilizes and universalizes binary oppositions at other levels, including sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and nationalism. ‘As a number of different feminists have argued,’ Martin writes, ‘the assumption of a core gender identity, now conceived as an effect of social construction, may also serve to ground and predict what biology, for constructionists, no longer can, namely, the putative unity or self-sameness of any given person’s actual sex or gender.’

Barker emphasizes that the connection among women and the land is an important aspect of indigenous feminisms and indigenous sovereignty, as settler colonialism used and continues to use violence against women as a tactic to exploiting and enacting violence against the land. Reclaiming this connectedness without reinforcing stereotypes about women, or casting Native women dismissively as “part of nature,” is central to the task of a comprehensive environmental justice that takes seriously the impacts of environmental harm on women’s bodies and on the land.

Racism/Privilege

The zero waste movement can be critiqued and strengthened not only through a feminist lens but also by analyzing how race and privilege play into it. Environmental racism is a term coined by Benjamin Chavis as, “racial discrimination in environmental policymaking, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of color from leadership of the ecology movements.” This has ongoing effects and has manifested itself in urban planning and coding laws, high instances of lead poisoning and decreased access to green space in communities of color, the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline near Standing Rock Sioux land, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the list goes on. Race is a “powerful predictor” in exposure to environmental hazards such as “distribution of air pollution, the location of municipal solid waste facilities, the location of abandoned toxic waste sites, toxic fish consumption, and lead poisoning in children,” even when income is controlled for. In addition, “Native American and African-American communities today face some of the most intense impacts of climate change, because Native peoples often live on lands that are targeted for fossil fuel drilling … and African-Americans are more likely than most populations to live near health-impairing coal-fired power plants.” These examples show how environmental racism is not a new phenomenon, but rather one entrenched in the long history of colonization and slavery in the United States which have continued impacts on the livelihoods of Native peoples, African-Americans, and other communities of color today.

There is also a large global disparity between nations that contribute to climate change, and those that have felt the brunt of its outcomes. According to OXFAM, the world’s richest 10% of the population is responsible for half of carbon emissions, while the poorest half is responsible for only 10% of carbon emissions. This goes to show the pervasiveness of environmental racism; the fact that communities of color in the Global South are so threatened by climate change should be a call to dismantle racism alongside remediating environmental damage.

With regards to the zero waste movement, race has primarily been addressed as an issue of inclusion, or lack thereof. For example, zero waste blogger Lindsay Miles of Treading My Own Path claims, “I am very aware that I am white, female, middle-class, and living in Australia. The stories that I share are written from this perspective: my lived experience. … If [people with privilege] are the only people talking about zero waste, then that is a bad thing. I don’t think the issue is one of privilege. I think the real issue is one of representation.” Rhetorics of representation or inclusion unfortunately universalize issues that are diverse and sometimes contradictory in nature, and lump together groups of people who might be opposed to the message to which they’re being co-opted. This is true of white feminism, which has espoused inclusion and intersectionality to promote more diversity without considering that Indigenous, Muslim, and Third World feminists, for example, have decolonialism and anti-racism — not mere “equality” with men — at the core of their projects, a message that shakes the foundation of white feminism’s goals. Gender justice theorists such as Houria Bouteldja have made this abundantly clear, to the point that she denies the term “feminist” altogether. Applying this same thought process to the zero waste movement, it may seem absurd to some groups of people that they should be merely “included” in a movement based on liberal and colonial ideologies to which they might be adamantly opposed.

Another way zero-wasters have discussed race is through issues of privilege. Miles addressed her privilege by saying:

the zero waste lifestyle is not reserved only for the young, affluent, or those with plenty of time on their hands. … It’s about working towards reducing waste, consuming less and choosing better. Privilege makes it easier, for sure. The less privilege and the less choice, the harder we have to work for our desired results and vice versa. … I disagree that we need expensive zero waste “trinkets” (like stainless steel lunchboxes or reusable coffee cups) to live zero waste. They are luxury items. … talking about the “stuff” can detract from the real message. … Ultimately, zero waste is not a lifestyle of “buying” or “stuff”. The less we buy and the more we make do, the better job we do of living zero waste. … I’m at a loss as to why anyone would think it is a bad thing that those with privilege are choosing to live zero waste, use less resources and tread more lightly on the planet. There are plenty of people with privilege exploiting the planet, using more than their fair share of resources, and encouraging consumption.

Miles’ claims are interesting on a number of fronts. While it’s true that zero waste bloggers create far less trash when compared to their demographic peers, income is the largest predictor of environmental footprint, and at a certain point money trumps environmental consciousness. Most of these bloggers live in affluent countries, where the baseline resource use and carbon emissions blow rates in countries in the Global South out of the water. Race and class also affect people’s individual environmental views and behaviors. Since many folks who consider themselves environmentalists are already starting from a place of more education, affluence, and privilege, it is sometimes hard to see the larger structural challenges that face positive environmental action. Miles appears unaware of this, or at least has other priorities in her environmentalism than issues of race and class.

The language of “choice” these bloggers keep circling back to is interesting as well. Choice feminism has been criticized by many non-western and queer gender justice advocates for its tendency to universalize women’s experience as a monolith as well as individualize the response as something each woman can enact on their own. Someone’s list of “choices” can be limited by their circumstances and the zero waste movement does little to address how we might change the systems of oppression that might limit someone’s choices. For example, a “green choice” might be buying bulk local grains in a reusable container. Someone who owns a car, has the time to weigh their mason jars at the front counter, and has expendable income can make the zero waste “choice” to drive to Whole Foods and spend $8.99 per pound for bulk almond flour, whereas someone living in poverty might not have access to a grocery store at all, let alone one where local, bulk, or “environmentally friendly” foods are available. (Almonds are actually pretty water intensive, and I used this example to emphasize the irrationality of logics of choice.) Now consider that for many people their choices are restricted by environmental racism, of which food insecurity and injustice is part and parcel, which removes even more choices from people of color.

In a conversation between two zero-wasters and women of color, Olivia LaPierre and Chanelle Crosby, they address some of the criticism launched at the zero waste movement, and include some of their own. Crosby says she takes issue with

the way [the movement]’s marketed now as a hot, new trend. There’s fancy upcycled you name it and beautiful bamboo and white everything. When you scroll through social media pages dedicated to zero waste you see a very small, privileged population of people who are able to spend a lot of resources (like time and money) to transition their lives to zero waste. … If we are simply replacing the “bad” things with “good” things and calling that a zero waste movement, we’ve missed the point. … To me, the zero waste movement as it is presented often comes across as extreme, elitist, and superficial. Honestly, sometimes I’ve even pushed away — and it’s my way of living. We can change the representation of the zero waste as people of color by sharing our stories and allowing space for everyone in the zero waste movement to see the big picture (which is definitely not matching mason jars!) We need to be active, not just hopeful and well meaning.

Crosby is pushing for more than just representation or inclusion, though that is a start, and environmental justice can be a good grounding for countering issues created by environmental racism.