Gendered Ecologies

This collection of women's racialized and gendered mappings of place, people, and nature includes the stories of teachers, organizers, activists, farmers, healers, and gardeners. From their many entry points, the contributors to this work engage crucial questions of coexistence with nature in these times of overlapping climate, health, economic, and racial crises.

Gendered Ecologies considers the value of interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman species, and inanimate objects, featuring observations by women writers as recorded in texts. The edition presents a case for transnational women writers, participating in the discourse of natural philosophy from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn examines the role of gender in recent debates about the nonhuman turn in the humanities, and critically explores the implications for a contemporary theory of gender and nature relations. The interdisciplinary contributions in this volume each provides theoretical reflections based on an analysis of specific naturecultural processes. They reveal how "ecologies of gender" are constructed through aesthetic, epistemological, political, technological and economic practices that shape multispecies and material interrelations as well as spatial and temporal orderings. The volume includes contributions from cultural anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, literary studies, media studies, philosophy and theatre studies. The essays are organized around four key dimensions of an "ecological" understanding of gender: "creatures", "materials", "spaces" and "temporalities". The overall aim of the volume Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn is to explore the potentialities and limitations of the nonhuman turn for a critical analysis and theory of ecologies of gender, and thereby make an original contribution to both the environmental humanities and gender studies. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students from the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities and environmental studies more broadly, as well as from gender studies and cultural theory.

"This innovative feminist rhetorical history advances valuable lessons for contemporary discussions in the discipline about teleological rhetorics, rhetorics of exceptionalism, and rhetorics of choice"--

This book will explore the ways in which young children perceive themselves and are viewed by others in terms of their gendered identities as individuals and as members of society. It considers research from a variety of perspectives in the context of home/family and school. Topics covered include: * the construction of gender from the time the child is conceived * the politics of category membership * analyses of play and art making * young children's experiences with technology * the influence of popular culture on the body image * gender equity policies in early childhood education * understanding sexual orientation. An examination and reflection of the issues will enable educators to improve their practice and have a greater understanding of the families and the children whom they teach. The diverse range and content of the research will make this book a valuable resource for all those interested in the education of young children. This book covers the issue of gender expectations of children with disabilities, and also discusses young childrens' experiences with technology and the ways in which they feel about their bodies. This book will be of great interest to all early childhood educators who are concerned about the ways in which the home and school impact on the lives of young children in terms of how they view themselves and how others view them. Trainee teachers will find this book helpful in developing their own attitudes, understandings and behaviours in relation to gender equity and young children.

Environmental history has traditionally told the story of Man and Nature. Scholars have too frequently overlooked the ways in which their predominantly male subjects have themselves been shaped by gender. Seeing Nature through Gender here reintroduces gender as a meaningful category of analysis for environmental history, showing how women's actions, desires, and choices have shaped the world and seeing men as gendered actors as well. In thirteen essays that show how gendered ideas have shaped the ways in which people have represented, experienced, and consumed their world, Virginia Scharff and her coauthors explore interactions between gender and environment in history. Ranging from colonial borderlands to transnational boundaries, from mountaintop to marketplace, they focus on historical representations of humans and nature, on questions about consumption, on environmental politics, and on the complex reciprocal relations among human bodies and changing landscapes. They also challenge the "ecofeminist" position by challenging the notion that men and women are essentially different creatures with biologically different destinies. Each article shows how a person or group of people in history have understood nature in gendered terms and acted accordingly—often with dire consequences for other people and organisms. Here are considerations of the ways we study sexuality among birds, of William Byrd's masking sexual encounters in his account of an eighteenth-century expedition, of how the ecology of fire in a changing built environment has reshaped firefighters' own gendered identities. Some are playful, as in a piece on the evolution of "snow bunnies" to "shred betties." Others are dead serious, as in a chilling portrait of how endocrine disrupters are reinventing humans, animals, and water systems from the cellular level out. Aiding and adding significantly to the enterprise of environmental history, Seeing Nature through Gender bridges gender history and environmental history in unexpected ways to show us how the natural world can remake the gendered patterns we've engraved on ourselves and on the planet.

A transatlantic phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the "New Woman" broke away from many of the constraints of the Victorian era to enjoy a greater freedom of movement in the social, physical, and intellectual realms. As Alicia Carroll reveals, the New Woman also played a significant role in environmental awareness and action. From the Arts and Crafts period, to before, during, and after the Great War, the iconic figure of the New Woman accompanied and informed historical women’s responses to the keen environmental issues of their day, including familiar concerns about air and water quality as well as critiques of Victorian floral ecologies, extinction narratives, land use, local food shortages, biodiversity decline, and food importation. As the Land Question intersected with the Woman Question, women contributed to a transformative early green culture, extolling the benefits of going back to the land themselves, as "England should feed her own people." Carroll traces the convergence of this work and a self-realization articulated by Mona Caird’s 1888 demand for the "acknowledgement of the obvious right of the woman to possess herself body and soul." By the early twentieth century, a thriving community of New Woman authors, gardeners, artists, and land workers had emerged and created a vibrant discussion. Exploring the early green culture of Arts and Crafts to women’s formation of rural utopian communities, the Women’s Land Army, and herbalists of the Great War and beyond, New Woman Ecologies shows how women established both their own autonomy and the viability of an ecological modernity.