Troubling Nature and Political Ecology: Feminists in the Capitalocene

Feminist political ecology has long been an important arena for debates on subjectivity, intersectionality, knowledges, multispecies studies, and social reproduction (Sultana, 2020). As such, feminist thought has been vital to core issues common to most political ecology scholarship: the social and material bases of marginality, critiques of hegemonic ways of knowing, and more than human and affective responses to neoliberal accumulation and control over resources. Yet despite strongly shaping the field, feminist debates are rarely taken up by those not self-identified as feminist.

Within feminist political ecology itself there is not a clear consensus on what doing feminist work means. Race and intersectionality, for example, have troubled a singular focus on gender, and shown how a performative understanding of subjectivity reveals the operation of power (Ahlborg & Nightingale, 2018; Mollett & Faria, 2013). While other feminists have insisted on the importance of the everyday to make sense of wider capitalist and developmental trajectories (Bee et al., 2015). But these insights sit uneasily alongside other formulations of subjectivity or the everyday that do not start from a feminist interpretation (Grove, 2009). Similarly, recent debates on emotion and care have permeated the field, stretching between fundamental questions about ethics and action research, to collaboration with colleagues, and alternatives to capitalist exploitative logics. Interest in conviviality, care, and affective understandings of nature (Bauhardt & Harcourt, 2018; Büscher & Fletcher, 2019; Singh, 2018), have led to a resurgence of ecofeminist thinking both within feminist and broader political ecology, along with the attendant critiques of essentialism originally levied at it.

We welcome contributions that broadly take up these themes or push against them to think about the contributions of feminist theory to political ecology.