Gender in the Climate-Conflict Nexus: “Forgotten” Variables, Alternative Securities, and Hidden Power Dimensions

The literature on the security implications of climate change, and in particular on potential climate-conflict linkages, is burgeoning. Up until now, gender considerations have only played a marginal role in this research area. This is despite growing awareness of intersections between protecting women’s rights, building peace and security, and addressing environmental changes. This article advances the claim that adopting a gender perspective is integral for understanding the conflict implications of climate change. We substantiate this claim via three main points. First, gender is an essential, yet insufficiently considered intervening variable between climate change and conflict. Gender roles and identities as well as gendered power structures are important in facilitating or preventing climate-related conflicts. Second, climate change does affect armed conflicts and social unrest, but a gender perspective alters and expands the notion of what conflict can look like, and whose security is at stake. Such a perspective supports research inquiries that are grounded in everyday risks and that document alternative experiences of insecurity. Third, gender-differentiated vulnerabilities to both climate change and conflict stem from inequities within local power structures and socio-cultural norms and practices, including those related to social reproductive labor. Recognition of these power dynamics is key to understanding and promoting resilience to conflict and climate change. The overall lessons drawn for these three arguments is that gender concerns need to move center stage in future research and policy on climate change and conflicts.

Gentrification and Care A Theoretical Model

Gentrification and care are two topics that are rarely brought into conversation in the economics literature. Often, gentrification is studied in relation to displacement, housing prices, property values, and segregation. The economics of care, on the other hand has often been occupied with measurement and valuation of women’s labor on a global, de-regulated market. Anthropologists and other social scientists, however, have studied the collaboration and care work that women foster beyond the household. The sharing of unpaid social reproductive labor among networks of women/families is key to sustaining the coherence of low-income communities. If gentrification causes displacement, then, an episode of gentrification can cause care networks to disperse. To bridge the largely parallel literatures on gentrification and care work, we present a mathematical model of gentrification where agents base their decision to move on both the price of housing, and the price of care. The price of care is offset by the ability of agents to form care networks. Our models suggest that gentrification disperses the care networks of the poor, increasing their vulnerability to rising housing prices. Thus, decisions to move are predicated on a particular ‘social price point’-a decision that is not only economic but reflects increasing geographic distance from those who collaborate to accomplish social reproductive and other tasks of community maintenance.

Women and children together and apart

In what ways, and to what effects, are proliferating temporalities of appropriation in financialized capitalism transforming or transformed by those of social reproductive labor? More specifically, how are woman-child relations affected when social reproduction becomes a site of immediate, not just indirect, capital accumulation through relations of debt? To answer these questions, we take up species-being as the labor relation that anchors socially necessary labor and links women and children by attending to three temporal modalities of accumulation via social reproductive labor: scholarization, (re)familization, and debt servicing. We argue that differentiated tempos in the appropriation of surplus value, operating to “fix” contradictions between capital's short- and long-term interests, are critical sources of tension between women and children in the meeting of needs. Producing and mapping divergent rhythms of appropriation on to different groups may both link diverse women and children, and put their interests at odds.

The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism

In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call “domestic geopolitics.” Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of Black geographies as a domestic form of colonialism, with an expanded understanding of domesticity as political work. We develop the domestic geopolitics framework based on the dual meaning of domestic: the inward facing geopolitics of racialization and the resistance embodied in domestic labors of maintaining life, home, and community. Drawing on Black feminist scholars, we describe three categories of social reproductive labor in conditions of racialized toxicity: the labor of keeping wake, the labor of tactical expertise, and the labor of revolutionary mothering. We argue that Black survival struggles exemplify a domestic geopolitics of everyday warfare against racial capitalism’s onslaught.

Athletic Labor and Social Reproduction

This article connects the exploitation experienced by athletic laborers to sports fandom by theorizing athletic labor as a form of social reproductive labor. The work of athletes in high-performance spectator sport contributes to the affective reproduction of spectatorial subjects required by capitalism, albeit at a great cost to the laboring athlete. This intervention advances Marxist scholarship on the sociology of sport by extending the literature on social reproduction and labor into an entirely new and necessary sphere. Framing athletic labor as a form of social reproduction reveals that high performance spectator sport is more central to the political economy of late capitalism than is often understood and that sport is a more exploitative and dehumanizing site of labor even than conventional Marxist analysis has suggested.

Multidirectional Care in Transnational Families

Adjusting to long-standing political economic conditions and the culture of migration in the Philippines, Filipino kin view their role of caring for their families in the Philippines as a form of care for a migrant family member, even though the migrant is not the direct receiver of care. To this end, the stories in chapter one follows the transnational care work within family kin networks to establish just how they reconfigure and make meaning of social reproductive labor in and from different places in a transnational arrangement. The unit of analysis in this chapter is the Filipino transnational family; following care work and its different permutations from the migrant abroad and from families in the Philippines. Further, the roles that extended and fictive kin play in the transnational family emerge as key contribution in shifting gender ideologies in care work.

The Labor of Care

Anchored in the experiences and lives of Filipina migrants and their families in the Philippines, the main objective of this book is to make visible all of the forms, roles and definitions of social reproductive labor and care work required in the maintenance of the transnational family; demonstrating just how many people are uniquely affected by migration and separation. A second aim is to critically explore current neoliberal moment under which families are forcibly separated and the reconfiguration of the functions, operations and definitions of family in and through the very neoliberal mechanisms that disperse them around the globe--labor migration and technology. Although a significant literature on transnational families exists, this book brings the scholarship up to date on the technological advances that enables intimacy for transnational family members. Additionally, the sociological analysis in this book delves into the emotionality that comes with care work in migration and separation. The transnational Filipino family, as the unit of analysis, shows that care work is shared between migrant and the family they left behind, albeit unevenly. Further, it considers the shifts in gendered work and expectations (for men and women) and it includes fictive kin and extended family to redefine the membership and function of a socially relative dynamic of “family”. Broadly, this book is about the labor of care engaged by families who are enduring and thriving in conditions of forced migration and separation.