Gender and Nature

Gender and nature are two of the most powerful concepts through which our understandings of the world are shaped. They are central to the framework of meanings through which people tend to view themselves and (human and nonhuman) others. Mutually reinforcing, conceptions of gender and nature are inextricably intertwined. Geographers’ interest in these two concepts has been driven by an interest in exploring these connections and, perhaps more important, by efforts to destabilize the assumed nature-given categories of man, woman, and nature.

The term gender, as used in contemporary social theory, emerged as part of this denaturalizing impulse. Gender is generally understood to be a social category that can be distinguished from the biological (or nature-given) category of sex. Thus, early feminist theorists delineated gender as a system of meaning that objectifies women, rendering them passive, immobile, and closer to nature. Men in contrast are constructed as agents. Through their gradual subordination of nature, men have been portrayed as on the side of civilization, their historic role being to free humanity from its natural constraints. This system of meaning naturalizes patriarchy through a particular understanding of nature: It places transformative energies in the hands of men as master subjects. In contrast, recognizing gender as a social category suggests that it is open to change. Put at its simplest, even if I am a man, I do not have to act in masculine ways. As this example shows, sex is generally viewed as inescapable: Nevertheless, in recent years, the sex/gender distinction has itself been called into question. This division, it is argued, is a mirror of one of geography's most deeply engrained binaries, the distinction between nature and culture. Within this system of meaning, nature has been framed as the essence of something: It is immutable and historically constant, as opposed to culture, which is viewed as a product of civilization. Questioning the reliance of the sex/gender distinction on both hetero-normative assumptions and dubious dualisms, feminist theorists have sought to historicize and contextualize sex in the same way as gender, showing it to be as much a social construction as the latter. In many respects, this echoes much of the work within critical studies of nature in which long-standing assumptions about the essential characteristics of nature have been progressively undermined. It also builds on a shift from epistemological to ontological questions. Sex, it is argued, is produced, constructed, and performed in ways not dissimilar to nature.

Although most of the work reviewed below still relies on a sex/gender distinction, this comes to be questioned in a variety of ways. This entry begins by discussing ecofeminism as a body of work that has placed gender-nature relations at the heart of its work. Then, the entry moves on to a brief consideration of feminist political ecology's contributions before looking at the influence of a broader set of debates within cultural and historical geography. The final section explores the ontological politics in recent moves to question both sex and nature.