“The Nature of Gender: Gender, Work and Environment”

By: Andrea Nightingale

This article begins by giving a historic analysis of three main frameworks for understanding gender and the environment: essentialist conceptions, materialist conceptions, and feminist political ecology. This background provides the basis for Nightingale’s call for a change from the cause-and-effect pattern of thinking about gender influencing environmental outcomes, to a framework where both influence and create each other. In order to make this shift, the definition of gender had to be broadened, blurred, and restructured as a process versus a static outcome. Nightingale argues that gender coexists with the production of other “subjectivities” that in turn have important implications for analyzing human-environment relations. I think that Nightingales most critical point is the idea of gender as performative. Actions and inactions are the drivers of the environmental narratives. This concept demonstrates why the idea of performing gender, or behaving within or out of certain expected and constructed guidelines would inherently have environmental implications because these constitute actions. In turn, a definition of gender that is dynamic instead of static would have the flexibility to be reciprocally shaped by the environment. The continuous development over the years of frameworks connecting gender and the environment are important to consider because these understandings help create more holistic ways of thinking when analyzing their complex connections.