The 19th: For those unfamiliar with the term “petro-masculinity,” what does this rhetoric around oil and gas dominance have to do with gender and identity?
I first thought of this term after Trump was elected in 2016 because I saw this trend of support for fossil fuels and climate denial on the one hand and misogyny on the other. They were usually treated as separate problems, and just coincidentally appearing together.
I come from a critical eco-feminist background where scholars connect the domination and exploitation of the natural world to the justifications for the domination and exploitation of work that is often done by colonized peoples, and by women or feminized bodies. Historically, this process developed under colonial capitalism. It helps me understand that these are not coincidental, that these two go together. In the United States, for example, it can be seen in the way that care work is devalued or taken for granted, in the same way that nature is considered a resource, something free to be taken.
Both of these are background assumptions that drive the capitalist economy. So the separation of them into the economic sphere and the private or identity issue sphere is really making it hard for people to see that these are not separate. These actually work together.