International relations are based on patriarchal norms – states are constructed and legitimized through masculinity making violence inevitable

Alternative

Alts

Everyday Focus

Traditional policy making ignores the everyday violence experienced by women- focusing on the everyday opens up the space for dialogue on violence as a gendered phenomenon

Elias and Rai, 2015

Juanita, an Associate Professor in International Political Economy at the University of Warwick; a Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick Rai. "The Everyday Gendered Political Economy of Violence." Politics & Gender 11.2 (2015): 424-29. Web. 10 July 2016.

This short commentary aims to think through the need to return to a more “integrated” feminist IR through a focus on some of the ways in which feminist political economy (FPE) scholars, such as ourselves, might 424 POLITICS & GENDER, 11 (2) (2015) better integrate a focus on gendered forms and practices of violence into our analysis. We do this via an intervention into debates about the nature of the “everyday” political economy. At the same time, we hope that this intervention might also draw attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the gendered structures and practices of the global political economy in feminist security studies (FSS). We note that a neglect of everyday gendered practices of violence in IPE is, in part, a reflection of the overall marginalization of gender within this field (Elias 2011). True (2012), however, has opened up important lines of debate — showing how violence against women both underpins and is perpetuated by the process of global economic transformation. Policy reports from key global economic governance institutions such as the World Bank (2013) have nonetheless displayed a propensity to present violence against women as an economic “cost” without examining the structures and processes that enable violence against women to take shape within the contemporary global economic system. While we, like True, are deeply skeptical of this approach, we do, nonetheless, seek to interrogate the “costs” of violence by focusing on the everyday human, as opposed to just the economic, cost of this violence. Within the study of IPE, one particular opening into which a discussion of gendered violence can make an important contribution is the recent turn to the “everyday” (Hobson and Seabrooke 2007) — a development that has largely neglected the contributions of feminist scholarship. This includes International Relations (Enloe 1989) and feminist scholarship on the nature, experience, and methodological significance of the everyday (Scheper-Hughes 1992; Smith 1987). Hobson and Seabrooke’s everyday IPE approach in particular can be critiqued for its propensity to present the “everyday” as a site of mundane acts of political agency — a perspective that jars somewhat when read against Scheper-Hughes’ ethnography of the “violence of everyday life” as experienced by poor mothers in the Brazilian favelas of the 1980s. Here, the everyday is an ambiguous and contradictory space in which injustices of political economic inequality are manifested in women’s emotional responses to child bearing, rearing, and mortality (specifically, poor women’s acceptance of their children’s death) (1992, 341). Scheper-Hughes’ work echoes Smith’s (1987) commitment to studying the everyday as “embedded in a socially organized context” (p. 90) but which must also be understood as “an actual material setting, an actual local and particular place in the world.” It is this local material world that is emphasized by Bourgeois and Scheper-Hughes (2004) in their rejection CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES 425 of all-encompassing (top-down) theories of neoliberalism as structural violence — instead pointing to how it is the lived experiences of those on the ground that generate the most useful insights that enable us to connect everyday acts and forms of violence to broader political economic structures and systems. In order to illustrate our argument, we outline three strands of the violence of everyday life in the global political economy: (1) the pervasiveness of violence within feminized global zones of work, such as export processing zones or the expanding market for migrant domestic work; (2) women’s experience of violence in public spaces, particularly that relating to mobility and public transport; and (3) the relationship between women’s subordination in the household and forms of violence. The experience of violence by women factory workers is important to consider in developing an FPE approach to everyday violence not least because of the tendency to equate women’s entry into paid employment with forms of “empowerment” that undermine patriarchal household relations. If we return to Elson and Pearson’s (1981) classic work on this topic, we see how gender relations are not merely decomposed, but also recomposed and intensified when women enter paid employment — for example, the uses of sexual harassment as a way of securing workplace discipline (Mun˜ oz 2008). An understanding of the gendered violence of global factory production must, furthermore, recognize how the emergence of export processing industrialization is, in many respects, an effective “scaling-up” of the working practices of the informal and/or homeworking sectors to the global economy (Cross 2010), serving to reproduce the structures of domination and inequality of the household within global zones of work. These blurred lines between the global and the household are, furthermore, evident in the emergence of large-scale movements of migrant women to take up employment as domestic workers, exposing women to multiple forms of violence by the state and individuals (Elias 2013). The recomposition and/or intensification of violent gender relations is also evident in relation to the violence that women experience in the everyday act of going to work; their mobility invites violence. Rises in women’s engagement in economic activity outside of the home increases their visibility in public spaces and yet also results in women experiencing forms of disciplining or “backlash” that stem from perceptions of women as stepping out of place. Urbanization and urban poverty bring about everyday violence for women. We see poorly supported, overcrowded public transportation systems 426 POLITICS & GENDER, 11 (2) (2015) within urban areas as a key site for gender violence. Travel on public transport is always mediated by class. The poor, in particular, need to travel long distances to get to work. The issue of sexual harassment and new experiences of assault on public transport — something that is frequently dismissed as an inconvenience rather than an act of violence — is one that speaks particularly well to developing an understanding of gender violence as an “everyday” phenomena. The relationship between women’s subordination in the household and violence is most frequently understood in terms of the issue of domestic violence. Global political economic transformations do play out in households in ways that empower women, making them less vulnerable to violence, but also in ways that significantly disempower women. For example, Baxi, Rai, and Ali (2006) found in their study of so-called “honour” crimes in India that one motivating factor in disciplining young women through household and community violence was the fear that the liberalization of the Indian economy, increasing migration of young men and women to cities, and the influx of television programmes from the West would lead to the erosion of traditional gendered social practices of marriage. The performance of this violence was also suggestive of the elision of governance of communities with the governance of polity — caste-based village councils (khap panchayats) being allowed to decree punishment with full knowledge of the state/ secular local government (Baxi, Rai, and Ali 2006). Beyond these specific examples, in thinking about the violence of everyday life within the household from a political economy perspective, it is also important to broaden notions of violence to include not just direct physical attack, but also forms of violence that impact on women’s bodily integrity in terms of access to adequate nutrition or healthcare. We would also add the psychological violence that stems from the way in which women’s work in the domestic sphere remains unrecognized, unrewarded, and misrepresented (Waring 1988). Thus, in outlining a theory of “depletion” through social reproduction, Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas (2014) underscore how the nonrecognition of the socially reproductive work that takes place within households can lead to discursive, bodily, emotional, and citizenship-entitlement harm. By showing how macrolevel nonrecognition of socially reproductive work is intimately connected to everyday depletion of individuals, households, and communities, Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas develop a materialist feminist understanding of everyday systemic violence. In this framework, harm occurs when there is a measurable deterioration in the health and CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES 427 well-being of individuals and the sustainability of households and communities and when the inflows required to sustain social reproductive work fall below a threshold of sustainability (2014, 6). In times of crises, economic downturn, war, and social conflict, there can be an intensification of this harm. So, by revealing the links between IPE and the everyday social reproductive work, we can analyze how women’s productive and social reproductive commitments under late capitalism are experienced on the ground. There is, we note, something of a gap within feminist studies of the household and social reproduction in political economy when it comes to the issue of violence. Although there exist multiple strands of feminist political economy analysis (Elias 2011), we focus on the more materialist-oriented social reproduction literature since this is where we locate ourselves as scholars. We feel that it is useful to think through how a theory of violence might be embedded into studies of social reproduction, and one way to do this is by mobilizing the concept of depletion. For example, by situating factory or domestic workers within broader sets of socially reproductive relations, it is possible to point to the costs and harms that are experienced by female workers in low-paid, labor-intensive work — the harms to their health and well-being (including emotional well-being) and broader harms to the community and (global) household. Outlining the ways in which we think a focus on the “everyday” in IPE opens up space for discussions of violence as a gendered phenomenon. This, then, is an intervention we hope serves as a starting point for developing further conversations within feminist IR (while at the same time ensuring that we continue to have conversations with nonfeminist critical IPE scholars). This short piece is not a critique of FSS for its lack of attention to the everyday political economy (or even the not-soeveryday political economy of neoliberal economic restructuring). Rather, this piece is a contribution to this Critical Perspectives section, which provides a forum for thinking about ways in which we can re-engage. We recognize that for many FSS scholars focused on unpacking the discursive construction of militarized and/or securitized identities, an engagement with the more materialist focus of much recent feminist political economy scholarship may not be particularly attractive. However, our intention is that through demonstrating the strong and clear links between social reproduction, the everyday political economy, and issues of violence against women, we can encourage a dialogue across these subfields. In doing so, we also hope that we can inspire 428 POLITICS & GENDER, 11 (2) (2015) more FSS scholars to start thinking about links between violence and everyday political economy.

Gendered Lens

Using a gendered lens is critical to understand US hegemonic masculinity - security and the political economy are intertwined with gender making gender the critical component of understanding the effects wealth has on international relations

Sjoberg in 2015 (Laura Sjoberg is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL “From Unity to Divergence and Back Again: Security and Economy in Feminist International Relations” POLITICS & GENDER, 11 (2) (2015) PG: 408-413)

In Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, J. Ann Tickner (1992) identified three main dimensions to “achieving global security” — national security, economic security, and ecological security: conflict, economics, and the environment. Much of the work in feminist peace studies that inspired early feminist International Relations (IR) work (e.g., Brock-Utne 1989; Reardon 1985) and many of Tickner’s contemporaries (e.g., Enloe 1989; Peterson and Runyan 1991; Pettman 1996) also saw political economy and a feminist conception of security as intrinsically interlinked. Yet, as feminist IR research evolved in the early 21st century, more scholars were thinking either about political economy or about war and political violence, but not both. This divergence was recognized and reified with the use of the terms “Feminist Security Studies” (FSS) and “Feminist Political Economy” or “Feminist Global Political Economy” (FPE). Both FSS and FPE went from being named to developing into vibrant research communities over the last decade (e.g., Rai and Waylen 2013; Sjoberg 2009a). While specialization led to a significant amount of intricate field research (e.g., Chin 2013; MacKenzie 2009) and deep theoretical conversations (Peterson 2003; Wibben 2010), the overlap that early feminists in IR saw between political economy and security has often (though not always) been lost in both FSS and FPE research. This brief essay contends that looking at the space where “security” and “political economy” questions intersect is one of the most fruitful directions for researchers in the field and provides an added value to the analysis that either “lens” would provide individually. The essay uses an example from my research on prostitution of male members of the U.S. military to explore the utility of understanding the interlocked nature of security and political economy in feminist scholarship on global politics — politically, analytically, intellectually, and normatively. It concludes by arguing that a reunification of FSS and FPE is a productive and intellectually essential direction of future research. Naming FSS and Identifying its Losses I certainly was not the only one who started using the term FSS around a decade ago, but I can speak to my purposes for using it (which may differ from others’ purposes). In 2006, I proposed a special issue of Security Studies (Sjoberg 2009a) and a 2007 International Studies Association workshop on FSS. My use of the term had an explicitly outward-focused intent: there existed a subfield of IR called Security Studies, and an employer had asked me to write an essay evaluating feminist contributions to it. As I tried, I realized that although feminists had been writing important works about gender, war, and conflict for decades, they had not made the radar screen of Security Studies, so I used the term “Feminist Security Studies” with the explicit intent of convincing people in Security Studies that feminist work matters to their research. That mission has had some successes and failures, I think, but they seem to me to be secondary to the (at least for me) unintended consequences of naming FSS. To me, there seemed to be a (hopefully-short-term) effect of a trend of research that self-identified as FSS, mine included, marginalizing feminist work on global political economy within the feminist IR community. The FSS work became, in my view, overrepresented in the field. I also felt that sense of overrepresentation looking at the proliferation of work on women’s violence within Feminist Security Studies, which was certainly for a while (and may still be) a significantly larger part of feminist research on security than are gender issues in lived experiences of security. While there are indicators that both of these trends are at least being tempered, I think it is important to evaluate how those consequences might have evolved. In hindsight, I think the notion that the label FSS could possibly be purely outward-looking was short-sighted. Whatever successes it had in gaining traction in Security Studies that made the never-intended “subfield” of FSS appealing, the work it inspired was, by definition, going to be impacted by the assumed intended audience of Security Studies with its narrow definitions of security and assumptions about methodology. While I think (and hope) a lot of our work has either rejected this direction or walked the line well, there will always be trade-offs in such a project. While early feminist IR addressed militarism, political economy, and the environment as interrelated, much more recent work in FSS has either been narrower or wielded a “security” lens to analyze those other issues. My work is as susceptible to this critique as anyone else’s, if not more so (e.g., Sjoberg 2009b). My research has often not done a good job at approximating the relationship between FSS and FPE that would be ideal, in part because I have always felt more comfortable in the realm of security (as traditionally understood) than researching and theorizing political economy. Still, writing a book about the different areas of feminist theorizing of wars (Sjoberg 2013), I found political economy always and everywhere relevant — to individual experiences of war, to conflict-related migration, to the funding of war and conflict, to the social dynamics of joining militaries, to the constitution of military action. In fact, some of the most interesting and underexplored intersections between war practice and feminist theorizing are the places where questions of political economy would dominate the analysis — like analyzing the gendered nature of military logistics practices, understanding the long-term effects of conflicts on populations in conflict zones, and understanding the gendered health impacts of war, to name a few examples. A narrowly framed FSS-focused research approach might miss many of these dimensions — which I think is the loss for FSS research involved in its divergence from FPE research. Thinking About FSS and FPE in Male Military Prostitution I have just started a research project on male members of the U.S. military who prostitute themselves to near-based populations. I initially became interested in the question of where male military prostitutes are while reading Aaron Belkin’s (2012) book on homoeroticism underpinning the straight, hegemonic masculinity of the U.S. military next to Katharine Moon’s (1997) book on base camp prostitution. I wondered — are there base camps for male prostitutes? I found a positive answer to that, but found myself more interested in having discovered the male members of the military who prostitute themselves. I was interested for Belkin’s reasons of understanding military masculinities and their relationship to sexualities, but also because I was interested in what “straight” soldiers prostituting themselves to men meant for the social construction of heterosexuality. I started thinking about it as both securitized (what does this mean for the sex of security?) and as an artifact of queer history (Be´rube´ 2010). That said, my approach largely ignored political economy dynamics, not least that prostitution is, by definition, a practice where money changes hands. The more research I do, however, the more I find a politics of the monetization of sex mapped onto the politics of performed masculinities, where particular sorts of men performing particular sorts of sex acts command a financial premium, while others are financially undervalued because of their assumed desire for the sex act. The exchange of money can also act as a “pass” to deny desire. In that way, the constitution of securitized masculinity (which I am interested in) cannot be separated from the power-laden political economies of prostitution since “straight” male prostitutes provide only certain services, and command a premium, especially if they are selling themselves as soldiers. This brings up a number of other questions that I previously had not considered: What are the monetary significations of idealized militarized masculinities, inside of prostitution and outside of it? A number of male soldiers who prostitute themselves say they do it “for the money,” so what are the political-economic pressures on their lives that make that (or the perception of it) true? From where is the money that goes into male military prostitution being diverted? Where is it being spent? Does economic well-being in the location where soldier prostitution occurs dictate the volume of that prostitution or the price that it brings? In situations where soldiers do not do it “for the money,” what is the signification of money changing hands (particularly for military masculinities) rather than not? To what degree is male military prostitution performed involuntarily or with limited agency? Do the pressures to which that involuntariness responds lie largely in the financial or social arenas? Is there utility to comparing soldier prostitution with soldier consumption of prostitute services? If so, what is that utility? What roles do economic inequality and commerce dynamics have in the constitution of idealized military masculinity through sexuality? These are, of course, a rough cut, both conceptually and terminologically, but even that very rough cut seems to suggest that research in FSS that takes political economy seriously is likely to provide a deeper understanding of the phenomenon being studied, important clues into the empirical dynamics of the subject matter, and an overall higher quality analysis. Reunifying FSS and FPE To achieve this higher-quality analysis and start recovering the losses associated with the divergence of FSS and FPE, ideally, conceptual and empirical feminist research would recognize, like early IR feminist research did, that there is no separation between “security” and “political economy,” as security is intimately bound up in political economy, and political economy is bound up in security. That is not to say that they are the same thing, but that they are a continuum without clear or defined boundaries. Any “security” question has political economy implications and needs political economy analysis to be fully understood. Any “political economy” question has security implications and may benefit from security analysis. At the same time, while there is very little risk of doing economic analysis on issues traditionally considered part of security studies, there is, as we have witnessed, a fair amount of risk to securitizing political economy issues (Duffield 2001). In some sense, then, the trend of treating security issues as primary within feminist IR not only needs to be equalized but politically and intellectually reversed. This would make both FSS and FPE research richer and serve as a step toward dissolving categories that may have served their purpose.

The alternative is three-fold: collapse the patriarchy, engage in a massive paradigm shift, and change the human perception of nature - it’s the only way to solve for environmental destruction and structural violence

Nhanenge 7 (Jytte Nhanenge is a student at University of South Africa (UNISA) and a ecofeminist author, “Ecofeminism: Towards Intergrating The Concerns Of Women, Poor People And Nature Into Development”, University of South Africa, http://s3.amazonaws.com/roomr-production/speeches/speech_docs/000/005/534/original/ECOFEMINSM_TOWARDS_INTEGRATING_THE_CONCERNS_OF_WOMEN__POOR_PEOPLE_AND_NATURE_INTO_DEVELOPMENT.pdf, accessed 7/13/16//KR)

Based on the interlinked effects from the multiple, global crises, modern Western culture is required to make some necessary transitions. These changes are rather extensive and will probably shake the foundations of the modern way of life and deeply affect its social, economic and political systems. To approach the situation it is therefore wise to adopt a broader view. One way is to perceive the situation as a natural cultural evolution. Hence, the modern perspective needs to make a shift from seeing social and natural systems as being static, to perceiving them as being dynamic patterns of change. In this way, one may view a crisis as a natural aspect of a transformation. This perception is equivalent to the ancient Chinese philosophy, which found that times of crises are both times of danger and opportunities. It can be seen in the Chinese sign for crisis, which is composed of two characters "danger" and "opportunity". Thus, the old Chinese were well aware that there is a profound connection between crisis and change. (Henderson 1978: 381; Capra 1982: 7). When one examines the interconnected effects of the crises it becomes clear, due to the persistent domination of women, Others and nature, that there are three fundamental and interconnected challenges, which requires transformation in the modern culture: (Capra 1982: 10) The first is the slow but inevitable decline of patriarchy. According to Adrienne Rich, "Patriarchy is the power of the fathers. It is a familial-social, ideological, political system in which men - by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law, language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labour - determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male". Patriarchy has had a time span of approximately 3,000 years in Western civilisation. Its full power is extremely difficult to grasp because it is all pervasive. It has influenced the basic ideas about human nature and people's relations to the universe. It is a system which, until recently, has never been openly challenged and whose doctrines have been universally accepted and presented as laws of nature. However, a society where men dominate women is an unbalanced society. It is a society, which is much less than what it otherwise might have been. The complementary contrast, which men and women give to society creates the necessary social balance. Since extremes always lead to disaster, patriarchy has played an essential part in promoting the global crises. Today the disintegration of patriarchy is in sight. The feminist movement is one of the 98 strongest cultural current in present time and it will have a profound effect on the further cultural evolution. A more in-dept discussion about the patriarchy and its domination will take place in chapter 4. (Capra 1982: 10-11; Capra 1989: 240; Rowe 1997: 234). The second transition is a paradigm shift. The modern vision of reality, including its common concepts, thoughts, perceptions, values and practices, needs to be changed. The present paradigm has dominated modern culture for several hundred years. It has shaped Western societies and has had a strong influence in the rest of the world. It comprises some entrenched, patriarchal ideas and values related to the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. It includes the assumptions that the scientific method is the only valid approach to knowledge; that the universe is a mechanical system composed of material elements; that nature is dead; that the human body is a machine; that life in society is an individual, competitive struggle for existence; that man can have unlimited material progress through economic growth and technological development; and that females are subsumed under the male as a basic law of nature. These assumptions have proven to be inadequate. The values they promote have contributed fundamentally to the present crises of poverty, environmental destruction, human repression and a violent world. The modern vision and its values are now challenged; they are in need of major revision. This relates to the fall of the patriarchy. When modern science is historically examined from a feministic point of view, it becomes clear that the scientific epistemology is an ideological and aggressive patriarchal way of perceiving the world founded on power and control. An analysis of science has therefore been helpful to understand the current patriarchal domination of women, Others and nature. A critique of the modern meaning structure and suggestion for an alternative perception of reality, is the main subject in chapters 4, 5 and 6. (Capra 1982: 12; Norgaard 1994: 62-66; Capra 1997: 5-6; Des Jardins 2001: 255). The third transition is the human perception of nature. The current paradigm and its institutions see environmental destruction as an unforeseen and unintended side effect of development and progress. Thus, the remedies advocated are based on improving the tools by introducing better science, appropriate technologies, improved resource management and environmental accounting etc. It is a kind of enlightened stewardship of nature by human beings. However, reforms alone are not enough, instead the root causes must be addressed. This has led to development of other views like those of Deep Ecology, social ecology and ecofeminism. These alternative perspectives challenge the dominant mode of progress as being inherently wrong. They point to the cultural roots of the crisis and call for a re-conceptualization of development based on equitable relationships between humans and humans, men and women, and humans and nature. These visions consequently have ethical and 99 epistemological positions that are alternatives to those of the old scientific experts. The latter have continuously claimed a superior epistemological position, due to their objectivity, but this is part of the problem rather than a solution to natural destruction. Sustainable development will hardly be possible without the contributions of these alternative perspectives. Together they make up a broad movement towards pro-environmental change, which will require fundamental transformation in the modern economic and political systems. It will include decentralisation of power and ownership of natural resources together with establishment of ecologically harmonious life-styles. It will promote formation of new coalitions and new forms of politics. Part of the change is the decline of the fossil-fuel age. Fossil fuels include coal, oil and natural gas. These have been humanity's principal sources of energy. However, since they run out in 2300 the era will come to an end. The effects of the decline are already felt in scarcity of energy leading to high prices, debts, unstable economies, tense competition for resources and violence. Since the use of fossil fuels has played a major role in perpetuating the global crises, healthy alternatives are needed. The cultural transformation would therefore include a shift from the petroleum age to the solar age, where activities will be powered by renewable sun energy. This third transition is an integral part of a paradigm change and the fall of patriarchy. The present paradigm, which was generated and is maintained by patriarchy is by feminists seen as promoting inequalities, unsustainable progress and violence. Thus, peace, equality and sustainable development have become interlinked issues in women's movements. Peace is not only the absence of war but also a compassionate way of life. It is the creation of a certain mind-set of sharing, reciprocity, love, happiness and care as the central issues in societies, in relationship with nature and in development. Few people talk about happiness and love as a motivating force, but these are ethical values, which can change the world and its institutions and they are promoted by women. From this, it follows that the cultural transformation will be promoted by ecological movements, women's movements and peace movements. An ecological feminist environmental ethics, which is an alternative to the current perception of nature, will be discussed in chapter 4, while chapter 7 will present some basic elements in its alternative epistemology. (Capra 1982: 11; Capra 1989: 253; Braidotti et al 1994: 126, 131). The above three interconnected challenges are all contributing to the present global crises. They therefore require major and profound changes. However, in order to promote good results transitions must be done in a peaceful and harmonious way. A perspective which can do that and which therefore is suggested here is the ideal of harmonious change portrayed in the Chinese book "I Ching", Book of Changes. The ancient Chinese philosophy of change is a holistic, systemic perspective, which by its two, equally important dynamic forces of yin (the feminine) and yang (the masculine) should be able successfully to overcome the imbalanced, and disharmony innate in the static modern perception of 100 reality. The I Ching philosophy can be contrasted to the Marxist view on social evolution. The latter emphasizes conflict, struggle and violent revolution where human suffering and sacrifice is seen as a necessary price that has to be paid for social change. This view is parallel to Darwin's emphasis on struggle in biological evolution and the Social Darwinists, who vigorously promoted the view that life was an ongoing struggle. However, such perspectives are one-sided. They overlook the fact that struggle in nature and society takes place within a wider context of cooperation. Although conflict and struggle have brought about important social progress in the past and is often an essential part of the dynamics of change, it does not mean that they are the source of this dynamics. Oppositely, the I Ching minimizes conflicts in times of social transformation, a view considered necessary in an increasingly violent world with many human casualties. I Ching's ability to overcome Western, patriarchal dualism, which promotes domination of all that is feminine, is specifically important in this context. The reason is that domination, as will be discussed in the subsequent chapters, is a major part of the global crises. (Capra 1982: 14-17). Various authors (Hazel Henderson 1978; Marthinus Versfeld 1979; Fritjof Capra 1982; Janis Birkeland 1995; Edith Sizoo 2000) have in different ways incorporated the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang in their individual critiques of the modern culture and its development. The work of these have been an inspiration for the comparison, which in this dissertation is done between the yin and yang perspective of changes and an ecofeminist philosophy as an example of change towards an alternative future.

Politics of Place

We must engage in place-based indigenous feminist dialogues to combat hegemonic representations- other alternatives reinforce the system

Brun, C., & Blaikie, P. (2016). “Alternative Development: Unravelling Marginalization, Voicing Change”. Farnham, GB: Routledge. Retrieved from http://www.ebrary.com.proxy.library.umkc.edu Brun was appointed Associate Professor at the Department of Geography in August 2004, and Professor from September 2013. I am currently Director of Research in the department. She teaches and supervises students in human geography, development studies and globalisation studies. Piers Macleod Blaikie is a geographer and scholar of international development and natural resources, who worked until 2003 at the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia

In the early 1990s, Ragnhild Lund (1993) argued for a place and people centred perspective in development theory. In doing so, she was one of the first geographers to recognize the devaluation of place in conventional development studies. Lund points out that guidelines for development during the latter half of the twentieth century were heavily focused on economic rather than social, cultural or ecological issues. Drawing from a range of theories from Marxism to liberalism, she notes that few of these perspectives focused on place as a dynamic factor in societal change. Rather, place was characterized as a relatively passive stage for social and political action and interaction. In a broad-ranging critique of ‘modernist’ Rostowian and Marxist perspectives, Lund argues against both the popular regionalizing systems theories based on Wallerstein and humanist perspectives that advocated endogenous self-reliance. The former tend towards purely economic solutions and the latter suggest a focus on local practices that are hugely valuable and tie in with perspectives that date back to Ernst Schumacher’s famous Small is Beautiful (1973) , but are also easily conscripted into the service of neoliberal policies that foist way too much responsibility for economic advancement on to the shoulders of people who are least able to bear it. Instead, Lund favours an ‘alternative development’ that takes account of gender and is influenced by social movements focused on ecology, peace and women (see also Nederveen Pieterse 1998). In so doing, she recognizes: … that women and men encounter a variety of external policies and interventions in a given place, and modify and adapt to external influences in accordance to norms, conventions and practices prevalent in the local society. Both internal and external factors are historically and geographically specific. Consequently, it is necessary to understand the relationship between gender and place to realize change. (Lund 1993: 197) Lund’s perspective highlights the need for indigenous women to renegotiate continuously local values in the light of broad structural economic and social transformations. Her poststructural feminism is pragmatically grounded in the realities of shifting economic and social conditions and how they play out in local landscapes. In a study of working women in Malaysia, for example, Lie and Lund (1995: 10) argue that studies must focus on local values and, from a feminist perspective, ‘… women’s views on the changes taking place in their own lives as well as in their families and the local surroundings.’ Lund’s focus on women’s perceptions and values ties in with 1990s literature on feminist, postmodern and populist approaches to development and postdevelopment (Nederveen Pieterse 1998, Blaikie 2000, Momsen 2004). It also resonates with Arturo Escobar’s (2008) interest in the ability of indigenous peoples to create ‘figured worlds’ in which local practices, culture and identities are deployed effectively enough to create a visible (spontaneous, emotional and corporeal) space for authoring that contest external, hegemonic representations of that place.

Queer Fem

A queer feminist perspective is necessary to solve climate change- exclusion of perspective and identity makes for policy failure

Gaard, G. (2015, April). Ecofeminism and climate change. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 49, pp. 20-33). Pergamon. Gaard was a UWRF Sustainability Faculty Fellow in spring 2011, Dr. Gaard is the current Coordinator for the Sustainability Faculty Fellows. Before coming to River Falls, Gaard was an Associate Professor of Humanities at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington (1997-2002) and an Associate Professor of Composition and Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth (1989-1997)

For example, at the First Worldwide Peoples' Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth held in Cochabamba, April 19–22, 2010, Bolivian President Evo Morales claimed that the presence of homosexual men around the world was a consequence of eating genetically-modified chicken: “The chicken that we eat is chock-full of feminine hormones. So, when men eat these chickens, they deviate from themselves as men” (ILGA, 2010). This statement exemplifies a dangerous nexus of ignorance, speciesism, and homophobia that conceals the workings of industrial agribusiness, and simultaneously vilifies gay and transgendered persons as “genetic deviants.” Yet in statements of climate justice to date, there is no mention of the integral need for queer climate justice—although all our climates are both gendered and sexualized, simultaneously material, cultural, and ecological. Described largely from the perspective of the environmental (climate) sciences (i.e., astrophysics, atmospheric chemistry, geography, meteorology, oceanography, paleoclimatology), climate change has been most widely discussed as a scientific problem requiring technological and scientific solutions without substantially transforming ideologies and economies of domination, exploitation and colonialism: this misrepresentation of climate change root causes is one part of the problem, misdirecting those who ground climate change solutions on incomplete analyses (cf. Klein, 2014). On an international level, solutions mitigating climate change include Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+ Initiative), the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) that encourages emission trading, sustainable development funding for Two-Thirds countries, genetically modified crops, renewable energy technologies, and the more recent strategy, geo-engineering (Klein, 2012). On an individual level, citizen-consumers of the North/One-Thirds world are urged toward green consumerism and carbon-footprint reduction. Certainly renewable energy is a necessary and wholly possible shift; moreover, it carries within its practice the ideological shift needed to make a wider transformation in the North/OneThirds consumers' relationship with environments and ecosystems. From a feminist perspective, however, the problem remains that at the highest levels of international discussion, “climate change is cast as a human crisis in which gender has no relevance” (MacGregor, 2010) and “man” is supposed to mean “everyone.” Such gender-blind analysis leads to excluding data and perspectives that are crucial in solving climate change problems, while the issues that women traditionally organize around—environmental health, habitats, livelihoods— are marginalized by techno-science solutions which take center stage in climate change discussions and funding. GLBTQ issues such as bullying in the schools, hate crimes legislation, equity in housing and the workplace, same-sex marriage (not to mention polyamorous marriage) don't appear in climate discussions either. Given the gender-blind techno-science perspective dominating climate change discussions, queer feminist entry to these discussions has been stalled, trapped between Scylla and Charybdis: over the past two decades, discussions have alternated between the liberal strategy of mainstreaming women into discussions of risk, vulnerability, and adaptation, as WEDO has done; or, adopting the cultural feminist strategy of calling on women's “unique” capacities of caring for family and for environment, women's “special knowledge” and agency based on their location within gender-role restricted occupations, and lauding women's grassroots leadership. In either strategy, “gender” is restricted to the study of women, and feminist analyses of structural gender inequalities that compare the status of men, women, and GLBTQ others are completely omitted. To date, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) “Gender and Climate Change” website addresses these problems by drawing on both reformist liberal ecofeminisms and cultural (essentialist) ecofeminisms. In its statement on women's vulnerability, inclusion, and agency, the UNFCCC website asserts: “It is increasingly evident that women are at the centre of the climate change challenge. Women are disproportionately affected by climate change impacts, such as droughts, floods and other extreme weather events, but they also have a critical role in combatting climate change.” In order to perform that “critical role,” however, gender parity in climate change discussions is a minimum requirement: women need to be equal members in policy-setting and decisionmaking on climate change. And to have authentic, inclusive feminism, gender justice and sexual justice must be partnered with climate justice, for women of all genders and sexualities form the grassroots force within these three movements