Week 6 Reflections

Climate Justice, Digital Activism, and Gender, Prof. Frances Roberts-Gregory
By Cormac Madden, 2/27/2019

Week 6's readings elucidated a side of gender-disaster studies that I have found to be an afterthought in my own conceptualization of the course up to this point, that of masculinities. Which is not to say that my own understanding of these concepts is not tied to nor viewed through a lens of masculinity, for it certainly is, but rather that, as has been covered in this course, "gender" is often seen, problematically, as being synonymous with "women." This week's readings disentangled that notion, introducing me to the field of critical men's studies and providing insight on the emotional burden that men may struggle with during disasters. Men, Masculinities and Disaster by Elaine Enarson and Bob Pease explores the interaction of gender and disaster through the lens of critical men's studies. In the opening chapters of their book, they note, as many of this course's readings have, the gender disequalities that are reproduced before, during and after disasters and the deprioritization of sexual assault post-disaster. With a focus on masculinity, however, they also note how the dominator model of hegemonic masculinity is often at odds with environmental realities and necessities. They also detail the masculinization of environmental politics, which has led to an overreliance on technofixes and a lack of attention to the role that social issues play in environmental problems. In Racialized Disaster Patriarchy, Rachel Luft also explores the gender dynamics of disasters, looking instead at the economic, classicist, racist, and gender-based policies that create what she terms the "Racialized Disaster Patriarchy." With a focus on Hurricane Katrina, she describes how the processes of disaster capitalism rewrote the social workings of the city and highlights the outsize consequences that post-Katrina policies had for poor, black women in New Orleans. Frontier Masculinity in the Oil Industry looks at a dramatically different group of women, engineers in Canada's oil industry, who also exist in a world where policies are determined by the patriarchy around them. According to Gloria Miller, these women often exist in extreme gender isolation in their workplaces, and are constrained by a hegemonic masculinity that reinforces itself through everyday interaction, gender-based divisions of labor, and the frontier myth. She sees this frontier mentality of the oil industry as being intimately linked to ideas of masculinity and exploitation. Finally, Miller also details the assimilation strategies that women in the oil industry employ to counteract hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy.

My personal reactions to this week's readings centered around two foci: my relationship as a man to hegemonic masculinity and a comparison of the readings for this class with discussions centering on post-Katrina gentrification in New Orleans in my Community Engagement seminar. As a man who attempts but often fails to avoid the more pernicious (as I see them) aspects of hegemonic masculinity, it is important for me to be constantly aware of both how my gender performance affects how I am viewed by other people as well as the structural and social privileges that arise from my gender identity. The dynamics at play in Miller (2004), including paternalism, condescending patriarchy, and gendered power dynamics are revolting to read not because of how foreign they seem from my life, but rather because of how sadly common these dynamics are in everyday life. As someone who spends lot of time in and is often made uncomfortable in all-male spaces, I cannot imagine the difficulty in existing in those spaces as a woman. I also found Luft's (2016) recounting of the exploitation of Hurricane Katrina by the government and corporations to be disgusting. The degree of gentrification that this exploitation allowed for is extremely disheartening, especially given the complete disregard with which the city of New Orleans treated its poorest and most disenfranchised citizens.


Vocab
Racialized Disaster Patriarchy: The confluence of factors that occur at all stages of disaster policy to produce gendered, class-based, and race-based inequalities.
Disaster Capitalism: The system of collaborations between governments and corporations that occur after disasters that results in a rewriting of the social contract.
Frontier Mentality: Ideology based in rugged individualism and emotional self-reliance that is common in the oil industry according to Miller (2004).

References
Enarson, Elaine and Bob Pease. 2016. Men, Masculinities and Disaster. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis.
Luft, Rachel. 2016. "Racialized Disaster Patriarchy: An Intersectional Model for Understanding Disaster Ten Years After Katrina." Feminist Formations. 28(2): 1-26.
Miller, Gloria. 2004. "Frontier Masculinity in the Oil Industry: The Experience of Women Engineers." Gender, Work, and Organization. 11(1).