Paper short abstract:

Exploring representations of electric engines as “zero emissions”, I analyze how Tesla re-centers carbonization away from the driver, sketching a future of mobility where energy transitions leave unquestioned the demand of “behind-the-wheel” masculinities for space, speed, and comfort.

Paper long abstract:

In light of oil-soaked ideals of petro-masculinity securing exhibitions of hegemony through intensive and violent fossil fuel consumption, I examine how Tesla’s consumer stories envision the encounter of men and electric batteries within sociotechnical systems of automobility, exploring how corporate representations co-construct drivers and vehicles in gendered ways. Using multimodal discourse analysis on video material, I show how the “driver-car” appropriates movement as a work of gendered, age-dependent, and classed culture. Through a “Zero emissions, Zero compromises” rhetoric avoiding any thematization of possible sustainability downsides in the production, charging and disposal of electric batteries, Tesla validates energy-soaked lifestyles in an age of climate change marked by the urgency to decarbonize, enabling “green” enactments of fast, aggressive, and reckless styles of driving that come to be constructed as "impactless". Electric batteries de-center carbonization away from the male driver, allowing him to ground endorsements of environmentalism within traditionally hegemonic energy epistemologies: Tesla drivers choose electricity over oil but remain as “soaked” in violent and reckless consumptions of energy as petro-masculinities. Fully charged up, the "driver-car" penetrates and assimilates previously hostile and gender-threatening scripts of environmental care, rearranging itself as an ecomodern sociotechnical actor who, by moving and relocating, debunks that preventing disastrous planetary change will require new ways of thinking about, valuing, and inhabiting energy systems.