- Convenors:
-
Lea Kammler
(University of Hamburg)
Martin Hultman (Gothenburg University)
Anna Fünfgeld (University of Hamburg)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
We propose a standard panel format comprising up to four paper presentations, followed by a moderated discussion.
Long Abstract
Masculinity studies are increasingly intersecting with planetary crises, illuminating how extractive capitalism and patriarchy co-produce ecological and social harm. This panel explores how masculinities function as both drivers and symptoms of the Anthropocene - understood not as a new era, but a long-standing trajectory of environmental degradation legitimized in the name of ‘development’. While the gendered and racialized impacts of climate collapse are well established, less common - but urgently needed - are analyses that interrogate how masculinities and patriarchal structures themselves shape, sustain, and resist planetary destruction.
The term (m)Anthropocene has been used to describe such entanglements along critical conceptualisations such as industrial/breadwinner masculinities, petromasculinity, ecomodern- and prefigurative ones such as ecological masculinities and caring masculinities. This panel invites scholars who engage in genders studies, specifically those focusing on masculinities research in relation to issues such as energy, climate, biodiversity, rights of nature, extractivism etc. to make sense of how we can allow the warming earth as well as pointing towards prefigurative politics repairing our human common planet. This panel will highlight planetary issues as climate, environment, the more-than-human, energy, sustainability, social-ecological justice, and various (m)Anthropocentric encounters.
To this panel we welcome contributions that pay attention to artistic/activist modes of re-articulation of relations between masculinities, nature, animals as well as the marginalized other and the politics and ethics embedded in it. We also welcome analytical, empirical, theoretical and methodological contributions from within gender studies, ecofeminism, indigenous studies, decolonial theories, environmental humanities, feminist posthumanities, feminist animal studies, and feminist STS and more. We especially welcome non-Western, queer, non-binary and trans, queercrip, and indigenous perspectives and voices to challenge the often implicitly white and Western parameters of what is considered a feminist environmental theorization.
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
Climate obstruction is far from a gender neutral phenomenon. This paper investigates how the Canadian far-right skilfully leverage masculinities to secure consent for their particular environmental mandate, and asks what such a misogynistic complexion may imply for climate ambitions moving forward.
Presentation long abstract
Climate denial and refusal remain central to the ontologies of far-right political projects in many of the countries most responsible for rising temperatures. This article demonstrates how misogyny facilitates the proliferation of obstructionist rhetoric. Specifically, the People’s Party of Canada’s (PPC) climate discourse is analyzed through a feminist lens anchored in Gramscian theorisations of hegemony and masculinity. I find that the PPC articulates a heavily masculinized and topically diverse form of obstruction, simultaneously enacting attributes and ideals of industrial/breadwinner, frontier, petro and (to a lesser extent) ecomodern masculinities. The broadness of the party’s appeals and their affirmation of particularly fragile masculine archetypes are assessed to be deliberate discursive moves constituent of a broader strategy to secure power within the Canadian political landscape via dominant fossil fuel and patriarchal regimes. Ultimately, several strategies for subverting such a tenacious discourse are discussed, including a steadfast commitment to feminist ecological alternatives and an unwavering endorsement of multiculturalist ethics.
Presentation short abstract
Digital media reshape how extinction is witnessed, mourned, and imagined. Using Sudan and the megalodon as cases, this paper examines how simulations, films, and online publics generate new ecological narratives of care, grief, and technological substitution
Presentation long abstract
In the Anthropocene, extinction has become both an ecological reality and a cultural event, increasingly mediated through digital technologies. This paper examines how digital media reshape ecological narratives of care, grief, and control by producing “digital afterlives” for vanished or vanishing species. Drawing on two contrasting cases—the death and digital resurrection of Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, and the cinematic revival of the prehistoric megalodon in The Meg—the study explores how technological substitutions transform how extinction is experienced and understood.
Sudan’s highly publicised death in 2018 generated global mourning, with images and videos circulating widely across social media and becoming sites of collective ethical reflection. His subsequent digital reanimation in Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s installation The Substitute presents a hyperreal virtual rhino that embodies presence and absence simultaneously, unsettling the perceived finality of extinction. In parallel, blockbuster cinema deploys CGI to resurrect the megalodon as a spectacular, fictional predator, offering a contrasting mode of substitution that emphasises thrill and spectacle rather than care or mourning.
Using a multimodal, multi-sited qualitative approach—including online discourse analysis, film analysis, and in-gallery observation—the paper traces how digital doubles blur the boundaries between life, loss, memory, and simulation. It argues that digital technologies now function as cultural and epistemic tools that reconfigure how extinction is narrated, witnessed, and emotionally processed. These mediated substitutions reveal emerging ethical and affective landscapes in which extinction is not only observed but imaginatively negotiated through digital forms
Presentation short abstract
This paper explores the re-configuration of the relationship between masculinities and nature within queer articulations of veganism. Through an ethnographic study of a queer festival, it examines the reclaiming of the ‘soy boy’ stereotype to highlight radical gender and environmental politics.
Presentation long abstract
This paper addresses the powerful effects of queering masculine relationships to nature through veganism’s gendered politics and its potential for queer expression. Hegemonic masculinities have commonly been depicted in opposition to the supposed ‘feminine’ nature of environmentalism, exemplified by gendered attitudes towards veganism. Indeed, veganism is stereotypically labelled as a passive and feminine diet, resulting in the portrayal of vegan men as ‘unmasculine’. Alongside this we have seen the development of the phrase ‘soy boy’, an insult used against men who do not hold traditionally masculine traits, including meat consumption. The term soy boy is used as a reference to the fabricated idea that consuming soy-based products dramatically increases one’s oestrogen. This paper concerns itself with the destabilisation of the ‘soy boy’ stereotype and the queer and ecological effects of this. In its explorations it turns to an ethnography of a queer festival, examining the types of gendered expressions within the festival’s vegan kitchen and food tent. Here it utilises both queer camp and vegan camp theory to suggest that the ‘soy boy’ image was effectively parodied by the individuals within the food tent, largely through the adoption of a camp aesthetic, seen within clothing and movements. The food tent thus highlights radical displays of gender ‘deviance’ intermingled with environmentalism, with queerness and veganism working effectively to redefine the relationship between masculinity and the more-than-human. The paper utilises veganism and its environmental ethics to foreground queer masculine approaches to the ways the more-than-human figures within both our diets and lives.
Presentation short abstract
This paper examines logics of rehabilitation in relation to land damaged by mineral extraction and drill rig workers’ bodies. Promises of rehabilitation allow damage to land and labour to occur in the first place and masculinity plays a key role in rig workers’ willingness to break their bodies.
Presentation long abstract
This paper examines logics of rehabilitation as they relate to land damaged by mining activity and to the worn-out bodies of drill rig workers. It examines claims that mining can repair damage done to the land and return land to its pre-mining state (and even ecologically improve the land); and parallel notions that bodies, abused during work in the mining industry, can be repaired by medicine. Drawing on ethnographic research on a drill site in ‘Australia’ in 2023, where a drill rig prototype for mineral exploration was being tested, the paper shows how the breaking of land and bodies is directly connected (the redirected energy used to break the land during drilling is what breaks the bodies of drill workers). It further shows that these discourses of rehabilitation allow the damage to both land and labour to occur in the first place – rehabilitation discourses reassure communities and mine workers that they can break their land/bodies, with the promise of their future repair. I argue that masculinity plays a key role in drill rig workers’ willingness to break their bodies for capital accumulation (and settler colonial land appropriation by mining); workers performed various masculinities, navigating tensions between the desire to exhibit macho traits, and the desire to protect their bodies. This paper intervenes in debates on the possibilities of regeneration from colonial capitalist ruination (Tsing 2003, Khayyat 2022) and in recent literature on the intersections between disability studies, masculinity studies and political ecology.