(Femme)inism 101

My environmentalism post was a beast so I promise to make this introduction to the importance of feminism more brief. Also I’ve tried to write this post like four times and it just keeps ending in rants, so I’m going to challenge myself to just get the basics out there.

The goals of this post are to:

1.     Demystify feminism a bit if you’re not familiar with it. 

2.    Explain why this blog has a femme-centric approach to environmentalism.

3.    Question what kind of content you as a reader would like to see in regards to environmental, feminist,          and ecofeminist issues.         

So, let’s get some definitions, let’s get on the same page, and let’s go.

Definitions:

Feminism—a sociopolitical movement that combats sexism, the cisheteropatriarchy, and the devaluing of femme people and labor. 

Femme--for the purposes of this blog, a  femme is someone who identifies with the word femme. I’m not the identity police so do what you will. (Autostraddle did a really good roundtable on the word and its origins in Black queer communities if you want to read more!)

AFAB—assigned female at birth; a doctor looked at this person and said ‘that is a girl.’ AFAB people commonly have some combination of a uterus/clitoris/vulva, but not always, and that says nothing about their gender identity.

AMAB—assigned male at birth; a doctor looked at this person and said ‘that is a boy.’ AMAB commonly have some combination of a penis and testicles, but not always, and that says nothing about their gender identity. 

Woman—someone who identifies with the gender identity of woman; can have any sort of genitalia; can be AFAB or AMAB.

Man—someone who identifies with the gender identity of man; can have any sort of genitalia; can be AFAB or AMAB.

Non-binary person—someone who does not identify as either a man or woman.

Cisgender—someone who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth; an AMAB person who identifies as a man and an AFAB person who identifies as a woman.

Transgender—someone who does not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

Misogyny--gendered oppression that holds masculinity as superior to femininity; perceives femininity as weakness and threatens its existence with violence.

Transmisogyny—the specific form of oppression experienced by trans women, non-binary femmes, and some AFAB people.

Misogynoir—the specific form of oppression experienced by Black women and femmes.

Disclaimer: Gender is really personal and we are all allowed to relate differently to words, to ideas, to the process of discovering who we are. Terms are only so helpful; people connectto them in many different ways, and sometimes don’t fuck with them at all. Take the words that feel good to heart, challenge those that don’t. Call people in, care about their personhood.

So, if everyone experiences gender really differently and has different feelings about words, then why celebrate femmehood? Why is that good for everyone?

Well, folks, even though people experience gender differently, the existence of gendered oppression affects everyone—definitely some more than others. When we think about the most affected--queer women, AMAB femmes, trans women, trans women of color—there is so much violence and hatred directed at these identities. Celebrating them becomes an act of resilience. To this day I work through my own internalized sexism and part of what helps me do that is owning the parts of myself the world would like me to be ashamed of. It was revolutionary for me when I began to feel my own fragility as power. I want to be unapologetic in my femmehood—meaning my embodiment of my self-indulgence, empathy, and love for community. Being femme, for me, is these things and so much more. It’s glitter, wearing skirts when it’s dangerous, having sharp nails ready to be used against catcallers, loving fat people and how they look, fighting for my sisters in all forms, and still more. And because people claim this identity in diverse and multifaceted ways, I want this blog to be a place that celebrates all expressions of femme identity and its reclamation. Especially by fat femmes, disabled femmes, femmes of color, genderqueer femmes, poor femmes and all the femmes who rep the identity among their many others.

This is a lot to digest and I want it to be more of the start of a conversation rather than a single piece, so I’ll end with some bullets on some femme things I want to explore here and please continue your lists in the comments below:

Femme things near and dear to me:

1.      Expectations of womanhood and performativity
2.     Navigating consumption culture as a perceived consumable object
3.     The necessity of intersectional feminism
4.     Acknowledgement of us saavy poor femmes who do it better on a budget
5.     The empowerment of women and femmes in environmentalism aka ecofeminism
6.     The empowerment of women and femmes and especially women + femmes of color into outdoors-y,             camping, hiking, nature survivalist spaces that are dominated by white men. (Isn’t the dream just                   femmes with power tools building greenhouses on the farm?)
7.      Power of the unacknowledged emotional labor demanded of femmes
8.     Mermaids. Everything mermaids forever

I am femme and proud, I am open to learning and expanding, I will dedicate my life to honoring the importance of femmes and recording here all our intricate and nuanced existences. I want to hear your thoughts.

Environmentalism 101

If we are to ground this blog in a specific understanding of environmentalism, one that is in constant flux but holds to certain values, we might as well begin at the beginning. What are we talking about when we say “environmentalism,” “environmental justice,” and the “environmental movement?” This blog post doesn’t answer these questions, that’s for this community, but it does position us with an understanding of today’s environmentalist landscape to continue the conversation.

I think many people would say that the environmental movement in the United States was started by Richard Nixon in the 1970s. And it’s true, he created the EPA and passed the Clean Water and Air Acts. Because he was a Republican, he made “saving the Earth” his left-leaning initiative that would please both sides of the aisle. (But Earth doesn’t need #whitesaviorism.) So it is fair to say that Nixon was a key player in the beginning of the environmental political movement in the United States.

But environmentalism was not birthed by Nixon or neighborhood cleanups in the suburbs. Doing things to support the Earth and its environments did not begin with a political campaign in the 20th century.

Urban gardening as a community tool for survival has existed in this country since Black families escaped southern terrorism by fleeing north to cities and creating intricate dependent networks of food growing and sharing.

Subsistence living and symbiotic ways of engaging with the land have been practiced by indigenous people on this land since before settler-colonialism and the invention of the nation-state here.

Taking the bus, reusing items, and having little tech are all sustainable practices that poor people have done out of necessity since always.

People today want to talk climate change. Which is good, we should. It is an issue that is going to actively affect us all in the next 5-20 years in ways we can’t even totally anticipate. But when we have these conversations, we must recognize that ‘first-world’ country white middle-class and up inhabitants are buffered from the effects of climate change. While it surely will affect us all in the near future, climate change is actively affecting indigenous people, residents of the global south, and poor communities right now. With no buffer zone, these people face the brunt of the current environmental burden.

These are the same people who live the most sustainably. Poor people have significantly lower carbon footprints that others. And this makes since—when you take public transportation, don’t travel widely, own few things, shop secondhand, reuse plastic bags and everything else your grandmother’s savvy taught you, you are working significantly to save the Earth. But rarely do those people and those acts go recognized.

This is why I think top-down only solutions to climate change are doomed. But let me take a step back and define the environmental schools of “Top-Down” and “Bottom Up” and their divides.

Top-Down environmental solutions utilize technology and wide-scale legislative, commercial, and cultural shifts to decrease consumption, carbon emissions, and climate change effects. Things like carbon taxation, regulatory laws, and Carbon Neutral City campaigns are examples of top-down environmental strategy. One thing that often crops up with top-down thinking is that it is up to “first-world” countries to decide and spread protocol change to the rest of the world. Things like the Paris Accords are top-down global strategy to combat climate change.

The belief that it is up to the United States and Europe to create and implement the global solution is flawed because these are the same countries who disproportionately cause the effects of climate change. Furthermore, they are largely responsible for emissions created by other parts of the world. For instance, China, because of its rapid industrialization has some serious carbon emissions—we’ve all seen the photos of the smog—and is ‘running behind’ in greenification. But the industrial demands placed on China are due to demands from the United States and European consumers’ and created largely by foreign companies who manufacture there for cheaper and more exploited labor.

Top down thinkers want to keep their cake and eat it too. We can’t save the earth and continue to live the way we do. Uncomfortable sacrifices, especially on the wealthy’s way of life, is a brutal reality. There’s just no if, ands, or buts about it. If the entire world consumed at the rate of the average middle class American family, we would need four Earths to have enough resources to support consumption. But we only have one Earth. So why are we pushing for third world countries to develop and be like us? It’s simply not sustainable. Technology is not going to save us. The cost of producing that tech in and of itself is a drain of resources. We cannot rely on the policymakers and corporate entities who got us into this mess to get us out of this mess.

Which is not to say that things like the Paris Accords are bad. They’re not, they are strong goals and they make an important statement. However, we cannot reduce the import of bottom-up environmental change as well.

Bottom-up environmental efforts are those that operate from grassroots-level actions to effect change. They’re the actions we take as individuals and communities to build the Earth we want to live on that everyone can enjoy.

Things like Boston’s Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative are examples of impactful grassroots environmental change. The continued practice of interconnecting community gardens that create food sovereignty, foster knowledge sharing, and build competent independent communities who could feasible survive an environmental disaster.

Land reclamation, both of indigenous territory and, in places like Detroit, of formerly corporate land, both redistributes resources and allows intimate person-nature connections. Giving land to those who are closest to it fosters a way of interacting with the land that ensures the mutual gain of both the land and its inhabitants. This idea can be summed up as the “you wouldn’t pollute your own backyard” concept.

Not accumulating trash, rallying your farmers’ markets to accept EBT (and then making the market actually inviting to low-income people), transitioning into smaller housing, valuing keeping your phones and computers for more than five years—these are also examples of bottom-up environmental efforts. These actions may be less flashy than the Accords, they take hard work, sacrifice, and collaborative effort, but they will have just as strong an impact.

A bottom-up framework is inclusive, brings marginal experience to center, and prioritizes the voices and goals of those most affected by problems in creating solutions. Whereas top-down thinkers are often critiqued for being disconnected, bottom-up thinkers are engaged and working from the heart of issues. Bottom-up environmentalism must work alongside anti-racist, pro-indigenous sovereignty, class-confronting, gender equality movements in order to be effective. But unfortunately, we have a ways to go before this intersectional bottoms-up environmentalism is the norm.

Nixon-era mainstream environmentalism prioritized cleaning up the water and air in middle class neighborhoods, praising the creation of the Clean Water + Air Acts, while ignoring environmental issues that were harming society’s most vulnerable. Environmentalism today cannot continue to overlook the issues affecting the least protected communities. Again, these are the communities made of the very people leaving the smallest carbon footprint and are least responsible for our present state. Top-down theorists and policymakers need to confront the reality that the onus is on us—we have made the greatest mistakes and instead of dictating to “third-world countries” or urban communities what they need to be doing, we need to be prioritizing altering our own consumption patterns and modes of operating. You can’t demand someone wash their hands when there’s dirt on your own. We—and I say we as a class-ascending white person—need to be buying less, living close to where we work while actively resisting gentrification, growing our own food, repurposing things—doing a lot of things that poor/migrant/disabled+ marginalized to the point of squeezing folks already do. And we need to be listening to the solutions of those who already live sustainably. The knowledge already exists. It’s been silenced through oppression, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, but those who know it are the experts. And we need to be paying attention to what these most affected folks are saying. Until then, efforts against climate change will not be equitable and therefore not actually useful in ‘saving’ the world.