2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This session will examine how women negotiate the relationship between space and identity through environmental justice organizing. This session uses specific urban case studies to encourage conversation that moves beyond ecofeminist critiques of male domination to an intersectional analysis of environmental justice. Giovanna Di Chiro and Keisha-Khan Perry document how grassroots activists connect their right to sanitized water and solar energy with struggles against land dispossession. Dawn Biehler explores how women of color raise awareness of chemical contaminants and domestic pests that infiltrate their bodies, homes, and communities. Julie Sze and Kera Lovell compare visual and material representations of nature as mobilizing tools in urban environmental direct actions. Finally, Jessie Frazier analyzes how the Women’s Environment and Development Organization unites human rights and environmental activists across ethnic and national borders.

Taken together, the panel examines how patterns of environmental injustice and political resistance are intersectionally connected through the movement of people, their bodies, ideas, and the environment itself. While acknowledging the systemic inequalities regulating women’s mobility, these presentations provide evidence of how women not only move through the landscape, but how the environment circulates through them in physical and metaphorical ways. Crossing historiographical boundaries, this session will reframe so-called “women’s issues” and “environmental issues” to include the day-to-day surroundings in which women live and work raising questions about how women’s contributions to debates on their environments shape narratives about feminist and environmental issues and movements.