Queering environmental regulation?

Abstract

Motivated by thinking at the intersection of queer theory and environmental regulation, the co-authors of this piece pay attention to a stubborn persistence we negotiate when dealing with environmental studies and politics – namely, how environmental regulation functions through discrete timelines with linear notions of progress and through bounded and static conceptions of space. Given the linear and bounded logics of environmental regulation, our collective commentary endeavours to ‘queer’ the logics of environmental regulation and questions of the environment and nature more broadly. Our intent is to capture emerging discussions on ‘queering environmental regulations’. Incomplete and ever evolving, we offer thoughts and questions from our distinct entry points to grapple with the limits and possibilities of taking up queer theory and linear logics that permeate regulatory procedures on the land.

Gender, intersectionality and Indigenous rights in social impact assessment

“…These analyses are often divorced from issues of race and racialisation as well as ableism. Serious issues relating to violence against women including 'missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls' (MMIWG) remain unaddressed within normative impact assessment theory and practice, as does examination of gender outside the gender binary (Martignoni & Umlas, 2018;Farrales et al, 2021;Dempsey et al, 2022).…”

“…Improved mainstream understandings of sex and gender are facilitating better recognition of rights for LGBTQ2S+ individuals and populations that recognise the oppression and sexism gender-diverse peoples face. Issues of gender-based violence and toxic masculinities within workplaces exist in the resource extraction industry, with gender and diversity having been largely ignored in environmental regulatory debate, including in impact assessment (Landry, 2017;Ey, 2018;Farrales et al, 2021;Dempsey et al, 2022). There remains a gap in SIA to meaningfully integrate gender analysis and address the rights of populations that experience gendered systems of oppression.…”

Handbook of Social Impact Assessment and Management

“…These analyses are often divorced from issues of race and racialisation as well as ableism. Serious issues relating to violence against women including 'missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls' (MMIWG) remain unaddressed within normative impact assessment theory and practice, as does examination of gender outside the gender binary (Martignoni & Umlas, 2018;Farrales et al, 2021;Dempsey et al, 2022).…”

“…Improved mainstream understandings of sex and gender are facilitating better recognition of rights for LGBTQ2S+ individuals and populations that recognise the oppression and sexism gender-diverse peoples face. Issues of gender-based violence and toxic masculinities within workplaces exist in the resource extraction industry, with gender and diversity having been largely ignored in environmental regulatory debate, including in impact assessment (Landry, 2017;Ey, 2018;Farrales et al, 2021;Dempsey et al, 2022). There remains a gap in SIA to meaningfully integrate gender analysis and address the rights of populations that experience gendered systems of oppression.…”

World-making, desire, and the future

“…Yet in the genealogies I operate from, which inform how I do geography, space is always imbued with many axes of power (Daigle and Ramírez, 2021). The overemphasis on capitalism, without an attention to race, gender, or sexuality, perpetuates a white, euro-centric, hetero-patriarchal spatial imaginary that limits an understanding of the multitude of ways that people resist power formations and imagine futures beyond the crises of the present (Farrales et al, 2021; Nagar et al, 2002; Oswin, 2020; Vasudevan et al, 2022; Werner et al, 2017).…”