Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics
This chapter uses gender lenses to evaluate recent population debates and the implications of dominant discourses within those debates. It asks about the gendered implications of environment and population discourses by focusing largely on population discourses in the US context that have also tended to have implications far outside US borders. Paying particular attention to the politics of climate change, the chapter argues that environment and population discourses in multiple spaces continue to reflect rigid gender norms and assumptions about who in society are environmental saviors and who are environmental problems. It argues that failure to critically evaluate population discourses contributes to injustice among peoples and among states. While the most extreme forms of population discourses linking women’s fertility to food insecurity and environmental decline have shifted away from their most extreme versions, other developments are also worrying from the perspective of gender justice.