- Author(s): Unger N.C.
- Author(s) ID: 56856633400;
- Document Type: Book Chapter
- Publication Stage: Final
- Volume: 9780813542539 | Issue: | Article Number:
- Page Start – 45 | Page End – 60 | Page Count:
- Cited By: 18
- DOI:
- EID: Scopus2-s2.0-84917506871
The modern environmental justice movement emphasizes the right to a safe and healthy ecological, physical, social, political, and economic environment for all people. Issues of race and class are regularly addressed in environmental justice studies as characteristics that increase people’s chances of being subjected to injustice, but these characteristics have also served to unify and mobilize those same people in their struggles against that injustice. Only limited scholarly attention, however, has been paid to the vital function of gender and its role in people’s environmental vulnerability and empowerment (Blum 2001). Issues of sexuality, especially as they relate to reproduction, have played a leading role in subjecting women to a variety of environmental injustices. Native American women in the 1970s, for example, protested that uranium mining on their lands led to high levels of miscarriages and cancers of the reproductive organs, while at the same time Indian women were the targets of an aggressive government-funded mass sterilization program as part of the effort to take over resource-rich Indian lands. However, women have also used their unique strengths and experiences based on their gendered identities and sexualities to benefit themselves and oppressed others. Certainly women have taken part in more conventional environmental justice campaigns, such as community-based organizations protesting local environmental hazards brought on by major corporate polluters. But women’s less conventional methods of seeking environmental justice (such as Margaret Sanger’s insistence in the early twentieth century that birth control devices for women could end the sexual subservience of working-class women to men and the resultant overcrowding and cycle of poverty) remain underappreciated. Through a sampling of women’s contributions that highlight sexuality issues, the relationship between gender, race, class, and environmental justice activism proves to be not just occasionally and peripherally a part of recent American history, but rather a varied, pervasive force from the pre-Columbian period to the present. © 2004 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. All rights reserved.
New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism