People, spaces and places in gendered environments podcast

Transcript

People, spaces and places in gendered environments

Thomas Felix Creighton (TFC): Hello, welcome to the Emerald Podcast Series. My name is Thomas, and my guests today are Vicky Demos and Marcia Texler a Segal, who are the series editors of Advances in Gender Research from Emerald Publishing. In this episode, we're looking at volume 34 People, Spaces and Places in Gendered Environments, which has a special chapter by our third guest, K. Lorena Romero Leal. She co-authored Indigenous women and climate change in a Colombian Amazon with Julian Neira Carena. Lorena is a PhD researcher at the University of Florida USA. The book People, Spaces and Places in Gendered Environments is available now. 

Vasilikie (Vicky) Demos (VD): The volume is made up of selections of contributions by various authors and in places around the globe. And they talk about the physical environment, both in terms of the built and the natural, and they talk about the social psychological environment, such as toxic workplaces. 

TFC: Oh, yes, oh yes, absolutely. Well, thank you very much. It gives us a, first of all, a good take on the series, your involvement and this specific volume. Thank you very much. Could I now ask Marcia for First of all, what is your involvement with this volume?

Marcia Texler Segal (MS): We started out thinking about the environment in an ecological sense, but when we wrote the call for proposals, we realised that there was a built environment as well as a natural environment, and that some how we wanted to show the relationship that gender impacted both the built environment and the natural environment. So, we wrote our call for proposals that way, and it turned out we got actually more proposals about the built environment than the natural environment. For example, the two chapters about Rome and the chapter about Athens and the way that cities developed and grew, we realised that we were into something very, very current, because we were seeing things in the newspapers and on TV at the very same time, and I was experiencing it right here in my own city. I live in Louisville, Kentucky, in the US, touristification was becoming one of the most prominent issues, and those chapters focused on that. So, we realised we were into something really important. The city that I live in is home to the Kentucky Derby. So, you can imagine what happens. Everything is turning into Airbnbs and posh little cafes and people are, my goodness, how can we even live here? And that's exactly what Marzia's chapter talks about in Rome. And it turns out to be also connected, because in a previous volume, we published a chapter about ecotourism in Vietnam, and that same thing was happening in rural villages, where people were coming in to do ecotourism in rural villages, which sounds like a great thing, but it was disrupting everyday life. It was making opportunities for some of the tour guides to work, but it was also disrupting family life and regular agriculture and whatnot. So everything sort of came together here. 

TFC: Yes, absolutely, I must say, I've never made it to that horse event, and I hope one day I can, I do have a mint julep every year in honor. Thank you very much. I hope I'm hope when I do some environmentally conscious tourist as well. So now seems a perfect opportunity to introduce our third guest today. Lorena, hello.

K. Lorena Romero Leal (LL): Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm really happy to be here sharing my work regarding how I started looking at gender and environment. Um, I first I was um, when I was a bachelor student in sociology in Colombia, I was part of a student group co-founded by a student, a Indigenous students from the Colombian Amazon. So, I decided to join this group and started to have an advocacy work in the Colombian Amazon. So, from that, from this idea that academic people should work with indigenous and local communities, I decided to build my career. So after many years, at the end, I decided to become an anthropologist, and I think that to understand what is happening in that region, in the Colombian Amazon, we should look at the social but also the ecological dimensions on of the present situation of the of the region. Obviously link this conjuncture with the current environmental crisis that we live in this planet. So this is part of the motivations behind my current interest in feminist political ecology, the colonial studies.

TFC: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All three of you are fully introduced. And a question for actually, for anyone who wants to answer, the volume focuses on, well, eco feminism. I think a lot of people have an idea about environmentalism. A lot of people have an idea of feminism. Can they not explain to me, what is eco feminism? What makes it a unique field?

VD: There's one particular chapter in the book that is the Eco spirituality, eco feminist chapter. And eco feminism has to do with and I'll begin this on I'm sure that Marcia can add to this, but it has to do with the recognition of the environment, having to do with taking care of the environment as a feminist endeavor, taking care and nurturing the environment and stewarding the environment as a feminist endeavor, it's anti in this particular chapter of ecofeminism, eco spirituality, there's A criticism of the masculinist view of the environment, that the environment should be exploited. An ecofeminist point of view is that there's an interrelatedness between humans and the environment, that there is a relationship between them and that and that relationship should be honored,

TFC: I see, and I'm interested. So that gives us an idea of eco feminism. And also, you mentioned the spirituality. That's an interesting dimension as well.

VD: Yeah, well, and I think it's, you know, as I was talking about that, it's, it's difficult to set in my mind, to separate it from the Eco spirituality. And in this particular chapter, and the chapter is by XXX, there's they're the three authors, and they're from most and they're located in Australia, and they have their eco spirituality has to do with an earth-based spirituality, and they're critical of the Abrahamic religions, that they're patriarchal, that they don't honor the earth. You find that the leadership positions in the patriarchal religions are taken up by men, and they say an eco spirituality is more the with the honoring of the land, of indigenous of many indigenous religions, such as the Australian Aboriginal dreaming or American Indian Two Spirit part of religion, and that gets into also the eco feminist part so that so I think in this particular chapter, there's a very close tie between the two.

MS: Now, I think a very quick way of grasping that is a very short little essay in the book by Clara Rodriguez in. It's not even a real chapter. It's kind of a personal reflection. She started to write a chapter, realized she did not have time to do that, but gave us this personal reflection of how thinking about the lessons her mother taught her as she was growing up helped her to understand her relationship to the environment. She is at Fordham University in New York, but her heritage is Puerto Rican, and her mother came directly from New York to Puerto Rico, and so she just growing up, just realising how my mother related to fruits and vegetables and buying chickens, and what she taught us about conservation and observing family visits to Puerto Rico and how the local people dealt with the environment, finding natural produce and whatnot, and that that really struck home to me because of the times that I've spent in Sub Saharan Africa, where I myself was picking mangoes or avocados or whatever off of trees and living more in the land than we tend to do here.

VD: Yeah, it's interesting, I think in her particular piece, it kind of, I recall how I grew up. And one thing that was really put struck me was that when her mother bought a poultry and usually they went to a market in the South Bronx, and there they, uh, they found, they found a life and she picked out a live chicken, and then it was slaughtered, and that she brought it home, and the whole thing was slaughtered, and she brought the Whole thing home, and they ate everything. They didn't get, uh, breast wrapped up in solo and saran wrap. You know, they didn't just eat one part. They ate everything. And even in Puerto Rico, any scraps of from the meals, went to the to the pigs, and it's anything that was left over that humans could not eat. Then they went to the next level. They went to the they went to the pigs so that everything was used, little sugar. She just knew her mother was not highly educated, but she she knew that too much sugar wasn't good for you. I remember growing up limitation on sodas. So, there were many things that she provoked, many ideas that She provoked, and that my first environmentalist peace. 

TFC: It's really interesting, especially the fact that this can reflect to our past, so say, in the Western world, but also to currently in parts of the wildlife in southern China, or all parts of the animal like Eaton. And you do pick out the live animal. So yes, it's, it's something that exists in our past, but also the present day in many parts of the world. I'm very interested. You talked about the relationship, the relationship, the spiritual relationship, to the natural world. Lorena, you talked to, I say, indigenous people in Colombia. Did this relate to your experience?

LL: Yeah, well, indeed, one of the contributions that we did in this chapter, along with my colleague, Julian Neira, who is also a Colombian social scientists is that we should go beyond that. Women are naturally linked to nature. It's important to understand these different power relations imposed in the gender roles and expectations on women. So there are obviously different ways in which Indigenous women relate to their natural and built environments, but we think that this is changing all the time, and this specific program provides really good case to see that the more involvement and participation of women in environmental governance could expand their traditional gender roles. Women's traditional roles such as harvesting and processing food products, looking for palm fruits and all the care work that they did in they do in their communities and families. 

TFC: And it's an interesting relief that it's thought that women are particularly close to the environment, rather than men, no women and men in. 
MS: Many traditional cultures have different roles, and we tend to see the gender division of labor in our own society as a negative thing that women are constantly having to do the caregiving and the taking off of work to go pick up the child at school or whatever. But in many traditional societies, there is a clear division of labor, and each is contributing to the overall health and wealth of the society. And people have indigenous people in many parts of the world have knowledge. Indigenous women have knowledge. Indigenous men have knowledge. That keep the society going, and we tend to unless we look at knowledge in a much broader frame than just book learning, we miss what people in other cultures actually know and we miss sometimes, the compatibility and cooperation between men and women that just because we say something is gendered, that's not necessarily a criticism. It may also be a strength. 

TFC: I'm interested that does relate to and I realise this was 20 minutes ago that it was raised, but I think both you and Vicky talked about how you started out with women's studies, and it's moved into gender studies. Could you pick apart the difference between those two terms?

MS: Oh, for sure. When we started, the kind of catch phrase was, let's do something more than add women and stir because that's exactly where this whole thing started, where, for example, when you looked at social mobility, when you looked at they would compare what fathers did for living to what their sons did for a living. And then they would compare what a woman's husband did for a living compared to what her father did to gauge her social mobility without ever asking, what does she do for a living? Are you just assuming she's a homemaker, a teacher or a nurse, or is there something going on here? So at first we were just look at what women are doing, look at women separately from men, see what's going on in women's lives, and then people would say, but we don't have the data. Well, you're looking at the wrong data if you just look at the past and the present in terms of official statistics or in terms of the research that's been done. But what about looking at diaries, memoirs, even quilts to see. Look at the handiwork of women. Look at the traditions that women have started. Look at the daily lives of women. So at first it was just, let's put the women in there. They're not even there. You can't even find them in the research. So that was the first step. Then when we got there and we put women in the research, and we put women doing more of the research, then we started saying, let's report out this research. And then we were told, when we asked for a session at the American Sociological Association that there would not be enough interest in having a whole research paper session for 90 minutes about women. And we replied, Yes, there would be, let us show you. And so we began fiercely demanding that we have time and space. An article that I wrote with a colleague in a collection on new trends in sociology. This was in 1980 I believe the author was doing a special issue on new trends in sociology of one of the major journals, and we wrote a proposal saying we'd like to have women's studies included. And he wrote back and said, sorry, that's not relevant. But then when you turn the special issue into a book. He came back to us and asked, could he now have our articles? So we gave it to him. But at that point, we began realising there was more okay. We pushed women's studies into the view, but we were now beginning to see. That we were hearing, for example, from our colleagues of color, that we were just writing about white middle class women because we were white middle class women, and that we were not hearing from our colleagues of color. And so we began to look at that about the intersectionality of women's lives, of the differences between middle class women and working class women, or women white women and women of color, again, looking at those things and so with things got broader. Then we began hearing from people who were questioning the gender binary and saying, wait a minute, where are we? Suppose we're not just identified as cisgender women and cisgender men, but there's more going on here about sexuality and about breaking the binary. So that's how Women's Studies kind of morphed into gender studies as we began looking more broadly, admittedly starting out basically as white, middle class women.

TFC: Thank you very much for sharing, and of course, now we are 30 odd volumes in through this series and Gender Research.

MS: Yes, exactly, exactly. I'm wondering

TFC: If, when your younger colleagues come in, you know new researchers, people who are just coming through, can they relate to this world? What? What is their perspective on your experience? 

VD: Well, they have, they're coming in with a different background, from our background. So we get informed and educated as we make calls for papers and look in different areas. Recently, we're seeing a lot in terms of trans studies as a part of gender studies, and a lot of interest in that, what is the relationship between sex, sexuality and gender? We're kind of assigned by a cursive look at birth. You know, the doctor looks at that, at the anatomy of the of the child, and and that and that anatomy isn't always very clear, but traditionally, we get categorised as either being male or female, even if that anatomy isn't clear, there is a decision that is made because it has been thought to be sacred, and as we start to explore issues of gender, we get into a lot of controversy because people have held these things so sacred that it it's a shock to them frequently to be able to understand that not everybody thinks this way, not everyone Is feels that they are the gender they were assigned at birth.

TFC: So we still have more questions coming up in the field. 

VD: Yeah, and so, and we start, and we're doing a lot of research on this and into the these areas. 

MS: And our younger colleagues also are more varied than we are. I mean, we have so many more international students and people who have immigrated from other countries to the globe, from the global south to the global north. And so our younger colleagues are also questioning those issues of, does all knowledge come from the Global North? And even, why is everything in English? Well, it wasn't always in English. It became you when we were in grad school, yeah, take tests French and German, because everything was at those were considered the basic scientific languages of that time. Now it's English, okay, but that's a fair question. Why is everything in English? What is accessible to people for whom English is not their first language, or for whom they have to publish in many universities in the global south expect candidates for promotion to publish in a major journal in the Global North? Well, that's not an easy thing to do. 

VD: Yeah, there's a lot of concern about colonialism and and then the Neo colonialism, and that's part of that conversation. Conversation, and we have had publications from the from the Global South, but a lot of publishing places do not let allow room for that. It goes from the researchers to the writers to the publishers to the consumers.

TFC: This seems an appropriate point for me to ask. Lorena, this is your first publication in English. How did you find the experience moving from your first language to this.

LL: Interesting. I learned a lot. I love to do collaborative work with people working in in the terrain, in in the region. So my colleague doesn't speak very well English, but he writes better in English. So for that reason, I'm just the only person, the only author of this chapter here. But for me, was a challenge, because obviously I'm studying my doctoral program at IUs, based university, University of Florida, and I have to write all my assignments in English, so obviously I need to be better at this, but I think that it's a really big gap between writing your assignments in English, but going and publish this the results of your research is totally different because, you know, academic English is so different if you compare, for example, with academic Spanish. So I can say that I already published some research results of a study on Indigenous women's organisations. Because before this research work I did with two other researchers, activists, mapping of these kind of organisations, but the format and the length of the documents were totally different. So, it was a very enriching experience.

TFC: Absolutely and for me, even in my undergraduate, I was drawing on Turkish sources, as that's my second language, and the format is different, the conversation is different. Terminology is very different. So that affected the way I wrote in English, because the sources I was drawing upon. So were you able to draw on Spanish sources?

LL: Yeah, the idea was to include even literal quotations from indigenous women. And I think we did a really good job, because from these previous work, we had more than 40 interviews of Indigenous women leaders, and we wanted to show their perspective as well.

TFC: Yeah, that's absolutely a new contribution to the field, but especially new in English as you present it. Are there any other chapters that you'd like to highlight?

VD: One that we did not talk about was the home based sex workers in Punjab, India, the relevant environment for them was the home, and in that home, they were doing both family work and their paid work. And Arcana Sharma, the author of the chapter, talks about how she makes a case for the dignity and human rights of the sex workers. And she notes that for poor women in India who do not have very much education, sex work is the best kind of work that they can do in terms of a livelihood in order to provide for their families. And so the reason for the work is for the for the money that is really needed for the families. And sex work is illegal in India, but these workers work under conditions that are sometimes very risky. They're vulnerable to STDs, HIV virus and abuse and in other ways, rape. And she argues for intervention. She makes a case also for the women, dividing for themselves, making a separation between their family work and their sex work, maybe dividing up the house in different in different ways. So I thought it was important to bring that particular study up, and the home is as an environment. 

TFC: Absolutely. Thank you very much for raising it. And for those listening on the Emerald podcast website, there will be details to all of that and links to all of that on the page itself. So thank you very much. It is important one to highlight. Thank you and Marcia. Can I invite you to have some closing thoughts for this?

MS: Well, I'm picking up on what Vicky said so many of our chapters in this volume and in some of the others to really focus on the idea of rights, of human rights and the rights of workers, the rights of people of all sex and gender categories, and really focus very clearly on the whole issue of human rights and on many of the United Nations goals as well, both about people's rights, human beings, women and girls, but also about the environment. So many of our chapters in this and other volumes go in that direction as well.

TFC: Thank you very, very much. Yes, this is a particular volume to be proud of. Thank you. Thank you. And finally, can I say Lorena, any final, final, concluding thoughts from you?

LL: Yeah, I think that this present time of environmental change is an opportunity to understand not only environmental injustice, but also these coupled social and environmental effects of climate change and how we can address as a society, these many inequalities in a very complex and comprehensive way. So that's the relevance of this work, that we provide new perspective from a very complex analysis processes, and we, I think, that we have from the field of gender studies, ecological studies, we have many inputs and reflections to do, especially in terms of climate change.

TFC: Thank you for listening to today's episode. For more information about our guests and for a transcript of today's episode, please see our show notes on our website. I would like to thank Daniel Ridge for his help with today's episode, and Alex Jungius from this is distorted. You've been listening to the Emerald podcast series.