Gender Studies MA

Giovanna di Chiro "Sustaining Everyday Life: Bringing Together Environmental, Climate and Reproductive Justice" in Different Takes 2009 Social reproduction - "An analysis of social reproduction as an environmental issue allows us to understand the impacts of the current mode of production—corporate globalization—on the survivability into the future of individual bodies, particular communities, national cultures, and the biosphere as we know it." p.1 "Social reproduction, as feminist theorists define it, is about the conditions necessary for reproducing everyday life and includes the ability to procure healthy food, clean water, decent shelter, clothing and health care. These daily tasks are part of the political-economic, socio-cultural, material-environmental processes required to maintain life and to sustain human cultures and communities." p.2 "Globalized capitalist production has put at risk the realization of social reproduction for a large...

Hartmann, Betsy and Elizabeth Barajas-Román 'The population bomb is back - with a global warming twist' in Women in Action  2009 " Overconsumption by the rich has far more to do with global warming than the population growth of the poor. " p.72 " Not only is the individual woman responsible for her own children’s emissions, but for her genetic offspring’s emissions far into the future! Missing from the equation is any notion that people are capable of effecting positive social and environmental change, and that the next generation could make the transition out of fossil fuels. It also places the onus on the individual, obscuring the role of capitalist systems of production, distribution and consumption in causing global warming." p.72 " Social reproduction includes the conditions necessary for reproducing everyday life (access to food, water, shelter, and health care) as well as the ability to sustain human cultures and communities" p.73 ...

The effect of delaying motherhood on the second childbirth in Europe. Massimiliano Bratti and Konstantinos Tatsiramos 2010. Springer-Verlag "Two well-known empirical facts regarding fertility in developed countries are the decline in Total Fertility Rates, which are now below the so-called “replacement level” of 2.1 children per woman, and the increase in a woman’s age at first birth." p.292 "in the presence of capital market imperfections, women have children when their incomes are high enough to bear the costs of childrearing" p.294 "Several studies have shown that women who delay childbearing after the age of 30 are at greater risk of remaining childless due to declining fecundability" p.293-294 "working women give birth when it penalises their careers less, which means when they have accumulated substantial work experience." p.294 "This “North–South” divide has been already observed by many researchers (Esping-Andersen 1990; Bettio and V...

Ord, Toby 'Overpopulation or Underpopulation' in Is the planet full?  by Ian Goldin. 2014. Instrumental benefits of increasing a population: 1. Instrumental benefit - the people who are born might invent something new that would benefit all of society 2. Intrinsic benefit - the people will have good lives, bring joy, experience love Instrumental benefit - informational goods: value lies in the information, so a song/novel/film. As a population grows, so does the value of an informational good. The more people there are, the more potential listeners there are of your song. Our economy has shifted massively to the production of informational goods - artistic, academic, political, software "The total value of someone's life consists of its instrumental value (the aggregation of all the intrinsic value they add to other people’s lives) and its intrinsic value (the value of the life for the person himself or herself)." p.50 "If it really is socially im...

Sherilyn Mcgregor, "Gender and Environment - An introduction' in Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment. 2017 "Environmentalists have objectified the environment in order to advocate its preservation and remediation. Feminists have reified gender in order to politicize inequality, or more precisely the subordinate status of women in all spheres of society." p.3 Gender "is typically thought to be the sociocultural layer that sits atop biological sex" p.3 By focusing on gender, I am in fact focusing on women - this is a political choice, given that there are male members of Birthstrike, and that reproduction most commonly involves sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. I have made this choice because it is interesting to me as a woman, and because as a student of gender studies, I have been made aware of the historic exclusion of women from mainstream research (p.4). I am, however, aware that the social construction of gender, and the soci...

Stacy Alaimo (2008) Ecofeminism without Nature?, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 10:3, 299-304 "Does allying feminism and environmentalism reinforce the sense that men are disembodied, or exist within more solid body-boundaries that protect them from environmental risk? Does ‘ecofeminism’ attract or repel women who experience nature and environmentalism as places and political philosophies that are – attractively – a refuge from the constrictions of gender and heterosexism?" p.301

Chronic Environmental Change: Emerging ‘Psychoterratic’ Syndromes. Glenn Albrecht. 2011. Chapter three "Chronic stress on ecosystems and home environments is likely to produce a similar chronic stress in humans as in other sentient animals. For human beings, one of the most understated, but potentially powerful of all, relationships is the one we have to our home environment. Our physical and mental health, our total sense of well- being, is tied to this vital territorial relationship, and when it is threatened, we can become distressed and diseased" p.45 "a reliable and predictable environment and climate is powerfully connected to the very possibility of a distinctive culture (and agriculture)." p.46 "Instead of regularity and the ability to plan ahead, people are now anxious about an unreliable future and what it might hold for them, even in the relatively short term. They are asking legitimate questions about the current and future impacts of climate change...

Thesis questions - June 15th is THE DEADLINE My thesis will be about the social movement of BIRTHSTRIKE; they are a mostly female led group of people who are foregoing reproduction in the name of the climate emergency. I will be interviewing them, as well as analysing media reports about them in order to find out why, how and what they are protesting, and how it is being reported on, and why it is being reported in that way. Ultimately, I want to dig into the deep-rooted anxieties of the British public which I believe will be revealed through analysing how the BIRTHSTRIKE movement are being portrayed. There are three areas of interest: Nationalism  - how do the British see their women's bodies as reproducing the nation, and what does it mean if they decide not to reproduce the nation - is that a threat on the future of England? Gendered expectations of parenthood  - when women decide not to have children, are they given a different social meaning, are they monsters, are...

Heyward, Clare. "A growing problem? Dealing with population Increases in Climate Justice" in  Ethical Perspectives . 703-732. 2012. " ensuring water, food and health security in a climate-changed world might be easier in the case of smaller populations, as a larger population means a greater demand for the very things being jeopardised by climate change." p.704 " because most population growth is occurring in the countries of the global South, highlighting population growth as a morally relevant issue might be regarded as yet another attempt of the global North to deflect attention from its role in causing anthropogenic climate change." p.705 " arguing about the distribution of duties in a crisis situation is unlikely to be of much help when thinking about what should be done in order to avoid such a crisis." p.706 - Birthstrike - deciding not to have children, aka the distribution of population - is unhelpful when thinking about how to av...