ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how debates and discussions about gender and environmental justice (EJ) have changed over time. The sophisticated spatial analysis that has become the norm in EJ literature echoes the links that environmental justice activists have made between local and global forces and phenomena. Scholarship on gender and environmental justice is diverse in every sense of the word: in terms of the issues it addresses, the theoretical frameworks and methodologies that are used, and the geographical and historical scope of analyses. Gulf Coast African American EJ activists have been leaders of the national movement, in part because of the extensive problems they face from toxic-chemical pollution from oil refineries and petrochemical facilities. EJ research has moved to another scale of analysis: the body. To some extent this move has been sparked by the attentiveness to the material interchanges between bodies and environments that has been observed in other fields of environmental scholarship.
