ABSTRACT
The urgency of understanding the dynamics of a warming planet and its effects on people and place inspires a new generation of researchers from which disaster and gender work can only benefit. Examining gender relations in degraded physical and social spaces and specific environmental and cultural contexts will bring a needed place-based dimension to masculinity studies. Community-based action research and feminist methodologies, with their shared histories and communities of practice, are especially useful for gender and disaster research. Theory must always drive method, but it is essential to capture sex- and age-specific data, and allow for comparative, longitudinal, interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis. Male dominance in resource-dependent occupations and lifeline industries helps explain their disproportionate exposure to toxic hazards, illustrated recently by the male damage control teams responding to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a concept imported into disaster studies with little critical analysis, has informed most psychosocial research with male disaster responders and survivors.
