ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an introduction to environmental feminist literature situating it within wider debates in feminist scholarship. There are a small number of feminist scholars who have commented on the persistence of simplistic and universalising framings of ‘gender’ in political spaces of global climate governance, such as the UNFCCC. This chapter identifies and explores four debates in this literature under the headings: ‘dilemmas of rhetorical strategies’, ‘radical outsiders versus pragmatic insiders’, ‘questions of power dynamics and hierarchies’ and the ‘academic-activist debate’. It concludes by suggesting that while ‘better answers’ to the gender and climate change question are needed, it is first necessary to understand how such answers have been arrived at in the first place if we are to move beyond them to find better ones. It is this endeavour that motivates this research.
