Editor's Introduction

Abstract

> “The very concept of feminist emancipation harbors an implicit ecology.” > > —Claire Colebrook, Sex after Life , 20141 Feminism has contributed much to the discourses of environmentalism. But as we come to understand and face the climate crisis in this critical moment, it is time for new voices and new paradigms to emerge in feminist scholarship on the environment. As this special issue demonstrates, feminist media history can be particularly salient to current debates in the environmental humanities. The essays collected here present a set of materially grounded case studies on the role of women in historical representations of the environment, the gendering of nature, and the history of feminist interventions in environmental media. Feminism, media studies, and history are each vast categories, but what joins them together here is the concept of the environment. For the purposes of this special issue, I define “environment” in the broadest possible terms to mean the habitat and matter that surround us on our planet—atmosphere, landforms, oceans, mountains, forests, deserts, rocks, weather—along with the human and nonhuman lives that they support: animals, plants, microorganisms, ecosystems, and so forth. Although “environment” is conventionally understood as a synonym for “nature,” I include the built environment—that which has been made by humans—in my definition. Likewise, I invoke feminism in the most inclusive terms …