Framing Degrowth: Queer Materialist and Decolonial Feminist Perspectives
By Caleb O’Connor
Decolonial feminism invites us to push back against the dominant narrative of economic development by asking ethical questions: Who is doing the consuming? Whose lives are being consumed?
Mehta (2021 p2)
In her article on the cultural politics of degrowth, Miriam Meissner defines degrowth as being “a form of political economy, ecology and socio-cultural organization that transcends the imperatives of capital accumulation and growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It refers to productive systems, ideologies and lifeways that define and strive for alternative pathways to wellbeing” (2021 p513). Of course, this broad definition leaves enough room for different conceptual frameworks to adapt degrowth to achieve a multitude of political, economic, and social goals. Concurrently, in her work on the transformative power of degrowth, Susan Paulson remarks that:
The magic of degrowth lies in its ability to energize and connect remarkably heterodox thinking and surprisingly heterogeneous action, including that of non-dominant groups. Therein also lies the challenge for our conventional minds. Indeed, we (…) struggled against a tendency to portray degrowth as a single voice (…) It should come as no surprise, then, that debates about what degrowth is, is not, or ought to be entail extraordinary theoretical and normative complexity. (2017 p436)
This post is the first of a short series which will explore the concept of degrowth from multiple perspectives. Below, a specifically queer/decolonial feminist framework will be adopted to explore the potential for degrowth to become a tool for navigating new nature-cultural relationalities.
In her decolonial feminist critique of the Capitalocene/Anthropocene periodizing debates, Mehta argues that they fail “to focus sufficiently on power and injustice, or to highlight historic divisions between global North and global South, between men and women, colonialists and locals (…) nuanced accounts are required to reveal the varied and complicated relationships between dynamic environments, humans and more-than-humans, power, identity, discourse and control” (2021 p2). Marian Abazeri also remarks that queer materialist and decolonial feminist approaches challenges degrowth theory to “adopt a more critical social lens that engages how historic processes of colonialism and modernity still instruct social, economic, and political relations of knowing, seeing, and being, informing present and fictive states of the world” (2022 p1). These interventions argue for degrowth discourses to register the scope and gravitas of colonial history and asymmetries on contemporary environmental politics and civil governance. Abazeri goes on to argue that:
many degrowth scholars have sidestepped or deferred some of the critical discussions that connect environmental justice with degrowth, especially as it pertains to historic economic and political relations between the North and South. This leaves degrowth proposals (…) evading connections between colonial/modern dynamics of race/class/gender and capitalist sociality within and between the Global North and South, further anchoring white/European middle-class histories, epistemes, and ontologies within the movement. (2022 p1)
In no uncertain terms, queer and feminist decolonial theorists urge degrowth discourse to register and critically consider the varied dimensions and histories of socio-ecological injustices, an idea similarly addressed by Paulson in her work on degrowth and sociospatial displacement which will be explored later.
While queer materialist thought and decolonial feminism recognize that global issues place a heavy responsibility on concepts like degrowth to imagine alternatives to capitalist world-systems, they argue that if solutions are not critically informed by the histories from which the problems emerge, then they are likely to repeat the same systems of violence. Thus, theorists like Mehta caution against the “the optimistic and promethean tendencies of ecomodernists” (2022, p2) who rely on “techno-solutions such as the next generation of nuclear energy to solve the energy crisis, geoengineering to combat global warming, and genetically modified food crops to address hunger and food crises”. Where are the materials necessary for these techno-solutions being extracted from? Whose labour is exploited in this system? Can there be ethical sharing of these technologies under a capitalist system?
These questions and more are central to theorists such as Paulson, who contend that ecomodernist notions of “decoupling” the extraction of natural resources from pollution and depletion is a dangerous fantasy. She directly responds to the arguments presented in The Ecomodernist Manifesto (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015) stating that “with or without sociospatial displacement of ecological costs and damages, quantitative analyses cast doubt on the ability of current societies to outgrow coupling of economic and material growth through technological innovation alone, without radical political and social change” (2017 p429). Paulson’s sensitivity to the cultural and sociospatial dimensions of degrowth, which she argues techno-centric solutions fail to appropriately register or resolve, contribute to wider discourses on materialist queer feminist degrowth theory, and offers a clear argument for the limitations of non-intersectional ecomodernist thought. This presents a clear distinction between the techno-centric solutions presented by ecomodernist approaches to degrowth, and queer materialist/decolonial feminist perspectives on degrowth.
To conclude, materialist queer and decolonial feminisms are essential voices in degrowth discourse, they are necessary for registering the often-overlooked dimensions of heteronormative, gendered, class-based, and Eurocentric cultural assumptions which are left unchecked by techno-centric approaches to tackling climate change. Emergent scholarship by queer and decolonial feminists hotly contend that such critical interventions are necessary for imagining a just post-carbon future.
Reference List
Abazeri, Mariam. “Decolonial feminisms and degrowth.” Futures 136 (2022): 1-6
Asafu-Adjaye, J; Blomquist, L; Brand, S; Brook, Barry; Defries, R; Ellis, E; et al. An ecomodernist manifesto. University Of Tasmania.
Mehta, Lyla, and Wendy Harcourt. “Beyond limits and scarcity: feminist and decolonial contributions to degrowth.” Political Geography 89.1 (2021) 1-3.
Meissner, Miriam. “Towards a cultural politics of degrowth: prefiguration, popularization and pressure.” Journal of Political Ecology 28.1 (2021): 511-532.
Meissner, Miriam. “Against accumulation: lifestyle minimalism, de-growth and the present post-ecological condition.” Journal of Cultural Economy 12.3 (2019): 185-200.
Paulson, Susan. “Degrowth: culture, power and change.” Journal of political ecology 24.1 (2017): 425-448.
Williams, Rhys. “Turning Toward the Sun: The Solarity and Singularity of New Food.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120.1 (2021): 151-162.