Feminist Environmental Futures

Feminist Environmental Futures explores how ecologies and environments are shaped, understood, and struggled for in relation to sex, gender, and sexuality. It also considers how ecological and environmental thought have deepened feminist and queer theories, practices, and organizing.

Over a five-year period, CSW|Streisand aims to develop this theme as a multi-faceted research program that brings together scholars, scientists, artists, organizers, and practitioners across disciplines to examine the intersections of environment, gender, and sexuality.

Some questions we are asking include:

• How are water, land, and labor are gendered, and how do they differentially and influence the lives of women, girls, and queer communities?
• How can climate change can be conceptualized through queer temporalities, kinship, and futurity?
• How are ecosystem degradation and restoration are entangled with histories of gender, sexuality, and colonialism?

Artists and scholars—such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Joanne Barker—have connected Black and Indigenous feminisms to marine life, water, and relationality. Indigenous epistemologies and posthumanist approaches further expand these inquiries by foregrounding kinship and reciprocity with more-than-human worlds.

From gendered and colonial constructions of wilderness and domesticity to feminist and queer narratives of place and care, such work demonstrates that ecological flourishing is inseparable from feminist and queer justice.

Environmental struggles worldwide—from Standing Rock to Flint, from the Rio Blanco to Compton—reveal how women, queer people, and communities of color have led transformative movements for environmental justice, health, and collective survival.

Methodologies and Collaboration

Understanding feminist and queer ecologies requires multidisciplinary inquiry and collaborative experimentation. This theme brings together:

• Environmental scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars
• Artists, storytellers, and community organizers
• Practitioners of environmental justice, sustainability, and place-based knowledge

Participants engage diverse methods—scientific analysis, ethnography, storytelling, political theory, ecological modeling, and multimodal creation—to illuminate how gender, sexuality, race, and ecology shape one another.