The Climate Crisis and the “Unnatural” Body: Onto-epistemological Possibilities of and Threats to the Genders of Children and Adolescents

Abstract

Utilizing the work of philosopher Karen Barad, this paper explores the intraplays between gender, antigender discourse, and the climate crisis. In the midst of a world that is ecologically breaking down, gendered embodiment is a domain in which, for some, the dismay, despair, and reconfigured possibilities of our current world gathers. I use clinical examples to suggest that the disruptive elements constitutive of embodiment, as well as its potential porosity with the more-than-human world, make gender a possible site of resistance and ethical response-ability in the context of the climate crisis. Gender can become a powerful medium for an experience of a circulation between the density of the familiar and an alterity that is inside/outside. At the same time, as our usual coordinates are lost, the immersive panic that ensues also creates attempts to reinforce a threatened heteropatriarchal world, as is seen in Far Right ideologies. Attacks on trans children frequently center on defending “the natural” and protecting these children from “mutilation” and the “contagion” of gender ideology. The paper explores the way these claims project destructiveness and perversely distort several terrors entangled with the climate crisis—about “nature,” violence, and permeability.