Capitalism is killing us. It is killing us through producing huge amounts of environmental waste in the process of making capitalist commodities, trafficking workers along polluted highways and drilling oil to traffic workers. In this chapter, I will show that often this process of commodity production is gendered as masculine. As a core part of capitalism, contemporary economies of carbon production, consumption and trading mobilise masculinist tropes of competition, performance and frontier politics. As the carbon futures trading market shows us, carbon is now not only a core commodity on which contemporary capitalism is built, but carbon has also become a fiction that is performativity traded in a masculinist practice on which global stock markets depend. Indeed, while carbon is a resource on which both global industry and the stock markets rely, economic units of assessment never take into account the full market value of commodities that rely on generating carbon. Throughout the process of its production, carbon (which is ostensibly “in everything”), becomes gendered: carbon is made as masculine. The natural resources drawn on to make carbon can be seen as the feminised, exploited, taken for granted resource on which ‘liberal’ late capitalism depends. In this chapter, I argue that the gendered nature of carbon production shows us that in order to achieve a carbon neutral future we need to rethink the systems of cultural value and associated pedagogies of masculinity embedded in carbon production and consumption. Carbon production and consumption are one of the core forms of masculine performative materiality and cultural economy on which capitalism depends.
This is the most polemic chapter of the book and I engage with some theorists who employ Deleuze to rethink gender and the environment, such as Stacy Alaimo and her brilliant work on carbon heavy masculinity. That said, the remit of this chapter is slightly different from those which come before. In this chapter, I advance an argument about masculinity and energy cultures that opens new pathways of inquiry in Masculinity Studies. Specifically, I argue that masculinity, as it is taught and learnt through carbon economies, needs to change. These are lines of inquiry I hope other scholars will pursue, employing Deleuze’s thought to consider the pedagogy of masculinity in ways I have suggested might be of use in the preceding chapters of the book. Contemporary carbon economies have a sad global affect: across a long period of time they reduce the ways in which the planet can act. They also reduce the ways in which masculinity can be recognized, to form quite a select range of similarly assisted performances: driving big cars, fast cars, aeroplanes, rocket ships, and other lightweight carbon vehicles.
the elements of the state identifiable as masculinist correspond not to some property contained within men but to the conventions of power and privilege constitutive of gender within an order of male dominance… This dominance expresses itself as the power to describe and run the world and the power of access to women. (1995, p. 168; emphasis added).
Modes of governance teach gender. In the same way that the capitalist liberal state governs gender, partly through the division of family, civil society (economy) and state, by constructing the family as a ‘natural’ realm and civil society as the masculinist space where rights/freedoms are exercised, carbon production and emission is the unspoken necessity of contemporary capitalist life and, as such, is core to the production of gendered economies. The resources from which carbon is drawn are the ‘feminised other’ of economic life. Carbon is the new man in the state that Wendy Brown characterises so powerfully as constituting liberalism under late capitalism. Contemporary carbon economies need to change, and this requires a new economy of masculine performance.
The Politics of Surfaces
If transportation systems and liquid hydrocarbon infrastructures (such as drilling platforms, pipelines, gas stations, tankers, etc.) figure urban spatial formations (and their associated ways of life) as socioecologies of energy, then the circulation of electricity is the other key form of energy that shapes contemporary socioecologies. (2014a, p. 128)
Carbon is produced as energy, and as matter. In extracting carbon from the feminised, naturalised environment and making it into a commodity that can be traded in the act of masculine competition that is the carbon futures trading market, the contemporary socioecology that is created is explicitly masculinised, performative and embedded in capitalist structures in ways that ensure its longevity.
The method that Sheller develops in order to follow energy pathways is one that she calls “following things”, explicitly, this is tracking material cultures from their source out into the world, “showing where material artefacts come from and how they are interconnected” (2014a, p. 130). This offers an interesting method for establishing how the formations of carbon production and consumption that I am interested in come to be shaped. Carbon itself is everywhere, in every living thing. Yet across a range of economies of production and consumption, carbon is created as a commodity to be traded, and it is a vehicle for increasing competitive masculine relationships across all kinds of fora. From its inception, and certainly from a very early point in its production, and across its globalised and globalizing trade and consumption, carbon is used to craft a masculinist energy culture. It is employed to these ends through its physical and symbolic extraction from the increasingly ‘feminised’ repository of natural resources which, while they hold the ingredients for the manufacture of the economically important unit of carbon, are imagined within late capitalism as ‘natural’ and therefore ‘free’ for the taking. The feminised and increasingly exploited earth is available at apparently no cost other than extraction and fabrication prices and the unspoken cost to the global environment. Well before the point at which it enters the market, carbon itself, and indeed the very idea of carbon, has a masculine e/affect which is magnified by the structure of the stock market, cultures of mobility and associated forms of frontier masculinity performed through carbon framed racing cars and road bikes. Fast and light vehicles eat up space, they move the body across frontiers in ways that are only made possible by technology. There are particular modes of gendered performance that accompany frontier masculinity. In her insightful discussion of frontier masculinity in the oil industry, Gloria Miller explains the particular gender performances that become embedded in ways of taking new spatial frontiers. Miller describes J. P. Bryan, the former CEO of Gulf Canada in a way that illustrates this performativity though characterising him as “‘a miscast cowboy’, ‘a brash, tough-talking Texan’ (McMurdy, 1998), a ‘Texas gunslinger’ who ‘follows the only rule that matters: survival of the fittest and fastest’ who ‘plays the corporate takeover game with guts and gusto’ and who ‘played by his own rules, which meant being fast on the draw, and making sure his opponent was dead before he hit the ground” (Miller, 2004, p. 62). In addition to styles of gendered performance, frontier masculinity requires a particular attitude to space and, of course, frontiers. For example, a confident claiming of space, stating “this is the way it is and we should drill here” (Miller, 2004, p. 62). Carbon brings with it a particular set of frontiers and technologies for mapping spaces. Carbon futures as imagined, valued and traded on the carbon futures trading market and ultra-light frame Formula One cars that have a chassis moulded from carbon fibre 1 sheets are examples of one frontier made available for colonisation and a technology of spatial domination that is fashioned from carbon. Carbon futures are made as an afterthought of the environmental damage caused by a huge global increase in carbon emissions.
Control over energy involves transferring it into particular objects and moving it through various distribution networks. This infrastructure then supports particular materializations of energy that become routinized in the ways people use and access matter in all its forms, such that material cultures embed energy in forms that become taken for granted or invisible. (2014a, p. 134)
human mobility, transport of goods (logistics), and energy circulation to support these routings […]. We can refer to such assemblages of matter, energy, practices and meanings as an energy culture that is embedded in ongoing processes of mobilizing, energizing, making and doing. (Sheller, 2014a, p. 134; emphasis in original)
Carbon is both an energy culture on which contemporary capitalism depends and a material culture on and through which the energy culture is built. If we were to think about tracking the material culture of carbon we would have to begin with the realisation that carbon, or at least the possibility for carbon, is everywhere, in every living thing. Embedded in my inquiry, then, are the questions: at what point in its production, consumption and/or trade does carbon become a masculinist energy culture? And how so? If it is only at the point at which it enters the market, is it carbon itself or is it the structures of the market that give it masculine e/affect?
Control over energy involves transferring it into particular objects and moving it through various distribution networks. This infrastructure then supports particular materializations of energy that become routinized in the ways people use and access matter in all its forms, such that material cultures embed energy in forms that become taken for granted or invisible. (2014a, p. 134)
A peculiar sort of hypermasculinity of impervious but penetrating subjects has emerged in the United States… SUVs and pickup trucks have not only grown ludicrously huge but are armed with aggressive impenetrability, covered, as they often are, with armour-like accoutrements including big, rugged grille guards and hubcabs arrayed with frightening cones that look like medieval weapons. Some of these vehicles sport large metal testicles that hang from the trailer hitch (the hitch itself becomes the penis in this ensemble). … Just in case this is all too subtle, the ‘rolling coal’ movement drives into blatantly connect masculinity, the exuberant production of pollution and the rejection of environmentalism … People in this movement, usually men, equip their trucks to use more, not less gasoline, in order to blow out black clouds of soot. (Alaimo, 2016, pp. 95–96)
Cars are now both made of carbon and produce carbon. They become vehicles for the performance of masculinity in numerous ways. SUV’s and the ‘rolling coal’ movement that Alaimo discusses are one example of how carbon is both used and produced in the performance of masculinity, but car racing and the fantasy of fast and strong masculinity facilitated through carbon fibre racing car shells are another example of the all-too-easy, yet ever so enduringly popular, equation between masculinity and motor cars. Carbon materially shapes our contemporary world, our capacity for mobility and our economy. In this respect, various forms of carbon are actants, or objects and materials that play roles in global narratives of speed and progress.
This approach of reading material, objects, omissions and compounds as actants is embedded in the work of a range of scholars. In adopting this approach, Sheller draws on Jane Bennett. After Spinoza, Thoreau, Lucretius and others, Bennett reads ‘things’ as lively, or as agents. The approach to materialism facilitated here examines the agency of things as exercised through materiality in its expressive capacity to act. Bennett asks if things can actually ‘hail’ us or interpolate our experiences through their thing power.
Aluminium moves around the world, changing shape as it moves: from underground bauxite ore found especially in the Caribbean into alumina refineries and smelters driven by hydroelectric power harnessed from rivers; from ingots, rolled sheets, and extruded parts into electrochemical alloys, packaging and products; from shipments loaded and unloaded at ports and stored in warehouses into engineered infrastructures, built vehicles, and architectural assemblages; from the London Metals Exchange and the global newspapers. (2014b, p. 67)
In each of its material configurations, aluminium is surrounded by performative economies and the same can be said for carbon. Materials are agents of globalisation and provide the means to generate material signifiers of global modernity. The affective capacity of metals and resources, in this instance carbon, can be used to show that material economies of carbon production signify social values, indeed, I would argue, they articulate masculinity cultures of the anthropocene.2
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 1)
Capitalism will maintain its addictive relationship to carbon through twisting and turning itself into all kinds of justificatory positions that advocate the idea that carbon production and consumption of many forms is necessary. It absolutely is not. Humans can survive perfectly well without petrol, Formula One cars and prosthetic limbs designed for sport, but contemporary configurations of masculinity, and associated high performance economies cannot.
Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in the form of the “free worker.” Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field. By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius. Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field. Is it correct to say that in this sense schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine, as manic-depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, and hysteria the product of the territorial machine? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, p. 33)
On the path to producing schizoid detachment from the socius, and indeed the world, capitalism sells the possibility of environmental redemption; carbon offset markets posited as a way of ameliorating the damage caused by the huge carbon emissions made by the capitalist machine. Dhanda and Hartman (2011) provide a grounded understanding of the nature of the offset market and suggest a tendency toward carbon neutrality as a possible point of equilibrium for the consuming public. They outline the standards environment for offset providers to illustrate most effectively the need for a single set of criteria among providers that is readily understandable by the common consumer stakeholder. Dhanda and Hartman (2011) explore the differences among the providers—and articulate the specific criteria upon which providers may be evaluated by this particular stakeholder constituency—namely, by bringing together ‘best practices’ based on currently available analyses. As I have intimated above, and continue to suggest throughout this chapter, offset trading, like all economies surrounding carbon, is an inherently masculinist practice, but offset trading is unique in the respect that it is an emerging social and economic fiction. Characterised by specific performative tropes and affective registers, carbon markets form the new frontier for what Connell (1998) refers to as ‘transnational business masculinity’.
Transnational business masculinity does not require bodily force, since the patriarchal dividend on which it rests is accumulated by impersonal, institutional means. But corporations increasingly use the exemplary bodies of elite sportsmen as a marketing tool … and indirectly as a means of legitimation for the whole gender order. (1998, p. 16)
The institutional dividend on which the frontier markets of carbon trading rely is a financial fiction, that is grounded in environmental exploitation. True to Connell’s argument above, these practices of exploitation absolutely run through into elite sport, but also characterise the masculinist nature of late capitalist culture: fast moving, hard, ‘strong’.
Moreover, global capitalism makes a fortune—indeed, a speculative fortune, from carbon production and the exploitation of natural resources. Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels already carry an economic price, though the real bill comes to us all in masked public health care costs, harm to the environment, the effects of climate change and reduced options for the future. I briefly sketch an incomplete geography of carbon emissions before looking at the masculine performance of carbon trading, an act which can arguably only be conceived in light of some understanding of the contemporary cultural landscape of carbon production.
The production of a material culture is not—as Sheller and Alaimo show us—solely a physical issue. Cultural values are conceptual and embodied as much as they are articulated through matter. The cultural value of carbon has become inextricably enmeshed with the worth of masculinity in ways that we can only begin to understand, and which I examine as this chapter develops. To begin synthesising this analysis, I want to make a materialist point about the feminisation of natural resources and the masculinisation of capitalist ‘value-adding’ processes of industrial production and associated carbon emission. A huge amount of money is made by producing carbon and selling carbon offsets in capitalist markets. For example, if we look at the carbon futures markets, we can see that capitalism is a system employed to make a speculative fortune from carbon production, carbon offset and the associated exploitation of natural resources. Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels carry an economic price in some legal jurisdictions, though the actual damages done are repeatedly obfuscated by media, policy and masculine prowess achieved through industrial success. This process of environmental exploitation, and the feminization and exploitation of the ‘natural environment’ held up against ‘(hu)man made resources’ has a long history within capitalist economies, a history which coagulates in particular ways around certain materialities such as oil, aluminium and carbon. I briefly review the respective politics of these actants as pedagogies of masculinity, beginning with oil.
On the Politics of Oil: Masculinity and Post-carbon Transitions
In their themed edition on “Energizing Societies”, Tyfield and Urry (2014) convene a series of investigations into the politics of oil and post-oil transitions. Of note amongst this edition of Theory, Culture and Society is Geels’ work on “Regime Resistance against Low-Carbon Transitions: Introducing Politics and Power into the Multi-Level Perspective”. Drawing on insights from political economy, Geels examines the politics and power relationships that articulate across the multi-level perspectives of low-carbon transitions. Instrumental, discursive, material and institutional forms of power and resistance are distinguished and illustrated with examples from the UK electricity system. Geels concludes that the resilience and persistence of coal, gas and nuclear production regimes currently negates the benefits from increasing renewables deployment. Fossil fuel regimes are much more difficult to stabilise than existing policy-makers assume. The same themed edition features an insightful essay by David Tyfield titled “‘King Coal is Dead! Long Live the King!’: The Paradoxes of Coal’s Resurgence in the Emergence of Global Low-Carbon Societies”.
Tyfield shows us that, while discourse on low-carbon transition envisages progressive social change towards environmentally sustainable and more equitable societies, such assumptions pay inadequate attention to the key questions of (productive, relational) power embedded in existing carbon-intensive energy systems. He examines how energy infrastructures and socio-technical systems interact with, construct, enable and constrain political regimes. Conceiving low-carbon energy transitions through an analytic focus on power, Tyfield holds in relief the paradox of the ‘phenomenal’ resurgence of coal in an era of low-carbon innovation. The strong connections between coal-based socio-technical systems and the political regime of classical liberalism can be used to show energy and political regimes connecting ‘clean coal’ with a ‘liberalism 2.0’ centred on a rising China. This connection affords a critique of the low-carbon society emergent in these developments—a society almost completely lacking the progressive visions of much ‘low-carbon transition’ literature.
Other work by Urry, in which he examines the energy economies of capitalism, is instructive. In Consuming the Planet to Excess (2010) and then later in Societies Beyond Oil: Oil Dregs and Social Futures (2013), Urry examines major changes relating to the contemporary conditions of human life. In examining what he calls ‘Carbon Capital’, Urry explains how “Many oil companies are more powerful than governments. The power of these companies, what I call ‘carbon capital’ is not just economic but also political, cultural and military. Carbon capital consists of a complex of oil and gas exploration, producing and refining companies; vehicle, plane and ship manufacturers; media, advertising and cultural corporations; and many think tanks and consultants. Such carbon capital has been enormously effective in wielding power, especially in the U.S.A but also with Britain, the Russian Federation, parts of Africa and Latin America and most Middle Eastern countries” (Urry, 2013, p. 47). Carbon capital has used “different strategies and tactics over the past half a century or so … oil is not any old energy source. It is the only one that so far is able to move people and objects on the scale that the twentieth century brought into being, and he has locked the world into social practices that will not continue if there really is an ‘energy abyss’” (Urry, 2013, pp. 95–96).
These shifts involve moving from low-carbon to high-carbon economies/societies, from societies of discipline to societies of control, and more recently from specialized and differentiated zones of consumption to mobile, de-differentiated consumptions of excess. (Urry, 2013, p. 1)
Urry shows us that, in no uncertain terms, societies are currently characterised by their wasteful consumption. He examines the implications of such forms of ‘excess’ consumption for clues as to the nature and characteristics of possible capitalist futures, all of which are bleak and vehicles for the environmental exploitation of the twenty-first century.
Carbon creates an enmeshment of economy and cultural value that is materialist, gendered, and oriented toward the technical modification of human affairs. Carbon economies suppose that humans have become significant in terms of collective activity that is historically recent, highly unequal, and global in scope. Here, the human is configured not as a biological species, such as in debates on “life itself” or in distinctions between humans and other species. Rather, “carbon accounting formulates the human ecologically and geologically with an eye toward imagining the future forms these relations might take. … climate change has identified the human as a contemporary problem with particular urgency” (Whittington, 2016, p. 46). Contemporary formations and performances of masculinity are at the heart of this global problem, drilling for oil, driving cars powered by oil, selling the possibility of redemption from oil and exploitation. This needs to be addressed with particular urgency.
Financial and Environmental Gendered Fictions
Global emissions can be allocated to human activities in various ways. One of the most straightforward analyses of carbon emissions to be found comes from the World Resources Institute (2016), which breaks down total global emissions into the following sectors: “Energy (24.9%), Industry (14.7%), Transportation (14.3%), Other fuel combustion (8.6%), Fugitive emissions (4%), Agriculture (13.8%), Land use change (12.2%), Industrial processes (4.3%), Waste (3.2%)”3 (World Resources Institute 2016). When considered both individually and collectively, sales of these resources, or revenue surrounding resource management (e.g. waste) show us that the extent of the fortune created by capitalism from selling natural resources is not only enormous but also made impossible to accurately quantify by the nature of the shifting metrics used to evaluate energy production, consumption and sale (Friedrich, Ge, & Pickens, 2017).
The World Resources Institute (2016) shows us that a huge 24.9% of the world’s carbon emissions come from electricity and heat. While, based on this information, we could arguably develop an estimate cost of the environmental damage done, there are no estimates of the global value of the coal and gas energy market. How much money does this damage make corporations who are its perpetrators? The Australian Bureau of Statistics coal mining data shows that in 2014–2015 sales and service income in the coal mining industry was $45.9 billion. This was a decrease by 6.4% from 2013. If we subtract the total capital expenditure for the coal mining industry (which was $6 billion4), we can see that a conservative estimate of the net profit of the energy industry for 2014–2015 is $39.9 billion. The kind of revenue is far more than twice the amount recuperated by carbon taxes which was estimated as just $7.6 billion in 2014–2015.
Since 1990, US greenhouse gas emissions have increased significantly. From year to year, emissions rise (and very occasionally fall in some places) due to changes in the economy, the price of fuel, and other factors. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency’s 2016 report Trends in Global CO2 Emissions shows us that 2015 was the hottest year since records began in 1880. In 2016, the 16 warmest years recorded were between 1998 and 2015. In the European Union, emissions increased by 1.3% in 2014, but the year closed with the adoption of the landmark Paris Agreement on Climate Change signed by 194 countries and the European Union (Olivier, Janssesns-Maenhout, Muntean, & Peters, 2016). As a result of these changes in national emission totals, global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion, cement production and other processes decreased in 2015 by 0.1%. It is generally conceded that, in 2015, global CO2 emissions in Europe improved (Olivier et al., 2016).
Carbon emissions in Asia are profoundly impacted by the world’s top emitter of CO2, China, which only started to marginally curb its carbon dioxide emissions in 2015 (WRI 2017). In 2015, China and the US reduced their emissions by 0.7% (China) and 2.6% (US), respectively, compared to 2014. However, these decreases were counterbalanced by increases in India of 5.1%, so while Asia has some relatively carbon neutral countries, it also houses the largest site of global carbon emissions, China, and the most rapidly growing emissions market, India.
In 2014, the major carbon emission sources in Australia were electricity, gas, water and primary industries (agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining). These emission sources accounted for 35.4 and 29.4% (primary industries) of direct emissions respectively. As I have suggested, the energy industry alone made at least $39.9 billion in the 2014–2015 financial year, and yet carbon taxes in Australia across all sectors—so including the primary industries—were just $7.6 billion. That’s a $32.3 billion profit coming from the feminisation and invisibilisation of capitalism’s reliance on carbon.
Carbon taxes and the carbon futures market remain inadequate responses to the global problem of carbon pollution. Setting a carbon tax, or putting a “price” on carbon emissions, supposedly helps shift the burden for the damage back to those who are responsible for it and makes those who can reduce carbon emissions accountable for so doing. But instead of dictating who should reduce emissions, where and how, a carbon price leaves polluters to decide for themselves whether to discontinue their polluting activity, reduce emissions, or continue polluting and pay for it. Given the huge profit margins outlined above, the choice to continue polluting and pay the meagre tax placed on it is obviously appealing, as substantial profit margins are retained. You can buy pre-set prices for carbon emissions on the futures trading market, so even if the cost of carbon emission triples in the next three years, you can pay a carbon tax rate you secured in 2017.
An emissions trading scheme, or ETS—sometimes referred to as a cap-and-trade system—caps the total level of greenhouse gas emissions and allows those industries with low emissions to sell their extra allowances to larger emitters. By creating supply and demand for emissions allowances, an ETS establishes a market price for greenhouse gas emissions. The cap helps ensure that the required emission reductions will take place to keep the emitters within their pre-allocated carbon budget.
The choice of the regulatory instrument (an ETS or a carbon tax) will depend on national and economic circumstances. There are also more indirect ways of more accurately pricing carbon, such as through fuel taxes, the removal of fossil fuel subsidies, and regulations that attempt to compensate for the “social cost of carbon”. However, what I am suggesting here is that current attempts to think through the social cost of carbon are partial at best; and they necessarily exclude the gendered, geographic and economic politics of carbon production.
The performative nature of the carbon futures trading market is evidenced by Vesty, Telgenkamp and Roscoe in their work on ‘creating numbers’. Vesty et al. illustrate the performative ways in which carbon emissions are given calculative agency. Through an empirical case study of a large Australian water utility, the authors explain the calculative appeal of the carbon emissions number, how the carbon emissions number came into being and its performative effects. Quantifying carbon emissions gives them agency and mobilizes them to act in economies in certain ways. Descheneau (2012) examines the fact that making money from carbon is now possible through a number of market devices: processes that have themselves enabled the construction of carbon as a form of money. The social underpinnings of the commodification of carbon cannot be underestimated, and, following arguments about the performativity of economics Descheneau (2012) shows us that carbon performs functions similar to those of money. He persuasively argues that the construction of carbon money should be seen as a fundamentally social (rather than ‘merely’ technical) process.
Inventing and performing the carbon market, then, is a social and human as well as a material act. Liu (2015) examines the social dynamics of the performativity of the carbon market in greater detail, arguing that three important dimensions need to be considered in understanding how the carbon market operates: materiality, framing, and citizen participation. First, to understand how the carbon market is established, Liu argues that it is not enough to examine the politics among the social actors alone. Carbon’s biophysical properties actively participate in market construction, shape the contours of the market, and may resist the desires of commodification from the social actors. Liu also examines the market crisis in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and shows us that the heart of the debate lies in the different framings of the objectives of the carbon market. The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme can be framed respectively as economic efficiency, a market, a system of regulation, an economic disadvantage, a tax, and a European integration project. Various political coalitions are actualised through each of these different kinds of framing, while the state still wields the ultimate power to regulate this market. Liu concludes by arguing that the market can potentially become a site for collective action, and, subsequently, that this activity can re-embed the market into the social fabric that created it. For Liu, then, the performativity of the carbon market is just as socially constructed as it is materially produced. There are implicit links here between individual’s embodied gender performance, the commanding men who dig for oil, tear up tram tracks and barter on to stock market, with the material and social performativity of the carbon market, that relies on associated gendered economies of carbon performance.
Pellizzonni (2011) also offers a critical perspective on the intersection of the social and the material embodied by the carbon futures market. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality framework and focusing on biotechnology patenting and the financialisation of climate and weather prediction and regulation, Pellizzonni argues that the conceptual underpinnings of these approaches bring with them a novel understanding of the ontological quality of the biophysical world. The biophysical world is conceived as fully plastic, controllable, open to an ever-expanding human agency. Neoliberal governance operates through, rather than despite, disorder (i.e. through contingency, uncertainty, instability). If environmental social theory can be brought in, to account for the ways in which the chaos in the biophysical world increasingly folds into and supports neoliberal systems of governance, we might begin to see that climate change is a biopolitical strategy for social control.
Romain (2014) develops a resonant perspective, arguing that as environmental degradation becomes a growing concern, the development of international law on climate change articulates profound social contradictions between accumulation and reproduction under capitalism. These contradictions are translated into the creation of a form of public property over the right to emit greenhouse gases (as opposed to the ‘privatisation’ of the atmosphere). This public property is unequally distributed among states in an imperialist manner. The distribution of these rights at the domestic level amounts to the distribution of rights to ‘climate rent’. Romain (2014) argues that emission rights are not ‘commodities’, and emissions trading and carbon markets are not ‘accumulation strategies’. These are merely depoliticised forms in which ‘climate rent’ is extracted and circulated to preclude political debates about the goals of production.
Over the past decade, carbon trading has emerged as the industrialised world’s primary policy response to global climate change, despite considerable controversy. With carbon markets worth $144 billion in 2009, carbon trading represents the largest manifestation of the trend toward market-based environmental governance. In Carbon Coalitions, Jonas Meckling presents the first comprehensive study on the rise of carbon trading and the role that business played in making this policy instrument a central pillar of global climate governance. Meckling explains how a transnational coalition of firms and a few market-oriented environmental groups actively promoted international emissions trading as a compromise policy solution in a situation of political stalemate. The coalition side-lined not only environmental groups that favoured taxation and command-and-control regulation but also business interests that rejected any emissions controls. Considering the sources of business influence, Meckling emphasises the importance of political opportunities (policy crises and norms), coalition resources (funding and legitimacy,) and political strategy (mobilising state allies and multilevel advocacy). Meckling presents three case studies that represent milestones in the rise of carbon trading: the internationalisation of emissions trading in the Kyoto Protocol (1989–2000); the creation of the EU Emissions Trading System (1998–2008); and the re-emergence of emissions trading on the US policy agenda (2001–2009). These cases, and the theoretical framework that Meckling develops for understanding the influence of transnational business coalitions, offer critical insights into the role of business in the emergence of market-based global environmental governance.
Despite this wealth of critical engagement with the material, social and political natures of the carbon futures trading market, and the generally accepted consensus that carbon is an agent, very little other than Alaimo’s insightful analysis of carbon heavy masculinity, and my earlier work on carbon fibre masculinity, has developed enough to consider the gendered nature of carbon, carbon trading and the carbon markets. The basic divide between the feminised resource of nature and the masculinised waste of CO2 or commodity of carbon fibre, echoes Donna Haraway’s now-well-known point that: “Feminists have sometimes affirmed the categories of nature and the body as sites of resistance to the dominations of history, but the affirmations have tended to obscure the categorical and overdetermined aspect of ‘nature’ or the ‘female body’ as an oppositional ideological resource. Instead, nature has seemed simply there, a reserve to be mined for the uses of capitalism in general. Rather than marking a categorically determined pole, ‘nature’ or ‘woman’s body’ too easily means the saving core of reality distinguishable from the social impositions of patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, racism, history and language. That repression of the construction of the category ‘nature’ can be and has been both used by and against feminist efforts to theorize women’s agency and status as social subjects” (Haraway, 1999, p. 442).
So, building on Haraway’s astute observation that natural resources, akin to women’s bodies, are unconsciously seen as simply there for the taking, I ask what happens when the feminine bites back? When we question the construction of the naturalness of matter? If we take the materialist position in which women’s status as “reproductively fertile” social subjects can become conflated with “natural resources”, we can go on to see the masculinised results of industry as an act reliant on penetrating the natural body of the earth. But to do so, we, or specifically, myself as a women would first have to be permitted to think about the gendering of matter and culture, and this, I have discovered, is a dangerous activity.5 In 2015 I co-edited a themed edition of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. My contribution to this edition was an article called “Carbon Fiber Masculinity”, and in this paper I examined the gendered economy of carbon fiber as a prosthetic form of masculinity through which men are more effectively able to compete with each other (Hickey-Moody, 2015). The article focused on a case study of Oscar Pistorius and the way in which his prosthetic legs both allowed him to compete alongside non-disabled male athletes and were also part of the production of his intensely misogynist subjectivity. The paper draw on Deleuze’s work on the surface as a series of effects. In The Logic of Sense , Deleuze shows us that “identity” and “experience” are actually overlapping connections between surfaces: “The struggle between the mouth and brain. .. eating, on the one hand, and thinking, on the other, where the second always risks disappearing into the first, and the first, on the contrary, risks being projected onto the second” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 240). Who we think we are, who we are seen as being, and how we feel, come together on the surface of our skin.
The surfaces of carbon fibre prosthetics were used by Pistorius to connect him to other non-disabled athletes, and carbon fibre is regularly used by competitive bike riders to connect competitively with other competitive riders, by car enthusiasts and professional car racers in order to belong to the world of carbon fibre mesh ultra light racing car frames—and the list of competitive economies could continue. My analysis of this politics of surfaces has two layers—firstly, it draws attention to the misogynist gendered politics often associated with using carbon fibre in competitive practices. Secondly, it explored Deleuze’s concept of the surface as a theoretical tool that can help us understand how subjectivity extends across and beyond our bodies. Published in a cultural theory journal, the paper is not surprisingly a piece of contemporary cultural theory. It seemed strange, then, that a piece of cultural theory would attract the attention of the biologist Richard Dawkins, and, even more so, be deemed an appropriate focal point for his scathing critique, and indeed for the critique of his many vitriolic male social media fans. Their interest in the paper was not only seemingly misplaced, and ill-informed if not ignorant, but was doggedly pursued across Twitter, YouTube and various internet discussion forums. An army of angry and broadly uneducated men rallied against a feminist piece of cultural theory that dealt with matters well outside their areas of expertise (see Hartley, 2018).
The remaining section of this chapter, then, is a response to Richard Dawkins’ critique of my earlier work on carbon fibre masculinity and gendered nature of the cultural value of carbon fibre. I begin by providing some institutional and disciplinary context.
Empire and Legitimate Knowledges
This analysis necessarily begins at the University of Oxford, “one of the leading universities in the world” and, by its own admission, “the oldest university in the English-speaking world.” Oxford, an institution of white patriarchal success par excellence, disregards well respected accounts of older universities beginning in Bologna, Egypt, Morocco and touts itself as the oldest English speaking University, which is indeed the case. At the time of writing, Oxford holds pride of first place in the hegemony of English-speaking educational league tables, and is an institution that is pre-eminently populated by white students. It can be seen as symbolising the last vestiges of English empire, ever fading in the shadow of Brexit and Britain’s associated waning powers. Oxford supports the work of biologist Richard Dawkins, who from 1995 until 2008 was the university’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science and is currently listed as a professor emeritus. As an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, Dawkins runs his own foundation for ‘Reason and Science’. As this name suggests, the coupling of enlightenment knowledges with a legitimation of particular ideas of reason is embedded in Dawkins’ work, as is the masculinist nature of the discipline he represents and the institution to which he belongs.
There are disciplinary boundaries that mark out questions about legitimate knowledge (there are proper knowledges of carbon), and investments in policing disciplinary boundaries; investments that shore-up popular imaginings of the justified, or correct, role of science that Dawkins recreates and steadfastly maintains. As I move on, I show the very cursory nature of claims for disciplinary authority that Dawkins has made in critique of my work, but first I sketch the gendered nature of a very different institutional and disciplinary home.
At the time when Dawkins’ public critique of my work was advanced, I was working at Goldsmiths, a college of the University of London, originally naval and marine training school. Arguably, Goldsmiths is famous for having attributes that are easily ‘feminised’—it is known for its interdisciplinarity, has a highly-ranked art school and has a strong tradition of practice-led research cultures. While ‘high art’ is a notoriously masculinist world, if we are to put interdisciplinary art practice and biological science on a spectrum of gendered performativity and value, biological science’s claims to truth, and its populist essentialism are likely to have the masculinist edge on art theory’s recognition of multiple truths, the postmodern cultural turn and legitimation of identity politics. Much of my research and teaching has explored the feminization of education as a profession and as a discipline.6
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The first thing that the lively social media discussion and associated YouTube clips show is that Dawkins, and his angry fans, have no understanding of disciplinarity. The fact that a biologist’s comment on social media could be taken as a legitimate critique of a refereed cultural theory paper clearly shows that the skills Dawkins possesses—skills that are specific to biology—were assumed completely transferable into cultural theory. It was clear from personal correspondence between myself and Dawkins surrounding the shaming of my academic work on social media that Dawkins has not read any of the resources being drawn on in the original piece on carbon fibre, and, as such, is not in any way equipped to comment on the nature of the argument being advanced. Yet a register of being ‘right’ and entitled shapes Dawkins‘ uninformed critique, and indeed those of his followers. I would qualify this statement with the fact I could and would never criticize the biological work of a biologist, and I expect disciplinarity to be respected.
People Who ‘Know What They Are Talking About’
On 30 January 2012 the YouTube content delivery company “Crash Course” published a 12:32 video called “That’s Why Carbon Is A Tramp: Crash Course Biology #1”. Over the course of the short video, carbon is characterised in an explicitly gendered and sexed fashion. The name itself genders carbon as feminine: ‘tramp’ is a noun used to describe promiscuous women and the animation in the film presents the carbon atom as a woman’s head. The woman’s body is a voluptuous pink dress with a plunging sweetheart neckline and noticeable cleavage. “Hank”, the white American middle-class narrator of the film who talks us through the story of carbon as a tramp, contextualises his mini-lecture by telling the listener that “biology is just about sex and not dying”. Hank then proceeds to characterise carbon as “a bit of a tramp”, a “jezebel”, and a “hussy”. Why? Because carbon easily and willingly bonds with other molecules. “Carbon is kind” suggests Hank, at which point a disproportionately large pair of lips, adorned with a ‘sexy’ beauty spot appear on the molecule head of the pink-dress-wearing-sexy-carbon-tramp-woman. In fact, according to Hank, carbon is a perfect mix of ‘small, kind and a little bit trampy’. Here, Hank is discussing carbon molecules; in what is called a science video. There was no backlash to this apparently legitimate gendering of science. My paper on carbon fibre masculinity is not supposed to be a science paper, it is about social relationships between men and the ways in which they are altered by certain objects, such as things made from carbon fibre like bicycles, cars and prosthetic legs. The social life of the prosthetic leg attached to Pistorius’ frame was masculine. The legs intensified Pistorius’ competitive relationships with other men. This argument is not only sociologically accurate, it is quantitatively and qualitatively a world away from pretending that carbon molecules are heterosexual, promiscuous women. Molecules are not promiscuous women, they molecules. However, the project of pretending carbon is a hyper sexualized woman somehow seems okay, or at least went unnoticed, by the men who leapt in alarm at the prospect of thinking about the ways in which surfaces favoured by men might act as extensions of gendered subjectivity. There are clearly questions of genre, method and masculine performativity that are in need of addressing.
It seems, then, that knowledges about carbon, as well as systems of producing and consuming and trading carbon are parts of complex gendered economies that are synonymous with capitalist existence. As Deleuze and Guattari show us in their scathing appraisal of capitalism, the capitalist machine is “the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money” (1983, p. 139). Only capitalism could thrive on, and indeed commodify, environmental disaster. This process of commodification, unified as it is with the process of masculinization, ensures that we will not be carbon neutral without significant intervention into popular practices of masculine performativity. Carbon is humanities doing, but if we do not work to change the current state of affairs, it will also be our final undoing.
The righteousness with which Dawkins’ assumed his expertise in hard science translates into expertise in cultural theory alarmed me, when held against the fact that I would never assume expertise, and indeed authority, in hard science. The public shaming of my work undertaken by Dawkins’ and his fans made me realise my argument rang true to them. They protested too much. As I reflected on the broader politics of the argument, I came to see that, for these men, expertise in the hard sciences translates into expertise in anything, including cultural theory. This is simply another example of the broader misogynistic economy of capitalism in which the feminised environment, and also feminized knowledges, are exploited and dominated by masculinist technologies of carbon production and consumption. These complex and connected systems of gender performativity need to change if we are to create an environmentally sustainable future. Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of capitalism as a mad system that ‘invents’ economic value, and their work on sad affect as the way in which global agency is reduced, or positive affect as the ways in which global agency is enhanced, offer theoretical routes forward that will be of use. To begin, we must locate the gendered nature of the issues at hand, and this is what I have attempted to do here.
Conclusion
This chapter has examined the surfaces, energy cultures, gendered cultures of performance and knowledges of carbon fibre. These systems are cultural pedagogies that teach men and women how to perform in gendered ways and indeed, extend and intensify performances of masculinity. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that “there is only one way of making the state of nature viable: by striving to organize its encounters. Whatever body I meet, I seek what is useful. But there is a great difference between seeking what is useful through chance (that is, striving to destroy bodies incompatible with our own) and seeking to organize what is useful (striving to encounter bodies agreeing in nature with us, in relations in which they agree)” (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 260–261). This ethical system of relation developed by Deleuze, which he takes to illustrate positive and negative, or affirmative and sad affect, shows up the gendered politics of economies of carbon with sad consistency. From the masculine domination of the feminized ‘natural resources’ mined in the quest for carbon producing substances, to the performances of hyper-masculinity facilitated by carbon fibre objects, the frontiers of the carbon futures trading market and the vehement protection of legitimate knowledges of carbon, various forms of frontier masculinity maximize their capacity to act through maintaining a physical and conceptual enmeshment with various cultural formations of carbon. In their study of women’s status and carbon dioxide emissions, Ergas and York’s quantitative cross-national analysis leads them to argue that: “improving gender equality may serve to transform how the environment is viewed. In particular, as gender equality improves the environment may not simply be seen as a storehouse of resources to be used to generate profits, but, rather, as having intrinsic worth. Furthermore, since women are often disproportionately harmed by environmental degradation, increasing consideration for women’s well-being may lead to greater awareness about environmental problems. More specifically, since women generally have different knowledge about and concern for the environment, it is entirely possible that women make different decisions than do men when placed in positions of power. Thus, we may see this connection because nations with more progressive gender policies may tend to have more progressive environmental policies” (2012, p. 974). It is imperative that we start to challenge the masculinist nature of carbon economies of production and consumption if we are to move towards the possibility of a carbon neutral future.