Environmental crises, climate disruption, and extractivist petromodernity have come to existence not only as products of the global capitalist system, but equally significantly as products of cisheteropatriarchal structures. This mono-thematic issue of Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research titled Ecofeminisms and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Environment takes this position as a departure for investigation of political, academic, social, cultural, spiritual, and epistemic responses to life on a planet, whose capacity to sustain lifeworlds and ecosystems as we currently know them, has been and is continually being compromised by human actions.
As the world tips closer and closer to the 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures and 2024 and 2025 were yet more years with the highest temperatures recorded, with the current year possibly following suit, the very existence of a healthy, thriving planet is at risk not only for human societies, but also for our non-human relatives. Attempts to solve the global climate disruption and the current state resulting from industrial devastation include, in international and larger governmental circles, lessening our dependence on fossil fuels, switching to sustainable energy sources, lowering carbon emissions, eliminating the environmental impact of and/or ending animal agriculture, addressing overpopulation, and preventing species extinction. Policies that respond to such topics are articulated in diverse green movements, deep ecologies, and ecological conservation efforts, as well as environmental resistances, indigenous decolonial projects and local activisms. Yet, due to democratic backsliding, many existing solutions are not necessarily as beneficial to the planet as they could be, offering bandaids to larger issues, such as technological fixes as mitigations to climate change, and even serve the needs of late-stage capitalist patriarchy without those in political and economic charge having to change much if any of their wasteful habits. In other words, many dominant political, economic and technological proposals and discussions almost completely ignore what will bring about actual sustainable environmental change as detailed within ecological, environmentalist, and ecofeminist circles already since the late 1960s and early 1970s; that is system-wide change, criticism of anthropocentrism, the end of patriarchy and of colonialist and capitalist exploitation of environmental resources and physical bodies, both human and non-human (Salleh, 1992; Vance 1997; Mellor, 1997; Mies and Shiva, 2014).
Ecofeminism is a feminist perspective, as Mary Mellor (1997: 2) defines it, ‘that sees a connection between the exploitation and degradation of the natural world and the subordination and oppression of women.’ Ecofeminists trace this connection to Western patriarchy and, minimally, its epistemological system of hierarchical dualism. Kathy Rudy (2012: 31) exemplifies this hierarchical thinking in a striking example when she offers her body to feed lions at an animal sanctuary where she volunteers. The sanctuary director is taken aback by the idea and responds that laws prevent such a use of human remains. Rudy argues that patriarchal values do not see humans neither as animals nor as possible food for animals and that is coded into our society and its laws. Her point is to show how ecofeminism challenges human separation from the natural environment. In addition, ecofeminism - or rather ecofeminisms - have been the branch of feminism that is consistently intersectional, concerned with the intricacies and effects of mutli-layered oppressive structures, including anthropocentrism as an exploitative system of identification (A.E. Kings, 2017). Likewise, ecofeminisms have consistently contained a focus on diverse cosmologies, spirituality and the spiritual life compared to other iterations of feminism (McGuire and McGuire, 1998: 199). Finally, ecofeminisms have their own epistemologies where knowledge comes from experiences interacting with nature in a given environmental location (Mellor, 1997: 103-126). That means those who have more intimate experiences of a given environment should be trusted to understand its active processes when solving local environmental crises (Mellor, 1997: 124).
Hierarchical dualisms show the philosophical and epistemological link between values and action in Western patriarchy, such as racism, classism, (neo-)colonialism, globalization, settler colonialism, (neo)imperialism, capitalism, etc. (Mellor, 1997: 5; Jaggar, 1983: 124). As already mentioned, ecofeminisms argue that societies will be unable to solve current environmental crises without upending patriarchal structures, their hierarchical dualisms, and capitalist and colonialist anthropocentric instrumentalization of the world we inhabit and share with our non-human and other-than-human relatives. Thus, among the multiple goals of ecofeminisms is to revalue both theoretically and materially the less-valued side of the dualism. Working to reclaim and revalue at the bare minimum nature, bodies, and embodiment (the connection between mind and body), A. E. Kings (2017) argues that ecofeminisms must operate out of an intersectional lens. Finally, feminist and ecofeminist research suggests that a shift in the gender(ed) division of labor, in consumer gender(ed) behavior, and even in conceptions of gender identities is indispensable to alleviating humans’ destructive impact on planetary health.
In alignment with ecofeminist thought, recent interdisciplinary perspectives investigated within energy and/or blue humanities accentuate the petromodernist character of societies predicated on access to and burning of fossil fuels. While pressures on phasing out of fossil fuels mount, contemporary social and cultural formations continue to be organized around the extraction of finite subterranean resources, but also of marginalized bodies, communities and places positioned farther from fossil fuel(ed) hegemonies of power. As Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel have argued (2021), extraction is not merely an economic or technological process but a structuring logic that permeates social relations, cultural production, political imaginaries, and existing epistemologies. The waning of extractive regimes must therefore be understood not only as a material and infrastructural crisis but also as an epistemic, social, representational, and affective one. Additionally, fossil fuels-reliant, petromodernist social structures are inherently (and intersectionally) gendered, classed, racialized and hierarchically structured making specific social and cultural strata and epistemologies vulnerable to extractivist regimes.
This mono-thematic issue seeks papers that contribute to ongoing interdisciplinary debates in ecofeminist thought situated in specific contexts of various regions of the world, in energy and blue humanities, environmental studies and ecology, cultural and literary studies as well as postcolonial/decolonial and queer theories, arts, anthropology, sociology, theology and philosophy and any other fields by theorizing extractivism, exhaustion, survivance, and future-oriented imaginations and epistemologies. By integrating analyses portraying material infrastructures, aesthetic forms, environmental responses and representations of, among others, environmental and gender-based violence and/or symbolic violence, this issue aims to illuminate how ecofeminisms, environmental movements, social mobilizations as well as cultural texts register the limits of capitalist cisheteropatriarchal society and fossil modernity and participate in the imaginative labor of articulating sustainable futures.
If you are interested in publishing your research in this special issue, please submit an abstract of your paper (max. 250 words) with 5 keywords and an a short bio (approx. 100 words) by June 10, 2026 to the editor’s office (genderteam@soc.cas.cz) and to the editors Ivy Helman (ivy.helman@fhs.cuni.cz) and Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová (tereza.jiroutovakynclova@fhs.cuni.cz). Please include “Ecofeminisms” in the subject line of your email. Articles will be accepted in English and should be between 6,000 and 10,000 words in length, including footnotes and references. Further guidelines for publishing articles in English are available at:
https://genderonline.cz/artkey/inf-990000-1200_Submission-Guidelines.php.
Notifications of acceptance to publish in the thematic issue will be sent out before June 30, 2026. Final versions of articles are to be submitted by December 31, 2026. The editors also welcome book reviews and reports relevant to the topic of the forthcoming issue. This special issue will be released in late fall of 2027.
Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research is a peer-reviewed scientific transdisciplinary journal of gender studies and feminist theory. The journal is included in SCOPUS, ERIH PLUS, CEJSH, DOAJ and other databases. More information, including formal requirements for submitted manuscripts, is available at: https://www.genderonline.cz/
Jaggar, A. M. 1983. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Kings, A.E. 2017. Intersectionality and the Changing Face of Ecofeminism. Ethics & the Environment 22 (1): 63–87.
McGuire, C. and McGuire, C. 1998. Grassroots Ecofeminism: Activating Utopia. Pp. 186-203. in Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (eds.) Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation and Pedagogy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Mellor, M. 1997. Feminism and Ecology. New York: New York University Press.
Mies M. and Shiva, V. 2014. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books.
Rudy, K. 2012. Locavores, Feminism and the Question of Meat. The Journal of American Culture 35 (2): 26-36.
Salleh, A. 1992. The Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate: A Reply to Patriarchal Reason. Environmental Ethics 14: 195-216.
Szeman, I., and Wenzel, J. (2021). What do we talk about when we talk about extractivism? Textual Practice, 35(3), 505–523. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1889829
Vance, L. 1997. Ecofeminism and Wilderness. NWSA Journal 9 (3) No. 3: 60-76.
