The Slums of Aspen by Park Lisa Sun-Hee; Pellow David N.; & David Naguib Pellow

Author:Park, Lisa Sun-Hee; Pellow, David N.; & David Naguib Pellow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2011-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Gender Politics

One cannot understand nativist-environmentalist politics without grasping how deeply certain ideas concerning gender permeate the movement, from the university and the cities to the rural communities and from Aspen to the U.S. Congress. Immigrant women are blamed for producing children who then become the public burden, the cultural contaminant, and the driving force of ecological decline.

The environmentalist slogan “Love Your Mother—Don’t Become One” deftly places accountability for ecological harm on women’s reproduction. This kind of ideological bent might be expected from right-wing nativist groups, but some EarthFirst! activists and other radical environmentalists have given voice to this framing of the problem for years. At the 2009 EarthFirst! Round River Rendezvous, a young Chicana told us that an activist friend of hers decided not to attend the event out of fear that she would be chastised for being a mother and therefore responsible for adding an additional ecological burden (i.e., a baby) to the planet with finite resources. It becomes evident then, that white racism and patriarchy work together to reinforce nativist-environmentalism. Sara Diamond, a critic of right-wing movements, notes that “Two staples of anti-immigrant literature are the obligatory photos of Mexican ‘illegal aliens’ running perilously from INS agents across traffic on San Diego freeways, and the requisite folklore about ‘legions’ of pregnant Mexican women arriving in Texas just in time to suck up free childbirth services and ‘instant citizenship’ for their newborns.”41

This linkage among gender, immigration, and population is central in the ideology that blames immigrant women’s fertility for the problems of global ecological degradation, for which corporations, militaries, and governments are arguably largely responsible, according to many progressive scholars.42 The feminist scholar Betsy Hartmann calls this the “degradation narrative” or the idea that poor women around the globe produce too many children, which drives up population numbers, causing environmental harm and poverty. Under this model—which Hartmann rejects—the poor are to blame for their own poverty and for the environmental crisis that affects the rest of us, including the rich.43

An example of the degradation narrative was a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, paid for by the Population Institute. It reads: “Stop: Denying poor women protection from unintended pregnancies. Grinding Poverty, Hunger, Resource Depletion, Environmental Degradation. Civil Unrest.”44 The photograph accompanying this message is of a group of women and children, presumably from South or Southeast Asia. The advertisement decries the Bush administration’s freezing of $34 million that Congress had approved for the UN Population Fund that would go to family planning in the global South. The advertisement claims that U.S. funding for this work is now $100 million less than what it was in the 1990s because of the right-wing anti-abortion agenda of the Bush regime. While that critique of the pro-life lobby is warranted, this advertisement is sponsored by an organization that encourages population control and could all too easily reinforce the agenda of eugenicists and population control advocates who care less about people and more about having fewer of them on their planet. Considering how

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.