Article by Juri Kawamura

Photo by Raphael Renter | @raphi_rawr on Unsplash

Masculinity. It is a fragile thing that must be constantly proven as an extension of constant comparison, differentiation and differentiation from femininity. But as long as there are conservative people who adhere to it and who also occupy a large part of power, we have to remove gender from ‘care’.

Kan, M.-Y. and Laurie, H. (2018)

The table above shows the share of housework by gender and ethnicity. In all categories, inequalities can be seen where the burden of domestic work falls on women. As Marçal (2015) points out, while men were socially engaged and economically active, who continued to perform activities that were not recognised as labour and for which they were not paid? It was women. Are women naturally suited to care labour? Is ‘care’ really an activity that lacks masculinity and feminine? No. There were people for whom it was more convenient to define women as innately suited to care work.

The world we live is the world of whom benefited and authorised by continuously shackling women to invisible, historically less respected, unpaid work. Sedgwick (1985) called this a ‘homosocial’ world. According to her books, in a homosocial world where men place women in power relationships in order to cement their relationships with other men, there is a unique symbiotic relationship with patriarchalism.

This causes women to experience inequalities in environmental justice as noted by MacGregor (2020). They are forced to participate less in key decision-making arenas in society, such as politics and economic activities. As well as they are made less visible in society, and face difficulties such as not being able to fully access and utilise resources in a society based around adult male-based role models.

As I mentioned earlier, if we cannot stop judging the act of ‘care’ for people and the planet in the context of the gender-role division of labour, dichotomised by binary gender, ‘care’ will not be effective enough to the environmental sustainability.

Or would it be easier to re-recognise ‘care’ as an act common to all people regardless of gender/sexuality? What if we reconsider ‘care’ as a queer behaviour in the sense that it is non-binary?

I would like to argue this perspective because we need to recognise that patriarchy underpinned by not only feminised ‘care’ discourse (or misogyny), but also homophobia and transphobia. In other words, the premise of patriarchy is cisheterosexualism. Just as patriarchalism and the homosocial world it supports binds women’s existence to the home and strips them of participation rates and representation in society, the existence of all queer people is also rendered invisible.

For example, according to Faye (2021), the majority of trans people are working class, and their gender identity has more negative economic consequences in terms of joblessness and unemployment than cisgender heterosexual working-class people. Besides that, the threat of harassment and violence has led many trans people to change their appearance, narrow their job categories and avoid public spaces. Class issues are also connected with race issues, so coloured working-class trans people are even more deprived than white working-class trans people, on top of the economic disadvantage they already suffer because of their class. That is, queers and/or ethnic-divers people also suffer from luck of participation, misrepresentation, and luck of opportunity to make their voice matter. We must not naturalise these things simply because they are minority.

How many people do you know around you who are CEOs and profess to be queer? How much our society make gender/ sexually inclusive policies or opportunities to participate in them easily? Do you think queers’ voices reach authorities enough?

Hardly say enough.

So, we need to think more about environmental justice not as a binary assigned gender issue, but as the issue with diverse sexuality and ethnicity perspectives. ‘Care’ is what we can start from today. It is not what only women’s do. It is what human being must do for us, our society and environments. Otherwise, it is unlikely that ‘care’ will be high on the list of priorities for white cis-hetero men. Because they are living in the unequal world where they can hold the majority of privilege and where they are cared by a gender who are supposed to cares for them or where there are minorities that are invisibilised and not even raised for discussion by them.

Who cares? ——Us.

References:

Faye, Shon. (2021). ‘The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice’. Penguin Books.

MacGregor, S. (2020) ‘Gender Matters in Environmental Justice’ in Coolsatet, B (ed.)

Environmental Justice: Key Issues. London: Routledge. Available at: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/978042902958521/gender–matters–environmental–justice–sherilyn–macgregor.

Marçal, K. (2015) ‘Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?: A Story about Women and Economies’. Albert Bonniers Förlag

Sedgwick, E. K. (1985) ‘Between men : English literature and male homosocial desire’.

New York : Columbia University Press. Available at: https://archive.org/details/betweenmenenglis00sedg/page/n5/mode/2up.

Kan, M.-Y. and Laurie, H. (2018) ‘Who Is Doing the Housework in Multicultural Britain?’, Sociology, 52(1), pp. 55–74. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038516674674.

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