The Latent Exigence of Climate Change and the Gendered Construction of the Environment

Paper accepted for the International Communication Association conference, Prague, Czechoslovakia · Jan 16, 2018

This paper is a rhetorical criticism of “elite” climate science denial discourse between MSNBC host Joe Kernen and former EPA chief Scott Pruitt. In it, I argue “elite climate refusal” discourses are dominant expressions of in situ cultural narratives of environmental value dualisms that leave the climate change activist largely marginalized in cultural politics. Conservative [W]hite male climate denial discourses are the apotheosis of a chauvinistic relationship with the biosphere. Human interests here are masculine, privileged, and lie within logical structures of modernity, progress, and development. Nature is the feminine, inferior, invisible Other, and becomes available to be annexed and mapped with a gender hierarchy. Nature and human relations are marked as a value dualism where reasoned men, the purveyors of economic development and modernity, logically dominate. This Master Rationality forms a dominant cultural production towards the climate crisis within the context of “distance psychology”; where patriarchal superiority justifies subordination of the biosphere, creating cultural blind spots to environmental risk and dependency. These discourses represent highly influential yet atypical environmental and technological risk acceptance that forms an impenetrable masculine stance towards the climate crisis.