Gender And Sea Level Rise Summary

After this past week’s reading and discussions, it has become evident to me that women, because of their gendered position in society, are affected by climate change and natural disasters in particular and salient ways. I understood this idea as a general concept previously, and could theoretically see how women, a large portion of which live in poverty, might be affected at a greater and more devastating rate than men. However, now I can draw upon concrete examples from the chapters we read by Nagel.

In Gender and Sea Level Rise, Nagel draws from two specific contexts to support these ideas, discussing both Cyclone Marian, which occurred in Bangladesh in 1991, and Hurricane Katrina, which occurred in the United States in 2005. In the discussion of both contexts, Nagel points out how women are

In Gender and Climate Change, Nagel brings up “the incremental, almost invisible nature of delayed destruction” or what one researcher calls “slow violence” (103). It is interesting that the word “invisible” has been used by feminists and scholars to describe both gendered care work and the slow violence of climate change. I would argue that this is indicative of how interrelated the two topics are, as discussed above. If women’s issues are largely ignored and deemed unimportant by society, it is no wonder that climate change, in many ways a women’s issue, also so often goes unnoticed. Additionally, in Neoliberalism, Globalization, and the International Division of Care, Joya Misra and Sabine N. Merz bring up how work done by immigrant workers “remains invisible to the outside world” (114). Therefore, I think it would be interesting to look into how nationality and gender intersect in an analysis of the unequal effects of climate change, for it is at the intersection of those things that largely go unseen by the majority of society that true understanding of inequality and difference