Theorizing Race and Gender in the Anthropocene

Bibliographic Data

ID8096037
AuthorsGermán Morong Reyes (0009-0007-4921-7170, Lewis & Clark College, corresponding author), G Mitchell Reyes (Rhetoric and Media Studies, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon, USA), Kundai Chirindo (0000-0002-7161-3176, Rhetoric and Media Studies, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon, USA, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume43
Issue4
Pages429-442
Publication date2020-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWomen s Studies in Communication (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0749-1409 • E-ISSN: 2152-999X
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/07491409.2020.1824519
OpenAlexW3097222031
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited18

What does it mean to think about race and gender in the Anthropocene? In collaboration with Achille Mbembé’s recent work, this article argues that the Anthropocene requires rethinking race and gender and that retheorizing race and gender might just offer avenues for mitigation and adaptation of/to radical ecological and cultural transformation. To understand how we arrived at the Anthropocene and how race and gender are implicated, the article first traces the emergence and articulation of race and gender alongside the discursive formations of colonialism, capitalism, and necropolitics. These relations, effected in the establishment of differential temporalities, catalyzed our arrival at the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, we argue, marks the generalization of precarity that was once concentrated among those disempowered through perceived racial and gender differences. Turning to Mbembé’s radical humanism as antidote, we conclude the article with some rhetorical and ethical principles for (re)asserting the plurality of ontology, part of which is positioning rhetoric as a counterforce to the asymmetrical distributions of precarity. Rhetoric as an analytic for tracing necropolitics, rhetoric as an inventional resource for the rearticulation of racialized and gendered subjectivity, and rhetoric as a counterhegemonic challenge to necropolitical representation—these we argue are central to the future of the field in the age of the Anthropocene

Anthropocene · Capitalism · Environmental ethics · Political science · Politics · Precarity · Race (biology · Rhetoric · Sociology · Temporalities · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Rhetoric and Communication Studies