Gender and nonhuman animals

In this chapter we point out that while increasing attention has been paid to gender and environmental inequality, the more specific area of gender and nonhuman animals has received significantly less attention. In order to begin to rectify this we outline why the growing literature at the gender/animal nexus is valuable for understanding the causes and remediation of environmental issues. We argue that attending to the gender/animal nexus highlights the critical and intersecting roles of gender/species, sexism/speciesism, that in more recent years has usefully expanded to include other intersecting forms of oppression. This intersectional work, we argue, confirms that our current environmental crisis is not simply due to specific political economic systems or widespread cultural acceptance and facilitation of anthropocentrism - although they have certainly played critical roles - but is also due to patriarchy and speciesism. We conclude that a failure to critically engage with speciesism will not only leave the culture/nature binary undisturbed, it will actually reinforce it, to the detriment of all in the long term.