Gender and Sexuality in U.S. Biodiversity Discourse

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role of gender and sexuality in discourses surrounding the biodiversity crisis that threatens the future of most known species, including humans. I examine the gendered rhetoric that biodiversity scientists in the United States use to frame species extinctions through interviews with scientists and textual analysis of scientific documents. I also analyze gendered depictions of environmental futures in broad cultural contexts, including popular-science, environmental non-profits, and the media. In particular, I use insights from feminist science studies to examine the role of gendered rhetoric and images embedded in scientific and popular representations of species extinctions. Ultimately, I find that representations of the future of endangered species in the context of environmental change are entangled with cultural anxieties about the future of human gender and sexuality. I argue that a subset of this rhetoric portrays the biodiversity crisis as a crisis of the norms of masculinity and heterosexuality. These findings are significant because they show how cultural constructions of gender and sexuality influence how we imagine possible environmental futures.