Seeing Nature Through Gender

by Scharff, Virginia J.

• ISBN13: 9780700612857
• ISBN10: 0700612858
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas

Summary

Environmental history has traditionally told the story of Man and Nature. Scholars have too frequently overlooked the ways in which their predominantly male subjects have themselves been shaped by gender. "Seeing Nature through Gender here reintroduces gender as a meaningful category of analysis for environmental history, showing how women's actions, desires, and choices have shaped the world and seeing men as gendered actors as well. In thirteen essays that show how gendered ideas have shaped the ways in which people have represented, experienced, and consumed their world, Virginia Scharff and her coauthors explore interactions between gender and environment in history. Ranging from colonial borderlands to transnational boundaries, from mountaintop to marketplace, they focus on historical representations of humans and nature, on questions about consumption, on environmental politics, and on the complex reciprocal relations among human bodies and changing landscapes. They also challenge the "ecofeminist" position by challenging the notion that men and women are

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction,
Virginia J. Scharf	xiii
Part I. Representation
1. Man and Nature! Sex Secrets of Environmental History,
Virginia J. Scharff	3	(17)
2. Naturalizing Power: Land and Sexual Violence along William Byrd's Dividing Line,
Paige Raibmon	20	(20)
3. Thinking Like Mount Rushmore: Sexuality and Gender in the Republican Landscape,
Peter Boag	40	(23)
Part II. Bodies
4. Scaling New Heights: Heroic Firemen, Gender, and the Urban Environment, 1875-1900,
Mark Tebeau	63	(17)
5. "New Men in Body and Soul": The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Transformation of Male Bodies and the Body Politic,
Bryant Simon	80	(23)
6. Voices from the Spring: Silent Spring and the Ecological Turn in American Health,
Maril Hazlett	103	(26)
7. Gender Transformed: Endocrine Disruptors in the Environment,
Nancy Langston	129	(40)
Part III. Consumption
8. Putting Gender on the Table: Food and the Family Life of Nature,
Douglas C. Sackman	169	(25)
9. From Snow Bunnies to Shred Betties: Gender, Consumption, and the Skiing Landscape,
Annie Gilbert Coleman	194	(27)
Part IV Politics
10. "She Touched Fifty Million Lives": Gene Stratton-Porter and Nature Conservation,
Amy Green	221	(21)
11. Nature's Lovers: The Erotics of Lesbian Land Communities in Oregon, 1974-1984,
Catherine Kleiner	242	(21)
12. Saving Centennial Valley: Land, Gender, and Community in the Northern Black Hills,
Katherine Jensen	263	(19)
13. Steps to an Ecology of Justice: Women's Environmental Networks across the Santa Cruz River Watershed,
Giovanna Di Chiro	282	(39)
Contributors	321	(2)
Index	323