Embodied geographies of environmental justice: Toward the sovereign right to wholly inhabit oneself

Abstract

I introduce insights from Latin America and across disciplines to advance our understanding of environmental injustices as written on women's bodies. This paper will entice environmental justice scholarship into conversation with geography to stress how embodied geographies of environmental justice are necessary to understand the geographical, gendered, sexualized, and racialized arrangement of environmental injustices. Expanding Environmental Justice to incorporate the body through Segato's understanding of cuerpo-territorio, a concept that blends geography, territory, and the body, we blur the lines between public and private—emphasizing the role of the state and global capitalism in the subjugation of women and people of color. By asking who reproduces, what is reproduced, and where, in environmental justice work, we underscore that environmental matters are reproductive, and the disproportionate embodied consequences of environmental injustices on sexualized, gendered, and racialized bodies. This violence against feminized bodies is explained as the unintended consequences of global capital accumulation, but decolonial, queer, Black, and feminist geographical insights show how these are central for capital accumulation. Attending to the body as an important geopolitical site allows us to articulate mundane, everyday instances of environmental justice and reproductive justice as geopolitically important. I propose that Embodied Geographies of Environmental Justice that center the concept of cuerpo-territorio underscore that the physical territory of both environmental justice and reproductive justice struggles is in racialized and feminized bodies. By bringing in feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial understandings of production and reproduction, I provide a framework that allows for a global and nuanced understanding of gendered geographies of violence, environmental, and reproductive justice. A reading of a Moraga poem toward the end of the paper, demands that we attend to women of color theorizing their own experiences in radical and innovative terms that resist and transform oppressive relations offering possibilities for renewal, regeneration, and healing.