What is Petromasculinity?

Why is gender important in understanding climate justice, wars for oil and extractivist imperialism?

“The term petro-masculinity points to a relationship between gender hierarchies or gender domination, the exploitation of energy, and the way that they are connected to political power.”

The concept, introduced by Cara Dagget, helps us to understand how gender identity has been utilized by capitalist interests to control society for the benefit of the elite minority by forging an emotional bond between the use of fossil fuels and ideas of what it means to be a “strong man” rooted in nostalgia, freedom, pride and power.

Anti-gender and pro-fossil fuel narratives are gaining popularity, especially among white male voters and used as a tool for authoritarian leaders to take power with little to offer in terms of improving the lives of ordinary working class men. It is a clear resistance to the evermore obvious truth that we need to move towards a transformation of our economy that generates life and wellbeing instead of death and destruction.

This concept builds on the work of ecofeminists such as Lorena Kab’nal, a Maya Xinca community-territorial feminist of the Red de Sanadoras Ancestrales of Guatemala. A survivor of sexual violence herself, she sees her work in defense of her ancestral land from extractivism as intertwined with the struggle against patriarchal violence that women face when their communities are displaced and their social fabric is destroyed by foreign capitalist interest. “It’s incoherent to want to save water and land without wanting to save the bodies of women”.

She centres healing and prioritizing pleasure as a form of resistance to destructive patriarchal systems of oppression.

Petro vs Petromasculinity

Unlike his aggressor Trump, Colombian president Gustavo Petro based his campaign on notions of an “economy of life”, a shift away from fossil fuels and a promise to be led by popular social movements, indigenous, afro and campesino communities and those defending the environment.

Before the US bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its President in order to control Venezuelan oil reserves, Trump had made threats to Petro, accusing him of drug trafficking as a justification for intervention. This is a threat to an entire people who chose hope for a different future, one that doesn’t fit into the colonial mindset of exploitation of people and resources for the benefit of the few.