Petro-Feminism
Josie Taylor
Related concepts: petrocultures, energy humanities, ecofeminism
What does it mean for a liberation movement to be connected to the exploitation of a natural resource? An ideological and popular cultural understanding of female empowerment has been co-opted by a particular flavour of oil capitalism in the Western world and its cultural imaginary. This is a key concern in an environmental humanities context where various forms of feminism have featured as a core part of environmental analysis, from Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature through Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature to seminal pieces of ecofeminism. But unlike the premises of ecofeminism, connected as it is to environmental justice, as well as the Marxist and socialist stance of much of the second-wave feminism with its anti-capitalist sentiment, ‘petro-feminism’ is tied to the machinations of capital and resource extraction. To define ‘petro-feminism’: it is a brand of femininity and an ideological understanding of female empowerment that is tied to the energy culture from driving, petro-infrastructure, and the consumption of crude oil products. As environmental humanities scholars, it is important to consider when radical movements become co-opted by capital to sustain business as usual. Just as queer theorists have critiqued LGBTQs absorption into the marketplace, with the commodification of street protests such as pride, as feminists we too must consider what liberationist movements become once mainstreamed into consumer culture.
Sheena Wilson, director and co-founder of the Petrocultures research group, coined the term ‘petro-feminism’ to illustrate the ways Western contemporary feminism and the age of oil are culturally and historically related. Consuming oil, embedded in its infrastructure, and its commercial products, petro-modernity has been intertwined with the histories of Western feminism and female empowerment. As Wilson suggests,
Petro-feminism reveals the ways in which oil, as an energy source, has shaped the lives of Western women not only through infrastructure but also through explicit advertising strategies with well-defined consumer aims, as well as through political discourse that mobilizes the concept of “woman” as a means to justify resource extraction and international political relations of power (Wilson 2020, 250).
The symbolic power of automobiles and the road, the emotional geographies of acts of driving, and the many commercial products enabled by the world of crude oil in the popular imaginary have been associated with women being in power and on top. Cecily Devereux also considers “how petroculture, the ‘cultural system’ that situates its meanings in the context of the late nineteenth- to early twenty-first-century business of oil, drives the representation and performance of femininity into the twenty-first century” (Devereux 2017, 163). For Devereux, a particular feminine identity and cars are interchangeable, both appearing as interchangeable commodities. In this sense, petro-feminism could be argued to be more of a brand of femininity than a particular movement, but it is nonetheless ideologically wedded to ideas of freedom and mobility which are accessed through the infrastructure of energy. It is less connected to the different waves of feminist movements in the West and more to a particular brand offered by the market in the age of oil and mass consumption. The 2023 blockbuster movie Barbie is perhaps the most iconic branding of petro-feminism and petro-femininity. In the soundtrack hit “Speed Drive,” pop icon Charli XCX hums the lyrics: “Ah-ah, Barbie, you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind, Jump into the driver's seat and put it into speed drive” (Charli XCX, Barbie the Album, 2023). The overt feminist 101 message of the film is perhaps undone, however, by being a commercial product of Mattel, the infamous Barbie creator, which of course specialises in the petrochemicals of plastic.
Sharae Deckard is another theorist who has analysed the relations between oil and gender. Drawing on Wilson, she states: “In particular, Wilson has criticized how main-stream Euro-American media instrumentalize rhetorics that invoke women’s rights to rationalize colonial extraction politics and position female bodies as sites of spectacularized petro-politics while marginalizing the agency of women in acts of petro-resistance” (Deckard 2021, 41). It is quite clear how petroleum politics invoke a particular kind of woman, a specific type of feminism uprooted from its origin of revolutionary action and protest. It is a brand of femininity associated with capital, labour and absorption into markets. It is anti-environmentalist in its sentiment, explicitly tied to sustaining continual extraction.
Petro-feminism as a particular brand of femininity can be said to be advertised by the likes of Beyonce, liberal elites like Hilary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg’s (Facebook CEO) lean-in style, as well as ‘female boss’ configurations of women’s empowerment. To return to current Generation Z star Charli XCX, the BRAT album she released is particularly wedded to petroleum consumption and a fast-paced lifestyle. “Apple,” a hit from the summer of 2024, includes the lyrics: “So I just want to drive to the airport’ (Charli XCX, BRAT 2024). Petro-femininity is a mainstream ideology of what women's empowerment looks like in a capitalist world, connected explicitly to incorporation into the market, the workplace, and consumer practices. It is a process that links consumption and consumer choice to liberation, power and mobility. It becomes a way of reducing what in its conception is a radical movement to resource entrapment.
Emblematic of women free from constraints, powered by petroleum and automobility, the iconic blockbuster movie Thelma and Louise (1991) shows petro-feminism at its most alluring. The road in the movie and access to unlimited petroleum are carved as the only solution to escape patriarchal power. Released in 1991, at the time of the Gulf War, it ideologically embeds the aesthetic qualities of driving and petroleum consumption particularly wedded to the freedom and liberty of the individual, ignorant of its violence and corruption. What happens in Thelma and Louise is that as they move further along their journey becoming outlaws of the traditional markers of femininity such as dresses, and make-up, the adorns of the domestic sphere are left behind for what can historically be said to be a man’s position, a position in the driver’s seat and a dominant place on the highway. We can thus compare petrofemisnim to the cultural changes in the transition between the second and third waves where there was a movement to take on quasi-masculine traits, labelled as a garcon look. Petro-feminism, however, is firmly about dominance, power and individualism, rather than subverting gender norms. It is about occupying a space in a private vehicle rather than about the origin of feminist action: gathering in the streets collectively to protest.
Ten years on from Thelma and Louise, in stark and vivid contrast, Nawal El Saadawi, the Egyptian writer, publishes her novel Love in the Kingdom of Oil which stages a very different relation between women and crude oil. Set on a fictional island in the Middle East, the island floats on a sea of oil. Oil consumes the land. Oil is aligned with patriarchal control in the novel, and as oil falls from the sky, the women in the novel have jars placed on their heads and are expected to catch them. Crude oil is an oppressive weight and burden for the women in the novel. Oil is the very reason for their stagnation and entrapment. Love in the Kingdom of Oil destroys the illusion of petro-aesthetics and illustrates the suffering of women in the context of environmental devastation and the corrupt geopolitics of crude oil.
If we follow the movement of the petroleum pipeline, crude oil means something very different to women in different locations concerning the Global North and the Global South. The petro-aesthetic ideology has held an influence on liberationist movements in the Global North, key conceptions of American Dream individualism have been shaped by oil capitalism. We can thus witness how in one place it is captured as an aesthetic and symbol for liberation, but elsewhere it can be at the heart of oppression. Petro-feminism as a capitalist ideology is a masquerade of freedom tied to the exploitation of the environment and a commitment to the consumer market.
Even in a global context, however, freedom under the umbrella of petro-feminism is not so easily achieved. Petrofeminism is tied to the exploitation of capital and a certain subservience dressed up as empowerment across the globe. In the kind of pop culture configuration of female agency that is tied to a petroleum aesthetic, it is explicitly wedded to labour and capitalist markets, a mode of co-option, to be simultaneously both a consumer and a worker, a grifter and a female boss, where in the words of Britney Spears, “You Better Work Bitch!” (Spears, 2013).
References
Deckard, Sharae. 2021. “3 Gendering Petrofition: Energy, Imperialism, and Social Reproduction.” In Oil Fictions, edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi, 41–58. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271091877-006.
Devereux, Cecily. 2017. “‘Made for Mankind’, Cars, Cosmetics, and the Petrocultural Feminie.” In Petrocultures, Oil, Politics, and Culture. Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Konrad, Tatiana, and Sheena Wilson, eds. 2020. Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change: Accelerating Ride to Global Crisis. First edition. Energy and Society. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.
Merchant, Carolyn. 1989. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row.
Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Opening Out. London: Routledge.
Saʻdāwī, Nawāl, B. Hatim, and Malcolm Williams. 2001. Love in the Kingdom of Oil. London: Saqi Books.
Scott, Ridley, dir. 1991. Thelma and Louise.
Spears, Britney. 2013. Work Bitch. Record Plant.