Icy Encounterings: A feminist geopolitics of climate change

Abstract

Climate change requires that we rethink the global order of politics by developing a formulation and practice of geopolitics that takes seriously the dynamism of earth’s systems and their differential effects. This is a geopolitics that not only demands we rethink what constitutes the ‘geo’ but also that we rethink how we understand what ‘politics’ is, does and consists of. Using case studies drawn from the UK climate change arts organization Cape Farewell, and in particular their Arctic voyages, I explore how geoaesthetic practices
offer a way to experiment with thinking such a geopolitical reformulation. In order to advance this contention, I draw contemporary scholarship on elemental geopolitics together with broader work that aims to reframe the ‘geo’ as a political force. Taking seriously the manifold challenges that such a proposition poses to methods, to understandings of the politics of the intra and inhuman, and to compositions of bodily relations, I turn to feminist geopolitical scholarship where bodies –human and non-human– are an important geopolitical site. Experimenting with geoaesthetics as tools to think and feel with, I don’t claim that the feminist ‘geo’politics of climate change proposed is the only possible feminist geopolitics, nor does it have all the answers to the problems posed by taking seriously the ‘geo’ within formulations of geopolitics. It does however; offer a productive and provocative place from which to begin to create geopolitics adequate to the challenges of climate change.

Keywords: Climate change, feminist, (geo) aesthetics, art, Artic.