A Case Study of Bodily Normativity in California’s Wildfire Governance

Keywords: critical environmental justice, disability studies, disaster governance, political ecology, queer geographies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 4

Abstract

This research is located at the cutting edge of two contemporary problems: climate change-driven disasters and disaster governance that produces uneven outcomes across bodies. ‘Bodily normativity’ is used as an analytical lens because it encompasses complex situations that are crucial to navigate, yet remain unaccounted for, during disasters. Activists who foreground non-normative bodies (e.g., disabled, gender diverse, and elderly) consider wildfire governance a key disaster issue to mobilize around. The extent to which they are able to shape this political terrain is examined as unprecedented wildfires, smoke plumes, and precautionary power shutoffs that halt electricity to life-sustaining devices infiltrate communities. The San Francisco Bay Area is an exemplary multi-site where dry forests, growth-based development, and longstanding activism––from critical disability to transgender justice––converge. To understand how knowledge and meaning are constructed, codified, and circulated within this domain, a discursive analysis is used to investigate the following questions: How does bodily normativity operate across wildfire institutions in the Bay Area? In what ways does the operation of bodily normativity shape physical sites and impact as well as produce individuals with non-normative bodies? And, how is the political terrain of wildfire governance co-constituted by practitioners and activists while producing distinct political subjectivities among them? Bringing queer critique and its interrogation of norms to spaces of wildfire governance in this way can yield better understandings of embodied marginalization and vulnerability during disasters.