Domestic Environmental Labour ― An Eco-Feminist Perspective on Making Homes Greener

This book addresses the question of domestic ecological labour from an eco-feminist perspective, creating new ground at the intersection of critical labour, environmental, and gender studies. It explores the proposition that the practice and politics of domestic labour being undertaken in the name of ‘the environment’ needs to be better recognised, understood and accounted for as a phenomenon shaped by, and shaping of, gender, class and spatial relations.

This book argues that a significant yet neglected phenomenon worthy of research attention is the upsurge in voluntary and yet mostly unrecognised domestic ecological labour in high-consuming households in late modernity, with the burden largely falling on women seeking to green their lives and homes in aid of a sustainable planet. Further, because domestic ecological labour is undervalued in governance and the formal economy, much like other types of domestic labour, women have become an unrecognised and unaccounted supply of labour for the greening of capitalism.

Situated within broad global debates on links between ecological and social change, the book has relevance in the many jurisdictions around the world in which households are positioned as sites of environmental protection through green consumption. The volume engages existing interest in gender studies and domestic labour, environmental labour, household environmental behaviour and practice, and ecological citizenship in a way that advances understanding of each of these topics in new and novel ways.

Carol Farbotko is a researcher in cultural geography, with interests in conceptualizing and analysing the ways in which culture shapes, and is shaped by, environmental change. She has studied the cultural politics of a range of human and non-human subjects.