The climate emergency is wielding a gender bias. Scholars and international organizations have shown that climate change and environmental degradation disproportionately affects people of marginalized genders across the globe. Indigenous women and women in the global south are especially impacted. Affected women have organized the Women and Feminists for Climate Justice (WFCJ) movement—a transnational activist network composed of women and gender-marginalized participants for a “feminist system change, not climate change” (Gorecki, 2015). WFCJ seek to remedy the disproportionate effects of global warming on women by advocating that there can be “no climate justice without gender justice,” as stated by one of the movement slogans (Gorecki, 2015).

In the face of today’s climate emergency, this dissertation proposes a new theoretical framework for Ecological Feminisms through time spent with the transnational movement of WFCJ. This work is a critical discourse and concept analysis of the theoretical foundations of “Gendered Systemic Oppression,” which is grounded in the participatory action research (PAR) of international multi-sited ethnographies and interviews of WFCJ. I bring the former and the latter together to re-examine the root causes of climate change’s gender bias. Drawing on five years of qualitative PAR, including multi-sited ethnographies and interviews, my research maps and compares the narratives and experiences of WFCJ activists at the annual United Nations Climate Conference (COP) and at numerous miscellaneous global climate justice gatherings.

Yet, how do disparate women and gender-marginalized people from varying locations across the globe build solidarity to collectively foster common discourse, advocacy, and international demands on climate and gender in transnational climate justice arenas? More specifically, how do different women, from varying hemispheres of the globe and from differing political and socio-economic realities and histories gather in the same spaces to discuss, debate, and develop both divisions and solidarities about gender and climate change?

My work finds that solidarity is built amongst WFCJ through a common named resistance to some iteration of the global capitalist system. I refer to this global system, or common enemy, as The Racial Capitalist Climate Patriarchy— a global earth commodifying economic and socio-political system that has been historically uplifted and sustained through colonialism, imperialism, and an imposition of dominant cis-hetero subjectivities and social relations.

Within this overlying structure are a multiplicity of Racial Capitalist Climate Patriarchies. These Climate Patriarchies comprise a plurality of distinct and more localized, national, regional, or place-based manifestations of the larger global system, and are characterized by specific geographical locations, socio-political histories, and positionalities of gender, race, and class.

Chapter 1 revisits the foundational literature on Gendered Systemic Oppression to tend to the links between today’s climate emergency and its disproportionate burdens on gender-marginalized people across the globe. There, I identify two paradigmatic shifts that are fundamental to climate change’s structural impact on gender today. The inception of these two paradigmatic shifts occurred on parallel tracks without converging, thus creating a gap in the foundations of the literature. The first paradigmatic shift was put forth by original Ecological Feminist theories, which incorporated the domination of ecology as part of Gendered Systemic Oppression, but fell short on race. The second paradigmatic shift is an early form of intersectionality that showed structural racism to be “interlocked” with gendered and class oppression but did not elaborate on the domination of the environment (The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977).

Chapter 2 is devoted to a full analysis of the intersectional side of the gap. I trace the genesis of the intersectional side of the gap through a letter of critique written by Audre Lorde to Mary Daly in 1979. Thereafter, I identify three post-inaugural Ecofeminist works of systemic oppression that did acknowledge and incorporate the significant concerns about race and racism, as articulated by Lorde. A presentation of Black Ecological Feminisms follows a discussion of the intersection of Ecological Feminist and Intersectional Feminist perspectives, revealing the ongoing critique of Ecofeminism's white legacy. Lastly, this chapter explores the intersection of gender and ecology outside of academia, tracing gaps in scholarship and presenting early examples of women-led ecological resistance and activism on the ground

Chapter 3 explores the empirical findings and theoretical frameworks that underpin the global movement of WFCJ, elucidating how these disparate women build solidarity. As a result of my data collection, this dissertation suggests that what invokes collectivity between WFCJ is a shared recognition of naming two or more of the following global systems: capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, racial capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, and/or colonialism as the historical and current source that is responsible for disempowering and subordinating gender by causing and exacerbating climate change itself. These findings produce the empirical support for The Racial Capitalist Climate Patriarchy. Simultaneously, these observations were paired with a continual emphasis by WFCJ, on the geographic, racial, class, and gendered (in the case of further marginalized gender identities, such as LGBTQIA2++) disparities between the incredibly diverse women comprising WFCJ. The theoretical framework of The Racial Capitalist Climate Patriarchies are grounded within these latter observations and presented within this chapter.

Chapter 4 develops the concept of the Androcene. The Androcene is both a feminist approach to the Anthropocenic literature and the historical epoch which produced the structure of The Racial Capitalist Climate Patriarchy. The Androcene is an epoch defined by patriarchal social relations and structures, built from an interlinked subordination of gender, race, and nature.

This dissertation concludes by offering instances of ongoing resistance that visibilize Climate Patriarchies. As a primarily theoretical dissertation, this conclusion, therefore, looks toward future research into ethnographic case studies that interrogate the possibilities opened by frontline communities when Climate Patriarchies are dismantled. This, then, offers a hopeful look at a future heralded by revolution and feminist system(s) change for climate justice, and gestures towards the necessity of future research into these examples of “Climate Revolutions” (Sultana 2022).

This study assessed the relationship between beliefs about drug assignment and abstinence status in two treatment studies using nortriptyline hydrochloride as an adjunct to smoking cessation. Smokers (N = 345) drawn from two clinical trials were asked at the final follow-up (FFU) at 52 or 64 weeks whether they believed they had received active or placebo drug. Responses were obtained from 262 participants, or 76% of the sample. Biochemically verified abstinence was collected at end of treatment (EOT) and FFU. In both studies, participants were correct in guessing drug assignment. At FFU, belief about drug assignment was not related to abstinence for either active or placebo participants. Participants who received active drug and who were smoking at EOT were more likely to believe they had received placebo than active drug participants who were abstinent at EOT. We found no significant relationship between belief about drug and abstinence status for placebo participants at EOT. Baseline variables did not significantly predict correctness of drug identification. Participants who experienced drug side-effects not easily attributable to nicotine withdrawal were more likely to identify their drug assignment as nortriptyline. We conclude that experience during the active treatment period, including side-effects and treatment success, may be related to belief about drug assignment, that the field would be well served by at least two assessments of blindness in clinical trials, and that discrepancy between these findings and those regarding nicotine replacement therapy may be related to differences in dependent variables.

Quitting smoking benefits older individuals, yet few recent studies have described older smokers. The goal of this paper was to test a series of hypotheses about differences between smokers aged 50 years or older (50+) and those younger than age 50 (<50) presenting to the same treatment facility during 2002-2004 for participation in two randomized clinical trials: one exclusively for smokers aged 50+, and a second open to smokers aged 18 or older. As predicted, smokers aged 50+ were more tobacco dependent, had better psychological functioning, and had poorer physical functioning than those aged <50. Contrary to predictions, we found no differences in motivation to quit cigarette smoking or in alcohol use. Women aged 50+ were less likely to report marijuana use than women aged <50, and less likely than men to receive a positive diagnosis for alcohol abuse. Despite higher scores on measures of tobacco dependence, older smokers were less likely to be diagnosed as tobacco dependent or as having tobacco withdrawal using DSM-IV criteria. Rates of DSM-IV alcohol abuse and dependence were high in both age groups but were higher for smokers aged <50. We found no striking differences between studies in reasons for exclusion, but in both the proportion of individuals excluded due to current antidepressant use was high. Implications for the assessment and treatment of older adults are discussed.

OBJECTIVES: For smoking cessation, physical activity (PA) may help manage withdrawal symptoms, mood, stress, and weight; yet studies of PA as an aid for smoking cessation have been mixed. This study examined: (1) the impact of an extended relapse prevention program on increasing moderate to vigorous PA (MVPA) in adults enrolled in a tobacco cessation treatment trial; (2) whether changes in MVPA were associated with sustained abstinence from smoking; and (3) mechanisms by which MVPA may support sustained abstinence from smoking. METHODS: In a randomized controlled trial conducted from 2003-2006 in San Francisco, California, 407 adult smokers received a 12 week group-based smoking cessation treatment with bupropion and nicotine patch with the quit date set at week 3. At week 12, participants were randomized to no further treatment or to 40 weeks of bupropion or placebo with or without an 11-session relapse prevention intervention of which 2 sessions (held at weeks 16 and 20) focused on PA. Participants receiving the PA intervention (n=163) received a pedometer, counseling to increase steps 10% biweekly towards a 10,000 steps/day goal, and personalized reports graphing progress with individualized goals. The International Physical Activity Questionnaire assessed weekly minutes of MVPA at baseline and weeks 12 and 24. Sustained abstinence from tobacco at week 24 was validated with expired carbon monoxide. RESULTS: In a repeated mixed model analysis, intervention participants significantly increased their MVPA relative to control participants, F(1,475)=3.95, p=.047. Pedometer step counts also increased significantly, t(23)=2.36, p=.027, though only 15% of intervention participants provided 6 weeks of pedometer monitoring. Controlling for treatment condition, increased MVPA predicted sustained smoking abstinence at week 24, odds ratio=1.84 (95% CI: 1.07, 3.05). Among participants with sustained abstinence, increased MVPA was associated with increased vigor (r=0.23, p=.025) and decreased perceived difficulty with staying smoke-free (r=-0.21, p=.038). CONCLUSION: PA promotion as an adjunct to tobacco treatment increases MVPA levels; changes in MVPA predict sustained abstinence, perhaps by improving mood and self-efficacy.