1. Introduction
Modern capitalist societies depend on growth, i.e., on the permanent and limitless
expansion of economic activity. In the degrowth debate, it has often been argued
that this societal compulsion to grow is not only rooted in an economic system
geared around profits and in hierarchical societal structures that enforce
participation in ‘the economy’, but that it has also deeply inscribed itself into the
worldviews, sensibilities and practical dispositions of people living in such
societies (Eversberg, 2014; Latouche, 2005; Schmelzer et al., 2022). Yet, while in
a growth society everybody’s subjectivity – how we relate to ourselves and the
world – is profoundly influenced by the effects of this expansionary logic. The
forms that this assumes vary widely according to the different ways in which
people are involved in how growth is generated and experienced, and the kinds
of work they are typically tasked with – in short, on their positionality in society,
intersectionally understood (Crenshaw, 1989). That is, not every subjectivity into
which growth has inscribed itself as a ‘normalcy’ can be rightly labelled a ‘growth
subjectivity’ (normalcy can also be viewed critically, even experienced as
unbearable). Still, it seems possible to describe a certain logic or ‘grammar’ of
relating to oneself and the rest of the world that is logically most in line with the
demands and promises of growth. When actively internalised, it ‘anchors’ the
growth imperative within the individual, turns them into its willing agents and
faithful believers, and thus strengthens the growth-centric and structurally
externalising imperial mode of living.
In this narrower sense, we may conceive of the growth subject as a subject
accustomed to asserting itself as an actively sovereign agent by accumulating
ever greater and more far-reaching capacities for action while negating or
denying its own dependency on others’ care and the natural environment. As a
mass phenomenon, this type of experience and the subjectivities it has formed
have only become possible under conditions of expansionary modern societies
since the onset of the fossil age.
In the dominant cultural imaginary of growth societies, this figure of the growth
subject is powerfully gendered: it is coded as masculine. The classical figure of
the white bourgeois, the agent of capitalist expansion, is that of a
man seeking to optimally deploy the resources at his disposal so as to rationally and
purposefully enlarge them (Harrison, 1999; Hunt, 1996; Tosh, 2005).
This image, however, makes the social and natural preconditions of such
supposedly sovereign activity invisible. And it conceals the fact that this kind of
agency could only be asserted based on hierarchical divisions of both a symbolic
and practical nature, allowing the socially privileged male to appropriate nature
and the labour of those excluded from such privileged status. ‘Masculine
domination’ has thus become inscribed in the gendered division of labour of
capitalist societies as well as in their cultural imagery, which associates
masculinity with public visibility, independence, strength, technological
dominance and control over human and nonhuman nature (Biesecker &
Hofmeister, 2010; Bourdieu, 2001; Federici, 2004; Merchant, 1983).
This does not mean that only men are growth subjects and that others are not,
nor that all men have incorporated growth subjectivity in the same way and to
the same degree – but rather that key aspects of growth subjectivities are coded
as masculine due to the historical genealogies of their cultural understandings.
In fact, within modern growth societies the cultural, social and economic logics
that structure people’s everyday experience are so deeply impregnated with
‘masculine’ principles of expansion, exclusion and competition that these leave a
mark on everybody, regardless of gender. Growth societies are inherently
androcentric societies because their inner logic makes masculine growth
subjectivities the norm and the condition for success. While everybody is to some
degree subject to ‘masculine’ growth subjectivation, the variable forms of
‘hegemonic masculinity’ that arise as epitomes of the successful growth subject
are most readily adopted and performed by men (Connell, 2005; Connell &
Messerschmidt, 2005; Pulé & Hultman, 2021; Salleh, 2017).
This historically constituted relationship between gendered subjectivities and
modern capitalist expansionism is crucial for understanding the logic of growth
societies and possible alternatives. Feminists have long been pointing this out
and calling for a more thorough engagement of the entire degrowth spectrum
with gender relations and patriarchal dominance (Abazeri, 2022; Barca, 2020;
Bauhardt, 2014; Dengler & Strunk, 2018). They have rightly highlighted the
invisibilised caring relationships and the enormous amount of labour,
symbolically and economically devalued as ‘feminine’, without which all the
achievements of those male heroes of capitalist development would not have
been possible. A complementary aspect of the feminist challenge to the
degrowth community, however, has long received too little attention: The difficult
question of what role(s) men and masculinities might play in the course of social
transformations away from growth dependency (Khanna, 2022). How can
masculinities rooted in the logic of growth and dominance be overcome? What
alternatives to existing conceptions of masculinity are conceivable that would not
stand in the way of degrowth transformations, but could play a fruitful part in
fostering them?
In this essay we want to suggest that the approaches to transforming self- and
world-relations that are present in degrowth debates and practices contain a
number of core elements of what it will take to overcome the bourgeois-capitalist
mode of subjectivation. Degrowth societies will have to be very different from
capitalist modernity, not merely in terms of their material and institutional
infrastructures and the logics according to which they are organised, but also in
terms of how people conceive of themselves and relate to others as well as to
extra-human nature. Capitalist modernity’s expansive-individualist ideal of
growth subjectivity will need to be supplanted, succeeded or replaced by
degrowth subjectivities that reintegrate precisely those relations whose
externalisation it had been built on. One of the most challenging aspects of these
transformations is that they will require particularly far-reaching change to
currently prevailing conceptions of masculinities.
These arguments are based on our reflections on the question of the post-growth and degrowth subject
(Eversberg & Schmelzer 2017) and the experience of a participatory workshop at the 2018 International
Degrowth Conference in Malmö.
2. Degrowth’s lessons for the phaseout of hegemonic
masculinities: (Re-)Production and Deprivileging
Although the degrowth spectrum has only recently begun explicitly engaging with
masculinities to any significant extent (Hultman & Pulé, 2018; Khanna, 2022; Pulé
& Hultman, 2021; Salleh, 2017; Scholz & Heilmann, 2019), some of the
considerations present in degrowth thinking seem to open up useful perspectives
for thinking about the transformation of gender relations and masculinities when
read from the appropriate angle. This, of course, requires a strong emphasis on
feminist insights concerning the significance of care practices for the broader
transformation of modes of production and life, as well as the social relations
with nature in which these are embedded (Abazeri, 2022; Barca, 2020; Dengler &
Seebacher, 2019; Eversberg, 2021; hooks, 2004).
In this vein, let us simply highlight here two important aspects of any
transformation away from the hegemony of growth that are bound to have
profound implications for the (gendered) ways in which subjects living through
such transformations relate to themselves and the world. One of these aspects
is to overcome the gendered division of labour by revaluing care work, the other
is to conceive of degrowth as deprivileging or male depowerment.
On the one hand, as feminists have rightly insisted time and again, a crucial
element of all degrowth thought must be a critique of the gendered division of
labour and of the way in which the focus on economic growth devalues and
renders invisible the socially necessary work of reproduction that constitutes the
bulk of the ‘iceberg’ of any economy. This is one of the reasons why degrowth
critique cannot restrict itself to questioning the logic of permanent
quantitative expansion and simply call for its reversal. Rather, at a more fundamental level,
what degrowth problematizes is the qualitative makeup of the mindsets and the
technologies of power that enable modern capitalist societies to abstract from
the concrete relations of care and the biological-material cycles of reproduction
on which all human life depends. They make it possible in the first place to posit
these basic (re)productivities as unquestioned ‘givens’ requiring no further
consideration by those pursuing the ever further expansion of so-called
‘productive’ economic activity. It is precisely the separations between
‘production’ and ‘reproduction’, ‘public’ and ‘private’ and ‘male’ ‘gainful’ work and
‘female’ care work, which a feminist degrowth critique exposes as basic
preconditions for the implementation of an abstract logic of increase. This implies
that it is not simply the basic calculative logic of the capitalist economy, but also
a specific, historically bourgeois conception of (male) subjectivity and gender
relations as well as relationships with nature that needs to be fundamentally
changed (Barca, 2020; Kothari et al., 2019; Schmelzer et al., 2022).
And secondly, we argue that degrowth ought to be understood as a movement
for global ecological justice that seeks to overcome the inequalities associated
with a world system that creates exclusive affluence at the centres, where the
benefits of the imperial mode of living concentrate, while appropriating labour
and resources from the global poor and externalising its costs (Brand & Wissen,
2021; Lessenich, 2019). In this regard, and against the background of our own
research, degrowth can be seen as starting from the positionality of certain social
groups within affluent Northern societies who reflexively gain insight into their
own privileged status and involvement in the imperial mode of living and who
turn to self-transformation as a starting point for much more comprehensive and
systemic societal change (Eversberg & Schmelzer 2018; Eversberg 2017). From
this sociological perspective, degrowth appears at least in part as a self-critical
movement of parts of the young, highly mobile educational elites of European
societies – in a way: an inherent counter-tendency of flexible capitalism. If we
take this into account, the concerns with self-problematization and self-restraint
in the context of the imperial mode of living that have often been regarded
weaknesses of the degrowth perspective (see, for example, Huber, 2022) do
indeed rightly play a central role. Of course, this is linked to and includes (cis-,
heterosexual, white) male privileges – as is particularly obvious with regard to
the ‘masculine’ obsession with fast mobility, high-tech or other forms of
particularly destructive behaviour. In a way, this is also relevant to the degrowth
community itself: only 43 percent of respondents to a survey at the 2014
international degrowth conference identified as male, and men were particularly
overrepresented among those parts of the ‘degrowth spectrum’ that were open
to ideas of ecological modernization, technologically driven transformations or to
political top-down solutions and to privileging theory over practice (Eversberg &
Schmelzer 2018).
The tendency toward reflexivity and empathetic consideration of the
consequences of one's own life for others is itself a largely gendered disposition:
It is not just any segment of the privileged parts of society that turns reflexive,
but specifically those who, although privileged in some respects, are also involved
with the (re)productive work of dealing with some of the burdens and
dependencies externalized by the imperial mode of living. Degrowth is typically
supported by people working in (or studying for) educational, cultural and social
professions (Eversberg, 2015) – and among these the proportion of women is far
above average. That is, the entrenched gendered division of labour as a specific
structural dimension of modern capitalist societies must be a prime object of any
degrowth transformation, and it will be a particularly challenging task to come up
with viable paths of a politics of male deprivileging or of intentional and targeted
male depowerment (Elliott, 2016). Here, too, conscious self-reflection among
some of the privileged is a necessary starting point for ideas and practical
experiences from which visions of alternatives may arise. But politically agreed,
structurally promoted changes to the division of labour at the societal scale will
ultimately be indispensable for actually challenging the prevailing order.
3. The relational subject
In addition to the inevitable practical self-contradictions of such a politics of self-
deprivileging, it also seems likely to suffer from some rather fundamental
motivational problems: why should people actively commit themselves to a type
of social change that explicitly promises them losses in material affluence and
opportunities – even if those losses are recognized as morally justified? The
degrowth answer would of course be that posing the question this way is itself
an expression of the growth-based imaginary that needs to be overcome. A
common argument in second-wave feminism was that ending patriarchy would
free not only women but also men, because they too are restricted, constrained
and limited in their capacities by patriarchal relations. The degrowth argument
about deprivileging is akin to this point: The fixation on growth restrains the
capacities of all by forcing them to direct their activities at contributing to
economic expansion, and therefore, despite the enormous differences in the
kinds and extent of hardship and suffering this imposes, there is on some level a
common interest of all in the human emancipation that liberation from the
growth imperative offers. It would therefore be a misconstrual to perceive
degrowth as calling for individual renunciation or personal austerity: What it
promotes is not the conception of a ‘reductive self’ that is primarily negatively
determined, but a positive, concrete-utopian impulse to invent new forms of
practices and modes of existence, converging on what we think is more
adequately described in terms of a ‘relational self’, a subject defined by the wealth
of the ties with others and with nature that it is embedded in. Instead of the
growth subject that aims at ‘higher, faster, further’, degrowth subjectivities
revolve around the motto ‘Moins de biens, plus de liens’ (less things, more
relations).
From the dead ends that the androcentric Promethean individualism of
modernity has run into, the degrowth movement has learned to question central
aspects of modernity – not in order to end it, but rather to push it beyond itself
by once again including the rich multitude of possible social and socio-natural
relations that escalatory modernism had systematically excluded. The gendered
implications, however, have yet to be understood theoretically and, above all,
anchored in movement politics. Here, let us just mention three aspects of what
such as positive conception of degrowth subjectivity may entail:
relationality, conviviality, and resonance. Rather than individualistic with regard to others and
nature, degrowth subjectivities need to be relational; instead of constant
increases in ‘world reach’, the establishment of fewer, but stable ‘axes of
resonance’ would be sought; and instead of technologically supported individual
sovereignty, conviviality could be a practical mode of achieving this goal. We call
this the ‘relational self’.
Relationality
Firstly, degrowth subjectivities are not individualistic, but relational. The feminist
degrowth debate and related discourses (Abazeri, 2022; Jax et al., 2018;
Rendueles, 2017) argue for a conception of selfhood founded on the existential
condition of being fundamentally dependent on others and on nature, exposing
growth societies’ androcentric ideal of individual autonomy as a hollow fiction.
This is not about abandoning the ideal of autonomy, but about redefining it as a
capacity for collective self-determination that is always already social, because
it is based on mutual concern and access to limited, shared resources (Asara et
al., 2013; Kallis et al., 2020; Schmelzer et al., 2022).
The individualist illusion is built on the separation and hierarchization,
constitutive of modern capitalist societalization, between a ‘male’ public and a
feminised private sphere as well as between ‘productive’ work performed by
ostensible individuals in the former and the caring, relational labour that is
indispensable to their performances, but invisibilised and devalued by being
relegated to the latter (Barca, 2020; Dengler & Strunk, 2018). Relational selfhood,
in contrast, is founded on the rejection of that separation. It constitutes itself
based on the awareness of these fundamental interdependencies as conditions
of one’s own life that can be creatively shaped, but not denied. And it defines
itself through its links with others, experienced in practices of giving care as well
as of receiving it. This includes recognizing the obligations that come with mutual
dependence. Regarding masculinities, the crucial challenge here lies less in
fostering the integration of active caring into male subjectivities than in
accepting and affirming one's own dependence on care. For it is this that is most
fundamentally incompatible with modern masculine subject constructions,
insofar as it represents their very externalised and repressed ‘Other’. We will
return to this at the end.
Conviviality
The constitutive relationality of degrowth subjectivities sets them apart from the
modern, originally patriarchal illusion of an individuality in total separation and
independence from others. Conviviality, its closely related second aspect,
specifies the logic of how degrowth subjects experience and shape their
relational embeddedness in the socio-natural world. It counters the deeply
ingrained aspiration of growth subjects to not only set themselves apart from the
world, but also assert a position of sovereign control and dominance vis-à-vis
other people and the extra-human by way of instrumentally deploying personally
controlled resources to personally defined ends. Degrowth subjects are not
consumers or investors seeking to maximise their present or future utility or
enjoyment by allocating whatever means are at their disposal in line with their
preferences. Rather, they can derive contentment directly from practices of
determining and catering to shared needs and desires together with others in an
equitable and sustainable manner. In accordance with these requirements,
relational subjects reject the illusion of immortality implicit to every accumulative
or speculative practice as part of unrealistic male fantasies of omnipotence.
This convivial dimension requires the cultivation of a different economy of
personal desire. Part of a global consciousness as co-inhabitants of the world is
the ability to cultivate needs and desires in mutual, socio-ecologically embedded
processes, rather than experiencing personal desire as an urgent longing for
goods and experiences that can only be catered to by exerting control over others
and instrumentalizing nature. Again, this is a gendered form of emancipation – it
is much harder to achieve for those who have internalised the typically male
experience of always being able to get what you want. This is probably particularly
relevant with respect to technology. When Ivan Illich (1973) called for
technologies to be ‘tools for conviviality’, his concern was with a critical analysis
of the social function and ecological consequences of specific technologies.
Degrowth implies pushing back technologies that afford individuals experiences
of enjoyment, comfort and control, but whose functioning requires and deepens
domination and ecological destruction. Rather, the criteria for convivial
technologies are whether they can be employed in ways that are truly sustainable
and globally just, democratically controlled, low risk and conducive to autonomy
(Schmelzer et al., 2022). Engaging in the social processes of negotiation and self-
limitation that this entails requires abandoning the approach to technology as a
means for feeling powerful and exerting control that constitutes a core
component of hegemonic masculinity in capitalist societies – as epitomised by
large-scale industrial geoengineering or rich men’s competitive missions to
colonise Mars.
Resonance
Instead of the quantitative orientation towards maximum ‘world reach’ (Rosa,
2019), towards ever more and greater possibilities for action and experience that
can ultimately only be had at the expense of others, degrowth calls for a different,
qualitative criterion for what sorts of relations and shared experiences can
constitute a ‘good’ life. In combination with relationality and conviviality, Hartmut
Rosa's (2019) notion of resonance seems helpful here, as referring to a quality of
positive experiences of mutuality and connection. Experiencing resonance is not
per se dependent on energy consumption, resource use or instrumental power
over others – it can be experienced with very simple means and in all sorts of
environments, and it is all the more probable when experiences are sought for
intrinsic rather than extrinsic motives, i.e., when they are not an object of
competition.
Exiting the escalatory logic requires a practical idea of enough, or a criterion of sufficiency.
Conceived in terms of resonance, satisfaction is itself something that
there can be more than enough of: too many emotional experiences of
connectedness overwhelm and numb the senses, thus negating themselves as
such. For the relational self, establishing a limited number of stable and fulfilling
‘axes of resonance’ (Rosa, 2019) along one’s social and socio-natural relations is
the key to a satisfying life in an autonomy that is both at peace with dependence
and mortality, as well as capable of being permanently generalised globally in its
socio-ecological consequences. In short: a good life. For the relational self, the
boundedness of the personal option space does not have to appear as a loss but
can also be desired as a commandment of solidarity. It is therefore not about a
‘return’ to pre-modern ways of life, it does not follow a conservative,
particularistic logic, but an inclusive and plural universalism, which is itself
inevitably premised on the very logic of modernity that it wants to move beyond.
4. Conclusion
One of the greatest and most underestimated challenges to degrowth
transformations will lie in how to foster the changes in subjectivities and
processes of subjectivation that these entail – and particularly challenging will
be the transformations of growth-dependent masculinities. To give just a few
initial pointers on what this might entail, we have suggested three core
dimensions of potential degrowth subjectivities: relationality, conviviality and
resonance. Of course, all three of these dimensions can be strengthened and
enabled by socio-political changes often discussed in the degrowth spectrum,
including the radical shortening of working hours for all and the breaking up of
gender-specific patterns of division of labour. Overcoming the ‘male breadwinner’
model of the family in favour of a more balanced division of labour and redefining
work and the status of employment are key. In fact, they are the very conditions
for creating the possibility for genuine time prosperity and stable axes of
resonance in all spheres of life – beyond coercion stress, and competitive
pressure. Such reforms in the field of work are key to transforming masculinities
in the transition beyond growth because they enable different and more diverse
experiences and can thus help in establishing connectedness and mutual
dependence rather than separateness and supposed independence as a basis of
subjectivity.
In conclusion, let us offer one further reflection on the relevance of care as a key
field of such transformed experience. For the relational subject, notions and
practices of care – which androcentric growth subjectivity has displaced as its
constitutive outside – undoubtedly play a central role. In terms of transforming
masculinities, assuming responsibility for caring relationships and learning to
practically live ‘caring masculinities’ (Elliott, 2016; see also Hultman & Pulé, 2018)
is certainly crucial. But as great an emancipatory progress the establishment of
such caring masculinities would undoubtedly be, as practices and self-
conceptions of active caring they do not necessarily touch on the very
fundamental taboo of male, growth-oriented self-relations, namely the reality of
one’s own dependence and mortality. In addition to ‘caring masculinity’, therefore,
the aspect of ‘needy masculinity’, so far perceived as more of a deficiency, might
have its own transformative potentials (see also Kastein, 2019). For needing
others, needing care, is the real experiential core of that inescapable human
condition that all hegemonic masculinities have been forged to ward off with all
their might, and which they again and again symbolically negate by attempting
to assert dominance using all kinds of technical prostheses.
Experiencing oneself as passive, as dependent, as needy (rather than desiring),
is perhaps the strongest, and therefore most powerfully repressed, antithesis to
a masculine identity. While caring masculinities, such as positive concepts of
emancipatory fatherhood, still allow the male subject to experience himself as
active, as influential, as a force shaping the world, the conscious experience of
existential dependence – as symbolically purged from boys’ identities in rites of
passage to manhood and hitherto experienced by most men only in situations of
acute illness or in old age – calls masculinity as such into question in a very
practical and very effective way. It is precisely because ‘passive masculinity’ is
an oxymoron against the given subject-historical background that such
experiences are so central. And they are constitutively part of human existence,
merely cut off from becoming part of the constitution of masculine subjectivity
by a multi-layered protective shield of material, discursive, social and mental
technologies. Bringing passive masculinities and relational subjectivities to the
surface may be one of the keys to the truly profound transformations of self-
relations that are necessary, especially in the context of debates on degrowth.
They could seriously destabilise the boundaries of what would still be adequately
described as ‘masculine’.
Conflict of interest
The authors have no conflict of interest to disclose.
References
Abazeri, M. (2022). Decolonial feminisms and degrowth.
Futures,
136, 102902.
Asara, V., Profumi, E., & Kallis, G. (2013). Degrowth, democracy and autonomy.
Environmental
Values,
22(2), 217–239.
Barca, S. (2020).
Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene.
Cambridge University Press.
Bauhardt, C. (2014). Solutions to the crisis? The Green New Deal, Degrowth, and the Solidarity
Economy: Alternatives to the capitalist growth economy from an ecofeminist economics
perspective.
Ecological Economics,
102, 60–68.
Biesecker, A., & Hofmeister, S. (2010). Focus: (Re)productivity: Sustainable relations both
between society and nature and between the genders.
Ecological Economics,
69(8), 1703–
1711. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.03.025
Bourdieu, P. (2001).
Masculine domination. Polity.
Brand, U., & Wissen, M. (2021).
The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological
Crisis of Capitalism (Z. King, Trans.; p. 256). Verso Books.
Connell, R. W. (2005).
Masculinities. Polity.
Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.
Gender and Society,
19(6), 829–859.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist
Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.
University of
Chicago Legal Forum,
1(8), 139–167.
Dengler, C., & Seebacher, L. M. (2019). What About the Global South? Towards a Feminist
Decolonial Degrowth Approach.
Ecological Economics,
157, 246–252.
Dengler, C., & Strunk, B. (2018). The Monetized Economy Versus Care and the Environment:
Degrowth Perspectives On Reconciling an Antagonism.
Feminist Economics,
24(3), 160–183.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2017.1383620
Elliott, K. (2016). Caring Masculinities: Theorizing an Emerging Concept.
Men and Masculinities,
19(3), 240–259. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X15576203
Eversberg, D. (2014). Die Erzeugung kapitalistischer Realitätsprobleme: Wachstumsregimes und
ihre subjektiven Grenzen.
WSI-Mitteilungen,
67(7), 528–535.
Eversberg, D. (2015).
Erste Ergebnisse der Teilnehmendenbefragung zur Degrowth-Konferenz
2014 in Leipzig (Working Paper WP 01/15; Working Paper Der DFG -
KollegforscherInnengruppe Postwachstumsgesellschaften, pp. 528–535). Kolleg
Postwachstumsgesellschaften. http://www.boeckler.de/wsi-mitteilungen_51357_51372.htm
Eversberg, D. (2021). The Social Specificity of Societal Nature Relations in a Flexible Capitalist
Society.
Environmental Values,
30(3), 319–343.
https://doi.org/10.3197/096327120X15916910310581
Federici, S. (2004).
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.
Autonomedia.
Harrison, C. E. (1999).
The bourgeois citizen in nineteenth-century France: Gender, sociability,
and the uses of emulation. Oxford Univ. Press.
Hooks, bell. (2004).
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (Reprint Edition).
Washington Square Press.
Huber, M. T. (2022).
Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet.
Verso Books.
Hultman, M., & Pulé, P. M. (2018).
Ecological Masculinities: Theoretical Foundations and
Practical Guidance. Routledge.
Hunt, M. R. (1996).
The middling sort: Commerce, gender, and the family in England, 1680 -
1780. Univ. of California Press.
Illich, I. (1973).
Tools for conviviality (1. Perennial library ed.). Harper & Row.
Jax, K., Calestani, M., Chan, K. M., Eser, U., Keune, H., Muraca, B., O’Brien, L., Potthast, T., Voget-
Kleschin, L., & Wittmer, H. (2018). Caring for nature matters: A relational approach for
understanding nature’s contributions to human well-being.
Current Opinion in Environmental
Sustainability,
35, 22–29.
Kallis, G., Paulson, S., D’Alisa, G., & Demaria, F. (2020).
The Case for Degrowth. Polity.
Kastein, M. (2019).
Gleichstellungsorientierte Männerpolitik unter Legitimationsdruck: Eine
wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. Verlag
Barbara Budrich.
Khanna, P. S. (2022).
Sustainable Masculinities and Degrowth: Pathways to Feminist Post-
Growth societies. Institute for Political Ecology.
Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F., & Acosta, A. (Eds.). (2019).
Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary. Authors Up Front.
Latouche, S. (2005).
Décoloniser l’imaginaire. La pensée créative contre l’économie de l’absurde.
Parangon/Vs.
Lessenich, S. (2019).
Living Well at Others’ Expense. Polity.
Merchant, C. (1983).
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution.
Harper & Row.
Pulé, P. M., & Hultman, M. (Eds.). (2021).
Men, Masculinities, and Earth: Contending with the
(m)Anthropocene. Springer Nature.
Rendueles, C. (2017).
Sociophobia: Political Change in the Digital Utopia. Columbia University
Press.
Rosa, H. (2019).
Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity Press.
Salleh, A. (2017).
Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern. Zed Books.
Schmelzer, M., Vetter, A., & Vansintjan, A. (2022).
The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World
Beyond Capitalism. Verso.
Scholz, S., & Heilmann, A. (2019).
Caring Masculinities?: Männlichkeiten in der Transformation
kapitalistischer Wachstumsgesellschaften. Oekom.
Tosh, J. (2005). Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800–1914.
Journal of British
Studies,
44(2), 330–342. https://doi.org/10.1086/427129
|
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dennis Eversberg is head of the BMBF-funded junior research group ‘Mentalitäten im Fluss.
Vorstellungswelten in modernen bio-kreislaufbasierten Gesellschaften’ [‘Mentalities in Flux.
Social imaginaries in modern circular bio-based societies’] (flumen) at the Institute of Sociology,
Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany. Dennis does research in Political Sociology, the study
of social-ecological movements, environmental politics, mentalities and social structure. He
currently works on the mental preconditions and consequences of post-fossil transformations,
the subjective limits to capitalist growth regimes, the degrowth movement and authoritarian
nationalism. Email address:
dennis.eversberg@uni-jena.de.
Matthias Schmelzer is an economic historian, social theorist and climate activist. He is a post-
doctoral researcher at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena and is active at the Laboratory for
New Economic Ideas in Leipzig, Germany. His main interests include the political economy of
capitalism, social and environmental history, climate catastrophe, neoliberalism and alternative
economics. He is author of ‘The Hegemony of Growth. The OECD and the Making of the Economic
Growth Paradigm’ (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and co-author of The Future Is Degrowth:
A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism (Verso, 2022). Email address:
matthias.schmelzer@uni-jena.de.
|
![[groups_small]](groups_small.gif)