'Petro-masculinity', 'petro-nostalgia', and 'fossil rule'
New words in hard times
It can be exhausting to be switched on to language all the time. My brain rarely gets a rest. Because I teach about grammar - real grammar, the stuff that powers every interaction we have, no matter what we are doing or who we are - I can hear all kinds of things in a conversation that the humans having it typically can’t.
When language is being beautiful and inspiring, when it is being intelligent and insightful, it is enormously pleasurable to be able to hear how a particular linguistic symphony is orchestrated. When language is being used to divide and conquer, it hurts my brain. I hear the power contest - I hear just how powerful language can be in the wrong hands. I’d like a rest from language sometimes, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
We live our lives in a lot of mass produced discourse - advertising, news, social media, bureaucratic language, political campaigning, authoritarian diatribes, wellness memes, AI generated text. All of these types of language are homogenizing and de-individualizing. Same old same old. As the audience for this discourse, you are not you, you are just a category.
But out of this boring hum hum hum, every now and again new meanings get a label that helps our brains see something in a completely different way. By opening up new conceptual spaces, these new wordings make our brains bigger, which they need to be to encompass the intersecting crises of global heating, war and genocide, species extinction, and all the many forms of entitlement and social inequality.
To see the problematic intersection of gender and climate politics, look no further than the gender of the world ‘leaders’ assembled at COP 29. Turns out Beyoncé was wrong: girls don’t run the world. But what we see on the world stage at a COP is the symptom, not the cause.
World leaders (sic) at COP29. Source: https://cop29.az/en/media-hub/media-gallery
Enter Petromasculinity. What a powerful idea! While as a deeply feminist person I see everything in gender terms, this concept really brought home to me not simply that fossil fuels are textured into our daily lives, they also penetrate into the deepest recesses of our minds.
Petromasculinity, and other ‘petro-’ compounds
‘Petro-masculinity’ is not yet in the dictionary - at least as far as I have checked. I looked up the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Merriam-Webster, and Macquarie Dictionaries, but didn’t find it there, which is not surprising. The word will need more of us dropping it into conversation to build its profile and frequency so that it comes to the attention of the lexicographers who make decisions about what is in and out of the dictionary.
We do have ‘petropolitics’ and ‘petro-power’, as well as ‘petro-resources’ and ‘petro-wealth’, ‘petrobillions’ and ‘petropounds’ as the screenshot below from the OED shows. Why are some hyphenated and others not? Most likely it will be about how old these new words are. As hyphenated terms get up some steam, they start to be seen as a singular unity (so the hyphen is dropped), rather than as a compound of two other words.
The word ‘petro-masculinity’ was invented during Trump’s first term as president. One of the many things I have learnt in my time in my home discipline of linguistics is that language is the ‘nervous system’ of a community. This metaphor for language comes from J.R.Firth, first professor of General Linguistics in the UK, in his book titled The Tongues of Men Humans. Some of Firth’s brilliant ideas in linguistics explain the potential of Language Large Models behind generative AI to generate text from well written prompts - this from a guy who died in 1960.
Here’s the full quote from Firth:
Speech [i.e. language] is the telephone network, the nervous system of our society much more than the vehicle for the lyrical outbursts of the individual soul. It is a network of bonds and obligations.
While words so often seem discrete to us, they are always part of moving paths of meaning which cross over our skin. So, when a new word pops up, there will be something already bubbling along that provides the wellspring in which it has taken shape. I know this means that if I follow a new word on its highways and byways, it will take me new horizons, which are likely to be mind blowing.
Petro-masculinity is no exception. The beautiful thinker who came up with this term is Cara Daggett, Associate Professor in Political Science at Virginia Tech. The birth notice of this word is titled ‘Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire’, published in the Journal of International Studies. Daggett argues that our modern climate politics are a disastrous intersection of masculinity, fossil fuel burning, and authoritariansim. We need to take petro-masculinity seriously, she argues, by ‘paying attention to the thwarted desires of privileged patriarchies as they lose their fossil fantasies’.
Fossil fuels are not just about how we fuel our homes and overseas holidays. And they are not just about the billions earned by petro-billionaires. Their reach over our cultures, our politics, our collective consciousness, is even wider and even deeper. They fuel our modern subjectivities.
‘Carbon democracy’ and ‘fossil rule’
Daggett’s work belongs to a field referred to as the ‘energy humanities’, which studies fossil fuels not simply in technical terms but as something that permeates every part modern human experience. Daggett argues that over recent centuries, these dirty fuels have become ‘the metaphorical, material and sociotechnical basis of Western petrocultures that extend across the planet’. Petrocultures. Just so many new and important concepts here.
Dirty fossil fuels not only degrade the environment. They have also determined the limits of our political systems. Daggett refers to Western democracies as ‘carbon democracies’ (a concept from Timothy Mitchell’s work1). Our democratic structures and freedoms have depended on everything entailed in access to cheap dirty energy, including proximity to and support for, authoritarian petro-states. In Daggett’s words:
authoritarian politics have historically been part and parcel of the project of securing Western (fossil) rule. By fossil rule, I mean a logic of governing that is dependent upon intensive fossil fuel consumption in both material and … psycho-political ways. Fossil rule is mobilised through ‘fossil capital’, Andreas Malm’s term to describe how modern capitalism was erected around a belief in ‘self-sustaining growth … welded to the combustion of fossil fuels’. Fossil capital requires an unending, cheap flow of fossil fuels for the concentration of wealth at the expense of other people and things, and this necessitates authoritarian tactics in certain sites and moments
The fundamental freedoms we associate with Western democracies - the ones that put fire in the belly of so many Americans on No Kings day on June 14th - are ‘energy intensive’. As such, they have required said democracies to build relationships with, and defend, rapacious companies and dubious governments.
Trump and ‘petro-nostalgia’
The election of Trump in 2016, Daggett argues, was a case of ‘petro-nostalgia’. The MAGA slogan brought with it a harking back to ‘the mid-20th century patriarchal ideal’ which was ‘predicated upon an ongoing supply of cheap fossil fuels’:
Cars, suburbs, and the nuclear family, oriented around white male workers, formed a triumvirate that yoked the desires of Americans not only to wage labour, but to the continued supply of cheap energy that made the dream possible.
In this MAGA project we see an inseparable alliance between big dirty technology, fuelling and fuelled by a nostalgic hypermasculinity. Which is why Daggestt argues that in its recent form, the reactionary defence of fossil fuels, against the science AND EVEN the economics of renewable energy, has a kind of Freudian, ‘psycho-affective dimension’. The continued burning of fossil fuels isn’t just about money: it bolsters ‘privileged subjectivities’, which have always been ‘oil-soaked’ and ‘coal-dusted’ - and let’s add in ‘gas-fired’, with a nod to Australia’s Labor government, and their recent treacherous approval of a huge, multi-decade dirty gas project.
Daggett describes various manifestations of petro-masculinity, including the practice known as ‘coal rolling’, where a diesel vehicle is modified so that it produces dirty black smoke pollution - deliberately.
Petro … transphobia?
Petro-transphobia - you heard it first here. I put this new word together after reading the always excellent journalism of Emily Atkin at Heated. I’m sure many of you understand already that transpeople are the latest whipping person for politicians and their fossil sponsors wanting to distract us from the real actual climate crises. In a collab with Atmos, this piece investigates the dirty fossil cash being paid to organizations promoting transphobia.
The article reports that of 45 anti-trans organizations investigated, 80% have received funding from fossil fuel companies. For example, Shell USA has funded an organization whose lawyers have written bills to force transpeople to use bathrooms associated with their assigned sex at birth. Dirty oil even dirtier than I had imagined.
Feminist energy systems
Daggett’s concept of petromasculinity leads, logically, to a feminist - and intersectional - perspective on energy systems. I didn’t see this coming, but as I wended my way through her tapestry of ideas, I arrived at her explanation that what we need is not simply alternative fuels, but ‘new ways of thinking about, valuing, and inhabiting energy systems’. From her book called The Birth of Energy, she urges us to look for alternative ways of ‘knowing energy’.
A feminist approach to energy involves a reimagining of life, including a shorter working week, and for privileged communities to ‘power down’. It provides a vista in which ‘high-growth modernism’ is traded for communality. It argues for a higher value to be accorded to
so-called pink labor jobs: caring, service, and regenerative labor, including everything from child and elder care to teaching, community art and events, and environmental rehabilitation, which could include caring for brownfields and other polluted ecosystems, especially those where vulnerable populations live.
I will end with these thoughts. I’m on leave for July, and intend to spend at least some of this time reading more of Daggett’s work. Expect your next column from me on September 1st. Thanks, as ever, for reading.
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2013)