THE COMMONS : Exploring power relations in climate fiction TV series from an Ecofeminist perspective

Sammanfattning

Patriarchal and masculinist ideologies have facilitated the global climate crisis and need to be transformed to address climate change successfully and achieve climate justice (Gaard, 2015). Climate fiction stories can envision future states of society (Robinson, 2016) and can thus challenge these ideologies and disrupt binary concepts of domination (Anglin, 2015). This research uses the theoretical framework of critical ecofeminism and its understanding of the dualistic construction of relations between humans and nature or men and women. In combination with relevant multimodal critical discourse analysis tools an analytical toolkit is created. This is used to analyse the climate fiction TV series THE COMMONS (Birse, 2019) with regard to present structures of domination between men, women and nature. The research findings determine that key dualisms are strongly present and accompanying power relations are reproduced, but also critically questioned to an extent. Especially class domination and the concept of men as the dominant gender is challenged.