Cara Daggett, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech University, coined the term “petro-masculinty” in a paper she published in 2018. She used the term to describe the rise of authoritarian movements in the Western hemisphere and how they were being shaped by climate change denialism and misogyny in an appeal to men who felt they were being left behind by society.
At the time, Donald Trump had been in office for two years. For Daggett, his “Make America Great Again” message during his campaign evoked nostalgia for a time of traditionally structured families whose upwardly mobile lives in the suburbs, anchored on cheap energy production and the jobs that came with it, were threatened by efforts to confront climate change, racism or gender equality.
No longer just an energy source, fossil fuels have become wrapped up in the American identity, says Daggett. For conservative men in particular, that’s essential to a return to male-governed households and society, not only at the expense of women, Daggett says, but also the environment.
The 19th spoke with Daggett, currently a senior fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany, about how she views petro-masculinity today, and what it signals for a second Trump administration that is ready to roll back energy protections, ramp up fossil fuel production and challenge gender rights.
The 19th: For those unfamiliar with the term “petro-masculinity,” what does this rhetoric around oil and gas dominance have to do with gender and identity?
I first thought of this term after Trump was elected in 2016 because I saw this trend of support for fossil fuels and climate denial on the one hand and misogyny on the other. They were usually treated as separate problems, and just coincidentally appearing together.
I come from a critical eco-feminist background where scholars connect the domination and exploitation of the natural world to the justifications for the domination and exploitation of work that is often done by colonized peoples, and by women or feminized bodies. Historically, this process developed under colonial capitalism. It helps me understand that these are not coincidental, that these two go together. In the United States, for example, it can be seen in the way that care work is devalued or taken for granted, in the same way that nature is considered a resource, something free to be taken.
Both of these are background assumptions that drive the capitalist economy. So the separation of them into the economic sphere and the private or identity issue sphere is really making it hard for people to see that these are not separate. These actually work together.
How do you think it played into the 2024 election and why do you think it resonated with voters?
In some ways, petro-masculinity was a little more subtextual. I mean, definitely misogyny was front and center, but climate was not on the agenda in the same way it was in 2020. In this case, you still see oil companies lining up behind Trump, basically giving him their policy wish list, but at the same time, Kamala Harris did not have a strong climate message, and embraced fracking for fossil gas.
But if you look at Project 2025, the preface had four pillars, and two are related to family and fossil fuels. Pillar one is family, a traditional family—anti-queer, anti-feminist. And pillar three is about defending oil and gas, with no explanation of how this is related to a traditional family. So it’s certainly, definitely still there.
I am reading the election results as a reactionary defense of these processes of gender and racial domination and the exploitation of the natural world. We are not just in a climate crisis, but a crisis of imperial capitalism. And there is also a crisis of the traditional gender order, and the White supremacist order, with Black Lives Matter, feminists and queer movements pushing against them. The MAGA movement is a reactionary defense of these traditional orders that are in crisis.
Can you talk a little bit more about that sense of belonging and the traditional family structure and how this desire of oil and gas expansion plays into that?
Energy and the access to energy expansion still very much drives power in the world. And there is a fossil fuel nostalgia for embracing fossil fuel power as a good thing, and asking why would the US sacrifice that? Ironically, my feeling is that this right-wing climate denial and celebration of fossil fuels has understood the existential threat of climate change better than a kind of centrist Democratic position. Their reactionary response understands that the challenge to fossil fuels is a very deep one.
A sustainable future will mean more than just substituting out one type of energy for another. It really requires challenging a modern Western culture and a way of life that’s premised on unending growth and expansion of cheap energy, mass consumerism and all of the ways that those things factor in a certain traditional vision of the American way of life. Right-wing climate denial understands that the change required is this significant, and their response is defiance – to refuse that change.
A very tangible way to see the connection between the gender order and fossil fuels is if you look at the development of suburbs and the suburban way of life, especially automobility, in the middle of the 20th century. Because this led to segregated, privatized, White home spaces where you have a vision of a housewife protected from all the dirt and grime of the working world; and also of the multiracial, diverse world. Everything is only accessed by the car, and the people who are showing up in public spaces and workspaces are the breadwinners, who are coded as masculinized. This particular division of private and public, housewife and breadwinner, White and multi-racial, home and work, was built on a flow of cheap fossil fuels and car culture.
This is the kind of world that MAGA wants to inhabit and arguably, it’s a world whose innocence was only ever a dream, in terms of all the violence that has to take place to make the suburban home feel safe, clean and White. But it was a very seductive dream that has, in many ways, oriented how many people live now and how Americans design their housing and how they design their cities.
How does Elon Musk factor into this calculation around expanding oil and gas? He is essentially the poster child for electric cars yet has become one of Trump’s most prominent supporters and will have some influence in the White House.
On the one hand, it’s not surprising to see Musk and Trump as partners. On the other hand, it’s fascinating to see a segment of the Silicon Valley corporate world ally with the MAGA movement, and it begs further thinking. And that’s because, in addition to my work on petro-masculinity, there’s work on something called eco-modern masculinity, or noticing how a lot of energy transition and big-scale climate policy-making have also taken what you might call a patriarchal relation to nature — the faith in techno-fixes to stabilize the status quo.
They are patriarchal in that they rely on an entitlement to the ‘reproductive’ labor of others, and of the more-than-human world. This is a faith that capitalism can be made green, can be made more just. Musk is an extreme example of that and he always has made the masculinity piece very obvious. Everything from the Tesla truck being designed to look like a military vehicle and having muscle men, you know, try to break its windows with a baseball bat. There’s always been this kind of toxic masculinity to Musk.
So what is this relationship between eco-modernism and this defense of fossil fuels? On the one hand, you could say there’s a continuity there. Adding solar and wind power does not necessarily challenge fossil fuel power, if you assume a project of ever-expanding energy. I think what you see in both Musk and Trump is a desire to maintain a status quo that is still extractive and is still about the expansion of energy.
Recently Elon retweeted the names of women working on climate change in the federal government leading to harassment and threats. It made me wonder, what are the implications for women and LGBTQ+ people in this return to climate denial and fossil fuel expansion?
There’s so much evidence that the climate crisis and energy poverty falls hardest on women around the world, especially working-class women and women of color, and often that is because it affects basic needs, and women are disproportionately responsible for household labor and reproductive labor and things like food and housing and water. So already, many women are suffering more — and that’s at a systemic level.
On the personal level in the United States, the violent rhetoric, the normalization of harassment and sexual assault, the normalization of harassing trans people, homophobia, I mean, these are all part of this turn towards fascism. And it’s really scary.
Looking ahead to a Trump administration, what are you watching for in the next four years, particularly as the climate crisis worsens?
I’m still in a mode of recovery and head-spinning because when I look ahead, it’s hard. There are many people, including me, in the rich, consumerist world who are in some sense living in climate denial, because just to get through the working day you need to bracket how bad it is, how serious it is, how much the powers that be are failing or refusing to change.
So I see darkness in the United States. The first Trump administration tried to roll back as much environmental regulation as possible, open up as much oil and gas expansion as possible. If anything, that will be worse.
It feels impossible at the national level, but cities and states in the United States have actually been more successful at pursuing climate and environmental justice and many are already planning to continue that effort.
The most exciting voices and the most exciting energy coming for climate justice and environmental justice are from social movements, from Indigenous peoples, from small island states, from the global South.
We have to be aware that those are where the ideas are going to come from. That’s where the leadership is going to come from, not only as an ethical demand that people who are suffering the most should be leaders in terms of what should be done, but also just because of the kind of violence and power that is going to go into defending the current system in places like the United States government.
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This post contains content that was first published on 19th News and republished here under a Creative Commons License. Read the original article.
