Queer care and epistemic justice: From theory to collective agency

Françoise D'Eaubonne, an activist with the Women's Liberation Movement (MLF), is credited with being the first to extend the feminist debate to environmental issues. In her book, Le Féminisme ou la mort, in English: Feminism or Death, (1974), she elaborates on what she defines as a “new form of humanism”. This perspective is based on the idea that ecology and feminism cannot be thought of separately: they constitute two inseparable dimensions of the same systemic critique (D'Eaubonne; 1974). At its core, ecofeminism examines the connections between the oppression of women and environmental degradation, but queer ecofeminism goes further by incorporating the diversity of gender identities and sexualities (Muthukrishnan & Venugopal; 2024).

Moving past mere definitions, illustrating the impact of queer ecofeminism in 2026 is an invitation to resist thinking from a crisis place. It suggests that even in the face of a climate and social emergency, we must not let urgency blind us to the work of dismantling and reimagining unequal social structures. The emergency situation tends to shift the focus from the cause of the problem to the immediate solution. From this perspective, responsibility for many of these crises should be acknowledged more explicitly. Until now, the issue of pollution and crossing of at least six planetary boundaries has been addressed primarily in terms of relations between states: for example, when one country commits to transferring or offsetting carbon quotas in favour of another.

In these cases, it is implicitly recognised that some countries have contributed more than others to global emissions, instability, and environmental damage. This logic echoes the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR), which asserts that while the climate crisis is a global burden, responsibility is not split equally. Instead, it is distributed based on each nation's historical carbon footprint and its current capacity to respond to the emergency.

In the 1990s, many ecofeminist theorists shifted their focus to fundamental criticism of essentialism, criticising books such as Caroline Merchant's The Death of Nature (1980), and arguing that certain branches of the movement had inadvertently reinforced the idea of a special, inherent bond between women and nature, a concept critics felt limited women to biological or traditional roles rather than liberating them. This tendency forces ecofeminists into a false dilemma. Compelling the movement to operate within such binaries is risky, as it suggests ecofeminism is trapped in an "either/or" framework. In reality, the primary goal of contemporary ecofeminist methodology is to challenge and deconstruct the very Western dualisms that create hierarchical divides such as culture vs. nature, man vs. woman, human vs. non-human, reason vs. emotion, and theory vs. practice(Estévez-Saá, 2018).

In academic spaces, queer ecofeminism has offered powerful conceptual tools: relational ontology, intersectionality, the rejection of binaries, situated knowledge, and transformative praxis. These models, which emerged during the third wave of feminism (dating back to around the 1990s), that Evans defines as characterised by “overlapping and contradictory ways of being interpreted” (Evans, 2015) express the complexity, criticality and multiplicity of the current of thought from which they originated, and that framework helps us understand that the context in which the climate polycrisis has arisen is not just an environmental issue, but a crisis of relationships between humans and ecosystems, (who, after all, are part of those ecosystems themselves), between physical bodies and built infrastructures, and between knowledge and power. Yet, while the theory is metamorphic, its circulation is not; these radical insights remain, most of the time, trapped within academic jargon, institutional spaces, and paywalled journals.

A gap persists between academic work and everyday practice. Queer care, I argue, is not only an ethical orientation toward bodies and ecologies, but in fact,  an epistemological intervention into how knowledge itself is produced, shared, and legitimised.

A relational epistemology

In the queer ecofeminist conception, the relational ontology’ perspective challenges the idea of isolated subjects, and, instead, places beings within networks of interdependence. It is from this basis that the question of access to knowledge emerges, which is unquestionably never neutral.

If knowledge is situated, then producing it requires accountability, in the sense that requires transparency, equal access to knowledge and influence in the creation of that knowledge. Queer care unsettles the image of the detached researcher observing from a distance. It asks us to recognise positionality, to refuse extractive methodologies, and to co-create knowledge with those whose lives are implicated in the research. It destabilises the hierarchy between expert and subject, between theory and lived experience. Therefore, is not only a methodological adjustment, but a political stance.

In queer ecofeminist thought, care is not reduced to a private or moral duty, but redefined as a political and relational practice. Drawing on J.Tronto’s and B Fisher definition, in the article Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring (1990), care encompasses everything we do to maintain, repair, and sustain our world including bodies, communities, and ecosystems. It highlights interdependence as a structural condition of life rather than a weakness. Queer ecofeminism reclaims care from its historical confinement to feminised, racialised, and underpaid/unpaid labour. Instead of rejecting care because it has been exploited under patriarchal and capitalist systems, it seeks to politicise and transform it. Care becomes a site of resistance: a conscious, collective commitment to sustaining life beyond profit-driven logics.

If we shift our focus from humans to living beings, the spectrum of possibilities that open up to us is infinite. Just think of natural ecosystems, where if one species becomes extinct, the consequences affect not only that species, but also all other animal and plant species. The entire ecosystem loses its balance and demands a new equilibrium. It is in this sense that care must be deconstructed from the concept of caring for, and recognised for what it is: the dimension and condition of existence.

Nancy Fraser’s critique of capitalism in Contradictions of Capital and Care (2016) explores how care and social reproduction are systematically invisibilised despite being foundational to economic systems. Similarly, ecological economics exposes how ecosystem services are only recognised when translated into monetary value. Both cases demonstrate how capitalism marginalises what sustains life.

Reclaiming care, therefore, means shifting societal values from productivity and extraction toward vulnerability, reciprocity, and justice.

In this sense, queer ecofeminism proposes a reorganisation of political and economic systems around interdependence and collective responsibility, offering an alternative ethical foundation for navigating ecological and social crises.

Activism as knowledge practice

Activism can be dismissed as reactive or anti-intellectual. Yet queer ecofeminist perspectives challenge this divide by recognising activism as a site of knowledge production in its own right. Drawing on Jasbir Puar’s understanding of assemblages, knowledge does not emerge from isolated subjects, but from shifting constellations of bodies, institutions, infrastructures, and power relations. Therefore, what counts as legitimate knowledge is shaped within these geopolitical configurations, where visibility, authority, and credibility are unevenly distributed.

Another perspective worth considering is that of Patricia Hill Collins, articulated in her book Black Feminist Thought (2000). In this work, Collins reminds us that knowledge has historically been produced and sustained through collective practices. Black feminist epistemology highlights that theory does not emerge in abstraction, but rather through dialogue, lived experience, and, above all, shared struggles. 

“Reading Black women’s intellectual work, I have come to see how it is possible to be both centered in one’s own experiences and engaged in coalitions with others. In this sense, Black feminist thought works on behalf of Black women, but does so in conjunction with other similar social justice projects." (Collins, 2000)

These perspectives disrupt the vision of legitimate and recognised knowledge as an external actor to events, and bring the relevance of knowledge as situated and experienced to the forefront. It is in this light that practising queer care in the context of activism means resisting capitalist and exclusionary logics, including the appropriation of histories, labour and suffering for institutional purposes. This affirms that those who organise on the margins are not merely applying theory, but are an essential part of the process of constructing it. If academic theory is to remain politically meaningful, activism cannot be treated as an add-on. It must be recognised as epistemic labour. 

Queering knowledge: Who gets to know?

To queer knowledge is to interrogate not only its content but its authority: who is recognised as a knower, and under what conditions. Academic institutions continue to privilege Western, institutional, and economically secure voices, while access to education, funding, and publication remains uneven. Even critical traditions can reproduce exclusion through citation practices and gatekeeping structures. Queering knowledge entails disrupting hierarchies of expertise, valuing embodied and experiential forms of insight, challenging paywalled economies of research, and refusing the reduction of marginalised communities to objects of study. Thus, making it clear that they are producers of theory, not simply its subjects.

Climate justice is inseparable from knowledge justice. Ecological transition requires transforming not only energy systems but epistemic infrastructures. Queer care, in this sense, becomes a practice of redistribution: fostering collaborative pedagogies, expanding spaces of dialogue beyond institutional boundaries, and designing modes of learning grounded in reciprocity rather than hierarchy. In the face of the climate polycrisis, neither technocratic solutions nor isolated critique are sufficient.

What we need is an approach that brings together theory, activism, accessibility and shared contextual responsibility, but also historical responsibility. Queer ecofeminism aims at this integration. The goal, therefore, is to translate conceptual insight into structural change. Addressing the climate polycrisis requires collective intelligibility and shared action, conditions that emerge when knowledge is co-produced, accessible, and accountable. Bridging the gap between theory and practice is not simply a communicative challenge, but a matter of epistemic justice.

Transformative action begins when the infrastructures of knowledge itself are reshaped to support interdependence rather than hierarchy.