“I Don’t Feel Like It’s Extra Work”: Gender, Parenting and Everyday Sustainability Labour

Abstract

In this article we enlist the feminist lens of the everyday to theorise the way parenting and environmental sustainability intersect in the lives of parents committed to combating climate change. Based on interviews with 27 parents from 20 families in Iceland, we interrogate whether and how gender fractures parental sustainability labour - the work that goes into making family lives environmentally sustainable - in a country which is often described as the most gender equal in the world. While extant research is largely disjointed, our data reveals that everyday sustainability labour is undertaken disproportionately by mothers and that it encompasses overlapping yet distinct physical, cognitive, emotional and pedagogical dimensions. However, mothers reconciled their commitment to gender equality with their lived experiences of gendered division of sustainability labour by re-framing the latter as preference, hobby or enjoyable activity. We situate these gendered narratives of parental sustainability labour within broader discourses of neoliberal climate governance that seeks to shifts the responsibility of climate action to individual households and intensive parenting ideologies that individualises child-rearing, prompting parents to make informed choices for their children’s future. We conclude by reflecting on how gendered politics of child-rearing and neoliberal climate governance are shaping each other.