SEXTANT: masculinities, sexualities & decolonialities

ABSTRACT

This article explores the trope of fertility-anxiety in the work of imagining post-apocalyptic ecologies where fertile women are considered scarce resources, in the cult-favourites, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood and the film Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) directed by George Miller. I introduce the concept of ‘petropatriarchy’ to describe hegemonic forces which take advantage of gender inequalities to control economies of extraction, as illustrated in these texts. By interrogating the petropatriarchy’s relationship with oil as a fetishised fluid, I propose that these texts illuminate a similar fetishisation of the reproductive fluids, milk and blood—one that manifests out of the dwindling of oil resources and the unsustainability of oil. I read the petropatriarchy’s inability to think beyond modes of extraction and its reliance on hyper-regulation of women as a manifestation of a melancholy attachment to an unfulfilled, masculine, oil imaginary. This petromelancholia however, is perpetuated by the leaking, unruly female body’s refusal to be subsumed.

KEY WOrDS

petromasculinity, social reproduction, petrofiction, ecofeminism

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