Intime Infrastrukturen: Feministisch-geographische Perspektiven auf Energie

Abstract

Facing multiple and embodied inequalities inscribed in the energy system, this intervention argues for a feminist perspective on energy geographies. Extending critical research on urban infrastructure with concepts of care, it seeks to contribute to more just energy relations. In a first step, the article examines two energy fields: The home, where gender identities are produced and challenged, and the urban, where practices of solidarity oppose the conditions of care work in the context of neoliberal service provision. Shedding light on those „labourious spaces“, where urban materialities and its subjects are closely interconnected (Lancione and McFarlane, 2016), I reveal how heterogeneous infrastructural experiences are constantly contested within multiple entanglements of energy flows, gendered labour and care practices. In a second step, I provide three impulses for a relational perspective on energy. I argue for taking the intimate aspects of urban infrastructure as a starting point for feminist scholarship; for tracing a crisis of social reproduction along embodied energetic experiences; and for creating a collective vision of caring infrastructures.