Forests are critical spaces that shape and enable gendered subjectivities in culturally and historically specific ways. However, scholarly work on forest or biodiversity conservation continues to take a very perfunctory view on gender–environment relationships. Many projects remain gender blind or view everyday practices of forest resource collection by women through a transactional or economic lens. Research has shown that forests are spaces wherein identities of women are entwined with their everyday activities in the forest. In this article, we demonstrate the gendered nature of forests of the Corbett Tiger Reserve (CTR) in India, and their different socio-cultural framings. We reveal how the forest spaces of the CTR are used by women for a wide variety of cultural and livelihood needs. We further show how biodiversity conservation practice in such forest spaces alters the activities of women in a myriad of ways. The increasing use of digital technologies in biodiversity conservation shapes how the forest space is observed and governed. We argue that the use of digital technologies for forest governance such as camera traps and drones tends to transform these forests into masculinized spaces that extend the patriarchal gaze of society to the forest. Finally, we reflect on how the use of digital technologies for biodiversity conservation is easily co-opted for purposes beyond conservation that reinforce patriarchal norms and propagate gendered structural violence.
The Gendered Forest: Digital Surveillance Technologies for Conservation and Gender-Environment Relationships
Year: 2024
