Gender, Energy and the Aeolian: Windfarm Developments and Saharawi Imaginaries in Occupied Western Sahara

Scholars in the energy humanities have revealed the gendered workings of the oil economy, the links between gendered violence and petroviolence, and how petroculture drives performances of femininity. In the context of such arguments, this chapter directs the discussion towards the gendering of renewable energy via one of its key sources: wind. While most studies of renewable energy and gender focus on the number of women in the industry’s workforce, here the focus is on how gender informs renewable energy at the discursive and imaginary levels. Using the case of corporate-led renewable energy developments on occupied land in Western Sahara, this chapter firstly argues that developers rely on discourses of wind and desert that reproduce colonial, gendered and racist tropes to promote their activities. Secondly, it argues that Saharawi poetry makes specifically gendered challenges to such colonial and racist discourses. Works by Limam Boisha and Bahia Awah, published in anthologies; Malainin Lakhal, published in a book-length collection; and Fatma Galia Mohammed Salem, widely available online, expose gendered, colonial violence, but their works also offer anticolonial and decolonising ways of viewing desert, wind and aeolian (i.e., pertaining to the wind) geology. The poets achieve this by questioning human exceptionalism in the desert ecosystem, by showcasing nonhuman desert agents, such as wind, and by repurposing traditional Ḥassānīya romantic poetry (where Ḥassānīya is the dialect of Arabic spoken by Saharawis). Consequently, the odes to the beauty of women of these female poets become gendered deserts that claim Western Sahara for Saharawis and do so based on love and respect between humans and more-than-human desert actors, rather than as determined by capitalist conceptions of land ownership.