Coordinating Council for Women in History Plenary: The Erotic History of Oil—Sexuality and Energy in an Age of Crisis

What connects oil to the intimate worlds of care, desire, and labor? This talk explores the gendered and sexual labor and erotic sentiments that sustain our current energy regime by examining the processes that transform nature into wealth. Tracking the erotic life of energy, from the social reproductive labor that turns crude into commodity to the petroleum and petrochemical outputs that structure gendered notions of good living, the talk reveals energy to be more than a material resource. Fossil fuels are foundational to modern sentiments, identities, and hierarchies. If historians have a role to play in this uncertain future, it lies in accounting for the desires oil has enabled and foreclosed as we imagine a more just and equitable world to come after.