Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Energy Research & Social Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/erss Original research article Hegemonic stories in environmental advocacy testimonials Kirstin Munro Department of Economics and Finance, Peter J. Tobin College of Business, St. John’s University, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Queens, NY 11439, United States ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Feminist theory Gender Motherhood Climate change Narrative persuasion ABSTRACT Several environmental advocacy organizations have emerged that use narrative persuasion techniques to change climate change opinions and overcome climate change inaction. Written from the perspective of parents and grandparents (particularly mothers), the narratives in these testimonials use socio-cultural values and relatable images to motivate environmental concern. This article identifies pernicious hegemonic themes in the testi- monial stories that have been featured on the websites of environmental advocacy organizations and critically analyzes these narratives using feminist and queer theoretical frameworks. Two themes are highlighted for analysis: first, themes about the special knowledges, powers, emotions, and duties of motherhood; and second, themes about the importance of preserving the environment for children and their offspring in the future. The oppressive influence of these particular narratives has been argued at length in previous research. Efforts to mitigate climate change are important, but attempts to shape public opinion should not simultaneously re- produce harmful myths about women and motherhood. 1. Introduction A minority of Americans report worrying about climate change “a great deal” [1]. People tend to have a preference for present con- sumption and have trouble conceptualizing events in the future [2], and this may be particularly true for an abstract phenomenon like climate change whose impacts, for many in the Global North, are yet to come. Climate change opinions and environmental concern in the United States appear to be largely a matter of tribal knowledge, with opinions increasingly divided along partisan lines [3,4]. Brulle and coauthors [5] find that access to scientific information has a minimal effect on public climate change opinions, and Leiserowitz [6] finds that climate change opinions are formed on the basis of experiential, psychological, and socio-cultural influences rather than analytical ones. These findings from public opinion research are supported by social psychology and marketing studies on the efficacy of narrative persua- sion techniques for overcoming psychological resistance—the motiva- tion to avoid a change in attitude or behavior when presented with new information [7–9]. Public opinion research also suggests the usefulness of narratives for mobilizing participants in social movements [10]. Recent research indicates that these methods are particularly effective when the subject identifies with the narrator [11]. A growing number of environmental advocacy organizations have emerged that use narrative persuasion techniques. Organizations like Mothers Out Front, Mothers for Nuclear, Grands-parents pour le Climat, and DearTomorrow use testimonial stories to overcome inaction and resistance in their intended audiences. Targeting parents and grand- parents, particularly mothers, the narratives in these testimonials use socio-cultural values and relatable images to motivate concern for en- vironmental issues. The synthesis of existing research on both climate change opinions and persuasion methods indicates that narratives may be an effective tactic to increase the proportion of people who see cli- mate change as a very serious problem that merits addressing. However, narratives are not neutral and in fact often reproduce existing power relations. Powerful groups preserve the institutions that maintain their power by obtaining the consent of less powerful groups through a process known as hegemony. This consent is obtained not by force but through subtle yet pernicious narratives woven into the cul- tural material of everyday life that justify and reinforce distributions of power [12,p. 11–16]. This article identifies pernicious hegemonic nar- ratives in the testimonial stories featured on the websites of environ- mental advocacy organizations, and critically analyzes these narratives using feminist and queer theoretical frameworks. Two themes are highlighted for analysis: first, themes about the special knowledges, powers, emotions, and duties of motherhood; and second, themes about the importance of preserving the environment for children and their offspring in the future. The oppressive influence of these particular narratives has been argued at length in feminist and queer research [13–18]. Recent studies question the efficacy of narrative persuasion tech- niques in environmental advocacy campaigns [19–21]. At the same time, MIT recently awarded DearTomorrow top honors in its climate http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.05.038 Received 15 October 2016; Received in revised form 29 May 2017; Accepted 30 May 2017 E-mail address: munrok@stjohns.edu. Energy Research & Social Science 31 (2017) 233–239 Available online 28 June 2017 2214-6296/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK