Gender and Environmental Justice in Louisiana: Blurring the boundaries of public and private spheres HILDA E. KURTZ University of Georgia, Athens, USA Abstract Many scholars have examined the implications and effects of a putative dichotomy between public-as-masculine and private-as-feminine spheres on community activism, and suggest that women’s community activism blurs this ideological divide in numerous ways. This article draws on a case study of a siting conflict in St. James Parish, Louisiana, to examine how, in the process of blurring boundaries between gendered spheres of interest and activity, predominantly women environmental justice activists contended with differently gendered contexts. Concepts of performance and performativity shed light on how gendered hierarchies of public and private sphere activism both constrained and enabled the protest group’s political practice. Key Words: Gender; environmental justice; performance; performativity; activism Introduction Recognizing the permeability of public and private allows us to identify spaces, interests, and actions that are more or less public without implying they are either absolutely or ideally public. It also allows the possibility that the relationship between public and private may change over time with respect to different issues, or for different social groups or individuals as the power relations that shape them change. (Staeheli, 1996, p. 605, citing Benhabib, 1992) The national environmental justice (EJ) movement in the USA is partially structured around a gendered division of labor, in which most of the grassroots activist work is done by women, while men are more visible in positions of national leadership (Di Chiro, 1992). This distinction is not entirely clear-cut, but it is reinforced in movement discourse and general understandings among activists at the grassroots. Such a gendered division of labor partially re-inscribes Correspondence: Hilda E. Kurtz, Department of Geography, University of Georgia, 204 GG Building, Athens, GA 30602-2502, USA. Email: hkurtz@uga.edu Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 409–426, August 2007 ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online/07/040409-18 q 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09663690701439710