Kristen Abatsis McHenry Getting Fracked: Gender Politics in Fracking Discourse H ydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) refers to an increasingly common tech- nology used in the United States to extract natural gas primarily from shale bedrock, a process that critics have linked to health problems, water contamination, and environmental degradation. In most media accounts, the safety of fracking has been portrayed as a contentious topic of debate between industry experts and activist laypeople in which each side claims to use science to support its positions. To date, most of the scholarly conversations regarding fracking have been rooted in environmental health and sciences or in political economy without explicit attention to gender. This article, however, examines the ways in which gender has been deployed in public dialogues about the en- vironmental and health impacts of fracking to make or contest truth claims about science and the environment by both industry advocates and antifrack- ing activists. It offers a discourse analysis of qualitative interviews and pro- industry websites, news accounts, and antifracking blogs and websites to illumi- nate the mechanisms of gender policing deployed by the oil and gas industry in response to this debate and the ways in which the technology of fracking contributes to a deepening of inequality on multiple levels. Taking a feminist technoscience approach, this analysis demonstrates that both gender oppres- sion and environmental domination are sustained in simultaneous and complex ways through the scientific discourse regarding fracking technology. Hydraulic fracturing is a technology used to extract reserves of natural gas that requires millions of gallons of water and numerous chemicals. Its potential health effects vary depending on engineering infrastructure and product trans- port. Fracking is defined here as an industrial method of accessing natural gas that involves heavy transport and the use and disposal of water and chemicals and thus refers to the entire industrial operation involving drilling, fracturing, wastewater, and transportation (Mooney 2011; Americans Against Fracking 2017). In this, it reflects the most common way in which nonindustry people refer to the process while challenging its safety rather than the way industry I am deeply grateful to Moon Charania, Martina Caretta, and two anonymous reviewers for helping to craft this essay. I am grateful to the Race in Biomedicine working group of Atlanta, and I drew inspiration from our work and other feminist technoscience scholars such as Banu Subramaniam and Rajani Bhatia. I am also thankful to Beverly Guy-Sheftall for her encourage- ment and support. [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2021, vol. 47, no. 1] © 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2021/4701-0012$10.00