Island Kings: Imperial Masculinity and Climate Fragilities

In this chapter we interrogate relations between masculinities and climate politics by focusing on global elites. The positionality of elite actors as white, wealthy, cis-gendered men is usually ignored, even by critical scholars of climate politics. We characterise their strategies as expressing “imperial masculinity”: that is, they assume they can use their extreme wealth to insulate themselves from climate insecurities. However, these strategies to make themselves invulnerable to climate disasters are ultimately hubristic. While climate impacts are indeed highly unequal, many of the places elite men use to display their wealth are highly climate-fragile. We use the example of Richard Branson and his Caribbean island to illustrate how hyper-elite men are indeed subject to climate impacts in ways that exceed their attempts to make themselves impregnable to the consequences of climate change.