Racialized Disaster Patriarchy: An Intersectional Model for Understanding Disaster Ten Years after Hurricane Katrina

The year 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall just outside of New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Critical narratives point to the glaring racial and economic inequality that contextualized the catastrophe. However, most Katrina discourse has been limited by its neglect of intersectional feminist analysis. In this article I introduce a model for making intersectional sense of Hurricane Katrina with lessons for the study of other disasters. By intersectional I mean a gender- and race-conscious framework that exposes the way in which structural sexism and racism came together to produce the disaster and even the social justice response to it. Following Naomi Klein’s (2005) use of the term “disaster capitalism,” I call the intersectional formation “racialized disaster patriarchy” as it refers to political, institutional, organizational, and cultural practices that converge before, during, and after disaster to produce injustice. Disaster patriarchy links the intersectional experience of disaster to the experience of recovery and the politics of the grassroots social movement for a just reconstruction.