Exploring how commoning helps reconfigure feminist analytical tools in times of socio-ecological crises

Commoning, the processes of the production of community through collective management of a commons, is widely practiced in Japan, but commoning, as an analytic, is rarely used by feminist scholars in Japan. It is forecasted that Japan’s demographic transition combined with the wave of conservative politics will both threaten existing commoning activities and impose negative commons on large segments of the population. This essay explores the productivity of the analytic of commoning, which derives from postcapitalist community economies and feminist political ecology for our times of socio-ecological crises. Drawing on a case study of older women’s entrepreneurial activities in rural Japan, I make connections between commoning and concepts such as gender, intersectionality, economy, community care, agency, and transformation, which are already familiar analytical tools of feminist scholars in Japan. Commoning increases the visibility of productive but often overlooked dimensions. I discuss how reconfiguring the conceptual tools we use to include commoning makes it possible to see new potential paths towards transformations from exploitative, patriarchal and extractive to less exploitative and more just socio-ecological relations in our times of socio-ecological crises.