The essay below originally appears as Chapter 15 of Mad Max and Philosophy.

Liberating Mother’s Milk: Imperator Furiosa’s Ecofeminist Revolution

Jacob Quick

Women hooked up to milking machines. “Breeders” wearing chastity belts. A masked man telling people not to “become addicted to water.” What in the world is going on here? In addition to imprisoning and subjugating women, Immortan Joe also hordes natural resources like water and uses it to control the people. In a post-apocalyptic nightmare, Immortan Joe has cruelly subjugated an entire society and ecosystem to his will. His empire is a patriarchal hellscape ravaged by greed, exploitation, and violence.

Clearly, Mad Max: Fury Road presents a world terrorized by misogyny and environmental catastrophe. Indeed, the connection between environmental degradation and misogyny lies at the heart of ecofeminism. According to ecofeminism, both nature and women are oppressed, objectified, and exploited by patriarchal systems, and this overlap of oppression is no mere coincidence. In many modern societies, the oppression of women goes hand-in-hand with the abuse of nature. In other words, patriarchy is not just bad news for women, it’s also bad news for the planet.

Ecofeminism is more than a fascinating theory, more than just analysis and criticism. Ecofeminists don’t just want to understand the world; they want to change it. Liberation from patriarchy is essential for the flourishing of all people and for the well-being of the natural world.  This is where our protagonist, Imperator Furiosa, grabs the wheel. She takes matters into her own hands, a decision that leads to a car chase to end all car chases. What we see unfold over the course of the film is nothing less than an ecofeminist revolution: one that not only liberates women, but also frees nature and its inhabitants from the shackles of patriarchal domination.

The Inhumanity of the Citadel

Needless to say, Immortan Joe’s Citadel is no paradise. We are introduced to the Citadel through the experience of Max, who is captured and forced to be a “Blood Bag” for Nux, a War Boy who supports Immortan Joe’s reign of terror. Nux is dangerously low on blood, and since Max is a universal donor, Nux seizes on the opportunity to pump Max’s blood into his own veins. This introduction to the Citadel has plenty of red flags: no healthy and desirable society has the habit of capturing, torturing, and enslaving people, let alone stealing their blood. But the injustices don’t end there.

Eventually, we get a broader perspective on the Citadel, beyond the cavernous walls of Max’s prison. Taking a step back, we see that the Citadel is a place of massive inequality. People at the bottom of the Citadel (geographically and socially) are impoverished. But this poverty is not simply about lack of money or income. The people don’t have immediate access to the most fundamental of natural resources: water. Immortan Joe keeps water reserves that he rarely, and reluctantly, share with the people, all the while commanding them not to “become addicted” to it.

Immortan Joe’s water reserves are located at the top of a cliff, forcing the people to (literally and metaphorically) look up to him and beg for hydration. The inequality of the Citadel, therefore, is captured in its architecture. Power, privilege, and natural resources are located at the heights of the Citadel’s cliffs. Not only is water stored hundreds of feet above the ground, but vegetation grows at the top of the cliffs. The Dag (one of the women running away from Joe) explains that the Citadel “has everything you need, as long as you’re not afraid of heights.” So, looking at the architecture of the Citadel, we have water, growth, nutrition, and abundance at the top, and scarcity and desperation at the bottom. In the Citadel, a privileged few reside “at the top” of society, where they have an excess of resources, while the majority reside “at the bottom” of society, where they have little-to-no access to necessities. So how do we make sense of this hierarchy?

Some ecofeminists propose that we can better understand oppression and injustice by taking a close look at the concepts of humanity and animality. At first glance, they may seem distinct: humans (homo sapiens) belong to one category and animals (in other words, animals that aren’t homo sapiens) belong to another. But if you think carefully about how the ideas of “human” and “animal” function in society, you will see that they aren’t as straightforward and distinct as they initially appear.

We generally believe that humans have basic rights that should be respected, but some humans enjoy luxury and privilege while others are treated “like animals.” We may think of animals as creatures that humans can kill and eat, but there are plenty of animals (like pets) that we treat like fellow humans (or, in some cases, even better than humans!). In other words, the terms “human” and “animal” aren’t simply scientific terms, but also concepts that represent many ideas about value, dignity, and purpose. “Animal” and “human” as concepts intersect and diverge in interesting ways.

Humanized Humans and Animalized Humans

To make sense of these concepts, contemporary philosopher Cary Wolfe introduced the notions of humanized humans and animalized humans.¹ Not long after Wolfe proposed this distinction, contemporary ecofeminist Carol Adams added the categories of animalized women and feminized animals.² As we will see, these categories map onto the social hellscape of Mad Max: Fury Road, and they help us understand how each character fits into the politics of the Citadel. So what are these concepts? And how do they apply to our characters? We can start by looking at the people at the top of society: humanized humans .

Humanized humans have all the respect and rights that humans should have. They have access to necessities, opportunities to pursue their goals, and a legal system that protects their well-being and interests. In Immortan Joe’s Citadel, the humanized humans  are Immortan Joe and his sons. Joe and his heirs have plenty of water, food, and technology, as well as slaves who cater to their needs. The entire political structure of the Citadel is organized to support their health, wealth, and happiness.

Animalized humans are humans who are perceived and treated (in one way or another) like animals. Animalized humans suffer various indignities: they are thrown into cages, deprived of resources, enslaved, exploited, and killed. Animalized humans are called “brute savages,” “barbarians,” “pests,” “pigs,” “snakes,” “rats,” “beasts,” and a whole host of other derogatory terms. Animalized humans are dehumanized: they are perceived as subhuman creatures who (for whatever reason) don’t deserve to be treated with human dignity.³ Using derogatory, animal-related language is an effective way to dehumanize people. It’s no surprise, that historically groups of people are animalized before they become victims of genocide.⁴

The Citadel’s Animalized Humans

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of animalized humans in the Citadel. The War Boys are treated like subhumans in that they are forced to devote their lives to violence and war. Brainwashed, they believe that their greatest calling is to die while killing other people all for the sake of Immortan Joe and his empire. Joe even calls them “my half-life War Boys,” indicating their short life span. Since the War Boys are taught that the lives of animalized humans (which includes them and their enemies) have no inherent value, they wreak havoc wherever they go, killing without compunction and celebrating their own deaths as mere collateral damage. That is what Immortan Joe wants because he sees the War Boys as nothing other than “kamakrazee” “battle fodder.”

The War Pups, the children who are painted in white, are also animalized humans. They are forced to serve Immortan Joe and his heirs, catering to their every whim and following the orders of their superiors. When a War Pup is old enough, he becomes a War Boy. So, War Pups’ lives will always revolve around pleasing the humanized humans of the Citadel. It is no surprise, then, that they are called “pups.” After all, they have only subhuman status in the Citadel.

The most prominent animalized human is Max, describes himself at the beginning of the film as “hunted by scavengers… A man reduced to a single instinct: survive.” And survival is no easy task. After enjoying some fast food (in the form of a two-headed lizard), Max runs for his life from a group of War Boys who eventually capture and cage him.

We then learn the reason why Max was hunted down: they want his blood. The Citadel tattoos Max with “Universal Donor” and tries to brand him with the Citadel symbol. Max is forced to hang upside down while Nux takes his blood. But Nux refuses to stay still for the blood transfusion because the battle drums begin pounding, calling him to wage holy war for Immortan Joe. Creatively, Nux mounts Max onto the front of his car so he can drain his blood bag while driving on Fury Road.

Max’s introduction is rife with animal imagery. Max (who looks unkempt and wild) is operating solely on the basic animal instinct of survival, so he eats a raw lizard whole without hesitation. Max is then hunted down and captured like a wild animal. After his capture, he is thrown in a cage and shocked with a cattle prod. Forced to wear a mask that resembles a muzzle, he hangs upside down like a bat while his blood is drained from his body. What’s more, when Nux proposes mounting Max to his car, another War Boy objects, “It’s got a muzzle on it. It’s a raging feral!” As if to re-enforce Max’s subhuman status, he isn’t called by a proper name but is simply referred to as “it.” Max is not considered a proper human with his own thoughts or feelings. He’s just another instrument of war; a feral animal, reduced to his survival instinct, who is valued only for the blood that can be drained from his veins. In other words, Max is an animalized human.

Feminized Animals and Animalized Women

Two examples of feminized animals are cows and chickens. We eat a fair amount of eggs and dairy, or what Adams calls “feminized protein, that is, protein that was produced by a female body.”⁵ Adams notes that there’s a particular disadvantage to being a female animal in food production: “Besides the bee’s production of honey, the only beings who produce food from their own body while living are females of child-bearing age who produce milk and eggs. Female animals become oppressed by their femaleness and become essentially surrogate wet-nurses. These other animals are oppressed as Mother animals.”⁶ In animal agriculture, female reproductive systems are used to produce products that can be sold for a profit. Cows produce milk to feed their calves, but this process is manipulated and the milk is taken from them for the sake of human consumption.

Fury Road doesn’t show us any feminized animals like cows or chickens. There are barely any animals in the barren wasteland. But Adams’s discussion of the dairy and egg industries sheds light on the role of animalized women in the Citadel. Animalized women are dehumanized and oppressed through their sexuality. They aren’t treated as persons in their own right but are sexually objectified: they have societal value insofar as they can sexually gratify others and reproduce. In the Citadel, there are two categories of animalized women: the women who produce Mother’s Milk and the breeders.

The fact that there are no cows in the Citadel doesn’t stop Immortan Joe from creating a disturbing dairy industry of his own. He uses animalized women to produce feminized protein: Mother’s Milk. Just as humans hook cows up to machines to take their milk, Immortan Joe hooks these women up to milking machines so that he can consume and commodify their milk. The women are oppressed through their lactation. And if this machine milking is not disturbing enough, a close look reveals that the women aren’t holding human babies, but toy dolls. They aren’t allowed to nurse their own children but are forced to produce milk for the humanized humans of the Citadel.

Joe’s enslaved wives are also oppressed through their reproductive systems. As their name suggests, the Citadel values the “breeders” insofar as they can produce healthy heirs for Immortan Joe. They are animalized women who are forced to produce humanized humans. Their subhuman status is indicated by their name: we typically use the term “breeder” for breeding animals, like horses, cattle, and dogs. At one point, someone tells Nux that Imperator Furiosa is helping Joe’s “prize breeders” escape. These prize breeders are kept well-dressed and clean, and Immortan Joe speaks of them as if they are well-groomed show animals.

Looking at these various categories of people, we see that the Citadel has a horrific social structure. A few people at the top of society are valued, while everyone else is devalued as subhuman. But the mistreatment of people is not the only cause for concern. The Citadel is also estranged from the natural world.

Immortan Joe’s Unnatural Empire

Immortan Joe’s society has a bizarre relationship with the land and its natural resources, treating the natural world in an unnatural way. Something is off. We come to realize that Immortan Joe owns everything. He owns the land, the water, the greenhouses… . What is going on here?

According to ecofeminists like Val Plumwood (1939-2008), patriarchal ways of thinking present the myth that “real men” conquer and consume “mother nature”.⁷ Masculinity is associated with a man’s ability to dominate his surrounding environment and its inhabitants. Immortan Joe embodies the masculinity that ecofeminism criticizes: he sees all of mother nature (including women) as an object to be conquered, controlled, and consumed. When he looks at nature, he doesn’t see an environment to live in and interact with, but an object to be owned.⁸ In this way, the Citadel is Immortan Joe’s attempt at turning all that he sees into private property; property that he alone owns.

But Immortan Joe doesn’t simply own land, water, and resources; he also owns people. Or, put another way, he owns people because he owns natural resources. The Dag explains that “because he owns it [water], he owns all of us.” When Immortan Joe tries to shoot Furiosa, he refrains from firing the gun because The Splendid Angharad has put her pregnant body in his line of fire. Joe yells, “Splendid! That’s my child! That’s my property!” As Joe sees it, they are not human women, but animalized women whose bodies and babies belong to him. He even forces them to wear gruesome chastity belts to reserve their sexuality and reproductive systems for himself.

Immortan Joe’s unhealthy relationship with nature pervades the Citadel and even influences language. People refer to organic objects using inorganic language, and vice versa. They call bullets “Antiseed” because you “Plant one and watch something die,” and the Citadel gets its bullets from “the Bullet Farm.” A disturbing irony is at play here: bullets are inorganic weapons, but people use organic farming terms to describe them. Instead of encouraging natural agriculture that cultivates life (like planting trees), the Citadel demands violent conquest that causes death (like bullet farming). This violence is dressed up in agricultural terminology.

While inorganic objects are given natural names, natural resources have unnatural names. Max’s blood is described as “high-octane” as if it were another form of guzzoline. Even something as basic as water goes by “Aqua Cola.” By calling water “Aqua Cola,” Immortan Joe is branding water for the same reason he brands people: to claim property. The more people think of water as Aqua Cola, the less they will perceive it as a natural resource that must be shared. To be fair, when Immortan Joe calls his branded Aqua Cola “water,” he treats it as a precious commodity. He instructs the people of the Citadel not to “become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.” Addicted to water? He talks about hydration like it’s a dependence on Coca-Cola. So Immortan Joe hoards the water for himself but speaks as if he is in possession of a rare product that he benevolently provides to the masses.

All of these cruel practices and misguided terms highlight a central fact about the Citadel: the people are alienated from the land. No one is allowed to relate to the world as a healthy human being. They aren’t even able to hydrate themselves, never mind grow fruit and vegetables. No wonder Nux doesn’t even know what a tree is when he comes across one. The people of the Citadel are trapped in a machine: an oil-fueled, unnatural operation of violence and oppression. But the Citadel is about to face its most formidable foe: Imperator Furiosa.

“We Are Not Things!”

As the engines rev at the beginning of the film, Immortan Joe proudly salutes Imperator Furiosa as the leader of the mission to get more guzzoline and bullets. But Joe doesn’t know that Furiosa has hatched an escape plan. She’s going to help liberate Joe’s “breeders” so that they can be who they truly are: women in their own right.

The women reclaim their own dignity by climbing into Furiosa’s war rig. When Immortan Joe figures out what has happened, he rushes to their former cell where he finds that his wives have left after painting “We Are Not Things” and “Who Destroyed the World?” on the walls. Miss Giddy remains behind to confront Joe, telling him, “They are not your property. You cannot own a human being!” The message is loud and clear: no matter how much Joe claims to own them, they are not his property. They are more than reproductive vessels, more than animalized women. They are human beings, full stop.

Furiosa’s plan is to head to the Green Place of Many Mothers, where she grew up as a child until she was kidnapped and brought to the Citadel. The Green Place of Many Mothers is a place where women live in equality with one another, a landscape that is not subject to the tyrannical rule of greedy men like Joe. But when Furiosa and her crew finally arrive there, she learns that the fertile ground of her memories has now soured. One of the Mothers, though, keeps seeds and grows them like potted plants in animal skulls. This small practice shows the resilience of hope in a bleak world. The plants also symbolize feminine fertility and the Mothers’ harmony with nature. But the Mothers need more than potted plants to sustain their community. They must plant their hopes in fertile ground, and The Green Place is no longer green. They must move on to more habitable land.

Initially, Furiosa and the others decide to drive in the opposite direction of the Citadel, as far as their fuel can take them, on the off chance that they come across water. But Max intercepts them and convinces Furiosa that their only hope of finding water lies in returning to the Citadel. More importantly, returning to the Citadel can also bring what Furiosa has been looking for all along: redemption. Furiosa wants to atone for the terrible things she had done for Immortan Joe in the past, and now she has an opportunity to do so. Instead of running away from Joe and the Citadel, she’s going to bring the Green Place of Many Mothers right to his doorstep. What was once a daring escape plan has now transformed into a full-scale ecofeminist revolution.

“Who Killed the World?”

As Imperator Furiosa and her crew make their way back to the Citadel, several characters seize the opportunity to redeem themselves. Redemption begins with taking responsibility for their actions and resolving to improve themselves and the world around them. Earlier in the film, the women confront Nux and explain that Joe sees him as nothing other than “Battle Fodder,” just as he sees the women as nothing but “Breeding Stock”:

Capable: “You’re an old man’s Battle Fodder! Killing everyone and everything.”

Nux: “We’re not to blame!”

The Splendid Aranghad: “Then who killed the world?”

At this point in the film, Nux refuses to take responsibility for his role in the destruction of the world. He is correct that it is not all his fault: he was already born and raised in terrible conditions. But he’s not innocent either. Once Nux stops trying to excuse himself and begins contributing to a worthy cause, he begins to travel his road to redemption.

The redemptive character arcs show that Fury Road is not a film about “women against men,” but rather an epic tale of humans reclaiming their dignity in the face of rampant dehumanization. The women in the narrative not only insist that they are subjects in their own right, but they help humanize others by treating them with respect and dignity. Just look at Max and Nux: they were treated like animalized humans and acted accordingly, but their encounter with Furiosa and the other women empowers them to reclaim their humanity.

In a beautiful twist, Nux fulfills his own prophecy that he “will die historic on the Fury Road,” but not in the way he initially expected. Instead of dying for Immortan Joe and the Citadel, he dies to liberate the Citadel from Immortan Joe’s tyrannical rule. He doesn’t give his life for the sake of personal glory or to be “McFeasting with the heroes of all time” in Valhalla. Instead, Nux gives his life to save the ones he truly cares for; those who helped him to become fully human in his own right.

Similarly, Max begins to act like a human after the women treat him like one. Imperator Furiosa empowers Max to take his muzzle off, and once he does so, he stops acting on his survival instinct. Instead, he risks his life to save others. In a moving scene near the end of the film, he gives Imperator Furiosa his own blood to prevent her from dying. While transfusing his blood into her veins, he finally reclaims his own personhood as he declares: “Max. My name is Max. That’s my name.” The feral, no-named “Blood Bag” who was running for his life at the beginning of the film now reclaims his identity, drives toward danger, and freely gives his blood to save the life of someone else.

At the end of the film, we see the fruit of Furiosa’s revolution as she inaugurates a new era. Immortan Joe has been defeated, and the Citadel is under new management. But Furiosa and the women don’t simply replace Joe. They liberate the Citadel from oppression and scarcity. As they are elevated on the platform, they take others with them, helping people onto the platform rather than kicking them off. The women who are now liberated from Joe’s rule unleash the water for the thirsty land and people to drink. Everyone can find redemption in the land of equality and abundance.

Where Must We Go?

In true ecofeminist fashion, our heroes respond to the call of redemption. As ecofeminists note, the regrettable state of our world is not any single individual’s fault, but this doesn’t excuse us from accepting the responsibility we have for the ecological crisis. Instead of pointing fingers or deflecting the blame away from ourselves, we must face the facts… and ourselves.

The movie ends with the question: “Where must we go… we who wander the Wasteland in search of our better selves?” The answer to that question, in the story arc of Fury Road, lies in reclaiming selfhood from those who would diminish it. In a barren and unjust world, we must insist upon the dignity of the earth and the equality of its inhabitants, no matter the personal cost. In the end, Fury Road invites us to ponder the dangerous, revolutionary idea that true redemption is not found in simple survival, but in radical solidarity.

1. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 101.
2. There are other categories as well, such as Wolfe’s humanized animals and animalized animals, but since these are not as relevant for the Citadel since it doesn’t have many animals.
3. I will be using contemporary philosopher David Livingstone Smith’s definition of dehumanization throughout this chapter, which can be found in David Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). According to David Livingstone Smith, “To dehumanize another person is to conceive of them as a subhuman creature,” 19.
4. Ibid., 9-21.
5. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), xxxi.
6. Ibid., 62.
7. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), 106-107.
8. Ibid., 1.

The essay above originally appears as Chapter 15 of Mad Max and Philosophy.