Women, Networks, and Care for Life in the Face of Precarization: Contested Territorialities in Rural Contexts of Uruguay

In this paper, I aim to present the findings of my doctoral thesis titled 'Women, Networks, and the Care for Life in the Face of Precarization: Disputed Territorialities in Rural Contexts in Uruguay.' The objective of this research is to understand how the subjectivities of women in struggle are shaped in response to the precarization of life in rural areas where agribusiness coexists with family farming, and to uncover the insights that emerge from women's struggles as they care for life in these territories in Uruguay.

I situate myself within the field of Latin American feminist political ecology to explore the feminization of territorial struggles through collaborative and feminist research conducted in a contested region in eastern Uruguay. The territorial conflict manifests in the expansion of the rice agribusiness, which threatens livelihoods by gradually displacing family farming over the years. In the face of ongoing destruction and threats to life, women organize to denounce the impacts on health, the degradation of ecosystems, and the depopulation of rural areas. While the predominantly masculinized rice agribusiness dries wetlands, poisons the water, harms people's health, destroys native forests, concentrates land, and pushes out family farming, women resist and promote practices that care for human and more-than-human life within their communities through family agriculture.

The central questions guiding this research are: What do the strategies employed by women to care for life in disputed rural territories in Uruguay reveal? And how are the subjectivities of women in struggle constructed in response to the precarization of life in rural areas where agribusiness coexists with family farming?