Extractivism, dispossession and gendered transformations of territoriality

The primary commodity boom of the last decade – driven by global transformations of emerging and speculative economies – has clearly generated new forms of unequal development and dispossession. Anti-extractive and indigenous movements continue to challenge the expropriation of resource-rich lands, but their resistance is complicated by subjective transformations in these territories. In Latin American countries where redistributive projects benefitted from high oil, gas and mineral prices, “neo-extractive” policies were established at the overlap of social democratic rights and neoliberal appropriation. Dispossession in these contexts does not always mean the direct loss of land, but rather, the transformation of inhabitant’s relationships with their surroundings, and the incorporation of these relations into capital accumulation processes.

In the Ecuadorian Amazon, for example, as developmental and extractive projects further intervene in indigenous communities’ daily activities, their territories increasingly separate the human from the natural world, the productive from the reproductive sphere. Gendered territories are reconfigured, with women’s care work and activities bounded not only to the human, but also to the family and the household. Activities that sustain social and natural reproduction – including participation in cycles of fertility, growth and waste interdependent with nature – are thus progressively gendered, domesticated and devalued. These redefinitions of the situated territories of care differentiate and increase men and women’s dependence on commodity and labor markets. New subjectivities – more social than ecological – are shaped through affective, political economic processes, in which the institutionalized violence that structures inequalities is anchored in gendered transformations of territoriality.