Women’s resistance to extractivism. A transnational embodied framework for analysis.

Mineral extraction is a foundational aspect of development, whether it is driven by fossil fuels or renewable energy sources. Extraction of minerals increasingly takes place in the Global South – away from the main sites of consumption. These zones of extraction can be sites of ecological degradation and pose risks to human life.

Feminist studies have shown that these socio-environmental risks are borne differently based on social relations of gender, age, class, that shape individuals experiences of extraction through the body.

Additionally, social movement research has shown that it is often women who lead resistance to extractivism, but this has not been theorised in relation to embodied experiences of mineral extraction’s socio-environmental injustices. This research proposes to theorise this relation through a transnational study of women’s resistance to extractivism.

Using interviews, body-territory mapping and workshops, the study will explore embodied experiences of women in extraction zones through two case studies in Ecuador and South Africa.

The aim is to develop a transnational analytical framework for the link between the gendered effects of extractivism and the resistance to it.

Given the continued reliance of minerals and the socio-environmental injustices their extraction generates, this theoretical work is key to academia’s role in thinking forward global sustainable futures.