This article argues that the contradictory character of Ecuador's current development project is made evident through a focus on energy resource management from a feminist ecological perspective. The hydrocarbon exploitation fundamental to these projects transforms women's roles in social reproduction and production, their relationship with nature, and their dependence on state‐institutionalized energy regimes. We examine changes in women's territorially based work of care at sites in Ecuador's petroleum circuit. An ethnographic focus on the transformation of women's daily lives at sites of petroleum exploration, exploitation, and processing in Ecuador reveals an often overlooked dimension of the socioenvironmental conflicts produced by the intensification of national economic insertion into the global energy market. This article thus examines the intersection of state development policies and the gendered construction of subjects of development. The exploitation of natural resources transforms the meanings and values of nature and development, of women's work of care, and of the participation of these in different energy regimes.

Social inequalities can only be understood through the interaction of their multiple dimensions. In this essay, we show that the economic and environmental impacts of natural resource extraction exacerbate gendered disparities through the intensification and devaluation of care work. A chikungunya epidemic in the refinery city of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, serves to highlight the embodied and structural violence of unhealthy conditions. Despite its promises of development, the extraction-based economy in Esmeraldas has not increased its vulnerable populations’ opportunities. It has, instead, deepened class and gendered hierarchies. In this context, the most severe effects of chikungunya are experienced by women, who bear the burden of social reproduction and sustaining lives under constant threat.

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During the pandemic, the collapse of the San Rafael waterfall and the spill of thousands of barrels of crude oil has caused serious damage to aquatic ecosystems, a chain of catastrophes that affect the health and well-being of people. The Amazonian cosmologies that view the waterfalls as magnificent bodies that protect the lives that inhabit them, watch their death in amazement. In the dislocated landscape of the neoliberal Capitalocene whose precondition is the channeling of vital energy for the growth of capital, I observe how the de-corporalising fetishism of affects turns the work of the extended reproduction of life into financial figures. This is an ecofeminist reading of financializing dislocations and rebellious embodiments, insurrections that combine new kinships between diverse struggles. The challenge is an ecosystem look that displaces the sovereignty of the subject, a shamanic vision of double consciousness: historical materiality and material contiguity of the world.

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