Articulating Body, Territory, and the Defence of Life: The Politics of Strategic Equivalencing between Women in Anti‐Mining Movements and the Feminist Movement in Peru

Abstract

In Latin America, rural and indigenous women have mobilised in defence of their territories and built strategic alliances with urban and mestiza feminist movements. This paper focuses on how these processes have played out in Peru, tracing the development of the discourse on ‘body as territory’, which articulates sexual and reproductive rights with territorial autonomy. It discusses the ‘cosmopolitics’ of translating the distinct concerns and worldviews of the women involved, arguing that this discourse has enabled partial recognition and strategic equivalencing but that it has failed to fundamentally transform the underlying asymmetric relations of power and privilege.

Gender and natural resource extraction in Latin America: Feminist engagements with geopolitical positionality

“…Approaches to natural resource extraction and gender tend to homogenize negative effects on women's lives, and produce problematic generalizations, not only because they consider men's domination unquestionable and natural, but because they ignore the women's agency in the different roles they occupy, and their practices of resistance from those positionalities. However, and in tune with the strengthening of community and/or territorial feminisms that we presented earlier, there is a growing, recent academic literature on women's actions in the face of extractive industries and development policies, emphasizing how they contribute to the local knowledge of these resistance movements, and how their interactions with other social movements also benefit from women land defenders' strategies (Coba 2019;Echart & Villareal 2019;Leinius 2020;Tapias Torrado 2019).…”

Conflictividad socioambiental en Quintero-Puchuncaví: narrativas feministas más allá de lo organizacional

“…Dejando en evidencia un incremento en las luchas socioambientales que son protagonizadas por mujeres, así como de los feminismos y ecofeminismos como perspectivas críticas en torno de la naturaleza, nuestro parentesco y requerimiento mutuo, abandonando perspectivas jerárquicas o dualistas (Leinius, 2021;Mies y Shiva, 2014;Haraway, 2019).…”

Introductory Chapter: Feminism, Corporeality, and Beyond

“…Even beyond the pandemic, the issue of the corporeal continues to permeate the many dimensions of women's lives. The corporeal is even more meaningful today given the many continued struggles of women in various aspects of their lives-from women and their bodies in anti-mining movements [12,13], the feminine body in the context of the culture of care [14], body positivity in digital media cultures [15], among many other iterations. It is true that the history of gender theory is almost equivalent to the history of conceptualizations of embodiment and corporeality [16].…”