“Soft, airy fairy stuff”? Re-evaluating ‘social impacts’ in gendered processes of natural resource extraction

Politicizing the Body in the Anti-Mining Protest in Greece

“…In focusing on use of the body as a resource for the gendered construction of space (Tyler, 2019;Tyler & Cohen, 2010), we demonstrate how space becomes a place for people's histories and the meanings they attach to them (Massey, 2004;Tuan, 1979). Places are important for sustaining bodies and providing a sense of rootedness for people who refuse their erasure through mining (Ey, 2018) and oppose their place being turned into an extraction site. Attending to the embodied and emplaced ways in which people/place become and resist together in the everyday is of paramount importance for developing relational ontologies.…”

“…Our passionate engagement and entanglement with the field is part of feminist ethnography and a unique source of knowledge, allowing us to unearth erased emotions in the extractive sector that facilitated dismissal of the distinctly emotional consequences of resource extraction for people and place (Ey, 2018). In related research in a contemporary anti-mining protest in Romania, emotions became both a contentious factor for the project's opponents and a target of 'rational' accusation for the corporation (Velicu, 2015, p. 847).…”

“…Our primary contribution is to the literature on embodiment and how women's 'othered' body plays out in and through public space, for example in feminized work (Pullen & Simpson, 2009) and academia (Tyler & Cohen, 2010), showing how women use it to reclaim public space in the context of gendered resistance. Our second, related contribution is to offer a feminist analysis to the literature on organizing alternative social movements (De Bakker, Den Hond, King, & Weber, 2013;Parker, Cheney, Fournier, & Land, 2014;Reedy et al, 2016;Reedy & Learmonth, 2009) through embodied affectivity as a way of accounting for emotional dimensions of resistance, to extractivism specifically (Ey, 2018;Ey et al, 2017) and social movements more generally. We thus extend Vachhani and Pullen's (2019) work on feminist solidarity in contemporary social movements combating inequality, sexual harassment and violence against women in the workplace and beyond.…”

“…Historically, women have played an important but relatively unrecognized role in opposing large-scale mining developments in rural Andean communities (Jenkins, 2014;Jenkins & Rondón, 2015), Asia and the Pacific (Horowitz, 2017;Nabulivou, 2006) and Australia (Ey, 2018;Ey et al, 2017), and in challenging the expansion of extractive industries (Jenkins, 2015). Although some studies have demonstrated women's direct involvement in mining activities (Hinton, Veiga, & Beinhoff, 2003;Jenkins, 2014), women-based groups are often at the forefront of anti-extractivist struggles (for example, the Mothers of Ituzaingó; see Leguizamón, 2019), having to combat sexism and marginalization within anti-mining movements and facing threats from within and outside their communities (Velasquez, 2012, cited in Jenkins, 2014.…”

Unlikely Alliances in the Battle for Land and Water Security: Unconventional Gas and the Politics of Risk in NSW, Australia

“…Jones's comments echo the concerns of many, not just local communities, as they speak to larger issues such as loss of place, the demise of rural landscapes, environments being eroded and overall, rural places beginning to represent what Murton has referred to as 'the countryside under construction" ( [25], p. 1). With extractive industries and their associated infrastructure playing a large role in this transformation, it is worth acknowledging that 'there are deeply emotional ramifications [associated with] resource extraction" ( [26], p. 1).…”