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Presentation short abstract

In Peru’s coastal extractive landscapes, women navigate care, resilience, and defiance to confront intersecting and sometimes contradictory forces of patriarchy and neoliberal extraction. I explore how their practices reveal complex forms of intersectional everyday resistance.

Presentation long abstract

Since Scott’s coining of everyday resistance, political ecology and geography have seen a rich increase of understanding of acts of resistance to multiple types of power. This has opened the door into spaces that are not usually considered political or public arenas, which are mostly male dominated; and it has given an insight into the types of resistance, hidden or otherwise, that women and people of other genders are able to carry out.

However, there is still a gap in the literature that considers everyday resistance carried out by individuals that face multiple systems of oppression at once. Particularly in sites of extraction, systems of oppression related to extractive capitalism, patriarchal logics, and class and racial/ethnic relations often coexist.

In interviewing women living in coastal sites of multiple extractions in Peru, I examine how women navigate different oppression systems such as patriarchy and extractive neoliberal capitalism, through their acts of everyday resistance. Grounding my analysis in feminist political ecology notions of intersectionality and on historical developments of small-scale fisheries in Peru, I examine to what degree these women’s practices of caring for families, for themselves, and their communities, engage with or resist patriarchal and neoliberal extractive logics. I do so to discuss what resilience needed for survival within these extractive landscapes means under different systems of oppression that overlap, interact, and in some cases, act at odds with each other; and to what degree the emerging intersectional resilience can counter the disposability logics of neoliberal extractive capitalism.