Presentation short abstract

This paper analyses how hegemonic rural masculinities and heritage regimes in El Bierzo (Spain) sustain coal’s afterlives, producing a liminal post-extractive condition that feminist just transition frameworks help to reveal and contest.

Presentation long abstract

In post-coal territories, extractive decline rarely dismantles the cultural and symbolic regimes that historically organised power. In El Bierzo (northwest Spain), coal closure coexists with the persistence of a normative territorial identity rooted in hegemonic rural masculinities—an identity historically linked to hardness, sacrifice and male-coded productive labour. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork and discourse analysis, this paper examines how these gendered infrastructures of meaning sustain coal afterlives even in the absence of extraction.

The argument draws on feminist just transition frameworks ((Lieu et al., 2020; Mang-Benza, 2021), and emphasises on the need to address recognitional, procedural and distributive justice (Fraser, 1995; Tyler, 2000; Rawls, 2001). In El Bierzo, these dimensions are constrained by heritage practices that elevate mining ruins, industrial nostalgia and heroic male iconographies as the core of local authenticity. Such selective patrimonialisation, as discussed by Dicks (2003), reinforces hierarchical distinctions between valued and devalued subjects, marginalising women’s experiences, care-based economies and non-extractive livelihoods.

This symbolic ordering produces a liminal post-coal condition: a suspended state in which extractive pasts continue to structure political imagination, while "just" transitions remain procedurally narrow and socially exclusionary. Rather than enabling diversification, transition programmes interact with existing gendered hierarchies in ways that reproduce fossil-era logics through cultural rather than material means.

By situating El Bierzo within broader debates on feminist territorial justice and post-coal realities, the paper demonstrates how coal’s hegemony survives through the reproduction of masculine-coded identity based heritage and institutional narratives that delimit who is recognised as a legitimate subject of the future.