Extractivism intimately colonizes subaltern women’s bodies and imposes colonial geographies through the separation of bodies from land

An important subset of literature expanding the political and conceptual lens of extractivism has been that within feminist political economy and ecofeminist critique, delineating the various gendered effects of resource extractivism (Elodie Behzadi, 2019; Lahiri-Dutt, 2022; Ukeje, 2005; Endeley, 2010) and unpacking the gendering of extractive geographies within ongoing practices of coloniality and neo-imperial geopolitics (Murrey and Jackson, 2020). This scholarship builds from the experiences of the people most directly impacted by extractivist paradigms, including Indigenous, Black, working class, rural women and more to show that ‘the impacts of extractivism-based development are deeply sex-gendered ones’ (Hargreaves, 2019, p. 63). Emphasising the mutually constitutive nature of oppressions, Lugones (2007) critiques the ‘modern/colonial system of gender’, arguing the modern/colonial analytical matrix of male-dominated decolonial studies fails to sufficiently grapple with the way power operates via gender norms and discriminations (Lugones, 2007). For Lugones, enduring racial/gendered colonial subjectifications are continuously transformed, yet obscured and ignored within colonial epistemologies (Mack & Na'puti, 2019). Extractivism, racism and sexism are often mutually sustaining and reinforcing within the same geopolitical context. Indeed, Voyles (2015, p. 15) argues that racism and extractivism are ‘conceptual intimates’. Work in the political economies of racial and patriarchal capitalism exposes the relationship between capitalism and racism, including the ways in which neoliberal capitalism heralded new forms of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2007) which have been predicated upon colonial (racial and gendered) logics. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007, p. 28) writes, ‘Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies’. Extractive dispossessions and socio-environmental processes of dehumanisation coincide (i.e., toxins on the body, racial/gender discrimination, and sex work and servitude) and each are acutely racialised and gendered. The coloniality of being would initiate a dual annihilation and negation ‘of both nature and natives’ (Rinaldi et al., 2022, p. 828); extractive logics reproduce these dynamics by directly refusing the full humanity of Black, brown and Indigenous people. A significant conceptual turn has been the emergence of work on cuerpo-territorio/bodies–lands (Cabnal, 2015), crucially stressing how land (meanings within, access to and the power/politics that determine these) are constitutive of Indigenous women's capacities for self- and community-caring (Zaragocin, 2019; Zaragocin & Caretta, 2021). Sweet and Ortiz Escalante (2016, p. 594) explain that cuerpo-territorio importantly works against Western epistemes that separate bodies from lands; this ‘helps to decenter the public-private divide, which is an important obstacle to eliminating violence against women’. This concept links women's struggles for territorial and embodied defence ‘against extractivist resource exploitation with the struggle against intersectional discrimination, racism, and the historic violation of their bodies’ (Habersang, 2021, p. 169; see also Sakshi, 2021). Senanayake (2020, p. 1577) conceives of ‘sensuous perplexity’ to make sense of the ways in which embodied forms of community knowing and witnessing can ‘(re)produce ambivalence and uncertainty about what harms and what heals’ within toxic and polluted geographies. In their analysis of the ‘noxious metropolis’ of Aamjiwnaag, a First Nation reserve where some 40 per cent of Canada's toxi-petrochemical industries are located, Jen Bagelman and Sarah Weibe (Bagelman & Wiebe, 2017, p. 79) argue for a focus on the intimate as a ‘prism through which the realities of global extractivis[m] … may be viscerally revealed, and felt’. By interweaving Indigenous ‘body maps’ that mark where and how on the body toxicity is experienced, and people's anxieties and connections with their land, Bagelman and Weibe argue that both places and people are ‘intimately colonised’ through extractivism. In this way, embodied knowledges reveal significant features of how socio-environmental harm are lived and resisted. With attention to the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and other global health crises, geographers have focused on the complex spatial and political ways in which bodies are governed (Fernando, 2020; Sparke & Anguelov, 2020). While responses to viruses can often be framed as ‘mere infrastructural failings’, critical health geographers have unpacked their techno-political and racialised roots. In Puerto Rico, for example, the differential value attributed to Black and brown bodies influenced global health responses to Zika virus (Patchin, 2020). In the use of a decision tree analysis, women's lives were reduced to their ‘economic imprint’ and potential deductions from the capitalist system (Patchin, 2020). Elsewhere, in an eastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Kivu, 1.9 per cent of the population is HIV positive (Taylor, 2020). Yet, antiretroviral treatment (ART) for HIV has experienced severe regional stock-outs, significantly slowing treatment and recovery rates (Taylor, 2020). These stock-outs are framed as unfortunate logistical, professional and technical deficiencies (Taylor, 2020). Yet, the allocation and denial of resources are arranged along hierarchies of class, gender, race and nationality – their supply and denial have been weaponised (Taylor, 2020). We draw on this important geographical work critiquing the uneven, racialised and gendered ways in which bodies are commodified as economic equations (Patchin, 2020); are exposed to toxicity (Coyle, 2004), disease and medical neglect via infrastructural and political deficiencies (Taylor, 2020); and whose bodies bear the auxiliary labour burdens of capitalism and extraction (Hausermann et al., 2020).