Women territory defenders’ activism in Bolivia: weaving resistance against extractivism through embodied, careful, and relational politics

Abstract

Women territory defenders’ activism in Bolivia: weaving resistance against extractivism through embodied, careful, and relational politics.
This thesis argues that in their resistance against extractivist projects, women territory defenders in Bolivia weave meshworks of resistance through embodied, affective, and careful politics in which different spaces, people and subjectivities are woven together as the fabric of resistance emerges from the women’s bodies-territories. In my analysis, I bring together anglophone geographies of resistance literature that considers resistance as an emergent practice, shaped by complex entanglements of dominating and resisting power, with anticolonial feminist proposals from Abya Yala that firmly locate processes of resistant becoming within the materialities of women’s bodies that are seen as ontologically inseparable from the territory/land and proposed as primary site of analysis. Conceptualising resistance as emerging relationally across time and space, I address the lack of empirical detail about women territory defenders’ embodied weaving practices in the cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) literature.
I furthermore critically analyse how embodied experiences related to extractive violence can lead to the unravelling of these webs of resistance. Bolivia offers a particularly pertinent setting to explore these unravellings, given the current situation of growing authoritarianism, political polarisation, and divisions within social movements in the country. How these political processes play out at the micro-level, particularly at the scale of families and communities, remains largely overlooked in the literature. In this thesis, I aim to deepen knowledge of resistance as an embodied and prefigurative process. I draw on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bolivia in 2019 and 2020 across two sites of women’s anti-extractive resistance: the Tariquía Flora and Fauna National Reserve and the Indigenous Territory and National Park Isiboro Sécuré, where I traced the threads of women’s resistance in their embodied emergence through a decolonial feminist epistemological and methodological approach that I call acompañar [to accompany].
I argue that in women territory defenders’ anti-extractive resistance, their body-territories simultaneously become sites of domination and resistance, challenging past-present, individual-collective, and human-nature dichotomies. Webs of resistant relationships are slowly woven across time and space through women’s everyday affective and careful politics that enable and sustain anti-extractive action. The defensoras carefully position themselves, navigating power inequalities, as they weave alliances across difference with external actors in a quickly changing political landscape. While emotions and embodiment enable the weaving of resistance on the one hand, the defensoras’ embodied experiences can also result in the unravelling of the fabric of resistance in context of the violence and temporalities that characterise socio-environmental conflicts. I conclude that prefiguration – ways of being, seeing, and knowing otherwise that foreground care, the relational, the collective and re-existencia (re-existence) – is crucial in imagining and creating post-extractive alternatives. Together, these points illustrate how meshworks of resistance carry the potential to contest as well as reinforce intersecting colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist systems of oppression, as they are always bound up with domination.

Date of Award	28 Nov 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Katy Jenkins (Supervisor) & Hilary Francis (Supervisor)