Indigenous women refusing the violence of resource extraction in Oaxaca

Abstract

This article examines the connections among the expansion of natural resource extraction, gender violence, and Indigenous refusal. It demonstrates how free market mining is operationalized through everyday violent practices that are perpetrated on human and nonhuman bodies. It moves from the global to the body to the community of bodies and the bodies of non-human entities to show the ways in which mining activities and violence are refused in Oaxaca, Mexico. By exploring Indigenous women’s practices of refusal, it critiques separations of mind and body, land and body, life and non-life, and centers the web of relationships that constitutes Indigenous life.