(Neo)extractivism and its impact on the lives of women in the southeast of Pará State (Brazil)

Abstract

The economic ventures that, in the name of “development,” have been implemented in the southeastern of Pará State (Brazil) since the 1980s generate constant social and environmental conflicts and deterritorialize men and women, leaving them trapped by the violence of a development model that uses them and discards them, to the same extent that it commodifies nature. As a result of (neo)extractivism, women experience situations that lead them to question their status and positions as women. This article aims to understand the experience and agency of rural women in areas affected by mining in Southeast Para. The perspective adopted is based on the Epistemologies of the south, which allow the construction of a situated knowledge that sprouts from shared time, valuing knowledge anchored in the women's experiences, monitoring the specificity that an intersectoral reading can inform. The methodology merges from the ethnographic posture that values direct contact with daily life, from which conflicts and resistances are reflected. It is concluded that the groups of women studied in southeastern Pará depend on the use of goods provided by the Amazon biome and, therefore, are interested in its sustainable management. They show the potential of strategies supported by solidarity, which leads them to reflect as political subjects. The diversity of life trajectories marked by the spatial movement is not an obstacle to articulate collective actions, expressions of their agencies in the face of the hegemonic capitalist and patriarchal model that oppresses them. The groups studied constitute spaces for democratic participation, solidarity, autonomy and expression of women's actions in the face of socio-environmental conflicts and violence that affect them. Thus, reconstructing other ways of being and relating to nature.