Empowered women on the mining tractor: The feminism we want? Purplewashing discourses and women’s resistance in the struggle agains extractivism in La Rioja, Argentina

Abstract

This article adopts a qualitative approach to examine territorial struggles against extractivism in La Rioja Province, Argentina. These struggles involve resistance to activities such as mega-mining, pollution caused by a tannery, and monoculture practices. The study begins by identifying the use of feminist inclusion discourse by corporations, governments, and NGOs as a marketing strategy—referred to as purplewashing—which serves to reproduce extractivist relations of domination and exploitation, functioning as a form of territorial re-patriarchalization. In other words, patriarchy is rearticulated through new forms of exploitation of women's bodies,masked by notions derived from liberal feminism that are functional to capitalism.The data corpus consists, on the one hand, of in-depth interviews with women engaged in territorial struggles—most of whom are organized in grassroots assemblies—and records from group workshops in which the author participated as a member of one of such groups. On the other hand, it includes social media posts from the provincial government and media archives.These materials are used to analyze two sets of discourses. First are purplewashing discourses, particularly those employed by the provincial government to promote mining and the Nonogasta tannery. These are examined alongside testimonies from women activists who denounce such discourse as an extractivist marketing strategy. Recognizing the functionality of purplewashingwithin the capitalist-colonial-extractivist model, the author refers to this discursive field as the feminism that the women involved in territorial struggles reject. Second, the article analyzes discourses expressing the forms of feminism these women do embrace and advocate for within their activist spaces. Particular attention is given to two collectives: ―Red de Feministas Antiextractivistas del Sur‖and ―Defensoras del Agua del Famatina‖.