Gendering Toxic Contamination: Toxic Risks, Bodies, and Pregnancies in Gold Mining and Coca Farming Communities in the Bajo Cauca Region

Abstract

This paper investigates women's everyday reproductive struggles in contexts of toxic contamination and the tensions emerging between toxic exposure and care in women's experiences of motherhood. While scientific framings of reproductive disruptions understand social identities as pre-existing the experience of toxic risks, in this paper I argue that, in toxic territories, the categories of “contaminating” and “contaminated” actors interact with other categories of identity, such as gender and race, shaping social relations. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Bajo Cauca region among gold mining and coca farming communities, I investigate the everyday processes of gendered subject formation that unfold in toxic territories and the emergence of “faulty” gendered identities for rural mothers. Building on scholarship in feminist geography and Latin American feminist science and technology studies, I argue that ineffective forms of integration of gender in the institutional debate on toxic contamination reproduce, rather than challenge, the invisibility of rural women before the state.