Description
This paper examines the strategic use of essentialist ecofeminist discourse to achieve materialist ecofeminist political goals. It investigates how a community of women smallholder farmers in Pará, Brazil, deployed essentialist ecofeminist discourses to achieve radical materialist transformations of gender and agricultural relations. Drawing on walk-along, focus group, and qualitative interview data, I analyse how smallholder women in an environmental settlement tactically deployed naturalised women-environment narratives while successfully pursuing the restructuring of agricultural production and community decision-making. In doing so, participants partially subverted Western development agencies' liberal feminist assumptions about women’s empowerment and environmental stewardship to secure resources for collective transformation. This use of essentialism as a means of resistance operates through invocation of maternal earth-protection and knowledges that legitimise women's authority while enabling them to dismantle patriarchal household structures and implement an agroecological planting system focused on biodiversity and reforestation. By converting oppressive narratives into tools of resistance, they achieve materialist ecofeminist goals through tactical deployment of the very discourses meant to constrain them. At the same time, the transformative potential of essentialism as a tool of resistance is limited in that it risks re-producing the triple burden of women’s productive, social reproductive, and conservation care labour. Far from suggesting a return to old essentialisms, this case instead challenges Global North ecofeminist scholars to look carefully at the use of ecofeminist tropes as a form of strategic resistance to – at least partially – dismantle the very patriarchal and colonial structures they are designed to uphold.
