Performing gender through contested waters : women+ water activists in Chilean hydrosocial struggles

A vast literature – cross-cutting fields such as Environmental Sociology, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology – explains women’s differentiated participation in water/environmental-related collective actions. Many common explanations use binary (male/female) socio-demographic variables and/or focus on traditional gender roles (e.g., as mothers, or as caretakers) as the primary explanatory factors. Although contemporary feminist scholars propose that gender is a fluid category that interacts with other axes of social difference to (also) co-produce changing environments, few studies have tried to understand how activism redefines gendered (intersectional and expanded) identities/subjectivities and also critically refashions meanings of/relationships with water and territories. In critical dialogue with those discussions, this research presents the results of my collaborative work with/within the Asamblea de Mujeres Insulares por las Aguas (AMIPA) – a women’s organization in defense of waters in the Chiloe archipelago (southern Chile). I focus on the Chilean case, aiming to understand women+’s engagements as a critical factor mediating the relationship between gender, power, and natures. I particularly ask: how, through activism, do AMIPA members reproduce/transform their gendered+ subjectivities, their connections with waters/territories/natures, and broader (water-related) contentious politics at different scales? Theoretically, I draw upon a Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) approach, emphasizing recent theoretical and praxis-oriented contributions from Latin America, in dialogue with social movements theory (SMT), broader political ecologies of water (POW), and other perspectives. By employing multi-sited ethnography, biographical interviews, activist-research and other methods during a three-year process of accompanying AMIPA, I analyze women+’s multiple experiences of (water) activism and the trajectory of AMIPA to particularly understand how they are challenging, re-signifying or transforming: 1) their senses of the self (Chapter 2); 2) the relationship between complex senses of ‘we’ and situated water activism (Chapter 3); 3) the ways of relating with and re-imagining (extended and embodied) hydrosocial territories and more-than-human watery beings (Chapter 4). These results highlight AMIPA’s situated feminist praxis and our collaborative work to offer a more nuanced approach to gendered+ water/environmental activism and ongoing discussions on the so-called new water justice movements (NWJMs), while enriching FPE and ally approaches on the relationship between shifting/expanded subjectivities, changing natures and co-production of knowledge.