Gestational care practices: women’s water activism in Chile within the Chilean feminist movement

Purpose This article examines how women in Chile mobilise around water scarcity and contamination and how their discourses and practices contribute to feminist thinking and political organisation. It aims to understand how gendered experiences of deprivation shape women’s environmental knowledge and collective action and how references to motherhood and care operate not as essentialist claims but as situated responses to socio-environmental devastation. By placing contemporary water struggles in dialogue with the genealogy of Chilean feminism, the article seeks to show how these practices – conceptualised as gestational care practices – expand feminist politics and offer relational alternatives to liberal, individual-centred frameworks. Design/methodology/approach This article is based on a scoping study conducted through desk research between 2023 and 2024. It reviews secondary literature, policy reports, press interviews, documentaries, artistic works and academic publications on water struggles in Chile, with a focus on women-centred organisations and activists. The analysis follows a new materialist and posthumanist framework, in dialogue with practice-based approaches that understand organisational practices as material-discursive entanglements. An ethnographic sensibility guides the interpretation of situated meanings, paying particular attention to how women articulate embodied experiences of water injustice and how these shape collective organisation and political resistance. Findings The article shows that women affected by water scarcity and pollution in Chile articulate critiques of extractivism grounded in their gendered, embodied experiences of sustaining life. Their statements highlight how hydric inequalities are lived through care responsibilities while also revealing broader human–more-than-human interdependencies disrupted by neoliberal water governance. These discourses, far from reproducing essentialism, mobilise motherhood and care as situated environmental knowledge that enables collective resistance. The analysis identifies these practices as gestational care practices, which both emerge from and productively transform gendered roles, expanding the horizon of feminist politics toward relational, place-based forms of organising. Research limitations/implications This article is based on a scoping study that draws primarily on secondary sources, public testimonies and artistic materials, which means the analysis reflects the perspectives most visible in media and published documents. As an initial stage of a broader research project, it does not yet incorporate primary interviews or ethnographic fieldwork, which may reveal additional nuances and tensions. Nonetheless, the article maps the key discourses shaping women’s water activism in Chile and outlines the conceptual ground on which further fieldwork is now being developed, offering a foundation for deeper inquiry into gendered experiences of water injustice. Originality/value This article offers a new contribution by bringing women’s water activism in Chile into dialogue with the history of the Chilean feminist movement. It shows that discourses of motherhood and care used by water defenders are not essentialist but situated practices that challenge the liberal ideal of the autonomous subject and make visible the interdependencies that sustain life. By conceptualising these expressions as gestational care practices, the article provides a framework for understanding how gendered responsibilities can be transformed into collective political agency. This approach expands feminist debates on socio-environmental struggles and highlights the value of relational, embodied forms of environmental knowledge.