Research on eco-territorial conflicts has examined both the disastrous effects of extractive projects on local livelihoods and ecosystems and the practices of resistance of social movements. The gendered dimensions of both processes, however, has received comparably less attention. In such conflicts, however, different understandings of territory, development and nature are negotiated in a context characterized by highly asymmetrical – and gendered – power relations.

In the Andean region of Peru, the protagonism of rural and indigenous women in eco-territorial conflicts is notable and, against previous paternalist tendencies, a certain level of convergence with the feminist movement, based on social movement encounters, can be observed.
Based on long-term research with Peruvian activists, I ask: How do rural and indigenous women organize to defend their territory? What politics of translation develop and what alternatives are articulated when they organize within male-dominated social movements and with/in the feminist movement?

I trace the politics of politics of translation that have resulted in the discourse on ‘body-territory’ that connects extractivism to patriarchy and the exploitation of territory to the exploitation of women’s bodies. I analyze the limits of recognition, the moments of strategic misunderstanding, as well as the possibilities for solidarity and emancipation based on partial connections between different worlds that play out in these encounters.
Combining the concepts of ‘cosmopolitics’ (de la Cadena) and of ‘boundary objects’ (Leigh Star), I argue that the merging of political ontology and of feminist science and technology studies offers fruitful avenues for understanding the potential but also the challenges that develop when different social worlds meet in eco-territorial conflicts. The dynamics of such contact zones, however, can only be understood when researchers adopt a cosmopolitical perspective that destabilizes their political, cultural, and ontological certainties as well.

Johanna Leinius works as post-doctoral researcher in the research program “Ecologies of Social Cohesion” at the University of Kassel, Germany. In her current research, she analyzes how societal alternatives towards socio-ecological transformations are constructed in encounters between heterogeneous actors within postcolonial contexts. Arguing for collective research practices, she has worked with the Programa Democracia y Transformación Global (PDTG) in Lima, Peru.
Previously, she was a research associate at the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies (FRCPS), Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. She is speaker of the Working Group ‘Gender and Politics’ of the German Association for Political Science (DVPW) and of the Working Group ‘Poststructuralist Perspectives on Social Movements’ of the Institute for Social Movement Studies (ipb).
Her research interests include postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist theory, the politics of ontology and of knowledge production, Latin American politics and societies, and social movement struggles.

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My paper might also fit within stream 4, depending on the final perspective the stream organizers choose to pursue.