Transformed Territories of Gendered Care Work in Ecuador's Petroleum Circuit

Abstract

This article explores the transformation of indigenous women's care work in the Ecuadorian Amazon, as their communities are increasingly integrated into petroleum industry activities. Care work activities–not only for social reproduction, but also to sustain cycles of fertility, growth and waste interdependent with nature–constitute affective ecologies. In development sites of Ecuador's petroleum circuit, such activities are domesticated and devalued, and the territories produced by women's care work are progressively delimited. Once aimed at social and natural reproduction, their care practices now focus on household and familial reproduction. This article is based on two years of ethnographic and qualitative research in indigenous communities of the Amazonian provinces of Sucumbíos and Pastaza. We bring feminist economic approaches to the study of affective ecologies to show how fundamental changes in inhabitants' historically shaped relationships to, and conservation of, nature both depend on and produce gendered ecological and socioeconomic relations.

Keywords

• care work
• petroleum
• gender
• territories
• indigenous communities
• Ecuador
• Amazon