Abstract

In this chapter, we explore the eruption of a territorial political ecology and why that must be read in an ecofeminist key. This upsurge is occurring at the intersection of critical eco-socioenvironmental reflexivity, rooted in the political ecology of extractivisms, and in various experiences situated in the territorial and socio-environmental feminisms that have arisen during recent decades in the Latin American region. The first is understood as an ecoterritorialization of environmental movements and the construction of an alternative expert knowledge by Indigenous and farmer communities and environmental groups, after decades of resistance against the extractivist advance and its multiple disastrous consequences for their lives. The second responds to an ecofeminization of territories, in which women from societies formed under social and sexual inequalities begin a process of denaturalizing the structures of patriarchal domination. We refer to women´s organizations in territories affected by various extractivisms—energy/mining, agro-export, forestry—and their articulation in response to the need to renew forms of struggle and defense of their territories, activating collective proposals that question the current forms of politics and knowledge. Without an initial definition of their struggle as feminist, women from these territories initiate responses against the policies of predatory overexploitation of nature, the consequences of which put the lives of their families, localities, and ecosystems at risk.