Women affected by mega development projects in pandemic times: conflicts and resistance

Abstract

This article aims to reflect on the logic through which mega development projects are set up in several places in Brazil and the impacts that they cause on women’s lives, taking into consideration what they have been announcing in the media: “all this already existed. The Covid-19 pandemic has intensified what we already used to suffer”. This reflection is based on the experiences of “women”, observed in field researches carried out in territories affected by large investment projects and through personal and virtual semi-structured interviews with those women affected by such projects, complemented by women that advice affected populations through online events related to the issue. We demonstrate how the existence of environmental conflicts, – that is, conflicts related to the access, use and material and symbolic appropriation of the environment – as a result of the set up of large projects, generate a process of expropriation of territories that adversely affects the lives of black, traditional, agricultural and indigenous populations, with differentiated implications for women. The domestic work and family care burden as a result of worsening health conditions caused by development projects, sexual exploitation of women and girls’ bodies and the denial of them as political actors revealed by how they have to struggle for the right to be considered as “affected” and the gender appropriation by corporations involved in such projects demonstrate how gender inequalities are compounded by this kind of investment as well as inflecting a universal, eurocentric and individualistic perspective of “gender” within communities. These are effects that due to the pandemic have been intensified and became even more explicit whilst being fought by these women.