Dineo Skosana and Jacklyn Cock have drafted a paper that is now available for download. “Our Existence is Resistance”: Women and the Challenge of the Climate Crisis and Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in mining-affected communities in South Africa. You can read the full paper here:
Introduction: This chapter suggests that many black working-class women living in mining-affected communities are expressing in their actions and practices a radical eco-feminism. At the same time, we argue that both the climate crisis and the covid-19 pandemic, as well as the subsequent lockdown- have exacerbated gender inequality, especially in mining-affected areas. Inequality is understood, not in economistic terms of assets and income but as ‘existential inequality’ defined by Therborne as “ a violation of human dignity; it is a denial of the possibility for everybody’s capabilities to develop” (Therborne, 2013:10). The paper suggests that these violations are ‘gendered’ in the sense that black working-class women experience them differently from men and most intensely as the household administrators of the consumption of food, energy, and water resources. Both the pandemic and the climate crisis are forms of what Nixon (2011) terms ‘slow violence’; violence which is relatively invisible, often unrecognised and involves pollution: of bodies in the case of the pandemic, of water and air in the case of the climate. However, their lived resistance to the ‘shocks’ of both the pandemic and the more extreme weather events of climate change could promote a unifying narrative in the form of an African eco-feminism.