INDEPENDENT EXAM – NIVEL SUPERIOR

NOMBRE: Nº DE ORDEN:
FECHA: .../…/…….

All answers should be written in SPANISH. This is a READING test in English (not an English Language test)
based on the course that is taught at this Faculty. You have FOUR hours to complete the test. You may start
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(four) equivalent to 70% of the correct requested activities in order to pass the exam as established by the
regulations of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Make sure that your name is on all the sheets you turn in and
please sign your name when you complete the exam. You may use a dictionary and the Grammar Dictionary.

Nº de DNI: …………………………
Porcentaje de
actividades correctas Calificación
Correo electrónico:……………………………………… 0- 39% 1 (uno)
40- 59% 2 (dos)
CARRERA: ............................................ 60- 65% 3 (tres)
66- 70% 4 (cuatro)
71- 75% 5 (cinco)
76- 80% 6 (seis)
81- 85% 7 (siete)
86- 90% 8 (ocho)
91- 95% 9 (nueve)
96- 100% 10 (diez)

Grant, J., & Snelgrove, C. (2023). Returning to totality: Settler colonialism, decolonization, and struggles for freedom.
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537231219935.

ANTICIPATION (THIS SECTION IS NOT SCORED)

1. You have 30 minutes to do this section before you read the text. (This is a very important
section) 1-Read bibliographical data, title, and subtitles. Advance a general reading
hypothesis.

2. Choose two strategies to write the specific hypothesis of the text. State them and explain why
you consider them useful in this text.

Reading strategy 1:

Reason for choice:

Reading strategy 2:

Reason for choice:

3. Follow the strategies you selected in exercise 2 and put forward your specific hypothesis.

NOW IT IS TIME TO READ YOUR TEXT IN FULL.

VERIFICATION: 25%

4. Choose the five paragraphs that you consider the most important ones, state the paragraph
boundaries, i.e., lines where the paragraph starts and ends, and indicate the main idea in each paragraph.
Paragraph number 1 must contain the most important information in the text, the new
information provided by the author. In this exercise you must organize the selected
paragraphs hierarchically. Express the main idea using a short sentence, abstract and
conceptualise. (25%)

Order Paragraph Main idea

boundaries
1
2
3
4
5

INTERNALISATION: 75%

5. After analysing the argumentation, complete the table below with the ten most important concepts of
each paradigm/point of view presented and the ten most important concepts supported by the
authors. Provide a name for each paradigm/point of view. Express your concepts in noun phrases in
Spanish. Feel free to add more columns if needed. (25%)

NAME OF PARADIGM OR POINT NAME OF PARADIGM OR POINT NAME OF PARADIGM OR POINT

OF VIEW OF VIEW OF VIEW
(MAIN CONCEPTS) (MAIN CONCEPTS) (MAIN CONCEPTS)

6. Explain the authorial contribution to the field. What is their own approach and conceptualisation?
(20%)

7. Now, summarise the most important concepts of the text hierarchically in a brief paragraph with an
academic tone. This must include the most specific ideas presented by the authors. Indicate relations
among concepts. This summary paragraph should be no longer than 100-120 words in length. (30%)
 Geoforum 126 (2021) 139–149

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

The coloniality of neoliberal biopolitics: Mainstreaming gender in

community forestry in Oaxaca, Mexico
Violeta Gutiérrez-Zamora
Department of Geographical and Historical Studies, University of Eastern Finland, Yliopistokatu 7, Metria-building, P.O. Box 111, FI-80101 Joensuu, Finland

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Gender mainstreaming in forestry and forest conservation has become a prominent strategy to address the
Biopower challenges and obstacles indigenous and campesina women face in terms of equitable inclusion in community
Neoliberalism forest governance. Drawing upon feminist and poststructuralist political ecology, this article examines how this
Gender mainstreaming
strategy, expressed through community forestry and forest conservation interventions, directs indigenous and
Coloniality
Community forestry
campesina women to conduct themselves in a particular manner to transform themselves into “productive and
Mexico entrepreneurial” subjects. Based on interviews and ethnographic research methods conducted in the Southern
Sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, the article illustrates how biopolitical and colonial techniques of government are
articulated within these gender equity projects and the everyday practices they encourage. In developing this
analysis, the article demonstrates how gender, racial/ethnic and class categorizations intersect in fostering or
abandoning specific bodies and populations as well as regulating the work in, use of, and access to forests. Based
on this discussion, the article questions whether gender mainstreaming in community forestry is becoming yet
another attempt to remotely control the interactions between gendered and racialized human populations and
nonhuman nature via a technical “toolkit” of neoliberal environmentality.

1. Introduction Mainstreaming gender and biopolitical
“toolkits” in community forestry
Over the last decade, gender mainstreaming (GM)1 has been an
increasingly active topic within the transnational agendas of forest and
biodiversity conservation, particularly in relation to community-based
approaches (Alvarez and Lovera, 2016; Asher and Shattuck, 2017;
Manfre and Rubin, 2012). GM aims to integrate gender equity concerns
within all aspects of analysis and formulation of policies, programs and
projects (Mukhopadhyay, 2004) to compensate for girls’ and women’s
historical and social disadvantages and thus to create the conditions for
achieving equality in the “enjoyment of rights and opportunities” (FAO,
2016). In the forestry and forest conservation sectors, GM has emerged
as a response to the long-standing trend to ignore gender as a significant
factor in facilitating or inhibiting access to and use of forest land,
products, and benefits (Mai, Mwangi and Wan, 2011) and has been
gradually integrated into public forest policy as an axis of action, given
the conspicuous lack of representation and/or participation of women in
forest governance in many places.
Studies by institutional analysts, anthropologists, and political
ecologists have helped to point out the ways that gender influences
differentiated access to, use and knowledge of forests as well as the
multiple challenges women, in particular, confront in accessing mean­
ingful participation in forest decision-making (Agarwal, 2001, 2009;
Evans et al., 2017; Cronkleton, 2005). Yet policy frameworks on how to
include gender equity in community-based forest governance continue
to follow a standard problem–solution formula typical in the
development-environment nexus, based in the assertion that to promote
equality, women need to be empowered and that this can be done pre­
dominantly via their participation within the market economy. Policy
measures to operationalize this approach include promoting and form­
ing micro-enterprises and encouraging “participation” through labor
incorporation.
In this article, I examine how indigenous and peasant (campesina)
women became a main category for this mainstreaming approach to
gender equity intervention in community forestry and forest conserva­
tion and how GM thus translates into the everyday lives of women and
men in these sectors. Drawing upon poststructuralist (Durand, 2014;

E-mail address: violeta.gutierrez.zamora@uef.fi.

1
Gender mainstreaming entails “initiatives that enable women as well as men to formulate and express their views and participate in decision-making across all
issues” (Mukhopadhyay 2004, 95). GM was adopted as a central strategy during the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 in Beijing, China. International
organizations later embraced it and largely adopted in social policy globally.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.023
Received 23 June 2021; Accepted 26 July 2021
Available online 9 August 2021
0016-7185/© 2021 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
V. Gutiérrez-Zamora
Fletcher, 2017; Fletcher et al., 2019) and feminist political ecology
(Nightingale, 2006, 2011, 2019; Elmhirst, 2011, 2015; Sundberg, 2004),
I argue that GM in these sectors can be understood as a particular ex­
ercise of biopower. In the Foucauldian sense, biopower is understood as
a set of practices and strategies of (usually state-centered) control for
managing humans as a biological species comprising discrete pop­
ulations understood as organisms in a structural-functionalist sense
(Foucault, 2008; Rabinow and Rose, 2006). Framing GM as an exercise
in biopower helps me to investigate how GM can operate at the inter­
section of the disciplinary techniques to control individual bodies; reg­
ulatory techniques to intervene in overarching relations between
humans and the nonhuman environment (Fletcher, 2010, 2017, Luke,
1995, 2016); and the articulation of these twin techniques within the
coloniality of gender and racial hierarchies (Castro-Gómez, 2010;
Hernández Castillo, 2008; Lugones, 2007).
Based on an in-depth ethnographic analysis, the article explores how
GM is translated into various endeavors to promote indigenous and
peasant women’s integration into forest governance in the Southern
Sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico. It draws on research undertaken in three forest
communities (comunidades forestales) of Zapotec origin officially regis­
tered as indigenous and agrarian communities.2 The communities –
Santa Lucía [SL], Santa Teresa [ST] and Santa Margarita [SM])3 –
manage and regulate their communitarian life based on systems of
community organization and self-government, so-called usos y costum­
bres,4 that imbue pine and pine-oak forests with significant economic
and ecological values and have developed community forest enterprises
(CFE) around these.
My analysis focuses on how indigenous and peasant women’s work
and political participation have been the sites of overlapping disci­
plinary and biopolitical techniques that regulate their relationship with
the forest. Previous research has shown how “gender equity” in­
terventions in indigenous communities have also aimed to restructure
“male labor” and encourage normative heterosexuality in the household
through the “two-partner model of love and labor” (Bedford, 2007). By
focusing on binary figures, GM advocacy remains blind to various forms
of violence in which bodies and desires are framed (Jauhola, 2010). In
this sense, the idea of GM as a tool of liberal Western feminism (Repo,
2013) may also become a strategy of biopower that aims to discipline
racialized and gendered bodies and populations to foster specific forms
of “life.” However, the excise of power over the bodies and specific
populations is never complete. As feminist political ecologists remind us,
elements of contradiction, ambivalence, and resistance often emerge in
everyday practices (Nightingale, 2019; Sundberg, 2004).
Although GM in community forestry and forest conservation at­
tempts to create opportunities for women, little attention is paid to how
policy efforts to incorporate gender as a cross-cutting issue are becoming
yet another technique in the toolkit of neoliberal environmental
governance. In developing its analysis, the article thus contributes to
research addressing neoliberalization within environmental gover­
nance. Within this literature, scholars’ analyses of neoliberalization as
embodying a particular “environmentality” have focused on the ways
both human bodies and nonhuman nature in its different forms and
representations (Castree, 2008) have been incorporated into mecha­
nisms of monetary valuation and commodification to generate economic
growth and capital accumulation, through both soft and coercive means
2
Ejidos and comunidades agrarias are two forms of collective land tenure in
Mexico settled in the Agrarian Reform of 1915. The agrarian communities were
recognized through land restitution upon the submission of land colonial titles
while peasants were granted land through the ejido system.
3
The names have been changed to preserve people’s anonymity.
4
The state of Oaxaca recognized systems of community organization and self-
government [usos y costumbres] in 417 out of 570 municipalities (Curiel et al.
2015). Systems of community organization and self-government often rely on
the so-called cargo system.
140
Geoforum 126 (2021) 139–149
(Büscher and Fletcher, 2018; Fletcher et al., 2019). By creating mone­
tary incentives for conservation and climate change mitigation, capi­
talist markets are seen as the answer to their ecological contradictions
(Büscher et al., 2012; Fletcher et al., 2019; Wilshusen, 2010). Whereas
scholars have demonstrated the endurance of inequalities between the
different groups and actors in community forest management and con­
servation (Doane, 2014; Durand, 2014; Durand and Lazos, 2004),
existing studies have paid far less attention to how women’s knowledge,
bodies, and reproductive work are adopted and incorporated into
community forestry and forest conservation industries and markets.
Hence, we examine how current GM may reorder and govern these
women’s work and aspirations according to the logic of “green” capi­
talism rather than contributing to forming more equal relations that
challenge and undermine the interlinked gender, racial and class hier­
archies to which women are subject.
My findings show that gender equity is interpreted in the community
forestry and forest conservation sector only to mean the inclusion of
women in family income-generation activities, neglecting how these
initiatives support specific forms of disciplining as well as the labor
burdens and geographic (in)mobilities these create. From this perspec­
tive, indeed, it is possible to interpret the current understanding of GM
within this sector as seeking to turn the lives of indigenous and peasant
women into productive and entrepreneurial life to be valued and inserted
within the industries and markets of forest products. Consequently, such
interventions do not challenge the structures of the inequity they
ostensibly confront; instead, they contribute to them in two main ways:
firstly, by reinforcing discipline on the behavior and bodily movement of
indigenous and peasant women in relation to the various forms of forest
use they practice; and secondly, by producing the category of “indige­
nous women” as a population who can be “empowered” and trans­
formed into “environmental entrepreneurs” to be “liberated” through
insertion into the market economy. Hence, I argue that current GM in
community forestry and forest conservation attempts to regulate the
material, symbolic, and affective relations that subjects create with
other people and nonhumans while making “nature” – and gendered and
racialized human bodies – governable.
2. The coloniality of neoliberal biopolitics
Critical scholars have argued that the primary objective of
community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) to conserve
common-pool resources and produce equitable outcomes for the pop­
ulations has often been jeopardized by its overly technical and
bureaucratic application, as well as its hybridization with market-based
solutions (Dressler et al., 2010; Li, 2007; Wilshusen, 2010). Similar to
other CBNRM models worldwide, Mexican community forestry is a
contested arena in which neoliberalization is often negotiated and
accommodated in the display of unequal power relations between the
members of the communities, professional foresters (García-López,
2019), state officials (Mathews, 2011; Merino, 2016; Boyer, 2015) and
conservation organizations (Doane, 2014; Wilshusen, 2010).
Analyses regarding equity in CBNRM have raised concerns over the
obstacles women face in terms of access to natural resources and
decision-making and the configuration of gender within community
forestry and forest conservation (Agarwal, 2001, 2009; Alvarez and
Lovera, 2016; Evans et al., 2017; Pineda-López et al., 2015; Rocheleau
and Edmunds, 1997; Vázquez-García and Ortega-Ortega, 2017). Within
this literature, researchers have focused on the differentiated access,
knowledge and use that women and men have in community forestry
(Agarwal, 2001, 2009) and how access to forest products for their
livelihoods is defined by culturally specific gender roles (Evans et al.,
2017; Vázquez-García and Ortega-Ortega, 2017; Pineda-López et al.,
2015). Such investigations offer insights into national and international
development policy by considering the conditions that permit or inhibit
women’s material access to land, food security, and dependence on non-
timber forest products (NTFPs), which may create uneven burdens from
V. Gutiérrez-Zamora
biodiversity loss and forest degradation (FAO, 2013). From this
perspective, scholars, practitioners, and officials have stressed the need
for incorporating gender as a cross-cutting issue over community
development and environmental conservation, leading to international
trends of including “gender analysis toolkits” and “women” in devel­
opment goals via “mainstreaming gender” (Mukhopadhyay, 2016).
In response to such largely materialist perspectives, feminist political
ecologists have argued that in analyzing the relationship between
gender and forests, livelihoods cannot be the only framework of un­
derstanding. We must also examine the historical, geographical, and
cultural constitution of subjectivities in human-nature relationships. For
example, Gururani (2002) urges consideration of the gendered mean­
ings and values of the forest that are formed in everyday practices and go
beyond the understanding of natural resources as mere sources of
livelihood.
In a similar vein, since GM maintains binary representations of
gender (women and men) as dominant categories and leaves aside other
systematic forms of discrimination (Jauhola, 2010), it remains an ahis­
torical and decontextualized technical project that leaves power re­
lations intact and unexamined (Mukhopadhyay, 2016). Furthermore,
when practices and discourses of emancipation in GM are framed solely
as women’s self-improvement, they become very similar to the projects
of moral regulation that aim to adapt female bodies to global capitalism
(Schild, 2015). Therefore, feminist geographers have urged examining
environmental subjectivities as constituted and questioned through
overlapping notions of race, ethnicity, gender, status and class (Elmhirst,
2011; Nightingale, 2006, 2011, 2019; Sundberg, 2004; Sultana, 2015).
To what extent, therefore, are policy efforts to incorporate gender as
a cross-cutting issue in community forestry and conservation also
becoming another technique in the toolkit of neoliberal environmental
governance? Following a poststructuralist perspective, the neoliberal
model of governing, regulating and validating specific human bodies
and subjects as conservation of the environment (often termed “envi­
ronmentality” in the literature) relies on particular methods or tech­
niques of exercising biopower (Fletcher, 2010; Luke, 1995, 2016). With
the concepts of biopower and biopolitics, Foucault stressed the acqui­
sition of state control over the biological, a power that takes “human
life” as a political concern of government. Foucault employed this con­
ceptual lens to trace the transformation of modern European statecraft
to emphasize how subjects could internalize state control and rationality
(in the form of what he termed governmentality; Foucault, 2008), not
only through techniques of power that centered on disciplining the in­
dividual body but also via regulatory techniques at the level of pop­
ulations (Foucault, 2003, 242–43). In these changes, state control over
subjects aims to foster life or disregard it to the point of death (Foucault,
2003, 241). Biopower is thus articulated in two distinct yet often over­
lapping ways: as disciplinary techniques focused on individual bodies;
and as techniques that intervene in the regulation of the biological life of
populations as a whole (Foucault, 1998, 139). In this way, biopolitics
seeks “control over the relations between human beings, in so far as they
are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live”
(Foucault, 2003, 245).
Drawing this framework into the realm of environmental gover­
nance, political ecologists have explored how environmentality has
operated to shape the regimes of truth and organizational practices
through which subjects are governed so as to care for and safeguard the
environment and thereby secure human and nonhuman life (Agrawal,
2005; Cavanagh, 2018; Fletcher, 2010, 2017; Lemke, 2001; Luke, 2016;
Ulloa Cubillos, 2010). Within this vein, scholars have extended the un­
derstanding of biopower to explain how human life is controlled and
administrated to defend nonhuman life and hence how some species are
selected to grow and flourish while others are left to die, for instance,
within forest and wildlife conservation programs (Cavanagh, 2018;
Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, 2015; Fletcher et al., 2019). From this
perspective, Fletcher et al., (2019) propose that neoliberalization within
conservation policies has implied a change in the particular
141
Geoforum 126 (2021) 139–149
environmentality strategies employed to influence the behavior and
attitudes of subjects from the cultivation of moral discipline (care for the
environment) towards external incentives of economic valuation. In
these terms, neoliberal environmentality promotes economic growth
and capital accumulation as the implicit mechanism for environmental
conservation (Fletcher, 2010). From the perspective of neoliberal envi­
ronmentality, we can understand how the two facets of biopower
(discipline and regulation) converge to manage human life in relation to
nonhuman life to expand the frontiers for capital accumulation. While
environmental discipline organizes human bodies, for instance, in terms
of body movement within space, environmental regulation intervenes in
the populations’ life processes, for example, through managing popu­
lation growth, migration, labor, and use of and access to “natural
resources.”
The prolific analysis of biopower and biopolitics in political ecology,
however, has so far paid less attention to how the exercise of biopower
works together with other dispositifs of power5 to foster or disallow
specific forms of life, bodies and populations based on their intertwined
racial, gender, and sexual classifications. I suggest that to understand
how biopower operates, we need to explore the social categorizations (e.
g., men and women, indigenous, mestizo and white, poor, and peasant)
and stratification systems that regulate specific human bodies and
populations to foster some species and ecosystems over others. The
understanding of biopower and biopolitics can help clarify the processes
of internalizing a certain logic in the conservation and use of an
ecosystem, such as a forest, and how this operates within and shapes
people’s practices, emotions, associations, and understanding of
nonhuman life.
Moreover, Foucauldian analysis of biopolitics is often denounced for
being Eurocentric and for placing a “universal, abstract, asexual subject”
at the center of the analysis, thereby constructing a genealogy of racism
and sexuality in Western civilization without sufficiently reflecting on
geopolitical determinations and sexual differentiation in the exercise of
biopower (Federici, 2014; Spivak, 2010). Foucault explained that in the
Western countries the first contact between life and history took place in
the eighteenth century, when “Western man gradually learnt what it
meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions
of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare”
[emphasis added] (Foucault, 1998, 142). He barely acknowledged that
the recognition of Western man’s condition of existence (and life) has
historically been intertwined with colonialism and with the categori­
zations of the colonized subjects, including human, flora and fauna
populations within the colonial territories.
Despite such valid critiques and following Castro-Gómez (2007,
2010), I consider that the Foucauldian analytical method has the po­
tential in any rethinking of the operation of biopower in neoliberal green
capitalism. Through a decolonial lens, the analysis of biopower requires
us also to reconsider how specific environmentalities are articulated
with the colonial gender systems (Lugones, 2007; Cumes, 2014) and
how they permeate diverse aspects of life and existence, and, conse­
quently, the interactions between humans, ecosystems and nonhuman
species.
Castro-Gómez (2010, 15) asserts that coloniality needs to be un­
derstood as one technology of life classification that operates through
specific dispositifs, rather than as a totalizing discourse. Colonial dis­
positifs (e.g., racialization and sexual difference) often favor specific
lives over others; they work through the internalization and reproduc­
tion of practices and discourses (Dietrich, 2017; Venn, 2009). The
classifications that the colonizers introduced have been altered, but they
still mark human populations in binary categories of gender [female/
5
A dispositif is understood as an ensemble of knowledge and practices, a
system of relations that encompass bodily forms, individual behaviors, spatial
configurations, cultural and linguistic performances, laws, institutional ar­
rangements (Prügl, 2011: 77).
V. Gutiérrez-Zamora
male] and racialized bodies [negros, indios, mulatos, mestizos, blancos].
The hierarchical classifications of human bodies and populations also
became a domination tool that continues to permeate all aspects of life
and existence (Riviera Cusicanqui, 2012). In the distribution of hierar­
chical sites, specific populations and their bodies have been positioned
in hierarchical social categories, creating mechanisms of inclusion,
exclusion, and antagonism (Riviera Cusicanqui, 2012). The designation
of such positions introduced the binary conception of gender in two
categories [men and women], in which generally women became sub­
ordinate to men within each racial category (Lugones, 2007). Knowl­
edge, experiences, and interactions with the environment were also
hierarchized between “truths” and “superstitions,” producing a coloni­
zation of the imaginary (Quijano, 2007).
For Foucault, the development of capitalism is not possible without
the “controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and
the readjustment of the phenomena of the population to economic
processes” (Foucault, 1998, 141). However, whose bodies, labor, and
knowledge are incorporated in the expansions of neoliberal green cap­
italism, and how does this process take place? The analysis of biopower
and its mechanisms in the contemporary development of green capi­
talism requires addressing how productive and reproductive labor is
distributed across the colonial classification of bodies into categories of
gender, ethnicity and race.
The reinvention of green capitalism depends on the expansion of
capital into new territories (e.g., the commodification of biodiversity
and the forest), continuous forms of enclosure, and the free appropria­
tion of the productive and reproductive labor performed by gendered,
ethnically and racially classified bodies (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014;
Federici, 2014). Current GM and conservation interventions focus on
reconfiguring labor divisions and distributions; however, the unwaged
reproductive work indigenous men and women have provided for forest
conservation often appears as externalities to the green markets. In the
category of reproductive work, I include domestic work and collabora­
tive care activities carried out at the community level.
When focusing analytically on the interactions between human
populations’ lives and the milieu, it becomes evident that there is an
overlap between the disciplinary and biopolitical strategies that support
certain forms of life depending on their ability to be productive and
profitable for green capitalism. As Fletcher et al., (2019, 1) assert,
neoliberal biopower focuses on the need “to defend life by demon­
strating its ‘profitability’ and hence its right to exist.” The disciplining of
the bodies that inhabit ecologically and economically “valuable” forests
and territories aims to adjust them according to economic processes. In a
novel application of the “civilizing mission,” the neoliberal environ­
mental interventions seek to prove that the economic valuation of nature
would foster life as the key to humanity’s long-term survival and that the
life of specific populations can only be secured through introducing their
bodies into green productive labor.
With this understanding that GM in community forestry and con­
servation seeks to enhance the capacity to live and reinforce the life of
specific sectors of the population, it is necessary to ask: 1) How does GM
work to control relations that gendered and racialized bodies and pop­
ulations have with their nonhuman environment? 2) How are indige­
nous women as a categorized subgroup of the population made
particular subjects of interventions in community forestry? 3) What
mechanisms shape and govern the conduct of gendered and racialized
indigenous men and women that lead to the (re)production of uneven
relations in community forestry? 4) To what extent do such in­
terventions embody neoliberal economic rationalities of managing for­
est and human populations? The following analysis addresses these
questions by demonstrating how dispositifs and technologies work in the
everyday practices of inclusion and exclusion within community
forestry in the studied communities of the Southern Sierra of Oaxaca.
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Geoforum 126 (2021) 139–149
3. Context, fieldwork, and methods
SL, ST, and SM hold and manage pine and pine-oak forests connected
to one of the Priority Terrestrial Regions for conservation in the
mountain range known as the Southern Sierra of Oaxaca in Mexico.6
Their CFE initiatives have a similar history: they emerged in the mid-
1980s after people mobilized against private and state companies’
concessions operating on their lands. As a result, they began a massive
transition from state-led forest exploitation, management, and conser­
vation to community participation schemes,7 where the central actors
have been the male campesinos. As collective forest landowners
(agrarian community members), the campesinos simultaneously became
waged workers and owners of the CFEs.
CFEs allowed the communities to reinvest their profits in community
development: public infrastructure (schools and roads), health, and
other social services. However, middle-aged and young women in those
communities have different experiences than their male counterparts
regarding labor division and human-forest relations changes. So far, in
the narrative of the community forestry and CFEs’ success such expe­
riences have remained invisible, missing critical aspects that sustain
inequality between the communities’ members.
When I started the research (2015), a group of six middle-aged
women in SL invited me to their new organization’s meeting. They
aimed to teach young kids the Zapotec language, recuperate their
traditional designs for embroidering blouses (huipiles), and share the
knowledge of medicinal plants. Some elders still speak Zapotec and have
the knowledge these women wanted to recuperate. At that meeting, the
older women suggested that the organization could also be a step in
gaining a “voice.” A month later, the recently elected authorities stopped
supporting these women’s attempts to establish the organization. When
I came back to Oaxaca in 2017, I realized that the organization could not
take off. Still, two other top-down processes were aimed at improving
women’s participation and access to natural resources governance: 1)
the federal and state gender equity law reforms for the community au­
thorities (agrarian and municipal) and 2) the conformation of a women’s
cooperative of pine-needle handcrafts implemented via Biodiversity in
Production Forests and Certified Markets, a project financed by the
National Forest Commission (CONAFOR), the United Nations Develop­
ment Program (UNDP), and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF).
However, the inclusion of women is not a new endeavor, as I show in the
following sections.
I base my arguments on research conducted from September 2015 to
January 2016 and September to December 2017 in three forest com­
munities in the Southern Sierra of Oaxaca. I employed ethnographic
methods, including participant observations and in-depth structured
and unstructured interviews. I conducted interviews at households or
workplaces with relatives, coworkers, or neighbors. All discussions were
in Spanish, and the quotes are my translations.
For the analysis, I selected 27 recorded interviews with a total of 50
participants (see Table 1) in which the interviewees discussed two
specific topics: women’s work and participation. I focused on the pat­
terns of response between and whitin interviews and observations as I
consider the three communities as variations of the same phenomenon
rather than three different cases. I followed the operations of biopower
through two overlapping processes: 1) the everyday practices aimed to
directly discipline women’s bodies, feelings, or opinions concerning
their labor and the forest and 2) the state projects aiming to intervene in
indigenous women’s lives as a segment of the population that inhabits
6
The National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity
identified 151 Priority Terrestrial regions across the country which have sig­
nificant biodiversity and ecosystem integrity (Arriaga et al. 2000).
7
Garibay-Orozco (2007) analyzed this transformation from a fragmentation of
community social life to the communal corporation in which the communitarian
ethos overruled individual and family interests.
V. Gutiérrez-Zamora
Table 1
Number of Interviews conducted and analyzed.
Interviews Female Participants Male Participants
Forest officials in Oaxaca 5 4 5
SL community members 14 19 10
ST community members 4 7 – 4.1. Female reproductive work
SM community members 4 5 –
Total 27 35 15
forests. I re-situate biopower in relation to the colonial dispositifs in
which categories such as indigenous and campesina women are pro­
duced, enacted, and reproduced in everyday activities and encounters.
I gained crucial insights raised while reviewing the projects’ docu­
ments (reports and guides) and producing a video in collaboration with
a young woman. The video shows her self-reflection on women’s
participation and works in her community, other women’s oral ac­
counts, and photographs we gathered.8 Our collaboration is not
extended to this article, so the results presented here are my
responsibility.
4. Reproductive labor and mobilities in the forest
Since the emergence of the CFEs in 1984, forest under commercial
management has gradually become a “productive landscape,” a space
dedicated to forestry and wood production. To consolidate the CFEs,
male comuneros, technicians, and professional foresters focused on
producing round wood and sawn timber while emphasizing efficiency
and productivity.
Forest policy has focused on reducing the “incapacity” of commu­
nities to meet productivity objectives, creating more efficient conditions
and making the CFEs competitive in a globalized market. The produc­
tivity improvement and the constant and increasing “capacity building”
became the primary domain of intervention for forest service pro­
fessionals and other experts. The acquisition of forestry and account­
ability knowledge has permitted male comuneros to contest the notions
of backwardness that often labeled them and, instead, to be considered
“rational” forest users, producers and entrepreneurs. Forestry-related
knowledge and labor gained a prominent position that implied that
some people partially rejected the link between the categories of
indigenous and peasant, reconfiguring their collective identity as forest
workers-owners. For instance, in an interview with a male comunero, he
commented: “Before the CFE started, we were one hundred percent
indigenous people. We did not have a considerable income to live; we
lived, most of us, we were peasants, small-holders that only produced to
subsist. Each one produced maize, beans, and other things.”9
Today the survival and the success of CFEs depend on the level of
engagement with national and international wood markets, the
compliance of the worker-owners with the demands for efficiency and
low cost, and the state’s environmental rules. Community forestry and
its success have gradually been connected and governed by distant
economic decisions and conditions (Robertson, 2015) that require
communities to be rendered more technical and efficient or left out of
the circuits of sustainability and development (Li, 2002). The premise is
that when communities acquire better productivity levels, they will
ameliorate their livelihoods and better conserve the forest. However, the
CFEs in Oaxaca rely on community organization and self-government
systems. Hence, they depend on three primary forms of labor: the do­
mestic, the tequio (unpaid collective work for public service), and the
8
The video was presented in the panel Locating Politics and Colonial Con­
tinuities at the Finnish Society for Development Research Conference “The
Politics of Sustainability: Re-thinking resources, values and justice” (Helsinki,
15.-16.2.2018). To preserve people’s anonymity, the video is not available for
publication.
9
Interview with comunero in SL, 22 October 2015.
143
Geoforum 126 (2021) 139–149
cargo system (civil-religious hierarchy of town services).10 The con­
ventional narrative of productive CFEs often keeps hidden or devalues
the work to reproduce the household, communities, and the forests,
mainly when it is considered “female work.”
Throughout the personal conversations and meetings I had with the
groups of women in SL, ST and SM, they expressed their concern over
four main topics: 1) the depreciation of their tasks and work, 2) the
restriction of their movements in various common spaces, 3) the unequal
political participation vis-à-vis men, and 4) the domestic and commu­
nity violence.
As male comuneros became forest workers and the value of work
became money, women’s non-waged reproductive work in communi­
tarian life was devalued. Female reproductive labor entails activities in
the domestic and communal space, which allows the procreation and
survival of human and nonhuman life for those communities. As Tzul
Tzul (2015) points out thinking from social reproduction as a conceptual
framework puts life at the center of political analysis.
Most women spend their time between the household, the milpa, and
the communal kitchen. In the domestic sphere, they clean the house,
wash clothes by hand, raise children, and cook tortillas and other
elaborate meals in the three communities. All the family members have
responsibility for the milpa cultivation (maize, beans, chilis, tomatoes,
and squash). Still, women grow garden herbs and fruits and farm small
animals (pigs and chickens). During weekdays, the mothers of school-
aged children also share work on communal cultivation plots, cook
together in the communal kitchen to feed their children and attend
school committees.
Apart from their daily activities, women must complete their tequios
in the communal kitchen to prepare special meals and drinks for the
civil-religious festivities. All adult community members must fulfill the
tequio, but the activities are divided by gender. But I include female
tequio as reproductive labor because it enables both the material and
symbolic reproduction of the communities, the workers, and the forests.
Female tequio is organized according to other forms of community
membership in different towns and municipalities. In SM and ST,
women’s membership, rights, and obligations do not depend directly on
their marital status, but in SL, they do. Married women organize and
classify their tasks in the communal kitchen according to their current
husband’s rung in the cargo system. Single women (women 21 years of
age or older, widows, divorcees, or single mothers) can obtain the status
of comuneras, which gives them access to a plot of land, the few jobs for
women in the CFE, social benefits provided by the community (health
care, scholarships for their children, financial support for the elderly,
and credit), and the right to receive dividends from the CFE. In return,
the comuneras must fulfill their tequios and fill the salaried service
positions (receptionists and cleaners) in the CFE offices in Oaxaca City.
These positions are complicated for comuneras with children because
they must leave them in the village with other female relatives (grand­
mothers or aunts). The comuneras’ status is not permanent, and they
must meet their duties if they want to keep it, even if they migrate to
continue their studies or work in the city.
The entry of the male labor force to CFEs also determines female
reproductive work. In SL, where the CFE employs more male community
members in forest and business management, married women have
acquired additional workloads. For instance, when the male comunero
needs to be in a management position in Oaxaca City, the wife and
10
The cargo system is a civil-religious hierarchy of services (Chance and
Taylor, 1985) with features that date back to the Spanish Colonial period (16th
to 18th centuries); it continues to be at the center of indigenous and some
peasants forms of government. It is structured as a hierarchical ladder which
memebers climb by providing services to the community.
V. Gutiérrez-Zamora
children often perform the tasks in milpa agriculture. One comunera
commented:
My father goes to work, and when he comes back home, he can rest,
but my mother has to go to the farm with the animals and to the
milpa and continue working every day all day. She never rests […]
maybe now some men, like my brother, also help with the dishes, but
when nobody sees him. 11
When seasonal forestry employment is scarce, comuneros must work
in the CFE of other communities or migrate to sell their labor in Oaxaca,
Mexico City, or the United States of America. In cases of masculine
workforce migration, women depend on remunerated employment and
other means of income. However, they have always contributed to the
family budget by engaging in commercial activities (e.g., selling agri­
cultural and handcrafted products) and paid reproductive labor (e.g., as
maids, cooks, cleaners, and babysitters). For those women, the possi­
bility of living close to their family becomes a priority, mainly when they
are the only providers.
4.2. Women’s mobility in the forest
When a forest stand is under exploitation, this space is turned into a
ground where handling heavy lumber, chainsaws and operating cranes
are referred to as signs of masculine skill. The commercial and pro­
ductive forest seems to be a space where women’s presence and mobility
have been partially restricted, although there are nuances between
communities.
In SL, the internal regulation is stricter regarding firewood, herbs,
and plant gathering; women who use firewood for cooking need to ask
for permission to get it and transport it by truck from the forest chief
[jefe de monte]. When talking about the firewood with women, they
often commented that “before,” their mothers used to be the ones who
collected it in the forest and gathered mushrooms and other plants they
can no longer recognize. Nowadays, this is unusual, as many do not
consider themselves to know the forest very well. The dissolved
women’s group expressed their interest in projects that could permit
them to recuperate their traditional knowledge and learn more about
medicinal plants. An external forest engineer mentioned that other
communities had such projects, and they thought these could help them
have more of a voice in their community. Similarly, in ST, the diverse
projects for women have not ensured their use of forests. In SM, how­
ever, where the CFE is less developed, women often went to gather
mushrooms, firewood, and other plants after looking after their milpas.
Women have limited access to forestry work in the three CFEs.
Although a couple of comuneras worked as forest technicians when the
CFEs began, women are still labeled too physically weak to perform
forestry-related jobs and “too morally weak” to discipline their sexual
behavior. One of the main justifications for the rejection of women for
forestry jobs was the perception that they lack compliance with the
community’s rules of sexual conduct when performing work in the forest
or away from the village. When I asked a former community authority
about the work of women in the CFE, he stated:
We started to give women some work, which is why we established
the water bottling plant. But with all respect to you, I see that women
have a fragile side. I don’t know if it happens in other towns or
countries, but we have cut the support to women because of their
sexual conduct. It’s difficult to control them, which leads to a lack of
trust from the community, there is no discipline, and they lose our
trust and respect.12
11
Group interview with comuneras in SL, Oaxca, 10 November 2017.
12
Interview with member of SL Supervisory Body of Community Assets, 06
December 2015.
144
Geoforum 126 (2021) 139–149
The productive forest has been constructed as a masculine space but
also a space where men cannot fully “control” women and their bodies.
Women who enter forest-related work or decision-making platforms
break the male rule and are sanctioned in different ways. The fear of
losing control over women, particularly over their sexuality, can lead to
varying forms of violence to reclaim discipline and control. When the
women who participated in the forestry jobs are asked what happened
and why they can no longer work in the forest, they argue that most of
the “events” were just gossip. Gaining or losing respect and trust de­
pends on the gossip about women’s sexual conduct when working away
from the villages. Vázquez-García (2008) identifies that gossip can
operate as a disciplinary mechanism to limit the aspirations of women
and as a justification for domestic violence or bullying. Due to the
various policies focused on indigenous women and their participation,
some women began to go to the assemblies for communal decision-
making and take some jobs in CFEs. Now, I discuss that process.
5. Biopolitical technologies of inclusion: Participation, waged,
and entrepreneurial labor
Since the mid-1990s, state officials, researchers, consultants and
workers in national and international agencies (e.g., CONAFOR, Food
and Agriculture Organization [FAO] and the World Bank), and non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) have gradually introduced gender
equity concerns throughout their forestry sector programs. In general,
indigenous and peasant women have become target populations for
poverty alleviation, forest conservation, and adaptation to climate
change (Radcliffe, 2017; Gay-Antaki, 2016). To this end, two key stra­
tegies have been proposed: expanding access to political platforms for
communal decision-making and incorporating women into local sala­
ried work in sawmills (SL), water bottling plants, and commercialization
of non-timber products (SL, ST, and SM). I interpret these processes as
biopolitical technologies of inclusion mechanisms through which the
Mexican state has attempted to incorporate indigenous and peasant
women into the nation as citizens and into the market as producer-
entrepreneurs.
5.1. Indigenous and peasant women as citizens and co-owners
In Mexican rural communities, land titles regulate the access and use
of common environmental and political spaces. So, the state has stipu­
lated gender equality interventions in two main areas: 1) women’s land
rights in ejidos and agrarian communities; and 2) women’s right to
political participation (to vote and be elected) in the Comuneros or
Ejidatarios Assemblies (Curiel et al., 2015; Vázquez-García, 2013)
where co-owners decide on communal land and forests.
Since 1971, the Agrarian Law has granted women the possibility of
land rights in the collective property system. Although women’s access
to property titles and representation has changed gradually, their
ownership and representation are still much lower than men’s in their
communities. According to the National Agrarian Registry (RAN), in
Oaxaca (2019), just 28% of community members with property titles are
women, and women occupy only 17% of managerial positions in local
assemblies and government bodies, primarily as secretaries or trea­
surers. Yet, rules over entitlements and obligations vary among villages
and municipalities.
Although some women are registered in the RAN, in general, women
in SL, ST, and SM are not considered co-owners, and they do not have
access to decision-making bodies. Instead, a woman is considered part of
the husband’s household, while her spouse or domestic partner is the
representative in the Comuneros Assembly. In each community women
can gain or lose these rights, depending on factors such as internal
community processes, marital status, or men’s migration (Vázquez-
García, 2011).
Women may also have differentiated decision-making spaces
depending on their marital status, as happens in SL, where comuneras
V. Gutiérrez-Zamora
have their own assembly. The Comuneras Assembly is not a body for
land rights but rather a meeting space between authorities and comu­
neras that does not include married women. It works as a space where
the community’s authorities evaluate and decide the tequios and
comuneras’ work in the community companies. It is also a space where
comuneras can express their complaints and opinions, but they are
reminded of the moral of obedience to receive their membership bene­
fits. As a comunera commented on: “We, as comuneras, receive [from
the community] many services, but we must be obedient to receive
them; otherwise, we are punished, and we do not receive them
anymore.”13
Worthen (2015) observed that in the usos y costumbres, the com­
munity members earned rights by providing service to the community
and performing the cargos and tequio labor. However, in SL, ST and SM,
women’s access to the assemblies is not guaranteed, although women
offer their tequio and cargo services with their husbands and male
relatives.
In recent years, state officials have urged communities to include
women in their General Assemblies as citizens, sometimes as a requisite
for forest exploitation authorizations. When asked about it, one woman
stated:
We have the same rights, but the only thing is that we, as comuneras,
do not have a voice or vote because the male comuneros decide for
us. We have the comuneras meeting, but the decisions are taken in
the men’s [General] Assembly. There is this inequality. I feel they
discriminate against us […] however, as citizens, we can vote for the
municipal agent […] we went to some [General] Assemblies, but
they kicked us out.14
A former member of the Supervisory Body of Community Assets
argued:
Women and comuneras are recognized as citizens, [but they] are not
co-owners. We call them comuneras, but they are not registered in
the RAN. Maybe there is a misunderstanding among the ladies. They
were 10 or 5 ladies who went to the [General] Assembly, but many
do not pay attention to what is said. They were told they were there
[in the General Assembly] as citizens, but they were not [there] as
co-owners.15
This case exemplifies that neither the state-led individual right to
citizenship nor the personal registration of few women in co-ownership
is a guarantee of women’s presence in the spaces of decision-making at
the community level.
In terms of access to authority roles, women in such positions may
experience various layers of violence that prevent other women from
aspiring to those positions. For example, ST women explained that the
one time a woman was elected to the municipal council, she had trouble
fulfilling her duties. The community put a lot of pressure on her. Her
responsibilities as a mother were affected, and gossip about her re­
lationships with men did not help. The other women did not want to go
through that and preferred not to be elected to those positions.16
Vázquez-García (2013) reveals that when women acquire authority
roles, they deal with inequalities in their communities and state
institutions.
Other experiences in the Sierra Mixe (Aguilar Gil, 2019) suggest that
changes may not come from state-led initiatives but rather from com­
munity processes where they recognize women’s work as a pillar of
community life. So they become communal land co-owners, participants
in the cargo system and attend assemblies, have a voice, vote, and are
13
Interview with comunera, in SL, 15 November 2017.
14
Group interview with five comuneras in SL 20 October 2015.
15
Interview with comunero in SL 29 November 2017.
16
Informal conversation in ST, 14 November 2017.
145
Geoforum 126 (2021) 139–149
elected.
The biopolitical mechanisms that operate through the notions of
citizenship and co-ownership have failed to fully establish themselves as
a norm for gender equity among members of these communities. As I
show next, a prioritized strategy has been incorporating women into the
market through self-employment and salaried work in communal
business.
5.2. Promoting waged and entrepreneurial labor
Based on the following examples, I suggest that GM projects have
focused on creating more jobs for women as a source of income gener­
ation in the community forestry sector. In addition, efforts focus on
creating positions for women in the CFEs, “women’s business,” and
promoting “entrepreneurial” skills.
Rural development programs have focused on facilitating women’s
monetary income by forming small family businesses such as grocery
stores, laundry services, fondas (food establishments), and molinos
(machines for mechanical maize grinding). Also, they focus on creating
cooperatives or communal businesses that aim to produce and market
artesanías (handcrafts), agricultural or non-timber forest goods. It is not
new that campesina women searching for monetary income are
employed in salaried agricultural labor, small enterprises, or urban low-
paid work, such as domestic services and manufacturing operations
(Arias, 1997). They have always worked for the family income. The
novelty of the current promotion of feminine work is that it is framed as
the moral norm of emancipation, improvement and personal
empowerment.
5.2.1. The water bottling plants
One of the first interventions in this matter was the Project on
Conservation and Sustainable Forest Resources Management in México
(PROCYMAF),17 which focused on “indigenous communities” but
several sub-projects started to include women’s participation as part of
their elements. The creation of women’s enterprises concerning natural
resources management was portrayed as a win–win solution. “Women,”
as a separated category were encouraged to enter the waged labor
market or create micro-business to be “empowered,” gain financial in­
dependence and public recognition. One such project has been the water
bottling plants in communities where spring water can be collected,
purified, and bottled for its consumption and commercialization.18 Since
1997, the SEMARNAP, together with WB and the PROCYMAF-I has
financed several feasibility studies in Oaxaca to create water bottling
plant enterprises where at least 60% of the employees would be women
(Bray and Merino-Pérez, 2004; Sandoval Alcántara and Larson Guerra,
2005).
The program did not explicitly focus on gender equity, but rather it
targeted indigenous communities with forest resources, where women’s
participation was often cited as an opportunity area for conservation and
household income diversification (CONAFOR, 2005). SL, ST, and SM
created their plants to employ women, particularly single women. They
labeled them as “women’s enterprises,” but female workers complained
they did not take leading or administrative positions and rarely received
the enterprise’s financial or managerial information. In the SL Assembly
17
The Secretariat of the Environment, Natural Resources and Fisheries
(SEMARNAP) and the World Bank funded the PROCYMAF I and II (1997 to
2003). PROCYMAF aimed to increase the forestry sector productivity and
competitiveness to enhance conservation and improve the inhabitant’s liveli­
hoods in communities with forest ecosystems.
18
Water is collected from the spring, disinfected with chlorine, filtrated and
later purified with ultraviolet light and treated with ozone. Water is bottled in
clean plastic jugs of 20 L, and 1 L and 500 ml PET bottles. The main market for
selling the water is in Oaxaca City, although people in the communities also
consumed it.
V. Gutiérrez-Zamora
Fig. 1. Palm leaf and Pine-needle weaving handcrafts.
of Comuneras, they elect the workers at the bottling plant, a similar
system to the comuneros whose work positions in the community en­
terprises become a communal duty. On one occasion in 2017, the elected
workers refused to work and left their positions because the salary was
too low and the night shift was unbearable for their health and family
caring tasks. The community authorities sanctioned those who refused
to work for not meeting their communal obligations. They hired women
from SM to keep operating the plant. After the events, some women
demanded better salaries and working conditions in the Comuneras
Assembly; however, the communal authorities claimed the enterprise
was not making sufficient profit, and changes were impossible. In
several interviews, comuneras stated that being employed at the bottling
plant was a kind of sanction or punishment rather than an area of
opportunity.
5.2.2. Palm leaf weaving
Another venture to develop the indigenous women’s enterprises took
place in ST. An NGO initiated a women’s group project to produce palm
leaf weaving handcrafts (Brahea spp.). The NGO originated from a
forestry services union that provided administrative capacity building to
CFEs. According to the interviews, the women’s project aimed to create
added value for the wood furniture industry. Women could weave some
parts of the wooded furniture (e.g., the seats of chairs) and earn income
for the household. Differently, from other communities (cf. Rangel-
Landa et al., 2014), they neither cultivate nor collect the palm in their
nearby territory, and they must buy it dried from a community in the
Mixteca region. Therefore, the NGO offered palm weaving training for
women to learn how to work this material and adapt it to industry. Later
they developed other products with the wasted small pieces of pinewood
and wove baskets, lamps, and decorative utensils (Fig. 1).
The NGO also promoted women’s rights as one element of commu­
nity forestry. Together with the Ministry of Social Development
(SEDESOL), they supported the women’s group financially to construct a
small building (“house of women”) to keep their workshop and have
meeting space. One of the NGO objectives was to open alternative spaces
from the communal life in which women could decide with whom they
wanted to work, and they have operated independently of the agrarian
and municipal authorities.
Joining the group was, for some of them, a complicated learning
process, as one woman declares: “I joined the group and worked with
them even though my husband wouldn’t let me come because he drank
and beat me. Before, we didn’t know what a group of women was, or
that women had rights; if our husband hit us, we didn’t know we had
rights.”19
19
Interview with woman in ST, 10 October 2017.
146
Geoforum 126 (2021) 139–149
After fifteen years of effort to create the group and improve weaving
techniques, the NGO left, and about twenty women also abandoned it
due to internal disagreements. Only ten women continued working the
handcrafts as a core group. The weavers face several challenges in
receiving funding for workshop maintenance and marketing of their
products. They sell their handcrafts in Oaxaca City with difficulty, as
many handcraft shops offer unfair conditions for their products, often
claiming they are not recognized maestras artesanas (master
craftswomen).
5.2.3. Pine-needle weaving
CONAFOR and UNDP Mexico implemented the project Biodiversity
in Production Forests and Certified Markets to promote a transition to
“an active conservation approach, ‘producing while conserving’, where
ejidos and communities can conserve their natural resources while
generating income for your wellbeing” (CONAFOR and UNDP, 2017).
Following the new laws on forest sustainability, the project considered
“women’s equity” and forest/biodiversity conservation as two criteria to
address. The project included other activities targeting technical forest
services (monitoring mammals in forests and incorporating biodiversity
standards in forest management plans). They also funded an initiative in
which women could produce added-value forest products.
Women from SL, ST, and SM received training in weaving pine-
needle (ocoxal) handcrafts (Fig. 1) and administration and managerial
skills. The idea was to use forestry operation waste, such as pine needles
(from Pinus montezumae) found on the ground, and hand-weave them to
produce decorative items (e.g., jewelry and baskets). They received
training from Rarámuri women from Chihuahua, and started a cooper­
ative in each community and a network between the cooperatives of the
Southern Sierra. For some, the training was rather technical for enter­
prise management and weaving techniques. Still, it provided opportu­
nities for self-improvement, as the pieces were made individually and
the women were paid as the pieces were sold. One young participant
commented that “this is promising because it is not like in the water
[bottling plant]. We don’t have to leave home; we can take care of our
children and our [domestic] chores while we work.”20
In recent years, the cooperatives have faced several challenges.
Among them was ambiguous support from the communities’ authorities,
which in some cases promoted the cooperatives as a strategy of inclusion
for women. Sometimes, the authorities played down their importance
because of the little money the collectives made. And the saturated
handcraft markets in Oaxaca City often undervalued their work while
requiring constant mobility (between the communities and the city) for
negotiation and sales.
20
Interview with woman in SM, 05 October 2017.
V. Gutiérrez-Zamora
The experiences of the three communities have similarly positioned
indigenous and peasant women as subjects of external intervention to be
incorporated into income-generation activities. They have aimed to
create for women new labor and enterprises related to non-timber forest
products, over which they could exert some control: water bottling and
pine-needle crafts. However, the projects seem like a means of ticking
the gender equity checkbox on the agenda, not a broad-spectrum scheme
where these women can articulate their personal and collective needs,
aspirations, and capabilities related to the forest as a space for their use
and enjoyment.
The projects have often positioned these women as potential workers
but not as capable subjects to direct their lives and movements and to
manage their environment. Thus, the primary challenge for indigenous
and campesina women has become to reinvent emancipatory pathways
in which they claim their political rights as women while participating
in defense of their collective rights for cultural difference (Hernández
Castillo, 2008; Vázquez-García, 2011). One of the enormous challenges
indigenous women face is to oppose the Mexican state and some NGOs’
discourses that stereotype indigenous communities as backward and
more patriarchal and use gender equity as a tool for control over
indigenous people’s forms of living and laboring (Blackwell, 2012).
Another challenge is the workload women carry when programs intro­
duce productivity and entrepreneurship to solve gender inequity.
Gender equity interventions in community forestry seem to follow the
same neoliberal notion that women only need to be more productive and
via entrepreneurialism, they will achieve equality. In these terms,
colonial and neoliberal notions foster the idea that indigenous women
will enter the world of production and entrepreneurship as individuals
to “free themselves.” Only when engaged in such work will theirs be
considered meaningful lives that need to be secured.
6. Conclusions
This article has aimed to demonstrate how indigenous and peasant
women as a categorized group have become a subject of intervention as
part of the efforts of GM in community forestry and forest conservation
in Mexico and to interrogate how GM has been translated into the
everyday work, mobilities and political participation of women. The
preceding analysis demonstrates that objectives of community forestry
to enhance communitarian participation and equity in forest gover­
nance, decision-making, and benefits sharing have resulted in diverse
outcomes depending on the patterns of inclusion and exclusion of in­
dividual bodies and populations across the political, economic, ecolog­
ical and social realms.
Analysis of the colonial continuities of patterns of exclusion and in­
clusion based on gender, class, and race/ethnic categorizations brings
important insights into how life has been fostered or disallowed (Castro-
Gómez, 2010; Foucault, 1998). It shows some mechanisms via which
biopower has been exercised since the emergence of community forestry
and its shaping by neoliberal environmentality. Firstly, the community
forestry programs and efforts have aimed to “integrate” the “indigenous
populations” into the national development and economy. To find ways
out of poverty and contest the colonial labels of backwardness, male
comuneros needed to reconfigure their categories of racial/ethnic
belonging (indigeneity) and class/labor (peasant) according to the lan­
guage of state officials and other promoters. Secondly, because of the
further devaluation of reproductive work, which was accelerated by
community forestry and the creation of CFEs, indigenous and campesina
women emerged as another sector of the population to be “improved”
(Li, 2007) and inserted into community forestry and forest conservation
industries and markets.
The focus on productivity in community forestry in the Southern
Sierra of Oaxaca has brought income benefits for the communities’
members, men and women. However, it has also brought to light
disciplinary practices in the use and knowledge of forest resources,
targeting women’s mobility in the forest and labor concerning non-
147
Geoforum 126 (2021) 139–149
timber forest products as a form of control of women’s sexuality.
Community forestry has changed the use of and the relation with the
forest into a productive landscape. To sustain their communities, resi­
dents should insert their forest products more “efficiently” into the
market and self-discipline their labor to meet the market demands. To
not be disregarded to the point of death, communities, and particularly
women, need to demonstrate that they can be part of the “nation” as
citizens and that they are “productive” to demonstrate their “profit­
ability” and their right to exist (Fletcher et al., 2019, 1). This logic,
however, presents the downside of dismissing the base upon which
communities are built: reproductive labor, particularly women’s work.
Following the problem–solution formula of many rural development
programs in the context of neoliberal environmentality, entrepreneur­
ship and participation have become critical elements for fostering the
life of indigenous and peasant women. The strategy in mainstreaming
gender in the community forestry sector seems to be that indigenous and
peasant women as a categorized population need to be inserted into
waged labor and attached to the market through community enterprises
developed specifically for women. In the rural and forestry sector, GM
has promoted the neoliberal idea that “empowering” indigenous and
peasant women means transforming them into entrepreneurs/producers
for the green capitalist market, rather than contesting systemically un­
equal relations as a product of classism, racism, and machismo in Mexico.
Such strategies do not confront the colonial configuration of masculinity
and femininity in indigenous and mestizo men and women (Cumes,
2014). Gender equity is interpreted only to mean the inclusion of women
in family income-generation activities. Still, this approach does not
consider the labor burdens and geographic (in)mobilities such processes
create, nor whether the work reproduces or enhances unequal relations
and violence at the household and community levels.
GM interventions have genuinely tried to offer solutions to the
women’s lack of access to work and political representation in decision-
making at the community level. However, such interventions replicate
colonial dispositifs of what “indigenous and peasant women” should be
and how they should behave, move, and participate in community
forestry, and they reinforce the disciplinary mechanisms that define
spaces for inclusion and exclusion. By considering community members
only as individual right-bearers and potential entrepreneurs in forestry
or conservation, interventions neglect their material, symbolic and af­
fective embeddedness within their communities and regional contexts.
They create additional labor burdens and emotional dilemmas for
women that obstruct the organizational processes of some women’s
groups. Despite the good intentions and nuances among projects, GM
promoters need to pay attention to indigenous and campesina women’s
aspirations and working conditions (working time, fair wages, and
safety) and expand the values that assess the success of their projects.
Promoters would necessitate moving beyond the ready-made neoliberal
toolbox for projects, and looking for comprehensive equity policy
processes.
“Entrepreneurship” in GM may also discipline and regulate indige­
nous women’s bodies, their relations with the forest, and their roles in
their community. However, these women have demonstrated resistance
to subjugation by contesting some working practices that aimed to
control and order their lives and acting in another way. They can and
have challenged colonial and biopolitical techniques of neoliberal
environmentality by sustaining and weaving the threads on which their
community is built: reproductive labor.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The author declares that she has no known competing financial in­
terests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
V. Gutiérrez-Zamora
Acknowledgments
My special gratitude to all respondents in Mexico who took part in
the study, and particularly the women who share their knowledge and
experiences with me. Many of the ideas for this paper borne out of
discussions with Robert Fletcher, Marjaana Jauhola, Fátima Cortés,
Diego García, Irmeli Mustalahti, Marjo Siltaoja, and Ignacio Rubio
Carriquiboide. Their feedback, comments and guidance were invaluable
in the development of this paper. I want to thank Karla María Gutiérrez
for the help with the transcriptions, and the anonymous reviewers
whose comments helped improve this manuscript.
The field research in Mexico was part of a long-term study funded by
the Academy of Finland (grant no. 259726) and led by Dr. Mustalahti.
Erasmus Plus Staff Training Mobility supported two months research
visit at the Sociology of Development and Change Group (SDC), Wage­
ningen University in 2019.
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