It rains miscarriages, a feminist investigation of toxic risks in the Bajo Cauca region (Colombia)

Chiavaroli, Chiara (2025) It rains miscarriages, a feminist investigation of toxic risks in the Bajo Cauca region (Colombia). PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This set of essays investigates the relationship between social identities and toxic contamination by analysing the role that institutional risk-issue framings play in enhancing or limiting the agency of gendered and racialized social actors exposed to toxic risks. This research is motivated by the increasing mainstreaming of gender in environmental policies for chemical risk management and, at the same time, the paradoxical lack of effective inclusion of the expertise of the most vulnerable social actors in environmental decision-making spaces. Drawing on more than 13 months of participatory ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Bajo Cauca region (Colombia) among gold mining and coca farming communities, as well as the revision of policies for chemical risk management, research in medical archives, and participatory video-making processes, I investigate the social life of two toxic chemicals: mercury and glyphosate, and their role in shaping processes of gendered identity-making as well as state-citizens relation. In particular, I engage with women’s everyday reproductive struggles to explore the tensions emerging between toxic exposure and care, to conceptualise miscarriages related to toxic contamination as resulting from a complex entanglement between social identities and everyday geographies, which determines the emergence of reproductive inequalities. Moreover, I investigate the interplay between representations of masculinity and the criminalisation of informal gold-miners and coca-farmers as contaminating actors. I build on scholarship in feminist geography and Latin American feminist science and technology studies to argue that the ineffective integration of gender in the institutional debate on toxic contamination reproduces, rather than challenges, the invisibility of rural women before the state. The essays contribute to the debate on gender and environmental policy-making by analysing the unintended political outcomes of gendered representations that underpin environmental discourses in contexts of toxic contamination, thereby suggesting ways for environmental policy-makers to better reflect the priorities and needs of local actors in risk management plans. I contend that making environmental policy-making more socially just does not only require the recognition of gender as a determinant of environmental vulnerability, but also the promotion of the effective inclusion of women’s reproductive concerns and their expertise on toxic reproductive risks in public debates.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2025 Chiara Chiavaroli
Library of Congress subject classification:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman T Technology > TD Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering
Sets:	Departments > International Development
Supervisor:	Leone, Tiziana and Forsyth, Tim
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4860

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