I Learned to Pick My Battles: Girls Dissenting in Oil Country

Abstract

In this paper I explore how girls living in a community economically reliant on the extraction of fossil fuels navigate gender expectations, loyalties, ideologies and moralities within their family structures, their places of employment and their affective communities. I describe how girlhood(s) within resource dependent communities are composed of and configured through the social, political, and economic conditions of extractivism, and the social relations that exist within these material conditions. The meeting of the material conditions of resource extraction and the social relations that exist within these environments, can be understood as “zones of entanglement.” An exploration of girls’ lives within these zones of entanglement, highlights how girls maneuver within the processes of social acceptance, belonging and notions of the “good life” by engaging in various strategies that work to create opportunities, while also reinforce foreclosures. These strategies include moving between speech and silence, learning to pick their battles, taking up space, and engaging in care-work. Through engagement in various strategies girls learn to protect themselves while maintaining opportunities for hope, connection, and transformation in their own lives, and in their interdependent relationships and attachments.