Abstract
In this article, I utilize a political ecology of the body (PEB) approach to analyze women's transnational migration and their experiences with 'food insecurity.' I situate this analysis within a tradition of feminist political ecology, seeking to advance a 'postcolonial intersectionality' that is attentive to gender, race, and class as axes of power and difference, and also to markers of citizenship or lack thereof, including 'illegality.' I argue that the ideologies behind these axes of power obscure the very social processes in which power is constituted, those that allow an unevenness to ecological suffering, specifically at the locus of the migrant women's body. I suggest that by applying a PEB framing to analyze the personally necessary activities of eating and feeding, we are able to elucidate material and health disparities characterizing transborder ecologies. Thus, I delineate the biopolitics of 'food insecurity': a contest over nutritional resources in which migrant bodies are subjected to the disciplining techniques of neoliberal capitalism, as migrants also subvert the conditions of this environment through embodied modes of collective resistance.Keywords: political ecology of the body, feminist political ecology, intersectionality, illegal migration, food insecurity, biopolitics
Highlights
Political ecologists have primarily been concerned with understanding configurations of power and the uneven distribution of costs and benefits associated with changes in the environment (Bryant and Bailey 1997; Peet and Watts 1996)
The findings presented in this paper speak to the range of concerns traditionally associated with political ecological perspectives, namely conflicts over resources, challenges of environmental governance, and human-environment relationships
This article has provided evidence of the ways that food is both entangled with migrant women's motivations for migrating, and how it emblematizes livelihood struggles encountered by historically marginalized populations, especially people of informally authorized status in the United States
Summary
Political ecologists have primarily been concerned with understanding configurations of power and the uneven distribution of costs and benefits associated with changes in the environment (Bryant and Bailey 1997; Peet and Watts 1996). They have argued that the terrain of human health must be acknowledged as an 'environment' in its own right, necessitating that we examine (un)healthy bodies within the wider ecological context of (un)healthy landscapes (Baer 1996; Guthman 2011; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2013).
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