Extraction companies and the political regime that they deal with in Equatorial Guinea rely on genderwashing narratives to justify their actions. That is, they claim to promote gender equality whilst, in reality, undermining women’s rights. Avila Laurel challenges genderwashing narratives by laying plain how exploitation of women is linked to petrocapitalism. He does so through an aesthetic of gendered oil gluttony, which aims to disgust as well as to reveal the circumstances that drive sub-Saharan migrants towards a mythical ‘better life’ in Europe. Electric light works as a metaphor for this dream of prosperity in Avila Laurel’s novel The Gurugu Pledge, and is also used as another tool to illustrate petrocapitalism’s gendered exploitations. But Avila Laurel’s challenges to petrocapitalism go beyond the content of his work, I argue. Style and form borrowed from oral tradition reinforce the disruptive power of Avila Laurel’s work, as does its distribution. Equatoguinean literature is – like the country’s oil - largely an export industry: it is consumed by North Americans, Brits and Spaniards, not by a local audience. In this way, it undermines extraction companies’ legitimacy in the latters’ countries of origin, illustrating literature’s capacity to challenge extractivism on several simultaneous levels.