Response to Enloe

In my Environmental Hazards class, we discuss an author, Robbins 2010, who discusses political economy, meaning the political and economic processes that affect the environment in which we live. She also discusses political ecology, which connects political economy to ecological and environmental states. The political economy of the capitalist society in which we live involves accumulation, contradiction, and crisis, meaning that as the necessity of amassing excess resources depletes resource stock, society falls into crisis as we compete for the remaining capital. This "crisis" as it is called also corresponds with distressed employment situations and environmental conditions. These environmental conditions, which include not just the physical environment but the social and cultural processes that affect the place in which one works, lives, sleeps, etc. The political economy of south Korea, encouraging police forces to sexually assault women as control mechanism for suppressing women's engagement in the labor movement, represents a system solely driven by a desire for accumulation and domination. The persistence of women in their fight for fair wages and employment rights, and their actions' subsequent effect on toppling South Korea's military regime and forcing open elections shows that it is persistence and not physical force, domination, strength, and ferocity that must be demonstrated to ensure success. These women, as active agents in a patriarchal system, bonded over their differences from others and used this to increase solidarity, efficacy, and political influence.

In a class I took last semester, Gender, Justice, and Environmental Change, we watched a film about Maquilapolis, a city on the border of the US and Mexico where underregulated and undertaxed factories owned by many companies, usually international, function. It is in these factories where mostly female employees are hired and must work gruesome hours in toxic environments, all for the sake of earning a close-to-nothing income for their families. Most workers earn about $11 a day and are exposed to chemicals, poisons, and dangerous materials that result in extremely harmful health concerns, which they cannot afford to address. Interestingly, this film documents the complete upheaval of these factories in the 90s, following the creation of NAFTA, to Asia. Factories left their chemical pollution behind, which seeps into the soil, contaminates the water and air, and exacerbates the already extremely destitute state of these neighborhoods. These companies now spread their toxins in another part of the world, without mitigating any accidents or negative environmental effects. The international community does not hold these companies liable; the women of Maquilapolis have formed strong grassroots movements in protest of the environmental degradation they face because they are located in the path of least resistance. They, however, have no political power in the international community, which is necessary to bring about the necessary change. There needs to be an international collaboration between grassroots women's organizations to force the United Nations and political leaders to address these blatant human rights violations.

Movie description: http://www.pbs.org/pov/maquilapolis/film_description.php
Some movie clips: http://www.pbs.org/pov/maquilapolis/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRdu5qo-htU