ABSTRACT
This chapter explores women's work in gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon. It describes the structural vulnerabilities organizing women's labour in mining communities, in particular the gender aspects of production and technology and their intersection with historical relations of class, colonialism, ethnicity and Westernization. The chapter analyzes how female labour in the mining frontier of the Brazilian Amazonia is functionally and spatially connected to the contemporary process of capital accumulation in peripheral tropical regions. It defines three main propositions to build a social scientific understanding of women in mining. These are that 'women in mining' refers to a complex social and historical category; it intersects with other historical relations; and it is linked to the continuation and contestation of capital accumulation and its hegemonic practices and ideologies in peripheral regions of the global economy. A more complex dimension of the vulnerability of women's labour responds to the hierarchical agreements of property, labour and production of garimpagem.
