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.
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Timsar, Rebecca Golden. “Oil, Masculinity, and Violence: Egbesu worship in the Niger Delta of Nigeria.” Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Masson, and Michael Watts, Cornell UP, 2015, pp. 72-89.
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Walkerdine, Valerie, et al. Growing up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class. New York UP, 2001.
Watts, Michael. “Securing Oil: Frontiers, Risk, and Spaces of Accumulated Insecurity.” Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts, Cornell UP, 2015, pp. 211-36.
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Youkhana, Eva. “A Conceptual Shift in Studies of Belonging and the Politics of Belonging.” Social Inclusion, vol. 3, no. 4, 2015, pp. 10-24.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Second Edition. Edinburgh UP, 2014.
—. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010.
Bae, Michelle S., and Olga Ivashkevich, editors. Girls, Cultural Productions, and Resistance. Peter Lang, 2012.
Bainton, Nicholas A., and John R. Owen. “Zones of entanglement: Researching mining areas in Melanesia and beyond.” The Extractive Industries and Society, vol. 6, 2019, pp. 767-74.
Bent, Emily, and Heather Switzer. “Oppositional Girlhoods and the Challenges of Relational Politics.” Gender Issues, vol. 33, no. 2, 2016, pp. 122-47.
Birk, Megan. “Poor Placed-Out Girls: The Rural Household Economy and the Value of Girlhood in the US.” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 12, no. 3, 2019, pp. 353-73.
Boler, Megan, editor. Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, Disturbing Silence. Peter Lang, 2004.
Boyd, Amanda. “Connections Between Community and Emerging Technology: Support for Enhanced Oil Recovery in the Weyburn, Saskatchewan Area.” International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, vol. 32, 2015, pp. 81-89.
Burbules, Nicholas C. “Introduction.” Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, edited by Megan Boler, Peter Lang, 2004, pp. xiii-xxxii.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1999.
Cox, Aimee Meredith. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Duke UP, 2015.
D’Angelo, Lorenzo, and Robert Jan Pijpers, editors. The Anthropology of Resource Extraction. Routledge, 2022.
Eaton, Emily, and Abby Kinchy. “Quiet Voices in the Fracking Debate: Ambivalence, Nonmobilization, and Individual Action in Two Extractive Communities (Saskatchewan and Pennsylvania).” Energy Research & Social Science, vol. 20, 2016, pp. 22-30.
Eaton, Emily, and Simon Enoch. “Making the Energy Sector Great Again: Extractive Populism in Saskatchewan.” Divided: Populism, Polarization & Power in the New Saskatchewan, edited by JoAnn Jaffe, Patricia W. Elliot and Cora Sellers, Fernwood Publishing, 2021, pp. 39-51.
—. “Oil’s Rural Reach: Social Licence in Saskatchewan’s Oil-Producing Communities.” Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 43, no. 1, 2018, pp. 53–74.
Gal, Susan. “Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender.” Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, edited by Miceala Di Leonardo, U of California P, 1991, pp. 175-203.
Gonick, Marnina. Between Femininities: Ambivalence, Identity, and the Education of Girls. State U of New York P, 2003.
Jaffe, JoAnn, and Amy Quark. “Social Cohesion: Theory or Politics? Evidence from Studies of Saskatchewan Rural Communities Under Neoliberalism.” Prairie Forum, vol. 2, 2005, pp. 229-52.
Jaffe, JoAnn, Patricia Elliott, and Cora Sellers, editors. Divided: Populism, Polarization & Power in the New Saskatchewan. Fernwood Publishing, 2021.
Jones, Alison. “Talking Cure: The Desire for Dialogue.” Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, edited by Megan Boler, Peter Lang, 2004, pp. 57-68.
Kendrick, Maureen. “Pumpjacks, Social Class and the Struggle for Belonging.” Our Rural Selves: Memory and the Visual in Canadian Childhoods, edited by Claudia Mitchell and April Mandrona, McGill Queen’s UP, 2019, pp. 167-86.
Khoja-Moolji, Shenila. “Doing the ‘Work of Hearing’: Girls’ Voices in Transnational Educational Development Campaigns.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, vol. 46, no. 5, 2016, pp. 745-63.
Kossick, Don. “From Big Bad Wolf to Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Uranium Industry Manipulates its Image to Stay Afloat and Faces Resistance Along the Way.” Divided: Populism, Polarization & Power in the New Saskatchewan, edited by JoAnn Jaffe, Patricia Elliot, and Cora Sellers, Fernwood Publishing, 2021, pp. 274-91.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford UP, 2005.
Malhorta, Sheena. “The Silence in My Belly.” Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound, edited by Sheena Malhorta and Carrillo Rowe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 219-27.
Malhotra, Sheena, and Aimee Carrillo Rowe, editors. Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Meloni, Francesca, et al. “Towards a Relational Ethics: Rethinking Ethics, Agency and Dependency in Research with Children and Youth.” Anthropological Theory, vol. 15, no. 1, 2015, pp. 106–23.
Milligan, Christine, and Janine Wiles. “Landscapes of Care.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 34, no. 6, 2010, pp. 736-54.
O’Connell, Anne. “An Exploration of Redneck Whiteness in Multicultural Canada.” Social Politics, vol. 17, no. 4, 2010, pp. 536-63.
Riley, Mark. “The Next Link in the Chain’: Children, Agri-cultural Practices and the Family Farm.” Children’s Geographies, vol. 7, no. 3, 2009, pp. 245–60.
Rogers, Douglas. “Deep oil and deep culture in the Russian Urals.” Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Masson, and Michael Watts, Cornell UP, 2015, pp. 61-71.
—. “Oil and Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 44, no. 1, 2015, pp. 365–80.
Royster, Francesca. “3210 S. Indiana: Silence and the Meanings of Home.” Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound, edited by Sheena Malhorta and Carrillo Rowe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 176-87.
Rubbers, Benjamin. “Mineworkers.” The Anthropology of Resource Extraction, edited by Lorenzo D’Angelo and Robert Jan Pijpers, Routledge, 2022, pp. 113-29.
Smith, Jessica, and Mette M. High. “Exploring the Anthropology of Energy: Ethnography, Energy and Ethics.” Energy Research & Social Science, vol. 30, 2017, pp. 1–6.
Solnit, Rebecca. Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions. Haymarket Books, 2017.
Switzer, Heather D. When the Light Is Fire: Maasai Schoolgirls in Contemporary Kenya. U of Illinois P, 2018.
Timsar, Rebecca Golden. “Oil, Masculinity, and Violence: Egbesu worship in the Niger Delta of Nigeria.” Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Masson, and Michael Watts, Cornell UP, 2015, pp. 72-89.
Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge, 2015.
Walkerdine, Valerie, et al. Growing up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class. New York UP, 2001.
Watts, Michael. “Securing Oil: Frontiers, Risk, and Spaces of Accumulated Insecurity.” Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts, Cornell UP, 2015, pp. 211-36.
Wilson, Sheena. “Gendering Oil: Tracing Western Petrosexual Relations.” Oil Culture, edited by Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, U of Minnesota P, 2014, pp. 244-63.
Youkhana, Eva. “A Conceptual Shift in Studies of Belonging and the Politics of Belonging.” Social Inclusion, vol. 3, no. 4, 2015, pp. 10-24.
Mantei, M. (2024). I Learned to Pick My Battles: Girls Dissenting in Oil Country. Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, 13, 13–32. https://doi.org/10.14201/candb.v13i13-32
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