Women’s precarity in a globalised world: an ecofeminist perspective

As French philosopher, anthropologist and sociolo­gist Bruno Latour noted, “[f]rom the time the term ‘politics’ was invented, every type of politics has been defined by its relation to nature” (2004 [1999]: 1). When the exploitation of nature became a subject of profit and global political discourse, women’s situation in the labour market underwent significant changes, resulting in precarity and exploitation due to their perceived proximity to nature. This presumed connection between women and nature has been studied by ecofeminist thinkers, revealing its profound influence on women’s roles in the labour system, particularly in capitalist societies where diversity is often sacrificed in favour of uniformity to facilitate the sale of products to a global audience (King 1986: 184). This contribution aims to explore, from an ecofeminist perspective, statistics regarding women’s precarity worldwide, with particular attention to the situation of migrant women in the global North and native women in the global South.