Caring for Gold: Social Reproduction and the Gendering of Mining's Social Value

Doris Buss, Carleton University (Canada)

'Responsible' gold has emerged as a type of legal category that embeds claims about the human rights, environmental and conflict-free origins of gold that is deemed 'responsible' or 'good', or 'fair' (as in trade). The production of this category occurs across scales engaging diverse actors all involved in efforts classified as 'improving' mining and transnational mineral supply chain regulation. While mining is often and historically associated with a hyper-masculine world of engineers and pit workers, responsible mining is more overtly oriented to the lives of women miners and feminised beneficiaries of mining. This paper draws from ethnographic research conducted over multiple years in a Kenya artisanal and small-scale gold mine (ASGM), together with participant observation at transnational mining policy meetings to explore how women's social reproduction roles are mobilized in the assemblage of 'responsible mining' as a policy category. More specifically, it considers how policy actors make claims about the inclusion of women's livelihoods -- and women's empowerment - to sustain the conditions of possibility for the transnational regulatory work of "good gold." The paper further considers how women's social reproductive labour becomes effectively coded into and sustaining of transnational supply chains of gold that rely upon gold mining as a poverty- alleviating livelihood. Time allowing, the paper includes reflections on the tensions in doing ethnographic research in both mining areas and transnational mining policy sites in which the rhetorical invocation of 'women miners' sustains conflicting policy narratives of mining as responsible, in which women miners are celebrated as mining's future, and mining as (not yet) modern, in which women miners are seen as dangerous.

This presentation is part of a series of three sessions on Global Mineral Governance, organized by Chris Huggins.