Life in Traffic: Women, Plants, and Gold Along South America's Interoceanic Highway
Ruth E. Goldstein
Jun 2026 · Univ of California Press
Ebook
297
Pages
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Eligible
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infoThis book will become available on June 16, 2026. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
In the year 2000, the presidents of Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia agreed to construct the Interoceanic Highway as part of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America. Instead of bringing the promised economic benefits to the shared triple-frontier Amazonian region, the highway facilitated trade in extracted natural resources, as well as a traffic in women. Centering "traffic" as both an analytic and a method, Ruth E. Goldstein argues that projects like this 3,500-mile highway have deeply gendered effects, reorganizing political economies of sex, nature, kinship, and care. Life in Traffic underscores how markets for women, plants, and gold are not just intersecting phenomena but historically co-constituted economies. Amazonian extractive industries, too, have global ramifications for a warming planet: as rainforests disappear, so do the oxygen-creating, carbon-sequestering, and life-sustaining abilities of Earth, known to many as Mother.
About the author
Ruth E. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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