Resourcified Bodies: Women Miners’ Narratives of Limits, Resistance, and Creativity

Abstract

Abstract

This article focuses on the gender dimensions of the mining industry in the Prionezhie district in Karelia (Northwestern Russia). It analyzes the formation of female workers’ gendered subjectivities through their close engagement with ornamental stones: gabbrodiabase and raspberry quartzite. The article uses the concept of resourcification to explore how industrial regimes render both materials and human bodies as extractable sources of value. During Soviet times, men in the quarries of Karelia were involved in blasting operations and stone transportation, while women did manual work such as cutting, polishing, and loading the stone. Close sensory interactions with diabase and quartzite resulted in women’s vulnerability to stone-caused diseases such as silicosis. At the same time, women miners have developed strong emotional attachments toward diabase and quartzite while engaging with the stone daily. Female interviewees also expressed astonishment and pride at the limits their bodies could withstand when performing hard work. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the diabase and quartzite quarries were closed or privatized. Today, most men in Prionezhie still work in the quarries, while women are no longer involved in the mining industry due to changes in state legislation. The article focuses on three interconnected narratives prominent in the interviews: mining as symbolic imprisonment, resistance against the imposed limits, and the creative connections of women miners with the decorative stones they produced. Using Karen Barad’s concept of cyborgian agency, the article reconsiders the relations between humans and materials in industrial settings and views them as a mutual transformation of interrelated actors.