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Fossil Fuels & Democracy

Mining Coal and Undermining Gender


Hypothesis
Industrialization is cause of the masculinization of mine work
encourages conformity to masculine-identified norms
But at Powder River basin, technology enables women to work
Smith Rolstons argument(13):
Arguments about technical skill and brute strength are both ideological justifications for
excluding women from mine work"
This is about cultural notions of gender not actual ability
Want to understand how these gender divisions get entangled in mining cultures, not
simply take them for granted
Method :
1. Examine the everyday lives of women miners
2. Deconstruct the masculinity of men miners
Chapter 2
non-unionized, and anti-union culture
role fo CSR(corporate social responsibility) discourse. Rajak: a moral
mechanism through which [corporations] authority is extended over the social
order" (57)
long history of labor union suppression, racial division, violence against workers
strategies to redefine manual labor as middle class technicians and hard
working westerners not union people
higher wages enabled by materiality of operation & technology
safety issues
company view: individualize risky (worker responsibility, BP good
example)
workers view: socialize risk (company responsibility)
Chapter 3
close affective bonds (fictive kinship, family)
=make handwork bearable (21 days of exhaustion, 7 days off)
gendered politics of exhaustion
question of pregnancy
child-raising
bathroom breaks
menstruation
Some equality, but heavier burden on women (84)
Power is inscribed on and through bodies through social supervision and
discipline as well as self-regulation"
Treating work like home makes exploitation easier(BG)

Chapter 4
rotating shift work = hard on family life
p. 95
but families intertwined with/by mining labor
again miners wives end up taking on more burdens to keep family running (social
reproduction womens unpaid labor subsidizes capitalist economy)
time is central to the creation of kinship ties"
Chapter 6 - Harassment or Joking
Chapter 7 - Decline of Coal
Whats the goal?
Denaturalizing the masculinity of mine labor, affirms that the cultural link
between masculinity and mining is not inevitable or natural"
assert that the Powder River Basin miners are key art of an industry that is
crucial to the everyday functioning of everyday life in the United States (31)
Miners know the network, consumers dont cals for caring from a distance"
agains commodity fetishism: we know the lightbulb and the cost of electricity; we
dont then about the mine or miners relation ship to us through the lightbulb (32)
Dont romanticize or demonize them
Final Paper
Intro
What the paper is about
What point are you trying to make
How it links up with the outside academic literature
How you lay out the argument and evidence
Methods
Section 1
Point
Evidence
Section 2
Section 3
Conclusion
What I learned and how it relates to what others have said about this
What implications does all this have for post-carbon futures, global
warming, fossil fuel independence
What to focus on?
Gathering evidence
Original work
Empirical data

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