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About the Book: 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 Mother Earth.
Ruth Goldstein is an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UW-Madison. She is interested in the gendered aspects of human and more-than-human health, a quickly heating planet and environmental racism.
Daniel N. Silva is a professor at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas – Unicamp, Brazil. His research focuses on language, violence, and hope in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas.
Maria Lepowsky is Evjue-Bascom Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.