Mining Men and Designing Women

This chapter examines the construction of gendered subjectivities and the ways in which men and women reinforced, challenged, and acquiesced to those images. Constructions of man and womanhood and their relations to mining life distinctly shaped the contours of consciousness and action in Butte and Chuquicamata. Drawing from the ethnographic data, the chapter illustrates how men and women talk back to these images as they talk of labor, friendship, intimacy, and one another. It also considers the ways in which they are marked by the politics of race and the meanings of "whiteness." Several themes resonate through the stories told by people in Butte and Chuquicamata: crafting the everyday, consumption, trust and betrayal, and reclamation.

Action (physics) · Aesthetics · Art · Betrayal · Butte · Consciousness · Ethnography · Friendship · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Law · Mining and Resource Management · Psychology · Social Psychology