LIFE IN TRAFFIC: Riddling Field Notes on the Political Economy of "Sex" and Nature

Engaging ethnographic fieldwork and archival research conducted between 2010 and 2021 along Latin America's Interoceanic Highway in Peru's mineral-rich Amazonian region of Madre de Dios, this article begins with a riddle that equates the exploitation of gold mines with that of women. I follow the riddle-revised and (re)told in rain forest mines, on the highway, by sex workers and Indigenous women leaders-through its different iterations to argue that the traffic in women and the political economy of sex/gender systems are discursively and materially linked with notions of the violability of feminized "nature" and associated racializations. The traffic in women also becomes a traffic in nature when economies of natural resource extraction create the grounds for the sex industry. Traffic as a methodological and analytical framework identifies the social, political, and economic interrelations and linguistic articulations that create (im)mobility, while also promoting reverse-ability. At the same time, this approach acknowledges collisions and jams, the realities of hard endings. Drawing inspiration from subversive retellings of the riddle, the concept of traffic underscores that while discursive framings can condition material possibilities and influence human actions by normalizing exploitation, they need not cement them.