Holding the periphery: Women, territorial holding labour, and the post-extractive labour-sending economy

Abstract

Post-extractive scholarship has focused predominantly on mines, mining towns and industrial transition, with limited attention to labour-sending territories historically incorporated into extraction through labour circulation and social reproduction. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 21 participants engaged in informal livelihood activity in Viljoenskroon, South Africa, this paper focuses analytically on nine women to examine how such territories continue to function after extractive employment contracts. The findings identify seven interlocking mechanisms through which women sustain households, livelihoods and community continuity under conditions of constrained accumulation, weakened institutional incorporation and infrastructural decline. The paper conceptualises the territorial condition produced through these relations as the extractive periphery and the feminised work through which its continuity is maintained as territorial holding labour. It argues that as extractive employment contracts, reproductive labour that historically subsidised extraction through the reproduction of labour increasingly subsidises its territorial aftermath through the reproduction of continuity. This extends post-extractive analysis beyond sites of production and social reproduction analysis beyond households and labour power to the reproduction of territorial continuity. The findings also challenge continuity as evidence of successful transition: apparent resilience may conceal the transfer of unresolved adjustment costs into women’s income, time and labour. Transition policy must therefore account for labour-sending territories and for who bears the costs through which their continuity is sustained.