Women and the structural violence of ‘fast-fashion’ global production: victimization, poorcide and environmental harms

This chapter explores how the profit motivation of private corporations and the demand for cheap goods from Western consumers result in environmental damage while furthering the oppression of marginalised women in the Global South. Specifically focusing on global assembly line workers in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the chapter investigates how the adverse effects of environmental damage, unregulated labour conditions and resultant disasters are disproportionately borne by poor women and how this is intimately connected to the lower socioeconomic status of women in these particular contexts. When the relentless pursuit of neoliberal forms of development endangers the lived environment, the consequences are experienced alongside already existing inequalities. Highlighting the Rana Plaza disaster of 2011 in Bangladesh and the aftermath, as well as everyday environmental degradation related to global production in both countries, the chapter argues that any public policy initiative to prevent or reverse environmental damage should take an intersectional approach that foregrounds the gendered and classed ways of experiencing the natural world.